DU NANANE
On Parnell Street, he told me about French camp in Maine.
“Camp Bleuet. You ever heard of it?”
I shook my head, and some slumbering beast rolled over in my rib cage.
My hand clutched the crook of his elbow as he led me across the cobblestones, fingers nestled into the folds of his leather jacket. His cowboy boots clicked over the mosaic of cigarette butts, cracked cement, and cerulean glass panes that peered up at us like the many eyes of ancient, spidery basements below our feet. Dublin was bitter cold that dark autumn night. But the warm lights from the pubs and shops illuminated him from one side, framing his pale face with a halo of urban splendor, as if the sun lingered on inside the brick buildings. His eyes searched the crowded sidewalk from behind glasses. I watched the glowing pink streak of his lips.
“I went there for years. Fun stuff. We’d canoe, swim, go on trips, camp in tents. Maine is great. But yeah, everyone spoke French. That was how I’d practice, with people other than my au pair.”
“Au pair?”
“Like a nanny. She’s from Paris,” he said.
The boots gave him two inches he didn’t need. I felt small and defiant; in this rare moment, I hated the feeling.
So I said, “I never went to summer camp. I didn’t even learn how to swim until I was, like, ten, because I was scared of water. I still hate it, being underwater. I don’t like holding my breath. I can’t open my eyes. It burns.”
He laughed. “So much for growing up in Maine.”
Suddenly, Dublin dropped away, and the world behind my eyes was painted in blues and greens. I’d flown back across the Atlantic. The sun danced on a pond, dodging the dark, rippled reflections of trees from the surrounding forest. I could see us there — two porpoises swimming gently, side by side. Then I felt the cold reaching my bones. My strokes grew weaker, and in a flash, everything went dark. I couldn’t breathe.
His hands dragged me through the murky lake and laid me on the grass, pumping water from my lungs. He held me there, in my mind.
We stopped at the crosswalk. Across the street, a red pixelated figure stood on a black sign. We waited shoulder to shoulder as the tram flew by on the track before us, glinting under the streetlamps. I watched our reflection stagger across the windows, over blurred silhouettes of strangers. Our image was constant: one young man, his tie hanging like a leash released; one young woman in a cheap beret. We looked right together, I thought.
He grew up in New York. I’d tried, and tried again, to imagine being a kid in the city. To me, his childhood must have been a rush of sneakers on littered pavement, dodging traffic and mythical urban characters. I could sense his adventures like a scent, and I savored all the places he’d been and all the sights he’d seen. I was hungry for those things, wriggling silently under his skin.
Meanwhile, I spent years roaming the woods barefoot, pretending to be in another world. There was nothing spectacular about my life. Any recollections felt embarrassing while standing beside him.
I was spending a semester abroad in Dublin, in a program for aspiring writers. Every time I stepped outside onto those European streets, it felt like a daydream. I was living my fantasy.
When I met him for the first time, I was wandering the Trinity College campus in early autumn, and the two of us almost collided. I stumbled across the cobblestones and nearly fell. Then things happened between us as they often do: a friendly laugh, small talk charged with admiration, phone numbers exchanged. We started spending days and nights together. I met his friends. I met his parents. As the autumn cooled, our relationship grew warmer and sweeter. Sometimes it was so sweet it hurt my stomach. I’d remember, in those moments, how soon enough the spell would wear off, and I’d be banished back to America, back into the woods.
“Say something to me in French,” I said, loud against the city’s chorus.
He paused for a moment, lips pursed. Then his voice procured syrupy words that lingered, incoherently, in my ears. “Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.”
“What’s that mean?”
The tram finished passing us, and the air in its wake whipped his dark hair back. He smiled at me, not unkindly. “I guess you’ll never know.”
I thought Pepère would probably know.
I spent summer days with my grandparents, in a house in the woods, by a pond. A thick wall of pines marked the edges of my world. But in those days, I could make my slice of the wilderness feel like it spanned the entire universe. I would savor hour after hour on the swing set that Pepère built, and as the wood creased my legs, I watched the planes streak over us in the blue sky. I imagined I was flying.
My Pepère would tell me stories of his family, who came down from Canada to work in the mills. He would talk about the hellish nuns at Catholic school, where they would speak French in the morning and English in the afternoon. And sometimes, he would sing to me. “De temps en temps, du nanane c’est bien. Once in a while, a little candy’s good.”
Our family was French, once. But I felt as though the essence had trickled away, a drip feed left to hang, a faint memory of some sweet, vital force long since weaned off. Nothing like a fix of culture to make me itch for what I didn’t know I’d lost.
On Parnell Street, I told him he should teach me French.
He stopped and grabbed my hand. “I’ll take you to Paris,” he said. “We can stay with my au pair. She’d love you.”
In hindsight, we both knew what he said wasn’t true.
The walking man appeared on the sign, and we crossed.