She Matters (11 page)

We were thrilled to use our French in real conversation. Maybe we'd be mistaken for French.

“Anyone know the word for ‘pillow'?”

“
Comment-dit-on,
‘Who cares?'” We laughed.

“Ça m'est égal,”
said Miriam. It was the first time she spoke. She was our exotic, living in a
pension
rather than with a family. “You're so lucky,” said everyone but Linda, who liked her guardians. They had cousins for her to meet, train trips they'd take her on. Will wanted to tell me about jazz, some Paris–New Orleans fraternity, while Miriam, on my other side, was rude about him in chaotic, vernacular French he couldn't follow. She leaned back in her chair, one skinny leg snapped over the other. With a cool, knowing purity, she was bitchy, which made her seem gutsy. We stayed out till three and I took a taxi home. I had not passed enough days here to feel money's value yet, to understand how soon it would be spent. The Haitian driver told me my accent was good. He smiled all the way to my neighborhood, knowing something but not telling me.

• • •

This was our group. Miriam and I would meet the others at galleries or for coffee after classes, but if I discovered a little park, a new plaza, I phoned only her, cultivating privacy. “I've got to show you this perfect place,” I'd say. I put the franc Madame expected in the dish next to the phone. Or Miriam called me. “You're not going to believe this,” she would say, “something else named for Victor Hugo.” I'd jump in on the crest of her laughter so that we'd both
be laughing the same way, both saying “Him,
again
!” We met on benches, my tired heart glad as she came across the raked gravel of the Jardin de Luxembourg. The gardens are beautiful! Why don't they have
gardens
in the States! She would give me the kiss on each cheek, take up my hand in hers, our bodies finding rest. We shared our information, tucked it away together, furtive. When she came to my place the first time she said, “There's me,” and pointed at the group photo from the first days in the small city, that staging ground. The entire group was arrayed in tiers on the front steps of the college, forty helpless recruits. I was standing next to Linda, who had been my friend, or at least necessary. Three months later I could hardly remember her. Miriam and I studied pictures taken at the châteaux and the vineyards, at the roadside picnics, half our tour bus nosed into the frame, and Miriam was in them, sometimes not far from me, slim and straight in her gray trench coat. I hadn't noticed her before Paris, and even that first rude incarnation now seemed ghostly and gone, someone else, because now she was my
intime
. She liked it when I played with her hair, liked to whisper to me, and with her I felt indomitable, awake to every city surprise.

We both had boyfriends at home, fading from relevance. They had the same birthday, that must mean something, about us being friends. We both attended universities near Boston. We shared packets of chocolate biscuits as we walked, split long sandwiches of ham and Boursin, agreeing without a word on which sunny spot to choose, which bench. She knew a restaurant near school where you ate the meal
du jour,
a plate set in front of you. You paid almost nothing. Each of us had wine in a short, clouded glass. We flirted with two foreign boys who sat nearby, asked the one to teach us words in Dutch and the other to name German towns. They loved us, and we loved that. They wanted to see us again
and, smiling, we walked away from them. I knew the weeknight soups at her
pension,
and she knew my uncharitable thoughts about ungainly, adolescent Hugues. Nasty secrets were glue. Throwing ourselves into the pronunciation of
Hugues
was glue. Miriam lent me
Talking Heads: 77,
which became my catechism, salvation in repetition; so she took me to see
Stop Making Sense,
which seemed to play all over Paris, any neighborhood likely to have a theatre where we could see David Byrne at 14h00, at 16h20, whenever we decided we wanted that. We must have seen it twelve times, our trance.

Eventually, exploring with Miriam, I came to know what I needed to know—the nearby
patisseries,
the metro stops. We liked
chaussons aux pommes,
we liked
pain aux raisins
. We carried bottled water and stamps, knew where to get cheap omelettes in places where they let you stay at your table. We came to feel natural as the grocer handed over plums in a thin paper bag. I bought cheese by the half kilo, grabbed my stiff metro ticket as the machine spit it out, pressed in the code for my building each evening. I no longer heard the clop-clop-clop in the late-night street made by my footsteps as belonging to someone else. Eventually, conferring with my confidante, I figured the age of each person in my French family, and that Hugues was embarrassed like an eighth grader by women, and that Marie-Christine snuck out every night with her red scarf knotted around her neck to go to her fiancé's. I knew to leave the butter on the table. I knew the family did have a country house and that they wouldn't invite me.

