We'll Never Have Paris

by Andrew Gallix

  Living Without

  Gavin James Bower

  I self-diagnose the way a friend of mine self-diagnoses sucrose-intolerance, the way I swear I don’t, or won’t, Google my symptoms when I feel unwell.

  It takes months before I admit to admitting, important, like seeing my dad in the chapel of rest, but not anything like a resolution. There’s no closure in looking at a dead body. A circle both can and can’t be closed.

  Somewhere between abuse and dependence, that’s me. I’m not a trope. I don’t binge. Sometimes, I drink a few beers and leave it at that. I don’t drink every time I’m stressed.

  Not at first, anyway.

  I give up alcohol when I’m eighteen and don’t drink again until after university. I grow up in a town where one wrong look and it’s a glassing. I accumulate a few too many bad experiences, the worst one after talking to someone’s girlfriend and that someone blind-siding me in a club. I pull on the girl’s tie, overstep the mark and blame it on the drink — foreshadowing the morning after, guilt and shame, and what I later become. A friend of hers tells me I’m a creep. This should matter more but it’s enough, even then, to make me stop.

  I start drinking again in my twenties, progressively more and more with the only problem years, before the most recent, during a bad break-up. This is at the end of 2011, beginning of 2012.

  I run away to Paris — am I sure I’m not a trope?

  You can walk across Paris in two hours, and for two months I do nothing but walk around and write bad poetry and letters telling her it’s over. She tells me the same. We fight to have the last word, like when we were together.

  In August that year, she says she wants to try again. By then and only then, I’m over it.

  I’m over it because of walking in the snow, the bitter cold of Paris. I’m not a father, not married, not engaged, not in a relationship with anyone or anything but me. Not any more and not yet. My misery. My pain. My solitude.

  My self-indulgence, more like.

  This is my first experience of grief as I come to understand it years later – my dad dead now but alive and at home then. Here I’m mourning a failed relationship, lost romance, in a city that’s nothing if not a mausoleum to Love.

  “I’ve lost that part of you — the part that was mine,” she says, just before it’s really over.

  I miss her when she leaves. To admit it, the sentiment somehow distorts; an abstraction hollow now by confession.

  “There is no such thing as autobiography,” Winterson says. “There is only art and lies.”

  Then the confession of a lost love’s the greatest deception of all.

  Back in 2012, I want to move on. People tell me I have to, like my dad in a letter he writes at the time — one letter from my dad I don’t lose — urging me to move on with my life.

  But I can’t replace her.

  In Paris, a sublet from a friend, I lean out of the window, fall against the frame in the cold — unbelievable cold that winter, a single heater on wheels positioned wherever I am in the apartment — and smoke. I think of her, the way we are or, rather, were. She isn’t with me. And there it is. There, in that ephemeral place, transient space.

  Life goes on, as stupid people say — as if the suffering of loss can be ignored simply because, for everyone else, it doesn’t matter.

  I fill a notebook I’ll later destroy, like another letter from my dad — one letter from my dad I lose deliberately. I fill it with my fears, fears I’ll never be able to love again, when in fact I’ll never be able to love her again.

  A perfect sentence.

  I will never be able to love her again.

  In that first glimpse of loss, grieving a dead relationship, I discover a self-destructive side of me that never really goes away. That side can only, I think, be suppressed — my not drinking meaning my lack of inhibitions has to take on an altogether different shape.

  Sober, I don’t go near strangers, take my turn, follow them into cubicles, or wander down alleyways and hidden corners of city streets after dark, my battery dead and my head spinning, no idea how or why I got here.

  With practice, I manage to get to the same level as friends who drink. I get progressively looser over the night. I can’t fake the chemical, though — the one I’ve got a problem with, the one that, no matter what I say or do as I negotiate ways I might one day drink again, long after I no longer live in Paris, I can’t live with but can just about live without.

