Tales From My Closet Read Online Free PDF Page A

about him, from his handsome chin to the clean way his skin smelled to his shaved cheeks to the laugh lines at the corners of his mouth made me feel comfortable around him, willing. Still, I was nervous. I didn’t want Arnaud to know how inexperienced I was. I didn’t want him to know that my dad was the most old-fashioned father in the whole world, who’d grown up in a Costa Rican neighborhood going to church every other second, and that I still, on occasion, sat on his lap. Nor did I want him to know that my mother had made a career out of writing about my “adolescent years.” After all, he thought I was already in college!
    He took me to the rue Mouffetard, which has open-air stalls selling old books, sheet music, china, jewelry, everything. He took me to hear a lecture on the late work of Camus. (It was in French, so I didn’t understand most of it.) He took me to his favorite spot on the Seine, where we watched the barges making their slow way. In another flea market — this one in the Marais — we stopped at a stall that sold nothing but the most beautiful silk scarves, but even secondhand, I couldn’t afford to buy one, even though I was dying to and tried on half a dozen of them, just for fun. So you can only imagine how amazing it was when, a few days later, Arnaud gave me most beautiful Hermès scarf I’d ever seen — pale pink, with tiny swirls of delicate grays and greens, wrapped loosely in crumpled brown paper, like he’d stuffed it in his pocket on the way back from the Marais market. As I turned it over in my hands, I noticed that on one end of the scarf was a tiny stain in the shape of a heart, and wondered if he’d seen it as well.
    “You must have it,” he said. “ Pour toi, la belle fille .”
    “Where did you get it?” I wanted to know.
    “It isn’t important.”
    “But it’s Hermès. It must have cost a fortune.”
    “Ah, but as you can see, it is not new.”
    “You went back to the flea market?” I asked.
    “It is my secret,” he said.
    When he put it around my neck, it was like his fingers were angel wings. Right there on the street, we kissed.

     
    Of course he wanted more. Every night, it was like a wrestling contest that would determine which of us would be in control of my buttons and zippers. But it was hard for me to explain why I didn’t want to go further, especially since a part of me did . It’s not that I wasn’t grown-up enough, either: It was more that it was such a huge thing, and I wanted to make sure that he was the one . Of course, I could have blurted out the truth and told him that I was fifteen, but then what? Thank God that I’d had the foresight to edit my Facebook page, getting rid of certain embarrassing details like where I went to school, and defriending some of the undesirables who I didn’t correspond with anyway. I could have taken the whole thing down, but I liked seeing what my friend Robin was posting now that she had gone wardrobe-wild and had (thanks to me) a fashion internship at Libby Fine Design. Finally I just said: “Arnaud, I’m Catholic!” Which was only half true, because though Dad’s Catholic, Meryl’s kind of nothing.
    “I’m Catholic, too,” he said, fingering my necklace. “Everyone in France is. This is all merely superstition, how we must stop what our bodies tell us to do. They try to control us with all this talk of sin.”
    “But . . .” I said, but then, when I couldn’t explain, I’d kiss him even more. I’d kiss him and kiss him and kiss him. And then I’d leave to get back to the dorm in time for curfew.
    On my very last day in Paris, I skipped my final lecture on Picasso’s early cubist work to walk up to Montmartre with Arnaud. It was, of course, lovely. It was also, of course, raining. When at last we reached the very top, with its famous Basilica, it started to pour. As in chats et chiens . (Cats and dogs.) We dashed inside, where Arnaud, looking very serious, took off his raincoat, draped it