You Deserve Nothing (4 page)

She left me on the steps. I watched her walk away. “Bye, Mr. Silver,” she sang, waving with both hands and spinning in the street before she disappeared around the corner.

MARIE
25 YEARS OLD

I
barely knew who the guy was. I mean, at the beginning of my junior year I don’t think his name would have meant anything to me at all. Maybe his name. I’m not sure. The point is that I didn’t know him. And more important is that I didn’t care. There were those kids who were interested in teachers, who really cared or fell in love with them. They’d search for a math teacher on the web and find out she had a secret life or something. It’s like they were amazed that a teacher might go home and take a shower, drink a beer, go to parties, fall in love. But I didn’t care. Or maybe it was just that there was no mystery. I didn’t get the surprise. Some of them you like. Some of them you don’t. They were like our parents or our older sisters and brothers. They were like us, really. A lot like us if you think about it.

And some of those teachers? I mean they only spoke one language. Not even French. They’d never even lived in another country before France. And so many of us had lived in three, four, five different cities before Paris. And most of us spoke at least, at
least
, two languages. And flawlessly. So what did I care if some guy from Nebraska went home every night and got drunk?

We came to the same place every day. We all had our problems, our preferences, our talents, our failures. We were part of one another’s lives.

My junior year I was miserable and lonely and tired and bored of everything. I wanted to get out of there. Out of ISF, out of Paris, out of France. Away.

I’d wake up at 5:45, have a coffee, maybe eat something, take a shower, and then stand in front of the mirror putting on lotion disgusted by my body trying to figure out what to wear. I dressed and hated my choice no matter what. I’d dry my hair, brush it, and put on makeup. Then afterward I’d call Ariel to make sure we weren’t wearing the same thing.

When I went downstairs my mom would be in the kitchen, usually standing at the counter drinking her coffee. We’d barely speak. I’d say
bonjour, maman
and pretend to search for something in my backpack and if she spoke at all it was because she didn’t like my shoes.

At 6:45 I’d leave and walk to the bus stop. We lived to the east, outside of Paris, near the school in St. Mandé in a nice house right up against a forest. From my window all I saw was green. My dad was the vice president of a company that made containers. Juice boxes, milk cartons, water bottles, yogurt cups.

The walk from the house was fifteen minutes and I’d spend the whole time on the phone with Ariel. She was my best friend. I hated her. That’s one of the strange things about those years. You spend all your time with people you despise. Even after everything that happened with Colin, the way he treated me, the things he made me do, there’s no question in my mind, I hated Ariel more. You can’t imagine a hatred more intense, more pure. We were vicious. Not just us two. I mean all of those girls. I was right in the middle of it. I was
part
of it and looking back, remembering how mean we were, really hating one another, it still makes my stomach ache. You couldn’t pay me enough money to go back to high school. Not as a teacher or a student or a visitor.

I caught the bus with all the other kids from my neighborhood, found a seat and tried to sleep or do some homework. I met Ariel by the front gate where we’d share a cigarette and tell each other how good we looked. She’d tell me her stories, I’d tell her mine, and then we’d go to class. That was it. When I wasn’t in class I was with Colin or Ariel or both of them or some other people we were supposed to be friends with back then.

About Colin, I don’t know what to say really. I can’t remember a single conversation we had while we were together. I don’t know what he said to me or what I said to him. Really the whole thing only matters at all because of what he did to me. I mean I remember it, him, because of that one thing. And maybe if that had never happened I wouldn’t remember his face or what he smelled like.

GILAD

O
ur first day in Paris. We’ve been driven from Roissy to our new apartment on the rue de Tournon. My mom’s in the living room, sitting on a low white couch facing the fireplace. All the windows are open. There’s a slight smell of paint. My dad is in a light-brown linen suit he bought in Rome. A blue shirt. His pale orange tie draped over the back of the white chair in the corner. She’s sitting with her arms spread out behind her. She’s golden there, so tan, wearing a dress the color of his tie.

I sit in the chair facing my father. After so long in the desert, the absence of a buzzing air conditioner is loud. The street noise floats through. No one speaks. I look at her cheek. She’s following my dad’s gaze out the window. I’m sure I know what they’re thinking.

This is the city where they fell in love. After all this time they’ve finally returned. All this time gone by. This marriage. It isn’t happiness they feel. Something else. They feel possibility, a faint hope perhaps. But it has nothing to do with love. It has nothing to do with them together.

We’re three people in a room.

We moved to Senegal when I was ten years old. My dad was the Counselor for Public Affairs at the American Embassy in Dakar. I went to school at ISD where I was taught to speak French by a Senegalese woman, one of the few locals employed as a teacher.

