Once Upon a Time in Paris

Once Upon a Time in Paris

My lover Andre is shaving. I stand a little bit behind him with my camera and try to catch his face in the mirror. What concentration. He doesn't look at me at all, but manipulates the blade over his creamed face with the skill and steadiness of a surgeon. It's dark in the tiny bathroom where he stands in front of the mirror as I lean on the old wooden door frame to help keep the camera steady. There is an antique fixture hanging from the ceiling, its dull bulb surrounded by fragile pink etched glass throwing a haunting glow over everything it catches - the peeling plaster walls, the old sink, the mirror with its missing bits making strange black splatters in odd places and most importantly, the beautiful face and the waltzing blade.

Without making a sound, I move away and put the camera on a tripod because the light is so dim, moving it along the old wooden floors, scratching them the way lovers might carve their initials in a tree, but nothing breaks his concentration. Music on the radio lulls us both into a light trance and nothing is hurried.

He is so much younger than I am, but I am falling more in love with him with every moment we spend together, wanting to drown in him, lose myself in his tangle of shiny black curls, his long arms, his whole body, his mind and his spirit and his soul. Making love is not enough. I want to be so tiny that he can suck me into himself whole and I never have to leave. These feelings are so new to me, something I thought I'd left behind as a teenager and even then were nothing like this. My husband is so much older than I am, he's nearly 60 now, and I've always liked it that way. Andre's physical beauty might have something to do with the attraction but it's so much more than that. There is a quietness in him that I like, a sense that everything that happens is fine. He is a Buddhist. Maybe it's that.

We have come here to Paris to take master classes with some of the best photographers in the world, our heroes. The day I met Andre, Lucien Clergue was giving a workshop on photographing the nude. Models posed for us on the grass, in the trees, poking out from behind huge shiny leaves, by the water, in the water or wrapped in one another's arms and I was intoxicated, drunk with desire to steal them from where they were and hold them tight to myself with light and film, anxious to get back to lab and watch them come to life in the developing trays, making them my own. I didn't know that before this perfect day was over, it would also be Andre I wanted for myself, equally intoxicated by what he was offering me.

The day of the workshop, tired from the pounding heat of the sun and the demands of his muse, he had fallen asleep on the grass, away from the rest of us where it wasn't easy to see him, but once I had I woke him up to tell him the bus had arrived and we were leaving. Walking together in silence, watching the sun's slow descent making abstract paintings in the western sky, we ran to catch the bus before it pulled away, sitting at the very back where is was empty and should have been uncomfortable but wasn't. Before we fell asleep, he had put his arm lightly around my bare shoulders and said, "K'Leigh. What a beautiful name. I could fall in love with you before we get back to Paris," and then given me a tiny peck on the cheek.

This trip away from home, where I live with my husband Clifford and my daughter Becky has me doing things I would never have done as my old self, but oddly, I don't feel guilty. I feel new. And unfettered. And free. And although things at home are fine, I am having trouble remembering my husband's face in detail, even as I rack up expenses on the credit card he has given me to use on this trip. My daughter is away at camp and writes almost daily so I feel a little bit closer to her, but some part of me seems to have been left over the Atlantic. My former life is beginning to feel like someone else's life and I feel more at home here than I do there. When my husband calls every few days his voice sounds odd and the conversations feel like scenes from a dream that I've suddenly been startled awake from. When he asks if I'm really alright, I tell him the connection is terrible, but everything is perfect and thank him again for giving me this trip for my last birthday.

Walking the streets of the city or through the gardens in parks with their reflecting pools and wrought iron benches, flower gardens and children sailing their paper boats, Andre and I are not only falling in love but telling each other things about ourselves that at least for me are long-held secrets that were never intended to be shared and I think he is doing the same. I hear about his French mother and Serbian father, the passion that lives in the home he was raised in, so unlike my own. The girlfriend who left in the middle of the night after he'd asked her to marry him because her parents didn't want her to marry a "half-breed" and she didn't have the courage to stand up to them, the pressure to excel in everything as the first generation immigrant child in a new country, his dog Oscar, his best friend Paul. The books he loves and the music he can read and write and the guitar he can play. Why he wants to be a photographer and not a doctor, even though he's almost finished med school now. How he knows it's going to break his parents hearts but he will not return to his small town in France after this course but stay and do what his heart tells him he must do.

