Paris Was the Place (17 page)

“So there’s still a house?”

“That no one has seen in forty years. But yes, my family owns it.”

“Your family has lost a house.”

“We lost a house, but we re-created it in Toronto. Down to the brick walkway.”

“So you and Gita are both exiles in Paris.”

“I am French, Willie. My mother was born in Paris. Gita is from India, and it will be hard for her to make a life here. You know that, yes?”

“But even harder for her if she’s forced to go back.”

“I understand your willingness to help Gita. I’ve had that need, too. Then it settled down into a job that I do every day. You will settle, too. Not because you will stand for anything less than what’s right, but because life is long and it’s hard to keep up the energy you have now. It’s impossible, for example, for me to form special ties with each of my clients.” He pauses. “The second place I’d go if I could is Joshua Tree. In California.”

“I think you are the most unsentimental person I know.” I smile.

“Then you do not know me very well yet. I cry at the movies, even comedies. I am what you call a sap. I have fallen heedlessly for you. Don’t you see that? It’s perhaps the most sentimental thing I’ve ever done. I’m shamelessly courting you because I have a need to see your face every day and the mole above your lip and this hair, this long red hair.” His face is very serious. Then he looks back at the road. “So have you been to this desert?”

The things he’s said are symphonic in my head. They keep playing there. I hear myself say, “I’ve been to Joshua Tree. The trees look
like old men. There are whole fields of them.” Why did I wear these jeans? It’s so warm now, and they stick to my legs. He has a need to see me every day. My face. My hair. “My brother and I camped there in college.”

“My mother has always wanted to go to California.”

“She’s in France now?” Courting. “Courting” is a pleasing word when I say it to myself silently in the truck.

“She never left Canada after my father got her to stay. But she’s never stopped being French. She lives too far away from me. Distance breeds worrying. I’ve been trying to convince them to move back to France. She says Romania is having a revolution and other countries will try to get rid of their dictators soon. She thinks this will be too complicated for Jews in Europe. She’s hounded by the past. She thinks I live too close to war zones. I tell her we live in France, far away from Romania and Poland and Yugoslavia, and that nothing bad is going to happen here, but she won’t believe me.”

He rubs his eyes with his right hand while he drives and looks over at me. “But you are from this golden land called California.” Another black truck filled with apples slows on the hill in front of us. Macon glances over his left shoulder and pulls out to pass. It’s been almost two hours since Lyon, and I’m starving. I pull a baguette and a small jar of Nutella from my bag. “It’s a circus act. What else are you hiding in that bag?”

I’m tired and hungry and overcome by this lassitude that the drive’s brought on. A deep, physical sleepiness. My mind thick and dreamy and associative. I walked into the asylum center on Rue de Metz and I met six girls and a lawyer and everything began to change. When will we see the ocean? I can almost smell it now. Signs for Avignon. I long for the ocean like a person. Like my mother. The closer we get to the water, the deeper my longing is. My brother’s probably taking a nap in his apartment, and I miss him. I’m almost asleep. Is there a way to find a pay phone to call Luke? He’s my family. He’s how I make sense of Paris and of moving away from my father and the open-ended sadness I felt in California after my mother died. I look out the window at the brown hills and the wiry trees—olive trees? My mother is gone. I feel
quieter about her death here. In California all I wanted to do was yell. I’m grieving for her here in a way I couldn’t before.

“Where are your parents now, Willie?”

“We lived on the coast in a town called Sausalito. My father’s still there—at least, I think he is. I haven’t talked to him since last spring.”

“Do you mean your parents are divorced?”

I miss my mother so much then. It’s a longing I can’t speak of to him. “My mother is dead.”

“Ouch. I’m so sorry.”

“Right after my mother died, my father designed this bench for her in the cemetery. Granite. Way too shiny, because that’s the only way he said they came. He asked me to help with the wording of the engraving on the bench. But I couldn’t. It was too removed from her—a bench in a strange town in Montana where all her family was buried. She didn’t know anyone in that state except her sisters and cousins. Her life condensed to a sentence.”

