Our hotel room was orange and gold. Across the way, a stone church charmingly clanged its bell on the hour. There were two twin beds. G slid them together to make one, and I felt a Frenchy breeze inside of me. We went to a perfect little restaurant nearby with a rusty spiral staircase up to an airy room where we ate next to an aviary of chirping birds. The staircase was a little hard to negotiate on Valium and red wine, but Paris was so well art-directed, I felt like I didn’t need to have much balance. We studied a face-lifted woman sitting next to us as she constantly adjusted her Hermès scarf, and it instantly became another marvelous private joke between us. “You are my favorite person to travel with,” G said. Everything was pointing so passionately toward a lovely climax that I felt all I needed to do was be classy and wait for that perfect moment, when G would make some absolute statement.
After dinner we walked through Pigalle and ended up at a dark little bar called Flipflop, near our hotel. We met the friendly owner, Thierry. It was poetry night, and we listened to drunks ranting spoken word in French. G put his arm around me and ordered me three Labats in a row. I drank them, and Paris turned into a nostalgic Impressionist poster. I was enjoying the colorful smears when I saw G talking to Thierry. “He has hash,” G told me, and we walked outside.
We were back at the hotel room, with Thierry. There was a short talk about the Future of Art when the Frenchman suddenly dove on G and kissed him. G kissed him back. I watched them chew on each other’s mouths. I sat there, drunk, on the edge of the bed and tried to find the right time to join in, like I was jumping into a double-Dutch match. But Thierry kept getting in the way. I pulled away, closed my eyes, and felt the Spins coming on. I ran to the bathroom to throw up the Labat and rhombus chicken breast and clams and white sauce. I heard their wet smackings while I curled up on the floor tile. Why hadn’t G kissed me yet? Did he just want hash? It was the night before Christmas Eve.
S arrived the next afternoon. He walked into the hotel room and looked at the beds pushed together, and I saw his face slightly fold inward. “I’m feeling a little sick, so I’m going to get another room,” he said. There was an unwritten agreement with G that I would not mention the Thierry experience, but I wanted to tell S, because he must have sensed the sexuality in the room. I felt like I was being blamed for being sluttier than I was, when, for once, I wasn’t. That night, G slept with his back to me, like we were septuagenarians.
The next morning, Christmas Eve day, he woke up and walked out without saying a word. I went down to the tabac across the street and sat there at the brass-topped bar drinking cappuccinos and eating almond pastries (the only thing I knew how to order) and trying to figure out why G was being cold to me. When I returned, the two of them were sitting on the bed, detectably cooling from a heated conversation, smoking the hash. They gave some to me, and we took a taxi to the train.
The wind evolved from delightfully bracing into icy, sudden gusts that made you wince. While we waited for the train, hail came. Thousands of mothballs bounced in front of flower shops and newsstands. The clouds outside were brownish black for most of the trip, and by the time we arrived in Rennes the sky had unnoticeably turned into night. In my hash high, I had no idea where I was, except that the rain was hitting the windows as if it were trying to get to me. We walked into an echoey station and were greeted by the Breton brothers and their father, a handsome Sean Connery look-alike in a heather-gray sweater and intelligent reading glasses. He guided us in the darkness to a sleek silver auto. The rain, whipped up in the wind, pelted my face painfully. I leaned down to put my bags in the trunk and slammed my forehead on the sleek, thin, expensive edge of the gleaming sports car.
In the car, I casually touched my forehead. I felt flaps of skin, and a trickle of blood dripped between my eyes. The cut was gushing, but no one seemed that concerned. I didn’t dare suggest their taking me to the emergency room; I’d be perceived as an American hypochondriac. I didn’t want to be any more of a nuisance than I suddenly felt I was being on this trip. The father gave me a roll of pink toilet paper. I tried to be cheery and comedic while I held a wad of tissue against my gash.
