Heart the Lover (28)

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.




I get to baggage claim fifteen minutes before his flight lands. I lean on my big suitcase, an old oatmeal-colored one of my mother’s, and wait for his flight to appear on the screen. Finally it does. Carousel 3. I drag my oatmeal bag over there and sit again. It is moving but there are no bags on it yet. Two women come down the escalator and stand close to the conveyor belt. I go over to them and ask if they’ve come from Knoxville. They have. Yash has landed. I go back to my perch on the suitcase.

‘Someone’s happy,’ a man with a Delta badge says to me as he walks by.

I watch the escalator. The backs of my legs prickle. My gut aches. My stomach has been upset all week. I think of sharing a bathroom with him again. Hinky Stinky, he used to say. All the people coming down the escalator now and standing at Carousel 3 waiting for their bags to appear on the conveyor belt are precious to me because they’ve been on a flight with Yash. I know he’ll be one of the last off. He walks slowly. He’ll stop in the bathroom, sip from the cooler. ‘He sounds a bit low energy if you ask me,’ my mother said once on the phone. This surprised me. What did I say to give her that impression? His mind works so quickly. Low energy? I watch more people glide diagonally down. None of them with his sweet face.

If he knew how much I loved him it would terrify him. I think of Willie in sixth grade, asking me out by the swing set. He called me every night that week. We talked a lot about his hamsters, Sailor and Glory. Glory stuffed her cheeks with seeds and you could press her neck and feel them all in there like a bean bag chair, he told me. Sailor didn’t do that. Willie and I met at the mall that Saturday, walked around holding hands. Before our parents came to pick us up, he kissed me outside the bathrooms by the food court. He said I was a good kisser and I told him about my crush on him since the beginning of third grade. I told him I remembered a pale blue shirt he used to wear that year, and the little drawings of rabbits he used to make at the back of his math workbook in fourth grade. He called the next day and broke up with me. Why, I asked before my throat closed and the tears started. He said it was too much pressure. All that stuff I’d said about liking him for so long. He said it made him feel like Sailor.

‘Why?’ I whispered.

‘Because you have all these memories of me stuffed inside you and I don’t, and it makes me feel funny.’



I sit on my suitcase thinking about that phone conversation. It was kind of a great comparison. And he was so honest. I haven’t told Yash that story. I didn’t want him to see it as a cautionary tale. When we’re in our walk-up I’ll tell him about Willie Sylvester. He’ll like that name. Good name for a character, he’ll say.