Page 87 of All That We Are Together
“Did you know my father?” I asked.
“I did. I bought some of his work years ago. He was talented. Your mother, too, but she wasn’t as taken with art as he was. When she put her mind to it, though…” He toyed with his napkin. “Don’t be nervous, Leah. I trust you even more than you trust yourself. This will be good for you.”
“I wish I could believe that.”
“Are you worried about it?”
“I’m worried about everything. The newness of it all. The people. The language.”
Hans seemed to understand. “My mother was Australian and my father French,” he said, “so I spent a lot of my life traveling back and forth. Believe me when I tell you the only thing you’ll need to know your first days here is a bit of small talk.”
Axel sat back down and smiled. “Why, do Parisians like to chitchat?”
“They do. And they have very specific ways of doing it. On Mondays and Tuesdays,bonne semaineis best; on Wednesdays and Thursdays, they usebonne fin de semaine; and on Fridays they saybon weekend.”
I laughed. I don’t know why, but it all seemed so funny to me. And the tension that had taken hold of me since we’d landed inParis disappeared all at once. I wrote those expressions down on a napkin. Axel made fun of me for it. I enjoyed the meal without thinking any more about my fears, enjoying the desserts and listening to Hans’s entertaining stories.
75
Axel
My head was about to explode. I tried to hold out till lunch was over, and when we got to the apartment, I took a pill.
“Are you feeling bad?” Leah asked.
“It’ll pass. We can go for a walk later, get to know the area, maybe grab some dinner. What do you say?”
“Sure. You need anything?”
I smiled mischievously and pointed at my cheek.
“I’d never say no to a kiss.”
“You are truly an idiot, Axel.” She walked upstairs, but I could see her lips tugging upward before she disappeared into the studio, and that warmed me up inside.
I swallowed the pill and fell back on my bed with my hands behind my head, looking at the ceiling and thinking…thinking how a part of me felt that being here in Paris was like starting over from zero. There was no logic to it, but it seemed as if, exiting the airplane, I’d become a different person from the one who’d climbed into it, and I asked myself if we would be thesame people when we went back home or no. Because in some weird way, Leah and I were stripping ourselves bare layer by layer every time our lives hit one of these crossroads and we had to decide what direction to take.
76
Leah
The first week was relaxed. We barely had any free time. When we weren’t buying art supplies, clothing, or food, we had to go to Hans’s gallery and meet people. I was incapable of remembering all their names.
“What was that guy’s name, supposedly?”
Axel suppressed a smile and bent over to whisper in my ear. His breath was hot, close, almost tingly on my neck. He was wearing dark pants and a white button-down shirt. I’d never seen him in anything so formal. I was painfully conscious of how attractive he was: his freshly shaved chin, the cologne he’d put on before leaving, his penetrating stare.
“Armand Fave,” Axel reminded me.
I finished the drink I’d been served in one swallow and stared at Axel’s neck in his shirt and his badly tied tie. We didn’t fit in there at all. What were we doing here, I wondered and grinned.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“Nothing. Come here and let me fix that…”
We were in a sterile space full of chatty people drinking andremarking on the works of artists who’d made it after an opening in that gallery. I didn’t know any of them, and I felt a little bit lost. As I cinched Axel’s tie, he said, “You shouldn’t get so close.”
“Why? Am I in danger?”