Chapter Twenty
George and Lou were strolling through the residential neighborhood just west of the Eiffel Tower when they felt the first drop of rain.
Lou groaned, looking skyward. “I forgot an umbrella.”
“We can share mine,” George said, pulling a miniature, collapsible umbrella from his pocket. Small enough to fit almost entirely in his palm while folded, it had been an impulse buy at the airport.
Lou looked at the umbrella in George’s hand and laughed. “That thing looks barely large enough to shield a mouse from the rain.”
George glanced at him and then looked hurriedly away. “We’ll just have to squeeze in close.”
It was just the two of them. The rest of the group had gone to Giverny to see the home of Claude Monet and the water lilies that had so inspired him, but Lou had admitted that he got carsick these days unless he was at the wheel and didn’t think he could stomach four hours round trip in the passenger van, and George had happily agreed to stay in Paris with him.
Ever since Cliff had taken their advice and declared his amorous feelings for Diane—which, to everyone’s surprise, she had reciprocated—the two of them had been inseparable, holding hands and cooing at each other like they were all by themselves.
Neither George nor Lou thought they could stand being in an enclosed space with them for the duration of the ride.
George felt terrible for Sheila, the other nurse Diane had taken the trip with, but Sheila didn’t seem bothered.
“Diane falls in love with someone new everywhere we go,” she’d said with a shrug when George had expressed his concern.
“She’s been like that since we were in our twenties.
Drives me crazy because it always fizzles out, and then she’s devastated.
But on the other hand, it’s inspiring, really.
Makes me think it’s never too late for new beginnings, you know? ”
George thought about her words as the Eiffel Tower came into view at the end of a side street. It’s never too late for new beginnings. But what if it was?
He and Lou had been strolling around Paris for the past two hours, losing themselves in the crisscrossing streets and avenues of the city as they chatted easily, catching each other up on the latest goings-on in their lives and agreeing that they needed to make more of an effort to see each other back in Florida, despite the ninety-minute drive between their homes.
Lou had just confessed that he’d been thinking recently of moving into a fifty-five-plus community like The Villages, just to have some company, and a surprised George had said he’d been considering the same thing.
As they’d wound their way past The American Library in Paris on the rue du Général Camou, the Eiffel Tower looming ahead of them, Lou had just suggested that they might think about moving into the same community, because then they’d both start with a built-in friend.
The word friend had echoed in George’s ear, because of course that’s how Lou saw him. A friend. His oldest friend. A friend he’d met and relied on in Vietnam and had trusted with his life.
And that was all well and good, because George considered Lou his closest friend, too.
But as the rain began to fall lightly, giving Paris a misty, ethereal feeling, and as he popped his tiny umbrella open and beckoned Lou to move in closer, he ached to say more.
“Well, come on in, before you get soaked,” George said instead, raising his arm and jerking his head to indicate that Lou should come into the fold.
Chuckling, Lou moved closer, and George’s arm fell over his shoulders as the two men huddled against the rain, which was coming down harder now.
“George Gallagher, you’ve been saving me for fifty years,” Lou said as drops of water deflected from their umbrella in a soft pitter-patter. “What would I do without you?”
George knew how lucky he was to still be in touch with Lou all these decades after they’d first met, to share such a close friendship with a man who knew him better than anyone in the world, and who was as good and decent as anyone he’d ever known. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, either.”
Lou slipped his arm around George, too, so that the two of them took up as little space as possible beneath the umbrella.
Matching each other stride for stride, they began to make their way toward the Eiffel Tower, the rain drumming down all around them.
As they approached the monument, they were passed by dozens of people dashing in the opposite direction, some using maps or plastic bags as makeshift shields against the downpour.
“We’re going against the tide,” Lou pointed out as a fleeing tourist bumped into him, jostling him against George and shouting an apology over his shoulder.
“Haven’t we always?”
Lou laughed. “I’ll give you that.”
They crossed into the tree-lined Champ de Mars, where the dirt paths were already dotted with puddles. “Watch yourself there,” Lou said quickly, pulling George to the side to avoid splashing through water.
“Thanks,” George said, leaning into Lou.