The car took us out, farther and farther into the flat countryside that appeared as an expanse of tar. The brothers pointed out the shadowy facades of five hundred-year-old churches. We turned onto a bumpy pathway between high mounds of grass. We pulled up in front of a large brown house that seemed warm inside. The mother greeted us sweetly, scooted me inside, and bandaged me up, pinching my wound closed and taping it with gauze. Then we sat down to eat a beautiful feast—oysters, salmon loaf, layered pig, apples from their garden, foie gras, clementines, lots of red wine. The act of eating kicked in the hash again, and I talked energetically and busied my mind listening to the history of Brittany while I studied G and S closely from the other side of the table. They were shoulder to shoulder. S was whispering angrily. He cut the air with his hand and stood up briskly. He said he was sick and needed to sleep. G looked like a reprimanded dog. After a proper amount of time, he followed him upstairs.
I stayed up and talked with the Breton brothers, but I was jealous and felt like crying. Funny how a mind can do that: divide you into a bubbly social being with the ability to ask questions and say, “I know!” while you seethe inside. I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. The gauze on my head was taped into a cross. It was Christmas Eve. I had a bloody cross on my forehead on Christmas Eve.
In the morning, I woke up in a warm bed in the upstairs loft. I had passed out from the food and wine and felt like a stuffed duck. G and S were on the floor beside me. G’s arm was around S, and they were sleeping off the hash, Valium, and alcohol, transforming it all into their consistent good looks as if they were vampires. God, I had to get away from them. I walked down the stairs. I needed one moment to be alone. The sweet mother was awake. She took off my bandage and said that my gash was fine and healing. She gave me some coffee and patted my forehead. “Go outside,” she said to me, and pushed me out the door. Outside were bumpy green pastures and a canal. The sky was cloudless. The Bretons’ garden was stippled with perennials. Next to the doorway was an old blue wheelbarrow, with three kittens tumbling over one another. I walked down a brick pathway walled in by cypress trees, to a view of a pasture on the other side of rusty barbed-wire fence.
Back in Virginia, my family was having another thoughtlessly pleasurable Christmas Day. My niece and nephew, brainwashed from Disney specials and Nickelodeon shows, their little developing consumer fangs exposed, were tearing through the wrapping paper of gift after gift, just as the tactless Americans before them had done, including me. The room was filling with the smell of fresh, fuming Fisher-Price plastic. My mom was getting a lovely sweater or pair of earrings and growing a little tearful, and my dad was throwing presents to my brothers from across the room—“Hurry up and open ’em!” he always says—having a wonderful time, which, I realized just then, has been one of my favorite things to see.
G came up behind me. “Where are the cows?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“Watch out. The fence is electric,” he said.
I wanted to hurl myself on it and fry into a little blackened, ignored pomme frite.
Why the fuck did you bring me here? I wanted to say. But S beat me to the drama. Anything I tried to say now would seem tiring and overly emotional. And anyway, what right did I have? I was just the tossed-around handbag on this trip.
“It would probably get rid of my hangover,” I said instead. G put his arms around me from behind. Here was my moment, but I was too overstuffed and hung over from the sumptuous food, rustic beauty, and from G, who made it all unsatisfying. I wanted to sit in the Dugout and yell at him like I was a brave, runny-nosed drug addict who didn’t give a shit who heard him. We walked back, and I stopped to watch those helplessly mewling kittens so well placed and perfectly cute, like the little conniving creatures planned it that way.
Back in Montmartre, G and S slept in the othe
r room. I spent the night alone. The wind sounded like it was picking up again. It whistled through the narrow Montmartre alcoves. In the dim light before sunrise, the windows of my room blew open with a violent whistle and the long white curtains actually heaved and billowed in a manner seen only in horror movies. The church began its ominous early-morning gongs. I sat up in bed, gasping. When would this goddamn biblical, overly symbolic imagery end? I was so afraid that I would be surrounded by escalating, momentous intensity for the rest of my life— doomed bells, hail and howling wind, trees struck by lightning and bursting into flames, infestations of locusts—all with a bloody, weeping mark of Satan on my head!
