Simon nodded, seemingly filing away her answer. “Have you ever been to the States?”
Her face lit up. “No, but I would love to go. I see so much of it on the television, and it all seems so glamorous.”
He laughed. “I’m not sure if I’d call it glamorous, but it has its perks. We are spoiled by things like water pressure.”
“I’m spoiled by what we have here,” Nita said.
The constant flow of hot water in the showers still amazed her. It was hard to imagine that America had certain conveniences that were even greater than those she had seen in Paris.
“If you aren’t dating Mathieu, then you should find a nice man to really spoil you.”
Nita wasn’t sure how to take Simon’s comment and cast her gaze downward, avoiding his eyes.
“It’s the Parisian way, after all,” Simon said.
“I suppose it is the Indian way as well.”
“Did you come here because you hadn’t found that guy in India yet?”
Nita thought of her husband, who had tried to give her everything society had told him he should: a home, servants, jewels, clothing, children. He just didn’t understand that what she wanted was different from what society wanted for her.
She shook her head. “I came because I knew if I didn’t come now, I would go my entire life without ever setting foot in this country. Days would pass, the same as the ones before, and I couldn’t let that happen.”
That much was true. The love she felt for Sophie had grown at the same rate as the resentment she felt for the life into which she had been born. That resentment had begun to spill onto her precious daughter, who had done nothing to deserve it. Nita could not see a future in which she could be the mummy that Sophie deserved. She loved her daughter as much as she hated being a wife and mummy and had no idea how to reconcile those two things. She wasn’t sure they could be balanced. That she could be fixed. In the months leading up to her decision to leave, she had realized she was becoming more and more short with Sophie. Scolding her when she was caught playing with Nita’s bangles. Brushing her hair harder than she needed to each night. Growing more irritated as her daughter asked questions about the French landscapes she was painting. Parenthood came naturally to many, but not to Nita. And she had felt like she was getting worse rather than better.
“There’s no time like the present, then.” Simon raised his glass in a toast.
She clinked hers against his and sipped from it, wondering what the present looked like for Sophie and hoping that Rajiv was finding ways to bring Sophie joy through this difficult time. Above all else, she wanted Sophie to be happy.
Nita sat on the leather sofa in Mathieu’s apartment, her sketch pad on her lap, untouched for the last several minutes. The pads of her fingers were blackened from the charcoal sticks she’d been using.
“Qu’est-ce qui ne va pas?” Mathieu asked her what was wrong.
She startled at hearing his voice break the silence.
“You look very far away,” he said, kneeling before her on the couch so that his gaze was level with hers.
She could smell the cigarette smoke emanating from his clothes and skin, the thin green sweater seeming to have trapped it all within its fibers. She placed the sketch pad down.
“Sorry,” she said, “my mind is somewhere else today.” She took a deep breath. “It’s just been very hard to find a steady job since I arrived, and I’m afraid of what will happen if I can’t make more money soon.”
He nodded. “Money is the greatest curse of an artist. We need it to live, but it takes away from our life.”
She wasn’t in the mood for one of his poetic musings. She was hitting a critical stage with her finances and was learning how necessary money was to survive. She had never thought about it like this because it had always been there. It was only when she had lost it that she realized how much power it held. And she had assumed that by now she’d have gotten a job that would have allowed her to extend her visa. How naive she had been. She’d never been in the position of worrying about whether she could be kicked out of a place that felt like her home, and that weight was exhausting to carry. There were so many things she’d never had to think about because they had been a given for her. And she realized she truly didn’t know what happened to people when they ran out of money and security. She pictured the countless beggars she had seen on the streets in Ahmedabad and shuddered at the thought of that being her life here. Homeless people were periodically seen in Paris, but not in remotely the same numbers as in India. She wondered if there really were that few of them or if they were off somewhere, hidden. Either way, she hoped not to find out, but she also could not see a way out of her predicament. She could not become fluent in a new language overnight, and the circular logic of needing a job to get a visa and a visa to get a job was hard to overcome. She had felt trapped in her life in India, but now she was learning a new form of being trapped and wondered if people were always trapped by something, no matter what they did or where they were.
“I’m sure it will be fine,” she said, forcing her voice to sound light and airy. She had been raised not to leave her problems with other people.
Mathieu’s eyes bore into hers, showing he did not believe her facade. “How can I help?”
She shrugged, turning away from him. “I don’t suppose there’s much you can do unless you know someone willing to hire an Indian woman who doesn’t speak French and pay her in cash.” She tried to laugh it off, knowing that if such a person existed, she would have found them by now.
She could see his mind swirling, his desire to help written across his face. He had been so attuned to her needs as their friendship developed, and his empathy was the quality Nita most respected about him.
“There must be something you can do for work,” he said, mostly to himself. Turning to her, he added, “We will find a way. Many people come to Paris just like you, and they find a way. We will too.”
She felt her cheeks flush. “You’ve been such a good friend already. You don’t need to take on this burden.”
He gave her his half smile. “What kind of friend would I be if I didn’t? Besides, I cannot have an unhappy muse! It’s bad for business!”
She looked at him, grateful for her fortune that in a city with this many people, she had stumbled upon this one. She had never had a stranger become a friend and was often surprised by how much he or Dao or Cecile were willing to let her into their lives, having known her for such a short time. Her friends in India had been curated for her. As a child, she had been introduced to the daughters of her parents’ friends, and then as an adult, it had been the wives of Rajiv’s friends. She’d never been in the position of doing something for herself and meeting someone whose path she was not predetermined to cross. Her bonds with her new friends in Paris felt so much stronger than the ties she’d had to people she’d known for her entire life. She had chosen her people in France, and choice made all the difference.
A few days later, Nita was at the reception desk of the hostel, covering an evening shift. Cecile had a date that night with a guy she’d claimed was “the one” and had taken the afternoon to get herself ready for it. The concept of spending hours getting ready to meet someone was completely foreign to Nita. Then again, the concept of dating was foreign to her too. Nita was flipping through a fashion magazine Cecile had left behind, trying to read the French and work on her language skills, when Dao came down the stairs.