Days passed, my jet lag passed; I no longer looked quite so red-eyed and exhausted. I walked back and forth from the apartment to shops and markets, to meet my friends and go to movies with them, to eat in restaurants and sit in bars, and all the time I was looking out for him. It was like being a spy. The three of us, René and Marie-Christine and I, went to see a film about May 1968, the one that had been made instead of André’s, and I told them that I had been born in May 1968, it was my month and year. When I was a child, my mother was always introducing me to people as a child of the revolution—her own piece of street cred, you might say. I couldn’t help thinking that André’s film would have been more interesting, because he had seen behind the obvious details, the barricades and rock throwing, the obligatory political stances. He had gone for something personal, something fragile: an unlikely love between two women. That was why his film had not been made. As we were coming out, Marie-Christine said, “Gaby, are you all right? You seem rather nervous.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not worried about something?”
“She’s still sad,” René said. “It’s our job to cheer her up.”
“We aren’t doing a good enough job,” Marie-Christine said. “Shall we go for dinner somewhere? A drink?”
I said, “I don’t sleep very well, that’s all.”
“It’s normal,” Marie-Christine said, in a tone that was probably that of her mother.
They exchanged a glance across me. They knew about Matt and me, and what they did not know, they guessed. It’s normal, she meant, if you have nobody to sleep with, when you are used to sleeping with your husband. They smiled at each other, possibly thinking up a further plan to cheer me up. I shook my head, no, no, really, but they only laughed. “Come for dinner tomorrow. We will give you a surprise.”
Yves was probably in his late thirties and was very dark, with curly hair and black eyes and a wide-lipped mouth that I liked the look of. He sat in René’s apartment on the one big easy chair and didn’t get up when I came in but grinned and held out a hand. Marie-Christine was pushing furniture around so that four chairs were free, and René was bringing in bottles and little bowls of olives and nuts. Yves presumably knew as well as I did why he was there. It was all right. People invited other people they knew to hook up with their friends; it was part of the coupling plot that ran the world. It was about helping people to cheer up. In France, it was evidently unconnected with plans for marriage. I sat down next to Yves and suddenly smelled him, sharp and peppery. You don’t usually pick up someone’s smell like this, unless they are very dirty or wearing perfume, but the smell of Yves came to me strong and immediate and very compelling. I breathed him in, before we had even said a word.
After talking about the film, and the one that had been shot on rue Mouffetard, and films in general, and American politics—what did I think of Obama? Hillary? Would America ever elect a black, or a woman, president?—we all moved into the kitchen and sat around the square table there, close to each other because the room was small, our elbows on the table, bread in a basket, wineglasses and a bottle of René’s family’s wine, and Marie-Christine serving soup. René, like me, could live in the desirable fifth arrondissement because he had inherited an apartment here from his father, who lived here for years before he more or less retired from publishing. We were the children of the bourgeoisie, he and I, however much we might protest; Marie-Christine, who had a tiny flat in the twentieth, on the outskirts of the city, sometimes made us feel it. I never discovered that night where Yves came from, just noticed the way he tore at the bread as if he were famished, and the way his eyes narrowed when he spoke, so that he looked sarcastic—possibly without meaning to be. And the way he smelled. Pheromones, I know. You can’t explain them or deny them—they simply are the body’s own anarchic signature. I don’t know whether the others noticed or not, but we hardly spoke, just eyed each other and ate. He did say that he’d been at Sciences Po and was now doing a teaching job and hoping to get certified, because there wasn’t much going for philosophers these days, thanks to Sarkozy and his plan to make everyone in France work harder. The exam he would take in a few months’ time would allow him to teach in secondary education all over France, so there was no telling where he might wind up. As he said this, he grinned at me over his lifted spoon and then slurped his onion soup. René and Marie-Christine’s matchmaking dinner was already a success. They were soon exchanging raised eyebrows and pursed mouths across the cheese and strawberries, and Yves and I were playing “let’s gratify the hosts.” A lot of good red wine had gone down, and it was close to eleven, though outside the open windows, the night was hardly even dark, just a greenish cool dusk with swallows and house martins diving and darting between roofs. I was tired and slightly drunk and ready to forget my sorrows at least temporarily, and Yves picked up my hand at last and said, “On y va?” Oh, the lovely simplicity of French. Phrases like this flow off the tongue, both exact and ambiguous, and one thing leads easily to another because there are the words for it. It has all been lived and practiced for so long that exactly the right thing happens at times like this, and everybody knows.
They had meant us to leave together, that much was clear, and we were being good guests, doing what was expected. They stood in the doorway against a square of yellow light, like parents, and saw us off down the narrow stairs. I went first, conscious of him behind me. He slipped and slid, loose footed, boyish, but I could feel his eyes on me. We clicked the door open and stepped into the street. His arm immediately through mine, guiding me home—the long way around, I noticed. Down the cobbled hill of rue Mouffetard and across Place Saint-Médard, with the dark trees huddled in clumps around the church, and past the boulangerie, across Claude Bernard on the crosswalk, traffic sparse by now, nobody walking but ourselves, and only the all-night cops outside the Israeli building on rue Broca in their sentry boxes to see us go past.
