Chapter 80 What If I Am the One With the Problem?

Chapter 80 What If I Am the One With the Problem?

I walk away from the café.

I walk back the same way I came, back toward the river, back towards Seine that moves with complete indifference to everything happening on the banks around it.

I walk with the even pace of a woman who is not running because running would mean that what she has just heard has made her afraid and she is not afraid, she is not afraid, what she is is something else, something that sits in the chest differently from fear, heavier and more specific, the weight of a woman who chose something with her eyes open and has just discovered that her eyes were not as open as she believed.

I get back to the river.
My steps are steady but there’s a roaring of wild waters in my ears.

I stand at the railing, my eyes fix on the clear waters.

Pierre told her the same things that he told me.

Not similar things.

The same things.

The same question even!

All he did what turn it to how she wanted it to be said!

The same analogy drawn from a different subject.

The same warmth applied to a different person.

The same Jean-Pierre that I chose.

Being exactly himself……… with someone else.
What a laugh.

What does that make me then?

An idiot?

At this moment, I will accept every insult because ---- Arrggghhhh!!! I don’t even know.

And that tiny thing that moves through my stomach stands up as if to say its still present and then goes to sleep.

I bite down hard on my lips, only stopping when I feel the coppery taste of blood in my mouth.

What moves through me is quieter than devastation.

It is the disappointment of a woman who convinced herself that a choice was better than the previous one because the previous one was bad, who measured a man against the lowest available benchmark and called the measurement good.

I looked at Jean-Pierre and said, yes he pays attention, he shows up, he is not Callum, and treated not being Callum as sufficient evidence of being something worth choosing.

Not being Callum is not the same as being right.

I know that, now.

The discomfort in my stomach rumbled again as if agreeing with me.

I called it fear, before.

I called it my fear because I have been here before.
I didn’t want Callum to spoil my chances of love.

If Callum was not the one, then that was it.

But that shouldn’t mean that no one else is right?

I came to that conclusion and chose Pierre because he was funny, attentive and that felt sweet because I breathed through it with forced peace once I had determined that he was the better choice.

Maybe the thing in my stomach was not fear.

Maybe it was warning.

Maybe my body was trying to tell me something and I decided I knew better.

I look at the water.

At the Seine moving in the direction it has decided to move.

Choosing between two devils will get you a devil no matter what you choose.

I think about what Elise said.

Focus on yourself.

I think about what Daniel said.

Find better rooms.

I think about what Jean-Pierre said to a woman in a café in the 6th arrondissement on a Friday morning.

What does it need to be itself.

I take my phone out of my pocket.

I look at it.

I put it back.

Not because I have decided anything.

Not because I know what comes next.

But because whatever comes next is going to require more than a Friday morning at the Seine to work out. The Seine is not going to wait for me to work it out,Paris is going to keep being Paris, and Stage 5 is waiting for me in my notebook.

There is work to be done.

I look at the water one more time.

I turn around and walk back towards the hotel.

The small quiet thing in my stomach has settled into something, that does not have a name yet and that I am going to have to sit with for a while before I understand what it is telling me.

This time I am going to listen.

\----------------------

I make it back to Hotel Beaumont and end up walking past it.

I do not register walking past it until I am half a block beyond the entrance and the doorman who has learned my face over the weeks I have been here is behind me rather than in front of me.

By the time my brain registers this I have already decided, that going back is not what my feet will be doing right now.

My feet are walking.

So I walk.

One step turns into two, then three, then four.

The street I am on becomes a different street.

That street becomes another one.

Paris keeps doing its thing around me, the buildings and the ironwork and the beautiful lights that look like the opposite of how I feel. The people moving through it all with the particular purposefulness of a Friday afternoon in a city that has somewhere for everyone to be, and I move through it in the opposite way, without purpose, without direction, because stopping feels worse than continuing.

I think about Jean-Pierre.

About the woman's laugh that came from her throat with the same way it came from mine.

And then I think about something I have been trying not to think about since the bakery on the narrow street, since the almond pastry and the two hundred customers and the economics degree from London, since the first day he told me I looked like I was paying attention to what was in front of me.

He used to stand at the door of the bakery in the afternoons and talk to everyone who came in.

I thought it was warmth.

I thought it was the warmth of a man who is genuinely interested in the people who come through his door, who has built something and is proud of it and wants to share it with the people who choose it.

There was a woman who came in twice while I was there.

Tall with expensive tweed red coat.

He talked to her about the croissant the way he talked to me about the buildings.

With the same leaning forward.

The same focused warmth.

The same quality of attention that I had taken and held and called specific, called mine, called the thing that made him different.

And I told myself it was customer relations.

I told myself it was how you built two hundred customers on a slow day, by making every person who came through the door feel like the most interesting person in the room.

I told myself that was not the same as what he did with me.

I told myself that.

And I freakingly believed it.

I breathed through the small quiet thing in my stomach and I believed it and I chose him and I wrote I am choosing this. Eyes open.

I wrote it in my notebook as if I was choosing a goal. Like an happy excellent goal. I wrote it in my notebook, underlined it and then woke up this morning feeling lighter than I had in weeks and went outside into a Paris morning that was sharp and clean and full of possibility until I found him telling a woman in expensive clothes the same words he told me, locking lips with her in public.

The same words.

In the same voice.

With the same warmth.

That I took and held and called mine.

This feels worse than Callum’s betrayal and insults.

\---

I keep walking.

My legs take me down a narrow street and I follow mindlessly.

The buildings close in on either side in the way of Paris streets that have not widened since the century they were built in and have no intention of starting now.

I think about Callum.

Callum who stood at a cabin door and called someone to clear my body from his property.

Callum who submitted my work under his name for four years and stood in a corridor in Paris and called it the central thread.

Callum who told me I was charity.

Callum who said it was my fault for not giving him a daughter.

Callum whotold me that I was too dependent on my childhood, then turned around to make me an unpaid carer for his own parents.

I spent six years in that life asking myself what I was doing wrong.

Six years of cooking more carefully, of being quieter, of making myself smaller, of taking up less space, of trying to become the exact shape of what he needed so that the gap between us would close and the thing I was calling love would finally feel like what I believed love was supposed to feel like.

Six years.

And at the end of them he stood over me, hands locked with his mistress on a path and called someone to remove me.

Then, I woke up in a childhood bedroom with smooth hands and a second chance and I told myself I would be different now.

I told myself I had learned.

I told myself I knew the difference between a man who sees you and a man who uses you.

And then I met a French baker who made me feel like I didn’t have to chase or try to show that I was worth a sliver of attention everyday.

He took the pains to get to know what I do and went out of his way to bring me to see architecture designs in buildings.

To me, that showed effort.

It was not normal.

You wouldn’t possible do that for someone you don’t care about.

But, you won’t be locking lips with another woman either.

The next thought arrives the way thoughts arrive when you have been walking long enough that the part of your brain responsible for protecting you from your own worst questions has gotten tired and goes on leave without informing you.

But ……..
What if the problem is not Callum?

What if the problem is not Pierre?

What if, I am the one with a problem?

What if there is something in me, something that can be seen clearly from the outside even when I cannot see it from the inside, something that makes men look at me and think, useful, and something that makes them look away from me and think, replaceable?