French Kiss, page 12
“Yeah, those are all good things to do in the next few days when you get an earlier start, but the museums are all closed by now. Now’s the time to stroll in all the parks and gardens and look for views and take perfect photographs.”
I’d thought about doing some of those things, but they’d all been tinged with the romantic light of being with Maddox. I was still stinging with the rejection of him having left me standing under the Eiffel Tower, and I wasn’t sure if I could muster the enthusiasm to be a fun companion to Josh. “Okay, maybe I should leave it to you to come up with an itinerary. Do you have a train ticket to go back in the morning?” I was used to a pragmatic approach, and I needed to know all my parameters—how long we had and what our choices were in that amount of time. Then I could prioritize. “Speaking of which, I should figure out when I’m headed out and where to meet up with Shelby…”
Josh held up a hand. “Stop. You’re in Paris. Be in Paris. It’s an amazing city, and you haven’t seen anything yet. Don’t be in such a rush to leave.”
“I’m not in a rush, but I don’t think spontaneity works very well for me. It took me here, only for me to get my ass handed to me under the Eiffel Tower. I need a plan and a road map.”
“You really don’t know how to be on vacation, do you?” He looked at me, amused. “I mean, I do have the benefit of having been in Europe for a couple weeks already, but I am way more relaxed than you.”
“That may be the normal state of affairs. I’m not sure I know how to relax.”
“Drink your wine, my dear. You’ll get there,” he said.
My heart skipped a beat when I heard those words. My dear. In the years we’d been friends, he’d never called me that. But maybe this was the carefree European Josh. Regardless, I liked the way it sounded.
I obediently took another sip. “This is really good, actually. I could easily drink this all day, and then we’d really be in trouble.”
“I’m stopping you after two glasses. And look, they’re small, so two is less than it sounds. We have many hours ahead of us.”
I held up my glass, which, sure enough, was about half the size of the average wineglass in the US. It was consistent with what I’d observed of France so far—subtle, well designed, and never more than it needed to be. I scooted back a little bit in my chair and leaned against the backrest. Josh was right. I wasn’t a relaxed person by nature, but if ever there was a time to let everything go, a day in Paris when I had nothing to do was it.
On the street in front of us, a woman in a dark-green coat that looked too heavy for summer walked by with two small dogs on leashes who wove in and out of each other’s paths. She bent every couple of feet to untangle them. Finally, she picked one up and let the other one wander on the leash.
I took a deep breath and another sip of wine. “Why am I such a fucking idiot?” I said finally.
Josh looked up from the doodle he was drawing on the place mat of a man swinging from the branch of a tree. For as long as I’d known him, he’d been a doodler, and the things he drew rarely had anything to do with what we were discussing or the scene around us, like a window into something he was thinking but not saying. I liked seeing what he came up with.
“You, without a doubt, are anything but an idiot,” Josh said.
My only attempt at art was tearing off a strip of the paper tablecloth and shredding it into pieces before balling them up. I was kind of mad at Maddox, but really, I was mad at myself. “Ugh! I’m still so pissed at him.” I still couldn’t get my brain around the fact that he’d ghosted me. “You could have told me Maddox wasn’t ever interested in me. Or maybe you did tell me, and I ignored you. I know it’s not your fault.”
“Look, it’s just what he does. You shouldn’t take it personally.” Josh sighed, and I could tell he didn’t really want to talk any more about Maddox or our busted chance at romance, but I couldn’t help it. I was still fixated on the rejection. In my academic life, if I set a goal, I always achieved it. I wasn’t used to failing, even if I knew that love didn’t follow the same rules.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “We don’t have to talk about this.”
“I think we do. You do. You’re never going to be able to enjoy yourself here if you don’t get it out. So talk. Say what you have to say.”
I looked at him and saw from his plaintive face that he did want to hear me out, even if I was an annoying broken record. I vowed to get this out of my system and move on. “I guess I’m feeling stupid for deluding myself into thinking I meant something different to him. It was my own ego, like I could change him or be something to him that would make him want to have a real relationship.”
“Okay… but do you see that it has very little to do with you? He was playing with your mind. He liked having you there, waiting in the wings for him. Maybe coming to meet you here would take that away. And he likes the idea of you still being out there as a possibility.”
“True. If we get together, there goes the fantasy. Why didn’t I see that?”
“Because you didn’t want to see it,” Josh said.
He was right. He also didn’t deserve to have me sit there and pour out my sad story for one more minute after he’d taken a train from Germany to be there for me. In that moment, I actually felt freed from giving Maddox any more thought, and my attention shifted to my good friend who I cared about more than anything.
“You know what? I think I’m done talking about him. Or thinking about him. I really am over it. Really.”
“It’s okay if you’re not. I guess I didn’t know you felt this way about him. Or maybe I didn’t want to know. He never seemed worth it.”
“No, you’re right. He’s not.”
Josh looked up at me, his long lashes shading his grey-green eyes. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but I knew he had to be skeptical about my sudden reversal. Any sane person would.
