Even now, sometimes I get the train home from St Pancras and I’ll find myself walking out of my way to pass through the Eurostar departures area and it’s like I’m cruising — I mean, I think in a way I am actually cruising — but I’m never quite sure what’s sexier: a person or the departures board.
Laisse Tomber
S.J. Fowler
Looking up from the centre of below. Begins nightmares about space itself, it’s fact, how one might travel through it if it folded. In a race car bed, waking up screaming, pulling a stereo down on to my own face. That begins below the tower. Paris is not a city for Cornish children.
My brother is built, back from Afghanistan. He seems fine. The family goes to Paris for a day, which is an enormous pain, travelling in and out from a gîte east of Rennes, but still, proudly, in Brittany. I jacket wrestle with a boy two years older than me who throws me like a doll. I am distracted by his sister. I don’t speak a word of Breton, but there’s live music. Paris seems unduly hot but an abstract collection of things to do. I can recall my first understanding of the concept of Napoleon, for which there is no English equivalent. I start to stamp my feet and even cry in an art gallery. This forces the entire party to bitterly leave, but in a typical act of stubborn defiance against its children the unit drags me to the Louvre. I become so incensed that I kick my father in the leg. Thinking back to this, what a gentleman he was to not slap my face. My embarrassing behaviour is vividly placed in cultural terms. What will the French think of English children? The same thing they have always thought. My savagery forces the aspirational working-class family to exit both the gallery and then the city, everyone throwing their tools to the floor. As we leave the Louvre I race out of my mother’s grip and make for the outdoor seating of the museum’s café. I grab the first glass bottle I can and throw it, without hesitation, at a flock of birds. It smashes into many pieces and birds expand into the air. This is the scene in chapter three of L’Assommoir, which Huysmans loved, where the working-class family discovers, in the most humorous manner, the impossibility of escaping the environmental fatalities to which they will inevitably succumb. I am instructive to the reader. I am a matrix of symbolic and thematic codes. I am a boy foreshadowing without crisis. Paris is an outlandish landscape, full of itself, needing to have a bottle thrown at it and its birds.
I’m old enough to be introverted. They offer me wine at the dinner table. It’s a package holiday. Just three of us. I am unable to understand it but I recognise, drenched in acne, that my family is without cynicism. We’re staying by the Sacré Coeur. The Gare du Nord is daunting. The waiter says I should try barberries. On the menu, I ask? No, he says, for your face. Any Middle Eastern grocer will have them. They use them in their rice.
I’m with three friends who are not my friends within one year of my visit. I cannot recall their surnames. I comprehend, in an attractive rented apartment on Rue Ramponeau, that people are not as comfortable around me as they are around each other. They are scared of something I might do. An argument sours the air at the midpoint of the trip. I end up shouting. I mock them for being sincere, overtly earnest to the point of being, in my eyes, categorically, stupid. The world needs balance. Balance in the universe, fuck these earnest shits. Shut up and sit down. The world needs people like them, who are sincere and in touch with themselves, they’re perfect for a quick Paris weekend break. I shall not come to the city again unless I am alone or with someone I can have sex with to mitigate the conversation.
