It's Not Love, It's Just Paris Read Online Free PDF Page A

finally, when Abel paid for him to transfer to college in New York. Daniel wanted to marry young, as both our parents had, though at nineteen I told him I wanted to wait, to know myself better, to build a life of my own before merging it with someone else’s. But he’d insisted there was nothing I wanted to do on my own that we couldn’t do together and that we were already practically family—Abel and my parents had adopted each other in exile and spent every holiday together. He believed that was enough. Eventually Daniel’s parents started pressuring him to go back to Amman and leave me behind.
    He didn’t know my marrying him would not have been without controversy. My parents tolerated our premature romance because they’d known Daniel since he was a child. They understood and trusted Abel’s influence; they could
all
keep an eye on us andchase him off if he ever became too much trouble. But my older brother, Santi, warned that if I married Daniel now or ever, our inherited culture, which hung by a second-generation thread, would fade to a more convenient English. Paternal heritage would dominate because Santi said patriarchy always wins, and I, as a daughter, needed to marry a full-blood Colombian like our father or at least an hijo de La Gran America, like us, with a foot in two lands, the product of our parents’ great migratory experiment.
    Santi held a practical policy on romance and wouldn’t date a girl he wasn’t willing to marry if she happened to become pregnant. I sometimes wished I could be that way. Especially when Abel told me Daniel was engaged to a Kuwaiti girl who’d been selected and endorsed by his parents because she came from a respectable Maronite family. Then I received a letter from Daniel saying he didn’t really want to marry her even though she didn’t have problematic ambitions like mine. He swore he’d love me into the next life. He swore we were
eternal
. I only wrote back, “Fuck your eternal,” because I can be very mean when I make the effort, especially to people I love.
    Maribel held her lighter to the hand-rolled tobacco stump on her lips.
    “Don’t worry, Lita. There’s a collective amnesia that sets in after a few weeks in this city. If there
is
somebody, you’ll forget him soon enough along with everything else that came before. How long are you here for anyway?”
    “A year.”
    “Just one year?” Naomi was incredulous. “What’s the point in coming if only for a year?”
    “She can always change her mind,” Dominique insisted. “That’s what I did. And now I’m on my third with no plans of leaving.”
    “I’ve got to go back home in June,” I said.
    “It’s easy to get a visa renewal. My father’s got a good friend at the American embassy. Remind me to put you in touch,” Camila offered, as if that were the problem.
    “It’s the agreement I made with my family,” I said, which left the others staring at me. “I have to go back.”
    I was grateful when Saira finally spoke.
    “I’m going to Avenue Montaigne for some shopping this afternoon. Anyone want to join me?”
    Giada and Dominique said they would. Tarentina took over, talking about her last trip to Marrakech with the Musician and how she’d run into a Swedish girl who lived in the House of Stars years earlier in the middle of Djemaa el Fna, turning the conversation into a string of anecdotes about their escapades, sketches of ways they’d uncovered their Paris together, making it clear that I was still as invisible as they wanted me to be, and there was a code to this house that was still beyond my grasp.
    My classes at the language institute were full of expat wives who’d leave early for lunch dates, dilettantes on perennial student visas, and distracted businessmen who alternated between taunting and flirting with the young teacher. I soon started forgoing class for afternoon excursions with Loic, who was always ready to teach me something like that the Louvre was not only a