A NOVEL SET IN PARIS ~ Chapter 1

I try to remember my first impression of him, but it’s hard to go back ~ like a dream that recedes the more awake I am. We met on the train from Lyon to Paris. There was a faint smell of cigarettes when he sat down, and cologne, I remember that. He looked overly warm in a thick hoodie on an early summer afternoon. His hair was dark and wavy. European, I guessed, maybe Italian.

He sat opposite me, leafing through a newspaper, trying to be quiet when he turned the pages and folding them into quarters each time he finished a section. Every time I uncrossed my legs he moved his knees sideways a bit to make room. At one point he asked me which book I was reading.

I hold it up so he can see, “Emerson’s Essays.”

“Light reading,” he grins.

“Yeah, it’s for a class.”

“In Paris?”

I nod. “At the American University.”

“Are you taking it or teaching?” he asks and I can’t tell if he’s serious or just trying to flatter me. He was cute, but I could never see the point of flirting just for the fun of it.

“Teaching.” I smile politely and then look out the window and back down to find my place.

“Are you American?”

His eyes were blue, the muted gray-blue of Delft china. I didn’t want to seem rude, but I needed to read as much as I could before I got back to Paris, back to the apartment and my boyfriend and all the things I needed to do before class tomorrow.

“Canadian.”

“Close,” he said and left me to my reading.

That was months ago and when I heard a voice behind me in the café, I didn’t look up. The words hung in the air, vaguely. I didn’t even notice that they were in English and I certainly didn’t think they were for me. No one knew me in Paris, except for my students and a couple of friends who lived in another part of the city.

“It’s you. From the train.”

I turned around, looked up at his silhouette backlit in the morning sun, and had no idea who he was. He looked different somehow, dressed in wrinkled linen, slightly bohemian with a pale scarf wrapped around his neck.

“Sorry?” I squinted against the sun.

“The train from Lyon to Paris, in the summer. You were reading essays. Emerson, I think.”

“Oh, yeah. You’re the newspaper guy.”

He laughs, “I am the newspaper guy and I only recognized you because of your hand. The ink on your fingers.”

“Fountain pens.”

Those two moments. Side by side: one on the train and in the café. Who can say if it was a coincidence or fate? “Who lays the crumbs of food that tempt you? Towards a person you never considered. A dream. Then later another series of dreams.”

We had coffee together, the man from the train who didn’t look like the man from the train and the woman with ink stained fingers. Two strangers. Two espressos. Two squares of chocolate. He tells me how he ended up in Paris (a year long painting fellowship) and I tell him about coming to Paris four years ago to teach. His hand brushes mine as he reaches for the bill. I pull my wallet from my bag.

“I’ve got it,” he says. He looks at me for a moment searching my face for something. “It was a pleasure to happen upon you again, Anya.”

I smile and we exchange numbers. I start to type his name in my contacts: J-a-s-o-n and then realize it’s not a good idea. This is the first trespass; the flimsy veneer of shared interests and the word platonic being uttered, just to be sure we were both thinking that this was definitely not platonic. Who could stop wayward eros, the spirit of desire hovering over us that day.

We make plans to meet next Thursday at the Art Brut museum in Montmartre. What I didn’t know then was that Thursdays would become our day, our time. Our time out of time.

While waiting for him in the bookshop wearing a black dress and heels that are utterly impractical for walking up the cobbled streets of this quarter, I flip through a catalogue of Degottex paintings until I feel him behind me. So close I can smell the mint and musk of his cologne. He leans over my shoulder so we’re almost touching. He whispers in my ear, “You like Degottex?”

A shiver of pleasure runs through me even before I turn around. “I do.”

“He’s very…” he looks at my mouth as if he’s going to bite it “ — primitive.”

We walk through the gallery a little too close together; our hands touching accidentally and sometimes not. Anyone could look at us and guess what was happening. Everything is cinematic: wide shot, medium shot, close up. Between us there is a thawing of caution. A feeling that the world is a mere backdrop for desire, a mise en scène for our unfolding. I would not use the word love or even lust. I felt a quickening. I felt alive in a way I have only felt a few times in my life. The air between us charged and full of possibility; standing in front of a painting on a humid afternoon. My thoughts circling around the future we could have but probably won’t.

