L’Américaine candidly smiled back at him as she made her way into the departure lounge at the airport. ‘Absolutely,’ she said.
<
* * * *
NOCTURNE LE JEUDI
SCOTT PHILLIPS
F
or over two years the English bookseller has lived in a former maid’s room on the top floor of an old building on the rue Yves Toudic in the tenth arrondissement of Paris. Day and night he hears through the walls shouting matches of impressive vulgarity and ferocity; the adversaries are a mother and daughter, aged about eighty and fifty respectively. For some months after moving in he was rather afraid of these hideous creatures nesting at the end of the hallway, until the day he realised that they were the same pair of old ladies he’d met a dozen or more times on the stairs. During these encounters the old dears flash him sweet charming smiles and their voices - hoarse and masculine behind closed doors - take on in public a honeyed, almost childish tone. The daughter, slightly handicapped in a manner that remains unclear to him, squints and limps and dresses like a nun. Once they’ve disappeared into their apartment the screaming fits start up again with as much hateful fury as ever, those sweet voices deepened and amplified: ‘Get up you lazy cunt,’ the mother barks, ‘I want my dinner.’
‘Fuck off, ass pirate,’ the daughter answers.
Before moving in here he’d never heard a woman called an ass pirate before; now it’s his daily lot. Normally it’s the daughter who calls her mother this; the older woman prefers the term ‘whore’.
Tonight he thinks he heard the curt sound of a fist against flesh, which bothers him; not knowing which woman is the aggressor this time, he decides to go out. In any case he would have had to leave for dinner, since as usual he has nothing to eat in his room. He almost never slept in it in the days when he had a girlfriend; since she showed him the door six weeks ago - six weeks! - he feels the need to get out in the evenings in order not to submit to depression. He grabs a book at random before opening the door, then double-bolts it behind him.
In the corridor he runs into a young man leaving the toilet, so wasted he has to lean on the wall to remain upright. He wonders if this isn’t the owner of the burnt, twisted spoon he found on the sink the other day.
‘Evening.’
The young man gives him a benevolent smile, shrugs, manages to burble an incoherent response before heading in a leisurely way down the stairs, leaning heavily on the rail. The English bookseller waits until the other has had the time to get to the ground floor before descending himself.
The café on the street corner, as most of its business comes from students in the morning and at noon, is closed evenings; and without thinking about it he chooses its rival across the street where he takes a bar stool, orders a beer and starts reading.
After a second beer and a ham-and-cheese sandwich he shudders at the unpleasant sensation of a hand on his shoulder. Looking over his shoulder he finds at his back a neighbour from the fifth floor, a retired pharmacist whose name he can’t recall.
‘Buy you a round, young man?’
‘Sure,’ says the Englishman, wishing to remain alone but unwilling to hurt his neighbour’s feelings.
The pharmacist, still standing, orders two draughts and grabs the book without asking his permission. ‘It’s in English? What’s it about?’
‘The death of John F. Kennedy, it’s sort of a rehash of all the theories about who was behind the assassination.’
‘Oh? And who was that, do you think?’
‘The author of the book thinks it was probably the New Orleans mafia.’
‘Wrong,’ says the pharmacist with a dry smile, shaking his head.
‘Oh, well,’ says the Englishman, with no desire to pursue it further.
‘Who profited from it?’
‘I don’t know . . . Khruschev, Castro . . . ?’
The pharmacist closes his eyes, as if patiently addressing a small child. ‘The Jews, naturally.’
‘Oh,’ says the younger man, whose stomach has just started hurting. He has no desire to despise his neighbour, who, pain in the ass though he may be, is alone in the world; he has let it drop that neither his ex-wife nor his daughter nor his grandchildren have any contact with him any more. ‘Is that so?’
‘You don’t believe me? John Kennedy was going to give the Arabs back the land they got stolen away from them in ‘47. The Jews didn’t have any choice. It was the Mossad that did it.’
The bookseller swallows the rest of his beer in a swig, stands up looking at his watch and feigning surprise. ‘Shit, I’m meeting someone at the Bastille in fifteen minutes, I’ve got to get going. Thanks for the beer, the next round’s on me.’
‘I’ve got my car outside, I’m free at the moment, you want me to drop you?’
Holy fucking God no. ‘That’s nice of you, I think the Métro’s quicker this time of day.’
Aware of the pharmacist’s eyes on his back, he leaves, crosses the street and walks to the place de la République, where he stops in front of the Métro entrance. Having nothing planned for the evening, and anxious to avoid the nauseating prospect of an evening listening to the neighbours, he decides to see a movie at the Bastille after all.
* * * *
The film is a piece of shit, an English love-and-war story; he stays seated until the end anyway, reading the credits along with a few other disillusioned, compulsive film buffs. When the lights go back up he sneaks into the screening room next door where another film is fifteen minutes under way. That’s all right, it’s the third time he’s seen it and he knows the opening by heart.
