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

and his companion who’d asked if I was lost were walking behind me with Tarentina. When he saw me look back, the friend pushed forward, and then, just as we came to the end of the bridge, he was beside me.
    “Why are you following me?” A stupid question but I couldn’t take it back.
    “I’m not following you,” he said, smiling. “We’re going in the same direction.”
    He wasn’t beautiful. People threw the word around like a rumor but I never did. It was a term more foreign to me than any other. My parents never referred to anyone as beautiful. When my classmates called me ugly, my mother told me beauty was an empty, made-up thing, but I knew it had to be worth something because Jesus and his army of saints always look like movie actors. I never understood the alchemy of allure or how some people get a reputation for being beautiful. My brother Santiago would say fantastically beautiful women never look as good the second time you see them, and a moderately pretty girl has the chance of growing more beautiful by the day. But I only came to understand beauty in school, through the principals of art dictated by scientists and masters like Da Vinci; symmetry, contours that capture light, balance and form—like the city of Paris itself, a perfect spiral of arrondissements, every park, bush, and tree lined and framed.
    The boy walking next to me that night had none of those things going for him. One might say he was in the family of handsome, but askew, unkempt, with a marbled complexion like Paris fog, one green eye a bit larger than the other, one sideburn longer than the other, and brown hair that looked as if he’d cut it himself. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. My mother cut her own hair and ours, too, but his looked like it was cut while he was driving or frying eggs at the same time. His jeans and sweatshirt were too big for him, and with his hands thrust in his pocketshe looked like he was carrying a weapon. He was as tall as I was, maybe an inch or two taller, but it was deducted by his slouch. His smile was misaligned. I could tell his teeth had never been fixed and thought of my own messy grin, twisted and concaved until shrouded in braces at eleven. Santi and I each wore them for years, and our parents, who’d been deprived of dentistry most of their lives, proud they could finally afford them, decided to fix their own neglected teeth, too.
    Somewhere around Les Invalides, we stopped at a tiny flower box of a hotel so Naomi could beg the concierge to let her use the toilet. While we stood around on the sidewalk waiting for her, Tarentina declared that we should continue the party at the House of Stars and invited Sharif and his friend to join us. Sharif agreed on both their behalf.
    It was late. There were few cars on the street. I didn’t say a word and neither did Sharif’s friend as we continued down boulevard Saint Germain toward the house, sometimes drifting one before the other, sometimes walking as a pair at an identical pace. I kept track.
    Conversations in the House of Stars were a mishmash of dialects and linguistic collisions, flip-flops between French and Italian and Spanish, then to English to neutralize confusions, sometimes all in the same sentence. You’d think with so many of us speaking different languages there would be gaps in our communication, but it only expanded the banter. On the walk back from the party that night, Maribel revealed that Florian said that with her he’d felt a fléchazo, an arrow’s shot to the heart, which did not translate directly, and the closest evocative alternate we came up with was
coup de foudre
, because
love at first sight
is long-winded and corny in comparison, and Tarentina theorized that monolingual English-speakers are thus long-winded and corny due to their verbal confinement because people can only experience emotions for which their language already has a name.
    We convened in her bedroom with its own lounge area full of