My sister was increasingly looking unlikely to detour from a life lived as half romantic-comedy lead, half Xbox-playing college jock. She updated her Facebook page with photographs of parties where her group of friends dressed up in clothes that attempted to mock the very subculture they existed in, like a double-denim party or white trash party. I wasn’t sure they understood the double irony.
It didn’t surprise me that bringing a road sign back for her boyfriend would be the type of thing that would solidify the fact they were good for each other. I’d often wished I had relationships that required the same slim maintenance, with the same whatever way of staying on track.
One might think that being a single man in Paris with a decent education, a symmetrical face, a somewhat proportionate body, a vocabulary for wine, and a stable, sensible job would be enough to bed a woman for more than two weeks, but it wasn’t so simple. I was too stiff in ways the French men weren’t – their stiffness was in the upper back, mine in the legs – and I appeared militant, though with a journalist’s premature stupor, which made the whole package badly conflicting. Where they could be friendly and charming without smiling, I was all smiles and wide-eyedness. I knew very well how it looked – I appeared too keen, too trusting – yet I couldn’t stop making a fool of myself.
In my work I was neither very good with people, nor was I adventurous in my writing. I had resolved that I dealt well with orders. Though lately I’d been determined to change my fate as a writer: after work I’d been researching a group of underground Parisian bandits who secretly repaired historical sites in the city. Last year the Pantheon clock that hadn’t rung for seventy years started chiming, and there had been rumours then about the group. I was due to meet with a clock maker who knew something the following evening.
‘How about you let me take you to a couple of my favourite places while you’re here too. There’ll be places to shop. First I’ll take you to Musée Rodin and then to Puces de Clignancourt market – one side of my Paris and then the other – the rest near my apartment you can navigate yourself. Tomorrow I have a little work, but I’ll set you up for the day.’
‘Oui,’ she said, pronouncing the word in a foreign, detectable accent. It was nice to see my sister.
Easter, 1988: we waited all day for our drunk dad to hide the Easter eggs in our yard, all day we played around with our cousins who’d been dumped with us while the adults boozed inside. Outside we smelt barbecues over neighbours’ fences, listened to the above-ground chlorine pool splashing, and retreated in boredom to the cubby to play cards and pretend to kiss each other, or – more to the truth – kiss each other with tongues; yes, my first cousins. At one point it was early night and finally we spotted our father exiting the back sliding door onto the lawn, a shopping bag filled with foil-wrapped eggs in one hand, in the other a goblet-sized glass of red wine, and, for good measure, the remaining bottle clamped to his side with his elbow. He was lit up by a back-door floodlight as we watched every egg he ‘hid’ – and the spectacle as he leant down and either stumbled or spilt wine over the little pile of eggs he’d just deposited.
I remember we sat up there in the tree cubby saying, ‘What a freak show, man, what a freak show’ – yeah, the kissing cousins thought this was a freak show.
After my cousins and drunk uncles and aunties had left, Dad had woken up, attended an AA meeting, become a born-again Christian in mere weeks of being sober, and talked endlessly about his ‘higher power’ enough for our mom to leave and take Dad’s place as the resident alcoholic. It had been a reliable enough reason to move away from a hometown, and we did – my sister eventually to an administrator’s traineeship on the other side of Ohio, and me to any other major city where I could be anonymous. After I’d first left though, Sal had stayed on with Mom. I’d call every so often, not very often, to check in, and nothing gave it away, gave away that something awful was going on at home. Then after I graduated I’d got the call from Sal to say Mom was dead, a bad fall at home. I’d flown back from college for the funeral and tried forgetting that I’d forgotten about them all before everything became even worse than it had ever been. When families fall apart, traditions that seemed important, those simple guides on how to live, end up disintegrating under the weight of their own ability to be invalidated and become the dates and habits we try hard to bury, though silently we lament their death. I missed what Easter weekend had been as much as I longed to forget it.
On our first day touring we ended up doing both the Rodin and the Puces. We took the Métro and had dinner at Lipp in Saint-Germain and then retired for an evening of a bottle of Martini Blanc and a bottle of riesling, and two joints.
‘How do you get weed when you’re here anyway?’
‘By text messages that read 20 euros Saint-Paul or 10 euros Bonne Nouvelle or whatever and we quickly exchange it in our hands as we pass each other on a platform. I always imagine, just before passing him, that I’ll reach out with my other hand, grab the elbow and twist it around his back, and say “you’re under arrest” and push him up against the white tiles.’
The high kept us both vague and giggly. Sharing a mutual feeling of self-loathing was what good siblings did – it was special.
‘Hey Sal, ever thought we’ll somehow always be fucked up because of our folks?’
‘Yeah, definitely.’
We choked on our laughter while hovering above the sink, brushing our teeth together before heading to bed. I gave Sal the double and I took the sofa.
I heard her call out, ‘I really need to talk to you about that soon, being fucked up,’ and in the dark we broke into laughter again and likely passed out.
For our second day, I took Sal to Palais Royal, and then to have noodles. My meeting in the evening with the clock maker was in the same area, so we stuck around. Sal got her 3.00 pm wind of normalcy after our horrid hangover and we decided to walk to Trocadéro. We had to stop at every newspaper stand to browse the same postcards we’d seen at the stand before. It was okay for me, the obligatory tour-guiding; I decided to have a can of soda at each stop, and a cigarette. Mostly, I needed to have something to do and let her enjoy the postcards or little street-name magnets.
