We Won’t Always Have Paris

APRIL 2004

I made all the arrangements for my trip to Paris. The political science conference was to take place the weekend at the end of one of Mark’s weeks with Natalia, so I planned to leave earlier and spend a few extra days with Karim in Paris before it began. My fantasy continued where it left off the year before. Karim and Natalia and Arina and I one day would become some kind of elegant family that people would watch with interest, wondering whether we were the parents of both children or which child was whose. It was my Hollywood way of repairing the cosmic lack of synchronicity of having met too late, too married, and with children of our own.

When I told Mark I was going to be gone at a conference the third week in April, he smirked just a little. We still lived under the same roof, and I wished our new living arrangement could finally start, our fifty–fifty of everything, our lives of halves and new freedoms, when I wouldn’t feel as though I had to ask for Mark’s permission to see my lover. But house sales were slow, and our real estate agent said we might have to wait until the summer to have a good offer. Natalia didn’t say anything when I told her I was going to Paris for the conference. She put on her impenetrable look and stared at the wall. When were we going to go to Chicago to see Aunt Biljana, she wanted to know. I changed the subject back and asked her what I should bring her from Paris. She thought for a few minutes, her face changing from impenetrable to dreamy, and her green clear eyes became softer and more watery. Then she said she wanted a painting: “A painting like the one from the artist who did your portrait in Paris before, Mama, remember?” Everything was well stored in her mind.

“A painting of what, Natalia?” I asked.

“I don’t care,” she answered lightly, “just a painting made by one of those street artists, could they make one of me if you showed them a picture of me, Mama?”

Natalia told me she was going to the beach with Mark for spring break and I tried not to show my pain.

“Why don’t you and Dad go to Chicago for spring break?” I said cheerfully. “That way you’d get to also see Biljana and Melissa and Amanda and you’d have the beaches all along the lakeshore. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

Her face brightened up and her eyes opened. “Do you think Dad will really want this, Mama? With the divorce and stuff, you know…”

“Just ask him, Talia, and see what he says.” Maybe there was a way to live our new lives of halves.

To both my surprise and Natalia’s, Mark liked the idea. He went ahead and reserved plane tickets to Chicago during the same days that I was going to Paris. Maybe he was recomposing himself just like I was. But still, I chose to keep him in my mystery box for now. He seemed safer that way.

Two days before my flight to Paris, Karim called to tell me he wasn’t sure he would be able to come after all, because his mother was sick again, and his daughter was going through a difficult period. Besides, he thought he was coming down with the flu. I was walking on M Street in Georgetown as I listened to his slow, raspy words, out shopping for a smashing dress for my Paris trip. I lost my balance and leaned against the wall of a building. Someone asked if I was okay. Did I need help? I heard Karim’s voice: “Lara, tu es toujours là?” Lara, are you still there? “Are you kidding me?” I finally said. I had already bought the ticket, arranged my family schedule around the trip, I just couldn’t believe it. He said he was really sorry. I hung up. The brick wall I was holding was actually the Sephora store. Women inside were trying on makeup, mascara to lengthen and darken their eyelashes, lipstick to add lusciousness to their smiles, foundation to cover up imperfections on their cheeks. What a sham it all was. The only thing I could think to do was go in and look for a deep, dark lipstick.

I was ashamed even to call my sister, but I did, after I bought the darkest-red lipstick I could find in the store. Biljana sounded troubled, not her usual upbeat cheerful and unconditionally supportive self. “Just attend the conference, Larinka, enjoy Paris, make a vacation of it, maybe hang out with other interesting men at the conference and forget the motherfucker!” she said breathlessly. But something was wrong with Biljana. She was quiet for a moment. And then she told me that Marija had called her. In a tired voice she continued to tell me that Marija was in Los Angeles, that she sounded strange and incoherent, something about a child, a boy back in Bosnia. I felt sick again. Marija’s callings and writings about a child must be true. “Did you know about it, Lara? Did you know she had a child from the rape?” I wished Biljana had not named it. Now it was truly real and truly unbearable. “Sort of, yes, I guess I knew it but didn’t want to believe it. She’s been sending me notes, letters, and I’m pretty sure she called here a few times, but Mark always answered and she must have hung up. I guess she’s preparing me for, you know… for when we finally see each other again.” Biljana said, “There was something so ominous and cavernous in the way she talked. She scared me. She said she wanted to come to Washington and try to get the boy out of Bosnia with your help, Lara. It’s awful, Larinka. I would have killed myself, that’s all.” I had never heard defeat like that in Biljana’s voice. “Of course her voice sounded ominous and cavernous, what did you expect after all that she’s been through?” I said in Marija’s defense. Though it terrified me, I felt I could deal with Marija’s war child.

I did go to Paris after all, and I did meet with Karim, but under circumstances so dire and so wrenching that I wished Paris had never been invented. After my troubling talk with Biljana, Karim called again and poured his sweetest, most loving, most heartbreakingly romantic voice and words into my cell phone. He had been under so much pressure, under such turmoil seeing his family disintegrate. Tell me about it! He was torn between seeing his family fall to pieces and his impossible love for me, but I was the love of his life, no doubt about it, he had married his wife out of duty, but I was the one he loved. More than he had ever loved a woman. In my vulnerable state, I believed his words, which felt like soothing medication in a moment of extreme pain. I would both renew my affair with Karim and attend the political science conference, too.