Macon just nods and listens. He’s good at listening. “Once”—I rip the bread into smaller pieces and prop the Nutella on my knees—“it was impossible to live without my dad. But then my mom died and it was crazy to try to live near him. He’s still my connection to her, though. He’s more than that. But it’s better here without him.”

I try to hand Macon bread dipped in chocolate but he opens his mouth, so I lean over and feed him and get Nutella on his chin. We laugh, and he wipes the chocolate with his thumb. “It’s better that you’re in Paris. Better that I met you. But I am sorry. Sorry it has come at the price of your mother.” An hour after Avignon we pull into a service station in a town called Aix-en-Provence. It’s a one-story blue concrete shop with a concrete parking lot. Two red gas pumps sit out front in the bright sun. Macon pulls up to the first one. I get a metal key on a dirty string from a teenage boy in a mechanic’s suit and find a smelly bathroom behind.

When I step back into the sun, a huge flock of birds is passing over—thousands of them. The sky darkens with birds until it looks like rain. I jog back to the truck and jump in. Macon bangs the gas nozzle down and slides in beside me. The birds turn the inside of the
cab darker too, so that it feels almost like night. He takes my hand and kisses it quickly. The birds fly hard, as if they’re straining to pull something—a black blanket?—over the sky.

When the sun reappears, I’m on Macon’s lap, one leg wrapped around either side of him. We make out in the truck—small kisses over each other’s faces and mouths, laughing. We kiss and kiss and the kissing is good and I’m connected to the truck and the birds and the green trees that flank the sides of the gas station driveway. It’s not often we receive what we want. Now he’s kissing my mouth harder. I want to bite his lower lip. To taste it. He kisses between my collarbones—that private hollow. Then down the center of my breastbone. He cups each of my breasts in his hands and I close my eyes. We stop kissing only because a car pulls in behind us.

Then we have to disentangle, and I’m laughing again. He puts the truck in first and second and third gear and accelerates onto the highway. I have this sense that everything is in reach—the drive, Luke’s health, the beach where we’ll camp.

The sign on the highway reads
CANNES 140 KM
. I place my head under the steering wheel on his thigh. I’m still sleepy, but it’s a warm, delicious tired now. “My mother was a psychologist. But then she closed her practice and became a different kind of therapist. My father’s a mapmaker. He started in the sixties, before computers. They bought a redwood house for nothing thirty years ago.” I close my eyes. “You would have liked it, I think—the houses are stacked on the hill with redwoods and eucalyptuses and open stretches down to the bay.”

After Aix-en-Provence the view widens again into dry fields and rows of the red poppies I’ve been hoping for. The air is salty now. The ocean must be close. “You haven’t named two places yet.”

“Game’s over.”

“No, really, Willie, where would you go if you could?”

“I’m not telling. Remember, you hardly know me.”

“Oh, but I do know you.” He traces the long creases that run across my forehead.

“I would go to India. In fact, I’m going to India. I got a research grant from the school where I teach. Two weeks in the northern
mountains in July, tracking down the daughter of an Indian poet. I can’t wait.”

“That’s incredible.”

“You have to tell me if you think Gita will be awarded asylum and what tricks you’ve planned for the court.”

“No tricks. Only facts strung together to make a story.”

The
Graceland
album is playing when I wake up. I lift one sticky leg off the seat, then the other, trying to stretch the cramps in my calves. I finger a string bracelet on Macon’s wrist. “Pablo made it.” He looks down at me while he drives.

“Made what?” I squint in the light.

“The bracelet. Pablo beaded it.”

“Pablo who?” I hold Macon’s arm close to my face with both hands and look at the beads closely.

“Pablo Ventri.”

“Ventri. Your name, Ventri?”

“Pablo my son.”

“Your son.” Now I sit up.

“He made it in school.”

Something stings. I can hear Luke inside the truck:
Don’t overreact. Don’t panic. You never know how he might explain it
. But I always grow attached to people too quickly. I do this over and over. I’ve given Macon pieces of myself. Why did I do this? Why did I tell him about my mother? Why do I offer my parents up as if they’re only what they appear to be on the surface?

“How old?” I study the toenails on my left foot and force myself to sound casual. “How old is your son?”

“He is four.
Merde
. He is already four.”

“He lives where?”

