Free Paris Was the Place by Susan Conley Page A

apartment at eight-thirty and let myself in with my key. I come here. A lot. My special place in Paris. Refuge. Gaird’s in the middle of the living room belting out a song in Norwegian. I’ve never heard him sing before. Luke flashes me a secret look of mock horror from the arm of the couch. Is Gaird drunk? He has a low, lovely baritone that vibrates when he holds the notes too long. He’s a tall man in a black suit with ruddy skin and one of the most coveted people in the French movie business. The apartment feels like a movie set, overflowing with settees and ottomans and pillows. There’s a purple velvet couch and ornate gold wallpaper and a large mural of hound dogs going after a fox, because Gaird is obsessed with anything French that references Versailles.
    Andreas is also on the couch with his partner, Tommy, smiling. There’s a woman across from him, whom I’ve never met, wearing incredibly high wedge heels. The song sounds like a Pete Seeger melody. Andreas claps. He’s also Norwegian. He must know what he’s doing. Then we all clap. Gaird sings: “Oh, I know of a land far away in the north, with a shimmering strand …” Then he bows. “Happy birthday, Andreas!”
    His scotch is on the top of the grand piano, and when he reaches for it, he sees me in the hall. “I am still having a love affair with my home country, Willie.” He takes my hand and kisses it. “We have been waiting for you.” He speaks English in a singsong accent that ends on a high note and leads me into the dining room. He and Luke have done a seating chart for dinner—they always do. Tonight they’ve placed me between Andreas and Tommy. I put out my hand and say hello to the woman in heels before I sit. Her name is Clarisse. She says she’s a painter at the Sorbonne. I’m relieved not to have to talk to her during the meal and offer myself up to her explicitly.
    Tonight I just want to listen. I talk all day in the classrooms.Andreas has curly black hair like a mop on his head. He wears clear plastic glasses. One of his eyes is green and the other is pale blue. I try not to watch his eyes while he talks, because then I think too much about whether they’ll ever turn the same color. And they never do. He asks me about the asylum center. For him I’ll answer anything. He’s one of those generous listeners who makes me feel like I’m sharing instead of burdening him. He’s calm and self-composed and absorbs everything I say about Rajiv’s connection to the center and the backlog at the immigration courts.
    Luke pours red wine and Gaird brings out a white platter from the kitchen with something he calls
dyresteg
on it. “In English, please, Gaird?” I smile.
    “Venison.” Andreas pats my hand. “Roast venison with a goat cheese sauce.”
    “It is straight out of my mother’s recipe book” Gaird says. His parents owned a commercial dock in Drammen Harbor in Norway. He left after high school and rarely went back. In 1986, he parachuted over the Torne River into Finland. Last December he invited Luke to sit in the plane’s cockpit and watch him drop out over Lemvig and pass over the Danish fjords. Luke called me when he’d made it safely back to Paris. “I live with a man who likes to open the plane door at ten thousand feet and jump out. People who fly are crazy. Stay away from them.” Then Luke got the flu.
    The woman named Clarisse has a sweet, knowing smile and perfect jaw-length black hair. She says, “Thank God for meat. We used to eat venison growing up in Switzerland. Sometimes it was all we had on the farm to get us through winter.”
    “This reminds me,” Luke says, “of the food in Innsbruck, where Gaird was foolish enough to try to ski on the full moon.”
    “First he had us cross entire glaciers in our sneakers,” Andreas laughs.
    “We’d taken a tram halfway up.” Gaird waves his hand in the air dismissively. “Then we began the push through the new snow toward the hut.”
    “At one point I was