I think we should go to Paris.”
Chris and I were lying in bed on the morning of my twenty-fifth birthday. I had just finished opening presents from her: a Mont Blanc pen, an annotated edition of Walden, and a pair of small gold earrings. We were in Colorado and I was barely a month into my ill-conceived travel and writing sabbatical. So far I had spent most of my days crying and hiking on trails no more than ten miles from my parents’ house. Before I left Philadelphia I told Chris that I wanted this time to be a break, and she said sure, we’ll take a break. But she flew to Colorado almost every weekend. When she came we walked downtown together and browsed bookstores and ate Mexican food. We went to the movies and napped in the sun. And now she wanted to take me to Paris.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, I’m going,” she said. “I’m going for New Year’s, and I would love for you to come with me.”
“I’ll think about it,” I told her. But I didn’t really need to think about it. I knew that I would go to Paris with Chris that winter. I had made my choice; I had chosen her. And while I still had no idea if it was the right choice, I didn’t regret it.
Chris and I landed in Paris at dawn and went straight to the hotel. “My god, I’m exhausted,” Chris said as she walked into the hotel room. She dropped her bag and started to undress. She pulled the duvet back from the bed. “Let’s sleep.”
“We can’t sleep,” I said. “We have to get ourselves on Paris time.” I walked over to the double windows, which I realized were actually the doors to a small balcony from which I could see the Tuileries and its Ferris wheel, unlit and still. I turned back to look at Chris, who was now in bed, and at the room, which was green and gold and smelled like wealth. It smelled like nowhere I had ever been before. “We should walk,” I insisted. “Or eat some breakfast.”
Chris beat the pillow to fluff it, then flipped it over and lay her head down. She lifted the covers in invitation. “We’re here for a week,” she said. “There’s no harm in a nap.”
Chris did everything her own way, which was the most exciting thing about her. I crawled into bed with her that morning, and we slept until afternoon. We went out into the falling dusk and stopped at a café for omelets and wine, and when we had finished, the time on the clock no longer mattered. We weren’t tired and there was plenty to do. And when we did tire, we pulled the heavy silk drapes over the balcony doors and slept. It was winter, and so the sun rose late and set in the midafternoon, and for the brief time it was in the sky it barely shone. Paris in December was cold and damp and gray. It was the most beautiful place in the world.
And it was so far from home. In Paris, Chris did not hesitate when I reached for her hand, did not pull back when I leaned across the café table to kiss her. And when, late one night we stood kissing against a building near the hotel and someone honked and called out a car window at us, she pulled away only to laugh. This was not the Chris I knew. A few weeks before, when we were still in Philly, we had run into a managing partner of Chris’s law firm at a small neighborhood restaurant. “There’s Henry,” Chris whispered, straightening in her chair. When he came over to say hello, Chris introduced me as her friend. Henry insisted we join him and his son, which we did. And when dinner was over, Chris and I rose from the table, put on our jackets, and walked out the door. That dinner was the longest she had ever gone without touching me.
I, on the other hand, told everyone at my office about Chris. When she called me at work (this was before cell phones, before texting), she had a terrible of habit saying, “Erin White, please,” when the receptionist answered the phone, as though I worked at the next law firm over instead of a community education project. “That was my girlfriend,” I told the secretary the first time Chris called. “Sorry about her greeting.” And then, by way of explaining, I told her that Chris was a commercial litigator, which was, in my world, more scandalous than her gender.
In truth, I preferred Chris’s caution. In Philly, when we said good-bye without touching on the crowded train platform, we were the only two people in all the world who could imagine how our morning had begun. Our sex was a deep and arousing secret, a secret that had eased my inhibitions and cleaved me to her far sooner, far more deeply than I had been joined to anyone else.
When I think of my penchant for secrecy—as though it were a preference, a chosen pleasure—I am discomfited by how little I understood of what was really at stake. Chris had a job that, for many reasons, could not be jeopardized, one of the reasons being she had a family who had not entirely accepted her gayness. She was on her own, and had been for a long time. She hadn’t lived at home since she was eighteen. She put herself through law school and when, at twenty-five, she graduated, she moved to New York City and began working the fifteen-hour days she was still working when I met her. She was always afraid of losing her job, despite the fact that she was a star.