  The Hanged Man

  Joanna Walsh

  The Hanged Man shows a man suspended, upsidedown, from the living World Tree, rooted in the underworld and supporting the heavens. Given the serene expression on his face, it is believed he is hanging on the tree of his own will.

  — www.biddytarot.com

  Do you know the streets I like

  In Paris?

  They are the streets along the top

  Of the cemetery wall.

  The cemetery walls are white; they don’t know what to do with themselves

  So all of them turn from each other.

  At steep angles

  Still I like them

  Why?

  Because they are always going away from something.

  I am going away from something in order to be here. Here I do not go away from something. I am in the first place I have been in not in order to get away from something. Does this mean I am going toward something? If so, I do not put it like that.

  I have generally gone away from men. But wherever I am, I find another.

  1

  Here are some things men have said to me during sex:

  In each case, I have not known what to answer.

  I am in this city to pay homage to

  The god of skylights. There is one in my bathroom. As it faces the sky that is all I see out of it.

  The sky is white.

  I am here now pour de bon, or so they say, unsure how to cope with such fulfilment.

  I look up and see the branches over the cemetery wall: they say nothing to me. Looking takes the place of hearing.

  ...

  The small woman stopped outside my door and knocked three times. I answered, wrapped in a sheet. She said, do you have a man? I said, yes? And she said, I need him.

  It turned out she needed him to lift her father who had fallen from his bed and could not rise. She could not lift him and, watching her look at me, I knew she did not think I could, and that she did not think that we could lift him together. She did not ask me any of this, she could just tell by looking. And she could tell without having ever looked at my man that he could lift her father. I got my man and we went to her father’s room and her father smelt quite clean, though he was wearing an adult nappy. He was fat from sitting and inside his thighs were two long white scars from an operation, his belly button was out and round from perished muscle, his belly also a dome and he was solid. It took us time to raise him, all three of us, two of us not even men, during all of which time he smiled, and was entirely mute. She said, thank you, she said, I called the fire brigade, the first time they came, the second they said, don’t you have a man? She said, thank you again, and I must make you a couscous, how long are you here for? My man said, we are going tomorrow. We did not tell her we were coming back next week, and that her father was still lying on the other side of our wall.

  He did not smell bad, her father. That’s what I’d been straining for. A spicy smell: cologne, no body behind it. He could have been made of wax.

  ...

  We went into the cemetery and the only grave we could find was Merleau-Ponty. It was white with a crack in it. .A few weeks later someone in the building died and we were asked for contributions. My landlord wondered if it was the wax man. My landlord said he had not been the small woman’s father but her husband.

  We crossed from the cemetery on the crossing with the hanged man on green, the usual light suspended upside down. I only saw it as day crossed to night. It looked like a hanged doll. This morning after
you left the river was up over the quais: the lip on the edge of each quai, exposed, and I saw a man and his son (aged about nine) walk along the lip, as it seemed, between two bodies of water. And though the water on the land side could not have been more than a few inches deep, it kept level with the Seine on the other, which made the whole thing artificially appear an entirely terrifying enterprise. Instead of only half so.

  …

  I am physically distressed that (See how bodies displace so quickly into writing!)

  Sometimes I look up underneath of your upper teeth. White, no fillings: and don’t they look lovely!

  Again, though repetition were addition. As perhaps it is.

  Of Père Lachaise, On Business

  Eley Williams

  I’m thirty-nine, many people spell my name incorrectly and in these ways I think I have much in common with Elisabeth Demidoff.

  She died aged thirty-nine in 1818. I died in 2018 — JUST KIDDING. My parents died in 2018. If you write 1 8 1 8 with a thick black marker on a cheap whiteboard, the lines and sweeps of ink squeak with a sound that goes something like this: weep woo-weep, weep woo-weep. If you draw the number 3 9, the squeak is more like this: woo-woo woop-weep.

