but for the first time he thought there was a chance
that he might forget, at last,
for a few seconds, at least,
that he had completely screwed up his life.
Forget that he’d killed/not killed his best friend.
Forget that he’d killed/not killed his only love.
Forget that he’d broken
every single precious thing he’d ever touched.
Forget all that, as shorter and shorter skirts
brushed past him and he felt more alive.
Not much.
But a little.
A faint, distant stirring of life.
So he puffed up his chest
and forced himself
to whistle. He knew it was absurd,
but he needed to know
that the inside of his torso
was not hollow, but full
of music, as yet unheard.
*
Meanwhile,
at the Sainte-Geneviève Library,
leviathan of metal and stone,
beneath the noble arches,
among the students dazzled by the shafts of sunlight
that kept crashing into its windows,
Tatiana was trying to concentrate.
In front of her, a pot-bellied tome of paper and leather.
Inside it, interminable paragraphs
with no meaning whatsoever.
Transmogrified by the pointillist hyperthymesia,
the polychrome, coruscating landscape
overstimulates – one might even say, brings to
a state of synaesthesia – the observing subject.
Damn I should write to him
A book like a bucket of clams,
sentences like flabby molluscs,
from which she couldn’t extricate a sliver of broken shell.
No that’d be a really stupid thing to do.
No.
Only two more days to go
you can hold out for two more days, can’t you?
Degas’s ballerina is, in all probability, soteriological;
touched by her messianic grace, we caress the
dream of a utopian and sempiternal weightlessness.
what the hell is that supposed to mean
why can’t this idiot just talk normally
Impossible to make any sense of these cryptic phrases.
Tatiana put the book in her bag
and her forehead in her hands
and pushed her eyeballs until, beneath the lids,
there appeared Bastille Day,
the magical fireworks display
that we all have inside our closed eyes,
an entertainment for those moments
when we don’t know what else to do with our lives.
been so tired lately and everything aches.
But even when she pushed hard with both her thumbs
and saw the grand climax of explosions,
Tatiana didn’t really appreciate it.
God what’s wrong with me?
Why can’t I concentrate?
After having made her decision
in San Francisco,
Tatiana had at first felt fine,
fulfilled, content. Serene. And then,
for a long time she’d gone to bed early, and slept
peacefully through the night;
she was going to cross the great ocean without him,
without anyone,
because she had big dreams and that was all she needed;
and besides, after the whole mess
with Lensky, and what Eugene had confessed –
and Olga, my God! Olga and Anthony! –
well anyway, she didn’t need to drag all that around
with her for the rest of her life.
The past was the past, and the future was hers –
And, weird as it seemed, it didn’t involve
the man who she thought
that she loved.
Because in San Francisco she had seen
what she would miss out on if she let
Eugene
into her life: the beauty,
the true beauty
of the existence she had elected for herself,
examined and executed.
She understood now
which passions are destined to consume us
all the way through our long existence,
tender and glorious, never to die.
She knew without a doubt
that there were colours
and paintbrush strokes
that throughout her life
would glaze her eyes with tears,
and that kind of love would never lose its charm;
never in her life would she look at her favourite painting
and think
I don’t know what I ever saw in you
or you’re getting old
or I wasted so much of my life looking at you
Loves like those were no accidents,
a friend of your sister’s boyfriend
encountered in a garden,
who only talks to you
because he has nothing better to do,
and whom you start to wait for
the following day
because you’re young and lonely
and easily impressed
by his pencil-shaded art,
and because anyone, in those circumstances,
could just come in and break your heart …
no!
Her own passions, the real ones, the good ones,
were long-lasting. She would stay faithful to them;
they were the only things that were truly hers.
And in San Francisco she had met like-minded people,
moved by the same enthusiasms.
And it’s not as if there weren’t lots of young men over there,
handsome and eligible,
and perfectly compatible.
If it came down to it, she’d be spoiled for choice:
a sea full of healthy fish
to hook and reel in
and she could always throw them back if the feeling
wasn’t right.
