She decides the minute she wakes up-with Cole pressed against her back, Gabi’s tiny feet in her face, and Vic gone at some ungodly hour of the morning-that she will meet her French tutor somewhere else, anywhere else other than in this apartment. She usually has her lesson at her kitchen table. Today she needs to get out. She slides Gabi’s feet-powdery-smelling baby feet-away from her and glances out the window. Rain. She hates Paris. It’s the secret shame that she carries inside her. What the hell is wrong with her? Everyone loves this fucking city.
Riley has lived in Paris for a year, long enough-or so everyone says-to learn French, the métro system, and how to dress. She’s a dismal failure. She should also have friends, cook soufflés, and have the energy to have sex with her husband in the middle of the night. Except there are always children in her bed in the middle of the night, and she has no energy, day or night. But she’s what her mother always called “a tough cookie,” and so she tells no one that she’s miserable. Besides, who would believe her? She’s living in Paris.
Here’s what she has accomplished in a year in Paris:
1. She had a baby-no mean feat, since she never understood a word that the doctors and nurses at the clinic barked at her all day and night.
2. She has gained thirty-five pounds and lost twenty-five pounds and still eats a pain au chocolat every day, even though she can no longer blame it on the cravings of pregnancy.
3. She has learned where to buy paella at the street market near her home and serves it out of a bowl to the astonishment of Vic’s co-workers.
4. She has lost contact with most of her old best friends from New York because she can no longer send them emails extolling the virtues of expat life.
5. She has convinced her mother-every day-not to visit. Yet.
6. She has watched two-and-a-half-year-old Cole learn French, make friends in the playground, lead her home when they are lost, and say the words, “It’s okay, Mama,” so many times that she worries that one day she’ll murder someone and he’ll pat her hand and say, “It’s okay, Mama.”
7. She has lost love. She had it when they moved here, and sometime during the first few weeks, while she and Vic were unpacking the dishes and books and Cole’s toys, she misplaced it and hasn’t been able to find it since.
Riley tries to maneuver her way out of bed without disturbing the kids, but they cling to her like vines. Take the tree trunk away and those vines sink to the forest floor. In a quick moment, Cole’s asking questions: “Where’s Daddy?” “What we do today?” “Why rain, why rain?” and Gabi’s crying, a whimpering, pitiful cry that probably means she’s got another ear infection.
Riley scoops Gabi into her arms and plops down in the armchair, opens her pajama top, and attaches the baby to her breast. Breathe, she tells herself. Breast-feeding is the one thing she loves. She loves it so much that she does it far too much-she knows what the baby books say about getting your child on a schedule-but she just doesn’t care. She wants only this: to sit in her lemon-yellow overstuffed chair, as ugly as all the rest of the mismatched items in this furnished apartment, and feel Gabi’s mouth on her breast, feel the comforting release of milk, and pause.
Because in a minute she’ll be moving again.
She’ll call Philippe and tell him to meet her at a café.
She’ll call Fadwa or Fawad or Fadul downstairs and ask her to babysit. It’s a school day. The girl won’t be home. She’ll ask the girl’s mother, but the woman doesn’t speak English. She’ll gesture: Baby. Sit. Like charades, she’ll show the baby and then sit in a chair. That’s ridiculous. The word in Arabic probably doesn’t have anything to do with sitting.
Breathe, she tells herself.
“Why rain, why rain, why rain, why rain?” It’s become a chant as unnerving as a police siren, and Cole runs around the house like he’s on fire.
Riley looks at the clock. Seven-fifteen A.M. Where the hell is Vic this early?
They fought last night, in the only time they spent together before crawling, numb and exhausted, into bed. “You think I like this life? You think I want to work all hours of the day and night?”
“Yes,” Riley said.
“That’s ridiculous,” Vic snapped. “I have to pull together a team from four different countries and most of them hate each other. I can barely understand half of them myself. You think I wouldn’t rather build sand castles in the park in Place des Vosges?”
He was standing in the bathroom in his pajama bottoms, his bare belly gone soft and pale. He stabbed the air with his toothbrush like a fierce bathroom warrior. Riley looked at him and thought: Everything you say is the opposite. You love being the big shot who makes an international team work. You hate the sand.
“Get a grip, Riley,” he said, spitting toothpaste into the sink.
And when did he start wearing pajama bottoms? Riley had a momentary wish to walk up to Vic and slide his pants down, wrap her body around her naked husband and whisper, “Come back to me.” But he pushed past her and headed into the kitchen for another brownie, left over from a care package her mother sent a few days before.
Riley smells the top of Gabrielle’s head. It’s perfect baby smell and she remembers to breathe.
The phone rings and she jumps and Gabi’s mouth pulls from her breast, taking her nipple with her. She screams and the baby cries. But the phone has stopped ringing. Then Cole walks in, carrying it. He’s smiling. “Nana,” he says.
He’s never answered the phone before. She’s amazed. Soon he’ll put on a tie and leave for work at seven in the morning like all the other competent people in this household.
“Mom?” she says into the phone. She does a quick calculation-it’s one in the morning in Florida.
Her mother is crying-or she’s making a gulping sound of trying not to cry.
“What’s wrong?”
She’s not sentimental enough to be crying because her grandson answered the phone for the first time.
“Mom?”
“I don’t want to bother you with this-”
“With what?”
“I didn’t even want to tell you that I was having tests-”
And Riley knows everything she needs to know. Her father died of cancer years before, and somehow she waits for everyone she knows to get it and die. On TV, people survive; in her life, they die. She is crying, silently, a steady stream of wet stuff pouring down her face.
“Mama?” Cole asks.
“Mom?” Riley asks.
“Mama?”
“Shh, honey. I’m okay,” Riley whispers. Or maybe that was her mother whispering to her. She’s squeezing the baby too tightly.
“What tests?” she finally asks.
“Ovarian cancer.”
“You should have told me.”
“I’m telling you.”
“I’m coming home.”
“You’re not coming home.”
“Mom.”
“Mama?” Cole is tapping her shoulder. She looks down. Gabi is hanging from one foot off her lap, ready to fall. How is it that Riley got a hold of this foot? And why is the baby laughing like this is some kind of game?
“Sorry, sweetie,” Riley says, pulling Gabi back to safety. But there is no safety. Gabi throws up in Riley’s lap.
“Mom, I’ll call you back.” And she hangs up.
She’s holding Gabi in the air. Vomit puddles in her pajama bottoms. And Cole pats her shoulder. “It’s okay, Mama.”
Soon she will clean the mess and call her mother back.
Soon Cole will find a French cartoon on TV and watch happily as if he understands every single word of this damn language.
Soon she’ll call Vic and ask him why he had to call a breakfast meeting when he had a dinner meeting last night and will have another dinner meeting tonight.
Soon she’ll call every pediatrician listed in the guide her realtor gave her and ask every snooty receptionist, “Parlez-vous anglais?” until she finds someone who does, and she’ll make an appointment to check Gabi’s ears.
Soon it will stop raining.
Soon she’ll see Philippe.
Riley slides into a chair inside the café-the rain has stopped for a moment, but she knows Paris well enough to know that the wet stuff will rain on her parade.
She’s amazed she has managed so much already today. She called her mother back but Mom said she was going to sleep-it was 1:30 in the morning in Florida and she needed her beauty rest. Riley convinced the woman downstairs to watch the kids. She found clean clothes. They almost fit her-another ten pounds and she’ll be back to her fighting weight. But she’s not giving up the pain au chocolat and there is the problem of her enormous milk-laden breasts. Tant pis. She’s learned that expression-too fucking bad. So the shirt pulls tight across her chest and the jeans hug her hips. Tant pis, Victor.