  There were nine different guidemaps to Père Lachaise available online, so one can visit the cemetery with the following discrete approaches in mind:

  ENGLISH / FRENCH / SPANISH / ITALIAN / FAMOUS WOMEN / ARTS / GASTRONOMY / LITERATURE / COMMUNARDS

  Elisabeth Demidoff is buried in one of the biggest mausoleums in the grounds of the cemetery. It’s a romantic, dead, moss-spackled place, and this huge structure looms large on one of its tiered hillsides. The mausoleum has lovely pale masonry and the whole thing is far taller than my house back home in England. I slip a little on black, wet leaves as I make my way around the building to try and find the entrance or a door, catching my balance by placing a hand on the stone of its walls. The stone is neither warm nor cool. There are little ferrets or stoats or polecats chiseled in roundels all along the walls of the mausoleum, their tails bristling in relief. It looks as if they are chasing one another through a series of tossed quoits, or as if they have been modelled spraying one another with terrified or territorial urine.

  Weird animal to have on your grave, I think. The printed guidemap in my hand is crumpled and the ink bleeding a little in the light rain. Ermine is too close to vermin. I consider which animal I would have on my heraldic crest. Something mythical or chimerical but at least pretending that strength or nobility is a theme: a lion crossed with a bull, say, or a leopard crossed with an eagle. A shark with a pair of crossed secateurs. At school, my best friend’s surname was Coglione. His official family crest bore “per fess argent and gules, three pairs of testicles counterchanged”. We drew our idea of this crest on each other’s textbooks. I once went to his house and saw what the actual crest looked like. At the time I didn’t know what shape testicles might be, or should be, or could be. They looked like brash bulbs of garlic or a deck of cards’ hearts sinking in on themselves, deflated.

  I hadn’t thought about those testicles for a long time. I hadn’t thought about testicles generally for a long time. Funny the way your brain twists and turns when it should be concentrating. When I’m excited I almost can’t control the way my mind goes, I’m so sorry. Back to the business at hand.

  Having found Elisabeth Demidoff’s resting place, I push the printed map into my pocket alongside my flask and sandwiches. I look at the ferret-creatures on the masonry again, and check on my phone, fingers skittering a little.

  Ferrets bush up their tails to try and make themselves appear more intimidating if frightened or on the defensive.

  This is my first encounter with bush as a verb like this and I try bushing my jacket and shoulders. The sky is stained with post-storm, the clouds grave-coloured and moving like something curdling, amontillado shaded, humming and emptied just above the cemetery’s lampposts. I kept reading on my phone.

  A bushy tail can also show excitement or interest, and learning to tell the difference is important. If the ferret is hissing or backing-up then one might assume that they are frightened or annoyed and the handler must proceed with caution.

  A group of ferrets is called a business, I read. That suits me just fine.

  It is not just the print-out that is in my pocket. I feel the familiar edges of the newspaper cutting that sits hidden in there with the tips of my fingers, touching it as if it is the ear of a beloved, companionable dog.

  The cutting is from back home. It’s old. Not as old as weep woo-weep, weep woo-weep 1818, but we’re talking the same century. I was clearing out my parents’ house — they were dead, I’m no thief — and this wadding of paper was being used to flesh out and enplumpen a teddy bear’s collapsing face. I noticed a corner of it and tugged it free. This was the kind of teddy bear no child would ever want to hug with its one livid eye, its fur worn away to scrofulous nothing and body making strange creaking and crackling with old newspaper. I gutted the teddy and laid its innards across my knees. The newspaper was cramped with text and in a typeface I didn’t recognise.

  Daily Tribune, 25 October 1893, 4

  A newspaper older than the concept of teddy bears, I thought. Downstairs, I heard my parents groaning. (I messed up the tenses before — I apologise: I was clearing out my parents’ house — they were dying, I’m no thief.) There had been a disagreement about their Will and I was upset or something. That was on the Friday. I did some things I regret, horrible but fair things, then found this newspaper on the Sunday as I was upstairs in the attic. It’s all a bit of a blur, really, but I had scrubbed myself and the house pretty clean by then. Not scrubbed the room they were in, of course, as that really was beyond a mess. Anyway, imagine! We’d be arguing about a Will, and then in my hand was this tattered scrap of newspaper about a Will. A sign: that’s how I interpreted it. I have it committed to memory, testing myself on the precise wording as I sat in my first-class Eurostar seat and played with my complimentary orange juice, watching the Kent countryside streak by. I took a snapshot on my phone too, just in case.

