Paris Was the Place (21 page)

“Where is this person I’ve been waiting to meet? Where is he?
I need to get my hands on him.” I present her to Macon with a bow. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, let me at you!” She hugs him hard next to the stove, and what I love about him is that he hugs her right back.

Luke comes down from the roof and distributes more big hugs. “How can I help?”

“Can you taste the vinaigrette and tell me if it’s okay?”

He puts his finger in the jelly jar on the counter. “Too much lemon.” I frown, and he says, “Hey, your brow furrows when you get stern like that. You shouldn’t frown. Those are wrinkles that will stick. All I have to do is add sugar and more oil.”

Macon holds out a spoonful of the chicken sauce for me to taste. “It’s perfect!” I say. “Sublime.” I can never use this word and not think of my mother and the day when the words crowded into my head for the first time before Luke’s play.

I was a girl with words on a chalkboard inside my brain. Sometimes, when it became too much and I wanted the words to stop, I went to my mother and asked her for help. She said we can’t fight our brains. That they’re bigger than we are. All we can do is try to divert them.

Sara and I bring the plates to the table, and everyone sits. “This is beyond delectable,” she says after the first bite. “Tell us your favorite food, Macon.”

“The next time, I’ll make you my grandfather’s stew. It’s not so different from this.”

“Your father lived where?” Rajiv reaches for the wine.

“My father began in Estonia. He migrated with other Jews to Canada. ‘Fled’ is the word I should use.”

“This is during the Second World War?” Gaird asks.

Macon nods. “The moment of truth for my family.”

“I’m not Jewish,” Gaird says, “but my parents had Jewish friends in town. The number of Jews was small—in the hundreds—but the Nazis found them, and this was horrible.”

“Macon, how old was your father when he arrived in Toronto?” Rajiv asks. “Did he get sent to a refugee camp first?”

“No camp. There was a boat to North America. Then a long trip
up the St. Lawrence River. He was twelve. He didn’t speak the language.” I reach for Macon’s hand under the table. Rajiv and Sara and Luke are conducting a silent test of him. I know this. But I’ve already chosen Macon. There’s a humming sound inside my head because of how happy this makes me.

“Rajiv,” Gaird says, “how did you ever find your way to Oxfam?”

“It’s quite simple.” Rajiv carefully wipes his mouth with his napkin. “I grew up in a country where people were starving every day. I was lucky. I was sent from India to a college in the United States with a campus so beautiful it was what I’d heard Disneyland looked like. Privilege like this can alter you. After that, my path was clear. But you, Macon—how did you end up here?”

Macon smiles. “My mother was a visiting student from Paris in Toronto. I think my father had an awkward, eighteen-year-old-boy crush. She was dark-haired and striking. Everyone in my family says this. He walked her home after a chemistry class. They both wanted to be scientists. He played a very good accordion. Maybe this was it. They married. But my mother never stopped talking about Paris. Or how I had to live in the greatest city in the world. So I came for law school.”

Rajiv nods. “Why immigration law?”

“I needed money, frankly, and there was a posting at school for a job at the Legal Aid Center. They paid me a small wage to be a legal assistant for refugee boys from the centers. That’s when I learned that the centers were like jails and that children aren’t supposed to be imprisoned, according to French law.”

Rajiv bangs the table. “I get mad when I think about this.”

“I was enraged,” Macon says. “When my father landed in Canada, he couldn’t pronounce the name of the country properly, but he had a much better chance there than these kids do in Paris. I began working at the courts. I graduated. I took the law exam and did a tour of every single asylum center in France.”

“Wow,” Sara says. “That’s dedication.”

“When these kids talk to a lawyer or speak in front of a judge, they gain social capital if nothing else. There’s some power in getting
to tell your story. Maybe you see that your life is not determined just by stars or fate. Because life is short, no?” We all raise our wineglasses. “I made Willie’s favorite for dessert,” Macon adds.

“You made flan?” I ask.

“On the top shelf of the fridge, behind the butter.”

“You live with a man who makes dessert?” Luke laughs. “I can’t get over your good luck.”

