Hidden in Paris (26 page)

The next day, they were in the kitchen attending to dinner and homework. So this was her new life, Annie pondered as she sat at the kitchen table picking at the baguette. She was enjoying the spectacle of Lola’s frightened attempt at soufflé making while her own chicken with tarragon was gently bubbling on the stove. How familiar those strangers were already, and how surreal it was that she actually liked this new life. And how fun it was to watch Lola squint anxiously at the cheese soufflé recipe. The ingredients were all on the table. All Lola had to do was read, measure, and mix, but by the look of her you’d think she was navigating a crocodile infested swamp. Also at the table, Lia and Maxence were studying less than half-heartedly and Althea was peeling the carrots necessary for the
carottes rapées
, prompting Annie to wonder once again why Althea insisted on joining them in the preparation of meals she would not eat. Meanwhile, Paul, Laurent and Simon ran around the kitchen, throwing ill-designed paper airplanes at each other that invariably landed on Althea who ducked them humorlessly.

Lola jerked up like a jack-in-the-box. “I can’t make this. We’re out of Parmesan.”

“Substitute,” Annie said.

“Substitute with
what
?”

“You could try cement. If the soufflé rises, it will make a very practical door stop.”

Suddenly the kitchen went silent. “What? What did I say?” She turned to see that Jared had entered the kitchen.

He mumbled hello and went about the room gathering plates, utensils, bread, and fruit. Annie exchanged a meaningful glance with Lola, silenced Paul’s giggles with a death stare and got up. She didn’t miss a beat. She took a ladle and a medium-size serving bowl, scooped out a generous portion of tarragon chicken, and handed it to Jared as though this were the most natural thing in the world. She might be festering with curiosity but she’d be damned if she showed it.

“Don’t forget to come back later,” she told him, “Lola is making concrete for dessert.”

Jared left with inaudible grumbles, and, on a tray, the makings of a setting for
two people
.

No one made a comment about what had just happened. A few minutes later Althea finished peeling, cleaned up the table, and was gone.

Lola approached the stove and whispered so the kids wouldn’t hear, “Do you think maybe he is helping Althea with her anorexia?”

“What anorexia?” Annie said through a mouthful of bread. “She’s weird about food and too skinny, but she’s a grown woman. If all it takes to be an anorexic it to whine about your thighs, then I’m anorexic.”

Lola considered this and said “I’d say your thing is more bulimia.”

Annie stopped chewing, opened her mouth wide. “Yaa reaaaaly thhhink?”

“Who am I to judge anyone,” Lola sighed.

“You think I eat like a pig, don’t you?”

Lola looked at her apologetically. “Sometimes.”

Annie considered the baguette in front of her. A good half was missing, and this was before dinner. She was a bottomless pit of hunger. Food: hunting it, preparing it, and ingesting it was how she self-medicated. “I’m glad Jared’s paying attention to Althea,” she said, “because I sure as hell don’t have that kind of patience.” She turned to the children. “If your homework is finished, put it in your backpacks and go watch a few minutes of TV before dinner.” The children were out of the kitchen before the end of her sentence.

“What am I going to do when I’m back in L.A?” Lola asked the contents of her bowl. “My life is out of control. My own husband is encouraging me to have an affair.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I’ve been faithful to him all these years and this is the appreciation I get? He’s right, I should have an affair. That’s what he deserves.”

“No one deserves that,” Annie answered. It occurred to her at that moment that sooner or later, Lola would be going back to that ape she had married. That was obviously what she really wanted to do. Annie removed her apron that read, “Don’t Provoke the Chef” and threw it on the kitchen counter. “Well, I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life either.”

“You? But you’re happy!” Lola exclaimed.

“Who says?”

“You have your house, your crafts.”

“Realistically, how many times can one sofa be reupholstered? One wall stenciled? What am I going to do with myself for the next forty, fifty years of my life? And
will I ever get laid again?
”

Lola contemplated her quizzically. “Is that what you worry about? Love?”

“I’m a frigging tub of lard,” Annie said, holding whatever was left of the baguette against her chest.

Lola wrestled the baguette out of her hands. “Sorry, but that’s it. No more bread for you until further notice
Madame
.”

Mai

Chapter 19

Between the surprising heat and the cobalt blue of the sky, Annie asked herself how those people in the office buildings were going to make it through the day. She was drenched just from walking three blocks. Granted she was walking kind of fast. Okay. She was exercising. She had retrieved a pair of forgotten gym shoes from the closet earlier in the week and begun walking around the neighborhood at a brisk pace. This was something she kept to herself. She did it while Lola was at yoga and the kids in school. No need to make a big statement about it since she couldn’t guarantee she’d stick with it. Also, she cut pasta and bread out of her diet cold turkey, and the combination of both made her feel lightheaded, almost saintly.

