Too Suddenly and Too Late

Because it is easy to fall in love in Paris, that is where we go to try again.

When I say I am not optimistic, you look at me like the dog does when I leave the house and he sees I don’t have his leash.

“Patricia, please,” you say. We are on the plane. You are using your polite-in-public voice. “Jillian would want us to work this out.”

And I want to snap back that we don’t get to ask Jillian what she wants anymore, but I go from furious to numb in an instant and lose my will.

Instead, a memory overtakes me.

“You look like me when you smile,” Jillian remarks, turning the creaky pages of a photo album that landed with us after my mother died. I peer over her shoulder from behind the couch. She’s looking at photos of me in high school, around her age. Posing with my violin. On a camping trip with a friend whose last name I don’t remember. Staring directly into the camera, half my face irradiated by an outdoor flood lamp, backlit as if from a detonating bomb.

I remember collaring her and yanking her toward me, kissing the top of her head. Now, I seek out that same smell by burying my face in her winter hats.

“No, you look like me when you smile,” I tell her. “Heredity only goes one way.”

“Mm, don’t you wish you were more like me though?” she shoots back, grinning.

How sincerely in that moment I want to answer Yes.

“She would want us to work this out,” you say again. Your face still wears the betrayed-dog expression.

“You should walk the dog more,” I finally reply. And I put on my headphones and do not listen to music.

***

This is the grief counselor’s idea, this trip. I resolve never to speak to her again as I struggle to pull our suitcase off the baggage carousel.

“Paul,” I say. The suitcase is wedged in sideways and taking me with it.

You are looking at a map of the city. I do not know why you need a map inside the airport.

“Paul,” I say again.

“Oh, God.” You run over. “Here, let me.”

I let you lunge for the bag and knock over a group of Frenchmen anticipatorily rolling cigarettes. We have to let it go around again.

It stuns me how intimidated by you I once was, even after we started dating our junior year. You looked exactly like every other Ivy League legacy case, except you also looked at me. I had only recently started wearing makeup and took your unexpected attention to mean that I should continue my transformation from awkward secretary of the Francophile Club to insouciant waif who smoked cigarettes when she was drunk. I had just turned twenty-one without anyone trying to buy me too many drinks and it depressed and embarrassed me in equal measure. Two days before you asked me out, I waxed my eyebrows for the first time.

To this day, I think it was the milquetoast rebellion of having an uninitiated, unmonied girlfriend that piqued your interest. You had ambitions beyond lolling on the cushion of your family’s money and occasionally scooting funds around the stock market. You wanted to start an independent publishing house for emerging writers. And bringing home a starry-eyed poetry major whose moonshot dream was “to go to Europe someday” fit your narrative.

I thought that when your father’s business imploded after we graduated—taking the downy crashpad of money you’d inherit with it—you would feel free of your family’s narrow expectations. Instead, you molted your every ambition like a snake and got a vague, corporate job through a country club connection of your father’s. Even then, I understood you did this because of a fear of uncertainty learned too suddenly and too late in life. But you never saw it that way.

“I just grew up, Trish,” I remember you saying sourly when I brought it up, years later. “One of us had to.”

***

I do not recognize the Paris I see on the way to the hotel.

“It’s grayer than I remember,” I say in the cab.

“The weather will get better,” replies the driver in French. His accent is slow and rhythmic, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to ease in my ear.

I smile weakly at him in the rearview mirror, because of course that wasn’t what I had meant. The Paris I remembered was seashell pink and muted blue, sunny and open yet labyrinthine—an inimitable and inviting ruckus. This Paris is oppressive and dark. It looms around us as we drive through the outer arrondissements, spiraling into the heart of the city. It has been raining sparsely all morning, and the bruise-colored backstreets under the slate sky make me think that from above, the city must look like a cigarette burn.

“Why you are come to Paris?” asks the cabbie in English this time, perhaps discouraged that I did not answer his French.

“Just a vacation,” you say quickly, afraid of letting me respond.