In fact the first time he saw it, six weeks ago, he was with the girlfriend, a fact that occurs to him towards the end of the film. It’s an American comedy, just the kind of thing she hated, and though it would be wrong to attribute the breakup to his insistence on seeing the movie, it was nonetheless the day after that she gave him the sad news that she was leaving him. At the time he’d felt no sadness, just a vague sense of humiliation - obviously he would have preferred to be the one doing the leaving - and irritation, since replacing her would not be easy.
Now he feels shadowed by deep depression, and for the umpteenth time since the breakup he misses her. He’s tired of jerking off, and his efforts to meet other women have come to nothing. Add to that the fact that his bookstore - where the ex-girlfriend in question still works - trudges forward day by day on an inevitable march towards the mortification of bankruptcy. He wonders at what point he will give up and go back to England, finds the prospect sickmaking.
Outside the air is cool, though not bad for the season. He stops off in a beer bar with a Belgian monastery theme where they know him. Without waiting for his order the waiter brings him half a litre of Abbey beer; he relaxes, begins to read again.
At a quarter to midnight, having read fifty pages and drunk a litre and a half of Tripp el, and having got up three times for a piss, he leaves the bar and crosses the place de la Bastille. He ends up standing before an art cinema that runs Dr Strangelove every night at midnight; it seems to him, drunk as he is, to be the only film in the world that could improve his outlook on life.
* * * *
As expected, he leaves the cinema with his spirits considerably lifted. Anxious to read a few more pages before sleep he stops in a café on the place and orders half a litre of Munich beer. When it comes he drinks it as though it were his first of the night and not the tenth and then, warmed and happy, orders another.
The boulevard Beaumarchais is nearly deserted when he starts walking it around two-thirty in the morning. He doesn’t give a shit about the girl or the bookstore or Paris. If he has to go back to England, tant fucking pis.
When he first hears the woman’s cries, he doesn’t identify them as such and doesn’t turn to look. When they continue, overlaid by others, male and full of rage, he looks across the boulevard to see a struggle between a man and a woman, the former attempting to forcibly drag the latter tow
ards the front door of a nearby building.
The woman is young and, like her assailant, of Asian origin. Her struggles against his efforts to drag her are frenzied, and he understands that she’s in a panic, begging for help in a language he can’t understand or even identify.
While the bookseller, stopped in his tracks, continues to watch, the woman continues to scream and her attacker continues to drag her towards the doorway. They’re both Japanese - Korean, perhaps? - and he decides they must be a couple, that this is a mere domestic dispute and therefore none of his affair.
He continues on his way home.
The young woman’s cries follow him up the boulevard, mixed with those of her enraged attacker, and the sounds of the occasional automobile passing at that hour of the morning. It must have been a couple having a spat, he tells himself, none of his business. They were probably drunk, both of them, and he knows better than to place himself between a man and a woman in the middle of a fight, especially when they’re drunk. And if that’s not the case then surely some passerby will note her distress and stop to rescue her . . .
As he reaches the boulevard des Filles du Calvaire, he realises that he no longer hears the woman’s voice; in fact he hears almost nothing. It’s the quietest moment he’s experienced since the day he arrived in Paris.
Now he’s stricken with an unexpected panic; how could he bear the knowledge that an innocent had suffered for his lack of courage? He turns on his heel and starts running at top speed towards the Bastille. Despite the dissipation of the last few weeks he’s in good physical shape, and he is rather proud of the fact that he’s running so fast without losing his breath. He crosses the boulevard and when he finally makes it to the spot where the struggle took place he sees no one. The night is calm, the door to the building closed, and no witness is present to tell the fate of the unhappy couple. He pushes the door without managing to open it, tries to ring the bell, knocks as hard as he can, but fails to awaken the building’s concierge, if it has one. He’s not even sure that this was where he was dragging her. In any case there are no more screams, no visual or auditory trace of the fight.
After a minute he gives up, takes up once more his slow ascent of the boulevard Beaumarchais towards his empty room, feeling not quite as nauseated as he will tomorrow morning.
<
* * * *
DEUS EX MACHINA
A Short Story about Hope
SPARKLE HAYTER
G
oing through a rough time in a happy and beautiful place like Paris puts one’s misery in sharp relief. The more luminous and prosperous Paris looks, the more Shay feels excluded from it. Her self-pity steadily darkens that winter despite her earnest efforts to make her dismal state of affairs romantic, invoking the spirits of great writers forged by poverty and depression. After all, while Hemingway was poor, he found a moveable feast. Orwell, down and out in Paris, scratching with bugs from old grey mattresses in flop hotels, sick from the stench of sulphur burned to try to keep the insects down, found in it all the brilliance to become a great writer. Then there was the composer Virgil Thomson, an intimate of Gertrude Stein and Miss Toklas, who once said, glibly, that he preferred to be poor in Paris rather than in America because ‘I’d rather starve in a place with good food’.
