Chapter I #2
On the way home he says, ‘They were such kind people, weren’t they?’
‘They were.’
He is silent for a long time. I take his hand. We’re walking up Mouffetard. We have it all to ourselves. The shops are closed, the restaurants quiet. The Parisians are gone and the tourists aren’t interested in this part of town at night.
‘That is the first time I’ve ever been to an Indian restaurant.’
‘You don’t have any in Knoxville?’
‘We have one. I could never go there. I was raised with India as the Death Star. You couldn’t mention it. My second-grade teacher gave me an extra credit assignment on India and my father tried to get her fired.’
He lets go of my hand and rubs his face and is quiet again. Then he says, ‘Four years of college and I never studied its history or Hindi. I’ve never read an Indian writer. Let’s go there. I’m not sure my father would ever speak to me again but let’s go. Will you come? Someday?’
‘Of course.’
In bed that night he tells me he has only one recurring dream, that he is giving his father’s eulogy.
‘It’s an embarrassing cliché. I’m standing there, sometimes in a church, sometimes in a field, once inside a storage unit—but it’s always good, my eulogy.
It feels sort of the same from dream to dream.
Off the cuff, no notes. But it feels like I’ve said it before.
It’s a very good speech. People love it.
My mother and my stepmother are right up front and they are weeping and holding hands. I nail it, every time.’
‘And your father is never there to hear it.’
‘Nope. He’s always dead.’
I convince him that we, too, need to get out of the city.
We take a train to Strasbourg and another to Davos.
Yash wants to see the sanatorium where Thomas Mann visited his wife, Katia, for three weeks in 1912, the visit that inspired The Magic Mountain.
The air is as clean and sharp as it is in all the books when tubercular characters go seeking a cure.
We feel lightheaded, walking up to our inn from the train station, the Alps rising on all sides, the highest peaks pale blue with ice.
Later we stand in front of the enormous building, still a sanatorium, for asthma now that tuberculosis can be cured.
It looks like a giant hotel with big balconies off every room where the patients would spend their days breathing in the cold, clear air.
We walk around the grounds and imagine we are consumptive strangers meeting there, like Hans Castorp and Clawdia Chauchat.
Chauchat, he tells me, was the name of the machine gun used by the French in World War I.
The next morning we go for a day hike, twelve kilometers to a southern peak.
We start early in order to get down by dark.
The innkeeper’s son packs us a lunch and snacks.
He is our age, blond and broad, a bit mechanical when he speaks English.
Yash is convinced he has a thing for me, and he has this running joke on the hike that the Swiss man is behind a tree or a boulder.
On the trail we talk as we often do about books, what makes the magic, where the genius lies.
He says it’s in the structure. It’s always in the structure.
We argue about this. I insist it can be in a number of elements—the images, the dialogue, all the ways in which the narrative comes to life—and he says it’s always the form that makes the difference.
I say the structure of War and Peace was no great shakes, and he breaks the book down for me section by section to show how Tolstoy was reconceiving both The Iliad and The Aeneid to build his masterpiece.
The trail is narrow, the trees tall on either side.
An occasional footbridge stretches over a stream.
During the first hour we have glimpses of the town below getting smaller through the trees.
The next hour or so we have no views, then with no warning the sky opens up and the land flattens into a meadow flush with pink and red flowers.
‘I warned you this might happen.’
‘You did,’ he says.
I put down my backpack and run through the grass with my arms stretched out.
I spin around and around and begin to sing that the hills are alive as loudly as possible.
Eventually I peter out and Yash joins me in the grass near the lip of the ridge and we lie there and feel the mountains and their shadows and we take off our clothes and have sex until three cows come trotting quickly toward us in an aggressive, uncowlike way, each with a big loud bell around its neck, and we leap up naked and laughing and unsure of which way to go.
They abruptly change direction and we lie down in the grass again and their clanging fades away slowly.
Yash traces his fingers over my neck and shoulders. ‘I think for the rest of my life the sound of cowbells will make me horny.’
Closer to the peak we come to a dark green pool surrounded by flat rocks.
We take off our clothes again. The water is very cold.
Not long ago it was ice. I want to play in the water together, ride on his back, kiss in his arms, everything slick and sexy.
But he swims away from me across to the other side.
I get out and stand on a warm rock, the cool water dripping from my hair down my back and legs into a pool at my feet.
The sun dries my skin. It feels polished and alive.
He comes out of the water and stands beside me.
He takes my hand and I feel relieved. I press my lips to his neck and hold him close and more water from his hair drips down my back and shoulders and my skin tightens as it evaporates.
I tell him I love him with my whole heart.
I look up at him and his mouth is twisted.
‘What’s the matter?’
He doesn’t answer.
‘You okay, Hink?’
He shakes his head. ‘It just hurts a little, to feel this good.’
When we come back to Paris at the end of August, Léa and her children are home.
Yash and I take them to tennis lessons on the Métro and shop for food and make them meals.