The hotel is marvelous—a four-star affair we can only afford because of the reflexive pity of our chilly Connecticut suburb. Unbeknownst to us, the PTA of Jillian’s high school organized a fundraiser after her death.

“For any hospital bills you might still have?” I remember the woman who delivered the money saying.

She was talking to me through the screen door of our kitchen. I had ignored the perky rapping on our front door, but she trekked through our side yard and knocked at the kitchen. This time, I was standing in her eyeline and couldn’t feign absence.

“You don’t need to do that,” I replied, the screen door between us. I resented the automated nature of raising money in response to any kind of local misfortune. Instead of a compassionate gesture, it seemed more like a Tragedy Tax: a karmic insurance premium against a similar fate.

“Oh, well, you know,” she said, gesturing vaguely. Her eyes darted to the envelope in her hand, then to the top of the door frame, then off into the buzzy June afternoon. She couldn’t bear to look at me, her greatest fears portraitized in the sorry figure I cut. It was edging into a broiling summer, and here I was wearing flannel pajama pants and Jillian’s long sleeve softball shirt. The lights were off in the kitchen, which smelled like the stale coffee evaporating on its hot plate. It was 4:30 pm.

“The expenses are covered,” I said.

The woman outside sighed. “It’s um, a gift then. We are so sorry about what happened to Jillian and we just want you to know that we’re all thinking of you and Paul.”

I had never seen this woman before in my life.

“Seriously, Patricia,” she said, and opened the screen door herself, just enough to stick the envelope through. When I didn’t grab it, she let it fall to the floor without meeting my eyes. “It’s a gesture of our sympathy.”

“Mm,” I said.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, and I’m sorry for your loss,” she intoned, walking away. She never broke character, her voice had firmed and flattened. My failure to perform gratitude had clearly cooled her sympathy.

I left the envelope on the floor for another hour, staring at it each time I drifted through the kitchen on my aimless rounds. Watching the clock, I knew you'd be home soon, and when I thought about telling you about this woman, this money, I felt exhausted.

So I decided not to.

When I finally opened the envelope, I sank to the floor, my back against the dishwasher. The money order inside was for an astonishing $20,000, and I was overcome by the realization that in my whole life I had never once commanded this much money on my own—this many possibilities.

The job with your father’s friend always meant that I didn’t have to work. Early on, I was excited to be a poet without the pressure of financial success—though I never had any kind of success. Later, I was grateful for the ability to stay home with Jillian. But in that moment, slumped on the floor and sweating through the crotch of my pajama pants, I felt deeply humiliated by my own dependence on the sellout I resented you for being.

The next day, I opened a bank account and deposited the money. When we planned this trip, I told you that my father had offered to cover a fancy hotel as a gift.

The view is just as fancy as the hotel: a generous panorama over the Seine. We can see the Tuileries and what I know is the roof of the Musée d’Orsay on the other side of the river. When I studied here for half our senior year, a Right Bank hotel like this was an unimaginable luxury.

“I can’t believe it’s taken us this long to come to Paris,” I say as you unpack.

You shut the top drawer of the dresser a little too hard. “Well, we’re here now,” you say.

I stretch myself along the length of the bed. The bleakness of the day is seeping into the beautiful room. The blue rooftops of Paris streak and run together behind the glaze of raindrops on the windowpane. I see lightning, delicate and far away.

“This place is very Jillian.” You talk about her like we just left her at home. Like we are doing this on purpose.

“Paul, I’m going to take a nap,” I say. “Go find a nice place to eat.”

You look frightened.

I say, “Everyone speaks English.” And roll over.

***

I try very hard to pay attention at dinner. You picked the closest tourist trap to our hotel. I order in French even though the waiter addresses us in English. I decline the wine list, but after seeing your face, I flag the waiter back and order a bottle. See Paul, I think, I am making an effort.

“I thought you didn’t like mussels,” you say as an overflowing crock of them is placed in front of me. Their shells are lacquered in butter and they glisten like sea stones in the candlelight.

“I don’t like them in the States. They’re different here.”

“Mussels are mussels.”

