Beautiful Americans (7 page)

 

Of course Alex bails as soon as the setup is in place! Why am I not surprised? After a half hour of the French guys cooing over how cute she is, how much they love her bag and her shoes, she gathers her things, ties a large vintage Hermès scarf around her neck, and air kisses the guys goodbye.

“Zack—call me tomorrow, and I will fill you in on how we’re spending
next
weekend. I love you more than anything.” Alex leans over, balancing precariously on her red stiletto heels to kiss me on the cheek.

“You can’t leave me with them!” I protest quietly into her ear, but she’s off, teetering down the Rue Saint Sulpice, already chattering away onto her Blackberry and waving for a cab. I rub at the lip-gloss, sticky on my face, fuming.

“
Alors, Zack, que penses-tu de Paris?
” one of the guys, a redhead with ruddy skin whose name I think is Martin, asks me. He looks deep into my eyes as he says it, his voice husky.

“Oh, I love Paris,” I stammer. “I just love it!”

“You should let me show you around sometime,” Martin says, reaching down and putting his hand on my knee. “Tonight we are going dancing at this really great club if you want to come with us.” His two friends nod in agreement.

“Oh, maybe,” I say.
Is it just me or did they dim the lights in here?

I look away from Martin for a moment. I
should
go to the club with them. I should go out dancing every night. I should meet guys. I should trust Alex. This is how to get a boyfriend! But somehow—this feels all wrong. It sounds strange to say it in my head, but I realize I’ve never hung out with openly gay guys before. It’s oddly terrifying, I have to confess.

With a sheepish smile, I turn back to Martin to decline his invitation. It’s just too soon. Besides, it’s getting late, plus . . . I don’t even know these guys. Maybe if Alex were here, but not like this. . . .

Suddenly, Martin is leaning in toward me like he is going to kiss me. My first kiss with a guy! In just one second, I’m going to be
kissing a guy
. In public. This is. Absolutely. Unreal.

Martin’s two friends have moved away from our table a bit to give us some privacy, and it’s obvious that they think he and I are a done deal. How did this all happen so fast?

“Oh, God!” I sputter, feeling a hot, red blush spread from my hairline to the absolute tips of my toes. “I’ve got to go—curfew—sorry—thanks for the drinks!” I leap out of my seat and hear the crash of our wine glasses as I blindly knock them over. I don’t even stop to help clean up the mess. I just bolt for the door.

Love and Lies in Le Marais

“T
his joker thinks he knows his way around the Paris metro, but he’s
demented
,” Drew practically shouts as he and George approach our table, each holding a tacky tallboy of convenience-store beer. “We were all the way to the Porte de Clignancourt before homeboy realized we were going in the completely wrong direction.”

A group of us is sitting at the most adorable outdoor garden café, located in the trendy neighborhood of Le Marais on a Saturday night. The café is draped in white Christmas lights and hushed except for a little retro record player warbling Edith Piaf. The patrons, locals dripping with style and class, give us an immediate look of disgust as the boys drag up chairs to join us.

I take a deep breath. Since Zack is clearly out of the question, George is the one I’ve selected to be my boyfriend this year. Half horrified, half cracking up, I grab the mostly empty cans from the boys and hide them under the table before the waiter turns around and sees.

“Shut up, you idiot! The girls are going to think I don’t have any game if you keep that up,” George retorts, also way too loud, giving Drew a friendly shove. “Don’t listen to him. He’s the one that got stuck in the metro turnstile. The dude in the little hut at the station had to come help him out of it. It was priceless.”

George and Drew are possibly the most eligible guys in our program, both of them clean-cut sons of New England privilege. They know each other from before the Lycée, since they’ve gone to boarding school together for the last four years. Though Drew is certainly plenty hot, tall and a little scraggly with shaggy blond hair, George is my favorite of the two. George is preppier and a little stockier than his friend, with a sweeter face and a certain je ne sais quoi. He reminds me of an old-school charmer, like one of the rich kids in an old John Hughes movie. A prepster with a heart of gold. Or something.

“I’m so sorry we’re late,” George says more quietly, looking right at me with piercing, intent eyes. “I hope we didn’t keep you waiting.”

