Blame it on paris, p.23
Blame It on Paris, page 23
“And we’ll all help,” Claudine said. “But you know that.”
The auto-da-fé note to this village gathering, two suckling pigs impaled on spits, rotated gently over coals. The pigs looked very much like the nursing children they had been a couple of days ago, little feet curled up under their chins, an iron rod coming up their anuses and out of their mouths, flesh orange-black from a night of roasting. Crowds flocked to this infanticide. “How cute!” they exclaimed. “They look delicious! Almost done, do you think?”
“That’s a good way to feed a lot of people,” Bruno suggested. “If you wanted to have a wedding here, we could roast cochons au lait like that. Or lamb.”
“No,” Titi said immediately. “It takes forever. You have to think about who would watch over it while we’re all at the ceremony.”
A shadow fell on their faces. “Papa always did that,” Claudine murmured. René had been too sick to come to this village festival, although it was the kind of thing he loved. She tilted her head up to the sky and gazed into blue. “He would have loved to dance you around at your wedding,” she murmured to me. “He really loves you.”
I blinked rapidly. René loved everybody. I didn’t know he loved me in particular, and I hadn’t known how much that would matter to me. “I would love to have him dance with me at my wedding, too,” I said, low. I could imagine it: René twirling me around on a wood dance floor like the one patched together in the center of the yard, his eyes glowing with joy. I could see him bouncing on his toes by a méchoui, being everywhere at once in Titi and Bruno’s vast garden, trying to make sure our wedding was beautiful and perfect for us. In my vision, he had all his hair and energy, as he had the day I met him at the Feast of Kings.
We all looked around at something other than what was in our heads. The hundred people gathered around us had to surpass the actual population of this dilapidated village, but everyone had invited friends and family from all over to come enjoy the fun. The day was beautiful, sunny and hot, and all but one person seemed to be having a wonderful time.
That one person, Jean-Charles, watched the rear corner of the stone building with feral alertness, rarely taking his eyes off the 1931 Citroen C4 that gleamed there. Jean-Charles had brought the beige and brown car over to show off at the festival but now acted like a miser who had displayed his gold in a weak moment. I can only imagine how insulted he would have been if the car hadn’t attracted attention, but there was no need to worry about that. The crowds were circling like vultures.
“They keep touching it,” he growled. “What’s the matter with people? Any minute now, someone’s going to open the door and take it for a drive.”
“Surely not.” I patted him on the arm.
“I’m not exaggerating! When I brought it up from Provence a few months ago, I actually came out of a restaurant once and found a kid behind the wheel. His parents had put him there and were taking pictures! Look at that!!” Jean-Charles half rose. “That man just ran his hand the whole length of it!”
Claudine grinned at him and caught my eyes. “He might bring the Torpedo up in the spring. He’s thinking of driving the old cars for weddings occasionally.”
Of all the cars Jean-Charles and his father had in their collection, the 1928 Torpedo remained my favorite, and that was saying a lot. “For . . . weddings?”
“Um-hmm.” She set her chin on her hand, smiling at me. “Wouldn’t that be wonderful, to ride to your wedding in one of those cars?”
Yes, it would. “Could I wear a twenties-style wedding dress?” I asked eagerly, seeing myself with a miraculously stick-shaped figure, berouged lips, a cloche hat, and a jade cigarette holder.
“Of course you could!” Claudine exclaimed, her eyes lighting up. “You would look wonderful in a twenties-style dress!”
My jaw dropped, and I decided I definitely loved Claudine. Nobody had ever been able to share my twenties vision of myself before.
Bruno leaned forward excitedly. “Could we all dress up in twenties style?”
“Yeah!” I leaned toward him, just as excited, then sat back, trying for a cooler head. “We couldn’t ask our guests to do that. Everyone wouldn’t be able to find the right clothes.”
“I’m sure they could manage something, if they tried,” Bruno said sternly. His gaze grew lost in the middle distance. “The twenties. Do you remember those little boater hats men wore?”
