Free It's Not Love, It's Just Paris by Patricia Engel Page B

we’d exchanged, listening and trying to push past their conversation patterns. The way Giada never contributed an original thought, only commenting on those already offered by others. How Dominique, following Loic around with the broken-down look of a circus elephant, was unable to look at a painting without thinking first of its monetary value. Tarentina saw nothing but herself in everything. I showed her the same painting and she launched into a story about her girlhood, the first time she felt a boy’s tongue in her mouth as he pressed against her behind a row of trees at the tennis club.
    I thought that after I’d written enough papers and saved some money, I might buy myself a new dress, but the night of the party, I wore the best old dress I had, a black cotton shift with short sleeves I’d worn only once before, for my college graduation. It was fitted to the body without compromising modesty, hitting below my knees. My mother had made it herself after I’d gone to the stores and couldn’t find anything I liked. Her eyes weren’t so good anymore, but she refused to wear glasses, and I’d watched her hunched over her sewing machine night after night after the rest of the family had gone to sleep, pushing the fabric along, the needle puncturing seams she’d realize were crooked, pulling them out with her teeth, only to start again. With the dress I wore the military boots I inherited at fourteen from my brother Santi, who’dbought them at an army surplus. I took them off only when forced into high heels or in the depths of summer when I traded them for sandals, even though my mother complained they made me look like a member of the FARC.
    Like my mother, I never wore makeup or blow-dried my hair unless it was freezing outside, so I was dressed and ready long before the other girls, who crowded around the bathroom mirrors, taking turns on the one power outlet in the house that wouldn’t combust under hair-dryer voltage.
    Romain and the Far Niente guys were rolling up rugs, pushing furniture against the walls in the grand salon, arranging the bar, while one of Giada’s DJ friends set up turntables and speakers. In the commotion, nobody but me noticed when the bell rang.
    I opened the door to a redhead in a furry blue coat and miniskirt, looking as if she’d walked a long way to get here.
    “I’m here for Loic,” she said, but if he’d been expecting her, he would have told her to use the side entrance to the family wing.
    She wouldn’t tell me her name, so I left her in the foyer and went through the narrow passageway under the stairs and banged on the wall until Loic opened the door, his shirt unbuttoned, damp hair uncombed.
    Later he would tell me her name was Élodie. She was one of his Avenue Foch prostitute friends and came to ask Loic for money to pay the babysitter holding her infant daughter as collateral. But there in the foyer, she only met Loic with the look of a guilty child and stared at me, unwilling to offer a single word until I was gone.
    “Lita, I was supposed to go to the pharmacy to get a medication for my grandmother before it closes. Can you go for me?”
    “Of course,” I said, because Loic wasn’t one to ask for favors. He was one to do them without ever getting thanked.
    It was a jacketless night, the last thread of Indian summer before the blue season of winter arrived to smother us. There were three pharmacies on our stretch of rue du Bac, but Loic told me it was the one on the corner of Varenne with the diet pill display in the window. There were a few other customers in the queue snaking along the wall. Mostly old folks and a young guy ahead of me looking to buy condoms. I thought of Ajax, my favorite encyclopedia of useless knowledge, who, during junior high sex ed class, informed the teacher that condoms were invented in Condom, France.
    The guy ahead of me couldn’t decide what brand he wanted, so the pharmacy lady told him the benefits of each préservatif while I