G walked in at nine and told me, in the flat tone of an itinerary, to hurry and pack and meet him in the tabac. Our plane was leaving in three hours. He was cold again. S had already gone back to Geneva, so I guess he didn’t need to dangle his seduction over me to keep us both in place. The clouds outside were moving at a threatening angle, as fast as black migrating birds. Warped sheets of metal and shutters from the Parisian windows were strewn all over the streets. I walked with my bags across to the tabac, pelted with wrappers, onion skins, leaves, and all the other attractive debris of Paris.
Later, on the plane back to New York, finally reading the London Independent, I discovered that deadly high winds had hit France that week—the worst in one hundred years. They’d even blown out the windows of Notre Dame. Something like sixty people had been killed.
At Charles de Gaulle, no one seemed to notice the scabbed gash on my forehead. Our plane somehow slipped between the storms and ascended before they shut down the airport. It was an empty flight, and G scooted into a seat a row behind me. He took two more Valium and ignored me. With a puckered Charles Manson mark on my forehead, I watched Julia Roberts being a runaway bride on the seatback screen.
I would love to say that all this has been composed with that calm, practiced distance they teach in writers’ workshops, and that I am happily coupled now with a nice, supportive hedge fund analyst, and that our clean, supermodern apartment will be featured in the March issue of Dwell. Wrong!
I mean, my cut healed; I don’t have a satanic scar. Also, I gained, finally, the self-preserving sense to step away from G and S. Although that wouldn’t happen for another several months. Upon landing in JFK, I still had yet to experience more fully the rotten undersides that come with being an enchanted fool. I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say the drama widened to B, Q, P, R, and F. Know this, reader: I am no longer the junkie mistletoe hanging between two men, but I still have a gusty love that has no home.
I’ll be going down to Virginia for the holidays, loving it when absolutely nothing extraordinary happens. I will celebrate a Christmas of scrutable, easy-to-process magic, bought in stores or online. My future husband better fucking appreciate it. Or my two husbands.
WE REALLY MUST GET
TOGETHER THIS YEAR
Marian Keyes
It’s not that I hate Christmas—it being the season of unlimited chocolate, how could I? And, of course, the presents are nice. Not to mention the trifle on Christmas Day. And it’s always cheery to see over-refreshed businessmen wearing big, mad, red antlers, swaying on the train home, oblivious to their headgear.
But, as my mother (devout churchgoer) often reminds me, Christmas isn’t just about selection boxes and shower gel/body lotion sets of Tresor. No indeed, she’s absolutely right; Christmas is about hard, bloody work.
I’m not even talking about having to get up before dawn on the big day to stuff turkeys and peel eight thousand potatoes. (Due to an excellent arrangement I have with my mother, we are both in denial about my being an adult. She’s the mother, she does the cooking and she has never actually eaten something I’ve made. Never. Mind you, most people wouldn’t.)
No. What kills me about Christmas is having to send cards. What is it about this particular task that makes me want to end my life? Sadness that there are so many people I don’t see anymore? To my shame, it’s more like the sheer life-sapping tedium of it all. Especially when people have long addresses. (The worst offenders are those with house names— Traveller’s Rest, Formentura Revisited, etc. It’s just a waste! A waste of ink, a waste of space, and a waste of an extra ten precious seconds of my time!)
I consider my list, an accumulation of dozens and dozens of people whom I think of fondly but haven’t seen for fifteen years and no longer have anything in common with, and a terrible lassitude overtakes me. I wish for a small but harmless domestic explosion, anything to get out of doing it. I could explain next year. “Sorry I sent no card last year, but our clothes horse blew up. We were picking knickers off the hedges well into the new year!”
Then there’s the challenge of trying to remember the names of people’s partners. If they’re still with them, that is. Because, although I might be dying to ask, “Are you still with that weird bloke with the rabbit fixation and the beard that looks like pubic hair?” I just can’t. I’m supposed to know. And what if they’ve had children? A vague half memory surfaces of being sent a photo of a squashed-looking newborn, along with a card saying, “The world welcomes baby Agatha.” Or was it baby Tariq? Or—Christ!—was it a dog this lot got? However, in such murky circumstances, I’ve found that a catchall “Hope you and the gang are well” usually suffices.
