He’s already regretting this. What insanity! Traveling with an assistant, and this punk calling her Mrs.!
“She’s not my wife. This is a business trip.”
I turn and look out the window at the stones of the street, not wanting to read the thoughts on his face. He’s thinking: isn’t this what he wanted? To show me the city? After all, he loves me, doesn’t he? The love started at the party. It started in August, when he looked at me from across a room. It’s a sickness. He still hasn’t recovered. He never will.
How could he not have known that love is a fever, a drug, needing to have the other person near you. Why hadn’t he felt that with Elsa? Was it because they’d always had their own separate selves? It feels to him like he’ll perish if he can’t be mine. He’ll cease to exist if he can’t be in me, inside me. If he can’t see me smile in the morning, still a little sleepy, he might as well put parentheses around the world.
He tries to reach a hand out to me, but can’t. An objection forms in his mind and takes Elsa’s shape. He sees Elsa right after she gave birth—and he’s surprised because Elsa is usually quick and compact, not giving up any of her self. She was walking down the hospital corridor a little unsteadily, porous, the belly that was just carrying their daughter still ample, like life. Elsa in the hallway, reaching out her hand: come on, let’s go look at the baby, I want you to see how much her nose is like yours.
He remembers how I lied to Elsa about the trip. I told her I had a lot of studying to do, made up a story about a trip home, without looking her in the eye. That’s a shame, she said.
“You shouldn’t have lied,” he says when the driver has picked up our luggage and we’re alone at the front door. “You didn’t have to lie to her that much, anyway.”
“Just a little would’ve been better, you mean? Lying just a little?”
He turns away toward the rushing crowd.
We’ve been talking about the trip all winter. Was it possible? How much of a deception would it be? Would it be more deceit than either of us was ready for? His friend was having an exhibition in Paris, that was our cover story.
At the airport he measures the weight of the clouds with his gaze, as if sketching the possibility of escape. We sit side by side without speaking, like two strangers. I no longer dare to touch him.
“This is my first time flying,” I tell the stewardess.
Something about her comforts me, perhaps her smile, perhaps the thought that here, above the clouds, safety and comfort are concentrated in the coffeepot she’s holding.
“Are you afraid?” she asks.
“I’m nervous. But the takeoff was lovely, like a carnival ride.”
She pours me some cognac. I gulp it and excitement flashes through me suddenly, unexpectedly. I don’t care about him with his face turned away anymore. What luck! What joy! To be traveling toward possibilities and know nothing about them except that they exist.
WHEN WE ARRIVE, there are plastic tubes leading up and down, like in a science fiction movie. People constantly being paged. We step into a tube. He still doesn’t look at me.
An Arab woman is standing next to me, her eyes drawn in charcoal. She’s swathed in meters of fabric, eyes shining like two emeralds. A curtain of incense surrounds her. I catch a glimpse of her fingernails. They’re as red as her lips. There are such things! The kinds of things I’ve only read about in books! All those dreamy evenings in Kuhmo, up in the attic, a bee buzzing in the window and me reading about faraway countries. Now those countries are becoming real. I love the woman for that moment, her abundance and her hard, hoarse voice that doesn’t ask permission.
She says to me in French that my skin is so pale it’s as if a lamp were burning inside me, and she smiles. I’ve studied the language for six years, I can read Balzac and order coffee and orange juice and a medium-rare steak, I can talk about the weather with subtle turns of phrase and exchange opinions about welfare and economic development, but I’m still amazed that this has been going on somewhere all this time, this language. I talk with her and he looks at me, smiling for the first time.
“You speak as if you’ve always lived here,” he says.
I put my hand in his. He takes hold of it, but he can’t shake off the feeling of strangeness. Who is this woman? He might mistake me for any Parisian. Like that girl there, with the ample bosom.
Actually all he wants to do is leave, pick out a few souvenirs for Elsa and his daughter from a department store and go, as if I don’t exist. He wants to go back to Helsinki and forget that he was ever so stupid, so thoughtless and heartless as to sneak away on a trip with me.
He has no intention of introducing me to his friends, either. He’ll send me out alone to see the sights, go to dinner with a few friends out of a sense of duty, get this whole absurd thing over with and buy me a return ticket on another plane.
That’s what he decides to do as we hold hands and he hails a taxi.
In the taxi I force the guilt out of my mind for a moment, because Paris is coming to meet me. House after house, and houses being built and suburbs already constructed, their courtyards nursing hopes of fame, of extraordinariness. Fates formed from dreams, indifferent to conventionality, hidden within their walls. And everywhere laundry drying in the air shafts, an endless, festive flag to a trifling Tuesday.
Then come the wrought iron balconies and the boulangeries, the Paris I’ve seen in pictures. I yelp involuntarily.
HE’S THINKING ABOUT Elsa, the times he’s spent in Paris with her. When they were in their twenties Elsa studied in Helsinki and he studied in Paris. She would come to see him whenever she could get enough money together for an airline ticket. Sometimes she came on the train.