He’s perfectly captivated by me, his manners honed carefully by his ritzy upbringing. I feel my mom’s nod of approval all the way from New York. “That’s okay,” I tell him, unable to look away.

I noticed him on the first day of school, checking me out as I put on my lip-gloss in French class. It took him a full
three weeks
before finally asking me what I was doing this weekend.

“So, Al,” George says, reclining comfortably, still looking just at me. “Now that you took our beers from us, how should we go about getting more?”

I
really
like that he called me Al. Having a nickname for me so soon is surely a good sign. “Um,” I say, barely able to think, nonetheless respond like an intelligent person. “Order one from the waiter?”

I usually have an arsenal of flirtatious one-liners to keep me going through the adrenaline high of being with a new crush for the first time, but tonight I’m falling flat. I must like George more than I realized.

Olivia raises her eyebrows at my quavering, nervous response and motions at the waiter to bring everyone a fresh drink.

I’d helped Olivia accessorize the striped baby doll dress I’d loaned her with my red stiletto pumps (I’m already sick of wearing them, anyway) and my wide black belt cinched around her small waist. She looks fantastic, though not quite as good as I do tonight in one of my mom’s patterned Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dresses with its plunging neckline. Olivia might have a boyfriend at home, but not for long if I have anything to do with it. Dating is no fun when you can’t include your friends.

“What do you care what I wear tonight?” Olivia asked me, disgruntled, when I insisted she changed out of her j eans and Ugg boots and into something of mine. “Besides, it’s starting to get chilly out. I’ll freeze if I wear this.”

“Wear this over it, then,” I told her, handing her a black pashmina wrap. “Olivia, it’s hardly freezing out. It’s not even October. Just wait till January. You’ll be begging to get on the first flight back to San Diego.”

“Still,” Olivia said, fiddling with the belt. “I like to be casual.”

“I’ve noticed,” I told her. “You and every other American in our program. How do you guys expect to find boyfriends over here if you’re always dressing like you’ve just rolled out of bed?”

“Alex,” Olivia told me for what seemed like the millionth time. “I have a boyfriend. Vince, remember? We’ve been going out for two years. I’m not about to go out with someone else.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it,
I thought. The whole story is tiresome by now. Olivia has known studly basketball star Vince her whole life—their parents are friends or something. They ran around in dirty Huggies together. If you ask me, that’s all the more reason she should date someone new!

I made a vomiting noise. “You’re in Paris, for Pete’s sake! The city of
love
. Life is too short for long distance relationships . . . and anyway, who else am I going to double date with?” Olivia knew I meant I’d picked out Drew for her, but she wasn’t taking me seriously.

I wondered, though, when I saw her fluff her highlighted hair (mercifully, she’s wearing it down rather than in a boring old ponytail like normal) as the boys approached.

PJ, of all people, is sitting to Olivia’s left. I was
so
annoyed when she came over to get ready with us earlier—
of course
Olivia felt like she had to invite her since PJ is
still
living with her. Olivia is far too kindhearted to leave anyone out, even a space cadet like PJ. Since she arrived at the café tonight, PJ has just sat there looking lovely and petulant, drinking nothing but sparkling water and in general making
everything
as
awkward
as possible. She can’t seem to stop fidgeting, or saying things out of turn.

Like when she prompts me for the right words to order my drink. Doesn’t PJ think I know how to say “
Je voudrais un verre de vin
”? It just takes me a second to think of it. I have other things on my mind. Like George, sitting not even a foot away from me, his smile as beguiling as a heartthrob on the cover of
Luxe
.

The waiter brings over our drinks. White wine for me, beer for George and Drew, a gin and tonic for Zack, and two very demure glasses of Perrier for Olivia and PJ. Olivia, as a dancer, has an excuse for not drinking. PJ, on the other hand, seems to abstain just to be a buzz-kill.

I sneak a look over at George, sipping on his Heineken (which is conveniently pronounced the same way in every language and thus easy to order in French without looking like a fool) and wonder if he thinks PJ is hotter than me. When he meets my eyes with an amatory smile, I have the answer to my question—there is no one in this program better suited to George than myself. Not even the six-foot willowy blonde hippie. I breathe a long sigh of happy relief.

