The Forbidden Heart (3 page)

“She doesn’t. She won’t talk about him, and now neither will I. He’s dead to us. Look!
There’s Vincent waiting outside the café,” she announced joyfully, waved, and sped
up. I quickened my pace to keep up with her, laughing to myself. She was practically
running to him. She could bowl him over at this speed, especially if she embraced
him, I thought.

“Does he speak English, or will I have to depend on my French?”

“Of course he speaks English,” she replied. “He’s the brightest in our family. I told
you. Vincent is perfect!”

Excusez-moi,
I thought. I could see I had better like him or else.

Crossing the Seine

Vincent was tall, about six feet one, with a swimmer’s build, lean, with round shoulders.
He had light brown hair that fell lazily over his forehead, nearly covering his dark
green eyes. His firm, manly lips were in a tight smile as we drew closer. He had his
hands on his hips and wore a dark blue pair of jeans with a light blue turtleneck
sweater and a pair of coffee-white running shoes.

“
Ça va
, Denise?” he asked, and held his smile. He didn’t look at me. I thought he was a
little arrogant in the way he purposely ignored my presence. Like her mother, perhaps,
he was waiting for some sort of formal introduction.

“
Bien
,” Denise said.
“Sommes-nous en retard?”

He held up his wrist to show us his watch.

“
Mais oui
. When are you not late?” he asked in English, and finally turned to me. “You are
showing your new American friend your bad American habits?” he asked her in French.

“Maybe they are French habits,” I said, and he focused fixedly on me. “She’s never
lived in America.”

His smile softened. “You speak French?”

“Enough to understand enough,” I said deliberately in English.

“I told you she spoke French, Vincent.”

“You said okay French, maybe a little better than most tourists,” he reminded her.
She blushed. “I have reserved a table for us. It has the best view,” he said, mostly
for my benefit. “
Apres vous
,” he added, and stepped back.

“
Merci
.”

I started for the café entrance.

“She hasn’t got her diploma yet,” I heard Denise tell him.

He rushed forward to open the door for us.

“You’re going to attend school here?” he asked.

“I will,
oui
. The American School of Paris.”

“Ah, yes, the place for the children of expatriates,
n’est-ce pas
?”

“I’m not the child of an expatriate, nor am I one. Maybe you don’t understand what
that means,” I said sharply.

He held his smile.

The hostess, who obviously had flirted with him before and was doing so now, came
forward to show us to the table he had reserved. He thanked her with a kiss on both
cheeks. I looked at Denise and saw her disapproval.

“You know she sleeps with everyone,” she muttered.

“Not everyone. Not women,” he countered. “She’s not that open-minded. She’s from Estonia,
not France,” he added, and laughed.

Denise looked down. I smiled and slipped into my chair. I was happy to see him sit
beside Denise, because she was hoping he would.

“I’m going to America next summer,” he declared immediately. “New York.”

“You are?” Denise asked. “You never told me.”

“Even my parents don’t know yet,” he said, “but I am. Keep it a secret,
s’il vous plaît
.”

“I never tell anyone what you tell me, Vincent.”

“My loyal cousin,” he said. “The snails are magnificent here.”

I looked at the menu. The waitress brought over a bottle of rosé and three glasses.

“She’s not—”

“Secrets,” he reminded her, and she pressed hard on her lips as if they might betray
her.

I watched the waitress pour our wine. She smiled at Vincent and walked away.

“
Bienvenue à Paris
,” Vincent said, raising his glass.

“Merci.”

We all clinked glasses.

“You’ve been here a while?”

“More than a month,” I said. “But Paris is a moveable feast. You don’t get to know
it well for years.”

“
A Moveable Feast
. That’s Hemingway, right?”

“Yes. My uncle gave it to me to read a few weeks ago.”

“What?” Denise asked.

“A book Hemingway wrote about his days in Paris,” I explained. She squinted, still
not sure what that meant. “Ernest Hemingway is a very famous American writer.”

