Paris Red: A Novel (11 page)

While I’m on the bridge, a flock of starlings flies overhead, and I stop to watch. The flock turns this way and that, here and there, and if one bird strays from the edges of the group, it quickly comes back. I keep looking up in the sky even after they fly on.

Whatever it is in me that wants and wants—it is as big as the sky and keeps going.

H
e said just a little
farther north is the Plaine de Monceaux, and that it still feels like a village there—allées lined by trees, farmland, goat paths. But to me even his studio seems like it should be in a village. A window with sixteen tiny panes of glass tops the door, and the door itself is made of rough, wood planks. Ivy overgrows it, and the entire place looks a little tumbled down. I noticed the other day, but now I see it even more clearly. And yet I can also understand why he picked this place. If you wanted to try to get something done, away from other people, this is the sort of spot you would want. I am trying hard to understand what it all means to him because I know that it does mean something.

Maybe that is how my face looks when he answers the door, as though I am still trying to take things in. Or maybe I just look as unsure as I feel. All I know is that he seems surprised to see me. Surprised, puzzled—something. But he should not be surprised, I think.

“Where is Denise?” he says when he shuts the door behind me. “Où est ta copine?”

“I didn’t tell her I was coming.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That I was going to see my mother. To do some sewing.”

He looks at me after I say that, and he seems solemn. Serious. Maybe because I came on my own and it is no longer his fantasy of the brunette and the redhead. And yet I came on my own last night in the street, too, and he was glad. More than glad—I felt it from him.

I am not sure how to get back to the place we were on the street last night, when I ran to him and he was pleased to see me, but I know it has to do with acting as if everything is as it should be. So I walk further into his studio and then I know what to do.

I go to the divan and I lie down. Then I let myself look at him the same way I looked at everything I saw today when I walked up here—the streets, the birds, the sky. I let my eyes move over him as if I were looking at a plain or a river.

That is how we get back to the place we were last night on the street, when I ran beyond the dogleg of Maître-Albert, when he was a stranger from far away and not a stranger once I touched him.

H
e half sits, half lies
on the divan and I am on top of him, my knees on either side. It feels odd at first to kiss him because no one else is here. I keep stopping because that is what I have always done, and then I realize I do not have to.

“What if she had come after you in the street last night and not me,” I say. I do not want to say Nise’s name, and I wonder if he will.

“She didn’t come.”

“If she had.”

“I don’t think you would have let her come alone,” he says. “I don’t think you would have ever let her come back down the street without you.”

“No,” I say. “I wouldn’t have let her come.”

“It counts more than you know.”

“What does?” I say.

“To be wanted like that.”

He kisses my
breasts. First one and then the other. He holds each one in both hands, as if they were bottles he could tip back into his mouth.

After he tugs and sucks, he says, “I like how they feel in my mouth.”

I’m the one
who unbuttons his shirt.

“I want to see,” I say. “I want to feel.”

“Feel away,” he tells me.

The forearms that I have held on to as we walked—they are covered with golden brown hair. His chest is like that, too. The hair is soft and silky, and again I smell the clove and orange scent I smelled the one night when we walked.

He must use cologne. This time the smell does not remind me of my mother.

He takes off
my boots for me. He takes them off so I can take off my stockings, so I can be bare-legged on his lap.

“Those are my whore boots,” I tell him. “A whore gave them to me.”

“Who was she?”

“Someone my mother sewed for. La Belle Normande.”

“Was she grand?”

“I thought so,” I say.

“Lift up,” he says then.

He keeps one arm around me and undoes his trousers with the other hand. Frees himself.

When I sit back down it is just my petticoat between us.

There is a
place at the base of his throat where the skin is very pale. It is a tiny indentation just above the breastbone and between the collarbones, a little scooped-out place that looks vulnerable.

Men look more vulnerable than women do when they are naked, I think. Or maybe I just think that because I know what my own body looks like.

When I look between his legs he does not look vulnerable. Does not look like anything but himself.

I would have
shared him with Nise. And if she wanted it, I would have touched her, too. It could have been the three of us, just like he always said.

But in the end he feeds the one whose mouth is open widest, who gets there first. That is what I tell myself.

He picks the hungriest one.

W
e stay together, the two
of us on that narrow divan, until one or two in the morning, until he says, “I hate to, but I have to go.”

He does not say the word
home
, but I know that is what he means.

“Stay here,” he says. “I’d like to think of you staying here.”

When I do not answer, he asks, “What is it?”

“I have to work tomorrow.”

“Don’t go.”

“And then what,” I say.

“There are other ways to earn money.”

Before I would have said,
What would you know about it?
But I do not say that now. Instead I just tell him, “It’s not that easy.”

“I’ll help you. Decide tomorrow. I’ll come first thing.”

I shake my head no, but I know I do not mean it because I do not stand up. I lie back on the divan, curl up under the blanket.

“Will you be all right here?”

“Yes. If you come back in the morning,” I say.