“I can’t wait to go to Amsterdam,” George says excitedly. “My sister went there this summer; she said it was
sick
. You can take a tour of the Heineken brewery, and then they, like, pour Heineken down your throat at the end, and you get wasted.”

“Fascinating,” Zack remarks. Before they arrived, Zack had made his impressions of George and Drew well-known: George is a pampered asshat with a sleazy Boston accent, and Drew poses like a chilled-out idiot surfer to hide his suburban Connecticut waspiness. Both of the boys lost marks with Zack for their bad shoes—loafers with no socks for preppy George, and old, dirty Vans slip-ons for Drew.

“And they dress like their moms shop for them at the Nordstrom kids’ section back-to-school sale,” Zack complained earlier. When Zack is in this mood—judgmental and hyperaware of what people are wearing—I think it’s best just to ignore him altogether. He just hasn’t seen George’s excellent qualities yet—the things that make George absolutely
perfect
boyfriend material.

George’s expensive brown leather loafers might be a cliché, but they are also an excellent metaphor for all that separates George out as the man of my dreams. He’s
reliable
, unconcerned with trends and what people think of him, and, best of all, he’s
rich
. I know that might sound superficial, but I believe it is incredibly important to know what you want. Dating can be such a royal chore when you have to spend the whole time wondering who is going to pay! Believe me, I’ve been there before, with Jeremy, my Park Slope pauper, art students from the Pratt Institute, cute guys playing Frisbee golf in Prospect Park. I’m ready for a prince.

“That’s fabulous!” I say to George more kindly. “Are you planning a trip?”

“Oh, hells yeah. Are we ever!” George shouts, Drew smacking him high-five across the table. “Dude, we are going to get so blazed in Amsterdam, we’ll probably never come back!”

“It’s gonna be sweet,” Drew concurs. “Pot, hookers, whatever we want, whenever we want.” He rowdily starts drumming the tabletop with his hands, pounding out a long solo that attracts even more attention to our table. While he does it, he stares me right in the eye.
Weird
.

“Drew!” Olivia scolds with a shriek of righteous, though giggling, protest. She smacks him playfully on the arm. “Prostitutes? That’s disgusting!”

“Hey, man,” Drew says gamely. “When in Rome . . . or should I say Amsterdam? Whatever. I’m just sayin’.” He makes a lewd hand gesture that sends Olivia back into horrified hysterics.

Even Zack, who I can usually trust to act like a gentleman in public, starts making fake-barfing noises. Shooting a look at our disapproving waiter, I flush with embarrassment. PJ, for her part, is at least acting like a grown-up. The rest of our group has devolved into a level of discourse that is just unsuitable for a Parisian café, no matter
how
much we’ve had to drink. And no matter how much I like George.

“Shhh,” I scold them. “You guys are going to get us kicked out! Can’t we have a civilized conversation? One that doesn’t involve all the criminal activity you two are plotting in my unwitting presence?”

Finally
, I think with relief. I’m forming sentences like a coherent person again, rather than being struck dumb and making googly eyes at George. I toss my hair. There we go.

George looks at me with a lopsided, guilty smile. “Of course we can, doll. What do you want to talk about? Jean-Paul Sartre? Sarkozy’s foreign policy? The plummeting rates of the dollar against the euro? Any of those civilized enough for you?”

“No,” I giggle. “Those things are boring.”

George shakes his head. “Alex, I’m quite positive that you’ve never uttered a single boring phrase in your life, no matter what the topic of conversation is.”

“Besides,” Drew comments, “don’t you worry your pretty little head about our criminal activity. It’s 100 percent legal to smoke pot in Amsterdam. Europeans in general are way cooler about that kind of stuff.”

“It’s true,” PJ says quietly. “Things are way easier over here.”

We all turn to look at her, since it’s practically the first thing she’s said all night.

PJ’s not even looking at us. She’s staring at an older couple, in their fifties at least, dancing slowly in the corner of the outdoor garden next to the old record player. When the man gently dips the lady, the people sitting near them break into pleased applause.