He shakes his head. “No. After school, I considered France, I suppose.”
She tilts her head. “Why France?”
“My French was good enough. My mother taught French literature, and I went to school in Paris for a while on exchange during undergrad.”
“Wow.” Lili gives a soft laugh. “Paris in your twenties.”
Aleksandr laughs, too, but it’s a hard twist of a sound. It makes her chest ache a little.
“I was miserable,” he says.
“What? What do you mean?”
He sighs. “Every day, something new from home. News, more misery. It felt like everything was crumbling, all the hopes for anything resembling actual freedom or change—anything beyond hunger, death, corruption—but I never had the full picture. Around me, nothing had changed. People laughed, lived life, and I—I didn’t feel like I was even part of the same species. Probably the loneliest I’ve ever been in my entire life.”
Lili says nothing. She holds her breath as his eyes roam the room, its oblivious chatter. His hair is still messy from earlier, from her own hands, and the loose collar of his shirt feels intimate to her.
She wants him to keep speaking; she wants to keep listening.
He twists his wineglass between his fingers. “When I’d wait for the Métro, it wasn’t that I wanted to jump, but there was some—understanding, I suppose. Of why people do that. Not the intention to do anything, but—”
“No, I get that,” Lili murmurs.
He looks at her, then. Some caution, eyes searching.
Lili holds his gaze. “Tell me more about it,” she says. “Paris.”
“Have you been?”
“No, why?”
“Your mother. She spoke French, did she not? Being Lebanese.”
“Oh. Yeah, she did. But she’d never been to France, either.” She shrugs, pushing aside a complicated, dark pain that arises: all the things her parents never did. “Go on,” she prompts. “Tell me about Paris, I’m curious.”
“I spent a lot of time in churches,” he says, a rueful smile.
“I thought you weren’t religious.”
“I’m not. And I wasn’t then, either, but I’d never experienced churches before, not really. The closest I’d come had been state monuments. So, I’d sit in these old cathedrals. Empty, weekday mornings before class. Staring up at those soaring stone arches, trying to feel something in the scale of it—something grander, more mysterious, more powerful, that wasn’t state or politics.” He shrugs. “So, churches. Wandering a lot. The Luxembourg Gardens were close to school, I’d read there most days. There were these used books,livres de poche, from Gibert Joseph that you could buy cheap.”
Lili doesn’t want to breathe for fear she’ll shift the moment.
She’s never really seen him speak like this before: thoughts and memories cohering into words a moment before he says them. It’s like he’s thinking out loud, and she doesn’t want to look away.
Aleksandr sighs. “I suppose I was grasping at so much, the stench of my own ambition disgusted me. Or rather, it was exhausting—how far there was to go between who I was, where I was, and what I wanted to be. In those churches, I wanted to feel small again, but not anonymous—not insignificant, which is typical to feel in Paris, I suppose.”
“In what sense?” Lili asks.
Aleksandr runs his finger over the edge of his fork. “Paris has a weight to it. It exists in the shadow of our memories, expectations. The city is heavy with the responsibility to be profound, life-changing, heart-stopping. Every street is named after some significance—person, event, place. I felt burdened with needing it all to mean something to me, while I felt like nothing had much meaning at all, at the time. There was this sense of never being able to relax into anything, any sense of rest or understanding—everything was constantly moving under my feet, growing up, and I didn’t trust it. I was lucky, I’d gotten out, but, I don’t know...”
Laughter from another table rises, a bottle of champagne uncorked. Aleksandr glances over at the sound. His expression is calm, as if at peace with these memories that make her feel things—a yearning towards him, a kinship of experience, this desire to smooth away that furrow of recollection at his brow—that she shouldn’t.
A few moments pass, quiet between them.
“Does it feel like home, now?” she asks, soft. “New York?”
“As much as anything could.”