Because I was in love with her I learned to speak French. I followed her everywhere and believed that we’d get married. I did whatever I could to be close to her and I listened carefully to everything she said. I’d never seen a woman like that. She spoke Senegalese French and taught us to speak like she did.

She wore a purple dress and smelled like garlic and onions. We cooked in her class and sang Senegalese songs. By the end of that year I spoke French well. I never exchanged an English word with Madame Mariama and when I left for the summer I cried in the car home.

She was fired when a group of parents complained that their children were speaking like the natives. Our new teacher was a pale Parisian ice cube. I refused to change my accent and I hated her. She hated me back.

That first summer in Paris I thought about Madame Mariama often. I loved speaking French. I got to know my neighborhood and found that I had more freedom there than anywhere I’d ever lived. We’d been in so many dangerous cities, behind so many gates in expatriate compounds, that arriving in Paris felt like being released from prison. It was the first time in my life that I didn’t have a driver or a guard.

* * *

As the story goes, they fell in love here—my mom just out of college and beautiful. In the photographs she has long dark hair and dark skin. After graduating from Berkeley, she flew to Paris in 1980 and rented a little apartment. She wandered around with a leather-bound notebook. My grandparents had given her, as a graduation gift, an around-the-world plane ticket and some money. Paris should have been the beginning of a long series of adventures.

There’s a photograph of her in black and white. She’s sitting on the Pont Neuf with her head cocked to the side. She’s wearing a thick turtleneck sweater, the sleeves drawn over her hands. She’s wearing jeans and a beat-up old military coat.

The photograph is one of the few things I’ve kept. I study it for clues of her life before my father. There’s a box of Gitanes beside her, a silver Zippo, a leather satchel at her feet. It’s a great photograph, the light on her face, her closed eyes, the shadows, her lips just barely parted as if she were speaking to someone. She says she doesn’t remember who took it. I don’t believe her.

I imagine she’s always dressed this way—big sweater, used coat. She’s smoking cigarettes, sitting in the sun, men chasing her. She’s full of ideas—places she’ll go, paintings she’ll paint, love she’ll find. I can see her walking along the Seine with nowhere to be, a little money in her pocket but not too much. She’s at bars, in cafés, one of those women who prefers men, who is loved by them, who flirts with strength rather than weakness. She’s smiling at everyone and everyone is in awe of her or in love with her. The bartender, the butchers, the florists, the cheese man, the fishmonger, everyone in her neighborhood protects her, keeps an eye on her, hoping, with their protection, that she won’t leave them, that she’ll love them in return.

Beautiful Annabelle Lumen, twenty-two, smoker of French cigarettes, wanderer of the city, who loved art so much but had never entered Paris’s greatest museum.

She’d waited, “preserving my virginity,” she says, spending days sitting in the sun, eating her lunch, reading in the muted quiet of the Cour Carrée, listening to the musicians. She sat on the steps and sketched tourists. She waited until the weather got colder, until the tour buses were fewer. She waited for the winter to come and then, one cold day at the end of January, she walked from her apartment on the rue Montmartre into the grand courtyard, passed through the gleaming new glass pyramid and descended slowly into the dark center of the Louvre.

The story of how my parents’ romance began is family legend. I’ve heard it told a thousand times. At embassy dinners and cocktail parties. It is a part of their public selves, part of their advertising.

It goes like this:

My father, Michael Fisher, straight out of Yale with a Master’s in Economics, in Paris for a vacation before he flies to Africa for his first assignment at the US Embassy in Pretoria, looks away from Prud’hon’s
The Empress Josephine
and sees my mother walking slowly across the gallery.

She is the first person to have passed in ten minutes and my father hears her footsteps before she appears. He glances at her and then returns to the painting. “It is as if,” he says, “Josephine herself has wandered into the room.”

Dad watches her. The way she’s dressed, the ease with which she moves through the gallery, the way she swings her arms, all make him believe she’s French. My father, a master of languages, has not then mastered French and wonders what to do.

“She is,” he says to himself, “the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”

She terrifies him. And so rather than speaking to her, he takes from his wallet one of his fresh-cut business cards. On the back he writes: Do you speak English? He keeps the card in his hand and goes on pretending to admire Josephine. Then he gives himself an out: if she doesn’t stop at this painting, he will let her leave undisturbed.

His heart beats. His palms sweat. She stops just behind him. He can feel her there. He can hear her pencil scratching across paper. He takes a breath. He counts to ten. He turns to her. He hands her the card, she looks at him surprised, thinks at first, she later says, that he’s a missionary, a Jehovah’s Witness, but accepts the card, reads his message, smiles, writes an answer on her half-finished sketch of Josephine, tears it from her notebook and gives it to him: Are you dumb?

