Heart the Lover (25)
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 ?a. 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.