On this first day of May, rue de Passy was overtaken by the sweet smell of Lily of the Valley. Street vendors had basketfuls of the small white flowers at their feet, and since Annie wasn’t carrying any yet, she could not make a step without someone shoving a small bouquet towards her nose.

The store windows she passed were in full spring regalia. The spring fashion, it seemed, had a nautical theme. It was in the streets as well.
“French women never go out without lipstick,”
was the circular thought in her mind. She did not look too French at the moment. Her hair was a disaster. No cut, no color. She slowed her pace and stopped to look at the mannequins in a boutique’s window. That T-shirt with navy and white stripes looked fresh and youthful. She had not bought as much as a new T-shirt in three years. She flattened her hair with the palm of her hand and entered the boutique.

What size was she now? She looked at piles of jeans, mountains of them. Where to start? A young woman in a flowery dress walked out from behind a curtain and looked at Annie disapprovingly from her toes to her head. Annie turned on her heels and made a run for the exit.

“
Je peux vous aider
?” the woman said.

“
Non, je regardais, c’est tout
. Anyhoo, ciao and sayonara as they say in Bangladesh.”

“I speak English,” the salesperson said. She had a nice smile, not that ice queen Parisian attitude.

Annie slowed down.

“I’d love to help you,” the woman insisted.

“Help me?” Annie inhaled. “Do you perform lobotomies?”

The woman considered her. “I can do better than that.”

Oh the power of a good salesperson. An hour later, Annie was leaving the store
with a bag filled with pretty clothes on her arm and the address of a hairdresser in her hand.

Althea had lit up all the candles in the room and set them around her desk. A Parisian landscape was taking form in black and white under her fingers on a piece of paper she had found around the house and with a sharpie borrowed from the kitchen: a café, passersby holding umbrellas, rain, silhouettes of a woman and a man in dark coats holding hands. It was almost eleven at night and Althea was dressed to go out. She had spent the last hour on her make-up, perfecting the eyeliner above her top lashes. Her coat was laid on her bed, ready to be put on. In a few minutes, she prayed, Jared would knock at her door and again would take her out for the evening. He had brought food for them to eat two hours before, in the strange ritual that was now theirs. Then he had left with a promise to come back.

Now that Jared fed her, painted her, and by some miracle seemed to want to show her the city at night, her time alone was spent on nothing but waiting for him. She counted hours, and she counted minutes, and she counted breaths inside of those minutes.

In the short month since Jared had begun painting her, everything had changed for Althea. She could hardly remember what she did with her thoughts before she knew him. She loved every instant of those nights, even if she was cold to the core, and tired, even if Jared never did what she most wanted him to do: kiss her.

Some nights with Jared, icy gusts of wind beat down on them without mercy. Other nights the air felt soft and smelled of lilac. His long black coat like the sail of a night ship, Jared ignored the elements altogether. Her hand in his, she floated, her feet barely skimming over the asphalt. Paris and Jared became confusingly entwined in her understanding, each inconceivable without the other.

It was on those nightly walks through the blur of light that was Paris that she was slowly discovering her voice. Jared never pressured her to speak. He could be silent for an hour and then speak for another hour, fervent monologues in French about politics, art, and religion. She spoke very little at first, she preferred to listen to him, watch his beard creep on his face as the night went on, and inhale his scent. Then she dared answer his questions, first a few words in French, then stringing words together like beads, then composing sentences more musical to her ear than music. Speaking in French, in Paris, was like a blank slate. Her voice was different in French; her thoughts were different in French. She never wanted to speak English, her mother tongue, again. But she loved being with Jared in silence too; she felt great freedom in simply being present.

Jared advanced through the streets of Paris rather than wander through them. He did not explain where they were going or why, and she did not ask. When they were not walking, they sat in deserted subway cars that meandered under the city and screeched through long stops at every station. There they sat shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, often not speaking a word. Yet, even doing nothing in silence, she felt more intensely awake in Jared’s company than she ever felt in her life.

Once they reached a destination, a party, a restaurant where people he knew were dining, or the home of a friend, Jared never really seemed to settle or plan to stay. In fact it wasn’t uncommon for them to walk or ride the métro for an entire hour to get somewhere, only to leave that destination minutes later.

Everyone they met in Paris, in cafés, in train stations, in the streets, seemed to know Jared. In the darkest corners of the city, homeless people, prostitute or junkies would speak to him, seeking his attention for a few moments. The same happened in glamorous areas of Paris where the beautiful people of an intelligentsia Jared seemed welcomed to join tried to seduce him into staying longer. All looked at her questioningly, some bold enough to ask who she was. Only then would Jared tell her name, but he never volunteered other information, and never introduced her. He had been one, and now he was two, and no explanation was given.