“I love flan!” Sara says.

“She could eat it at every meal,” Rajiv says.

“That’s because I made it for her in college all the time.” I go and find the flan and bring it back to the table. The candles taper down so we can hardly see our bowls, but the flan is perfect.

Gaird takes a bite, and his face changes. “You have made something delightful. I can taste the fresh eggs.”

“Four,” Macon says. “From the market at Gracieuse.”

I’m not going to worry about any of them getting along anymore. They’ve already found something that connects them, and it’s food.

Then it’s Tuesday morning and I’m bringing Gita to the Academy of France for the first time. I get to Rue de Metz and there’s a thin Indian boy slumped in one of the chairs in the common room. Who’s he? He’s wearing a wrinkled white button-down shirt and black trousers, and he stares at Gita while she cries into her hand. Sophie keeps making this “tsk tsk” sound and passing Gita tissues on the couch. I stand in the doorway staring, until Sophie motions me in with her free hand. The boy and Gita appear to be having a fight in a foreign language that I can only guess is Hindi or some cousin of Hindi. He looks about twelve.

“Pradeep!” Gita stands up. Then she sits back down and begins with another torrent of the language I can’t understand. “Pradeep!” Maybe this is the boy’s name. Her brother? Pradeep. She’s written about him in class. She puts her hand over her mouth again and talks through it. The boy has her black hair cut high around his little ears and her same huge eyes. He looks away while she yells at him.

Then she stops and he fires back, talking just as loudly and quickly as she did. They volley like this until Pradeep stands and hands Gita an orange tin of what looks like dried fruit. She bursts into tears when she takes the gift. Then she reaches for her brother and holds him
tightly. Pradeep sobs uncontrollably now. He doesn’t try to contain it. Gita makes a high-pitched shrieking sound until Sophie untangles them and takes Gita by the arm and walks her out the door.

In the hallway Gita yells, “Willow, please tell my brother he is wasting his time by coming here. Tell him he needs to be in school. Tell him he must never let my maa come here to see me.” She keeps calling out to me down the hall. “Willow, please.” The boy sits back on the couch and rubs his eyes. He looks much younger now. How do I talk to him? What can I say that he’ll understand?

Then I hear him say, “I want her to come back very much.” In perfect English.

“She can’t right now, Pradeep. I’m her teacher, and we’re trying to get her moved out of this center. Then you’ll be able to see her. There are problems in your apartment, Pradeep. Gita can never live there again with Manju. I’m not sure you know why this is.”

“I have been thinking it but not saying it out loud. I want to talk to my sister again. Please can I see her again before I leave? I have not told her that Maa will not cook. I need to tell Gita that.”

I reach out my hand, and he clasps it in both of his. I say, “Thank you for coming. I’ll take your phone number. I’ll call you after Gita’s trip to the court. It won’t work to try to see her anymore while she’s here, Pradeep. But as soon as she’s out, you can.” The boy bows his head. Then we walk down the hall to the front door and I wait for Truffaut to let him out.

Then I go find Gita. She’s sitting on the stool in Sophie’s office with her eyes closed. It’s taken four forms in triplicate and several weeks, but today she can leave this building with me and begin an actual job at the academy. That is, if she’s able. Because her face looks so sad. “Are you sure you want to go today?” I ask her.

“I want very much to go to your school. I am ready.”

She smiles when Truffaut buzzes us out. Then we turn right on Rue de Metz and walk toward Boulevard de Strasbourg. “I am pretending,” she says, “that I am not coming back here anymore. I am pretending I am leaving the center forever.”

We take the No. 4 line to Rue St. Sulpice and we’re at the academy by nine forty-five. “Luelle,” I say when we get to the office. “Meet Gita, your new receptionist.”

“I am so glad to make your acquaintance, Gita.” Luelle speaks formal English with a Belgian accent. “I will have you help me sort through the invoices. We will do the unpaid and the paid piles. I will also ask you to answer the phone. In English, of course.”