“And the flapper dresses!” I said eagerly. “Do you think I could have a jade cigarette holder?”
Claudine looked at me blankly. “Non, non, non. I was thinking of those dresses with bustles and little lace collars and S corsets for you. Isn’t that the twenties? Those flapper dresses just wouldn’t suit you.”
Damn it.
“But you would look wonderful in a lace collar,” Claudine tried, sensing she was losing me.
I scowled.
A dozen feet from our table, a sixty-something gentleman installed himself behind a synthesizer, and a teenager picked up an accordion. They burst into a polka, and Bruno grabbed me, over my protests that I didn’t know how to dance the polka. He solved that problem by holding me in a very firm grip while he danced it. Trailing my stumbling body around the floor, Bruno danced the polka, a Viennese waltz, a fox-trot, and various numbers I didn’t even recognize. Sébastien regularly tried to cut in, but Bruno ignored him. Only when the musicians paused and put on a CD mix did I get a break: Bruno had to let go of me to pull off his shirt and wave it over his head, per the instructions of a popular song that year. Over by the spit, organizers finished pulling Babe into pieces for our main course, and we returned to the table, breathless and hot. Claudine laughed through gasps for air. “That’s so much fun. French weddings are kind of like this, don’t you think, Titi?”
“Our PACS was like this, anyway,” Titi agreed, tugging on his diamond stud. “But with more champagne. Remember how you danced, Sébastien?”
“I remember the wheelbarrows of champagne,” Sébastien said, flexing his shoulders.
“I asked the mayor if we could borrow that dance floor,” Bruno said. “Just in case you two decide to have the wedding here. But she said they had borrowed it from another village.”
“A dance floor?” Jean-Charles waved a hand dismissively. “I can put together a dance floor for you. Don’t you worry about that.”
I leaned closer to Sébastien and squeezed his thigh. “It does sound fun,” I whispered.
His face lit up. “Really?”
“How would we manage two weddings on two different continents, though?”
“We could manage it,” he said. “Look at all the organizers we’ve got around us. They’d love to get their hands on our wedding. They love nothing better than to throw a big party.”
I looked around me. “It does sound fun.”
When I looked back at the others, Claudine was watching us, smiling happily and nudging Bruno.
Justine tapped my shoulder. “Do you want to go sign up for the stilt race?”
“There’s a stilt race?” I sat straight up. “Yes!”
We found a portly gentleman in loose shorts and an untucked shirt registering contestants at the other end of the pavilion. “Are you here for the stilt-walking contest?”
“Of course!” Not that I had ever touched a stilt, but that didn’t seem a good reason to shrink from entering a top-speed race to me. Justine knitted her hands together and hesitated uncomfortably when she saw the sign-up sheet. There were two categories—under fourteen and over fourteen. She had turned fourteen only a few months earlier.
I grinned at her. “Don’t consider yourself a child?”
She looked demure. “I don’t want to take advantage of anyone.” I stared.
She coughed delicately. “I mean, I, um . . . I’ve had a lot of practice.”
“You’re a stilt-walking expert?” Why didn’t my family produce these kinds of talents? “How did that happen?”
“Summers in Provence. My grandfather made me a new set every year because I kept growing out of the old ones.”
I watched her sign her name under mine in the adult category, deeply impressed. We just didn’t encourage such vital skills in the U.S.
“Good for you,” the portly gentleman said heartily, pleased to have his first two adult entries. “Do you have any stilt walkers at your table? We don’t have enough people in the adult category.”
As it turned out, everyone at our table of Parisians had stilt-walked at least once. I would have thought their skills would be confined to how to call a taxi, but I had noticed before how close some Parisians were to something rural and peculiarly authentic. Valérie, only thirty-two, often casually referred to daily trips to collect milk from a nearby farm when she was growing up in Brittany. Suave Bruno, at thirty-five the third highest ranking executive of a major French hotel chain, could, from personal experience, tell you how to kill and dress any barn animal you cared to name, including quite a few that weren’t barn animals in the U.S. What’s more, this was good cocktail chatter. I swear. Everybody but me always had something to contribute on the subject.
