"And he was happy."
In the parking lot at noon in August, hundreds of cars flashing in a flat, hot sea of metal and glass, Parsifal throws back his head and screams, the millions and millions of delicate wool knots clutched to his chest. His fingers strain under the weight of so many flowers, the creamy colors, peach and salmon, the filigrees in the design, the well-sewn hem. He screams and laughs and kisses Sabine, who knows enough about rugs to understand what has happened, that this will change everything. "That was the money he used to start his own store. He'd worked for somebody else until then, but when he found that rug he said he could see his name on the glass. We called all our friends that night. We drank margaritas. We went dancing."
"It sounds wonderful."
"It was heaven," Sabine whispered. She told Parsifal he was the luckiest person she had ever met in her life, not just in this, but in everything. Things came to him from nowhere. He got what he needed without ever asking, just like he had gotten her. She didn't say it with any sort of bitterness. She was proud of him. She was thrilled by his limitless good fortune. They were in her car, which had air-conditioning and no radio, as opposed to Parsifal's car, which had AM/FM and a tape deck and was hot as an oven. They passed the gravel pits of Irwindale with the windows rolled up tight. All the way home they sang "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?," the rug lashed to the roof of the car like a grizzly bear, shot dead and ready to be stuffed and mounted. I'm going back to find SOME PEACE OF MIND in San Jose. Sabine meant to tell Kitty that part, how they only knew one verse and still they couldn't stop themselves. L.A. is a great big freeway. That was the part of the story that she loved, but she had worn herself out, all the telling and listening, and before she could finish her point she fell asleep.
"Even when Paris is horrible, it's fabulous," Phan whispers into the back of her neck. He is behind her on the Pont Alexandre III, the most beautiful bridge in Paris, and when she turns he kisses her, first on both cheeks and then, quickly, on her lips. "Continental and American. Beautiful Sabine, look at you. Maybe prairie living agrees with you after all."
"It's killing me," she says, and wraps her arms around his waist, feels the soft cashmere of his coat with her bare fingers. She is not surprised to see him. She is not surprised that he is there or that she is there. Paris does not surprise her. She knows the heavy statues on either end of Pont Alexandre III, the lights that look like candles at night. It is a city that Parsifal loved. It seemed like every time they left the country they managed to work in Paris. They had their rituals, la Pomme de Pain for bread, Les Pyrénées for café au lait, a Mont Blanc at Angelina's when they were feeling reckless. Sabine knows which evenings the Musée D'Orsay isn't crowded. She knows the hidden sale racks at Au Bon Marché. There is nothing left to surprise Sabine.
"Paris is the perfect antidote for Nebraska. I come here whenever I've been spending too much time in Alliance, even if it's just for a minute. They balance each other out. One probably couldn't exist without the other."
"Paris would survive quite nicely without Nebraska." Together they lean against the railing and stare down into the Seine, which is gray and sluggish in the cold afternoon, and even then it is beautiful. The bare trees and the iron lampposts and the grates that cover the windows, everything that should not be beautiful is that thing exactly.
"I thought about taking you some place where the weather was better."
"The weather is better here," Sabine says. The women wear their dark hair pulled back. They wear fur coats or fur collars on dark wool coats. Their lips are smooth and red. They have never gone to sleep and dreamed that they were in Nebraska.
"If you really stretch, you can almost see where I used to work." Phan points far down the west bank, past so many gray palaces or annexes to palaces. "I did very good work. They were scandalized, these old French women, giving a sewing job to a boy. A boy touching their bridal gowns. It helped that I was Vietnamese. It made me seem more like a girl to them."
"How did you ever get the job?" The air always smelled of perfume. It smelled of the beautiful women who passed them.
"I said I would work three days for free, all handwork, and then I would go if they wanted me to go. I was so terrified, sitting in the back of that store, all those women watching me. I never spoke to anyone there. They didn't want me, but they couldn't resist either. The French will always take something for free. At the end of the three days, they needed me."
Sabine thinks of Phan coming home from eight-hour meetings at Microsoft and getting down on his knees to pin up the hem of her skirt. He had her stand on a wooden footstool. He did not ask her to turn, but crawled in a circle around her, his mouth full of pins. "Who taught you to sew?"
"My mother, my grandmother, my aunts. We all sewed. They wanted to keep me close, with them, all the time. Children weren't out roaming the streets then in Vietnam. The women sewed to pass the time and then they let me sew. My mother never knew what she was giving me, a means of taking care of myself, paying my way later on when the money ran out. Everyone needs to have something that he knows how to do, something that can support him."
"Did you tell Parsifal?"
"That I could sew? I sewed for him all the time."
The couple who is walking towards them stops and kisses without ever looking out at the water. He cups the back of her head in his hand. For a minute Sabine wonders if she and Phan look like lovers, the way they are pressed together on the bridge, but then she remembers that he is dead and she is asleep in America. She remembers and then she puts it out of her mind. "Did you tell him about living here? I know that he knew, but did you talk about it? Did you tell him how you felt, not hearing from your parents anymore, being alone, having to go to work? Did you talk about the things you were afraid of then?"
Phan runs his thumb back and forth across his lower lip. "It's so hard for me to remember. I'm sure I told him most of it. I know there was nothing I meant to keep from him, but did I tell him about those days in particular? Did I tell him about sewing seed pearls onto the train of a gown for ten days straight, the bride who wanted tiny bumblebees made out of seed pearls all around her hem? My stitches were so even that the woman who owned the shop said she could have worn her dress inside-out and still have had the most elegant gown in France, and I said she couldn't because then all those little bees would have stung her. It was the only time I ever made a joke in the three years I worked there. Maybe I didn't tell him that. It seems like there wasn't ever time to talk about the past. Those were such good days, when we were all together, but everything happened in a rush. When I think back on it now, I want to find a way to slow things down. I have so many memories of leaving the house. It seems like I was always walking away. We went out to dinner, we drank by the pool, we went to work, saw friends. Now I wish we had always stayed inside. We were so in love with each other, we were so relieved that the past was behind us, I don't think we wanted to talk about it."
"I used to think he told me everything," Sabine says, even though it is not her lover she is speaking of. It is her husband, her friend.
"You were his life. There was no one he trusted more than you, but no one tells anyone everything." Phan puts his arm around her and together they watch the river of tourists snaking its way towards the Louvre. "There isn't enough time."