Paris Was the Place (11 page)

“It’s history,” Luke says without looking up. Gaird pretends he hasn’t heard me. “War history.” Luke picks up the plate. “This looks delicious. You are a good person to cook for us. Gays, by the way, need to watch war movies. We need to bulk up on this artillery stuff.” He reaches for his fork. The TV screen blinks, and the sun goes down behind the clean line of mansard roofs across the avenue. I stare at the two of them and secretly wish them a happy ending.

I
TAKE
a taxi home across the river—a luxury, but it’s late and I feel like I’ve been gone from my apartment for weeks. The message light on my machine blinks. “Hello. Hello, yes, it’s Macon Ventri. Gita Kapoor’s lawyer. Yes. I was wondering if we could meet tomorrow at the center before your class? I will be there to interview Gita, and I believe that is when you teach.” I smile at the machine. I can’t help it. His English is so precise and grammatical. And he speaks in something that almost sounds like a British accent.

I change into sweatpants, pour a glass of wine, and sit on the rug to set up the VCR machine. My friend Polly, from the drama department at the academy, gave me a copy of
Hannah and Her Sisters
. She says I’ll love it—Woody Allen follows the lives of three American sisters and their errant husbands as they fall in and out of love. I’ve spent the fall and winter in France putting on more lipstick than I’ve ever worn in my life, and still it hasn’t happened. French men seem to live inside some impenetrable fortress.

I’ve always chosen men badly. It’s become a joke with Luke. I’m not sure how to love. I meet men and swoon, and overanalyze them. Then I can’t bring them home and they can never meet Luke. He
would only find ways to make fun of them, because this is how he shows he cares. Then I regret what I’ve done until the men leave me out of confusion. But I watch the movie for two blissed-out hours, and I allow myself to go far away from the student papers on French symbolism I need to grade and the question of what’s happened to Luke’s lung. Macon Ventri has called me here at my apartment. He knows where I live. I pull up the blanket on the couch and I’m alone again in France, but not lonely.

During our senior year of college, I’d driven Sara and Rajiv home for Thanksgiving in an old pickup truck I’d bought from a waitress at the Japanese restaurant where I worked in Palo Alto. The trip took much longer than it should have. The truck could only go fifty miles an hour—all of us mashed into the cab. Sara sat in the middle, listening to beginner French tapes.
Parlez-vous français?
She wanted to move to France even then.
Oui
, the three of us said in unison.
Je parle français
.

Luke had flown in from Beijing that morning, and he stood at the screen door waiting for us, big circles under his eyes like he hadn’t slept in a week. My father was at the stove, chopping oysters and cre-minis for the stuffing. This was after he’d found God in the desert and become a born-again Christian, which is still the greatest surprise of my life and something that, a decade later, I haven’t figured out how to assimilate.

Rajiv was forced to stand at the sink with a malfunctioning peeler (my mother didn’t believe in peelers and I’d found this one under old chopsticks in the wax paper drawer) for hours: sweet potatoes, white potatoes, pearl onions, and carrots. Sara got caught up in the turkey work. She and my mother and father fretted over the bird all day. Basted it and took its temperature like it was a new pet.

Then the turkey sat on the cutting board in my parents’ kitchen in its heat-spackled glory while we waited for it to cool. We were really going to eat it after all the pampering? Luke brought red maple leaves from China. Were there trees in Beijing? The leaves sat on the plates like small, veined hands. I assembled the salad and boiled cranberries for the sauce, and willed the boy named Ned, an ex–wide receiver for the University of Southern California I’d been sleeping with, to call me. The night before he’d phoned drunk from my friend Betsy’s house and said he was going to sleep there that night. With Betsy. Ned liked to flex his biceps when he was naked, which sounds horrible, but back then it made me laugh. He’d taken me to nightclubs and liked to borrow things from me—my sandals, my French linen nightie. I thought he was flattering me by stealing.

Luke kept putting his hand on my wrist in the kitchen and taking my pulse to see how I was. “I’m fine,” I said when he did it for the third time.

“You’re not fine. You’re wearing a nightgown.”

“It’s a tunic. I swear I didn’t sleep in it.”

“It is a potato sack.” Then he got serious. “You’re really okay? I’m here, you know. Breakups can be the worst.” I smiled, but I’d never felt this flatness before. I’d always been the one to end things until now.