The boys in San Francisco would read what she wrote,
they’d listen when she spoke,
they’d understand when she said
that the light coming through the curtains
in Martial Playing the Piano
was a miracle of precision
where did Caillebotte find that yellow?
it’s like a mixture of butter and sunlight
Oh, it would be tough, of course,
those first few days, those first few months
far from all she knew,
from Eugene,
but quickly, soon, she would adapt to
and thrive in this American life, this
New World washed clean
of all the problems of the past;
and after a few weeks, she would start to work seriously
on driving one of those young men
(glimpsed in the white space of a museum, inevitably)
crazy with love, and the two of them would concentrate
on nurturing
their tender, scholarly relationship,
to make it as efficient as it was delicious,
always constructive, never boring.
It has to be admitted
that Tatiana was sometimes disturbed
in the midst of her projects
by the sudden vibration of her telephone,
the rattle of castanets;
the messages from Eugene stung her, it was true,
like little sea urchins in her big rubber boots,
but she wanted something new,
and before her the ocean stretched out, foaming and free,
calling to her: come to me,
and so she knew she had to cross it, this great sea,
to be
who she wanted to be.
And anyway,
the decision had been made
already.
*
Except that … for the last few weeks or so,
Eugene’s words
had started
to scamper
softly
through her thoughts, to play on her mind,
though in truth, they had never really stopped:
she kept on her person
her phone, with Eugene’s texts inside,
her laptop, with Eugene’s emails inside,
the two letters Eugene had sent her,
neatly folded in her handbag, and
– most importantly –
everything Eugene had said to her
from the very start,
crammed into a storeroom in her heart,
or her memory at least,
and now the door to that storeroom
had been flung wide open
and all those words were scurrying over Tatiana’s skin
with their light, soft paws,
like kittens,
the feel of their claws
always halfway between
a caress and a scratch.
And now Eugene
hates me, for sure; I should have been clear with him
from the beginning
She reread his last email
last
the word gripped her throat:
Tatiana never cried, or hardly ever,
but in that moment she choked
I must be tired
hardly a surprise
I’ve spent the last two weeks packing my belongings
and saying goodbye
to Olga, to Mama, to the twins
but it was those others who’d cried,
not her,
because, deep down,
she was happy to be leaving;
for them, it was sad, of course, she got that,
but she was filled with the selfish serenity of a Marco Polo,
an explorer, the wind in her sails, heading out abroad,
voyaging solo:
the world’s my oyster.
And then, while loitering between
two rows of shelves in the library, it was as if she saw him
there again:
Eugene,
intent on breaking the dreams
that were supposed to carry Tatiana
onwards into the future;
Eugene, her ball and chain …
how could she free herself, how could she slay
this Eugene who haunted her thoughts,
this immortal hydra who, since the age of fourteen had
always resurfaced
at just the wrong time, in just the wrong place?
And so, moping over the cruelty of her fate,
two days before her flight,
Tatiana fingered the keys of her new MacBook,
sliding the cursor across the screen
idly, or so it seemed,
towards a certain icon,
which makes me suspect
that she was in the process of considering
the possibility,
among others,
that it was not entirely certain
just yet
that the fat lady had already sung.
*
And so it was that, elsewhere, at that moment,
Eugene, who,
was in fact beginning to
feel a little better, his cloud of despondency
finally lifting, grey turning to transparency
and revealing the first dim colours
in the world around,
the first pale rays of sunlight,
heard, to his surprise, the ping of Skype.
tatiana.reinal
Skype announced
would like to
Skype announced
connect with you
Skype announced
In the middle of his screen, a little circle appeared
around Tatiana’s smiling face –
a photo that was at least three years old.
And these words:
Hello, I would like to add you on Skype.
(the automatic message Skype provides
for those who want to add someone on Skype)
Eugene stared at the icon, and muttered:
‘I hate you,
seriously, I hate your guts,’
before immediately clicking Accept,
his fingers like lengths of firehose,
his body shaken by a Ben Hur-style chariot race,
horses galloping from the back of his neck
to the tips of his toes.