They would walk along the Seine and go to museums on Sundays. They would sit in cafes, he would read the paper or explain something in an eager voice, Elsa would read her textbooks, because she was determined to succeed and she didn’t want to let up for a minute. They would walk in Luxembourg Gardens and buy crepes from a stand, stop for a while to watch a tennis match. They were young, their love was still new. They had fights, misunderstandings, doors slammed in protest. Often he was the one who got angry, got fed up with her about something. She would contradict him and he couldn’t stand it. He would leave, wander the streets, stop to buy cigarettes in the Latin Quarter and take pleasure in being misunderstood.
He would walk around the Left Bank, go down to the level below the street and make the acquaintance of a passerby walking along the river shore. If there’s any place where arguing can be beautiful, it’s in Paris. They unconsciously struck up a ritual for making up. After the first, hours-long period of estrangement, he would get hungry and go to a small bistro on a square at the Sorbonne and order an omelet or a warm, toasted, stuffed baguette. The first time was an accident. Elsa wasn’t looking for him, she just happened to be wandering along St.-Michel, saw the windows of the restaurants beckoning, and opened the door to the same bistro.
They wouldn’t make a scene, wouldn’t behave like people in a movie—that didn’t fit their straightforward style. Elsa would just sit down across from him, smile, and order something for herself, maybe the same omelet or sandwich. Both of them would gradually give in and the fight would dissolve into the background, ridiculous.
The evening would already be turning dark when they walked to the metro station and neither of them would need to say out loud what they both were thinking: life, even a happy life, once you get used to it, is plainer than it is in dreams. And also heavier.
THE HOTEL IS more Parisian than any postcard sent from Paris. Narrow hallways, little elevators, steep stairs, cast iron railings outside the windows. The walls tempt us to tenderness, we should be sweating against each other’s skin, but we go to sleep like brother and sister. I can’t sleep. The room is an abyss.
I get up during the night, go to the toilet, can�
��t find the light switch. I do my business in the dark. When I open the door, I run into him. He’s a shadow—I don’t recognize him at first.
I yell. My voice shakes the window on its hinges. He takes hold of my shout as if it were a request and takes me in his arms.
“Shhh. It’s all right. Everything’s all right,” he says.
I’m trembling, can’t stop shaking. “You hate me.”
“No.”
“You do, I can see it.”
“I don’t hate you. I love you.”
“That’s just a word.”
“But it’s still true.”
In the morning he’s quiet again, as if he’s made of wood. He wants to meet some friends alone, to explain to them who I am before they meet me. I’m left with my anger in the hotel room and muster some curiosity to replace it: I’ll go out alone.
I spend the day wandering in a museum. I find a painting that I linger over for an hour. It’s a Rembrandt. The woman seems to be floating toward me. Her skin glows. No one knows anything about her hopes, her joys, her affections, but they still light up her face as if a lamp were burning inside her.
I go to the movies. I see a film about some people on the run from professional killers who escape from Paris to the south and end up in all sorts of difficulties. The man in the movie doesn’t understand the woman, he says that all he sees is an image. Maybe the woman doesn’t even want to be understood. Sometimes she goes dancing, sometimes she commits crimes. Sometimes she just saunters around on the shore with nothing to do. She wants to dance and doesn’t care about anything else. She just wants to live, but the man doesn’t understand that. She’s amazed that people in photographs are always thinking unknown thoughts, about the past, the future, basketball, anything, and the people who look at the pictures will never know anything about those thoughts.
I think about Rembrandt’s woman at the Louvre, about all that’s inside her that I’ll never know. I think about the people in all the pictures, in all the paintings in the world. A whole world behind their smiling faces! The crust of bread they ate that morning! A sneeze! A confession of love waiting to be spoken!
After the movie I take the metro north. A smell of toasted sugar and a swirl of stuffy air in the underground tosses me onto terra firma beside a white church. Suddenly the world is filled with song, steam, and rays of sunlight, the shouts and smiles of street musicians.
Men yell after me, a child runs toward me and offers me a piece of her bagel. The church is ridiculous, pompous, shameless. But I don’t want a sanctuary, I want the world—splashes on the street corner and smoke curling on the horizon.
I go up some stairs and walk along a little side street and get lost. I arrive at a square filled with a fragile little park. It covers its melancholy in bright colors that are repainted every spring. There’s a Ferris wheel, a carousel, and a row of little elephants going around and around in a circle forever. I pay a long-faced man with a billed cap and gray stubble a franc to rent binoculars and climb into a bright green basket. It rises up into the air. Suddenly I have the whole city, the meandering streets and the tower rising up in the middle of it all. People are bustling far below, crying, laughing, loving and betraying each other, making up, eating a meal.
I could live behind one of those windows. I have the language. No one here would smell the barn on my fingers. I could finally learn to pronounce aujourd’hui so that not one syllable would sound like I spent my summers and winters next to a pine forest. I would become a woman of today. Yesterday would become a word I pronounced without nostalgia.
THERE’S A MESSAGE for me at the hotel reception, the clerk hands the note to me ceremoniously, like a jewel. It’s an address and an apology. Under the name it says, Will you come?