She’s early. She opens her notebook to last week’s lesson. The words swim in front of her eyes. She used to be a smart person. She used to be a person who had long conversations with intelligent people about politics and the arts and why her neighbor in apartment 3B sang in the middle of the night.
Now she’s either silent or she talks to infants. Either way, there’s been a diminishing of intelligence, she’s noticed. Hard to discuss global warming when she’s got potty mouth.
And Philippe won’t speak English. She’s sure he can-he’s got that European je ne sais quoi that usually means “Oh, I speak six languages. And a little Japanese.”
He thinks that if she has to speak in French, then she will. Instead, she sits there as if she’s a timid soul, one of those mousy girls in high school who never raised her hand. “I’m the teacher’s pet! she wants to scream. I’ve got so much to say that you can’t shut me up!” But she has nothing to say, because she doesn’t have any of the words with which to say it.
Her wondrous career, which she gave up three weeks before Cole was born-though she can’t remember why anymore-had her writing crisis communications for major corporations. Stock tumbling? I’ll spin that! CEO caught in the men’s room with the mail boy? Give me a second and I’ll explain how this is good for the company! But now she can’t even turn her own life into a good story-because she doesn’t have the words for it. Je suis lost.
The waiter comes over and asks her something that she knows she can answer. “Café, s’il vous plaît.” Then he says something else and she nods. He’s probably going to bring her a plate of pigs’ feet with her coffee and she won’t be able to complain. Because she doesn’t have the words!
Six months ago, Cole went through a tough phase. Her American mom friends told her: “It’s the terrible twos, don’t worry, it will pass.” He raged-throwing things, often including himself, onto the floor and most often in the most public places. She and Vic found a phrase that helped: “Use your words.” And miraculously, as Cole learned his first few words, the tantrums stopped. He could say “Pop Tart” or “Rug Rat” or “Pig in Wig” or “bad Mama” and they would nod and get him what he needed. (“Bad Mama” meant that Daddy should put him to bed.) When Riley is standing in the middle of Les Enfants Rouges farmers’ market and the cheese lady asks her something in rapid-fire French, Riley considers throwing herself on the ground and kicking her feet. Use your words! But there aren’t any.
The waiter returns with coffee and no pigs’ feet. Riley burns her tongue on the coffee. Doesn’t matter, she thinks. Don’t need this tongue. Everything about her feels raw. She has stopped crying and promised her mother she won’t be a drama queen. It’s only cancer, for Christ’s sake. Everyone has cancer these days. Her mother is redefining “tough cookie” and Riley is redefining ball of mush. “On with your day!” her mother ordered. This is her day then. On with it!
She looks around the café. The place is crowded though it’s mid-morning. Is Vic the only one who goes to work in this city? Everyone else seems to sit in cafés all day, drinking endless espresso until they start drinking wine. They’re immaculately dressed, as if eventually they’ll either go to the office or a movie premiere. One woman is wearing a leopard suit, skintight, with four-inch stilettos. Probably on her way to pick up her babies and go to the park, Riley thinks.
The door opens and Philippe breezes in.
He’s tall and gangly and has wasted-rock-star good looks. Too many drugs, too many hard nights. It becomes him. His hair always falls in his eyes and Riley spends much of the French lessons imagining something so simple: She reaches out and tucks that lovely hair behind his ear. Today it’s a little greasy, though. Maybe she’ll pay better attention to the lesson.
“Je suis désolé,” he says breathlessly. She smells cigarettes and coffee and something else-sex? His clothes are rumpled. Did he rush here from his girlfriend’s bed?
She smiles at him. She could say something like “No big deal,” or “What is that delicious smell wafting from you?” but she doesn’t have the words.
When he had answered his cell phone earlier she had started to speak in English. “En français,” he admonished her. And so she gave him the name and address of the café and a time. That’s all. She felt a little bit like a spy giving out only the crucial information. No chitchat for her. She’s got international intrigue on her mind!
“Bon,” he says, settling into the seat across from her, pulling out his books from his very distressed leather messenger bag, ordering something from the waiter who says something in response, and then he turns to her and smiles.
She smiles back.
He asks a question.
She smiles back.
He shakes his head, unleashing that lock of hair. She looks away.
“Bon,” he says again. Though nothing is good. Even the coffee tastes like burnt tongue.
“Okay, listen,” she says in English. “Maybe we try something different. Maybe we get to know each other a little bit, figure out something we’d both like to talk about-I mean, I don’t know a thing about you-and then we could, I don’t know, talk about that. In English. And then eventually I’d be speaking in French because it would be just so interesting that the French words would squeeze their way into my little brain and pour right out of my mouth. Whaddaya think?”
“En français,” he says. He’s smiling though. Either he’s a nice guy or he understood every word she said.
That’s the other thing. She doesn’t know how to read people here. Back in the States, she had a sharp ear-she could figure out who was worth knowing by how they spoke, how witty they were, how observant and caustic and wry. She chose her best friend because the woman used remarkable metaphors, inventing them on the spot. She chose her first boyfriend because he skewered the sociology professor for his foppish mannerisms. She chose her husband because he was the first guy to beat her at Scrabble. She imagines a Scrabble game with Philippe. How often could she use the word bon?
And forget about words-she’s lost the cultural clues! Is Philippe’s shirt cool or dorky? It’s kind of shiny-that wouldn’t pass muster in New York. And he’s got one earring that looks like a cross, but maybe it’s an X. Does that mean something? Is he charming or creepy? Doesn’t matter. She likes to look at him. He’s handsome and that seems to translate well enough in any language.
He opens his book to a page that has a picture of a house. Pictures she likes. Pictures she can read. She feels like Cole, watching intently while Papa reads the text. If Philippe keeps this up for long, she’ll need her blankie and a nap.
Philippe stops talking and points to a picture of a bedroom. He’s pointed right at the bed! Yes, she wants to say: Let’s go!
But she says, “lit.” Amazing. When it matters, the words come to her. The important words.
“Le lit,” Philippe says.
Who the hell cares? Feminine, masculine. When will the gender revolution come to France? Maybe it’s a cross-dressing bed. Riley looks up. Philippe’s watching her. Why does she have this goofy grin on her face because she’s looking at a bed? Well, no fucking chance she can explain this one.
“Où est le lit?” she asks.
“Dans la chambre,” Philippe says.
“Où est la chambre?” she asks.
He looks at her. Is he so pleased because they’re having an infantile conversation or because they’re talking about sex?
No one’s talking about sex, Riley reminds herself. It’s just in the air, wafting toward her.
“Dans la maison,” Philippe says.
“Where is your maison?” Riley asks.
“En français,” Philippe says.
“I know it’s in France. Where in France?”
He shakes his head. But he’s still smiling. He’s left a couple of buttons open on his shiny shirt. Riley can see that he has a boy’s chest, hairless and lean.
She has never cheated on Vic. She once desired a man who worked in the art department at her PR firm and she told Vic, and Vic told her he desired a woman who worked in the finance department of his company and that was the end of that. Tit for tat. Well, she hoped there wasn’t any tit involved. There certainly wasn’t any tat for her.
Is Vic cheating on her now? Is he really meeting boring French businessmen every hour of the day and night? She asked him once-mid-dinner on a date night-and he said, “My God, Riley. Can’t we even spend one night out without your ruining it?”
She had a sudden image of herself as a shrew, the kind of woman a husband complained about to his office mates. Wasn’t she the siren a few years ago, the woman Vic boasted about? “My wife loves sex,” he once told a friend of theirs. “You lucky fuck,” the friend said. Whenever they finished making love, Riley would whisper in Vic’s ear: “You lucky fuck.” And he would fall asleep with a smile on his face.
She hasn’t seen that smile in a long time.
“J’habite près du Centre Beaubourg,” Philippe says.