Trembling, he awaited the next step,
for her to reply or explain or justify or
shit look at that she’s writing
the little pencil’s moving that means she’s writing something
he watched the dance of the little pencil as it moved
‘the little pencil’s moving’
he repeated in his head, like a child hypnotised
by an Apple screensaver
it’s moving wow, it’s moving a lot
is she writing me a novel or what
thousands of words were being written at this very moment;
Eugene savoured
the thought of Tatiana seeking the right terminology
in which to couch her desperately sincere apology:
‘I am so, so sorry, Eugene; you are the love of my life and
I want to be with you, come what may. Things went very
badly with Leprince; he refuses to marry me and he’s
boring in bed anyway. And you know I hate my stupid PhD
and I want to leave and live with you somewhere in Siberia.’
The little pencil was still moving.
What on earth could she be saying?
Maybe:
‘The only thing is that I am very, very sexually active and
I need to know if that would be a problem for you. For
example, it’s perfectly possible that I would wake you up
several times a night. Would that be all right?’
Dear Tatiana, thought Eugene,
that would not pose a problem to me.
I promise to meet your needs and fulfil your desires
whenever and wherever they may arise.
The pencil continued its waltz across the screen,
and the chair on which he sat trembled under Eugene’s
tense body; not that he noticed, for his eyes
were riveted to the pixel pencil as it scribbled
next to the circle with a twenty-one-year-old Tatiana inside;
he sat there waiting, and so did I –
although I am in a position to tell you –
because I was in both places at the same time,
thanks to my somewhat mysterious privileges,
that Tatiana wasn’t feeling ultra-confident either;
she was in control of the little moving
pencil, that’s true, but
just like Eugene,
she was shivering from head to foot,
constantly having to go back and correct
the typos that littered her text
because she was clumsy and overwrought,
and it had taken her so long to write all this!
All this! This enormous block of words that said
that said oh but hang on no
Command + A and then Delete
You’ve got to be kidding! I’m appalled.
What the hell has she done?
I know someone who isn’t going to be happy.
Eugene, I’m sorry:
she deleted it all.
Eugene had seen.
Well, what he’d seen, in fact, was the pencil halt
hesitate
then gesticulate
as it erased
the magnum opus she’d spe
nt the last five minutes writing.
And yet, he didn’t really react.
His face looked like it was frozen, in fact.
His stalactite teeth made a grinding sound,
but apart from that,
all was fine.
He imagined the unknown words swirling down the giant
plughole of the Internet,
vanishing into the black hole of cyberspace,
and he found a sort of nostalgic consolation
in this. It was just like when, in his imagination,
the sun would implode and swallow up the Earth.
What did she want to say?
Why should I care?
It’s gone now. It’s vanished forever.
He felt oddly soothed by this idea.
A few seconds later, the pencil started moving again,
before spitting out the following message:
hello
‘Okay,’ Eugene said calmly to his computer screen.
He wrote hello
and the pencil excitedly recommenced its gymnastics:
how are you?
Always ready with a lie,
Eugene replied:
great, and you?
i’m okay.
i wanted to wish you happy birthday before i want away
Happy birthday.
Given that his birthday was not for another two weeks,
this seemed like a lame excuse.
As for that Freudian slip … want away?
That meant she wanted him,
or that she wanted to stay,
or she wanted away from Leprince, perhaps …
when do you leave?
the day after tomoto
you say tomorrow, I say tomoto?
Let’s call the whole thing off?
Or maybe not all typos revealed some
inner meaning, after all …
wow
are you all packed?
nearly
i’ve got two suitcases full of stuff
i hope I’m not going to exceed the weight limit
oh yeah, it’s 20 kilograms or something like that, isn’t it?
not that much for two years away, really
yeah exactly
what will you do with your cat?
i’m taking him with me
in the baggage hold, poor thing,
he won’t be happy about that
but there’ll be loads of space for him over there I bet
yes
And after that, there was a blank.
On each side of the void, facing their screen,
separated/bound by miles of electrical wires,
Tatiana and Eugene
observed each other sightlessly.
A blind date in the literal sense;
In Paris With You Page 17