Jeremy tries to imagine Chantal, with her prim cardigan sweater, her neatly wrapped umbrella, her tiny pearl earrings, this lovely composed woman-living in a tent on the beach? He smiles at the thought.
“You’re laughing at me,” Chantal says.
“No, not at all. Did you come home right away?”
“Not right away,” Chantal explains. “But sometimes we have to run away from ourselves in order to find ourselves.”
A few days ago, Chantal and Jeremy had walked through the Parc Monceau during their French lesson. A woman and a man had stood near the crepe stand, arguing loudly. “Je suis Américaine!” the woman yelled. “Je suis Américaine!” Jeremy had told Dana the story later. “What happens to your identity when you take it away from everything familiar?” he had asked. “You know yourself better,” she replied assuredly.
Not me, Jeremy had thought. I know who I am when I am home in my shop. When I’m in bed with my wife. When I’m preparing dinner in my kitchen.
Already, in a few days in Paris, with a strange woman at his side, Jeremy feels like he is unmoored.
“Will you go back to the monastery?” Jeremy asks Lindy. He is a little frightened of the answer.
“No,” she says lightly. “I need sex.”
“Spare me,” Jeremy says, in English, and both women laugh.
Lindy leans toward Chantal and says something to her under her breath. More laughter. Jeremy feels his hangover for the first time. How many bottles of wine did they all drink at dinner last night? He needs food, he needs sleep, he needs to think about something other than his daughter needing sex. He thinks that she slept with her high school boyfriend, though that relationship only lasted a month or so. Dana speculated that they were “fuck buddies” after that, a horrible thought in Jeremy’s mind. Unlike most men he knows, Jeremy has always wanted love with his sex. When he knows someone in bed, he wants to know her out of bed. And when he loves her in bed, well, the rest should follow.
And here is his daughter-at twenty, beautiful and lost-looking for sex. Jeremy knows that men prey on this kind of girl and it terrifies him.
“I’m going to meet some friends,” Lindy says, “at the Champ de Mars. They’re having a picnic.”
Jeremy remembers his imagined picnic with Chantal. Now his feet press up against the wedges of cheese, tomatoes, olives. What happens next? he wonders. When Lindy leaves?
She stands up, leans over and pecks Jeremy on both cheeks. “À bientôt,” she says. And then she says something in French that Jeremy doesn’t understand. But Chantal smiles and shakes her head.
Lindy dashes off. Did she say something rude? Should he even ask for a translation?
“She is a beautiful girl,” Chantal says.
“Thank you,” Jeremy says foolishly. For of course he has nothing to do with her beauty. “I’m sorry if-”
“No, it was fine,” Chantal says.
He doesn’t even know what he was going to apologize for, and now it has passed. Lindy is gone. The teacups are empty. The girls have eaten their cookies. Even, somehow, the bill is paid.
“On y va,” Chantal says. And they are walking again.
Chantal has led them down to the Seine and while they stroll through the Musée de la Sculpture en Plein Air, a garden with modern sculptures dotting the landscape, they don’t talk about art but about love.
“Earlier this morning I was thinking about Lindy’s first love,” Jeremy says. “A river guide in Costa Rica.”
“How romantic,” Chantal tells him.
“Oh, it turned from romance to heartbreak in a day,” he explains. His mind jumps to sex with Dana last night. Pain, love, lust-sometimes it’s a package deal.
“So tell me,” Chantal says, “about your first love.”
“My first love?”
“Please. I’d like to hear the story.”
And so he tells her, in easy French, since all the words slip off his tongue-yes, it’s the language of romance-while they linger by the river. A photographer is taking pictures of an Asian couple in their wedding clothes. A little girl in a pink dress with a bouquet of flowers hides behind the bride. It’s a charming scene, with the stone walkway, the languid river, Notre Dame looming beyond them on the Île de la Cité. The air is thick with humidity and time seems to have slowed down.
“I met a girl at summer camp. I was thirteen. She was sixteen and much, much taller than I, with hair that fell to her waist. She wore it in one long braid that lay on her back like a thick rope. She was a swimmer and I would watch her race across our New Hampshire lake, and I thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world.”
“Was it love? Or-” Chantal says the words: “avoir le béguin pour quelqu’un.”
“What does that mean?” he asks.
“When you yearn for someone. They’re unattainable. But you can’t get them out of your mind.”
“A crush,” Jeremy translates. “So when does a crush become love? When you attain this girl?”
Chantal shakes her head with a sly smile on her face. “One should never attain the object of a crush.”
“Why not?”
“You will be disappointed. A crush is about desire. It’s not about love.”
“But how do you know until you’ve tried?” Jeremy asks.
The bride and bridegroom lean toward each other and when their lips touch, the photographer snaps a photo and the flower girl giggles.
“I know a place for our picnic,” Chantal says.
They walk along the Seine, leaving the photo shoot behind. Jeremy tells her his story.
“One day, toward the end of the summer, a girl came up to me and told me that Sarah liked me. Sarah, the object of my affection. I was out of my mind with excitement. I planned to kiss her that night. I wouldn’t talk about it with the other boys in my bunk who boasted about their meager fumblings in the dark-this was love of a higher order. I had waited for weeks, watching her, learning her every stroke. I knew how many twists on her braid, I noticed when a new bathing suit didn’t match up with her tan line.”
“A romantic,” Chantal says.
“A fool,” Jeremy tells her.
“We’re almost there,” Chantal says.
The stone walkway follows the edge of the Seine. Their bags bump against their legs as they walk. Chantal’s pace quickens. This is not the way they usually stroll-slowly, effortlessly, meandering around corners. He lengthens his stride to keep up.
The river is high from days of summer rain. Someone at dinner last night said that there was a threat of flooding, and the conversation turned to Hurricane Katrina. At home, Jeremy had been quick to accuse the Bush administration of doing everything wrong, but here, among Europeans, he is oddly defensive. He found himself arguing that it is impossible to protect a city built below sea level, and he thought to himself, even as the words slipped from his mouth: What am I saying? Do I even believe this?
Later, on the walk home, before the fight, he told Dana, “I’m not sure what that was all about. With these foreigners I find myself rethinking everything I took for granted.”
“In Paris, it’s still embarrassing to be an American,” she said.
“That’s not it,” Jeremy said. “I mean, I was thinking about it in a brand-new way. What I said made sense to me. I wasn’t just making excuses.”
She wrapped her arm around his waist and pressed her head into his shoulder. “I’m tired,” she said. “Sometimes it’s hard to be so sure of myself all the time.”
“You?” he said, and kissed the top of her head.