She understood him! The Pompidou Center! But they call it whatever he said. She remembers standing on the top floor of the museum and looking out at the rooftops of Paris and thinking: Everyone else is having a wonderful life. Just look. Charming attic apartments, sex in a single bed, the smell of bouillabaisse and hashish floating through the air.
Now she knows: Philippe is one of those people.
I had a wonderful life, she wants to say. She remembers the bon voyage party her friends threw for them a few weeks before they moved to Paris. She and Vic wore matching berets and striped shirts (hers stretched over a pregnant belly). Mid-party they had a fencing match with baguettes as weapons. They were grown-up kids embarking on a grand adventure. “Will you be lonely over there?” one friend asked her. “Not with Vic and Cole and little Miss Wiggle Worm. Besides, it’s Paris,” she said.
Wonderful slips away, day by day. Why, even yesterday she was more wonderful than today. Yesterday her mother didn’t have cancer. Riley has lost her mind in a tangle of thoughts and Philippe has asked a question.
She smiles.
He repeats it.
She shakes her head. “No comprendo.”
“Je ne comprends pas,” he corrects her.
Why bother trying to explain it’s an expression in English-well, not in English exactly, but something everyone says in English even though it’s in Spanish.
“Right,” she says. “What you said.”
Vic speaks French. He speaks it so well that he’s now changed his name to Victor. He says that the French don’t use nicknames and so he’s now Victor. “The Victor.” That’s what she calls him when she’s really annoyed, as in: “Will you be home for dinner, The Victor?” To which he usually responds no. He used to say “Don’t call me that.” But now he doesn’t bother. “No” takes care of everything-it’s an all-purpose word. In fact, it’s the same word in French even if they do put an extra unnecessary letter on the end. Non! I won’t be home for dinner!
But Riley is Riley in any language. “What am I supposed to call myself now,” she asked The Victor. “AllRiledUp?”
“Clever,” he said.
Of course he calls Gabi Gabrielle, which is her real name, but damned if Riley’s going to start burdening her daughter with a name that’s longer than she is. Cole is Cole is Cole is Cole. Thank God.
Does anyone call Philippe Phil? In bed, maybe? A kiss here, my Philistine? Sometimes sex draws a thing out, doesn’t it?
So they’re back to the lit and the lampe and all things de la chambre. Riley learns a few new words while gazing at the book. Then she imagines her mother in the bed in the picture. When Riley was little she would climb in bed with her mother and they would read, side by side, their cottony arms rubbing up next to each other. Her mother often hummed, but she said she didn’t. And now Riley hums while she gives Cole a bath. It’s the same tune. How can she ask her mother what the tune is when her mother says she never hums? Riley feels a kind of urgency and peers at her mother in the bed. The image begins to fade until poof-she’s gone-and a goddamn tear splashes on the page.
Philippe says something, real alarm on his lovely face, and Riley wipes her eyes, shakes her head and says, “Rien, rien.” Amazing what words appear when she needs them.
But in a quick moment, Philippe is packing up. Men and tears. She half expects him to dash out and leave her behind, but at the last minute he gestures for her to follow him.
Whatever.
They stand outside the café, in the middle of the Marais, looking at each other.
Philippe says something.
Riley smiles.
“Bon,” he says.
He takes her arm and they start walking down rue des Francs-Bourgeois.
For the first time in a year, Riley feels French. She’s walking next to a Frenchman-a handsome Frenchman at that-and instead of doctor’s appointments and playground visits and pain au chocolat shopping, there is only this: mystery. She has no idea where they’re going. She’s been dropped from her life into a French novel.
Never mind that Riley looks pathetically American. Before she moved to Paris, everyone told her “Whatever you do, don’t wear sneakers.” She left them all behind. And now, in a swift change of fashion trends, every goddamn Frenchwoman is wearing little white sneakers. But it’s not the clothes, it’s the breasts. No one in France has breasts this size. She tried buying a new bra and got tired of the way the saleswomen rolled their eyes and sadly shook their heads. And then there’s the hair! She has long, curly hair, messy hair, hair that won’t be contained in rubber bands or hair clips. It explodes from her head like confetti. “Cut it,” Vic said. “Non!” she told him. She loves her hair.
So somehow she has arrived at a point in her life that she looks like a porn star. She has big hair and high heels and enormous breasts. In New York, everyone would know that she’s not a porn star, because she’s smart and funny and the clothes she wears are sophisticated and she has her sneakers. But here, there’s only one way to translate this: “Fuck me!”
Maybe that’s what Philippe plans, Riley thinks. She tucks thoughts of her mother away-no, Mom, you’re not coming along for this ride!-and clicks her heels as she struggles to keep up with Philippe’s long stride.
The sky darkens as suddenly as a full eclipse of the sun and then, in a flash of lightning and thunder, as if God is screaming, Get sex out of your mind right now!, the heavens open up. Philippe’s grip tightens on Riley’s arm and he leads her under the canopy of a corner restaurant. In a second, a crowd of people huddle under this teeny canvas, and they are squeezed together.
The crowd oohs and aahs as if God were a fucking superstar. Riley can barely see the street anymore-they’re sandwiched between so many people. Someone smells as if they had garlic oatmeal for breakfast; someone else has the hiccups and the whole crowd seems to jerk with each gasp of breath. Riley feels her heartbeat racing-she’s not sure if it’s the drama of the heavens or Philippe’s arm pressed into her breast. And for once, she doesn’t have to speak. She gets this: it’s weather and it’s wild. No need for a running commentary. Just take it in.
Riley remembers a camping trip with Vic in Vermont-pre-kids, pre-marriage-when a storm woke them in the middle of the night, pounding their tent so loudly that they knew it was hail, a freak midsummer hailstorm, and Riley began to tremble, suddenly sure that the thin fabric would give way and they’d be iced to death. Vic climbed on top of her and in a quick moment their sleeping bags were unzipped, their clothes pulled off, and their bodies pounded each other in the most violent, urgent, ragged sex they ever had. Afterward, the hailstorm too had ended and they lay there, gasping, staring at the roof of the tent in the dark, side by side, their hands clasped together. They never spoke about it afterward, as if there were something shameful about the way they tore at each other. Riley wonders now: What would it take to bring Vic back to me?
A clap of thunder and Riley transports herself on a transatlantic journey from Vermont to Paris, from Vic to the French tutor, from the smell of pine trees to the smell of wet wool. The rain stops as abruptly as it started. The sky lightens. The crowd doesn’t move as if they’re not ready for the show to end. No one says a word. Riley almost expects a call: “Encore!” But eventually the first few people break away from their tight little gathering, and then the next, and then Philippe’s arm leaves her breast. She sags a little-not her breast, which is firmly ensconced in an American 34 DD bra with underwire and wide straps-but her whole body feels a little post-orgasmic. The show is over.
Philippe looks at her. She feels closer to him now, as if they have shared something. And to her delight, he doesn’t speak. He wraps that wonderful hand around her upper arm and leads her onward.
The sidewalks are crowded with people, everyone on the move again, and the city streets glisten with light reflecting off the puddles. Riley thinks of Cole and his new green rubber boots with the frog eyes on the tips-he should be splashing his way to the Place des Vosges instead of sitting in front of the TV with Fadwa or Fatah or Fadul’s mother. Bad Mama! And tonight, when he wants Daddy to put him to bed, she’ll have to explain: It’s you and me, babe.
But no time for children! I’m off on a Parisian adventure! It’s all about me-me-me!
How odd that a person can lose herself in a city, in a family, in a marriage. How odd that she never felt lonely when she lived alone all those years in New York, and now, wrapped in the tidy package of nuclear family, a member of every fucking expat group that exists in Paris, every moms’ group for English-speakers, every wives’ group for expats, she feels like she’s the kid standing outside the school and everyone’s gone home and her mother has forgotten to pick her up.