The kids grow attached to him quickly and Léa tells me that if he weren’t so marvelous she would never let him stay in my room.
Yash and Laurent argue volubly about topics as disparate as NATO and prosecco.
A week before Yash is supposed to fly home, Laurent offers him a job at his company in something called l’intelligence artificielle, which I’ve never heard of before and will for a long time think of as exclusively French.
Laurent insists it is an exciting and promising field.
He has a friend in the Ministry of the Interior who can move the papers quickly.
Yash thinks about it for a few days and accepts.
He’s going to stay! He will make a real salary.
We can get an apartment and I’ll finish out the year working for Lèa, then I can teach private English classes and really start to write.
On the night before he was supposed to fly back, he goes to the phone booth around the corner to ask his dad to send over some clothes and books. And there in that glass box, in less than ten minutes, he has a change of heart.
At first I think I can change it back. ‘This is a rare opportunity,’ I say. ‘Laurent is going to get you a work permit. Mr. Cautious needs to carpe diem a little.’
‘Or it could be a year of French bureaucracy and getting deported before the paperwork comes through.’ His father has gotten to him so fast.
‘What does your dad think is a better idea for you?’
‘It’s not him. I’d been thinking maybe I should stick to my original plan.’
Original plan? I have not heard of this plan.
‘To save enough to move to New York.’
New York?
‘A guy I know from high school is there. He’s working at Houghton Mifflin. Entry-level position, though he’s pretty plugged-in already. He had dinner with Philip Roth last month.’
I’ve never been to New York. It always looks so bleak in movies. This plan makes no sense to me.
‘Paris is better in every way than New York.’
‘Not for being a writer.’
‘Yeah. Think of all the crappy novels that have been written here. Ulysses, The Sun Also Rises, Madame Bovary.’ I have no idea where Madame Bovary was written and hope he doesn’t either.
‘New York is the hub that Paris used to be,’ he says.
We stay up all night, his last night, going around and around on this. Didn’t we spend last fall dreaming of living in Paris? What happened to that? What happened?
‘So,’ he says, softening, nuzzling up to me, ‘you don’t want to live in New York?’
‘Not really.’
‘With me.’
‘I like trees.’
‘With me, near a park?’
‘When?’
‘When I save up.’
It feels like such a mistake, him going back and working for his father again, miserable, when he could be here and we could be together right now.
Our last sex is sad. Or at least it is for me.
The first pale light comes through the window. In an hour he’ll have to go to the airport. I can’t stop crying.
‘How about January?’ he says. ‘I can make enough by January.’
He leaves. Paris loses all its luster without him.
There is a bare space in my room where his green duffel used to be.
I am the facteur again, checking the silver box morning and night.
He barely writes. He says he is working as many hours as his dad will pay him for, sometimes sixty hours a week.
I take on tutoring jobs while the kids are at school.
I stop going out. I buy nothing. I save for New York.
By the middle of October, I need to hear his voice. I go to the pay phone at the corner on a Sunday afternoon. As it rings I pray Yash or his stepmother will answer, but I am not lucky.
His father acts like my name is only vaguely familiar to him. I ask him if he could ask Yash to please call me when he gets a chance.
‘Does he have your number?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you still in Europe?’
‘Yes.’
‘That will be an expensive phone call. Which will appear on my bill.’
‘I’m sure he’ll reimburse you.’
‘Wouldn’t your words be prettier in a letter?’
The pay phone beeps. I have ten seconds to put in another coin or be cut off.
‘I’ll do that. Thank you, Mr. Thakkar.’
Yash does not call back.
I write Carson in Brooklyn about rentals, and she writes back fast saying a friend of a friend was looking to sublet her prewar walk-up between the Navy Yard and the bridge. I don’t know what any of it means. I send Yash the friend’s address and phone number and tell Carson we’re interested.
A few weeks later one of Yash’s packets comes, the yellow legal sheets of paper full of complaints about his father and whiskey distribution and the cubical he shares with a man who smells like mayonnaise and vapor rub.
On the last page he says he talked to Carson’s friend and the place sounded decent.
He would send her a check at the end of the week and she would send him the keys. We could move in on January 1.
To save money I don’t fly home for the holidays. Léa and Laurent go to Rome, and her children spend the vacation with their father in the 16th. I have a few students who stay in the city, and I squeeze out a few more francs from them before I go.
Yash calls me on Christmas Day. He wants to know if I’m okay. He hasn’t heard from me in a while.
‘The shoe is on the other foot.’ I can hear how strange my voice sounds.
‘What’s wrong, Hink?’
‘I’m tired. I’m tired of missing you.’
Words feel useless. I just need to see him.
‘I get it,’ he says. ‘It’s been a long fall.’
‘It has.’
We talk about the logistics of early January. He says his flight to Newark lands an hour after mine, giving me time to get through customs. We’re both flying Delta. We’ll meet at baggage claim. He received the keys to the apartment. He promises he won’t forget them.