Chapter I
His letters are small packets, six to eight yellow legal pages of his small blue ballpoint print, full of observations, allusions, and reflections, perhaps more Henry James than Henry Miller, but with far more humor.
I wait weeks for one. We are both broke and can’t afford phone calls, though after three weeks without a letter I will break down and call him from a phone booth, my ten-franc pieces swallowed one by one.
An hour’s conversation is a third of my weekly salary.
L’argent de poche, pocket money, Lèa calls it, because she is providing me room and board.
That spring, while he is writing his thesis, I do not hear from him for the month of April.
I call twice and leave messages with his housemates on MacDougal Street and he does not call back.
On the early-May day when Léa brings up the thick white envelope—she has met the real facteur on the street—I burst into tears.
I run to my tiny room to read it. It is, as they always are, brilliant, erudite, distant, unapologetic; sweet and affectionate only in the last two sentences, like the turn at the end of a sonnet.
‘Enough of my perambulations. I do love you, babe, cumbersome as it is for me to feel, and to confess.’
This is the first time he’s used ‘babe’ on the page. It’s his most tender endearment, which he uses only in the most intimate moments, when it feels like we are breathing from the same body.
At the bottom of this letter, in even smaller print, almost as a test to see how closely I am reading, is one more sentence:
P.S. I’ll land in your land on the 5th of August.
I hoped he’d come in June or July, but it’s okay—he is coming.
I need to start dinner, but I can’t get a hold of myself. He loves me. He called me babe. He is coming in August.
Léa knocks on my door. She comes in, sees my tears, sits beside me on my bed.
We’ve never been in my room together before.
She’s dressed to go out with her boyfriend, Laurent: silk shirt, suede belt, black skirt.
She wants to tell me a story. She speaks in English, which she rarely does, only when she wants to be sure I understand every word.
She tells me that when she was nineteen she fell deeply in love.
After a year he told her he wanted to go to the States, drive around the American West. He asked her to come, he begged her to come, she says.
But she had to finish her studies. And her parents didn’t want her to be an American hippie dropout.
He left, and when her studies were over she didn’t join him as she had promised.
‘I don’t know why. I suppose I was hurt he left.
And then he met someone. He wrote me. I was écrasée.
Completely broken. I could barely move. But my friend Alain, he is waiting for me all this time.
So I went with him.’ The old boyfriend came back looking for her.
It had not worked with the American. But she had just gotten married.
‘Then he married, too. I got divorced. He is divorcing now. This man, it’s Laurent.
He will move in here in a few months.’ She counts on her fingers.
‘Twenty-one years late. What I am saying, these decisions we make in youth are everything. You have no idea. Those feelings, they don’t revenir.
Pas comme ca. And no one tells you.’ She points to the pages of Yash’s letter on the bed.
‘Do not put this love second. Marry him. Marry him and have your babies. It doesn’t matter what happens after that.
’ I say I’m only twenty-three and she says, ‘Screw the calendar. What does a calendar know about love?’
‘Let him go,’ my friend Nobiko, who takes care of the twins on the fourth floor, says to me.
She is divorced. She hung on too long. Trop longtemps, she says.
It’s June. I’m waiting for a letter again.
The next day a letter comes and I show it to her.
She says something in Japanese then translates it into French.
Something about a petit poisson. He’s keeping you on the hook, is what she means.
I find some cheap French classes and make a few friends in them.
I bring the kids, Luc and Delphine, to their lessons and playdates all over the city.
I try to study grammar. I try to read. In my tiny room I start to write a couple of short stories but don’t finish them.
Most of my writing comes out in the form of letters to Yash, in which I try to stay upbeat and anecdotal and not overwhelm him with my longing for him, and the journal I keep for the overspill of that emotion.
I am so in love with him it is hard to take a full breath, I write in the journal. His absence feels like losing a lung.
My life is pending, suspended. It swings from letter to letter.
When one arrives, I soar for a week straight.
Over the next week, I come down slowly. Once back on the ground I fear the worst. He’s met someone, someone who makes him feel different, new, even more alive.