Do they call it nuclear because it’s bound to explode?
She has not mentioned to her mother that her husband has gone AWOL on their marriage, that he’s rarely home, that he barely touches her, that the last time she told a funny story about the crazy woman who yelled at her for breast-feeding in the park he said, “Maybe you shouldn’t be breast-feeding anymore.” When Riley found out that her pet name for Vic, “coo-coo,” is something French people say to their infants, he told her, “Maybe you shouldn’t call me that anymore.” She has not mentioned to her mother that she wakes in the middle of the night with something like terror lodged in her chest. No wonder her mother forgot to metaphorically pick her up-she’s a fraud and her mother knows it. She used to tell her mother everything and now she has spent a year telling her mother not to visit her in Paris, and now her mother has cancer.
“Comment?” Philippe asks.
She looks up at him. Has she said something? In what language? The language of grief?
“Rien,” she assures him. “My mother hums when she’s thinking and apparently I do that, too.”
“En français,” Philippe says.
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” she tells him.
He laughs. Fuck-the international language.
He slides his hand on her lower back as he presses her in front of him. The crowd is so thick on the sidewalk that they can’t walk side by side and he keeps his hand there, guiding her forward, like a dancer, leading her through complicated moves on the dance floor. She is a terrible dancer; she doesn’t know how to follow a guy, or maybe she’s never been with a guy who knows how to lead. Before their wedding she and Vic took a couple of dance lessons and they were dismal failures, bumping into each other, turning the wrong way, smacking into each other’s shoes. One night they got stoned and danced in the empty living room of their new apartment and suddenly they could do it-they were Fred and Ginger-they spun and dipped and swooned. A week later, at their own wedding, they had to bear-hug through the first dance, too embarrassed to fumble through a merengue in front of the crowd. “I can’t feel your lead,” Riley had whispered to Vic. “What do you want, a steamroller?” Vic asked. “Steamroll me, baby,” Riley whispered in his ear when they made love that night.
Philippe’s hand slides around her waist and pulls her to a stop.
“Nous sommes arrivés,” he announces.
She looks around. They’re in the middle of the block; all around them people walk in every direction and cars blast their horns. She looks at Philippe, who’s gazing up-at a building that might have been built in the fifties and hasn’t been washed since. It would look like just about any building except it’s in the middle of Paris and every other building is a piece of art. This is not. It’s got a flat surface that is dull and soot-covered, the windows grimy and dark. Who lives here?
Apparently her dashing French tutor lives in this dump, because he’s tapping in a code and opening the front door. Riley’s feet are frozen in place. She hears a chorus of voices-Vic, her mom, Cole, Gabi-all shouting at her. She’s being stoned by words.
“Riley,” Philippe says, and the voices vanish, her feet thaw, and she’s hurrying inside the door. She was never a pushover before-now the sound of her name in this man’s mouth turns her into a hussy.
The elevator smells of dirty diapers. It’s hard to think about sex, and Riley tries not to breathe, as if she’d be allowing Gabi to enter her mind if she thought about dirty diapers. How does she know the babysitter’s mother will change Gabi’s diaper? She once left Gabi with her mother on her last visit home, six months ago, and came back from the beach with Cole to find Gabi drenched and soiled. “I thought they made diapers stronger these days,” her mother said, unbothered by the mess. “Next time, you take care of the baby and I’ll go to the beach with the munchkin.” Riley’s mom prefers Cole to Gabi, and has never tried to hide it.
So the not breathing on the elevator didn’t work. She’s got Gabi and Cole and her mother all living in her head now. Go away, she wants to scream. There’s no room for you in this bed!
The bed turns out to be a futon, and an unmade one at that. Philippe throws open the door to his apartment and Riley sees immediately that she has made a terrible mistake. There is nothing romantic about a loser. And Philippe must be a loser-who else could live like this? There’s the pea-green futon, the beer cans (why would anyone drink beer in the land of Burgundy and Bordeaux?) strewn all over the floor, the poster of Angelina Jolie, the guitar in the middle of the floor. At least that’s a sign of culture. The guy must strum on his guitar, then drop it like a sack of potatoes.
Philippe tosses his jacket on the floor and walks into the kitchen. Riley stands there, waiting to flee. It’s easy, she thinks. Turn around, walk out the door. Send a check to the language school. Never see this man again.
But he returns, carrying two glasses of champagne.
She takes a glass and sips. It’s flat and warm but it tastes wonderful. She sips some more.
When she looks up at Philippe he leans over and kisses her, a long kiss that seems to include the exchange of champagne from his mouth into hers. It’s creepy and she almost chokes, but then his hand reaches under her shirt and touches her skin. She hasn’t been touched in a long time. Her mind goes silent, and her body goes liquid.
He picks her up and carries her to the bed. They tumble down-did he trip on a beer can or did she suddenly get too heavy for him?-and they fall in a tangle of limbs on the thin futon. Riley bangs her elbow hard, but Philippe’s kissing her neck and the pain gets lost in the heat coursing through her body. She tears at his clothes, pulling them off. He gets stuck on one of her buttons and she pushes him back, then yanks the shirt off her. He makes a deep animal sound at the sight of her breasts and dives in.
Philippe slides his hand into her panties and she whimpers.
Riley bites his neck and he groans.
Philippe’s finger slips inside her-she’s already wet despite months of thinking she’d gone frigid sometime after Gabi’s birth-and Riley gasps.
Riley’s hand grabs his cock-when did his pants come off? What’s on the end of his cock?-and he moans.
Philippe’s finger presses deep inside her, his mouth pulls at her breast, his cock grows in her hand. Riley’s panting but that’s the sound of his heavy breath in her ear and the noise makes her wrap her legs around him, pull him inside her, then pull him out. “Condom,” she says.
“Quoi?”
“Whatever,” she says. “Just put one on.”
Philippe reaches for the side of the futon and of course he has a bowlful of condoms or whatever they’re called here, and in a flash his lovely penis-yes, it’s uncircumcised and it’s a thing of beauty-is swathed in latex and it towers above her, pointing every which way in its wonderful excitement, until it finds its way home.
Both of them sigh-deep, long, luxurious sighs.
And then they begin to move together and the song in Riley’s head, the song she’s been humming since childhood, spills out of her, a nursery rhyme, a Russian folk song, something her grandmother taught her mother, something her mother hummed to her while bathing her and dressing her and walking her to school, and while Philippe batters her with his cock, bites her breasts, pulls at her hair, Riley cries. It’s a flood up there, tears spilling down the side of her face, and Philippe washes her face with his tongue, a tongue as wondrous as his penis.
He doesn’t stop. He’s grunting, making some kind of whoo-whoo-whoo sound. His body is hard, his muscles taut, his movements powerful. Riley watches him, amazed-it’s a feat of athleticism, this kind of sex, it’s a descent into darkness, it’s a wild-animal mating ritual.
When he comes, he hoots-a cowboy shout, a rodeo ride, this bucking bronco-and then he collapses on top of her, their bodies slick with each other’s sweat.
So. This is sex.
Every other sex she has experienced in her life had something to do with love, or the search for love, or the end of love. This is just sex.
Her mind floods with words again.
Amazing. For however many minutes that took, Riley had turned off her brain. And now it’s someplace new. She’s thinking about love.
Not love for Philippe-no! How soon till she can shower, dress, and flee! Not love for The Victor-no! Love is lost, she’s sure of that now. Love cannot be found, no matter how hard one looks in all the nooks and crannies of their foolish, over-furnished apartment. Not love for all the old boyfriends who didn’t know how to have sex like this-Franklin and his too-small penis, Luca and his wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am performance, Terry and his doughboy body, Johnny and his stick-it-in-during-the-middle-of-the-night obsession, Jesse and his terror of the female netherlands.
