Free Paris Red: A Novel by Maureen Gibbon Page B

have come. Could have turned and run with me, back down the street. But she did not, and I know that, somewhere in my mind, I have already taken his words to heart.
    He will sleep with one of us, and it will be me.
    He chose me the night he ate cherries from my hand, he chose me the night he sat beside me in the restaurant, he chose me when he held my hand over him, so I could feel his cock.
    He has said he wants us both. Yet each time he has a choice, he chooses me.
    By the time I crawl into bed beside Nise, there is a tiny wall between us that was not there before.
    But things can be like that. You can be so close with a person and still not tell them everything. You can choose not to say something, you can withhold something, you can lie to someone you love. I have known that since I was a child.
    So maybe his words were not poison at all. Maybe it was in me all along.

     

    I t turns out to be the easiest thing.
    It is Sunday, and we sleep in a little. But when we do wake up, the words are ready in my mind to say. I do not have to think them—they are there, ready when I need them.
    “I’m going to go see my mother,” I tell Nise. “I want her to help me with that dress.”
    And as I am saying it, I am picturing myself walking over Canal Saint-Martin, going to my parents’ door. I imagine myself showing my mother my dress, the one whose skirt is salvageable but which needs a new bodice because the old fabric is so threadbare it has holes.
    “If I remake it a little it will at least be good enough for work,” I say, taking it out of the dresser drawer where I have it shoved.
    Nise comes over and looks at it with me. “There’s a lot of good wear in the skirt,” she says. “It would be pretty with a different fabric for the top.”
    Then I picture my mother’s face. I take the trouble to see her in my mind’s eye before I say the next thing. Before I tell the next lie.
    “She’ll know what to do with it,” I say. “For certain.”
    So I am carrying my dress when I leave, when I walk up to the quai. And to be sure, I turn right on the quai, just the way I would if I were going to my parents’ in Popincourt. But instead of walking all the way down to Pont de la Tournelle, I take Pont de l’Archevêché to cut over to la Cité.
    While I’m on the bridge, a flock of starlings flies overhead, and I stop to watch. The flock turns this way and that, here and there, and if one bird strays from the edges of the group, it quickly comes back. I keep looking up in the sky even after they fly on.
    Whatever it is in me that wants and wants—it is as big as the sky and keeps going.

     

    H e said just a little farther north is the Plaine de Monceaux, and that it still feels like a village there—allées lined by trees, farmland, goat paths. But to me even his studio seems like it should be in a village. A window with sixteen tiny panes of glass tops the door, and the door itself is made of rough, wood planks. Ivy overgrows it, and the entire place looks a little tumbled down. I noticed the other day, but now I see it even more clearly. And yet I can also understand why he picked this place. If you wanted to try to get something done, away from other people, this is the sort of spot you would want. I am trying hard to understand what it all means to him because I know that it does mean something.
    Maybe that is how my face looks when he answers the door, as though I am still trying to take things in. Or maybe I just look as unsure as I feel. All I know is that he seems surprised to see me. Surprised, puzzled—something. But he should not be surprised, I think.
    “Where is Denise?” he says when he shuts the door behind me. “Où est ta copine?”
    “I didn’t tell her I was coming.”
    “What did you tell her?”
    “That I was going to see my mother. To do some sewing.”
    He looks at me after I say that, and he seems solemn. Serious. Maybe because I came on my own and it is no longer his fantasy of the