Séraphine said young women are most beautiful between the hours of seven and nine in the evening, freshly made up and perfumed with hope for the night ahead. She loved when the girls popped in to see her on their way to a soirée because she said it reminded her of her youth, and she’d have us pull photo albums from her armoires so she could show off the exquisite custom-made dresses she wore during Vichy times that made her irresistible to every man but her husband.
That night, all of us girls were expected at a party hosted by Florian Minos, a Greek-German painter who was also Maribel’s teacher and recent lover. He was not married but living for twenty years with a Catalan dancer with her own flamenco revue in Pigalle. Florian was a local celebrity and his summer-end parties, legendary. Everyone knew him, including Séraphine, who first met him in the sixties when he was just a skinny art student in a fisherman’s cap trying to crash her and Théophile’s cocktail parties. Back then Florian made a living painting commissioned nudes for society ladies to gift their husbands or lovers, which was the fashion. He’d regularly bed his clients, too, which Séraphine said was an easy way to earn favors in this town.
The other girls finished primping, modeling potential outfits for one another in the hall along our bedrooms, short filmy dresses and shimmery heels as if still summering on the Riviera, while I went downstairs to visit with Séraphine. Some people are afraid of old people or just avoid them because they can remind one of death, but I loved them, maybe because I never had grandparents. When I was a kid, our neighbor Abel brought his mother from Amman to live with him, and I’d go over and have tea with her because I enjoyed her stories, even ones about her family surviving bombings and massacres, though I could never keep the invasions straight. She smelled like pistachios and my mother used to send Colombian food over, which made her gassy but I didn’t care. Perla died in her sleep one night and Abel flew her body to be buried in Ramallah alongside her parents because that’s what she always wanted.
Perla had worn tablecloth-looking dresses, shawls, and headscarves, but Séraphine was always groomed, bejeweled, wearing one of her bed coats, and the maids changed the linens and duvet of her bed throne daily as if it were part of her wardrobe.
“Chérie.” Séraphine put down the book she was reading when she saw me in her doorway. “You’d better hurry and get yourself ready or you’ll be late for the party.”
“I am ready.” I was in my nicest blue jeans and a gauzy gray sweater.
“You don’t have something a bit more festive to wear?”
“All my clothes are like this.”
“That’s impossible.” I’d noticed French people love to say stuff is impossible.
She pointed me to the armoire, guiding me toward a tissue paper bundle on the top shelf. I brought it to her and she peeled back the layers, revealing a fuchsia kimono blouse with a black dragon painted across the back. She held it up with her fingertips.
“What do you think?”
I ran my finger over the delicate silk, as light as the tissue it had been wrapped in. “It’s beautiful.”
“It was made for me in Saigon. It’s special but it shouldn’t be a relic. Let’s see it on you.” She handed it to me and pointed me to the dressing screen in the corner of the room.
The blouse fit loosely no matter how tight I cinched the waist belt, and it cut low below my breastbone. I stepped out to show Séraphine.
“Pull your hair from your face, chérie.”
I did and she seemed pleased, clapping her bony hands together, asking me to spin for her several times.
“It suits you. You’ll wear it tonight. But you mustn’t tell the other girls where you got it, especially Tarentina. She’s very jealous about these things.”
“Thank you. I promise I’ll take good care of it.”
She pulled her cigarette case from her bedside table, took a stem for herself, and offered one to me despite the No Smoking rule she advertised to our parents. For decades she’d suffered from what she called a “butterfly heart,” for the frequent fluttery sensation in her chest, a heart that skipped and reset itself. In her old age the leaps were wider, causing an occasional syncope, but she insisted that cigarettes calmed her heart better than pills.
Loic came through her doorway, his wet hair combed back without a part, wearing another variation on his gingham and trousers. Then Gaspard appeared and Séraphine’s face brightened as if he’d fallen from heaven, the difference in how she looked at her two grandsons so evident that I truly pitied Loic, and I’m against pity in all forms.