Back at the apartment I’m so relieved that Luc doesn’t notice anything, not that I’m distracted or that I’m wearing a new dress. He doesn’t know I spent my birthday money on a black lace bra from La Perla, and if he did he would sulk at such a shallow extravagance. To be fair, I don’t notice him, either. We are both sleepwalking under the weight of poorly paid academic posts, his stalled novel, my unfinished essays, the death of our cat, Miles, a month ago and the incessant clatter of construction on rue Linne.

It’s early in the semester and we both have stacks of essays to grade, except I can’t grade anything because all I keep thinking about is Jason and how he smells and that the veins in his forearms look like something from a Michelangelo sculpture and how the sexy scratch of his dark stubble felt as he kissed my cheeks. My life before we met was entirely full: teaching and trying to write, cooking, cleaning, an endless To Do list. It didn’t seem like there was room for anything else or anyone else but now everything recedes and my thoughts are full of him, his eager laughter, how he wrapped his scarf around my neck even before I told him I was cold. The way he talks with a half smile, as if he’s still deciding how amused to be. I’d forgotten how erotic it is to be seen by someone you want to be seen by.

Luc is on the balcony grading papers and taking long, serious drags from the Marlborough hanging from his mouth. He’s doing corrections with a red pen and listening to Louder Than the Bombs by The Smiths, trying to drown out the construction noise. He might have gotten a haircut.

A few days later, we meet again. Jason throws his arm over my shoulder casually and I lace my fingers through his as I tell him about meeting Luc when I first came to Paris. We walk through the Jardin des Plantes surrounded by tourists and the army of gardeners taking care of the flowerbeds. A line of fit guys jog by in matching red shorts and blue t-shirts. The last one winks at me ~ he lives in the same apartment building. Jason looks at me. “You know all the beefy joggers?”

“No, they’re firemen and that one is my neighbor. He flirts with everybody.”

“So, Luc…” He grins, charming me with that smile again.

“What no one tells you about academia is that you and your colleagues are all vying for the one tenure track position that opens up every few years, so the camaraderie is laced with cold competition. Luc was the only professor who was even remotely friendly.”

“What was your first impression of him?”

“I don’t know. I had just broken up with my boyfriend and wasn’t looking to get into a serious relationship. He was kind of quiet and earnest and his first novel had just been published so there was a buzz around him on campus that semester. ”

“Were you attracted to him?”

“Not really. I mean he was good looking in that kind of shabby French writer way, but mainly he was just a guy who was nice and I thought his writing was really so honest and raw. At the time I didn’t know anyone in Paris, so we started hanging out on the weekends and then…you know…”

He smiles that half-smile. “I do. And who were you when you met him? Tell me about that version of Anya.”

“Somewhat ambitious, I guess, more than I am now. So glad to be done with my PhD and I was determined to live in Paris for at least a couple of years. I love that feeling of being in a new city, of being almost invisible, as much to yourself as anyone else.”

“Me, too.”

“It’s like, who are we in a new place, out of our natural habitat with its social norms and expectations? Who are we without a culture telling us who to be? Okay, your turn: how are you different here than you are at home?”

“Well, I eat more crêpes and I was just saying this to someone the other day: here in Paris art is a very normal part of life. It’s not seen as indulgent or irrelevant. In America, art is viewed with a certain amount of skepticism, like who are you to call yourself an artist. At home if I told someone I was a painter they looked at me like I was joking or they thought I was a house painter.”

It’s getting late and we stop under one of my favorite trees in Paris ~ an ancient ginkgo by the tall gates that surround the Jardin des Plantes before we have to head home. His eyes drift to my lips, he leans in and the sweet caverns of our mouths meet, our tongues search tenderly. It’s almost 6 o’clock so we kiss once more, long and lingering, and then turn and walk in opposite directions, away from each other and back to our real lives. The best moment and the worst moment, side by side.