Despite this familiarity with the terroir, or land, many hesitated to sign up for the stilt race, repeating phrases like “look ridiculous” and “fall flat on my face” so frequently that I started to think maybe I should have given both some consideration myself. This cowardly spirit forced Titi and Bruno to take matters into their own hands. When the portly gentleman came around to drum up the competitive stilt-walking spirit, they blocked frantic grabs for the pen with their bodies and signed up every single person at the table.
Passions ran high, or maybe it was alcohol, as Justine established a clear lead, someone else’s child cheated, I trod diligently but woefully behind, and Bruno proved himself competitive to the point of self-extinction. He was so determined not to fall off his stilts that he would keep clutching them as he fell, rigid as a board, until his face slammed into the ground and broke the fall for the rest of his body. By the time the adult stilt race ended, he had so many bruises on his face it looked as if he had entered a boxing contest; and he was complaining heatedly to the organizers about having left such hazards as bits of gravel and race course markers lying around, since anyone could see these could take out an eye.
I, of course, got eliminated in the first round. That brat, Justine. “Can we have a stilt race at our wedding if we have it in France?” I asked Jean-Charles when I sat down on the edge of the dance floor with him. “That would be cool!”
“Hmm.” He obviously didn’t want to say no and discourage me but had to admit: “We’d have to make a lot of stilts.”
Justine won, of course, and the embarrassed organizers handed her the adult prize—a bottle of fine champagne. She accepted the bottle with good grace and regifted it to Bruno, who needed it. Then everyone went back to dancing.
Children skipped among the gyrating adults: a vivacious métisse child with soft, dark curls, who danced with every single person on the floor; a tiny redheaded girl who attached herself to Sébastien, thumb in her mouth and head tucked down to stare up at him with enormous blue eyes. Whenever she shot her arms straight up at him, Sébastien would laugh and pick her up to dance with her in his arms until she wanted down again. A very sketchy adult male gyrated among the children, too, repeatedly attempting to bump and grind Justine and her even younger-looking cousin until Jean-Charles, Titi, Bruno, and Sébastien turned on him en masse. Sébastien passed the redhead to me, and I carried her away from the scene to her mother. When the sketchy man persisted, it looked very like we were going to have a fight right there, but the mayor’s husband finally ordered him to leave. It was midnight by then, and the stars were bright overhead, as they never were in Paris.
I would miss this place and these people, I thought. Well, maybe not sketchy males, but everyone else. I really would.
“Your wedding’s going to be just like this.” Claudine smiled at me.
“Including drunk men who try to grab parts of your body, probably,” Sébastien muttered, glowering. The loss of his little dance partner had wounded him deeply.
I seized Sébastien’s hands. “Let’s do it,” I said. “Let’s have two weddings, one in the U.S. in July, and one in August, here. It will be fun.” I really said that. And I wasn’t drunk, I swear.
Sébastien spun me around the dance floor, he was so happy. I stumbled the first steps and then caught up with him, laughing as we whirled around.
Twenty-six
I was halfway over the Atlantic before I realized I’d been had. Sure, the PACS sounded wonderful, and the village festival had been great fun. Who wouldn’t want to have a wedding with two days of dancing and feasting under the stars at a stone farmhouse built before my country was born? I had, however, forgotten one essential difference between those two events and our wedding feast: in the first two cases, someone else had done all the work. Caught up in the excitement, I had agreed to throw two big weddings on two different continents exactly five weeks apart from each other. Was it just me, or did that sound suicidal? “Does that sound suicidal?” I asked a recently married friend in the U.S. She handed me her therapist’s business card.
“Does that sound suicidal?” I asked my sister Anna.