“Thank you, Luelle,” I say. “Thank you so very much. You did not have to be so helpful.”

Then I walk to my office at the end of the hall and get ready for the ten-thirty class. Today we’re reading Anaïs Nin. Part of a poem called “Risk.” I start class by asking the girl named Virginie to read:

Then I ask a boy named John with perfect French grammar to translate it into English, which he does slowly, steadily:
And then the day came, when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom
.

This is the type of short narrative that the students love because they can attach themselves to the extended metaphors. Some of the kids compare the story of the blossom to risks in their own lives and how they dared come to France on their own. Some equate it with trying to write their own poetry.

The class finishes at twelve-thirty, and I look in on Gita. Two wooden desks form an L against the back wall of the office. Luelle is typing on a gray Olivetti. Gita speaks into a black phone receiver. They both smile at me. “It’s going okay?” I ask.

“It’s going very well,” Luelle says. Her hands don’t stop flying over the typewriter keys.

“Lunch?”

“I take lunch now,” Luelle says. “We close the office down for an
hour. So please, Gita,” she says, nodding, “you can eat at your desk or outside in the park. There are also several good cafés.”

“Follow me,” I say to Gita and smile. “We can go find food.” We walk down St. Sulpice to a small market on the corner of Rue de Tournon. I buy Brie and apples. There is a
boulangerie
next door where I get us a baguette. Then we take the long block all the way into the Luxembourg Gardens. The plane trees here are getting full and green, and the gardeners have cropped off their tops so the trees are flat and sculpted. We walk on the gravel esplanade toward the palace. There’s a row of slatted green metal chairs to our left overlooking the grass. The garden is full of red geraniums and bright-colored tulips and a flowerless plant with pointed dark green leaves that I don’t know the name of. I pull two chairs close together. Then I put the cheese and apples on the paper bag in my lap and break off a piece of baguette for Gita. “Is it okay in the office? It’s not too much?”

“I am learning.” She takes the bread and eats it without cheese. “Luelle is very helpful. It is nice of her to let me answer the phones in English. I hope I am good enough. I am grateful for the people who call and wait for me to speak my slow English.”

It almost feels normal to have a picnic with Gita in the garden. So hard to believe this is only the second time she’s left the center since I’ve known her, and that some of the girls haven’t even left once.

In the afternoon I teach a seminar on Rainer Maria Rilke, a German poet who lived for a time in France and wrote one of the greatest last lines of poetry ever written. It comes at the end of the poem called “Archaic Torso of Apollo.”

A girl named Hannah from Colorado reads the poem out loud in French. I tell the students nothing is superfluous with Rilke. Every line matters. Each word serves the next and moves the poem forward. “For a while,” I say, “Rilke worked for the sculptor Auguste Rodin. He wanted his poems to have the same muscularity that Rodin’s carvings did. He wanted to describe the statue of Apollo with sensory details that mirrored what a sculptor would do with a chisel.”

I hand out the English translation and ask Hannah to read the
last two stanzas. I want to spend the rest of the class dissecting the French words and comparing their meaning to the English.

Every time I come to that last line, the hair on my arms stands up. The imperative voice at the end changes everything. The reader is implicated. You. You out there. You must change your life. I’ve never read a better closing line.

A boy named Tyler, who rarely speaks, says, “This poem is an anthem. It’s a call to action. It’s about what a short amount of time we have here on earth. And how fleeting life is.”

Virginie nods at him. “And there’s immediacy. There’s this incredible culmination. I think it’s about how to live without pretense.” We’re equal parts poets and philosophers.

When class is over, I walk back down the stairs to the office to get Gita. “The Academy of France is happy to be sending you the information,” she says into the receiver and smiles. “I am Indian. It is an Indian accent, yes, good-bye and have a nice day.”

Her accent is strong, and she lifts her sentences up at the end, so the tone sometimes implies a question when it doesn’t mean to. She keeps using passive verb construction, even though we’ve talked about using the simple tense. But she’s answering the phones well. I wait for her to finish the last call. Then she stands up from her chair. “It is time to be going back already?”