• • •

On my tight cot one night Miriam and I hustled and giggled about Mme de Chambord. Sprays of laughter kept shooting up. “Shh, shhhh!” The center welt in the bed forced our bodies, our
inside hips. We held each other's faces, her skin soft, like nothing else in the house. Our fingers in each other's hair, we were kissing light kisses, the edges of our mouths, until we kissed fully, the taste a stronger version of her familiar breath. Her tongue was a tiny point, sharp and fast. I felt her breasts against mine, and our yield, and thought,
Oh.
I raised the edge of her sweater and grazed her belly with my cheek. I didn't know what I was doing, but I ran my hand down the leg of her jeans, and up, and over the heat between her legs, tapping my fingertips on the surface of the denim. Like that, she came. Like that. I didn't know it was possible. I could make her come so easily, or at least she made me feel it was my doing. And with that deft tip of her tongue inside me, I came too.

In daylight we were established friends,
les deux copines,
but a new demand crept in. I had to account for my time, hours not spent together. “What did you say about me?” she'd ask, head cocked. She would be almost smiling, not friendly. We agreed the sex was a secret, which made it easy to ignore, until we were alone in her room, the lock turned quietly; or back at my family's apartment, hands over our mouths as we came, Madame battering the evening meal in the kitchen next door. Since we maintained our identities as straight girls with boyfriends in the States, we had no problem when those boys visited. We pretended to forget how we'd be together after they'd gone, talking at their expense, coming at their expense.

No longer companion, moviegoer, art student, Miriam was the person who made me come. I needed this velvet hold more than anything, its crucial addition to make the rigid facades and planned gardens friendly. Out of bed, she turned petty over plans, whiny when she tired at the Musée de Cluny. She had to be cajoled at each turn, could brighten as soon as she saw a slice of
tarte
.
Once, as we walked across the Pont des Beaux Arts, the Académie Française spread wide and white ahead of us, overornamented and exhausting, I turned my head to look at the water, and she drew in and cupped my ear to sing, “I've got a girlfriend who's better than that . . .” I was sick of
Stop Making Sense.
I knew I was wasting my precious months of Paris. I was wasting them standing at the turnstile in the metro, arguing over which stop we'd get off at, arguing over how long I spent on the phone with my boyfriend. We argued about disappointments that hadn't even happened yet.

I wished she'd go away, wished that I could have more friends, blend into groups instead of being sequestered, except I couldn't give up the skin, the tight tongue, the sating kisses. Our hands warmed inside unsnapped jeans as we lay in the dark. The secret wasn't lively anymore. We'd been through the stories of firsts, knew every opinion formed in France. I wanted a graceful extrication, but her whine grew shriller, her grip tightened. It was too much work to resist, and too lonely.

• • •

That summer, in the States a month, I missed French. Disoriented, I couldn't get interested in bland, local rules, things I'd known for years. My boyfriend and I moved in together, a first-floor one-bedroom in a town on the green line. But with Miriam, I had tamed a whole country! I missed the ritual of ordering coffee, school bags at our feet, the cubes of sugar plucked out of the bowl. I missed how we measured rudeness in the waiters and targeted the strangeness of others so we could ignore our own. The cigarettes outside cinemas at dusk, we'd done that, smoked, the stately blue box passed between us.
“T'as un feu?”
we liked to repeat, pretending absolute ease with the colloquial. My boyfriend was irritated when I made obnoxious puns in French, and I was
irritated with him, his failure to laugh Miriam's short, derisive laugh, his inability to be
new
. As we had sex, I thought of her small, light body and of her breasts. “He doesn't even care about the Talking Heads,” I told her on the phone, wondering if I loved him. I was homesick for the bite of her saliva.

