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

worse for my grandmother than for myself or for my brother.”
    “Why is that?”
    “Nobody deserves to be abandoned by their own child.”
    “Or by their own parents,” I said, thinking of my own mother and father, but by the way he looked at me and nodded, I realized Loic thought I’d meant him.
    We didn’t speak the rest of the way home but I didn’t mind. I’ve always thought sharing silence is how you really get to know someone.
    Most of the girls had boyfriends, but in between romances, the girls had Romain. The maids called him Le Coq du Village. The girls called him The Corsican, holding him apart from the other waiters at Far Niente, the Italian restaurant on the corner of rue de Sèvres, who often stopped at our house for nightcaps after their shifts. Romain was a highly recommended bedmate, known as much for carrying high-grade hashish as for his Bambi lashes, that crown of gelled brown curls, a misty bronze complexion, and left cheek mole like the one Séraphine said she painted on in the forties.
    I started joining the girls for dinner there, and on slow nights, Romain would stand at the edge of the table and share pieces of his life with me—how he came to Paris from Calvi by way of Marseille and was saving his sous to move to New York. He wanted to be an actor. “The French Daniel Day-Lewis,” is how he put it.
    “I want to study at Lee Strasberg like Newman and Pacino. I want to play all types of persons. Spanish, Russian, or Arab. I havethe face for all these things,” he said, touching his chin. “I don’t want to be only a French actor. I want to be an actor of the
world
.”
    When he stepped away to tend to some other customers, Tarentina leaned across the table toward me.
    “I’ve known him three years and never heard him speak so much, not even in bed, and that’s where guys usually get around to spilling their dreams.”
    I shrugged. “I grew up with brothers. I’m used to hearing boys blab about themselves.”
    “I don’t think he’s looking at you in a sisterly way,” Naomi said.
    “I wasn’t flirting with him.” I must have sounded defensive because the other girls started laughing.
    “On the contrary. You’re a terrible flirt,” Tarentina put me in my place.
    “With no presence whatsoever,” Camila added with squinty eyes and a thread-thin grin, as if judging me for a pageant.
    Tarentina reached for the wine bottle at the center of the table, topping off my glass with what was left.
    “That’s precisely what is so brilliant about it, my dear Lita. Your charm is that you’re charmless.”
    The other girls found this hilarious and I forced myself to join their laughter. I wanted them to think I had a sense of humor about myself.
    “Romain was the first guy I slept with in Paris,” Naomi said, suddenly nostalgic, and Maribel and Giada chimed in that he was their first in Paris, too, though only Naomi had ever been to the apartment in Gobelins he shared with a Polish housepainter.
    I watched him across the restaurant as they went on comparing bed notes about Romain and the other waiters. The othercustomers had cleared out and the music was louder now. I saw a homeless man with a dragging leg in the doorway of the restaurant, careful not to step inside, waiting until Romain noticed him. Roman gave a smile and wave before slipping into the kitchen and returning with a wrapped plate of food for the man, who nodded appreciatively but never spoke before rushing off. It wasn’t the first time I’d witnessed this ritual, though the other girls never seemed to notice, but that night I pointed it out to Dominique. She gave a quick look and said, “Oh, that’s the mute who begs in the Babylone métro,” before cutting back to the discussion of the waiters as lovers: Giancarlo, the stocky tanned one with the tiny hoop earring was in the lead for endurance, but Maribel had snooped through his wallet once and found a photo of a child he later admitted was the son he’d left