“You know what bothers me?” She frowned. “When I go see my therapist, all she ever wants to talk about is you. You, you, you. She says you’re a fascinating case study, and she’d really like to meet you. Meanwhile, what do you think that does to my psyche that my own therapist would rather talk about my sister?”
Maybe I should give this whole double wedding thing some more thought.
However, I had other things to worry about first. Could Sébastien, too, give it all up for love and a woman who could cook but didn’t know what side of a plate to set a wineglass on?
“I told you that I would,” he said over the phone. He sounded slightly impatient for someone who had only answered this question twenty times the past week. There you go, impatience—I’d found a third flaw. “And the wineglass issue isn’t really as important as you think it is.”
“Oh, so left or right, it doesn’t matter?”
He sighed heavily. “I’ll set the table.”
“See, here’s the thing. You’re so gorgeous and so sweet and so French, and you’re going to give up everything to come to the land that invented Twinkies? For me? Why? It doesn’t make sense.”
He laughed. “I’d explain it to you, but it’s pornographic, and making you blush over the telephone is just an exercise in frustration.”
“That’s such a nonanswer. That doesn’t explain anything. Do you know one of my sisters thinks you’re just using me to get a visa?”
He laughed until he choked. “What, because this is one of America’s immigration problems? The horde of French people just dying to live there?” He laughed so hard he started to wheeze. “Excuse me, I’ve got to get some water.”
“Well, I know it’s ridiculous.” My siblings had obviously never lived in France. “I’m just trying to explain how incredible it is, even to the people who know me best, that anyone like you would do something like that for me.”
“I’ve always had a weakness for women who are chiante.” Chiante means a pain-in-the-ass. “My mom’s that way, too, so I must have imprinted.”
“Your mom is not chiante!” I said incredulously. “She’s a sweetheart. Just like me.”
He laughed.
“Well, at least Americans are normal,” I pointed out. “And easygoing. It will be much easier for you to adapt to my country than it was for me to adapt to France.”
“That’s what you say,” he agreed. “That Americans are so polite and friendly and welcoming.”
“Yes,” I said confidently. “So have you bought your ticket yet?”
A moment of silence. “No.”
A longer silence.
“I’m waiting for my paycheck,” he said defensively. “So I can afford it. Don’t start crying.”
I covered the phone with my hand and sniffed hastily. “I’m just worried you’ll decide not to come.”
“I told you I’ll come, and I’m going to come. And guess what else?”
“What?”
“Fabien is going to move to Québec! He’s been dreaming of it for forever, and saving money, and they’ve finally processed his immigration papers. We’ll be leaving almost on the same day.”
I remembered the threesome braking with all their might to escort me down a hill on skates. “How is Éric taking this?” That was, how was he taking the sudden vast hole opening in his life, his two best friends from childhood moving across the world? He was the only one who wasn’t replacing the friends with a new adventure, who was going to be right where he had always been but minus the two people he did everything with.
There was a long pause. “Well, none of us are taking it very well, shrump. But—that’s life. Sometimes things have to change.”
When he hung up, I lay awake all night, imagining how he must be feeling as he left all his friends, left his family, came to a country that had never held much interest for him, and where he knew no one . . . all for me. I had at least had practice at it, from so much traveling; Sébastien had never done it before. Would he be able to do it? Would he be okay?
A week later, he called back, troubled. “I got my tickets. But they won’t let me take Indy.”
“What? You can take cats on an airplane.”
“No. Maybe it’s something to do with the new security measures, but they won’t let me take him. I’ll have to leave him with my mom.” I could feel the frown in his voice, the worry. “But he’s my cat. I’ve always taken care of him.”
“You’re still going to come?” I asked fearfully. I mean, I’d choose me over Indy, but then Indy had tried to eat my teddy bear, so I bore a grudge.
“Yes,” he said. “I got my ticket. I’m coming. I just . . . feel bad about Indy.” Maybe he had counted on having Indy as his one friend.
Two days before his flight, his grandfather went back into the hospital.