I go as if I’m a stranger. Paris has wrapped itself around my gestures, the pine woods are just a memory. His friend’s art opening is over, and the celebration reaches all the way to the ceiling. Someone has climbed up on the table, someone else is playing the piano, although they don’t know how.
He comes over to me. Hands in his pockets, not hesitating but testing the climate.
“So,” he says.
“So.”
“Do you know anyone here?”
“One person. He’s an artist. You know the type.”
He sizes me up. This is the moment when he realizes that he doesn’t really know what I’m thinking. The thought rises up inside him, stays in his mind, off to one side, like a persistent insect. I might hate him. How would he know if I hated him more than I love him?
He asks, not seriously, just challenging me to a game: “And what’s your opinion of him?”
I speak carelessly, as if I’m discussing the endive: “Somebody said that I love him, but that was an exaggeration, because he keeps my heart in a metal box among the dust and the pocket change.”
“A metal box? What an idiot. Someone ought to teach him a lesson.”
“I already hired a few roughnecks I met on the Left Bank, under a bridge. They’ll be here at any moment. I sold our whole love story to a street musician in Montmartre for a franc. He’s singing it to the tourists for small change now. He gets some of the details wrong—you wouldn’t believe the tasteless things he throws in. As lightweight as the bread around here—airy and meaningless.”
He opens his hand in a gesture of surrender. “Then he must have lost the game, this artist.”
I hesitate over my answer. “Not completely,” I say finally. “There’s one thing that separates him from the others. He can see me. He can see me better than anyone else can.”
I’m introduced to the others. I meet René and his wife Yvette. Julien and Oscar, who think artists should be involved in politics, preferably by going wild and throwing their clothes in the corner and coating themselves with blood, or why not semen?
Evá, they call me, and I like the sound of it. Suddenly our evening is complete. We move our tables and chairs aside and the restaurateur carries a record player out to a side table. We dance.
Finally, when they can’t dance any longer, I dance alone. I carry all of Paris in my arms, lift it into the air like a globe and don’t let it fall. I stretch out one hand and let my skirt rise halfway up my thighs.
He’s thinking that this is how he’ll see me if this thing ever ends. The gentle curve of the soles of my feet at this moment, as the balls of my feet lightly brush the floor and then lift into the air until I look like I’m floating. My neck that sparkles, my smile intended for the whole town.
When night comes creeping into the evening and I’ve danced until my feet hurt, I sit at the table and listen to René say to him: “Your new woman is exquisite.”
He nods, smiles. He doesn’t deny it. And he doesn’t deny that I’m his. Maybe because René said it in French: ta femme.
They start to talk about art. I hear someone toss out a pronouncement of what should be done, how the world should create itself again. Maybe it’s René or the eager Oscar who seems to have a firm idea about reality: “Not just one image, but many overlapping ones. You have to account for all the layers of reality. Shadows, sadness, seriousness, along with happiness. And don’t forget cruelty, comedy, and banalities. No one can afford to fall into the trap of clearly delineated images anymore. Reproduction is the key word. Copy, copy, copy, that’s what it’s all about. Icons into the Dumpster, and stacks of copies in their place.”
Someone asks, “Do you intend to paint Evá? Do you have any plans to do it?”
I don’t see his expression when he answers but I can hear the tone of his voice. There’s pride in it, even tenderness.
“Eeva can tell us her hues herself.”
THE MORNING AFTER the party we walk along the paths that the street sweeper opens up. We come into each other’s space. There’s no time, no distance between our skins. I come into his ar
ms, he puts his hands on my buttocks. He slides a finger inside me. He opens me completely, that little notch inside me. He works the edge of his hand into the angle of my vulva and for a moment I’m nothing but a rising sound, a bright whirl that rushes from between my legs to the edge of my scalp.
Is it him or me? Do I make him see worlds that he’s only seen from outside before, standing at the threshold? Or is he making me real?
I lower onto him, he’s deep inside me, the city shelters us. Sometimes we feel like all this is just a dream. But in this city, just now starting to talk about change—a city that in three years’ time will shake up the whole world—right now, we are made of dreams and dreams are made of us.
By wrapping ourselves in dreams, we make each other real.
AFTER THE TRIP he invents a jealousy. He starts to ask me about my past. When Elsa’s in town and I’m staying on Liisankatu he calls me in the evening to make sure I’m at home. He asks me about my days as if he wants me to give him a report.
“What did you do?”
“What do you mean?”
“Tell me about your day.”
“I went to class, sat in the library, then went for a walk with a friend.”
“Who?”
I drag out my answer, wanting to bring him to the brink. There he is, on his knees, pleading, and I enjoy it without knowing why. I drop a picture in front of his eyes for him to latch onto: “I would have liked to go for a walk with you. I was thinking about you.”
“Who did you go with?”
“Kerttu.”
He’s quiet, weighing my answer, wondering whether he can trust me.
“Can I see you?” he asks. “Can we meet tomorrow?”
“Maybe.”
I know this game.
“OK,” I say finally. “Let’s meet tomorrow.”
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