Paris Was the Place by Susan Conley Read Free Book Online

on the board and two of his old colleagues from his time at U.C. Irvine. There’s also a Chinese businessman who works in steel and a Taiwanese woman who runs foster care programs for orphans throughout northern China. Luke hasn’t met anyone in China or France or anywhere else, for that matter, who thinks that getting clean drinking water to Chinese villagers is a bad idea. But he needs a great deal of money to make it happen. He’s hired a full-time CEO—a Chinese foreign policy expert he met in Beijing when he taught the man English. But Luke raises most of the actual capital. He calls it flushing ducks. It involves a series of orchestrated dinners in Paris and Beijing and San Francisco, and lots of time on the dreaded phone.
    “My book will be about how poetry and religion are woven together in India.” I close my eyes. “I’m starting to run out of time.”
    “You got the grant. Don’t worry.”
    “You’re right. I got the grant.” I’m not going to tell him about Macon Ventri. There’s nothing to tell. And he will only make a joke, and whatever it is between Macon and me is too early. Too tender in my mind for Luke’s jokes.
    “I think you should book a plane ticket to Delhi.”
    I take a sip of wine. “Rajiv said I would be an English teacher at the asylum center. But it’s more complicated than that. Why did I agree to teach there?”
    “Because you are weak and Rajiv took advantage of you.”
    “I feel a little like a giant from outer space in that center.”
    “Normally you’re graceful, and you are very, very short. You always pull the classroom stuff off. You’re good at it. It’s what you do. You certainly shouldn’t have said no to Rajiv.”
    “How do you know anything you’re talking about?”
    “I don’t.”
    “You’ve never seen me in the classroom.”
    “You’re right, I haven’t.” Luke laughs. It’s a low laugh. Morethroaty. Like my father’s. When I think of my dad I’m filled with missing and white-hot anger. The longer I hold this anger the longer I hold my mother. Anger and love. Twins maybe.
    “So, really, everything you’ve just said is guessing?”
    “Exactly.”
    “There are no mothers and fathers. Can you believe that? They have no parents to help them in there.”
    “You’re going to be good at this, Willie. Give it time. If they don’t have mothers, then what an amazing thing that they’ll have you as a short stand-in with flaming red hair that needs a trim. You must not quit, sweetness. You’re not allowed to quit. Mom wouldn’t want you to ever quit.”

4

Fondue: a dish similar to a soufflé usually made with cheese and bread crumbs
    Our mother’s name was Kate. She had long, dark hair parted in the middle, which she pinned up with two tortoiseshell combs. When I was five, I used to sit on her lap in the rocking chair in the kitchen and run my hands through that hair. I wanted to swim in it. It smelled elemental—like vanilla and her skin. Sweet and earthy. She spent the first ten years of her life in southern Thailand near the coast, where her Dutch father harvested rubber trees for export with a French lumber company. When she moved to Montana, my mother said, she was already an outsider.
    When I was growing up in the sixties, she wore Thai sarongs like skirts over pants. She wasn’t like other hippie mothers. She was sterner and more serious. She drank glass thimbles of espresso at lunch in our kitchen and swore out loud, and she was one of the first women psychologists in San Francisco. Her specialty was cognitive therapy, a type of psychotherapy developed by a doctor named Aaron Beck, who’d been my mother’s teacher. For years she thought this brand of therapy would save even her most troubled patients. She believed it could change dysfunctional thinking and alter emotional reactions and transform entire belief systems.
    Her standards for people were so extremely high. In her mind, personal change always lived just around the corner.