I said, “Where do you live?”
“Far from here. Near Porte de Montreuil. I’ll get the métro. But we can see each other again?”
I said, “Yes, okay.” We exchanged cell phone numbers. No point, we seemed to be agreeing, in arguing with fate, or pheromones, or other people’s plans for us. But in our glance at each other before parting, there was the tacit agreement: not now, but very soon.
A day later, after meeting him for a beer at the little café on the corner of my street, I thumbed in the code, and our big gate opened, and we stepped inside. Then, keys in locks, more doors opening, the stairs, my front door. Inside the door, kisses, tongues, clothes sliding, hands grasping, the rapid search of another’s body, who are you, where do we fit? No thought of anything but the immediate puzzles of belt buckles, buttons, bras, and tight underpants. He was, as I’d guessed he would be, smooth skinned and slippery almost to the touch, his skin not soft exactly but close-grained, tight. Some people have rough, porous skin, while others are smooth from head to toe. He, with his bush of black hair, a surprisingly hairless body, just a sprinkle around the nipples and a flare of black at his groin. I was hungry, ecstatic, finding him just as fast as I could, and surprised at my own hunger. We fell on the couch and slid off onto the floor, but the rough matting scratched my back, and without saying anything coherent, we made it to the bedroom and fell upon the bed. There, he explored my mouth and then my breasts, and his hand found his way to my crotch, and I grasped his penis, and he gasped, and then he was pulling on a condom with one-handed expertise, and finding his way inside. I couldn’t remember when I’d last made love with Matt, but it was not like this. Maybe it had been once. But no, Matt was a slow lover, a deliberate one, and, after all, we had been married for years. There’s nothing quite like the dizzy, grasping, messy slipping intensity of the first time. Even if it hurts, and he misses, and you bump noses and get your underclothes tied around your feet, you find your way like a blind person rushing down an alley, in through that door, into the discovery, and he’s in you, and you’re holdi
ng him fast for dear life, and then the movement begins, and you can hardly bear it.
There was a street light outside the window that struck in yellow stripes through the shutters to where we grappled on the bed, and it fell across my eyes and then his, and he threw up a hand across his own eyes and then covered mine, and in the darkness of my closed lids, I felt him come, with a few rapid little movements that didn’t do it for me—too fast, too soon, not the slow sweeps I was used to, but it didn’t matter, we would get there.
He held me, stroked me, and then lowered his head to begin kissing me with long, sweet kisses, licking and stroking, and then, of course, I felt myself rising and gathering in the way there really aren’t any words for, only sensations, and I fell shouting beneath him, my knees shaking, my whole body breaking open. I might faint, it was so sweet and harsh and insistent. Suddenly I remembered Matt talking about it, the American expression, “giving head,” and I began to laugh.
What’s funny? Nothing. I’ll tell you. Oh, God—and from shaking and nearly fainting, I was off into helpless laughter that came close to tears. He held me as if I was breaking apart, and indeed I was. Then we flung ourselves on our backs on the soaked sheets, our heads pillowed together and feet sticking out like two halves of a wishbone. The street lights striped us yellow, and an ambulance went past with its hee-haw note, somewhere a street away.
6.
In the morning, I woke with a familiar sensation of alarm from much earlier in my life, when I had been a teenaged waif in eighties London: What on earth did I do last night, what did I drink, what did I say, who did I go home with? Then I remembered it all. He’d left at three or so, after throwing on his clothes, pushing into his shoes without fastening them, kissing me fast and hard on the mouth, and then nuzzling a little into my neck. We had slept together for an hour or so. He’d said, “On se téléphone.” I remembered that. Then I woke again close to ten, and there was this panic, this leap into awareness. What had I done? It had all been too fast. Nobody in her right mind had sex on a barely second date. Nobody married, anyway. Guilt threatened—or at least, the unease of having done something precipitous that could not be undone. One other person now knew me this way, the way of the body, and I felt hot as I remembered it. I made tea and dragged the duvet back over me as I got back into bed with my mug. I had made love with someone who wasn’t Matt for the first time in eight years or more, and—come on, admit it—I had loved it. But the thought of Matt himself, in America, fast asleep in another time zone without any idea of what I had been up to, gave me a pang. He would get up in a few hours, having slept, having dreamed, having woken without me; he would shower and make coffee and look at the day and maybe think of me, but he would have no idea. In his book, I would have betrayed him. To me, what I had done seemed to have put me in solidarity with the whole male sex; I simply liked all of them better this morning, including him. It’s a strange thing that so-called infidelity can bring you full circle, to think tenderly of your spouse because he is of the same species as the one who brought you so much pleasure, because the blueprint works. Their bodies, their skins, their smells; the fact that they were once all little boys, and will become old men; their anxieties and their performances, not so very different; their desires to please; their fear of failure; their faked insouciance; their swift departures. But I knew that Matt would certainly never see things this way.