Far trickier is getting the tone right—to convey a message of warmhearted goodwill so that when they open the card they’ll smile and say, “Aww look, one from Marian. Isn’t she lovely?” BUT—and it’s a very big “but”—without being so pally that they’ll spontaneously lift the phone and arrange a night out after not having seen me for over a decade.
And so I get to thinking guiltily, this year, would it be so bad if I didn’t… ? Who’d miss a card from me when everyone gets so many?
And that’s it! The decision is made! With a light heart I tell Himself, “I’m not sending Christmas cards this year. Life is too short.”
“Fine,” he says. “You’ve enough on your plate.” I study him carefully to see if he’s being sarcastic, and I can’t be sure, so I go away. Which is when I start thinking, But I really like so-and-so. I want to stay in touch with her, not actually to see her of course, but I wouldn’t like us to lose touch. But if I send one to her and don’t send one to her sister, then her sister will think I’ve snubbed her, which of course I will have, but I wouldn’t like her to think I had…
The house is filled with Himself’s non-reproachfulness. Just because he’s sitting at a table methodically inscribing cards to everyone he’s ever met doesn’t mean he’s judging me for not sending any. Nevertheless, my guilt builds and builds.
Some people get around the hell of card-writing by sending what they insist on calling a “round-robin letter,” typed in fake-handwritten text. These letters usually begin, “Hello, valued friend.” Or, rather, “Hello, valued friend.” And then the writer tells you about all the fabulous things they’ve done over the past year, with a load of people you’ve never heard of. “Back in June, Lacey, Cain, and I did a Jin Shin Jyutsu workshop! We’re still walking funny!” And I’m thinking, “Who’s Lacey? Who’s Cain? What’s Jin Shin Jyutsu?”
These letters always end with something like “Love, light, and blessings to your loved ones and you,” the subtext being, “Whoever the hell you are.”
Obviously, it’s an idea… I could knock something up on the computer, lash out a hundred copies, and send them off. Mind you, I’d still have to write the bloody envelopes, never having mastered the printed label thing. That still wouldn’t get around the long address, Traveller’s Rest–type problem.
Anyway, they’re kind of creepy and too impersonal and… and… American. Despite my objection to doing Christmas cards, I still prefer to handwrite a personal message. Even if it’s the same one on each card. Even if it’s always, “We really”—with the really underlined—“must get together thisyear.”
Then the post yields up the first card of the
season, saying “We really”—with the really underlined— “must get together this year.” And I like the person it’s from—although not enough to see them, of course—so I think, I’ll just send one back to them. Then the next day, five cards arrive, and I’m fond of these people, too, so I dash off five “Really”—with the really underlined—“must get together this year”s. And then I’m thinking of all the people I haven’t sent cards to, and the torment is bad. And anyway, the next day the post brings an avalanche of “We really must get together this year”s, and I buckle.
I walk into the room where Himself is sitting, innocently watching telly or whatever, and yell at him, “OKAY THEN, I’LL WRITE THE BLOODY THINGS. HAPPY NOW?”
THE GIFT OF THE MAGI REDUX
Binnie Kirshenbaum
Some things to know: Yes, I am Jewish, and therefore it is fair to say that I have no business celebrating Christmas in the first place, but my mother’s counter to that comment was always “We celebrate Thanksgiving and we’re not Pilgrims.” And, as is often the way with converts and infidels, we celebrated Christmas with all the hoopla as if we were to the manger born. True, there was no mention, or display, of this being a religious holiday. It was about Santa Claus and elves and stockings hung by the fireplace and good cheer and a big dinner and sugar cookies and gifts, gifts, and more gifts.
As little ones, we visited Santa at Macy’s, to make our requests, and then wrote that very same Santa a letter reiterating our ferocious greed, just so he wouldn’t forget. When we got older, we skipped the visit to Macy’s, but we still wrote out our Wish Lists.
My mother had very definite ideas about Wish Lists, that the operative word was wish; that gifts, all gifts, not just those at Christmas but especially those at Christmas, were to be things you wished for. Gifts were things you would not, or could not, buy for yourself. They were to be luxuries. Special things. Treats. No one in my family ever got flannel pajamas for Christmas or anything from L.L.Bean.
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