Until then I’d only caught glimpses of Gaspard around the property or heard his piano-playing in the family wing echo through the house without regard for the hour. So, the piano was all I thought of to make conversation now that we were in the same room and Loic had made our first official introduction. I told Gaspard I thought he played Chopin beautifully. I should have stopped there but stammered that I loved Chopin and even though my father had never heard any classical music until emigrating, he said it was part of the human breath, proof that God exists, which is another one of those things that sounds much better in Spanish, forget about when I tried to translate it to French. My father had a hard time leaving God out of any conversation, always saying He was the head of his board of directors, which I don’t think his accountants appreciated, but my father was a humble man with an excess of faith, and my mother wasn’t too far off, equipping our house with saints on every nightstand, crucifixes over every bed, sewing scapulars into our clothes, a habit she picked up at the convent because it doesn’t hurt to know you’re covered should you die while you’re in the middle of something.
Gaspard didn’t smile. As far as I could tell, he didn’t like people, so I was surprised to learn he would be coming to Florian’s party, too. When I managed to shut myself up, Séraphine asked Loic and me to excuse her so she could speak to Gaspard privately, which I found strange, and when we were alone in the foyer Loic only said, “What can I tell you, Lita? There is always a favorite.”
Six years earlier, a South African resident of the House of Stars disappeared from a group soirée and turned up without her shoes, wallet, and panties on the Cannes Croisette, with no idea how she got there. Loic took the train down to collect her, then, per her parents’ request, put her on a flight home to Durban. As a result, Loic took his guardianship over our outings very seriously. We left for Florian’s party en masse, squeezing two or three of us through each métro turnstile rotation, with Loic taking head counts. As we approached the party, he stopped to point out the golden torch on a concrete island within the traffic of Avenue de New York.
“That’s where we’ll meet if any of us lose sight of the group. You’re not to leave the party without notifying me or one of the others,” Loic said, meeting each of our eyes.
I asked Maribel about the torch because it looked important—a fat flame like the one in Lady Liberty’s grip surrounded by a pod of tourists taking photos and posing by the mound of flowers at its base.
She pointed to the tunnel that ran beneath the torch’s concrete landing.
“Down there is where the princess died.”
We descended the steps from the sidewalk to a converted barge docked along the Seine between a pair of retired Bateaux-Mouches; a kaleidoscope of yellow paper lanterns and holiday lights, a band playing on the top deck as ladies in tiered ruffled flamenco dresses stomped, sang, and clicked castanets. Maribel was already half-drunk from shooting Tarentina’s reserve Leblon cachaça with Giada and Naomi back at the house. She’d changed her outfit seven times before settling on a violet sheath that outlined her braless breasts and willowy frame courtesy of a dual addiction to Marlboro Reds and a spiced tomato puree her parents sent from Madrid by the crate. She’d already slept with Florian a dozen or so times, and Tarentina told her that should be enough to take the mystery away, but she was still nervous, even frightful, to see him. She gripped my hand as we crossed the drawbridge onto the boat. From her panic I expected a real stallion, but the guy who sliced through the crowd to meet us was older than my father, with a square head and patch of silver grass for hair, his skin lined and gray. He wore a batik sarong and a silk blouse that hung like a curtain around his protruding belly. When he saw Maribel, shy yet hungry eyed, he pulled her off my elbow and into his arms, bellowing, “Welcome to my kingdom,” from behind her shoulder.
I’ll never understand why people admire an exuberant personality when it’s the kind I trust least of all, but the others were captivated by Florian’s sultan persona, too, and quickly dissolved into the party.
New politics emerged on Florian’s boat—the laws of the sea, I suppose. Until then I’d hardly ever seen Dominique and Loic speak to each other, but here they were holding hands, leaning into each other, Dominique’s eyes doubling in circumference as she watched Loic point to something across the river. Giada described theirs as a long history of attraction, but Loic always halted before it went very far, so it was more like a long history of rejection, with Dominique offering up love like a paid vacation and Loic saying he’d rather stay home.
I edged about the crowd alone, spying my housemates throughout. Some of them saw me as I drifted through the tributaries of laughter and conversation but none waved me over to join them. Tarentina found her place by the bar among a group of male admirers, wandering from one end of the boat to the other for a change of view with the boys following faithfully like goslings. Giada hiked up her skirt and joined the dancing girls on the top deck. Naomi, without Rachid, who was training that night for an upcoming boxing match, defaulted to a cluster of American preppies from her school, and Camila hooked up with her crew of South American socials who didn’t speak to anyone who hadn’t grown up with bodyguards and been driven to school in a bulletproof chauffeured car.