After several nights of this, Althea arrived at the conclusion that Jared liked places more than people. He pointed out the architecture, and the history behind the architecture. There was a narrative to each place he took her to, she could tell, but often she would have to guess that narrative herself.

One night, on the quays of the Seine at dusk, couples were soon replaced by a furtive crowd. He asked her to wait in a dark corner under a bridge while a conversation took place between him and a man. The exchange chilled her, though she heard not a word. It lasted only a few seconds, an eternity of separation between her body and his. Later, she told him she had been scared and he only smiled and squeezed her hand tighter.

Once they had walked fast on rue Botzaris when Jared came to a stop. There was a torn patch in a chain link fence, and he helped her crawl under. The moon was bright that night and she recognized the park of the
Buttes-Chaumont
where he had taken her the evening before, just before closing. It was a different park in the crepuscule. Gone were the voices and children, gone the dogs and the grass. Instead, shadows layered like Japanese inks, trees, grass, rocks, and ponds all turned shades of gray.

Walking on a graveled path, Althea thought she heard moaning. She squeezed Jared’s hand hard. Past a patch of tall bushes, two men, barely hidden, were having sex. They were close enough that the reflection of the moon shone briefly in one of the men’s eyes. Jared didn’t hurry or slow his pace any more than if he had passed a mother and carriage in broad daylight.

“That was horrible,” Althea whispered.

“Why? Because of the sex or the fact that they were both men?”

She loathed herself, but said, “The idea of sex outside of love.” Realizing she had brought up sex, she backtracked. “Paris is sad.”

“It depends on the mood you are in to begin with,” Jared responded. He removed his hand and she died a little, but he slowed his pace and put his arm around her shoulders.

One time, after wandering through Paris all night long, seemingly looking for someone, they ended up in
Rungis
. “This is the largest wholesale food market in the world,” he told her “Whatever you want to buy, someone will sell it to you here.”

It felt like the middle of the night but the market teemed with frantic activity. Althea gasped at the scale of what lay before her eyes:
entire animals hung on hooks, live geese in cages, piles of dead rabbits, croaking frogs, snails, fish by the bushel, head and tails attached. Odors. She should not have been surprised. In France, she had discovered, everything, the most disgusting things, were intended to be eaten. The ground was littered with bruised vegetables, feathers, crushed ice, straw, cigarette butts. She was overtaken with nausea between wheels of cheese piled like tires and black mushrooms that smelled of rot.

“The French are obsessed with food.”

“Whatever little happiness you can steal in a day seems like a good idea to me,” Jared had said.

There was never an instant when she was not terrified that Jared could turn towards her and realize his mistake. There was no reason he wanted to spend time with her at all, at least no reason he cared to give her. Just the same, at every street corner, every pause in this frenetic search for nothing, Althea dreamed, hoped, begged new and ancient gods that Jared would kiss her. But though he incomprehensibly held her hand tight and sat close to her in the métro, this he never did. Her nights with Jared were spent in a state of awakened dreaming and ended when he eventually took her back to Annie’s house, opened the door for her, walked up the stairs with her, deposited her back in her room, in her world, and then left. The first time he took her out, she thought it had been a fluke. The next evening though, he had come back. Every night after that she had wondered if it was the last time, but every time he had come back.

In her bedroom, Althea was done with the drawing. She tossed it in the trash. There was no more paper. She looked at the clock. Ten at night. Jared would soon be there she hoped, to rescue her for her main preoccupation, defined in her mind as “Not Calling Mom.” The obsession took over most of her waking hours and resulted in crippled sleep and circular thinking. She was in turns heartbroken and furious with her mother, emotions that soon morphed into self-loathing and confusion as she waited for sundown. It was in that state of anguish and suspended animation that she counted the minutes until Jared reappeared into her life.

Annie had not mentioned anything about her new clothes, the cute striped T-shirt, the new sandals, the pedicure, nor had she talked about her desire to cook leaner food to Lola who, she felt, was a bit too self-involved to notice details about other people. Annie tossed her cookbooks one by one onto the kitchen table. How was it possible none of them contained a single recipe that wasn’t laced with butter, cream, starches and carbohydrates? No more buying cookbooks on an empty stomach.

She heard the distinct sound of her front door opening followed by mild cursing
en Français
announcing that Lucas had let himself in and that she had therefore forgotten to lock the front door again. How predictable the man, how predictable the woman, how predictable the situation. Never mind food, a battle of a different nature was afoot. She braced herself, pretended to be absorbed in her cookbook.

Lucas entered the kitchen in a huff. “Your front door was open.”

“Hello to you, too,” she cooed.

“You didn’t lock. Again!”

“And?”

When Lucas was mad, his accent was even cuter. “Eets not safe to leave your front door open.”

She didn’t look up from her cookbook. “Eet’s my house so I do what ees good for me!”