by Laura Buch

Streets, chock full of cobblestones, echo the clicks of clacking stilettos. Black café from concentrate scorns watered-down café au lait; newsstands display uncensored breasts, and, if you have not already guessed, yes, I speak of Paris, France.

My love affair began at twenty. Too young for wrinkles but too old to live with my parents, I left the United States and fell wide-eyed into a pool of swimming lights, a city brimming with people all humming a tune that I could barely understand. But the initial blurriness of my awe transformed into a speechless adoration for all things Parisian. The French language invaded my body, I breathed the culture up my nose, and when I picture Paris through my watery viewfinder, the métro appears, a system of lines: running color under the earth and over the Seine like spiders painting the town with webs.

Lignes 1, 2 et 6: Charles de Gaulle Etoile

Above my head is the Arc de Triomphe. Underground, I look around; I watch each French woman wearing the same gaze, resembling that of a princess, bored and unfazed by the man conversing with the wall on which he is urinating. When the train approaches, it smells like burning rubber with matchsticks in a tin can: a subtle grinding of metal and smoldering trees. I do not find the odor unpleasant. In fact, I like it. Each time the train stops, the doors open and smack outward. Passengers exchange no glances as they pass in and out; some, late, wait for the warning buzz; others, late, run to jump in before it sounds. Slammed together in unison, the doors cause the train to shudder, and the cars shove their contents backward as they accelerate. Each stop is a drop beneath the street; the noises feel like a soundtrack: the thump, the beat. And at a few along the way, I surface, to meet a man for a drink someplace.

Ligne 9: Rue de la Pompe

I live at 9, rue Jean Richepin. I descend the stairs at Rue de la Pompe, slip the ticket through the reader, and hop down the staircase into the underworld toward Mairie de Montreuil every day. It feels like home. One evening, I go to a bar. A few days later, I go out with the bartender. Adam’s mom is an American. He speaks very good English. He doesn’t think that I am serious when I tell him that I speak French until I explain to the taxi driver where to drop me off. He looks at me in the back of the cab, and asks me what I am thinking. I hate this question. I am not stupid. I know that Adam is thinking about sex. I also know what Adam wants me to say. So I tell him that I don’t know. I also hate this answer; I am obliged to ask him the same question. I am afraid of the answer. He is still looking at me. He tells me he doesn’t know how to express it in English. I say, okay, in French, then.

Expecting words and looking at the floor, I felt his hand softly underneath my chin. The fireflies were now playing ping-pong in my lungs. The taxi slid alongside the post office on the corner, and Adam walked me to the door. ”How tall are you?” he asked. Five feet eight inches meant nothing. I slipped off my shoes and the cold cement smarted my soles.

As he walked away, he turned. “A movie moment, Laura.” I smiled. I, too, would always remember standing barefoot on the sidewalk, eye to eye below the moon, with a man whose

French kisses do not translate.

Lignes 6 & 9: Trocadéro

Take line 10 to Mabillon; I was there, on Rue de la Princesse. How fitting, since this fairytale ended too soon, just like all the rest. But unlike children’s make-believe, I promise not to fib. Leaning, hips forward, elbows back against the bar, taking vodka shots with friends, I caught my breath when he bled through the traffic jam. I stole eye shots in his direction, but did not change position; he and his friends began a French and English menagerie with my companions. The opportune moment arose, I turned my body and stood as he spoke, and answered, “Laura, et toi?” of course. My nomadic name turned French in my mouth; “Raphaël,” he responded. I just kept staring at his jaw, and the French came flowing out of me like vodka flavored water. I preferred him French, straight up. No inglés, por favor.

Voilà mon numéro: 06 24 58 31 86; I wrote quickly. He called in kind. We went out. He had a car. So strange to be outside, I thought, inside my métro mind. He shifted gears through Paris, illuminé at night; la Tour Eiffel, le Nôtre Dame, the glass pyramid by I.M. Pei, all basking in the uplight. Billie Holliday was still singing when he parked in the Marais. We walked along the Seine, hand in hand; evidently romanticism isn’t dead in France. Butterflies abound, he took me to my house; as I walked upstairs, I thought, how odd. Call me, if you want.

I did, and at Trocadéro, a roundabout, near six o’clock, as it got dark, we walked down a set of enormous stairs to the Eiffel Tower. I was leaving in three days, and I had not yet gone up, so there we went, to the second floor, where the monuments are not so tiny. We circled the tower in windy December, past some tourists in Disney attire, and then entered a museum that explained its construction.

A movie showed old footage of the erection of the tower, and when it was over, we were alone together. Mademoiselle Bouche, he called me (bouche means mouth), and then he made a sound that I can’t imitate; some sexy little laughing sound of which the memory still makes my knees go weak. And in the dark, oh, là, là, his bouche tilted against mine, and I’ve never quite recovered.

The evening ended underground, just beneath where it started: in the métro, at Trocadéro, where two lines cross and the crowds have grown. In a round corridor, flanked by the stairways below, I had another moment in my own picture show. He kissed me gently, slowing down, while the hundreds of people were running around accelerated into a faceless blur where the world was spinning, smudging sound; we remained motionless. That is, save our lips.