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

great museum but also served as a popular destination for making out and express public screwing, as it had been for him and his friends as teenagers. He said they’d sip from flasks sewn into their denim jackets, get drunk in front of the Poussins or in the caryatid room, fondle each other between the Canovas, roll joints and smoke beside the
Sleeping Hermaphrodite
, and somehow never get caught.
    It wasn’t my first time at the Louvre. I’d navigated the galleries as part of a teen tour squadron when I’d won a scholarship to a summer language program: two weeks of Italian in Alberobello, two weeks of French in Fontainebleau, and two weeks of Spanish in Valencia, though when I returned home with a Castilian accent, my mother threatened to smack the conquerors’ lisp out of me. But Loic taught me that if you wait until the late-afternoon tourist exodus, when they flood out of the museum into the dusty gravel of the Tuileries with exhausted enchantment, queuing up to buy Eiffel Tower miniatures from the Africans along the path, the museum staff is so worn from the masses that they’ll wave you right in, past the security checkpoint, and won’t even make you pay.
    “Always go through the Richelieu or Sully wings, where the guards rarely check for tickets,” Loic instructed as he led me through the great hall beneath the glass pyramid, “and if they do stop you, act as if it’s your first time in a museum and you had no idea it wasn’t free.”
    And he was right. We passed through without interruption, wandering up to the front salons of Sully where you can see through the Carrousel du Louvre across the labyrinths, past the Grand Palais down to La Défense on the horizon.
    Later, when we emerged from the museum into the amber dusk, Loic stopped under the Carrousel arc to light a cigarette. I saw Gaspard walking a few meters away, recognizing him from the times we’d passed each other in the courtyard and he’d never offered more than a nod, always dressed in the same tired chocolate corduroy pants and black-and-white wingtip shoes. He was wispy in build like Loic with the same overbred floppy facial features, and though three years younger, he was terribly aged and wore a permanent old man’s scowl.
    “Look, there’s your brother.”
    But Loic struggled to catch a flame with his lighter, and by the time he looked up Gaspard and his wingtips had already slipped into the hedges of the labyrinth.
    He finally caught a burn on his cigarette and, when we were passing through the Porte des Lions corridor, asked, “Are you close with your brothers, Lita?”
    “I’m close with both of them but they’re not close to each other.”
    “Something about brothers.” He drew in a mouthful of smoke.
    I nodded, though in the case of mine, it was because there were ten years between them and I was right in the middle, five years younger than Santiago, five years older than little Beto.
    “Where is your mother?” I asked. I’d been wondering.
    “Los Angeles.” He said it mockingly.
Loss Angeleez
.
    “What’s she doing there?”
    “I don’t know. A man, probably. Before Los Angeles it was Buenos Aires and, before that, Hong Kong. Always chasing men around the world, until they get tired of her and then she finds someone else. After our father died she had a breakdown. When she came out of the hospital my grandmother suggested she go visit an old friend in Rome to recuperate, but she met a man there and didn’t come back until Théophile’s funeral six years later.”
    “Do you ever see her?”
    “The last time was four years ago. She was in Paris a week before she came by the house. I call her sometimes. She always says she has so many problems, so many pressures. ‘Oh Loic, my life is so complicated,’ but she never asks how I am. Never. She’s waiting for my grandmother to die so she can claim her inheritance.”
    Loic threw the nub of his cigarette into the street as we stepped onto Quai Voltaire. “I feel