  Singular Provision in a Will.

  A curious Will contest, according to Paris papers, is about to be tried in the Seine courts. Five years ago a Russian Princess died, leaving a large fortune. There was great surprise among her relatives when the testament was opened. By one of its clauses she left 5,000,000 francs to the person who would remain a year in the chapel to be erected above her grave in the Père-la-Chaise. The body of the Princess, according to the legendary report, lies in a crystal coffin, in a wonderful state of preservation. No one of her relatives has been able to remain longer than two or three days in the chapel. What will become of the 5,000,000 francs is the question.

  I haven’t felt this calm for years, I realised, as I chanted this final line to myself for the umpteenth time and slid my hands against the mausoleum’s masonry. I haven’t done the calculations nor worked out the exchange rate, but I reckon that I’m in for a pretty penny. A year in the dark, all time to myself.

  Of course I dug a little deeper into the story. I researched on my phone that whole day in the attic until my parents were finally completely quiet downstairs and even the flies fell silent. Online I found out that another American newspaper had something to say about this Will. The Boston Herald had scanned its archives and in 1893, I got this hit for “crystal”, “coffin”, “Paris” as search terms. It claimed that it had documents obtained from the American Ambassador to France:

  Five years ago a Russian princess who died in this city, left by will $1,000,000 to the person who would consent to remain for the space of one year in the chapel which is erected over her tomb in the cemetery of Père Lachaise. The princess lies in a crystal coffin. Thus the whole body is distinctly visible and this is what causes so much fright to all who have as yet attempted to gain the prize. But the will forbids all visitors. The candidate must be alone with the dead for a whole year before the $1,000,000 is won. No
work is allowed. Books and newspapers, however, are permitted, and a servant brings meals regularly to the watcher. One hour’s walk a day is allowed, but this must be undertaken before 5 o’clock in the morning in summer and 8 o’clock during the winter months. Several Frenchmen have assayed to win the prize, but all have given up after a short trial. One lasted out nearly three weeks, by which time he had completely lost his reason, and remains a jabbering idiot. The will makes no mention of foreigners being ineligible. There is every chance, therefore, for a strong-minded American, who fears neither ghosts, ghouls nor gravestones, to become rich in the short period of 356 days. Application is to be made to the municipality of Paris.

  This added some interesting details, I think, especially about the walking. It was only a matter of more idle Googling to work out which grave or mausoleum they might possibly be referring to. I remember that as I formed a plan, excitement crackled up my spine and into my stomach. I realised that I had not eaten the whole weekend. I went downstairs, booking train tickets to Gare du Nord as I went. Thank God for phones. I stepped over my parents on the kitchen floor and made myself a sandwich, drinking old milk from the carton because no one was there to tell me that was vulgar. With a flick of my thumb on the phone’s blue screen, I learnt more about Princess/Countess Elisabeth/Elizaveta Demidoff/Demidov, née Stroganoff/ Stroganov. She was married off aged sixteen, her husband building his fortune through modernising infrastructure and mining. That sounds good. My parents owned a stationer’s and they made a fair bundle, so I reckon a Russian Count was good for a few bob. The reason why I couldn’t see a red cent of my selfish parents’ money I really couldn’t say. Unfair, basically. I’ll be candid with you now, as I use my phone’s blue screen to illuminate the cobweb-jammy door of the mausoleum: it’s entirely unfair the way my parents cut me out. I feel sick now just thinking about it. And still angry, even though I showed them what’s what. 300,000 graves in this graveyard, and I still find myself so angry that I feel the urge to kick down every stone, set fire to every tree and patch of ivy-bedecked masonry.