“Really,” I said again. “Let’s go back to your diagram, and you can tell me where we’re going next. You’re the expert. I trust you.”
He nodded, seeming satisfied that I was finally done being morose and whining over Maddox. I vowed to keep any new rounds of self-pity to myself. Josh stopped doodling and drew little boxes on his map, a few on each side of his river. “Here’s where we are now,” he said, pointing to a box and sketching two small glasses on it. “And here’s where we’re going next. The Rodin Museum. It’s open until five, so we can still get in and see the exhibit if we’re fast, but the main thing we have to see is the gardens. You’ll be amazed. It’s so peaceful back there—at least, if it hasn’t changed since I was there last.”
“When was that?” I asked, and he hesitated. “Did you come here with your French high school girlfriend?”
“No. I told you, that was a million years ago. But I did come here with a girlfriend.”
“Tell me. Who?”
“Lily. We dated for the last two years of college,” he said.
“Where is she now?”
“Charleston, South Carolina. She works at the aquarium there. She’s a marine-mammal specialist and a conservationist.”
I didn’t know why I felt so shocked to hear about her. It wasn’t like I knew everything about Josh, but a relationship for half of college seemed like something he’d have mentioned at some point. I tried to remember if I’d asked about the people he’d dated. Maybe I’d just assumed he hadn’t dated that many people because I couldn’t picture myself dating him.
“And you guys came here together?” I asked, picturing them sitting at the same table where we were sitting. I wondered if he planned to revisit all the places he’d gone with her.
As though sensing my train of thought, he said, “I’m not taking you on a Lily’s-greatest-hits tour of Paris. Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried. I just feel like I should have heard something about her before. But whatever. Tell me now. What was she like? Why did you break up?”
“Eh, I’m not sure I want to wander down that whole memory lane, but I’ll tell you she was about five feet tall, blond, and adorable, and she never met an animal she didn’t want to rescue. She was my first long-term girlfriend, and I thought I’d never love anyone as much as her.”
“Doesn’t sound like someone you’d break up with.”
“Yeah, well, she broke up with me. I was headed to med school across the country, and she was practical. I couldn’t blame her.”
“Do you think about looking her up now?” I asked. “Maybe the timing is better.”
He drained his beer and signaled to the waiter to bring us each one more drink—the promised second round. I was still only halfway through my first glass of wine, as small as it was, so I took another sip. “No, I don’t think about looking her up. The past is the past. Why are you trying so hard to get me together with my exes?”
“Sorry,” I said, realizing it did seem like I was pushing awfully hard. “I just want you to have a good life. I guess I’m a little trigger-happy.”
“I do have a good life.”
“I know, I just meant—”
“No, I get it. It’s nice of you, really. But once she crushed my heart, it kind of spoiled the memory of the good parts, you know?”
The waiter came by with our next round and took Josh’s empty glass away. Then, maybe sensing that we might need some carbs to go with our drinks, he put down a bowl of potato chips and a dish of pretzels. Josh thanked him and asked him a question I didn’t understand before resuming his doodle.
“Okay, after the Rodin, we’re going to a perfume shop where you can stand in a booth and experience all kinds of smells until you find what you want, and they’ll make you a custom scent.”
“You think I need that? Do I stink?”
“You’re in France. Yes, you need to find a perfect perfume. It’ll be fun. Then we’re gonna walk in the Jardin du Luxembourg and down Boulevard Saint-Michel to Notre-Dame. You have to see the stained glass. Then we’ll figure it out from there.”
“I don’t know what half of that is, but it sounds like a plan.” I was game for whatever Josh had in mind, since he seemed to know the city. The farther I could get from the Eiffel Tower and the bad memory of standing there alone, the better. I drained my first wineglass and set in on my second, feeling the tiniest tinge of relaxation wash over me. “Hey, you know what? I think it’s happening. I think I’m starting to relax.”
“Good girl.” Josh looked good, sitting across the table from me, the afternoon sun hitting his face.
“Being here suits you,” I told him.
“Thanks. I love this city. The first time I came here was kind of a disaster, back in high school. I didn’t know my way around, and I managed to find my way to the seediest area of town on the first day. Like I had radar that took me directly there. So I was scared out of my mind and didn’t think much of this place, to be honest.”
“I’m impressed your parents let you fly over here in high school by yourself.”
“They’re European. It’s a different attitude. Besides, once everything became part of the EU, France just seemed like an extension of Germany in their minds. It would be like them letting me go to Oregon from San Francisco.”
We still had plenty of time left in the day, and for the first time, I didn’t feel like I was in a rush to be anywhere. We had a couple of hours before the Rodin Museum closed, and even if we didn’t do all the things on Josh’s new list, it didn’t matter. For the first time in years, no one was grading us or giving us a deadline to get something done. The wine was doing its job. I felt the first evidence that coming this far for vacation had been the right thing to do.
“Sometimes you need to go a continent away to get out of your head, I think,” I said.