Shay tries to be buoyed by that philosophy but now she wonders if it isn’t better to starve in a place with bad food, where the warm gusts of air and laughter escaping through restaurant doors on cold winter nights are scented with less delicious flavours and don’t remind her how long it has been since she’s been able to afford even a medium-rare bavette in Béarnaise sauce with frites and a glass of beer, under ten euros in most joints in her neighbourhood. And besides, those who found inspiration and the seeds of prosperity in hard times were usually iconoclastic geniuses. She isn’t sure any more she has even the spark to genius, that she can justify coming here. It had all been done, hadn’t it? Every inch of this city, every quirk of the culture, had been covered long before she arrived, right down to the joys of the classic French pissoir which Henry Miller spoke about with such eloquence and affection. Most of them were gone now, the ornately decorated circular tin urinals, little green kiosks, open at the top and bottom so you could see the legs and heads of those using them, exchange a friendly wave or have a neighbourly chat. It would be hard to update that - the new version was an oblong booth made of corrugated fibreglass in dull beige or brown. It cost 40 cents to use it, and you had a limited amount of time in the closed, modular bathroom before it flushed itself with water and cleaning chemicals. She’d heard about someone who lingered too long in one and drowned.
During this time, she develops a terror that this is how she’ll die, not in a public toilet per se, but in some ironic, comic or embarrassing way, which will stick in people’s minds so everything she has done before will be blotted out by it. Instead of ‘award-winning graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and performance artist Shay Rutherford dies’ or even, ‘artist of some renown in certain circles dies during performance’, she’ll be remembered as the woman killed by the cork of the bottle of champagne she was opening to celebrate some long-awaited good news, or run over by a truck full of monkeys bound for the zoo, the driver later revealed to be a long-lost cousin, or by a car full of clowns in civilian clothes on their way to a wedding, or simply remembered as the woman killed while walking down the street by the last Titanic survivor who falls out of a window while watering her peacock tulips and, miraculously, survives yet again thanks to Shay’s broken body cushioning her fall.
Aware of her awesome ability to make her fears come true, she gets the idea that she should control her own death by killing herself. At this point, she is without hope, and this plan gives her a certain discipline and purpose. A project. She used to be much better at making her dreams come true - for example, her dream of living one day in Paris brought her to Paris. Now the fears rule, hard as she tries to keep them at bay. All the mistakes, the triumphs, have taught her nothing useful. She has experience now, and is hidebound by it, unable to move in any direction, lacking the same energy and daring she once had to challenge the maze, too prone to analysis - ‘what worked, what didn’t work, how did I do it before’, at the cost of all spontaneity. If experience was wisdom, it was greatly overrated.
The suicide note is the first thing that grabs her in ages, and she writes the initial draft in a frenzy, feeling unshackled from her fears, temporarily. But unfortunately, the fears kick in again as she edits and she can’t stop rewriting the note. Is she being too honest or too obtuse, too easy on herself or too hard? On others? Will people understand why she’d rather die than admit failure and go home? Will they lament the waste of a young talent, or her wasting their time and that of other people by trying to be an artist all these years? After all, what did she have to show for all these years in school and in Paris except a couple of lit mag publications and one article on French words that look like English words but mean completely different things that was printed on page seventeen of a free newspaper for Anglos? She imagines her death notices will read like her rejection slips: ‘over-dramatic’, ‘not much there to interest us’, ‘belaboured ending’.
Soon, she begins fictionalising here and there to make it a better read, and before long, the note isn’t about her any more, but about a man named Harry Waller, who sits down one day and loads a gun with bullets, placing it carefully by the side of a typewriter where he proceeds to write his farewell - the story of a life gone wrong, the love and opportunities lost, the heartbreak that he feels physically, a genuine pain in his heart whenever he thinks of his sad, bad and mad moments, as if these regrets reside in his heart like shards of glass. As he approaches the end of his ten-page suicide note, he suffers a sudden coronary, and instinctively picks up the phone and calls 911. Alas, by the time paramedics arrive, he is dead.
Afterwards, she reads it and decides it is good, not just good but redemptively good. Faith is restored. S
he spends precious euros at an internet café emailing it to magazines who take electronic submissions and on postage sending it to those that do not. Then she waits, living on street crêpes and water and the certainty that she has turned a corner and the future is wide open. Not only is it a great short story, she thinks, but it would make a great independent film, the note framing Harry Waller’s wild woolly life as an international oil rig salesman, which was much funnier and more interesting than her life.
But it turns out the editors don’t agree it is great, or even agree with each other about why it is not. ‘Too long’, says one. ‘Too short and undeveloped’, says another. ‘Very funny but not right for us’. ’Failed to see the humour’, and so on.
That day she receives the last rejection slip for ’A Short Story about Hope’. She hasn’t eaten in two and a half days and is more than two months behind on the rent, phone and EDF. The man who runs the Manhattan School for Business English in Paris, where she was working black, refuses to pay her the 1,500 euros he owes her. He knows that she can’t do anything about it without revealing her sans papiers status and getting kicked out of France. She wasn’t angry when he fired her - she hated the job and the students, who seemed to think she could do all the work in getting them to understand English, pumping them full of useful English words and phrases while they did nothing, sitting by slack-jawed and dull-eyed like force-fed geese. But she is angry that he won’t pay her what she is owed.
Paris Noir [Anthology] Page 18