She’s thinking about her love for Paris!
Paris. The city of sex. The city of clandestine affairs. The city of handsome French tutors in pathetic apartments. The city where the pain au chocolat you eat in the morning is only the first erotic taste of the day. The city where you can stop talking long enough to hear the song your mother sang.
Just in time-just as Riley remembers her mother’s phone call this morning-Philippe turns her over, holds her hands spread open on the bed, pushes her legs apart with his knees, and enters her from behind.
We are speaking the same language, she thinks.
And this time the sex is even harder-he bites her shoulder at one point, he pushes so hard inside her that she feels herself opening, breaking up, crumbling, splitting.
When he comes, he falls beside her on the bed.
She puts her hand between her legs and makes herself come. She’s almost there, and he’s not going to do anything about it. He watches, his face full of something like wonder.
When she’s done, she’s crying again. This time the tears are for Vic, the old Vic, the old marriage, the love vanished in thin Parisian air. Riley slides away from Philippe and hobbles to the shower. Sure enough, it’s a pit, a hole, and she doesn’t mind one bit. She washes and cries and washes some more. She hums.
Philippe is sleeping when she comes out. She finds her clothes and gets dressed. A button has torn off her shirt-it gapes open, exposing her baby belly. Who cares? She’s a sexpot.
She leaves, pulling the door closed behind her. She doesn’t want to talk to him. Besides, she doesn’t speak the language.
On the way home Riley sees a couple walking down the street, their pigtailed little girl between them, all of them holding hands. To let Riley pass, the dad drops the girl’s hand, like the child’s game London Bridge Is Falling Down. Riley walks past and then looks behind her-sure enough, the little girl skips ahead, untethered, and the parents walk with a gap between them.
Riley imagines that anything that once held Vic and her together-love, passion, Cole’s hands-has fallen down. She knows that cheating on Vic didn’t kill love. Love was already gasping its last dying breath. Even if Vic has been cheating on her, it’s what he did to fill the space between them.
She race-walks down the street, her heels clattering on the pavement.
Twenty minutes later, she is home. Gabi is taking her nap-with a clean diaper-and Cole is playing checkers with the babysitter’s mom. Riley pays the woman twice what she’d normally pay and bows too many times, backing the woman out the door. Cole wraps his arms around Riley’s leg as if she’s been gone for years.
“Let’s call Nana,” Riley says.
“Nana!” Cole repeats, rapturously. He loves his grandma.
It is early morning in Florida-her mother will be reading the paper in the sunroom overlooking the golf course. It is early afternoon in Paris-Riley and Cole sit in the breakfast nook overlooking the courtyard below. A little girl, the concierge’s granddaughter, stands in the middle of the courtyard, her mouth open in a wide O.
“Open the window,” Riley says. “I think she’s singing.”
Cole climbs over the chair and slides the window open. It squeaks and the girl looks up at them, caught mid-note. She pauses and the sound of tey-tey-tey hangs in the air. In a quick moment, she’s singing again, in a thin, high voice. It’s a beautiful song and she watches them while she sings.
“Mom,” Riley says when her mother answers the phone.
“Don’t start calling me every two minutes, Miss Worry-wart,” her mom says.
“I just want to talk to you,” Riley says quietly.
“Is my favorite little man there?”
“Cole,” Riley says, handing him the phone. “She wants you.”
“Nana?” Cole says.
He listens, but he never once takes his eyes off the girl in the courtyard below. He has his grandmother’s voice in one ear and a child’s song in the other ear. His smile spreads across his face.
“I love you, too,” he says, probably to both of them.
He hands Riley the phone.
“I’m fine,” her mother says right away. “I’ll have the surgery, they’ll take it out.”
“Chemo,” Riley says. That’s all she can say.
“So I’ll do chemo. I won’t be the first person in the world.”
“What does the doctor say?”
“He says we should all be so tough at sixty-four years old. He says what I already know. I’m a fighter.”
“How come you didn’t give any of that fight to me?”
“You got plenty of fight. Who else goes to live on the other side of the world with two babies?”
Riley looks around the kitchen-it’s all white, as if aliens or nuns live here.
“You’re the only one I ever talk to.”
“You don’t talk to your husband?”
“No, Ma. Not much.”
“He’s never there. Who takes his bride to the other side of the world and leaves her all alone?”
“Vic.”
“Oh, baby.”
Luckily Cole is staring out the window so he doesn’t see the tears pouring down Riley’s face.
“I’m coming home,” Riley says.
“No. Stay where you are and fix your problems. You have two babies. You can’t just go gallivanting across the world every time you have a little fight with your husband.”
“It’s not a little fight. And it’s not across the world. It’s an ocean. It’s a six-hour flight.” Riley’s mother never left the United States, never jumped on a plane at a moment’s notice, never served a cheese course after dinner.
“Tell Mr. International Businessman to pay a little attention to his wife. Tell him his mother-in-law said so.”
“It’s not so easy, Ma.”
“Nothing’s easy, Riley. No one ever said life is easy. You kids-”
“Don’t start that.” Riley hates the “you kids” lecture. No one ever served her her life on a silver platter anyway.
Her mother is quiet again, and it begins to worry Riley. Her mother has never waited for words to come to her. They just spill from her mouth.
“Your father came home to eat dinner with his family every night of the week,” her mother finally says.
Riley has heard this chant for years, and though she knows it’s not true-he worked late and she usually ate dinner hours before he came home-she loves the memory of her father’s entrance each evening. At the front door, he’d take off his suit jacket and place it over Riley’s shoulders. He’d perch his hat on her head. She’d smell his aftershave, his sweat, the stuffy air of his accounting office, and she’d feel the weight of him as the jacket pulled on her small shoulders.
“I miss Dad,” Riley says. It’s not something she ever says to her mother. She remembers the years of her mother’s grief after her father died ten years ago, years when she worried that her mother would suddenly grow old. But then her mother moved to Florida and forged a new life for herself-grief was no match for her. Riley’s own sense of loss became quiet, hidden, as if now, as an adult, she doesn’t have a right to miss her daddy the way she does.
“I miss him, too,” her mother says. “It’s quiet in an apartment all by yourself. I leave the TV on all day just for the noise.”
“Who’s taking you for your surgery?” Riley asks.
She has no idea if her mom has boyfriends, though she seems to have a lot of men in her life. There’s Art, the trainer at the gym who might be gay, but if he isn’t, go get him, Mom! And Stitch, the construction worker who has dinner over a few times a week, even though there isn’t any more work to do at the condo. Last Riley heard, a guy named Al was swimming laps with Mom every morning.
“Wally,” Mom finally says.
“Who’s Wally?”
“You know about Wally.”
“Never heard his name.”
“Doesn’t matter. He’s just driving me to the hospital. I’ll be fine.”
“What doesn’t matter?”
“Who he is. He’s just a ride.”
“Does he know he’s just a ride?”
Philippe is just a ride, she thinks. Why didn’t I listen to my mother years ago?
“Go take your prince to one of those fancy bakeries. Tell him Nana wants to buy him one of those French pastries you keep talking about.”
Riley nods and mumbles something and hangs up the phone. Cole is still spellbound by the chanteuse below. Riley looks out the window.
The girl in the courtyard finishes her song and takes a bow. She blows a kiss and Cole catches it, a trick Nana had taught him six months ago. He is in love, Riley thinks. For the rest of his life, this will be love.
“Nana wants to buy you a pain au chocolat,” Riley says.
“How? Nana in Florida.”