I got up slowly after drinking my tea, an English habit that he had once nurtured by bringing me tea in bed on good days—dear Matt, he had learned to boil a kettle and abandon the microwave—and I showered and brushed my teeth and stared into the mirror the way you have to after sex to see if you have changed. I thought of my father, because I looked like him in this raw state, and I wondered if he had used this flat for his rendezvous with that woman, whoever she was. Of course he had. Today, I had to believe it.
I went to my usual café for breakfast because I needed some air and had run out of bread. It was a cool gray morning again, and the gutters ran with water and the pavements were damp. The café was half populated by people reading newspapers, but they were mostly outside. I went inside, because I sat at the same table always so that people would remember me. In a shifting world, these things count. She is the one who sits at the table in the corner and orders a grand crème and a croissant and a glass of water, who writes in a little black notebook, who watches the men come in with their stacks of boxes of lettuce and herbs and stares at the other patrons of the café as if trying to commit them to memory. At the same time, my thoughts and feelings remain invisible. I never talk to anyone for long. I just observe them and want them to remember me: two vices of a writer. I didn’t know what I would do with the scattered words in the black notebook, what they would become, but they marked my trail, would show that I had existed, even when I did not. Since I won that surprising amount of money for my poetry, it all looked more real to me even when it was flung down illegibly on a small page—and they say that money has nothing to do with art.
My phone rang in my bag, and I fished it out, and when I switched on, heard René’s voice. “Eh alors, ma belle?” To be called, this casually, beautiful.
“That was a lovely evening, thank you, René.”
“So, I gather you met again?”
“Yes. Yes, we did.”
“Okay, I understand. You’re in public. So I don’t get to hear the whole story. I was calling to see if you wanted to come with me to visit my grandmother. She lives on the next street to you; she would love to meet you. I always go on Thursdays, in the afternoon. Are you free?”
“Sure, I’d like to. Come by on your way, then, and we’ll go together?” I wondered if there was any particular reason that René was inviting me to meet his grandmother today, apart from our being neighbors. It would give me a chance, anyway, to find out some more from him about Yves.
This small gap in my day was perhaps a good time to review my theories on happiness and its lack. In America, you were supposed to be happy; it was in the Constitution. In England, the best we could do, usually, was, “Mustn’t grumble.” In France, it seemed that happiness was a philosophical position that you could choose, as long as you were ready to surrender to pessimism when challenged.
My mother had simply said to me when I told her I was going to marry Matt, “I just want you to be happy,” in a tone of voice that suggested that it would be most unlikely. My father said dreamily, “I hope you’ll be as happy as we have been.”
Matt’s mother said, “I’m sure he’ll make you very happy, dear.”
I’d thought I was happy already, no problem, and that sleeping every night with Matt would make me even happier. I couldn’t think why everyone was commenting on my happiness; it was just there, like health, like youth, like having enough money for now.
Then—what happened? It began to drain away. There was no solid, lasting happiness, I discovered, only the ephemeral joy of finding the right word, a line in a poem, a final image. When my parents died, too young, one after the other, wasn’t I right to be unhappy? When I discovered I lived in a country that took no notice of the Geneva conventions, wasn’t unhappiness a correct response? When you were faced with the deaths of thousands, a brutal war carried on in your name, and people cold-bloodedly discussing torture, wasn’t happiness an insult, to memory, to humanity, to what made us so fragilely people, not beasts?
Good sex does make you happy, no doubt about it, in a very basic animal way; you bounce up and smile at the world like a dog who has been taken for a walk. To be entwined with another human being, to exchange what are rather disgustingly known as bodily fluids, to slip and slide along each other, skin close, bone socketed, to lick and kiss and giggle and doze, all this has its impacts upon unhappiness and makes it seem irrelevant, at least for the time being. You become part of the human race again, the part that pleases rather than torments each other, that makes love, not war, not pain. You look out on the day with the benign slight boredom of satedness, slowed an
d settled in all your fibers. Yes, I felt happier from having been to bed with Yves. But the circumstances of my life had not changed. I wondered, as I went to meet René to visit his grandmother, if perhaps the superficial things of life might have power, after all, to change the deep ones, not the other way around. If lightness of heart was the point, rather than the heaviness of taking life seriously. If my father had perhaps felt this too. If it all had to do with sex.
Light things and heavy things fall to earth at the same speed, don’t they? Are we humans essentially light, or heavy? And in our headlong fall through life, does it matter which? Can we choose, or are we chosen? A bag of lead or a bag of feathers? A groan or a giggle? A blow suffered or an easy caress?
We walked together up the street, René and I, crossed the boulevard under the bridge that hides the narrow, low-down old streets that once bordered the hidden river Bièvre, beneath the straight broad lines of Haussmann’s Paris. There are brass plaques on the pavement to show where the buried river flowed, and where it divided in two. I thought of an underground river, imprisoned there for centuries; surely you can’t stop water flowing, it must go somewhere? I minded for it, that its waters could not ever feel the warmth of the sun.
Paris Still Life: A Novel Page 4