It's Not Love, It's Just Paris Read Free Page B

arrived, they called her or just showed up at our door and my mother would bring them in, give them clothes, groceries, listen to their stories, and set them up with a job. Mami had built an intricate network of those she’d helped over the years who now had their own businesses. She was a one-woman embassy, getting the new arrivals to doctors who treated at a discount, lawyers willing to help with their papers, tutoring their children so they wouldn’t get railroaded into the slow classes in school. She was godmother to about thirty kids already and the namesake of a dozen others. She drove an old baby blue Mercedes and still wore her fat whip of a braid down to her waist, never a drop of makeup, and the same mochila she carried with her on that flight with the dogs out of Colombia.
    My father says he only moved us out to a fancy New Jersey suburb because he had a dream of owning acres, a house with many rooms so nobody he knew would ever be left without a place to sleep, and this was the closest thing my parents had known to paradise. There were always extra plates at the dinner table—water added to the soup, is what Mami would say—always a bed freshly made, waiting for the next guest, be it for a night, a week, or a month. On Sundays after church, our house was Grand CentralStation for Tristate Colombians, people passing through to say hello, celebrating successes or quietly relaying bad news, dropping off pasteles, buñuelitos, chicharrónes, and albóndingas, any little gesture of gratitude for my parents.
    I thought this was how all families operated until Ajax started coming over and mocked our clan, saying, “When immigrants get money they turn their mansions into refugee camps.”
    But my older brother, Santi, explained to me that Ajax probably acquired that line at home and the only thing people resent more than poor immigrants are wealthy ones:
    “Remember, hermanita, the Brown American Dream is the White American Nightmare.”
    I never thought much of any of this until I moved into Séraphine’s house. There, it was as if everyone carried their family history in their pocket, bragging about bloodlines, waving the family crest rings on their fingers. The paperwork to live in the House of Stars was more detailed than a college application, asking for the names and nationalities of grandparents and great-grandparents. I didn’t have anything to put in those spaces. Séraphine had been forced to grow lenient over the years, though. She said there were hardly any real blue bloods anymore; immigration, Communism, dictatorships, and little countries gaining independence did away with nobility and name privilege. Now, in the era of “le Self-Made,” a sort of charlatanism in her view, she lamented that any nobody off the street could come into the opportunities, money, and property that used to be afforded to the few of a certain birthright. According to Séraphine, all of us girls residing in the House of Stars were part of the fresh and hungry newly moneyed international breed that was turning France into a resigned colony of our pleasures. We were the
greenbloods
, full of equity, pedigree unknown.

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    Loic was an actor, though he’d never taken an acting class or performed anywhere. He said just because an artist isn’t actively creating doesn’t mean their time is without artistic value; if you want to create art you’ve got to
live
art, and he was in a period of creative fermentation, which sounded to me like a whole lot of nothing, but Loic was almost thirty, so I figured he knew something about life that I didn’t.
    The day after my arrival, he took me on a tour of the neighborhood, pointing out the locales that made up my new vie quotidienne. The pharmacies, the boulanger with the best baguette, the post office around the corner, the tabac with the cheapest cigarettes, the wine shop, the cleaners, the public pool, the Italian restaurant up the street where the girls of the house ate a few times a