She is typing into Google, how to expand a shirt that’s shrunk. She doesn’t add a question mark. I definitely shouldn’t, but I’m going to. To whom should I compare myself? Is there anything more foolish than an old man with a young woman? Her boyfriend, whom she refers to as a partner, without irony, is exactly double her age. I would imagine, instinctively, considering myself one of the unwashed, almost illiterate, that anyone who thinks they can resist an offered body is a bigger fool than those ageing across young women. Who do you like? I ask, with trepidation. She says the name of an American. Oh shut up, I respond. She doesn’t, and seems hurt but also convulsed by my volatility. She has a tattoo on her thigh. It’s writing. What the fuck is that I ask? Why are you so abusive, she replies, and I break into laughter, though I intended to maintain my reserve as long as possible. Why did I message her on Facebook? Because I cannot be in Paris alone. My Paris is specifically not a place to be alone. So anybody as company will do. How many times will this be why I am with someone? How long will I linger in the bar with her, trying to massage its fixtures into atmosphere? She orders me a very strong drink, which is the only thing she will ever do that surprises me and I don’t like it because I’m a sweet drunk. Have you read Lasomwar, she asks? I don’t even reply. She’s pointing to a plaque. We don’t even spend the evening together, I can’t take it. I walk from the Rue de la Goutte d’Or where we’ve been all night to the Boulevard Barbès, following it south down Boulevard Magenta. I’m intimidated by the side roads. I have no sense of this city, I realise. But hailing a cab seems worse than being lost. I find myself on the Rue de Turenne and cross the Île Saint-Louis. The Boulevard Saint-Michel is busy and I feel more confident, though I’m growing weary. I have the feeling I have so far to go. It made me proud to choose hotels randomly.
He begins a strange kind of wrestling with me, softly pushing his fingers into my face, as though they might disappear within my mouth, through my cheek. He doesn’t want to hurt me. I don’t know how to respond because he’s an Arab. I’ve been to Algeria, I say, and this is true. To Oran. This actually works: it stops him and while we don’t become friends, there is no more trouble. This comes into my mind every time someone chastises the practise of asking “Where are you from?” as racist. Cyril Abidi is fighting Jérôme Le Banner on a small television in a café. When I sit at the back, expecting to be welcomed, naively, someone mutters something about me and there are stares. My friend Alexander waits for me in the car. There’s the book in the car, but I never get beyond page thirty.
We take the Eurostar. I’ve known her for three weeks. It’s felt like longer. We stay two nights. We visit the catacombs. I’m reading Là-Bas, which makes more of an impression on me than her. How can some people be so… She takes a private phone call and puts it on speakerphone. She posts everything we do to visual social media. On the last day, I, for only the second time in my life, leave her in a shop and walk away. We never speak again. She listened to music in public without headphones. She ate loudly. She drank too much wine without knowing she was getting drunk, when I wasn’t drinking, then denied she was drunk. She liked to dance. She belongs in Paris as a visitor, a perfect guest to Paris. I hope she’s moved there.
A disrespectful smile. An unforeseeable wave. An unhurried pose. I’m not a Parisien so I can’t use the French words for insolent and languid, not having the linguistic context to walk in muddy footprints. It’s studied, and fraught. It’s anxious, the attempt to be effortless. An invisible dog, that makes me follow its lead. It’s all attractive though. I miss what I’m used to, clumsy efforts to not look away, grips like a Bulgarian. Inevitably, this is expunged with a desire for something new. It’s very nimble, very fluid. Like a minor electrical discharge from a cattle fence. She says she hates other women. I don’t know what to say. I know not to agree. There is a forced smile. Is it even a smile? A grimace at my not agreeing. Everything imperceptible is a test. I’m just going to look away, I think. I turn around, my back to her and look at nothing. I feel a hand on my shoulder. That’s unexpected. You’ve slipped, I say. There’s a certain danger. Do you think you can make a woman orgasm without touching anything on her body from coccyx to navel? she asks, emphasising the anatomical vocabulary. Why would I try? I reply. Impressed as I am that she was born here, I cannot help but be put in mind of a literary critic who has no love for writers, whose criticism is not an enhancement of understanding, an invitation to read the book again in the light of her interpretation, but simply an instrument of des
truction. The peroxide works, but I can smell it. Hair that smells a little like a chemical toilet. This is affecting, even arousing. This is also deliberate, I think. We make our way down Rue Condorcet, she stops at a patisserie and eats what she buys in three bites. The butter, she murmurs. I get nothing. Feeble applause. I’m quite tired. No one wants to talk to me. Her chin in her palm. She’s so senseless, she’s doing it deliberately. I have a good memory for clothes: she’s cut off one of the shoulder straps. She smells strongly; it’s acrid, urine is in there. This is why people shave, I say. To look like a little girl, she replies, or asks? I take a handful of her pubic hair and tug it firmly upwards, towards her belly. I end up drinking her blood and think this is standard, associate it from then on with Paris. That that is Parisian and not French. It doesn’t work as well back in England, makes me retch. I imagine I can feel cells between my teeth like fish eggs.