My mother took my hand and pulled me into the screened-in porch. It wasn’t warm enough to eat out there. She wore one of my father’s long navy Mister Rogers cardigans and sat me down on the bamboo couch. She’d left psychology and was studying the body on shakier ground by then. This meant she was an expert in things like chakras and energy points and nothing with a name that seemed to have anything to do with the actual, physical human anatomy. Patients came to the house so she could lay her hands on them. She was the real fixer. She did it for a living. That day her hair was up in a thick bun, held in place with two chopsticks. “Do you love this boy Ned?”

“I don’t know.” I’d never been in love before, so I wasn’t sure.

She studied me. “Your third chakra is the nexus of self-esteem. It’s blocked.”

“Oh, Mom. Please stop.” I couldn’t tell what was worse—when I was little and she used psychology vocabulary way too big for me or this weirder talk about energy. “What language are you speaking? You’ve got to stop.” I stood up. I wanted to be in love so badly then because I thought it would transform me, and that only once I was in love would my real life begin.

I was a serial monogamist in college. First I dated Brandon, a boy from Film 101: An Introduction Across Genres. We sat together during
The Deer Hunter
screening, and I had a small existential breakdown during the movie and became an instant Meryl Streep groupie. I reached for Brandon’s hand the first time the war vets walked into the woods with guns. He whispered that it would be okay—that he’d already seen the film five times.

We had sex on the floor of his dorm room that night. Neither of us knew what we were doing. His clothing hung off the radiator: dirty athletic socks with black stripes at the top, grayish boxers. He lived in a suite—six white guys who shared a swamp of a living room having Freudian relationships with their bongs.

Then I dated Sam from Pittsburgh, who wrote love poems in the school newspaper. I ran into him at an off-campus hash party and he filled my wineglass. He said, “The girl in the straw hat in stanza three is you.” Need he have said another word?

The poem was about taking a girl to a small lake and helping her walk out of the water. It had a proprietorship that doesn’t sound very evolved now. But here is what I thought: finally someone other than my brother to take care of me.

Sam started making Jesus pictures in Magic Marker after we’d been together for two months—the bright blue robe, dark brown hair parted in the middle. Lots of pictures. It became an obsession. What he was really afraid of, he told me, was dying. I couldn’t go to class without him worrying when I’d be back. He moved in with me and cooked Sara and me meals—hummus and thick vegetable stews. What was this trend of people I knew giving themselves over suddenly to God?

Sam graduated and moved to Nepal with the Foreign Service
and sent an airmail: “I want to marry you.” I wrote back that a man should never wait for a girl who was still in college.

Now there was Ned. Had I made another bad choice? Did I do it on purpose? Sara thought I intentionally chose the wrong ones. The complicated boys. I didn’t dare psychoanalyze myself. I followed my mother back to the kitchen and sat on the metal stool at the counter and waited for Ned to call. Or Betsy. I would take Betsy. I thought she and I had bonded that semester when we’d stayed up until three in the morning drinking Kahlúa and reading our sestinas out loud. But no one called.

After dinner I transferred the mashed potatoes into Tupperware. Sara poured me a big glass of chardonnay and said the words “lose him” to me. She was very over Ned by then, partly because I’d pined for him in the truck all morning when we weren’t practicing our French verbs, and partly because she was pissed at him. Deep in the languor of turkey hangovers, we managed to eat pumpkin pie, propping ourselves up against the kitchen counter. Then Dad clapped his hands. “Into the living room. Everyone. You haven’t seen my August slides of the desert. You haven’t seen the water holes I found.”

A group of men still lived off the land together out there in the Sonoran Desert—academic dropouts, environmentalists, leftover war protesters, gold miners, and people who just wanted off the grid. That was what Dad always called Sausalito and our house there: the Grid. He had one of the few actual paying jobs in the desert. He loved to catalog what he saw—red-spotted toads, kangaroo rats, desert tortoise, big-horned sheep, coyote. We followed him down the two steps, into the cantilevered living room. The walls were overcrowded with maps now and the Indian weavings. “Everyone thinks they know where the biggest water holes in the desert are. But how hard are they to get to? Extremely difficult, people. Very damn hard. So to find this water I had to follow my nose.”

