* * *
Dad refused to get a passport. He didn’t want to be in Paris without his wife. He insisted we go ahead, and Jean asked a million times if he was sure.
He was sure.
* * *
Naturally, Jean did all the talking. Having not taken a French class since high school, she must have spoken at a ninth-grade level. Still, I listened to the most basic French words fall out of her mouth, and something about the familiarity of her voice combined with the strange music of her speech carved out of me so much respect for her, I almost cried when she ordered, at a sidewalk café, two slices of quiche.
* * *
We scaled the Eiffel Tower and took selfies on the Champs-Élysées, which I stupidly hadn’t known was a street. (I’d thought it was a hotel.) This was my first time outside of the country, and I clung to Jean everywhere we went. People must have mistaken us for lovers. Jean looked beautiful — heavy lashes and eyebrows framed her big hazel eyes, and she had this naturally layered brown hair and year-round summer skin, and a wide mouth with lips so full, it gave her the look of a woman always on the verge of correcting something you’re about to say. People like a large mouth on a woman — even in Paris, I bet, and they probably looked at her and thought, why is this beautiful large-mouthed woman with him? Why is she with this young American boy with pale skin and an incomplete beard and skinny jeans unfashionably and unseasonably worn with boat shoes? Why is she with this idiot, who keeps calling her by a man’s name?
* * *
The flight the next day wasn’t scheduled until the afternoon, so Jean took me to a queer club that night and said, “I don’t know if there’s a place on earth more diametrically opposite to the Antelope Valley.” We ended up getting a table in the corner beneath large floating paper orbs of green light. I enjoyed watching the men dance, but the sheer mentioning of the name of our hometown seemed to tether our conversation to it, and our attention stayed there, and we spoke about home over the swelling wub-wub-wubs of the music. I told her about the name of the town, how the antelope weren’t really antelope at all. She seemed upset — she was drunk, to be fair, and so was I, and I said, “Sad, right? Even in Paris, we’re talking about the fucking Antelope Valley.”
Jean thumbed the water on the outside of her glass. “Have I ever told you the story of when Emily and I went out looking for one of those antelope-whatevers? We were with a guy.” I told her I knew; the guy she was talking about was my friend Robert Karinger. I reminded her about our meeting in the desert. “Weird,” she said, “I don’t remember that.”
Here’s what she remembered: She and Emily and a guy Emily brought along drove out at twilight to the eastern edge of the desert. The sky was the beautiful sky you hope for during a sunset, blue and orange upstrokes from behind the mountains. And there, on its hind legs, gnawing at the flower of a Joshua tree, stood an antelope. A pronghorn. Its black nub of a tail swatted yellow flies you could make out in the last of the light. When the animal landed on all fours, it turned to look at the car. Then the pronghorn came walking right up to the road, sauntering, and put its face up against the passenger window, the one by Jean’s face, as if saying hello.
The animal waited there for a while, its black eye staring dumbly into the car. Jean and Emily and the boy in the backseat spoke in the reverent tones of witnesses. Jean was the only one afraid. “Emily wanted to open the window and stroke its nose,” she told me. “The boy in the backseat, well, he got out of the car on the opposite side, and walked slowly around the back of the car to where the antelope was standing. He came up behind it, real slow. The antelope knew he was there, and put out his back leg. Not a kick — just slowly put out his leg, I swear to God, like a hand. And this boy, he held on to the hoof. First he just had one hand on it, as if they were greeting each other. Then he wrapped his other hand around the ankle. He just held the leg for a long time, started petting it, until Emily went out of the car and stroked the antelope’s nose. And the antelope — the pronghorn — let it all happen, back leg out, nose down. And I just watched and watched, afraid that as soon as I opened the window, he’d dart off. Eventually I did open the window, and I was right. The antelope shook free of the boy and ran off into the desert. And the boy — I can’t believe he was your friend — he kept saying on the ride back how the antelope must not have liked something about me. Emily was fine, and he was fine. But something about me scared the animal off. And the boy kept saying we shouldn’t tell anybody about this, like it was a secret between us. I think both Emily and I had a little crush on him. He was young — I didn’t remember he was that young — but he was a beautiful, white-haired, serious boy. And so, yeah, we agreed that we wouldn’t tell anyone, that we would keep the antelope — the pronghorn — a secret.”
The green light of the bulbous lanterns sharpened her features, lengthening the shadows of her cheekbones and nose. She had the look of something between a Halloween-store witch and our thinning mother toward the end of chemotherapy. The wub-wub-wubs seemed to increase in frequency and in volume, and although Jean continued to speak, I stopped straining to hear her. Soon we would catch our flights — Jean to New York, me to the Antelope Valley — and I didn’t know when I would see her next. Suddenly I imagined this was the last moment we’d ever share, and because I knew she would go on to remember it differently than I would, I ached to do something so spectacular and unordinary that, if every other memory of Paris were to be corrupted, at least we’d have this.
I stood, accidentally knocking one of the green orbs into a sway, and held out my hand. “Jean,” I said, the French way. And soon, while everyone else in the club beat their bodies against the thick air between them, I held her — my sister, depending on the swinging light, or my mother, or Karinger — and danced, slowly, to another kind of music. “Je t’aime,” I said through her hair, into her ear.
“I love you, too,” she said into mine. “Moi aussie, je t’aime.”
* * *
When you spend a life leaving a place, only to return to it again and again, the returns become increasingly shameful. One way to deal with this shame is to create theories, theories that either justify your returns or else allow you the possibility of leaving — actually leaving, once and for all.
This time, my theory is this: The antelope — the pronghorn — somehow knew that Emily and Karinger were different from Jean. Emily — married, pregnant with twins — continues to live in the Antelope Valley, just off Avenue N where the water tower looms in the foothills. Karinger became a husband and a father after joining the marines, and I’m convinced he would have lived in town the rest of his life if he hadn’t gone off and died in a different desert. My theory, I guess, is that the pronghorn knew Emily and Karinger were meant to stay, and Jean was meant to leave. All places, maybe, bear these two kinds of people, and ours just happens to have a way to tell the difference.