Saira and Stef found refuge in a quiet corner of the boat, talking into each other’s eyes. They intrigued me the most. According to the BBC, Saira’s father was about to be charged with war crimes, so you can imagine the guy knew a thing or two about intimidation, but that hadn’t deterred Stef from being with Saira. She was tall, elegant, and fine boned with wide-set eyes and dark skin. He was a short, thick, red-haired, and peach-flushed native of Bruges with a port-wine stain like a handprint around his neck. I liked watching them together, witnessing the daily bread of their love, evenings spent watching stupid shows like Starmania or Nulle Part Ailleurs and cooking for each other in our dingy kitchen; that oasis state of certainty that the person you love loves you in return.
Maribel found me alone by the railing. I thought she’d come to keep me company, but it was just to tell me she was going with Florian to his bedroom on the deck below, even though his partner, Eliza, was on the deck across from us, twirling her arms along to the guitars of the Rasputin-looking leather-vested musicians.
“Keep it a secret,” she smiled. “I’m only telling you in case I get murdered.” A weird thing to say considering the deep crowd and murky water around us made the party on the barge an easy place to kill someone and get away with it.
I was one of the first off the boat when the police later arrived to break up the party, waiting for the others by the pile of wilting flowers and limp teddy bears at the foot of the golden torch.
A long-limbed guy dressed like a ninja graffitied the stone wall behind the torch with a fat black marker.
“Are you lost?” I heard someone say.
I thought it was the ninja, but when I turned I noticed the voice had come from someone standing on the other side of the flame. In the shadows I couldn’t make out a face.
“I’m waiting for friends,” I said with an eye on the tide of partygoers rising from the dock to the street. Loic and Dominique were among them, and behind them, Tarentina, who turned out to be old friends with the vandal, running straight into his arms squealing, “My darling Sharif Zaoui! Defacing Paris as usual!”
They chatted as the rest of us gathered. After checking in with Loic, some of the girls peeled off with late-night plans of their own, but the five of us left started on the long walk home with Loic. It was after two, the métro was closed, the Noctambus that stopped by the big nightclubs didn’t pass this way, long lines had already formed by all the nearby taxi stands, and Saira had given her personal driver the night off on the one night we could have used his services.
We were halfway across Pont Alexandre when I realized Sharif and his companion who’d asked if I was lost were walking behind me with Tarentina. When he saw me look back, the friend pushed forward, and then, just as we came to the end of the bridge, he was beside me.
“Why are you following me?” A stupid question but I couldn’t take it back.
“I’m not following you,” he said, smiling. “We’re going in the same direction.”
He wasn’t beautiful. People threw the word around like a rumor but I never did. It was a term more foreign to me than any other. My parents never referred to anyone as beautiful. When my classmates called me ugly, my mother told me beauty was an empty, made-up thing, but I knew it had to be worth something because Jesus and his army of saints always look like movie actors. I never understood the alchemy of allure or how some people get a reputation for being beautiful. My brother Santiago would say fantastically beautiful women never look as good the second time you see them, and a moderately pretty girl has the chance of growing more beautiful by the day. But I only came to understand beauty in school, through the principals of art dictated by scientists and masters like Da Vinci; symmetry, contours that capture light, balance and form—like the city of Paris itself, a perfect spiral of arrondissements, every park, bush, and tree lined and framed.
The boy walking next to me that night had none of those things going for him. One might say he was in the family of handsome, but askew, unkempt, with a marbled complexion like Paris fog, one green eye a bit larger than the other, one sideburn longer than the other, and brown hair that looked as if he’d cut it himself. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. My mother cut her own hair and ours, too, but his looked like it was cut while he was driving or frying eggs at the same time. His jeans and sweatshirt were too big for him, and with his hands thrust in his pockets he looked like he was carrying a weapon. He was as tall as I was, maybe an inch or two taller, but it was deducted by his slouch. His smile was misaligned. I could tell his teeth had never been fixed and thought of my own messy grin, twisted and concaved until shrouded in braces at eleven. Santi and I each wore them for years, and our parents, who’d been deprived of dentistry most of their lives, proud they could finally afford them, decided to fix their own neglected teeth, too.