They emerged from a cluster of trees and stopped to stare up at the Eiffel Tower, which loomed above the park just two hundred yards ahead.
With the gray clouds as a backdrop and no sunshine to light it, the monument looked nearly black, a silhouette against the sky.
The rain was slowing, but drops continued to drum against the umbrella as the air around them turned misty. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” George said.
“Like something out of a classic movie,” Lou agreed. He glanced at George. “If this were a film, this would be the moment the lovers would kiss, wouldn’t it?”
George wasn’t sure how to respond. “Well, too bad Cliff and Diane aren’t here,” he said after a moment. “They’d be kissing up a storm.”
Lou chuckled, but he didn’t say anything.
“Are you missing Lavonda?” George guessed after a few seconds of silence.
Lou seemed to consider this. “I miss her often. She was a wonderful companion. But in this moment, George? No, I wasn’t thinking of Lavonda at all.”
There was something in Lou’s tone—a deepening of his voice, a tremor that felt like a little earthquake—that made George turn and look at him.
Rain and mist drifted down around them, but in the shadow of the umbrella, it was just the two of them, nearly alone in the park.
“You weren’t?” George asked, hardly daring to hope.
“No.”
“Who, then,” George said slowly, “were you thinking of?”
Lou held his gaze. The rain fell. The clouds rolled. The Eiffel Tower stood watch over the quiet morning, a witness to this and a million other moments. “You,” he said, and George stared because Lou couldn’t possibly mean what George thought he meant.
“Me?”
“George,” Lou said, “I understand if you don’t feel the same way. But for me, it has always been you.”
Henry and Celeste sat by the window, staring out at the rain.
They said little as they watched the drops fall, but when Henry had reached for Celeste’s hand, she hadn’t pulled away, and after a few seconds, she’d threaded her fingers through his, and they had been sitting like that, side by side, ever since.
Henry was afraid to move, for what if he broke this spell? It was enough, in this moment, to have Celeste’s hand in his, to be gently stroking her palm with his thumb, to feel the warmth of her coursing through him.
“It’s romantic, isn’t it?” Celeste finally broke the silence. “Paris in the rain. Like… a promise of new beginnings.”
Henry swallowed hard. It was the most lucid he’d heard Celeste sound since he’d returned to her. “I fell in love in the rain once,” he dared to say.
She looked at him, and for a split second, he could have sworn that she saw him, really saw him. But then her eyes clouded over again, and when she smiled, it looked vacant. “How wonderful.”
“It was,” Henry said, the memories tumbling back in.
Being walked through the waterlogged streets of Paris just before the curfew by a Resistance contact who introduced himself as Claude.
Knowing that he was marginally safer than he otherwise would have been, because the Germans and the French police were huddled in cafés, staying dry.
Seeing Celeste for the very first time, framed in the arched doorway of the building on the rue Dante, her hair damp, her dress clinging to every curve of her slender body.
Knowing that, somehow, his path was meant to intertwine with hers, even though he didn’t yet know that she was the next stop on the Allied escape line.
The insistent patter of the rain on the zinc roof as she hid him in her top-floor apartment.
The way he’d longed to kiss her for the first time as she’d perched by the window to look up at the drops falling from the sky.
Their first kiss, just a week later, when the skies had blessed them with a second rainfall, turning the streets luminous.
“And did she fall in love with you, too?” Celeste asked, and when Henry looked at her, he again thought he could see a glimmer of recognition.
“She did,” he said softly. “We promised that we would love each other forever. That we would find our way back to each other, no matter what.”
“And did you? Find your way back?”
“We did.” Henry’s voice cracked. “But I’m afraid it might be too late.”
Celeste absorbed this for a moment. “It’s never too late, though, is it?”
Henry did his best to keep his voice from shaking. “That’s my hope, Celeste, it really is.”
“I was in love once,” she said after a moment. “A very long time ago.”
“Were you?” He was afraid that she was about to tell the story of her husband, and he knew he’d have to withstand hearing the details of the man she’d spent her life with instead of him, even if it broke his heart.
Instead, she sighed and said, “It was here, in Paris. He was an American. We were both very young.”