“She told me to buy you one. When Gabi wakes up, we’ll go for a walk, sweetie.”
“Mama cry,” Cole says, looking at her for the first time.
“Runny nose,” Riley says. “Gotta catch it.” And she heads for the Kleenex box on the kitchen counter.
With Gabi in her Snugli and Cole by her side, Riley decides to embark on a quest: to eat the best damn pain au chocolat in all of Paris. At the last expat moms’ group-another miserable experience-everyone swapped favorite parks, favorite children’s clothing stores, favorite child-friendly restaurants, favorite pediatricians, and of course, favorite pâtisseries. Next meeting, Riley imagines herself spreading the word: Best tutor for a midday fuck fest-Philippe!
She heads toward numéro uno on the pâtisserie list. It has stopped raining and she needs to shake the spooks from her psyche. Somehow between now and late tonight when The Victor crawls into bed, she’s got to figure out what to do with her life.
Her cell phone rings.
“Hello?”
“Riley.”
“Philippe?” His voice sounds different, as if it’s been dipped in honey.
“Meet me for a glass of wine.”
“You’re speaking English.”
“The French lesson is over.”
“You speak English. All this time you speak English.”
“Not so well. But your French is-how you say-it sucks.”
His accent is not Maurice Chevalier charming but kind of high and whiny. He’s not sexy in English. In fact, he’s Philip in English. She would never fuck a Philip.
“I’ve got the kids, Philippe. Real life and all of that.”
“Oh.”
She thinks of his uncircumcised penis waving in the air above her. She almost runs into a street light but Cole shouts, “Maman!” Weird. On the street Cole calls her Maman. In their apartment he calls her Mama. How does a two-year-old navigate such complicated terrain?
“Sorry, baby.”
“No need to be sorry,” Philippe says.
“I was-”
“Bring the children. They are filming on the quai. Some famous American actress is here. We can watch, all of us together.”
One quick fuck-all right, two-and he’s creating a new nuclear family, Riley thinks. Let’s blow that one up before it even hits Code Orange.
“Listen, Philippe-”
“T’es belle. T’es magnifique, chérie.”
“Okay,” Riley says. She shakes her head. In some distant country her old friends scream at her: Pathetic fool! “Where?” she asks.
He gives her an address and whispers something in French. In a quick moment, he is her sexy lover again.
But she doesn’t want a sexy lover! She just wants someone to walk next to her in Paris, someone taller than three feet.
She leads the kids toward the nearest métro, already scrambling in her brain for a way out of this mess.
Cole used to love the métro, used to pull Riley toward the swirly green gables beckoning them to the underworld of speedy trains and flashy billboards. He watched the people who moved from car to car, making speeches, playing guitar, juggling balls, a wacked-out subterranean circus.
“What he say, Maman?” he’d ask when the homeless man would stand at the front of the car and recite some story to the captive audience.
“I don’t know,” she’d tell him honestly.
Then, as his French got better, he understood their terrible stories: Ladies and gentlemen. My wife has a broken leg. There is no heat in our apartment. My oldest children are sick from the cold, the youngest one has a rare disease. I can no longer work because my child is at the hospital. Cole would bury his face in Riley’s coat, hiding his tears, worried that the child in the hospital would die and the man would never get work and the poor maman could not walk. “We’ll give the man money,” Riley would say, as if one euro would solve the problems of the world.
“We have to take the métro,” Riley tells Cole now, urging him down into the underworld of misery and hardship. We have to go see my lover, she won’t say, but she presses her hand on his small back and he’s such a good boy that he heads dutifully down-down-down the stairs and toward her own personal Satan.
Thankfully there are no speeches on the métro today, just a boy doing some kind of break dancing-though Riley thinks they call it something else now. Already she’s too old for the latest fads. Cole applauds when the boy is done, and Riley fishes out a euro for Cole to put in the boy’s filthy palm.
Gabi pokes her head out of the Snugli, watching the world. She’s a quiet baby and Riley loves her for it. She loves the weight of the baby pressed against her chest, the smell of her powdery scalp, the tufts of strawberry-blond hair that swirl on her head like a halo.
They climb the stairs from the métro and for a moment they’re blinded-it has stopped raining again, and the brilliant sun reflects from all the puddles that have gathered in the street. Riley finds her movie-star sunglasses and hides behind them. In Paris the women wear small, dignified glasses, arty things with frames of red, purple, bronze. She won’t give up her oversize tortoise-framed specs. They make her feel like Gwyneth dashing over to Paris for a little shopping expedition.
She pulls out her plan, the little blue book of maps that she carries like a Bible, and finds the First Arrondissement-then rue de Rivoli, where Philippe awaits. She has never arrived anywhere in Paris without getting lost. The streets are treacherous, evil places that might deliver you to a canal instead of a street corner. She will not ask directions-it’s useless, all that finger-pointing and hand-waving and word-flying.
But miraculously, the entrance to the courtyard of the Louvre is across the street, and in front of it is Philippe.
He waits for her to cross the street, then he steps toward her and leans forward to kiss her.
She pulls back.
“Les enfants,” she says.
“Aha. So now you speak French,” he says.
He shakes her hand. That is what they do when he comes to her apartment for her French lessons. And he shakes Cole’s hand and says, “Bonjour, monsieur.”
“Bonjour, monsieur,” Cole repeats, his accent perfect.
Philippe leans forward to kiss the top of Gabi’s head, and while he does it he sneaks a hand onto Riley’s neck. Both Gabi and Riley make some kind of whimpering sound.
“Arrête,” Riley says.
“Your French is very good, madame.”
“It’s the only damn word you learn here in the playgrounds. Arrête, Antoine. Arrête, Marie-Hélène. Arrête. Arrête.”
“You are spending time in the wrong playground,” Philippe says. “Follow me.”
He leads them into a passageway with windowed sides that show displays of ancient art-sculptures and relics, half-excavated buildings. Riley glances to each side as they hurry by. She still has not visited the Louvre. In fact, in a year of living in Paris, she has missed most of the tourist spots. That’s not where you go with two babies in Paris. These are adult playgrounds; again the day feels foreign and thrilling to her.
They enter the courtyard of the Louvre, and even though Riley has walked through here once, with Victor on a Sunday morning, both babies in strollers, she remembers only their argument about an office party that didn’t allow spouses.
“Why not?” she had asked.
“The French keep their private lives and public lives separate,” Vic told her.
“Why?” she asked. She felt like Cole-why-why-why?
“Maybe the wife shouldn’t meet the pretty assistant,” Vic said.
“Whose wife? Whose pretty assistant?”
“Theoretically.”
“That’s absurd. That’s crazy,” Riley insisted. “That’s so-so blind.”
“Blind is good,” Vic said.
“You think everything they do is good,” Riley argued.
“Sometimes we have to see the world through different glasses,” Vic explained calmly, as if talking to a two-and-a-half-year-old.
Riley has found a new pair of glasses.
Now she’s awed by the daring of I. M. Pei’s modern glass pyramid in the center of these lovely, ancient buildings. She looks around, eyes wide open. She hears a storm of language-French, English, Spanish, German, Arabic-and turns her head in each direction. Everyone comes from a different country, everyone speaks a different language, everyone gathers to look at this. History. Art. Grace.
“There is a café here,” Philippe tells her, leading them to one side of the courtyard.
“Do we have time before the filming?”
“I think so,” Philippe says. “We will sit for a moment and I will buy you a drink.”
They enter the arcade of the Louvre. Café Marly fills the vaulted space with lush red decor, gold and teal tones. It’s stunning and glamorous and it’s crowded with well-dressed people. No babies here, no wild two-year-olds, no breast-leaking moms. Riley looks at Philippe with a worried expression.
“We will not stay for very long,” Philippe says.
