unhappy.”
She felt something sparking inside her. She’d heard a thousand lines and had a thousand funny responses. She couldn’t think of one.
“I’ll pick you up after work.” He moved a little closer. “We’ll have breakfast.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
“Suit yourself.”
His teeth gleamed white against his skin. His face seemed strangely exotic to her, broad and mysterious, a supremely African face, with all the lure of tribal warriors and mystic rituals. “I’m going to suit myself, Nicky Valentine.” As Cloudy watched from the table, he lifted her hand and kissed it.
He was a poet, with several critically acclaimed volumes and a contract for another. He was a part of the Negro Renaissance centered in Harlem, the peer of Langston Hughes and W. E. B. Du Bois. She entertained in a bar, dancing the Charleston.
They had dark-roast coffee and croissants on the terrace of Le Dôme in Montparnasse, sandwiched between tall boxes of red geraniums and the table of a couple who never exchanged a word. Nicky had gone home first to bathe and change into a skirt and sweater. As light streamed through the geraniums, she removed her cloche hat.
“It’ll be hot by noon,” she said, helping herself to an other croissant. “In a month or so we’ll be closing down.”
“Closing?”
“Sure. No one stays in the city in August. You’ll find it hard to eat or shop if you stay here.”
“Where do you go?” He sat back. He hadn’t taken his eyes off her since they arrived. She wasn’t used to intense scrutiny. She found herself squirming under the heat of it.
“Here or there. Spain once. The South of France. Clarence has friends with a house in Antibes. Maybe we’ll go there.”
“You call your grandfather Clarence?”
“Odd, isn’t it?” She gave no explanation.
“I called mine Old Man.”
“Tell me about him.” She had already listed the basic facts of her own life. Her years in Paris, her education, a hazy, fabricated account of her life in New Orleans. But Gerard had said little about himself.
“You were wrong about Alabama. I was born in Georgia, but we moved to Harlem when I was ten. My father didn’t make his crops two years in a row, and the white man took our farm. We left with nothing but a mule and an old wagon. We worked our way up north, mile by mile. By the time we crossed the Mason-Dixon line, we didn’t have the mule. Old Man got sick and died in Maryland, and we didn’t have the money to lay him to rest.”
Nicky already knew that Gerard was not a man who would appreciate sympathy. She just nodded.
“Some church people took pity and saw Old Man got buried. Then they bought us train tickets to New York. By that time there wasn’t much left of my daddy. He drank up what pennies he managed to earn. We moved in with a cousin, and she raised us until we were old enough to go out on our own.”
“What about your mama?”
“Dead early. Real early.”
“Was Harlem better than Georgia?”
“No place’s better than any other.”
She toyed with her coffee cup. “Then you’ve been everywhere?”
“Just about.”
“You’re a real hard-boiled egg, aren’t you?”
He smiled, and the shadows lifted. “You haven’t seen enough of the world to understand.”
“If I haven’t, why are we having a conversation?”
“There’s something about you.”
His voice was resonant and deep. The words, as clichéd as they were, lingered in the air, settled provocatively against her skin, bored inside her to places that had never been touched. She tried to be flip. “Yeah. Yeah. Long, long legs. Sea green eyes. A smile that lights up the darkest corner of a room.”
“Sounds like you’ve heard it all.”
“And more.”
“But you’ve never heard it from me.”
She faltered for a moment, aware—although she fought it—that he was moving quickly to some place she had not yet inhabited. “Why should that matter?”
He reached for her hand. His was wide, with short, sturdy fingers. A farmer’s hand with no calluses. He en closed hers and held it tightly. “Because I’m going to matter,” he said. “Starting right now.”
She was terribly afraid he might be right.
Nicky spent August with Gerard, in the third-story apartment of a tiny building in the rue Campagne-Première. The apartment was tiny, too, one room just large enough for a bed and desk, another with a love seat, a chair and two arched windows looking out over Paris rooftops. The kitchen had a stone sink and one gas burner; the toilet and tub were down the hall.
As if to make up for its truncated size, the apartment was a short distance from the beautiful Luxembourg Garden, with its graceful statues and Médicis Fountain. She and Gerard strolled there sometimes in the late afternoon and stood under the shade of chestnut trees, watching children sail toy boats at the edges of the pond.
They explored Gerard’s neighborhood, too, moving slowly through the narrow, winding streets of Montparnasse, stopping for crusty baguettes at a corner bakery, a small wheel of Mont d’Or from the shop next door, tart purple grapes from the greengrocer at the end of the block. Paris was sleeping, its residents and guests dreaming away their summer in other, cooler places. But Nicky dreamed only of Gerard.
She awoke each morning wrapped in his arms, too warm in the windowless room, and yet never quite warm enough. She had been raised among musicians. She had come of age in an era when jazz trumpeted the battle cry of sexual freedom and in a country where Prohibition was only a word in another language. But through it all, she had retained a stunning naiveté. Until Gerard.
He was all the things she hadn’t known enough to wonder about. When he filled her, she understood the words to love songs she had learned years before and never really believed.
He was complex and often moody. In sleep his face was kind. She could see the man he might have been, a man untormented by the devils of racism and rejection. Awake she could see his struggle to transcend his pain. He was a strong man, a man who took pleasure in his body and in hers. A man gentle enough to take her virginity and passionate enough to take her innocence.
He was also a man who drank too much, who brooded for days at a time and sometimes raged uncontrollably. But in his best moments he was adept at driving away the doubts that beset her. When she was with him she believed in their future together; she believed that they could hold the world away and make a life here in her adopted country. Although he never made promises or talked about the days