He laughs aloud. His heart races. Seeing those words, that simple question, “Are you dumb?” written in her wild hand floating there where Prud’hon’s dark woods should be, the story goes, “the world became a perfectly solvable equation.”

And so he spoke.

“She’s nearly as beautiful as you are,” he says.

Suave Michael Fisher. The world a perfect proof.

“Do you think so?” my mother responds, gazing up at the painting, as if, my dad tells his guests, she were truly trying to decide who was more beautiful.

Finally she says, “You know, this Josephine, she had a pug named Fortune. She used him to send Napoleon secret messages. Did you know that?”

My father did not.

“On their wedding night Napoleon wouldn’t let Fortune sleep with them and Josephine said, ‘If the pug doesn’t sleep in our bed neither do I.’ You know what happened then?”

“They slept with the pug?”

“They slept with the pug.”

“Smart man.”

All this time Annabelle has been studying Josephine. Eventually, she turns to Michael, who’s been studying Annabelle, and says, “I’ve got better teeth than she did. Did you know that she had famously awful teeth?”

What did she see when she finally looked at young Michael Fisher? A well-dressed man, wearing good shoes and a neat haircut. A man with gray eyes and a long, straight nose. Strong round shoulders. A wide, open, American face. Thick blond hair. An attractive, unremarkable looking man, whose flat eyes threw her—she couldn’t tell if they were warm or cold.

Why she agreed to have a coffee with him in a café (neither of them can remember its name) on the Place Dauphine she wasn’t sure. Certainly it wasn’t the world falling into perfect order. She’d never describe love in those terms anyway, but whatever was propelling her away from a museum she’d waited nearly a year to visit, I promise it wasn’t love.

And that’s how they met—the museum, the café, and so on. Then they became inseparable. Lumen became Fisher. There’s no detail after the café. We’re to imagine the rest—the long walks through the city, the laughing, the glittering lights, an accordion, a rumbling
métro
, passion. People nod, they close their eyes. Ah Paris. Love. Romance. A chance meeting. But what is it they imagine, these guests of my parents who nod and smile, enraptured by my impeccably dressed father and his charming story? What do they see? What is it that happens next? Why does my mother stay with him? Why does she pack up her apartment on the rue Montmartre with her flower boxes in the window? What makes her move to Africa with this man she’s known only two weeks? This man who has so little art in him.

But nobody seems interested in the answers to these questions. No one seems compelled even to ask. It’s all simply understood—the lovely couple, the brilliant young man, the beautiful young woman, one day in the Louvre.

And I can understand leaving with him—the clean entry into a place she’d never been, the exotic idea of Africa, the spontaneity of it. The pleasure of the phone call home, “I met a man. I’m moving to Pretoria.” Oh, our reckless daughter. But why did she stay? Why did she let herself get pregnant? Why did she follow him around the world for so long?

* * *

August came. I loved my new city. I went everywhere. I found the Goutte d’Or, hidden down the hill from Sacré-Coeur, a village really. Little Africa. I wandered those streets day after day feeling nostalgic for Senegal. The markets swarmed with people wearing leather sandals and
boubous.
There were makeshift mosques, small restaurants serving cheap bowls of
Thiébou Dien
.

I didn’t have a single friend that summer but I don’t remember ever feeling lonely. It was a kind of religious experience. I felt, for the first time in my life, a new sense of possibility, hope even, and belonging. That summer I was, I’m sure, as happy as I’d ever been.

The emptiness of Paris in August allowed me a new sense of ownership, of possession. There was a laziness about the city without traffic. So little noise. More and more I moved through the streets, sliding in and out of
métros
, fluidly transferring from train to train, bus to bus. I rarely used my map. I invented games for myself where each decision I made about where to go was determined by a flip of a coin. A bus would pass. Heads yes. Tails no.

I’d never had many friends in other cities, but there had always been people around. The compounds where we lived—heavily guarded, walled neighborhoods—forced us to interact. There’d always be a pool. There were always parties, somebody’s mother serving lemonade, somebody’s father grilling chicken breasts.

There was nowhere to go. You couldn’t leave without your driver and, in some places, without your driver and bodyguard. If you want to see the city you’re living in you do it through the bulletproof glass of your car. When we did go out shopping in local markets or to restaurants or museums, we were made so conspicuous by our attendants that I only wanted to leave. I always hated the spectacle we made. We were isolated in the countries we lived in. It was like living in a wealthy, American suburb—nice homes, swimming pools, maids, alarm systems, and so on. The friends I had were just kids who were around. Kids from school, kids who lived next door, kids from the neighborhood and somewhere I lost interest.

It wasn’t until Paris that something shifted. Paris was the beginning. Paris was everything.

August passed slowly. And then there was school.