As the plane descends into Paris, I am reading Another Country by James Baldwin. Eric and Yves have taken a trip together, and, anticipatory and terrified, they stand in a small hotel room, looked down upon by a cathedral. They venture off to an empty bistro, which is soon filled by a wave of drunken French soldiers. They clasp hands, briefly, but then pull away – hiding from who? From the soldiers? From the church? From themselves? 

The plane begins to rumble and shake. Eric and Yves are in bed now. They are each other’s first lovers. They’ve made love with others before – plenty of times. But have never loved, or, rather, allowed themselves to be loved. We fall from the sky, down into the miniature buildings and toy cars and itty-bitty people, and enter the city below. 

I come to Paris fraught about my sexuality. I visit Sacré Coeur two times. The white-stone cathedral hangs over the hill, its gaze harsh, aglow in golden light as the sky and city darkens. The nighttime birds begin to chirp, and a troubadour in a rasta hat sings “Three Little Birds.” 

In the streets of Paris, music is everywhere. At the base of the Eiffel tower there is a protest – Palestinian flags wave, hijabs bob, hands clap. The top of the tower forms a searchlight, moving over our faces. A brown musician, circled by tourists, sings in Arabic to his guitar. Bars fill with sweaty people. Wine glasses and bottles of beer clink beneath chatter. A man in a daisy-print pantsuit shimmies to Michael Jackson. The metro whooshes inside long dark tunnels, their doors splashed with graffiti paint. Thick rats rustle under garbage cans. 

I’m scouring for the girl I love – she might be along the Seine or sitting in a café. Before she left, we held hands at the train station and dreamed about me visiting. I let myself forget she had a boyfriend and that I was a girl. Maybe many miles away she’d realize she loved me too. 

In Another Country, Vivaldo, a white “straight” man with queer interracial desires, realizes, “Love was a country he knew nothing about.” High on a roof overlooking New York, a man approaches him. “Don’t bother. It’s not worth it, nothing will happen,” Vivaldo pleads. He can’t “bear” the “intensity” in the man’s eyes– he can’t bear to be wanted. He wants Ida, a Black woman and the sister of his late best friend, to love him. But they both don’t love themselves. “Perhaps it was he who did not know how to give, did not know how to love,” Vivaldo thinks.

I refuse to see my friend in Paris. I sip hot chocolate in Les Deux Magots – where Simone de Beauvoir, who we both adore, wrote. I look up at each person that comes through the door. 

There are other countries in Baldwin’s novel, pockets where we can know love. After violence, the first surrender we get is with Eric and Yves in France – away from the incessant noise and shutter of America. “Yves, do you love me?” Eric asks. “Yes,” Yves answers. “That’s good because I’m crazy about you. I love you.”

I’m staying with a childhood friend in Paris, who cooks me oatmeal in the morning and cuts up little slices of strawberry. “Love is both a feeling and an ability to show up for someone,” she says. “Your friend loves you, but she knows she can’t show up for you. You need to let her go.”

Baldwin once told the Paris Review that “It wasn’t so much a matter of choosing France— it was a matter of getting out of America.” He moved to Paris in 1948 because if he stayed in New York, he would have “gone under.” His character, Eric, makes a similar sojourn to Paris, in part, “to find out who he was, and it was his necessity to do this… alone.” And Paris, he found, was “the loneliest city under heaven.” That is until he heard music coming from an empty boulevard. The keeper of that music, a portable radio in his two hands, was Yves.

Inside a jazz club, I am swept up by two saxophones, bass, trumpet, and drums. There are a few couples of men. One partner, tall and in a leather jacket, dances with another, their hair gelled back, rouge on their cheek bones, red on their lips. I am dancing with someone I have just met – together we are two girl-like people in boyish dress. We get caught up in the bass, and soon they kiss me, and we kiss and dance, our bodies moving to the rhythm. They twirl me. I twirl them. We are right beside the band – a group of older white French folks puffing and strumming and thrumming. A couple, a balding man and a gray-haired woman, beckons us over, and takes our hands, spinning us around. 

I’m sitting on the metro, legs spread, head tipped back, guffawing. I’m strutting down the street, holding hands with the person I met dancing. My childhood friend and I cook for each other – steaming vegetables on rice – and stay up drinking cheap wine. I visit Sacré Coeur again. Resting on the steps, I look out at the city, swaying to a troubadour’s beat. 

The night before I return to New York, I continue reading Another Country. Eric is on the train: “He lit a cigarette and stood in the vestibule, while the hideous outskirts of Paris rolled by. Why am I going home? he asked himself.” I am on a train too, outside pastures pass by. Why, I wonder, would I leave this city which met me, and let me re-meet myself? New York has seen me weep and laugh and hyperventilate and be at ease and hide from myself. “It was time,” Eric answers. Time to put to the test if love is a country I can carry inside of me.