Some ill-advised gallery reading with name-droppers. I am not many things. This feels like the first time I’ve walked around Paris alone. Things haven’t changed here, though. I’ve never stayed more than four days. I’m not necessarily sad about that. First time on business.
I’m now aware of what being in love is and am kinder because of the fear it will depart. I sit in a hotel on Rue Henri Barbusse and write as she sleeps. There’s a picture of me upon Paul Éluard’s grave I’ve kept. Why did I choose the city for a honeymoon? I’m a hypocrite. Not worth recounting much else, love is repetitive.
Martin has arranged a reading at the Cirque Électrique, on the Place du Maquis du Vercors. No one attends.
Paris Doesn’t Belong to Us
Greg Gerke
On the third day of our honeymoon, we wandered back across the Left Bank. We walked the narrow blocks near the Sorbonne with their small expensive apparel shops, where a pair of woman’s shoes cost more than our two high-speed train tickets from Amsterdam, and their specialty stores, including a number devoted to antiquarian books. Only after I followed my wife into these establishments did everything about my person seem ill-fitting. My $50 coat from Uniqlo, my discount Merrells’ from DSW, my $16 haircut from Luigi at Astor Place Hair. The male and female handlers at these stores had the skin of porcelain sculpture and from that skin I extrapolated their existences in nanoseconds. They enjoyed their espressos (one couldn’t say “drank” of such a minute cup of liquid) with the distancing brio of the acculturated, they spoke of their trips to the Alps and Spain, and they had sex late at night with the aftertaste and acids of $50 dishes coursing through their blood. Years before, in another arrondissement, I walked into a small museum dressed in my 1999 outerwear, that is to say an ensemble fabricated by my station in life — I made minimum wage — and my place of residence, Eugene, Oregon, a bubble that held nothing against holes, screwy pastels, or crossknits in one’s rags. Dressed in some such unseemingly outfit of earth tones, I passed two well-heeled men who worked at the institution. They spoke to each other garrulously, but as I hove into view, the eyes of the more sophisticated locked on my form and I saw his head move up and down as he pored over everything I was to outer appearance. This motion ended with a strong look of dissatisfaction that he pinioned to my soul across our eyebeams and I convulsed like a David Lynch shibboleth, as I was now ruled by his implanted disregard. Outside of my parents and a few lovers, it was the first time I had the mind of another person inside me, feasting on my ego after an easy kill. Years on, it is a moment or rather a confluence that stays stapled to me like a lifetime achievement demerit slip. No matter where I go or what I do, the stain of that delicately cutting encounter lingers, pointing at me like a convict flaunting a knife at the next heart his life will harm. It is deep set, disappearing for a few years and then rearing like it gained strength all the while.