Later, much later, when it would become essential for us not to keep secrets, for us to be clear about who we were to each other at all times for the sake of our children, I would see how our honesty lightened every last bit of Chris. How it would change her life.
During those days in Paris, Chris and I didn’t want to see or do many of the same things. At the Louvre I wanted to see The Lacemaker; she wanted to see The Coronation of Napoleon. She wanted to find an Alsatian restaurant she had read about in a Hemingway novel; I wanted to find a crepe stand I had read about in a travel magazine. She wanted to read the plaque at the Place Vendôme; I wanted to walk the labyrinth at Chartes Cathedral. But even if we could not understand each other’s desires, we were enchanted by them, because we were enchanted by each other. Chris walked miles through the Louvre to find that tiny Vermeer of my dreams; I ate blood sausage and sauerkraut for lunch and sat on a bench reading a novel while Chris deciphered Napoleon’s worn invocation. And on a rainy afternoon that Chris surely would have rather spent in a dark bar drinking Cognac and daring me to smoke one more Gauloise Blonde, we took the high-speed train out of Paris to Chartres.
When we got to Chartres we found the labyrinth covered by row after row of chairs so that you could see its faded outline on the stone floor, but you could not walk the circling maze to the four-petaled bloom at its center. I was disappointed. I had secretly hoped that going to Chartres and walking the labyrinth would prove I could have this wild and improbable life, prove that I could rise from a hotel bed, naked and flushed from sex like I had never known with a woman—a woman!—whom I loved as I had loved no one else, and then, a few hours later, walk toward God on a meandering but certain path in one of the oldest Catholic churches in the world. I wanted to stand at the center of that maze and believe in every pleasure, every beauty, every possible union. But now it seemed that Chartes would not grant me this wish; now it seemed absurd that I had even hoped such a thing would be possible.
“Let’s stay anyway,” I said to Chris.
“Sure,” she said. “Let’s go in.”
I wanted to be alone, and so when Chris stopped to look at the paintings in the first alcove, I kept moving into the cathedral, further and further from the light of its enormous doors, its rose window. I spent the afternoon in the cathedral close, walking from one nave, one chapel to the next. As I moved further I was surrounded by what appeared to me as artifacts of seeking, stone and glass and plated gold, all of it arranged to bid miracles. And they buoyed me. As I studied the statues of the saints, their stone faces impossibly expressive, I thought of the men who made them, their rough hands and patience, their tempers and mistakes. Did they pare these saints for love of God or money? For love of God, I decided. And this was the solace of Chartres: that once ordinary men rose from ordinary beds to cut glass and stone into the shape of devotion. Ordinary men who then turned back to the world, happy to see beloved faces around the table, happy to stretch their legs on gray stone streets.
“Are you ready?” Chris asked when I approached her in the narthex, where she had been waiting for me.
I nodded. “Let’s go back,” I said with a smile whose meaning Chris, by now, understood perfectly.
When I returned home from Paris, I told my parents about Chris. They were cautious and kind. My mother asked me if I thought this was a one-time affair, or more of a shift in identity. She was asking me if I was a lesbian now. I told her I hadn’t really thought about it that way, by which I meant I hadn’t thought of how to classify or explain myself, or how she might explain me to her friends and our family.
I hadn’t thought about my relationship with Chris this way because I didn’t want to. I wasn’t interested in a new identity. I didn’t want to be anyone but the girl I had always been, certain of her place in the world and in the culture, which is to say certain of her privilege, her wide range of access. I was blind to the reality that this wasn’t a decision I could make, that no outsider, no matter her race, her money, or her education, could remain inside a culture that didn’t see her as fully human. It would take me years to understand that I sought an impossible and shifting stance: I wanted to move between insider and outsider—straight and gay—as it suited, as I wished.
I wanted everything: to love a woman yet avail myself of the opportunities and status of straight culture; to break the rules of the Church but still feel myself beloved by it. My mother had asked me a simple question. And while I didn’t know it at the time, a decade would pass before I could answer it with any honesty at all.