After a month together by the sea, Cato’s doctor told him that as long as he was cautious about what he exposed himself to, he would be strong enough to return to Paris with me. We stayed up late one night watching snow fall over the city in frosty chunks, covering tree branches, spreading over the garden in a marzipan sheet. In the morning, trains were delayed, busses stalled, businesses closed, the most dedicated commuters wrestled through four or five inches of pristine snow turning it into a slushy charcoal river. It was the perfect day to stay hidden, but Cato had run out of his medication, and because the pharmacy doors were all still shut on our block, he decided to go to his father’s place for his spare inhaler. Curious, I decided to go with him.
I was surprised he didn’t have his own key to his father’s apartment. The butler opened the door to him, and I followed Cato down the corridor to his bedroom, ignoring his father’s voice rattling through a phone call in another room. The machines were gone but it still looked as impersonal as a hotel room. I sat on the edge of the bed while he pulled a small box from one of the dresser drawers, went into the bathroom, and a few mechanical pumps and coughs later, returned to me with watery eyes, cheeks full of color, not the powdery complexion he’d woken up with in my arms that morning.
“Don’t you want to say hello to your father while we’re here?”
“He’s busy. Another time.”
But when we were nearly out the door, the old man called from behind us.
“Felix, why must you pass through this house like a ghost?”
I turned slowly and there he was, that stiff figure of a man feigning a smile, a mask of warmth, as his eyes fell on me beside his son.
“You don’t stop to greet your father? What’s become of your manners, my son?”
I thought they would at least hug, but they only shook hands like colleagues.
“Papa, this is Li—” Cato started to introduce us but his father interrupted.
“Yes, yes. How nice to see you again.”
I smiled as he gave me his hand to shake as well. “Hello.”
“Miss, would you mind excusing us so that I may speak to my son alone for a moment, yes?”
“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” Cato muttered.
“Not a problem.” I tried to sound as airy as possible. “I’ll wait in the hall.”
I heard a television in another apartment on the landing, dogs barking, a woman singing to herself in Spanish as she swept the marble floor in front of a doorway on the floor below. It was a melody I knew from my childhood. I went down a few stairs until I was on the same landing as the woman. She noticed me watching her and smiled.
“Excuse me,” I said in Spanish, “what’s that you’re singing?”
“Los Cisnes,” she said, and the song came back to me at once; The Swans.
“My mother sang that to my brothers and me when we were children,” I said.
“Really? Such a sad song?”
“I never understood why she loved it so much, but she says when she left her country all she took with her were her songs.”
“Where in Colombia are your parents from?” She could tell my accent was half a generation removed. I told her Bogotá and she told me she was from Tolima.
“Are you looking for work?” she asked, pointing to her doorway. “La Patrona is giving birth soon and needs a nurse. I only cook and clean these days. I’m too old to care for a baby.”
“No, thank you.” I didn’t want to be rude.
“Maybe your mother will be interested?”
“She’s in the States but thank you again for offering.”
“So what are you doing around here?”
“I’m waiting for my boyfriend.”
She watched me, suspicion spreading across her face.
“You’re one of Antoine de Manou’s girls, aren’t you? That’s where you just came from?”
But she didn’t wait for me to answer.
“You should be ashamed of yourself. And you’re stupid on top of it! Everyone knows those men have ways of making girls like you disappear. You’re one in a million. One less of you and nobody will notice.”
“No, you’re mistaken,” I tried, but she took one hand off her broom and approached me by the banister, grabbing my wrist.
“You’re going to get yourself in trouble, girl. Now get out of here and don’t let me see you around here again! Get out of here!”
I fled her yelling and went down the rest of the stairs to the courtyard, wondering what sort of girls she meant and what Antoine was up to with them.
When Cato came out to the courtyard a few minutes later and we started back toward the house, I said as cautiously as I could, “The maid on the floor below your father’s place asked me if I was one of your fathers ‘girls.’”
“Did she?” He was hardly impressed.
“What did she mean?”
“She was probably just looking for gossip.”
I waited a few moments to see if he’d say more but he didn’t.
“So, how did it go with your father?”
“Fine,” he shrugged. “Normal, for him.”
“He doesn’t like that you’re with me, does he?”
He looked up to the sky, then back to me, sighing. “Are you asking me for a lie?”
“Never.”
“No, he doesn’t like it. He’s an old man with old ideas about the world. But I’m an adult. I do what I want. What he thinks doesn’t matter to me.”
I was unnerved by the idea that I’d precipitated some sort of quiet rebellion and felt pity for Antoine because, in spite of his bitterness, my Cato was not his Felix, yet his Felix was his only son and all he had.
I ran into Romain in the washroom sometime after two in the morning. We stood side by side talking to each other through the mirror as I scrubbed my face and he brushed his teeth with an inch of toothpaste on his finger. He was shirtless, wearing his black work pants low, the folds of his hip bones exposed. Giada was the one who told me he never wore underwear. He said he’d finished work late and had to open early for the lunch shift tomorrow and didn’t feel like going all the way home to Gobelins for just a few hours. Tonight, he was crashing on Camila’s floor.
“You haven’t come by to read Martin Eden in a while.”
“Oh, you miss me?” He pinched my arm. “It’s okay if you miss me, Lita. You can admit it.”
I rolled my eyes at him.
“I’m kidding. I’ve been busy and”—he pointed to Cato’s shirt on me—“I know you’ve been busy, too.”
I splashed my face with water while he put his mouth to the faucet, rinsed, and spit out onto the porcelain. I started back toward my room but Romain tugged my sleeve.
“Why don’t you wait a bit?”
“Wait for what?”
“Keep me company while I smoke my last cigarette of the night.”
I wrapped my bare legs in a towel and sat on the heater while Romain sat by my feet, took two cigarettes to his lips and lit them at once, before handing me mine. I couldn’t stop myself from telling him about my encounter with the woman with the broom.
“So she thought you were a whore? So what? That’s not a tragedy.”
“It’s not the first time it’s happened in Paris,” I said. “But I just can’t shake the disgust on that lady’s face.”
“You want my opinion, Lita? You know I always have one.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Your problem is you take every bullshit moment as a defining event of your life. You let everything stick to you. You’ve got to learn to float, be above the tide, you know?”
“You’re saying I should be more like you?”
“If you need a role model, feel free.”
I took a few drags with him watching me.
“I have a question for you, Romain. Something I’ve been wondering about.”
“I am at your service.”
“How is it so easy for you to be with different girls all the time without feeling anything?”
“Who says I don’t feel anything?”
“I just assumed.”
“I feel things. I feel them then, in the moment, but when it passes, I let go.”
“You don’t get attached to the person?”
“Look, people are who they are whether I fuck them or not. Some I care for, some I don’t.”
“You don’t think sleeping with someone is … intimate?”
He stared at me so long I almost regretted asking.
“Lita, I’m not fucking you right now but I think this moment between us can be considered what you, a girl who likes to label things, would call ‘intimate.’”
“We’re friends. It’s different.”
“Is it?”
There were footsteps in the hall. Romain and I automatically rubbed our cigarettes into the windowsill and flicked them out to the roof. By the time he shut the window Camila was in the doorway, wrapped in a pink silk robe puddling around her feet.
She didn’t look that surprised to see us there but glared at Romain.
“I thought you said you were exhausted.”
“I am. I’m just catching up with my friend here.”
He leaned in and kissed me on each cheek before following her back to her room, leaving me alone on the heater. I waited a few minutes longer, studying my reflection in the windowpane, the same face, the same girl I’d always been, before crawling back into bed with Cato, who hadn’t noticed I was gone.