“He lives with Delphine north of Paris, in a town called Chantilly. We all live there right now in an old stucco house I own.” He slows onto a narrower road and yields to an orange VW van.

“Delphine.” I repeat the name slowly and look out my window and try not to blink the tears.

“Delphine, my ex-wife.”

“Ex-wife?”

“Delphine, the woman I once was married to.”

“You have an ex-wife and a son.” I thought he was opening his life to me.

“I do.”

I sit on top of my hands. Luke will love this. He had no idea there would be drama.
Go slow
, Luke would say.
Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars
. He and I went through a heavy Monopoly phase in middle school.

“Chantilly is the best thing for Pablo right now, and it’s a way for us both to live with him. I’ve been divorced for two years.”

I pretend to be busy finding lip balm in my bag. Then I redo the elastic in my hair. “It’s hot in here.” I turn the fan up on the dashboard and roll the window down. Then I move as close as possible to the passenger-side door. Whenever I choose badly in love, I only blame myself. I sit and stare out the window, and that familiar sense of disappointment creeps in.

“Have I lost you to the scenery?”

“I’m thinking about how much I don’t know you.”

“But also how much you want to kiss me.” He reaches far over and puts his right hand around my neck and massages it. I feel a tingling in my thighs again, which I can’t believe.

“That may be true.” But it’s more complicated now.

“The fact that you still want to kiss me makes everything easier.”

“You have a son.”

“I have a son.” Macon doesn’t seem put off by my logic, or the next long silence that follows. Ladysmith Black Mambazo sings along with Paul Simon. There’s a smell of gasoline and sweat in the cab.

“Why are we even camping on the beach? Is it allowed?” The son and the ex-wife rain in my head.

“Because I want you to see the mountains from the beach at night.” Is he crazy? Is he just stringing lies? The beach at night? I want him to stop the truck. I want to get out. I should go home. I should call Luke and go home.

We come down to the coastline in Fréjus on a narrow winding
stretch just above St. Raphaël. There’s no music because Paul Simon shut off north of Cuers—just the whir of the truck’s engine when Macon downshifts. In St. Raphaël, he turns east toward La Napoule and there’s the click of the blinker and I still feel unsure. Why hasn’t he mentioned his wife before? Why hasn’t he mentioned his son? The road tightens through a small range of dry, brown mountains, which mark the final descent to the beach.

We pass through Miramar, then Théoule-sur-Mer, then finally La Napoule. Each mile feels excruciating. All the silence. All the deceit. It’s a small village with flat-roofed stone houses built into the side of the mountain, overlooking the sea. Cafés line the main street, with steel chairs and round tables scattered in front. The edges of the awnings flap in the wind. It’s almost six-thirty now. The sky is purple, with stitches of darker purple on the horizon, where a round tangerine sun sinks over the ocean. But I can hardly see it, I’m so caught up in myself.

“Why are you hiding them from me?” I can’t stop myself. “You have a son. You have a wife.”

“I’m not hiding.” He looks straight ahead. “I wanted to tell you about my family but I haven’t had enough time to properly introduce myself.”

We don’t know the most important things about each other. Am I deranged? I’ve always thought if you found the person you wanted to have babies with, then you didn’t leave. You didn’t take off for the French coast with a woman you’d known for three months. You didn’t go to Greece on an airplane when your children were twelve and fourteen and stay away for a month. You didn’t head out on your motorcycle for the Sonoran Desert for the better part of two years. You just didn’t. Or you shouldn’t. These are children we’re talking about.

I’m foolish. I thought his heart was available. He finds a small road that runs parallel to the beach and parks between two Citroëns. We get out and I slam my door a little too hard and take the flight of wide cement steps to the sand, a rolled sleeping bag under each arm. I can’t find anything to say. Macon has a knapsack with wine and a flashlight in it, plus a paper bag with some food in it that I hadn’t seen
before. When we get closer to the water, I sit down in the sand. It’s childish, but I make a vow to myself not to move.

“If we sleep here, we’ll get wet.” Macon says it slowly. Patiently.

“I’m tired.” The kissing at the gas station was too much. The news about Delphine makes me want to find a place to lie down and go to sleep. I think I’m going to cry. I don’t want to be with him if he is with her.