“Did you use the latest geologic survey?” Luke asked. He and Dad were working together on Water Trust projects by then. One small village project at a time. Sometimes it took Luke a year or more to make local connections that would allow pipes to go through the
village. Sometimes he had to abandon projects because they couldn’t get the local Communist Party’s support.

“That last survey doesn’t go as far in as I went last month.” Dad smiled. “The elevation rises too fast, and the topography lines stop. They vanish into nothing. But I kept going, and that’s why I found the secret trove of water. I understood the land. I understood the place. I say this all the time, people. You’ve always got to know your place. Where you’ve come from and where you’re going. Always ask yourself, What are my coordinates? If you go off the grid, how can you get yourself back safely if you need to?”

Then he turned off the lights. I sat on the cold tiles next to Sara and Rajiv and watched the slides on a white bedsheet Dad had hung on the far wall. Landscape photos of the washed-out desert and the lusher canyons. I was back there with him, hiking for hours in the sun. Was that time really over? Were Luke and I really so far on our way to being adults? Was it normal to long for the past like this? To parse it and physically miss it in a way I didn’t know I ever would? In the desert everything was distilled into a series of simple questions: Would we have enough water to make it back to the truck alive? Would we find new hidden sources?

Dad narrated the slides in the darkness and his voice came alive. The Sonoran Desert was the place he liked most in the world, perhaps besides my mother. And he didn’t fight with the desert so it was easier maybe than living with my mother. He didn’t try to change the desert. He accepted it on its own terms.

It’s Thursday. Macon sits on the flowered couch in the common room talking to Sophie. She’s brought a pot of black Assam and vanilla biscuits and a small white pitcher of cream. I squeeze past her in the doorway and sink down into one of the blue chairs. “My goodness.” I smile. “No one asked you for tea service, Sophie. You have enough to do in here already.”

“It’s Macon who does too much. I’ll make him tea until God decides to close this place from lack of need.”

Macon blushes. “Sophie, you are killing me with kindness.” He flashes a huge grin. It’s a real smile. Genuine. Sophie rolls her eyes at him. There’s good history here. Then she waves and leaves. His hair is all messed up. He’s wearing jeans and hiking boots and a loose turtle-neck sweater. “Sophie is extraordinary.” He keeps speaking English. There’s a picture of a bright red soccer ball on his mug.
VIVA MÉXICO! WORLD CUP 1986
. He puts it down on the tray and bends his head to study the file in his lap.

“Mr. Ventri.”

“Please. There is no need for formalities. Please call me Macon. No one calls me Mr. Ventri.” He’s inclined to precision. When he smiles, he has surprisingly small, perfectly shaped teeth. The bones of his face are delicate too, small hollows under the cheekbones, and then
the honey-colored beard. “Willow Pears, what do you do for a living when you are not with the girls here on Rue de Metz?” He closes the file and looks up.

“I teach. I’ve written a book about one of your French poets, and I’m about to start another. This one about an Indian poet.” I’ve never kissed anyone with a beard before.

“The girls in your class are lucky to have someone with your background.”

“What are any of their chances, really? What, for instance, are Gita’s chances of getting asylum?”

“Well, we need to go about securing her the best chance she has.” He reopens the file and reads in silence. We sit like that, while French motor scooters buzz past the window, a swarm of mutant mosquitoes. I don’t think he notices the noise. He’s weighing Gita’s chances, as if he’s the only one who can save the girl. He closes his eyes and rubs them with his hands. Then he opens them and leans forward on the couch so that he’s as close as he can be to me without getting up. “This system is intricate. Elaborate. With politicians breathing down its neck of late. Thanks to Le Pen.” He puts his hands back on the tops of his kneecaps like he might stand and leave any moment, and in this way he also reminds me of Gita—both of them with this urgency.

He’s not wearing a wedding ring, but I already knew that. Today I just double-check. “Here’s how it works. Most people awarded asylum are flown into France after they’ve already been designated. It is much harder to apply for asylum status once you’re already inside the host country. Plus, the government doesn’t give out as many asylums now, and the process is too quick for girls to get their feet on the ground and establish a good case here before they’re sent back home. There’s no quota in France for asylum seekers and no lottery for asylum, and there are tens of thousands of applicants. Gita hardly has a claim. There is no war in Jaipur that I am aware of. No famine.”