The day before I left for Paris, Marija did reach me on my home phone finally and my heart stopped for a little while. Some people’s hearts would have started beating faster and more sonorously in their chests; mine went quiet. Marija’s voice sounded far away, speaking in a language I couldn’t penetrate. “I’m going to need your help, Lara,” she said with a quick laugh. Marija had never asked me for help before. “I want to get the hell out of this perfect blue-sky California crap. You know what I mean, right?” I had no idea what she meant but just said, “Aha, of course.” “And another thing”—she hesitated—“I need to go back to Bosnia and get back my kid, you know.” She said it like the most normal thing in the world. “He’s eight, and I’d like to have him here with me.” She sounded lucid and clear, the old Marija I knew, not the cavernous one Biljana had told me about. Still I needed time before I could really believe what she was saying, before I could join her. I would find her as soon as I returned from Paris. She could come and live with me, if she wanted, I said, and we could make a plan of action. I had no idea how those clear and reasonable words emerged from my mouth, but they did easily and smoothly. She said with a laugh to watch out what I was signing up for, but that it sounded like a good plan. “Take my cell phone number, call me when you’re ready. And of course if you need me for anything.” She laughed. I didn’t want us to end the conversation and I asked her in a rush: “Marija, how did you know I was going to go to Sarajevo last fall?… Or did you know? Those notes, the ones at the woman’s house, they were for me, right, you had left them for me?” “We’ll talk about all that when we see each other, all right?” she said firmly and hung up. I felt taken aback by her abrupt end to the conversation, but then I remembered. The cruelty of the war had brushed off on her. At least now Marija was no longer in a thick cloak of darkness and unknown. She was speaking, laughing, thinking and planning. After I returned from Paris, I would find Marija, no matter how hard it might be to get wrapped up in her story. And how like Marija to think I was going to need her! My life’s troubles, in comparison with hers, seemed like mosquito bites. And as my plane took off, I was filled with the richness of life, with color and complexity, despite all the wounds and confusion. I was on my way to Paris again.

Karim and I met in the same hotel as the previous year and the first couple of hours together brought back all the delights and passion I remembered. He seemed even more attentive and passionate than he used to; he called me all the endearing French words in the history of French romance plus the added Arabic ones for special spice. It was evening, and we were still lying next to each other in the small Parisian bed, when Karim started crying. I thought it was from happiness to be with me again, that we had finally sort of made it despite such unlikely obstacles. I stroked his face and felt tears welling in my eyes as well. I didn’t remember ever crying for happiness before, though I had heard many people’s stories of happy sobbing. I was proud I could have that experience, too. Karim then confessed to me that he had slept with another woman since our last encounter, or he had tried to though it appeared he wasn’t very successful at it, because all he thought of when he was with this other woman was me and his love of me, was what he said. He could only be a man when he was with me, he told me, and more tears flowed on his face, as though this would give me some kind of pleasure. It appeared that Karim’s big problem at that juncture in our lives was that he loved me so much that he couldn’t fuck other women because of the love he experienced for me. The woman had called him good for nothing, because he couldn’t satisfy her. She had shamed him. No words came out of my mouth. It was impossible for me to produce any intelligible sounds. But I found that my arms and legs could still move. My single persistent thought was that I needed to get out of that hotel room as quickly as my limbs could carry me, out of that street, out of that arrondissement and out of that city and never return until a new geological era started and Paris was nothing but a huge expanse of black sand. Paris had been a huge mistake. Karim had been a huge mistake. Why had I not flown to Marija the moment she called? If Marija asked for help it meant she had thought it over a million times before saying it. I was on the completely wrong side of the world and I was paying for it.

I don’t know how, but I managed to get dressed, gather all my things, leave the room, and ask the hotel concierge to get me a taxi to the airport. I found the Air France ticket counter at Charles de Gaulle. There were no more flights to Washington, DC, that evening, so I asked for one to anywhere in the United States. I was desperate to leave the city on the first plane that would take me across the ocean. The next one left for Los Angeles at six the next morning, and that was the one I would take. I changed my ticket to the flight to Los Angeles. I spent the rest of the evening and the night in Charles de Gaulle airport, gorging on sushi, seaweed salads, marzipan candy, and red wine from the various cafés and duty-free food stores strewn along the shiny hallways. I talked indiscriminately to strangers of various nationalities. I befriended the airport custodians from Poland, La Réunion, and Algeria who listened to my sob story in the neon night of the airport and advised me to “forget Karim, bad man, and get good American man instead.” I slept the few hours before the departure of the plane on one of the hard benches at the gate, waking up with a horrendous headache.

As I boarded the plane I wondered what LA would be like. I would use the remaining days of my wrecked vacation to discover a new city, Hollywood, the place that produced fake dreams of happiness and heroism and adventure and forever love for millions of gullible men and women, just like me. And most important I would find Marija. A lucky thing that she had given me her cell phone number. As the plane glided above Paris, I sobbed hopelessly. I was crying for Paris, I told the doctor the flight attendant had brought over to me. I cried over the sweet hilly picturesque streets of Montmartre, the shady groves and the blue pond filled with children’s boats in the Jardin du Luxembourg, the dizzying views from each bridge across the Seine, and all the kitsch portrait artists that filled the city from one corner to the other. I’ll never have Paris, I said, gulping through my own cascades of tears. The doctor gave me a pill to swallow, and soon my tears dried and the dense fog clenched around my brain started to slowly dissipate. I was soon dreaming of the final scenes in the hotel room, arguing with Karim, throwing his cell phone out the window, calling him names in English, French, and Serbian and, as I fled from the room, slamming the door so hard that pieces of molding fell from the ceiling with a crumbling sound like an earthquake.

As the plane was descending, bringing me back to the American soil, I had a vision of Mark and Karim both walking on the runway. They were walking away from me at a steady pace both wearing fancy dark suits. They waved good-bye to me. I felt only a cold sadness, like the passage of an autumn wind. I imagined Mark and Karim walking toward each other at the end of the runway, shaking hands, and then embracing just as my plane hit the hard earth of the City of Angels.