To embrace the Saint-Germain quarter of the city, we sought Les Deux Magots, being emblazoned in the guide book thus, “Its name refers to the two magots (grotesque figurines) of Chinese dignitaries at the entrance… Sit on the inimitable terrace… Sip its famous shop-made hot chocolate, served in porcelain jugs.” Joyce, Sartre, Stein and Hemingway went there when they were not so well known, escaping a dim limelight only cast after success. To sit in the dining room, given our blue jeans and the shortage of euros or applicable credit in those jeans’ pockets, would have required a caliber of effrontery we didn’t possess. We took a table inside, under the retaining vinyl plastic shield, facing the Church of Saint-Germain’s nave. The stiff-faced waiter in his sixties, short and fey with thin wire-rimmed glasses and a bow tie over his white serving coat (the repertoire of any stereotypical barista at a fine establishment), mercifully listened to our order of a café and a cocoa — the most affordable items, six and nine euros, respectively. The patrons were what one expects when paying astronomical prices for things McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts sell for a song. There were certainly tourists about, and also Parisians, but everyone was there to look or be looked at. Fine fittings, expensive outfits, the latest phones, the latest primary-colored handbags, eyes glazed by bullish calories, skin as soft as butter left out overnight. The elderly man next to us, who had padded in with multiple bags of papers and periodicals, decorated his table with a hand-sized journal and a shiny pen with an ink fuselage, though he did not indite, but fixed his eyes easterly to the church, and to those hundreds of people passing in an early evening growing cold. An American mother and daughter came in and sat before us at the table by the window, though the mother could have been an older sister in a certain light — her beige leather boots doubtless still smelling of the box that housed them on the Rue Dauphine the day before. Blonde from blonde, they were clearly chuffed at their outing and held a phone high to capture their faces close upon the other in happiness at Les Deux Magots. Could these people be thinking about us? Though a few feet away, did they even see us? If they did, what did they see? A married couple? Two people in love? Two people at odds? Two Americans at odds? Two Americans against all odds?
The popular cliché about the French, a cliché restated by my countrymen, is that they think Americans don’t know how to live. We are savage and deficient in certain refined aspects pertaining to composure, compunction, and, certainly, culture and its expression. As I primped for my wife’s picture of me, tipping my miniature cup of coffee with my pinky pointed out and cheeks sucked in, we could come close to the pitiful, ugly American, miming the etiquette he is so destined never to encompass. At times, my wife and I act goofy together — there is no other word for the spirit of our connection. The best approximation in French is joie de vivre. This goofiness enables the easefulness that is our love. I told the audience of our marriage this was the “most important reason” we were before them. Once I might have dreamt of sitting in the Les Deux Magots, sipping coffee and smelling the cigarettes of a proper philosophically-enamored female, aka Susan Sontag, but I am happy to report this is not my life. Wrongly, I once thought I needed someone to speak of Plato with to be happy. Uniformity is what I had been looking for all along.
Every Story of Paris is also a Story of Disillusion
Jonathan Gibbs
If you were brought up, like me, in a middle-class, reasonably cosmopolitan household in the south-east of England in the late twentieth century, then Paris was just there. Mostly you went camping in Normandy or Brittany, but you got to go to Paris, you had been there, before you even knew what it was, and what it might mean. Then gradually you learned what Paris had to offer — to you, personally — and it became established in your mind like the drop-in sets of a cardboard toy theatre: the ideal backdrop to whatever drama you imagined you might one day star in.
Yet when I think back on my experience of Paris, what comes most readily to mind is a series of mildly self-deprecating anecdotes.
The time I went to Paris to promote my first novel, translated into French, for a prize it didn’t win, and spent most of my time looking for presents to take back for my family. The time I took my wife, when she wasn’t yet my wife, to Paris for th
e weekend, and I was so intent on showing off my French to the waiter that I didn’t notice I was ordering steak tartare, and subsequently spent much of our romantic weekend on or near the toilet. The time I house-sat my uncle and aunt’s lovely house in the western suburb of Louveciennes for a couple of weeks — I think this must have been during the year after my A Levels — and spent whole days wandering lonesomely around the city looking for adventure, or just connection. I visited the Marché aux puces and bought a beret. I went to see La Cantatrice chauve at the Théâtre de la Huchette. I tracked down the Beat Hotel and found it was just a hotel, on the outside at least.
I did eventually find some form of connection in a boy of about my age who was sitting on his own on the edge of the huge Grand bassin octogonal in the Tuileries. Or else I was sitting there, and he found me. And we got chatting, and met again the next day, I think, to walk and talk some more. I have no idea what we talked about. I could never work out in the years afterwards if he was just lonely, like me, or was nervously trying to pick me up, or both.
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