“Maman,” Cole says, pointing to the group of children playing with a ball in front of the fountain.
“Go ahead,” Riley says. “I’ll watch you from the café.”
Cole dashes off, his arms turning into airplane wings.
Philippe and Riley are seated at a small table with a perfect view of the courtyard and the pyramid. Riley keeps Gabi in her Snugli and pats the baby’s head as if to reassure her that Maman can have a glass of wine with her French lover at this fabulous café in the center of grand Paris.
“This pain au chocolat comes from the best pâtisserie in all of Paris,” Riley says, digging into her backpack and producing a somewhat squished bag.
“J’aime pas,” Philippe tells her.
“What?”
“I can’t eat chocolate.”
“That’s impossible.”
He makes that peculiar French face-raised eyebrows, puffed lips-that seems to mean all things: Who cares? What do you know? I think you’re grand.
Riley takes a bite of her pastry. It is perfect but so is every other pain au chocolat she eats.
“I wanted to look at you,” Philippe says. He’s looking at her, all right. Did she forget to get dressed when she ran out the door? Is there not a baby perched right there on her mountainous chest?
“So who’s the actress?” she asks.
“Dana Hurley. She is making a movie with the great director Pascale Duclaux.”
“Dana Hurley’s the real deal,” Riley says. “I’d love to see her.”
Philippe is staring at her, his mouth slightly parted.
“Where are they filming?” Riley asks, glancing in the courtyard at Cole, who swings his leg out to kick the ball, misses completely, and falls back on his butt with a hoot of laughter.
“On the Pont des Arts. Soon. We will have a glass of wine first.”
“I thought you drink beer.”
He looks confused. “Oh, the apartment. I am sorry. I did not know-”
“Wine is good,” she says quickly. “Let’s have wine.”
They order two glasses. Riley looks around. The café is crowded, of course, and all the tables seem to be filled with couples. One young couple has locked lips and, for a bewildering moment, Riley thinks the woman looks like a very young version of herself; the guy could be Vic before he grew up and became The Victor. Did we ever paw each other in public? she thinks. Never.
She remembers one time she kissed Vic in front of his parents the first weekend she met them in Ohio.
“My parents aren’t really comfortable with that kind of thing,” he had whispered, taking her hand so as not to upset her. They were sitting on the couch, mid-Super Bowl party.
“What kind of thing?” she whispered back.
“Sex.”
“That was a kiss. You want sex, I’ll show you sex.”
“Later,” he promised. He asked his father to turn up the volume on the TV so they could all hear the football announcers instead of his crazy girlfriend.
Philippe leans toward her across the table.
“Ce soir,” he murmurs.
“Ce soir I’m making macaroni and cheese.”
“Feed me,” he whispers.
“Five’s a crowd at the dinner table,” she says, though there will only be three of them, of course. She points at the baby-as if Gabi could possibly understand this conversation-but Philippe either ignores her or she’s not using the international symbol for “Shut the hell up.” She remembers her father often saying “Not in front of the children,” which meant to her: Pay attention! Parental drama ahead!
“I want to see you again,” Philippe says.
Riley spreads her arms wide-lookee here. But what’s here is a baby girl staring back at him. Girls are so damned intuitive-maybe she knows what’s going on. Who needs words when a guy has sex written all over his face?
“Let’s talk about your life,” Riley says, patting Gabi’s head. She spends so much time patting the baby’s head that she’s surprised the kid has any hair at all. Maybe that’s why the stuff whirls around her head like it’s hula dancing.
“Bof,” Philippe says.
“Okay. Translate that. I’ve been here a year and every damn person I meet says bof in every conversation. Bof. Bof. Bof. What’s up with the bof?”
“There is no translation,” Philippe says.
“What kind of tutor are you?”
“The best kind,” he says, smiling his Satan smile. The shirt is definitely not cool. It is shiny-smarmy, not shiny-hip. I’m learning, Riley thinks. I may not know words, but I know my shirts.
“So. You got a girlfriend?” she asks. There was no sign of a female touch in that lovely abode she visited earlier, but who knows? The girl could be a beer hog.
“Elle s’appelle Riley,” Philippe says.
“Got that wrong,” she tells him.
“Pourquoi pas?”
“Parce que I’ve got this load of love in my lap and the other running in circles over there.”
“It is not the same kind of love.”
“We’re talking love?”
“We do not need to talk. We need to love.”
“You’re talking about s-e-x.”
“Faire l’amour. To make love.”
“In our country-”
“You are not in your country.”
“And in your country love and s-e-x are the same thing?”
“Perhaps.”
“Un-fucking-believable. I love this city.”
“C’est vrai?”
“Today. Right now. This second. I heart Paris.”
With that the waiter pours their wine and they clink glasses.
The sky darkens; thick black clouds have moved in again. Riley puts her monster shades up on her head.
“I used to think that every time I had s-e-x I loved the guy,” she tells Philippe. “Now I know. It’s s-e-x that I love.”
“But it is the man. It is always the man.”
“What’s always the man?”
“You have loved him. You have loved me.”
“Sorry, Charlie.”
Philippe looks confused.
“It’s an expression. I know your name.”
“Bon.” Philippe looks unhappy, as if she called him the wrong name in the heat of passion.
“I think you’re wrong,” Riley says. “You’re just a ride.”
“Je ne comprends pas.”
“You made me feel good today. Thanks. But it ain’t love.”
“We need each other. All of us. We cannot be alone.”
Riley looks around. Philippe must be talking some kind of Parisian truth, at least in this café. Not a solitary soul in sight. The make-out couple looks ready to tear up some bedsheets.
“Anyway, c’est fini. I’m not heading your way tomorrow for an afternoon delight. If you know what I mean.”
“Pourquoi pas? A few hours ago you were very, how you say, with passion.”
“But I’m not with passion now. I’m with kids now.”
The littler of those kids starts to squirm in her Snugli.
“I don’t want to breast-feed her in the middle of the café,” Riley mutters, fishing for a pacifier in her backpack.
“I will be very happy to see you breast-feed.”
“Yeah, I bet.”
“Americans believe in groups,” Philippe says. “You have all your expat groups and your maman groups and your book club groups. Do your groups make you not lonely?”
Riley shakes her head. She is most acutely aware of how lonely she is every time she enters someone’s apartment for one of her many group meetings and hears the clamor of so many voices and sees the spread of food and tries to find a place for herself in the middle of it all.
Riley tried to befriend someone at the last expat meeting. While most women boasted about their husbands’ positions as CEO of World Bank or editor in chief of Newsweek Europe or head of Apple’s international division, a shy bohemian woman introduced herself by saying, “I have to be here while my husband plays in Paris.” Riley assumed the woman was mocking the guy. But no, he was the new lead violinist of the Paris Symphony Orchestra.
“Want to get together one day?” Riley had boldly asked the woman. “I don’t know many people here.”
“Sorry,” she had said, “but I’m immersing myself in French life while I’m here.”
Riley felt like a fifth-grade misfit. She wanted to kick the woman’s shins. Instead, she wandered back to the smoked salmon canapés on the dining room table and drank a fast glass of cheap white wine.
“Here in Paris we believe in two people,” Philippe says. “It is only two people who can faire l’amour.”
“Let’s start walking,” Riley says, standing quickly. “I want to settle the baby down.”
She rocks the baby, standing in place. Philippe finishes his wine in a gulp and tosses some money on the table.
“Do not be angry,” he says sweetly as they walk out to the courtyard.
“I’m not angry,” Riley says. “I’m confused.”
Cole leaves the group of kids and races to Riley’s side. He looks up in her face.
“It’s okay, Maman,” he says, taking her hand.
What goes on in that complicated little mind of his?
