We think fairy tales exist and believe love comes in many forms. This month, we’ll be sharing personal essays from our readers about heart-swelling romances, platonic love, chance encounters, and everything in between. Enjoy!
I wanted my last night in Paris to be romantic. But Laurent, the French boyfriend I had struggled so hard to procure during my junior year abroad, was working. I spent my last night prowling the bars in the Latin Quarter with the American girls from my study-abroad program, smoking Gauloises and longing for the romance depicted in movies. A semester of too many new wave films had turned my thoughts to celluloid.
Laurent and I had arranged for a late-night rendezvous after his shift. With a double air kiss to my friends, I slipped away into the nearest metro station just as the rain started to fall. The Châtelet station reeked of rotten eggs, so when the train arrived, I quickly slid into the first empty seat. Across the aisle, an African man in traditional attire was asleep in his seat, and, across from him, a man in a black wool coat studied him unabashedly. After several moments, he produced a small Moleskine sketchbook and a stubby pencil from his pocket and began sketching the sleeping man.
I was intrigued by the artist, but physically he couldn’t compare with my tall, dark, and handsome cop-in-training. Soon Laurent would graduate from the police academy, second in his class (he claimed he didn’t like the limelight of being number one). He spoke English and was teaching himself Russian, and I suggested law school, but he had other plans. A job was waiting for him with the CRS, which is pretty much the French riot police.
I didn’t share his love for riot gear, but when he was off duty, he wore pink sweaters tied around his shoulders. We zipped around in his silver Audi on road trips through France, pretending we were queen and king of the châteaus we visited. His secret weapon was not his set of nunchucks but his easy laugh and chocolate-covered voice. To me, even his grocery list whispered en français sounded like Baudelaire.
And yet there was something alluring about the way the artist was consumed by his sketch. Normally, I wouldn’t have watched him so openly; I would have pretended to read or study my nails. But it was my last night in Paris, and after just a few short months, I believed the city had transformed me into what I had always dreamed of becoming: a real French woman. This gave me the audacity to stare.
Three stops to go.
My eyes ravaged the artist much the same as he did the sleeper. Watching him take in his model felt so intimate, that when the artist looked up, I felt as if I had been caught watching him make love. But I held his gaze boldly, before losing my courage and turning back to the rain. The drops were loud and quick against the window, in sync with the pulse of my heart. My heart had beat this fast when Laurent told me he loved me. We were spending a weekend in a small inn on the coast of Normandy. My heart leaped to my throat as I tried out the words “I love you” in French. The next morning, I called my parents from a phone booth and gleefully whispered the news.
And yet I couldn’t keep my eyes off the artist. The women in the French films who stare like this in their monochrome world end up with close-ups revealing bare skin and crinkled sheets. Was I ready to be a French woman? I sometimes ate at McDonald’s and still liked to cuddle with my parents.
Two stops to go.
Watching him, my breath no longer reached my belly or chest, lingering instead in my throat. Did I exhale? I studied his fingers. They were the perfect size, his long, clean nail beds trimmed, not bitten. My mother always told me that I needed to find a man with good hands, that how a man takes care of his hands reflects how he will take care of a woman. Laurent had blown off the tip of his index finger with a gun as a child but shyly hid his deformity beneath napkins in cafés.
One stop to go.
Was he a professional artist? In art school? Or did he make his living as a grocery clerk while he nursed his childhood passion? More pressingly, how did he see the world, and this man across from him? With a flash of kismet, he looked up and flipped his sketchbook around so I could see the delicate lines and light pencil strokes that held the weight and fatigue of the sleeping man. Sharing his art was an invitation into intimacy.
The artist had crossed the threshold into manhood some time ago and had a sense of self-confidence in his sharing. I, on the other hand, was daring myself to enter “real woman” territory, mad with curiosity about what was on the other side. No wine-induced coquetry, no coy lash-batting, just my naked self (dressed in the short black skirt I bought on sale at Kookai). It was frightening and exhilarating.
I greedily consumed the lines, smudges, and forms of his sketch. My blue eyes met his sea of green, and new art was created right then and there. I nodded in approval, but then, in an instant of self-awareness, I looked away. I no longer fancied myself the intrepid Parisian woman but saw myself as a little girl — cautious and frightened by the possibilities held between my eyes and those of a stranger. After all, I had a boyfriend, I was getting on a plane tomorrow, I was …
The train had stopped. The doors were open. We were at my station. I jumped out of my seat.
“You are getting off?” he asked in French.
I nodded and hurried out of the train, speeding up toward the exit, almost running. In the movies, French women were always running. I don’t know what they were running from, though. I didn’t know what I was running from.
Maybe I ran to stay the course. Laurent would be waiting; a plane would be waiting; my parents would be waiting at the airport; my sorority sisters and a BS degree would be waiting at Boston University.
If he caught up to me and touched my shoulder, what would I do? To accept this romantic moment in its totality would overwhelm me. I ran so I wouldn’t have to make the decision. If I slowed down or turned around, I would be faced with confronting a fantasy. Maybe I wasn’t ready for the reality of love. I wouldn’t know. Because I wouldn’t follow that road. I would run from it.
Any remaining thoughts I had were sucked into the acceleration of the departing train, swallowed by the deafening wind tunnel. Breathless, I pushed through the jaws of the turnstile and ran up the interminable escalator like Orpheus ascending higher and higher until my open mouth was struck with cold Parisian rain.
Against all reason, I realized I was praying that the artist had followed me, that I would turn and see his rain-streaked face. I would invite him inside for tea, we would talk until dawn, he might sketch me, we might … But when I turned around, there was nobody there. Just the silence of rain-soaked asphalt in the 14th arrondissement. Alone in the glow of the street lamp, I said a soft au revoir to Paris and all the romance and dreams it inspired.
“I’m kind of jealous,” Laurent said when I told him the story, though I left out certain details. We laughed and held each other, making all kinds of promises in the dark.
In the morning, we rode the metro to my favorite café in Saint-Sulpice before heading back to my room to get my suitcases. We arrived at the metro station just as the train was about to leave. I typically preferred the first car because it let me out closest to the exit, but it didn’t make sense to wait, so we squeezed into the last car before the train doors shut.
When we arrived at my station, Laurent and I strolled the long platform, our fingers desperately intertwined as we breathed in our final moments together. In the absence of finding the right thing to say, Laurent read the graffiti scrawled on the walls of the huge advertising posters plastered floor to ceiling. Suddenly, he stopped dead in his tracks.
“It’s for you,” he said, an unrecognizable expression on his face. “A poem for you.”
And there in the white space of a billboard advertising a 25-percent-off sale, I saw, scrawled in pencil in French:
Masha Sapron/Shondaland staff
I never saw the artist again. He would never fly to Boston and pay the bill for the unwanted pregnancy like Laurent did. A year later when I moved back to Paris after graduation, I wouldn’t cheat on him like I did with Laurent, and he wouldn’t scream outside my bedroom window, threatening to call his cop friends if I didn’t return the towel I took from his apartment. We would never have a first date, a first kiss, fall in love, or get married. He wouldn’t argue with my mother about politics or tell me that I don’t look fat even after three kids. And coming across a photograph of the Paris metro, I wouldn’t have paused, imagining how my life might have turned out to be. The artist remains perfectly preserved in my memory — a beautiful, old French movie, missing its last reel.
Masha Sapron is a Los Angeles based freelance writer, mom of three, and the creator of www.mylf.tv. Her debut picture book, YOGAGIRL, will be published in 2022 with Clear Fork. Follow her on Twitter @mashinkas.
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Love Stories: The Writing on the Wall - Shondaland.com
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