Somewhere around Les Invalides, we stopped at a tiny flower box of a hotel so Naomi could beg the concierge to let her use the toilet. While we stood around on the sidewalk waiting for her, Tarentina declared that we should continue the party at the House of Stars and invited Sharif and his friend to join us. Sharif agreed on both their behalf.
It was late. There were few cars on the street. I didn’t say a word and neither did Sharif’s friend as we continued down boulevard Saint Germain toward the house, sometimes drifting one before the other, sometimes walking as a pair at an identical pace. I kept track.
Conversations in the House of Stars were a mishmash of dialects and linguistic collisions, flip-flops between French and Italian and Spanish, then to English to neutralize confusions, sometimes all in the same sentence. You’d think with so many of us speaking different languages there would be gaps in our communication, but it only expanded the banter. On the walk back from the party that night, Maribel revealed that Florian said that with her he’d felt a fléchazo, an arrow’s shot to the heart, which did not translate directly, and the closest evocative alternate we came up with was coup de foudre, because love at first sight is long-winded and corny in comparison, and Tarentina theorized that monolingual English-speakers are thus long-winded and corny due to their verbal confinement because people can only experience emotions for which their language already has a name.
We convened in her bedroom with its own lounge area full of Moroccan pillows brought back from her frequent Marrakech holidays with the Musician, and ottomans surrounding a low table covered in liquor bottles and ashtrays. Sharif and Tarentina shared an ottoman and a joint while I kept to the edge of a lumpy purple sofa next to Maribel and Naomi. The couples—Loic and Dominique, and Saira and Stef—took to the floor.
Sharif’s friend turned out to be his cousin, Cato, which Loic alerted “is not a French name.”
“My given name is Felix.”
“I think nicknames are a farce,” Tarentina shot back with an eye on me. “A Danish guy once called me Tina and I rammed my mobile into his crotch for taking liberties.”
She threw her head back with laughter, one of her moves for flirting with the whole room, and everyone else laughed, too. But I felt Cato’s eyes fall my way.
Sharif said his father was Moroccan, which is why he had an Arab name, but his mother would call him Serge in public and within certain circles. Depending on the company, he’d play the part of the little French boy or the little Maghreb son.
“What does she call you now?” Naomi asked.
“She doesn’t call me anything. She’s dead.”
Everyone fell quiet, so Sharif told us the story of his parents’ meeting in “quintessential French form, at beach resort in Agadir.” She was a twenty-two-year-old university student on holiday with friends and he was a guitarist on the entertainment staff. Some girls exchanged glances and let out nervous, confessional laughter.
“You see,” Sharif mocked them. “It’s a common story.”
I looked to his Cato to see his reaction and saw his eyes were already on me, looking for mine.
The night ended around four. Those of us who remained left to our rooms, while Sharif pressed up to Tarentina in her doorway, but she pointed him out with a finger to his chest.
Cato waited for Sharif by the top of the stairs across from my room.
“It was nice to meet you,” I said as I unlocked my door and stepped inside.
“Same to you.”
I had an instinct the moment could be unfolded and pushed myself to say more.
“Do you live nearby?”
“No, I live on the coast, a few hours north, but I’m staying on rue Vaneau for now.”
That wasn’t more than two or three blocks away from Séraphine’s.
“Are you on vacation?”
He shook his head. “I came for a funeral. This morning.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” I felt like an idiot for asking.
“It’s okay. It was my grandfather. He was one hundred and two. He was always complaining that he was bored with life. Nobody was as surprised as he was that he lived so long.”
Sharif made his way down the hall toward us, giving a final glance back to Tarentina, but she had her boys she gave into and others she preferred to keep simmering. Cato’s eyes didn’t leave me as Sharif started down the stairs ahead of him. I waved good-bye and slowly closed the door between us but didn’t step away until I heard their steps fade into the foyer below and the creaky house doors push open and lock shut behind them.