“I love you, sweetheart,” Riley says. “Let’s take a walk to the river, okay?”
“The river,” Cole says happily. And off they go, the four of them. Sleep with a guy and voilà! You’ve got yourself a spanking new family. Would Vic notice if he slid between the sheets tonight and bumped up against Philippe? Again, that penis waves jubilantly in Riley’s mind, and she shakes the image away.
“What happens if it rains when they’re filming?” she asks.
“On verra,” he says.
She doesn’t ask what that means. Whatever it is, it sounds better in French.
The crowd is enormous at the quai du Louvre. As far as Riley can see, people are lined up at the side of the promenade, staring out toward the river.
“I didn’t know the French were starstruck like this,” Riley says to Philippe. They’re pressed together at the street corner, waiting for the light to change. Everyone seems to be headed for the same place, and when the light changes they shuffle along with the crowd.
“We love the cinema. We love art. We appreciate the work of our great directors.”
“Face it, Philippe. You’re all star-fuckers.”
“I would fuck the star, yes.”
“She’s a middle-aged woman,” Riley says.
“In our country, we love all women.”
“Love, love, love. If the French do so much loving all the time, why is everyone so angry?”
Philippe leans over and kisses Riley, missing her lips and brushing against her cheek.
“Arrête,” Riley says. She looks at Cole, who is singing to himself, ignoring his mother and her tutor.
“Je suis méchant,” Philippe whispers.
Riley knows that expression-another common playground phrase. Bad boy. Man, is he ever.
They cross the street, step over the low fence that is supposed to keep pedestrians from walking on the grass but is apparently ignored by everyone at times of international crisis like filming in progress, and they gather with the hordes of people near the river.
She wiggles through the crowd-a hard thing to do with a baby on her double-D chest, Cole in front of her, Philippe behind her with a hand on her rump-and she finds an unpopulated patch of grass under a tree. Front-row seats.
“Bravo,” Philippe says, and his hand slips away.
They all gaze out at the river. Across the way is the Left Bank, with its grand old apartment buildings, and to the right, the majestic Musée d’Orsay. Farther down, the Eiffel Tower peeks out above the rooftops. Riley’s mouth hangs open. Paris. For a year she’s been living somewhere else, somewhere dark and bleak. It’s like she’s just arrived, freshly fucked and wearing rose-colored glasses.
“Bed, Maman,” Cole says.
Riley pulls her eyes away from the view across the river and gazes down at the pedestrian bridge. There’s a bed in the middle of the bridge. In fact, it looks a little like it too has been freshly fucked. A tangle of sheets sprawl across the mattress.
“A bed?” she says.
Philippe mumbles a rush of words in French.
“Expliquez everything, s’il vous plaît,” Riley insists.
“I don’t know,” Philippe says. “But I have the great hope to see Dana Hurley in that bed.”
“Naked.”
“Bien sûr.”
“In front of the children.”
“It is art.”
“It is weird.”
“They’re making a movie,” Riley tells Cole. “They’re going to film a scene and put it in a movie. It’s not real.”
No one says anything.
“That makes no sense,” Riley tells herself aloud. “It’s perfectly real. We’re looking at it.”
“C’est vrai,” Philippe says.
She puts her hand on Cole’s head. He looks up at her, wide-eyed.
“You know how when someone dies in a movie, they don’t really die? It’s an actor pretending he’s dead? So if someone does something in that bed, they’re just pretending.”
Cole keeps looking at her, waiting for something better. She hasn’t got it.
“You explain it,” she says to Philippe. She says the same thing to Vic often. When he comes home at the end of a long day, she’d like him to answer all the questions that Cole asks. Sometimes it is too hard for her to explain the simplest things: “Why Daddy have to work?” “Why Daddy go away?” “Why Mama cry?”
“On verra,” Philippe says.
So much for men and their explanations.
But Cole is happy with that, and he goes back to watching the bed.
There are a couple of tents at one end of the bridge and a swarm of people around the bed. Riley spots a director’s chair and a red-haired woman perched in it. She’s waving her hands and shouting.
“There’s your great director,” Riley says, pointing.
“Mais oui,” Philippe says, sighing, as if he has attained nirvana. He didn’t sigh like that in bed, Riley thinks. He must save his sighs for art.
And then, in a blinding flash, the lights around the bed all illuminate and the bed itself becomes a kind of holy site, an oasis of white, a beckoning, a call. The crowd heaves a collective sigh-whatever the hell is going on out there, Riley is missing it. So it’s a mattress on a bridge in the middle of the river. What’s up with that?
Out of the absolute silence of the wondrous crowd comes a squeak, then a squall, then a bellow. Her baby is bawling.
“Shhhh,” Riley says, patting Gabi’s head.
Philippe shoots her dagger looks; even Cole looks up as if he’s about to belt her for failing to observe this sacred ceremony without the proper decorum. Fuck decorum, Riley thinks. The kid is hungry.
She slides down along the trunk of the tree until she’s sitting on its roots. She pulls Gabi from the Snugli and quickly unbuttons her blouse. She pulls her bra up and over her breasts and lets the baby latch on for dear life. Ahhh. Now Riley releases her own deep sigh. This is love.
While Gabi suckles and everyone else watches some stupid-ass scene on the bridge below-between Philippe’s legs Riley can see a naked young woman writhing on the bed, a pompous ass circling the bed as if he’s Elvis Presley incarnate-Riley thinks about love.
It’s not s-e-x, though s-e-x is a grand substitute for love. It’s this child, this breast, this flow of milk. It’s Cole, watching his first naked woman in his life, only a short time after listening to the love song of a young girl in the courtyard below. It’s her mother in Florida, who has asked her every day if she could come visit, knowing that Riley is unhappy even though Riley never said a word. And in that moment, Riley knows what she has to do. Love doesn’t just sit around watching. Love jumps on a plane and shows up.
She takes out her cell phone. She clicks her mom’s name and in moments her mother’s voice is in her ear.
“That’s three times in one day,” her mom says.
“I’m coming home. I’m your ride. Don’t argue,” Riley says.
“I’m fine-”
“Listen,” Riley says. “In a few months you’ll come visit me in Paris. You’ll love it here. I’ll take you to the Eiffel Tower, we’ll ride on a bateau-mouche. I haven’t done any of those things. But right now, I’m coming to Florida.”
“Why are you whispering?”
“Because everyone’s watching some film being made. Dana Hurley is in it. Oh, I think I can see her. She’s standing next to a bed on a bridge, and there’s some bare-assed chiquita doing some sex-kitten act on the bed.”
“Where’s Cole?”
“Watching. It’s art, Mom.”
“I don’t understand how you kids raise kids these days.”
“Yeah, well.”
“You can’t come rushing home, Riley. You’re married.”
“I hate it.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Not it. Him. Vic.”
“Oh. Vic.”
They’re both quiet for a moment. Finally her mother says, “I thought so.”
“I want something else. I don’t know what.”
Riley hears something whirring in the background.
“What’s that noise?”
“I’m making a smoothie. It’s an anti-cancer smoothie. Think it will work?”
“Yeah. We’ll make it work.”
“Thank you, sweetheart,” her mom says, and she’s crying, making gulping sounds that blend with the whirring sounds so that it’s an orchestral event on the other end.
Riley doesn’t cry. She smiles and lets Gabi suckle and watches Cole gawk. This is love. She’ll go home with her children and take care of her mother who won’t let anyone in the world take care of her. Maybe she’ll even let her mother take care of her.
Then there’s a roar of thunder, a gasp from the crowd, and the skies open up. Cole steps back and the three of them-she, Gabi, and Cole-huddle together under the canopy of the tree while the rain soaks the bed, the actors, the crowd, Philippe, and Paris in all its glory.