“True. It’s the hundred-mile rule. If you’re more than a hundred miles from home, you can drink without feeling hungover and have coffee without getting jittery, because you’re in a place where you know it’s all gonna be okay, so nothing affects you the way it would when you’re all wound up at home.”
I leaned back in my chair and felt the sun on my own face. “I’ve been wound up since I was nine.”
“What happened when you were nine?”
“I realized that things mattered—that if I wanted to do something in the world, there were steps I needed to take. I realized people were judging me.”
“You figured that out at nine? You poor thing.”
“It’s okay. It’s kept me motivated all these years.”
“There’s more to life than motivation. C’mon, let’s go see some art,” he said, taking some euros out of his wallet and leaving them for the waiter.
“Wait, let me get this. It’s the least I can do after you came all this way.”
“Oh, you’ll get your chance. Don’t worry. This isn’t our last meal, and the one you’ll be paying for will be a doozy.” He scooted out of his chair, carefully moving around the small tables. I followed him back onto the sidewalk, where he consulted his phone map to make sure we were headed in the right direction. “Hold on, I think I’m turned around,” he said.
That struck me as funny for a guy who always knew where he wanted to be.
18
Love in Marble
July 11
Paris
It was only a few minutes’ walk to the Rodin Museum, which hid behind tall gates in the seventh arrondissement. Across the street, a couple of police officers stood guard outside a building. The grounds consisted of crushed gravel paths leading past manicured hedges in conical shapes and well-placed sculptures in front of the museum itself—a massive rococo building, the Hôtel Biron, that had been built in the eighteenth century as a home for a French financier.
We wandered past The Thinker, which was cast in white marble and surrounded by rose bushes and tall conical hedges, then we walked to The Gates of Hell, with three bronze figures on top of an enormous doorway, which I remembered from a college art history book. I hadn’t paid much attention in art history, and I regretted it.
I’d taken the class as a filler in my schedule when I couldn’t get an organic chemistry course one semester, and I was grateful for the break from my science classes. I’d skipped out on some of the reading, however, and standing among these sculptures, I felt like I should know more about them and at least a little bit about Rodin himself.
Fortunately, Josh had paid better attention somewhere along the way. “Rodin made plaster casts for some of his iron sculptures, so you’ll find them in other museums. He made more than one of most of them. And for some, he went on to chisel them from marble as well,” Josh was saying. I was partly listening, my senses on overload from the beauty of the marble forms all around us and the light breeze that swept past us. Josh was telling me about Camille Claudel, Rodin’s muse. “You’ll see some of her work inside the museum.”
I was overwhelmed by what I saw inside. The Hôtel Biron had been built and decorated in fine detail, but now sculptures filled every room. Some were tiny, barely a foot tall, sitting on pedestals. Others were larger than life-sized, set in the center of a room. I couldn’t believe the craftsmanship and patience required to sand and polish a block of marble into one of these sculptures, let alone the vision and artistry that pulled a female medusa from a chunk of stone.
My favorite was a large sculpture called Le Baiser, which was a couple entwined in a kiss, arms and legs wrapped around each other and faces connected. I couldn’t get over how much love Rodin captured in a piece of marble. I stared at it for ten minutes before I realized Josh was hovering in the doorway of the gallery, waiting for me.
“It’s amazing,” I said.
“I know. I’ve been to this museum at least five times, and I never get tired of the sculptures.”
“But this one…” I didn’t even really know what to say. I couldn’t describe why it moved me so much. “You can just feel the passion between them. And it’s made of marble. He created all that feeling from marble.”
Josh smiled. He seemed glad that I’d responded so well to his first sightseeing suggestion. “Wait until you see the garden in the back.”
It was hard to imagine how the museum could get better than what I’d seen so far, but I wound my way through the rest of the bright, sunlit rooms, pausing to take in each sculpture, which was more breathtaking than the one before it.
I went through the museum slowly, reading the information posted about Auguste Rodin, who’d created most of his work in the late nineteenth century. He often made small versions of the largest sculptures he planned to create, casting them in bronze or plaster. Then he had apprentices begin to copy the smaller designs into the larger pieces of marble before coming in to finish the work himself.
When we came out to the rear of the building, I could see why Josh had insisted it was the best part. Calling it a garden made it sound like we’d find a few rows of tomato plants or some manicured flower beds.
Instead, we stepped outside behind the cream-colored mansion to find a sprawling lawn punctuated by crushed-granite pathways leading to a circular reflecting pool with a metal sculpture at its center. The expanse of lawn went on and on, flanked by manicured box hedges and tall trees, which gave the garden complete privacy from the outside world. Along the walkways, tucked in with the hedges, sculptures were displayed on pedestals.
“It’s the best part,” Josh said. “I could sit and chill out here for hours. People come and write or sketch. There’s even a bar out here.”
I followed him to a bench, from which we watched a blond boy in a red-striped shirt chase his dog in circles around the pool. The dog, which looked like a beagle puppy, clearly had the upper hand, waiting until the boy got close then dodging and running the opposite way. The boy squealed with joy every time he almost caught the dog, not caring that his target remained elusive.