And in exchange I tell him about the first husband who beat me, the pregnancy years after the divorce that was the result of another night of drinking and drugs, how I met my husband when he was my boss in another low-end job I hated, the way he loved me like a daughter and took my my own daughter on as his own, adopting her and giving her his name. The nice life that we have at home; the friends, the comfort, the way he lets me be. The fact that I was never in love with him but needed him. That he knew that and it was enough. How much I feel I've cheated him now.

Sometimes when we talk about these things I realize I am quietly crying and he will put his arms around me and pull me closer, kissing my tears and saying nothing, because there is nothing to say. And I might wonder for a moment what my husband would do if he could hear us, see us, talking about him, what expression he might have on his face knowing both of us are hurting for him but too greedy in our fascination with each other to let it go and give what we have to the man who earned it. But at the same time when I'm nestled in Andre's arms or have my head tucked under his chin as he plays with my hair before we fall asleep, I have such an overwhelming sense of peace that it just doesn't let the image form.

Night after night we return from our walks or concerts or trips to jazz clubs where occasionally Andre will play the guitar and I'll watch him cradle it and strum it like a lover, the same way he will touch and cradle me when we arrive at his room, the room we now share on the top floor of a crumbling old house that has become our home. I might dance up the stairs, losing my eternal shyness, always wearing one of my long white cotton dresses that billow around me as I twirl, knowing that in a moment I will find him swooping me up in his arms, laughing and carrying me the rest of the way up the stairs, still holding me easily as he puts the key in the lock, and I will feel again like a virgin bride in another time and place on her wedding night.
Afterwards, I will lie there thinking that this life must belong to someone else.

In the mornings we get up late and often take pictures of each other. We are missing most of our classes now but use the darkroom when no one else is there, documenting this love of ours moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day. He photographs me standing in the bathtub, light falling on my face from the tiny window, steam swirling around my body, my hair starting to curl in tendrils and it turns out to be my favourite. Even now I have it on the wall at home. I photograph him in jeans and wet hair, without a shirt, sitting backwards on a chair and looking at me as though he can see really see me, that all is transparent and all is good, even the not so nice things. It is the best photograph I will take in Paris and it later wins a prize.

While I am here my husband Clifford will be moving all of our things to new house that we found together and loved - a little dream house, he'd called it. He has just phoned to say that when he picks me up at the airport we will go directly there. When he talks about it, he sounds as excited as I've ever heard him and it breaks my heart. "I can't wait to see you K'Leigh. I miss you so much. Do you need anything? Is everything okay? Safe trip, honey. God Bless." This is the way he is. Good. Sweet. Caring. The man who took me in when even my family wouldn't speak to me anymore. Clifford and my daughter Becky are my world now. My only family.

On our last day in Paris Andre and I sit in an outdoor cafe drinking wine when he again asks me to stay. To send for my daughter and live with him here. He is crying into my silence in this public place. I've never seen anyone cry over me before and I don't know what to do. I take one of his hands into both of mine, moving our hands together in a barely noticeable rocking motion until he looks at me without tears and I'm ready to speak. "Andre, I'm going to go home to see Clifford and get Becky and bring her back with me. It might take a little while but I'll be back. I love you, but I have to know that this is not just a passing thing. It has to be what you truly want." He puts his arms around me and we sit there like for a long time, my head tucked into that little place between his shoulder and his neck, wondering how long it will be until we are together this way again.


On the plane ride home I become aware that not only am I literally suspended in the air I am emotionally suspended too, heartbreakingly hanging between here and there, between domesticity and bliss, certainty and the unknown, loyalty and betrayal. I know they'll be waiting for me at the airport, Clifford and Becky, the only two things I've managed to get right so far in my life. There'll be hugs and kisses and smiles and the trip to the new house where I can almost be sure my favourite flowers - yellow roses - will be waiting for me on the table in the hallway. Clifford is always thoughtful about the little things.

But I am also thinking of Andre and I together, our bodies glistening with love and lust and secrets, old lives fading away, everything fastforwarding at such a gallop that I feel dizzy and hungry and foolish. I fall asleep eventually, still not sure about anything, and when I wake up we are landing.

"Mommy. Mommmmmmmmmmmmmmy." Becky is throwing her little suntanned arms around me while Clifford watches from behind the rope at the Arrivals gate. From here I can see how people often think he's Becky's grandfather, his gray hair so neatly parted, wearing a suit in this warm weather, always elegant if a little formal and stuff. He smiles his sweet smile and waves and I can already feel the fault lines in my heart deepening their crevices as I smile and wave back at him.