At the end of the summer, I flew to North Carolina, and she was waiting for me in the airport.
“Salut,”
we said, but it was wrong. I was not myself. We were not each other. Never mind. At the house, she introduced me to her parents, and later we used the dark of her bedroom, trying not to be heard again, blocking out the footsteps and chair gratings from nearby rooms. “Remember Mme de Chambord,” we said when we paused, “remember the
pension
's fatty soups,” our war stories. The next morning, she cooked breakfast with her mother, waiting for her to turn away so we could exchange cagey glances. As she slipped food onto my plate, she bent and gave my shoulder a silent kiss, and I shivered it off. I thought we'd be bold with our many willful identities, but we were two little girls, costumes abandoned. “I'm going to take Susanna to that place?” she told her mother. To me, she said, “It's the best coleslaw in the whole wide world.”
“D'accord,”
I said.

She drove the blacktop, and as I looked out the window I couldn't see anything to notice, this American coma of dense, indistinguishable foliage, compared to the vital hues and edges of Paris, the careful forms, the exquisite plans, the shining architecture of conquering ambitions, where we, too, had stood out as vital and exquisite and symmetrical. The coleslaw was served in a scoop, as big as a baseball, sweet when I expected vinegar. In the afternoon she took me to her favorite spot on the kudzu-lined river.

“
What
is it?”

“Kudzu.” She drew the word out a long ways, her native pronunciation.

“How do you spell that?”

We drifted on black inner tubes, one of us in an orange bikini I can picture vividly without remembering to whom it belonged. The pitch and throb of crickets worked on me like a sleeping spell, and when we got back to the house I noticed mud and scratches on my hands and legs, presumably from my scramble up the bank, as I'd followed after Miriam, after the fray of her shorts against her tan legs. Both evenings, air conditioners at work, we watched baseball on TV with her parents before we excused ourselves to go down to the basement. They were Astros fans.

As I left, Miriam's mother gave me two pillowcases she had embroidered with my blue initials in thread still tight twenty-five years on. It's her I think of when I use them—the genial mother. At the start of senior year a few weeks later, I went to Miriam's dorm for a night. Because we'd done it before, because we were in the same bed, we had sex. I went down on her, she went down on me, but it offered no rescue this time, possessed no daring. I was thinking about the bookshelf my boyfriend wanted in the hall; I wanted it in the bedroom. She seemed listless, too. We no longer shared circumstances, our unsustainable French identities unuseful, cast down. We might never have met, or, if meeting—possible in Boston's collegiate stew—we might not have liked each other. After graduation Miriam left for the Peace Corps and fell in love with a Senegalese man, and that was the last I heard from her, a long, descriptive letter of dense pages about her wonderful new village in Africa and the wonderful strangers who had taken her in.

A
nnabelle was fierce about what was right. Letters were right, and invitations were right, and confidences and emergencies shared. She was soldierly about friendship: It must be like this, it will be like this. She sat me on her settee and leafed through the gilded album of pictures from five months before, explaining the Southern traditions, the rituals of weddings, the habits of her family. She was the third Annabelle in four generations on her mother's side. I went along, pleased to have instruction. She had a way of letting me know I had the right things coming to me.

Here's how we met: my boyfriend Jason and I were fairly new tenants in a modest Boston apartment building, slightly run-down, affordable. We noticed the couple at the U-Haul. Usually, we heard arguments in front of our living-room window, which was eye level with the sidewalk. The neighborhood was like that, a bit rough, and scraps of yelling would drift in, the sounds of car brakes, mad kids, doors slammed, so at the sight of two healthy people standing close together and smiling, we paid attention. He towered over her, but—their hair the exact same brown and their telegraphed understanding so complete—at first we thought they were brother and sister. A few weeks later the woman and I said hello by the mailboxes. I was on my way out, but I'd been hoping to run into her and we stopped a minute. She said they were newlyweds. I must have mentioned my birthday. The next week,
on the morning I turned twenty-one, I opened my front door to find on the floor a tin of muffins with a tiny pot of jam. The note on heavy cardstock read