It's Not Love, It's Just Paris by Patricia Engel Read Free Book Online

classical music until emigrating, he said it was part of the human breath, proof that God exists, which is another one of those things that sounds much better in Spanish, forget about when I tried to translate it to French. My father had a hard time leaving God out of any conversation, always saying He was the head of his board of directors, which I don’t think his accountants appreciated, but my father was a humble man with an excess of faith, and my mother wasn’t too far off, equipping our house with saints on every nightstand, crucifixes over every bed, sewing scapulars into our clothes, a habit she picked up at the convent because it doesn’t hurt to know you’re covered should you die while you’re in the middle of something.
    Gaspard didn’t smile. As far as I could tell, he didn’t like people, so I was surprised to learn he would be coming to Florian’s party, too. When I managed to shut myself up, Séraphine asked Loic and me to excuse her so she could speak to Gaspard privately, which I found strange, and when we were alone in the foyer Loic only said, “What can I tell you, Lita? There is always a favorite.”
    Six years earlier, a South African resident of the House of Stars disappeared from a group soirée and turned up without her shoes, wallet, and panties on the Cannes Croisette, with no idea how she got there. Loic took the train down to collect her, then, per her parents’ request, put her on a flight home to Durban. As a result, Loic took his guardianship over our outings very seriously. We left for Florian’s party en masse, squeezing two or three of us through each métro turnstile rotation, with Loic taking head counts. As we approached the party, he stopped to point out the golden torch on a concrete island within the traffic of Avenue de New York.
    “That’s where we’ll meet if any of us lose sight of the group. You’re not to leave the party without notifying me or one of the others,” Loic said, meeting each of our eyes.
    I asked Maribel about the torch because it looked important—a fat flame like the one in Lady Liberty’s grip surrounded by a pod of tourists taking photos and posing by the mound of flowers at its base.
    She pointed to the tunnel that ran beneath the torch’s concrete landing.
    “Down there is where the princess died.”
    We descended the steps from the sidewalk to a converted barge docked along the Seine between a pair of retired Bateaux-Mouches; a kaleidoscope of yellow paper lanterns and holiday lights, a band playing on the top deck as ladies in tiered ruffled flamenco dresses stomped, sang, and clicked castanets. Maribel was already half-drunk from shooting Tarentina’s reserve Leblon cachaça with Giada and Naomi back at the house. She’d changed her outfit seven times before settling on a violet sheath that outlined her braless breasts and willowy frame courtesy of a dual addiction to Marlboro Reds and a spiced tomato puree herparents sent from Madrid by the crate. She’d already slept with Florian a dozen or so times, and Tarentina told her that should be enough to take the mystery away, but she was still nervous, even frightful, to see him. She gripped my hand as we crossed the drawbridge onto the boat. From her panic I expected a real stallion, but the guy who sliced through the crowd to meet us was older than my father, with a square head and patch of silver grass for hair, his skin lined and gray. He wore a batik sarong and a silk blouse that hung like a curtain around his protruding belly. When he saw Maribel, shy yet hungry eyed, he pulled her off my elbow and into his arms, bellowing, “Welcome to my kingdom,” from behind her shoulder.
    I’ll never understand why people admire an exuberant personality when it’s the kind I trust least of all, but the others were captivated by Florian’s sultan persona, too, and quickly dissolved into the party.
    New politics emerged on Florian’s boat—the laws of the sea, I suppose. Until then I’d