Free Paris, He Said by Christine Sneed Page B

she depended on Laurent, nor did she feel like fending off the questions she imagined her mother asking, and not for the first time: What are Laurent’s intentions? What are yours? Which classes are you teaching? What? I thought you told us you planned to teach classes at an art school in Paris!
    And whether her parents would be willing to get on a plane together remained to be seen. “You’re in Paris now, Jayne,” said her mother, “living what sounds like a fairy tale. Please stop worrying about us.” At breakfast the next morning, Laurent had said the same thing, adding that she and Stephanie hadn’t lived at home for years anyway, and their parents’ private life really wasn’t any of her or her sister’s business.
    “You say that because you’re divorced,” said Jayne. “But I’m sure Frédéric and Jeanne-Lucie weren’t very happy when you and Anne-Claire announced that you were separating.”
    “No, maybe not, but they knew it was coming. They’d known this for years. I think it was a relief for them, in the end.”
    “I wouldn’t be relieved if my mother left my father,” she said. “I doubt they’d know how to live without each other.” If they did separate, it would probably feel as if some appalling truth about herself or the world had suddenly been revealed. ( All marriages are a mirage, Jayne. Didn’t you already know that? Or, I didn’t give birth to you, honey. We found you alongside the highway in a cardboard box! )
    “They would know how to live, Jayne. They are adults, yes? And they brought two children into the world and provided a good home for you, if I’m not mistaken. I am sure that they could figure out how to move on.”
    “I don’t want them to have to figure it out,” she said, petulant.
    “You want to live in the world as if you were a child,” he said. “But you cannot.”
    “Is it childish to want my parents to stay together?” she asked, her voice rising.
    “No, but expecting them to stay together for your sake is.”
    Once she’d been in Paris for a while, she was sure that she would want to show her parents and sister around the city, lead them to the base of the Eiffel Tower, to the Pont Neuf, to Notre Dame—they were the first Parisian monuments that she had ever seen. M. Keller, her junior high French teacher, had taped posters of those landmarks to his classroom walls. Oui , he was an American, but a Frenchman at heart, and the owner of a Peugeot, he’d proudly announced. He was also well dressed and handsome, and every girl in the room seemed to have a crush on him. “Paris, c’est ma ville préferée du monde entier,” he’d told her class, Jayne listening with smitten attentiveness to this tall man in the blue pinstripe suit, his silk tie green paisley, dizzyingly elegant. She later repeated his words to her mother and apathetic sister. His favorite city in the entire world! It would become her favorite city too, six years later, when she first stepped off the train from Strasbourg at Gare de l’Est, directly onto Parisian earth.
    “Un merveil,” he’d also said, translating it for the students who stared at him dully. “A marvel, mes élèves. A marvel!”
    Now that Jayne lived in Paris, she could see these monuments every day if she walked southeast from the apartment toward the Seine. Whenever she did, she would pause to watch the river traffic, the sound of the boats and rushing water filling her with an unaccountable surge of hopefulness. From the north end of the Pont Alexandre III, she could look across the swift, murky river to the immense golden cupola of the Hotel des Invalides, Napoleon’s remains interred beneath it.
    If she turned to the west, there was the wide, gray traffic-choked expanse of the Champs-Elysées, the unearthly Arc de Triomphe in the near distance, clusters of tourists shuffling over the sidewalks, their heads raised in tired or exclamatory wonder. Sometimes Laurent was with her, his hot, strong hand holding