Henry stared at her. “You remember?”
She looked at him blankly. “Remember what?”
“Falling in love with an American.” He had the terrible feeling that he was already losing her.
She scrunched up her nose. “That isn’t something I can talk about. It isn’t safe. The Germans could be listening.”
“The war is long since over, Celeste.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “So you say.”
“I promise, it ended eighty years ago. We’ve been apart all that time, Celeste, but I’ve found you.”
She peered at him. “But who are you?”
“I’m Henry.” He blinked back tears. She’d been so close to a breakthrough, but as the rain slowed to a trickle outside, it seemed that the fog of confusion had already begun to descend again. “I’m the American you loved in Paris, a very long time ago. I loved you, too, very deeply. I still do.”
She frowned and looked him up and down. “I don’t know you.”
“But you did, Celeste!” He could feel his desperation rising. “We used to lie in your bed and listen to the rain pounding on the roof. I used to sing to you. Do you remember?”
Her lips opened and closed, almost as if she was searching for lyrics she’d lost long ago. “There were love songs once.”
“Yes. Yes, there were.”
“I—I don’t remember the words.” Tears pooled in her eyes. “Why don’t I remember the words anymore?”
As tears streamed down her face, Henry’s eyes stung, too. “Wherever you are, you make the world bright,” he said, his voice raspy. “You light all the flames. You’re my City of Light.”
She stared at him for a long time. “But that isn’t a song. You aren’t singing.”
“I had cysts on my vocal cords,” he said, touching his throat. “They tried surgery and voice therapy, but nothing has helped. My singing voice is lost.”
She frowned. “It’s terrible to lose things, isn’t it? I think I have lost many of my memories. Don’t tell anyone. They’ll think I’m crazy.”
“You’re not crazy, Celeste. And though your memories may not all be here anymore,” he said, tapping his head, “they are here.” He put a hand over his heart. She stared at his hand for a moment.
“Because I feel them,” she said softly, “even if I can’t recall the details.”
“Exactly.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes more as the rain continued to fall. “I do not know you,” Celeste said at last. “But I trust you.”
“Hold on to that, then,” Henry said. “And I promise, I will find a way to remind you of all the ways we live in each other’s hearts.”
George could not find the words to reply to Lou as the two men stared at each other in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, raindrops landing like gentle drumbeats on George’s umbrella.
“What do you mean, it’s always been me?” George finally managed to say, his heart hammering.
Lou looked down at the ground for a long time as George’s pulse raced.
“I mean,” Lou said slowly, without looking at George, “that I felt something different with you the very first time we met. It was easier, though, wasn’t it, for me to love a woman?
To know that whatever else happened, we would always be friends, as long as I didn’t rock the boat? ”
“And now?”
“Now,” Lou said, finally looking up to meet George’s gaze, “the boat is rocking. And if I wind up alone in the sea, so be it.”
George could see anguish in his friend’s eyes, and confusion. “What are you saying, Lou?”
“Well, George, I’m saying that I love you.”
For a moment, George couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak. He simply stared at Lou, a lump in his throat.
“Say something,” Lou said, with a nervous laugh after a long beat of silence. “If I’ve misread the situation, if I’ve made you uncomfortable, perhaps we can just forget that I—”
“Lou,” George said abruptly.
Lou stopped speaking and looked at him.
George inhaled, gathering his courage. And then he took the leap he had always assumed would never be his to take. “I love you, too, Lou,” he said. “Always have, always will.”
“Really?” Lou asked, his voice hoarse.
As the rain drifted down, they stood there under the umbrella looking into each other’s eyes.
And then, slowly, George leaned forward and touched his lips gently to Lou’s, something he had dreamed of doing for so many years.
There had been men in the time since Sally had died, but George’s heart had always been right here, with Lou.
They stood like that for a long moment, their lips touching, the world going on all around them, not a single person giving them a second glance. Finally, George pulled away, and the two men stared at each other in disbelief. “Really,” George whispered.
Lou’s eyes filled with tears. “All this time…”
“All this time,” George said, his voice breaking. “It has always been you, too.”