From the apartment you could easily walk to the Parc the Champs de Mars to hang out and see the Eiffel
tower. Most evenings I just walking the beautiful streets alone and ended up drinking wine in my room
while the rain pounded on my window.
I was very lonely that first time in Paris. I hadn’t met my friend Remi yet and I didn’t make friends with
the other French students so easily. I thought about David a lot although I tried to ban him from my mind.
He called me for more than an hour on my birthday and told me he missed me. I could hear tears in his
voice when he spoke to me on the phone but I didn’t want to comfort him. I said I was having a great time
and lied I would go out with new friends that evening. I told him that I didn’t miss home at all and that I’d
met some cute French guy who I fucked. None of this was true.
I wanted David to feel hurt, to feel betrayed so that he would resent me and we wouldn’t be tempted
around each other anymore. He kept sending me pictures and postcards all the time. I never replied any of
them but kept them stashed away in a box that I took with me when I moved back to the States.
When his birthday came, I pretended to forget again. I send him a text-message the next day. Again, I got
a furious call from Christine who didn’t care about the costs of long distance phone calls when she
wanted to yell at me.
My dad called me every week to ask how things at the Sorbonne were going. I lied and told him I loved
it. He still paid for my expensive apartment in the States, tuition and the apartment I was staying in now;
he deserved to think he was getting some value for his money.
He told me that David was doing ‘charity work’ now. He’d joined this organization who gave legal
advice to people without financial means and who couldn’t afford a ‘real’ lawyer. Dad laughed about it.
He loved his big court cases and clients with money who he played golf with sometimes. He looked down
upon David giving counsel to poor immigrants in a crappy building without air-conditioning. I was proud
of David for doing this, but I didn’t tell my dad.
There’s not a lot else to say about those first two years I spend in Paris. Sure I had some nice times too
and I made some friends eventually but mostly I just worked hard, harder than I ever had worked at
university back home. I stayed at the library until late on a regular basis. When I came most of the times I
was too tired to go out and just watched channel TV5 until I fell asleep. The bad thing about French
television is that they dub everything. Watching movies where the actors have their own voice is a
pleasure I never knew I would appreciate so much.
I didn’t fly back home during my time in France, not even for Christmas. My dad and Juliette came to
visit me twice during my stay in Paris; they brought the twins with them the second time. Juliette was
appalled by how thin I looked by the time she saw me again for the first time after a couple of months. I
never liked cooking and rarely ate regular meals, now that I was studying so much. She and dad took me
to some really nice restaurants so that I would gain a few pounds while they were there.
Christine came for a month during the first summer I was there and then a year later during the fall. I never
invited David although I knew he wanted to come…
During my own holidays I travelled Europe a bit. I went to Italy to see Rome and Florence and went to
Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Barcelona in Spain with a group of students from my year. All those
cities were beautiful in their own way and I regretted that David was not there to share them with me.
I also tried to see a little of France outside Paris, visiting Lyon and finally Bretagne up in the northwest
of France. Most of the time however, each day was a repetition of the day before. I don’t want to sound
too sad, but that’s what it felt like when I was there the first time.
My love life wasn’t blooming like you would expect in the city of love, although I did pick up a guy on
occasion.
The guys weren’t what I had dreamt about when watching those French movies back in New York and
listening to French chansons about love. When I’d thought about French guys back at home I’d imagined
some intense lovemaking and being swooned of my feet with romance and good wine. Instead, the first
Parisian guy I fucked was arrogant, told me that really couldn’t stand ‘Americans’ and stole my favorite
shirt when he left. I never let anyone stay over at my place so he must have been pissed that I kicked him
out in the middle of the night. The second guy I took home, a Belgian exchange student that I’d picked up,
was so shy that he didn’t even want to undress in front of me and only let me fuck him in the dark while he
kept his T-shirt and socks on.
By the end of the second year I was feeling home sick and I longed for stupid American TV shows
without French translations and barbeques with my family…
I came back to the States in early June to take the New York Bar. Once I’d passed the exam I was
admitted to the NY State Bar and I applied in France to take the equivalency exam. This flying back and
forth for the exams took me most of the summer but then finally I could return home.
PART 4 BACK HOME AGAIN
13. Summer at home
When I came home by mid August, David wasn’t there. Christine told me he had a new boyfriend and
he wouldn’t be home for another week. I was aflame with jealousy, but this was what I had wanted after
all when I hadn’t returned any of his postcards or phone calls. I had wanted him to stay away from me and
now he did. He’d been dating this new guy for six months and things were pretty serious between them.
He’d sent Christine photo’s of the new boyfriend and she showed them to me. Like the previous
boyfriend, this one was tall and blond too and it was like looking at a weird picture of myself. The new
guy’s name was Chris and he was handsome in a Ken doll way. In the pictures, he was perfectly dressed
and his white smile gleamed against his sun-kissed skin. I wondered what he saw in David who is messy
and always wore a pair of old black jeans.
“They’re in love,’ Christine gleamed. “It’s so cute.”
“Yeah real cute,” I said and sighed.
Christine was now dating as well. Some rich guy in his impressive car picked her up every night and I
was left with Dad, Juliette and the twins.
When David finally came home to spend the rest of the summer with our family he was really in love
and brimmed with happiness. He greeted me more coolly than he’d ever done and I knew it was payback
time for never answering one of his phone calls or postcards.
At least he’d been smart enough to make amends with the fact that it could never work between us and
allowed himself to fall in love with someone else.
David talked over dinner about the holiday he and his boyfriend had spent in Montreal. The new guy
was Canadian and he’d introduced David to his parents while they were there. Things between them
sounded serious. David showed Christine some more pictures of the two of them on our home computer.
Looking at them made me feel sick. It showed them at the Montreal Jazz festival, drinking beers, listening
to music and holding hands. On other pictures they were relaxing and drinking wine near the waterfront.
Chris had his muscular arm around David’s shoulder and kissed him on one of the pictures.
“You look so cute together,” Christine said and glanced over her shoulder to make sure I wouldn’t say
anything mean.
All the jealousy that was building up inside of me caused me to be really bitchy to David. He did