She is Brazilian. She is a dancer. She is a Brazilian dancer and I will never hear from him again.
Then a fresh letter arrives and up I go again.
His first packet from Knoxville in June is exuberant.
He’s graduated with highest honors, he’s set up a table and chair in his father’s barn, and he’s made a vow to start a novel, five pages a day.
This makes me so happy I don’t force myself to wait a few days.
I write back immediately. I have so much I want to say, I tell him, that everything is bubbling up fast and jamming together.
‘And still,’ I write, ‘there is this sense that I could express it all in just one nonexistent word and you would understand exactly what I mean.’
His July letter is shorter and less buoyant.
His father is a despot at work, his mother is chaos incarnate.
He would leave town tomorrow but he has to save for France.
He is reading Kafka, he says, ‘possibly not the best choice for the moment in question.’ At the end of the letter he tells me he wrote nine of the worst pages of fiction ever committed to paper and they have been befittingly burned with the brush pile behind the tool shed.
And finally he is here. I go to Charles de Gaulle to meet him and bring him back to my little bed.
The family, like most Parisians in August, has left the city.
They’ve gone to Léa’s mother’s in Saint-Malo.
We have the apartment to ourselves. We lie down on our sides facing each other, the only way we can fit on the narrow mattress, pressed as close as we can be.
He is new but familiar, precious, thrilling.
‘I think it’s safe to say I love you,’ he says.
We move slowly—he’s been awake for over twenty-four hours—and have slow tiny-bed sex.
He comes and calls me babe when we are sweaty and spent.
‘I didn’t know how much I missed you,’ he says.
Our first week together we stay in Paris.
I take him to all the places where I ached for him.
It was like bringing him home to kindly relatives who would share my joy.
Here he is, I say to the horse chestnuts in the Luco, to my booth at Le Danton, and to the spot on the grass in the Champs de Mars where I read his most recent letter. Here he is.
We make our own Proust tour and see his recreated bedroom at the Carnavalet, with pieces of the cork he used to line his bedroom walls.
We go to 102 Haussmann, now a bank, where he lived for thirteen years while writing La Recherche and where, Dr. Gastrell told us, in September of 1914 he sobbed in the moonlight when a German invasion of the city seemed imminent.
We find the alley down which Swann went to find Odette’s bedroom door.
We go out one night with my friends from French class, Irish Deirdre and Dutch Loes and Loes’ friend Fabien from Toulouse.
We meet at a basement bar near the Pantheon and squeeze into a table in the corner.
I go to get us drinks and look back at him there with my new friends, elbows on the table, head tipped to the side, his rooster cowlick, his mischievous grin.
He’s telling them a story. I have that familiar impatience to get back to the table so I don’t miss what he’s saying.
Madame Trèves made me promise I would go to her favorite restaurant, Lapis, and I’d waited to go with Yash, but once he sees the menu on its little stand outside the blue-and-gold door, he won’t splurge on the prix fixe meal.
He worked all summer to afford this trip, but he doesn’t seem to want to spend any of the money he saved.
I take him to an inexpensive Indian restaurant in the 5th that I like, Le Punjab.
I’d never had Indian food until I moved to Paris.
We walk in and a woman in back calls out to us and Yash answers and I don’t know what either of them has said.
He always claimed he spoke no Hindi. She shows us the only table in the window, raised up on a platform so you have to step up onto it, and her husband brings over the menus.
The couple chat with Yash and I can tell he is telling them that he doesn’t speak much, but they disagree and tell me in French that he speaks very well.
Where in India is his family from, they want to know and instead of saying Delhi Yash says something else and they don’t know it so they get out a map and they all look at it together and can’t find the town. They ask him a question in Hindi he doesn’t understand and they ask it to me.
‘Comment s’écrit ce village?’
‘Je ne suis pas s?r,’ Yash says and they are thrilled he understands French, too.
They bring the woman’s father out from the back and go through it again and the old man doesn’t know the town either.
We never order. They just start bringing out dishes. They fuss over us. They think Yash is marvelous.