“No,” I say, “they’re not.”

You watch me as I begin to eat, picking out the first mussel with a fork, then using the empty shell as a pair of organic pliers to eat all the rest. I do this out of a habit I forgot I ever had.

I feel your eyes on me, on my hands. I am ignoring you but I can tell that you are watching me with a kind of horrifying suspicion. It occurs to me you have never seen me do this. I am eating mussels in a strange and terrible way and until three seconds ago your wife did not like mussels.

When I studied abroad in Paris, I fell in love with a man named Yves. He taught me to eat mussels this way, using one shell to cannibalistically pry the meat from between the wings of another. I lost my virginity to him, not you, but I never told you that. We were dating at the time, but you made a show of nonchalance before I left for my study abroad program, insisting that we were too young to be fully committed, and who needed labels anyway? I went along, convincing myself this was a mutually beneficial and modern relationship while never exercising the options it afforded me. Until I met Yves.

On the first day we met—he had almost hit me with his bike in Parc Monsouris—we rushed back to my dorm to go to bed with the sounds of the street coming through the window. After just three months, he asked me to marry him. But I returned to you instead, because my time in Paris wasn’t real life. It was a fantasy I was fortunate enough to try on for a bit. Attempting to extend it felt like alerting the universe to my happiness, inviting retribution and disaster.

Eating mussels like I used to with Yves, I expect to feel a pang of heartsickness for him. But instead, I feel a strange aching for myself, for the person intoxicated by her life for the first time and who thought, somehow, that that put a cosmic target on her back.

“Going to try to meet up with any old friends?” you ask. Your knife and fork are poised over the remaining half of your steak frites.

I actually laugh. “Absolutely not,” I say. “I don’t relish telling new people that my daughter is dead.”

You throw your napkin into your lap and grind the heels of your hands into your eyes. I am waiting for the polite-in-public voice, but this time I get something else.

“You say that like I do like telling people that we lost Jillian!” You sound shrill, panicked. This is your favorite terminology—we “lost” our daughter. Like she’s missing, hidden, or wayward.

“Nobody lost her, Paul,” I say.

“Please, let’s just try to have a nice time,” you beg.

“But I don’t want to,” I say. “I want to be miserable with you and you won’t let me. You won’t even be miserable.” Without realizing it I have half-stood in my seat. A few other tourists look my way warily.

After the accident, I found a little black notebook in Jillian’s backpack—something she must have bought out with friends at the mall. A ribbon attached to the spine marked a place about a third of the way in. I ripped the elastic closure off immediately and pored over it.

Paging through, I was crushed by the precious mundanity: a list of books she had read with a star-rating next to each; boys she thought would ask her to homecoming color-coded by whether she’d accept; gift ideas for me and you and her friends; doodles of lips and Christmas trees.

Then there was a page headed “Bucket List.” The lines on the page were numbered to fifteen, but only the first was occupied:

Go to Europe (someday!!!)

I come back to myself in the restaurant, hunched over our romantic table for two. I am fully inhabiting myself in a way that feels both familiar and foreign. It feels like being in Paris again after all these years. It feels like reading my own neglected desires in Jillian’s notebook.

I recall the money in my bank account, and it’s like the room has opened up so big that I can’t even sense where the walls might be. I’m in a neverending restaurant that’s expanding away from me at the speed of perception, but I’m anchored. The world moves around me for once instead of sweeping me forward.

You grab my hand across the table. “It was an accident, Trish!” you whisper desperately. “I’m trying to forgive myself. And begging you to forgive me.”

“You kept the car, Paul,” I say.

I throw my napkin on my chair and sidle through the maze of tables, brushing past the waiter who was just bringing our bottle of wine.

“Patricia!” you call.

But I am out the door. It’s stopped raining and the streets are shimmering and cool. Paris is clean, and everywhere outside smells like wet, warm dust. Under the sidewalk, my bones resonate with a familiar pulse. Setting off, I look for the nearest metro stop, my heart churning and my mind a blank.

Because is easy to fall in love in Paris. And maybe I can do it again.