“He had a boner when he stood up,” I said. “He had it tucked into his waistband.”
“Poor little idiot,” Amy said. “He thought he was getting some.”
“Well, the thought had crossed my mind, I admit. Okay, I have to sleep,” I said. “I’m beat. I’m not used to drinking beer in the middle of the day.”
I hugged them both. Later, I heard Constance talking to Amy about her wedding plans. I liked hearing their voices in the darkness.
Paris
48
Paris again. Paris in spring. Paris when the chestnuts are in bloom. Paris when the Seine runs at its fullest, and when the cafés, sleepy from winter, begin to shed their weight and heaviness and waiters in white aprons crank up their awnings to let the new sunshine find their customers. Countless brooms whisk the cobblestones awake, and the oxidized roofs shimmer green as pond moss, and the tulips, thousands of tulips, surprise you with a wink of color and a promise of warmth. Women find clothes deep in their closets and pull them out, unsure, because the weather can still change, still turn chilly, but it is worth the risk to wear something you love, and hats suddenly appear, fantastic hats, and your eye is pulled this way and that because it is Paris and it is spring and you are young.
In the days before the wedding, Constance is in love, about to be a bride, and she brings to everything such loveliness, such grace, that you think, This is how weddings should be, all weddings, and Raef, handsome Raef, dotes on Constance and does not leave her side, not for a second, not for a breath, and you wonder how this has happened, how Constance, the pale beauty on a Schwinn bicycle pedaling around a college campus less than a year before, has the maturity and wisdom to preside over these charming festivities, her sheepherder in her thrall. She strikes the perfect tone at each event, at the tea with the mothers as they meet for the first time, at the shops when ordering the last of the food for the ceremony, at the florist’s when she speaks in her eloquent French, bending beside the stout proprietress over flats of violets to smell the shy fragrance—who knew studying French would truly be useful in the end?—so that she herself at times seems a new growth, not a flower, but a sedge, a six-sided grass that arrives slowly and calmly in time at the edge of a meadow and whose beauty one must stop to appreciate. You stand beside her, a bridesmaid, and watch her prepare herself to love and to honor and to hold, and tears fill your eyes a thousand times, and Constance, sweet Constance, brings you and Amy to Notre Dame, where she kneels before her favorite statue of Mary and prays, not to God, maybe, not to any entity, but to the commitment she is making, to the desire to be good and kind in her marriage, to her promise to forsake all others and to become one flesh with the man she adores.
A hundred instances of perfection, small, delicate tones that only Paris can offer. And Hemingway, your Hemingway, lived here in deep love with his Hadley, and you hate the bastard for leaving her, as Jack left you, and you love him for feeling life so deeply, as Jack also felt life deeply, and you feel fluttery and wild and happy being in this wedding, being beside your friends, waiting for the day. In Paris. Always in Paris.
*
In the three days before the wedding, I tried my best not to be haunted by Jack. I hated that I thought of him, that I placed him beside me, mentally, a thousand thousand times; I hated that Constance had to give a single thought to my position, my situation, because she had a billion details to occupy her, and she didn’t need to concern herself with my mental state. When we put up at the Hotel Sampson, a beautiful Edwardian building on the outskirts of the seventh arrondissement—the same arrondissement that contained the Eiffel Tower—I found myself entertaining the possibility that Jack might attend the wedding. I mentioned the thought to no one, because I understood, in a deep part of me, that it was my own invention. No one had spoken of Jack to me at all. My daydream was so pitiful, so embarrassing, that, if anything, I went overboard attempting to be the life of the party to compensate for my moody dream-state. Without meaning to, I came perilously close to being “that” wedding girl—the girl ready to do shots with the boy side of the wedding, to stay up and find a new bar in the center of Paris—how I loved being able to guide people in Paris!—the girl who sometimes looked a little rumpled, a little too partied up, a tad too tarty. I knew what I was doing, but I almost couldn’t stop myself from doing it. I felt as if I stood outside myself—a ridiculous image, I know—to watch this crazy girl behaving as if she belonged in Sheboygan, not Paris.
Besides, who needed Jack? That’s what I wanted to prove to anyone who cared to notice.
Long before the wedding date, Constance had mentioned a friend of Raef’s who would be my partner in the wedding party, and that, nearly as soon as we landed, became a standing joke. His name was Xavier Box, an absurd name that made Amy and me laugh whenever we spoke it aloud. He was a tall, severe-looking Australian, with blond hair and eyes so blue they seemed made of ice, whose angular appearance belied the sweetness underneath his exterior. One of the ridiculous side notes of the wedding—everything was graceful, everything was beautiful because of Constance, but still it was a wedding and there was plenty of wine—was Xavier’s ability to speak something he called “sheep talk.” Apparently, it was a thing in Australia—although I had never heard it from Raef—and it involved saying everything in a bleating voice that was, supposedly, the stuttering speech of a sheep. It made no sense whatsoever and was not in the least funny, except that Xavier, maybe six foot three and as thin as a greyhound, used it so often that it became funny despite its chunkiness. Pretty soon everyone had a sheep talk voice, so that, if you wanted a drink, you might say, “May I have a drinnnnnkkkkk?” with the tail of the sentence going up like the voice of a baby lamb calling for its mom. Who knows why things like that become funny, but it did, and it became the wavering lament that wove through the wedding despite Constance’s ethereal beauty.
Xavier Box was the master of sheep talk—partially because he came from Australia but also because he looked a little goatish—and as partners in the wedding, we became adept at playing off each other. I spoke sheep well, and when we stood to say our toasts at the groom’s dinner held in a nearby pension (think checked tablecloths and grumpy waiters and wine bottles with straw bottoms) the night before the wedding, both of us managed to slip in a sheepish phrase. I said something like, Raef is the beeeessstttttttttttt man in the world, and Xavier topped me by saying, You beeeeeeetttttttttt.
It was funny. It made everyone laugh. We almost came across as a couple.
As I sat and watched Xavier finish his speech, Amy leaned over and told me I should sleep with him.