“Oh.”

“This is a nice rosé,” I said, twirling it in my glass and taking another sip. “Not
sweet and yet not too dry.”

“You’re familiar with wine?”

“Very much. My parents had wine at dinner almost every night. Almost always it was
a French wine. My mother taught me the correct way to taste wine.”

“You didn’t tell me that,” Denise said.

“There’s lots to tell each other, Denise. We haven’t known each other that long,”
I said, and she blushed again. What exaggerations had she told him?

He didn’t seem upset. There was a new light in Vincent’s eyes, in fact, more amusement,
now accompanied by some new interest.

“Most Americans your age whom I have met didn’t strike me as being very sophisticated,
especially about wine.”

“It’s not good to generalize about any nationality,” I said. “People are people.”

“What’s that mean?” Denise asked. “People are people?”

“Everyone is different,” I said.

“
Vive la différence
,” Vincent said, raised his glass, and sipped his wine. “Especially when it comes
to women.”

“And men,” I said.

He and I laughed. Denise looked lost.

“Let’s eat,” he said. “My father will be combing the streets if I’m too late.”

I studied the menu, but while I read it, my eyes drifted toward him.

For someone forced to work day and night in a pastry shop, he had a dark complexion,
and he didn’t look as tired and unhappy as Denise had made him out to be. He certainly
didn’t look unsure or ashamed of himself. Roxy once told me that you could tell a
great deal about a man by the way he sat.

“Confident men have good posture, and when they’re sitting across from you,” she had
said, “they don’t avert their eyes. You can feel the strength and security. A man
who is indifferent to his appearance will be indifferent to you eventually, if not
sooner than you’d expect. No matter what,” she added.

I could sit and listen to her lessons about men, about love and romance, for hours,
or as long a time as she wanted to devote to it. She told me that some of what she
knew she had learned from her mentor, Mrs. Brittany, but most of it was from her own
experiences. In the life she led, her instincts about the men she was with had to
be sharp. It was self-preservation.

Vincent wore his arrogance well, I thought. I could see that he had a secure sense
of himself. He sat and looked out at the other patrons confidently. I think his strength
came from his intelligence. It wasn’t physical or cocky. There was nothing like the
military demeanor I had grown to know so well in my father. There was instead an air
of expectation. It was as if he assumed a role the way a royal might. All the young
women working and eating here should pay him some attention. He was a good-looking,
intelligent, and sophisticated Frenchman. Who in the world could compete? It should
have turned me off, but instead, it captured my interest. I knew I was staring at
him. He turned slowly, that smile softening even more.

“Have you decided?”

“Decided?”

“On what to eat?”

“Oh.” A bit flustered, I looked at the menu again and said I would have the caprese
salad.

Denise started to order the lamb stew. She claimed she wanted to see if it matched
Maurice’s, but Vincent reminded her that she had already had it every time she ate
here.

“Oh, right. Then I’ll have the caprese salad, too,” she said. She started to reach
for the bread and stopped, sipping her wine nervously instead.

“Can we have some olive oil for the bread?” I asked. “Healthier.”

Vincent nodded and signaled to the waitress. He gave her our orders. He decided to
have the same salad, and he ordered some
huile d’olive
.

“For our American friend. She eats well,” he added, all in French. “Actually, very
smart,” he told me.

He looked at Denise. I could see she was anticipating something devastating about
her unhealthy eating, but he glanced at me instead and sipped some more wine.

“How is your work, Denise?” he asked her, keeping his eyes on me.

“How could it be? Nothing’s different. I get up, and I get dressed, and after I clean
some of our apartment, I go to work. I see the same people, even the same customers,
and then I come home and help Mama make dinner.”

“You make more money than most of us,” he told her. “Maybe you will support me, and
I can be a starving young poet on the Left Bank,
n’est-ce pas
?”