As the days pass into weeks I still can't summon the strength to talk to Clifford about what happened in Paris. Andre's letters urging me to come back as soon as I can are read and reread until I hide them in my lingerie drawer. Clifford doesn't question them, assuming they're from one of the girls I met in the course. One of these includes a photo that I took in the Luxembourg gardens by the reflecting pools on a day when we rolled around on the grass like teenagers. In the photo Andre's hair is tousled and falling into his eyes, his hands reaching towards me trying to grab the camera and pull me back onto the grass with him, impatient with me because I can't stop taking pictures, smiling that funny and sad smile that makes me ache. I carry it with me constantly, tucking it into a pocket or inside my bra close to my heart.

Clifford has bought me a new car for my birthday and I like go down into the parking garage and sit in it with the radio on rereading Andre's letters and composing mine to him. I can be completely private here with no interruptions from the phone or the call of the computer or Clifford and Becky, although their demands are always small. Yet nothing I write feels right and I rip the papers up and throw them into the garbage bag on the floor, paralyzed.

On one particular day I fall asleep there until a knock on the window wakes me up. Clifford is outside the car looking upset. "What are you doing down here?" he says, "It's 6:00 o'clock. We were worried." I don't know what to say other than "I was just listening to the radio and I guess I fell asleep."

"I don't know what's wrong with you these days K. The radio isn't on now, so you've probably killed the battery. Try to start the car and see what happens."

The battery is dead and Clifford asks me to go upstairs to let Becky know I'm alright while he goes to his own car to pull over and start mine with his jumpers. I'm still half asleep when I open the door to the townhouse and see Becky bent over her homework at the kitchen table. There's nothing for dinner and she looks at me as though she knows something that I haven't told her. "Are we going to order out then?" she says. "I'm starving." I order some Chinese and then Becky and I spend some time just talking about her day, her friends, her teachers and her dream of going to the school for the arts next year. "It's just like the Fame school, you know," she tells me. "But I don't know if my art is good enough to get in. What do you think, Mom?" I ask her to show me some of the new drawings she's tucked away into her portfolio when Clifford comes into the house looking as I've never seen him before. He is holding the garbage bag from the car and his face is contorted and red.

"What are these? Tell me, what are they?" He is holding up a letter from Andre and some of the torn bits from the letter I tried to write telling him that I would be there as soon as I could once things were settled at home. Telling him how much I loved him, how sorry I felt that I couldn't love my husband the way I loved him, and begging him to hang on until I got there.

"You know what they are," I say. "I just didn't know how to tell you. I'm sorry."
"If you want to go and live in Paris K, go. I don't want you here. Tell your boyfriend you've told me what you had to tell me and you'll be leaving soon. And tell him to send you a ticket because by god I'm not going to get it for you."
And I do. When I call Andre at the little apartment in Paris, crying and trying to explain what happened, he tells me he doesn't have enough money to send tickets for Becky and me, that it's impossible. That we'll just have to wait until Clifford and I have some kind of legal separation and I have the money to get there on my own. He sounds tired, maybe a little annoyed, weary of all of this. I can't blame him, but I feel betrayed. I am now both betrayer and betrayed, a feeling that makes me queasy and I want to be sick.

Later on Clifford and I fight again and I beg him to give me the money to leave but he is stubborn and humiliated and getting short of breath. "I'll find a little condo for you and Becky, pay for it, give you some money for both of you every month and that's it. If you want to do more than pretend to be a photographer, you can get a job and save for your trip. I don't want to talk about this anymore and I won't change my mind. I'm calling my lawyer tomorrow and that's that. We'll find a place as soon as we can, because right now I really can't stand the sight of you and the sooner you leave, the better it will be for all of us."

When I relay all of this to Andre he listens with half-hearted interest and finally says, "Never mind K. Don't come. It was a summer in Paris. And it's over. I'm sorry."

Did I really love Andre as much as I thought I did? Or was he just an interlude - something between here and there, contentment and excitement, security and the unknown? I think he was all of those things. My love, my fantasy, my dream, my indulgence, my imaginary future. He didn't know me as Clifford knew me, but then I showed him different things, things that I didn't know were still inside me. Was that person I became real? I hope so. It was a summer in Paris. And then it was over. And now I must learn how to take care of myself.