“
D’accord
.” She burst into a smile. “We could have our own apartment,” she said, her excitement
building. “I would cook and clean it. We’ll get one with a view. We could—” She stopped
when Vincent’s teasing smile almost turned into a laugh. “I mean . . . if you need
money, you just have to ask.”

“My rich cousin,” he said, nodding his head at her. “So tell me how you came to be
in Paris,” he said. “Denise hasn’t told me all that much about you.”

“I didn’t know that much. I know more about her now,” she protested.

“I lost my parents and came to live with my uncle. He was always closer to me than
any of my other relatives, despite the distance and long gaps of time between seeing
each other.”

He nodded, losing his smile. “For someone who has suffered such tragedy, you seem . . .
okay,” he said, struggling for the right words.

“You sink or swim,” I said.

“What?” Denise asked. “Of course you sink or swim.”

“No. She means you either give up or keep going. She keeps going. You’ve chosen a
good friend, Denise,” he told her, still keeping his eyes on me. “A good friend is
someone you want to be like in some ways, no?”

Denise looked at me with a little annoyance in her eyes. She shrugged. The waitress
brought our salads and the olive oil.

“So tell me,” Vincent said, “what should I not miss when I go to New York? And don’t
say the Empire State Building. We have the Eiffel Tower.”

I laughed. “I was going to say the Statue of Liberty. It came from France. You should
be sure to check out what you gave the United States.”

“
Touché
,” he said, and we began to talk more about the two cities, what tourist traps to
avoid, and where to get a real taste of the flavor of each city. Eventually, I realized
Denise was almost a bystander. I tried to bring her into our conversation, but she
had nothing much to say, even about Paris.

“Perhaps you and I will be able to visit some of the places in Paris that Vincent
has mentioned,” I told her.

She shrugged. “I don’t know them that well.”

“So you’ll be like me, exploring.”

That seemed to please her.

Vincent checked his watch. “Normally, I would suggest some coffee,” he said, “but
if I leave in five minutes, I can walk back to the shop before my father has a . . .
how do you say . . . a fit?”

“What’s a fit?” Denise asked.

“A little bit of hysterics,” I explained. “
D’accord
. Denise and I have more walking to do, right, Denise?”

“
Oui
,” she said. “We can walk Vincent back to the shop,” she added quickly. “It’s not
that far.”

“
Très bien
,” he said, and signaled for the check. I offered to pay my share, but he wouldn’t
hear of it. Afterward, we started out for his family pastry shop.

I could see he was more relaxed. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might have felt
he had to prove himself to an American teenager, but I thought that was part of what
had been happening. I felt a little flattered that I mattered that much to him, enough
for him to want to impress me. As we walked, we talked more about literature. He was
well versed in what had been known as the Beat Generation in America. Many of the
writers and poets had lived in Paris. I knew almost nothing about it, but he saw that
as an opportunity to talk about what was obviously one of his favorite topics. Every
once in a while, I glanced at Denise. She seemed more and more unhappy, drifting behind
us at times, distracted.

“Denise tells me you’re a poet,” I said.

“That’s yet to be proven. I just need editors of magazines to agree with Denise,”
he said.

“What?” she asked.

We both laughed. She looked more upset now than earlier, because she was left out
of so much, but when we reached the shop, she brightened.

“My mother will be surprised to see us. I didn’t tell her you were meeting us, Vincent,”
she said.

“Oh, I gave it away already,” he told her. “I used Emmie as an excuse to get my father
to give me more time for lunch. He complains about the American tourists who come
into the shop, but he envies them. He’s always saying if he had an American business
partner, he’d have a franchise by now.”

“I would think a franchise of a restaurant or a pastry shop would be abhorrent to
the French owner. It would lose its authenticity.”

Vincent paused and looked at me, his smile now more of admiration than humor. “That’s
true. How do you know that?”

“I told you. My mother was French,” I said, as if that would explain everything.