Eventually she made a purchase of some cards and magnets that were identical to the ones she’d fingered at the previous twenty stands. I was so jacked up on soda I had to jump on the spot and kick my legs out from under me to stop myself from sprinting off into the distance. My mouth had a bunch of things it needed to say too, shivering a little with the aspartame and caffeine and nicotine body assault I was having.
‘Show us your loot then, Sally.’
Out of the gift bag she produced one item at a time and explained who it was for. Immediately I had the desire to seize the bag and throw all the contents skyward and cackle as they fell around us, but I didn’t. I kept shuffling and nodding with a desperation that I imagine came across as boredom.
‘Do you need to go pee?’
‘No, no, no, I’m fine, keep showing me.’
Finally she got to the end of the bag, and pulled out a long plastic miniature baguette: ‘And this is for my friend Kate, ta-da!’ she said and pulled the baguette apart to reveal a pen, the top of the stick being a bread-coloured camouflaged lid. ‘Cool, right?’
‘You’d be surprised how many women talk about the baguette pen.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘What am I talking about, well, on dates I’ve come across a ton of women who like to talk about cutesy things, the baguette pen being one of them. Let’s keep walking, okay?’
I was high on caffeine and I needed to walk and talk a lot. I was inclined to tackle her or give her a knuckle-head in a mood like this, but I knew it had been too long for us to be close in that way.
‘The worst type of fawners gather in cities like Paris, women who find that stuff cute, or cute and quirky. They wonder who invented the baguett
e pen, what their favourite cliché of living in Paris is, or ask questions like, “Pixies or Sonic Youth?”’
‘What?’
‘Well, it’s Sonic Youth on account of “Diamond Sea”. But girls who ask grammarless questions like that don’t really know, they’ve just heard it somewhere and regurgitated it to appear in touch with whatever. You would be surprised how many women at, say, twenty-five, proclaim things like “Maybe one day I’ll become a dancer”, and you feign interest and talk a bit longer and find out she has no history of dance instruction. She giggles at stuff like this and pirouettes in the street and says “Let’s have a running race” or “Let’s get a whiskey”. For once I’d like to meet a genuine woman. One who isn’t inspired.’
Sally stopped walking. ‘You okay? You freaking out now? It’s just a souvenir!’
I was being a dick, I knew it. ‘Sorry. I just had too much coffee and I’m sick of having no luck in the city of love or light. I wish I had a partnership that was easy, like you and what’s his name?’
‘Dave.’ She shoved the plastic gift bag into her large, worn handbag, ‘Listen, Mr Caffeine – there is a bigger reason I came to see you here.’
‘A bigger reason?’
‘Okay, this is going to be a difficult conversation, but I want to keep walking. Can we keep walking?’
‘Sure, go on.’
‘Do you remember?’ Sal trailed off into an immovable silence.
‘You’re going to have to be more specific. Remember what?’
‘Mom’s boyfriend Gavin, do you remember what he was like?’
‘Sure, a red-faced cunning drunk.’
‘But, do you know about, well, did he ever touch you?’
‘No, what – he touched you? What?’
‘No! I mean a few slaps, but nothing more. Nothing like the way she got it. Look, I have a problem, the week before Mom died she asked me something.’
‘What was it?’
‘She asked me if I thought that she should leave him.’
‘That’s it? I mean, how did she say it?’
‘That’s how it was: “Should I leave him?”’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I said no, I told her that she should stay with him.’
‘But … how old were you, Sal? Like thirteen?’
‘Fourteen.’
‘Regardless of why you said it, you were too young to have a grasp on what it meant. And do you think she really would have listened to you anyway?’
‘I think at that point yes. I’ve had a lot of time to think about why, it’s like only when I smoke a blunt am I not thinking about Mom’s last months. I just wanted a family, the feeling of a normal family, with a dad there, even just the look of a dad there.’
‘I understand, Sal, but if this is a confession because you feel guilty, you don’t need to.’
‘No it’s not, it’s—’
‘You were a kid; we’re wired to be self-centred when we’re kids.’
‘It’s not it, completely. I’m pregnant.’
In my caffeinated high, my head and body felt the enormity of this news: my little sister, without a mother, as a mom. I put my hands on the side of my head to steady my reaction. ‘Oh heck! Wow!’
‘I’m pregnant and in a relationship that isn’t really good and I think I’m scared if I have this baby I won’t leave if it becomes bad and …’
‘Sal, let’s go home.’ She cried then, it seemed, in relief. I guided her onto the sidewalk and ducked into the lobby of a boutique hotel we happened to be nearby. I asked the concierge to call us a taxi and joined Sal outside. I put my arm around her shoulders, as if protecting her from a wild wind blowing in from Ohio and up the stony cold boulevards here. She was hugging me on my left side, our eyes closed to the imagined debris, as we stood. I pulled out my phone and called the clock maker to cancel. A woman answered and, while I waited for him to arrive at the phone, I drew my sister closer and rested my face against the top of her head. My sister’s hair, sweet green-apple scented, smelt of childhood, and I was sad for her, worried for her, and hopeful for her and us at once. I could feel it, I owned this feeling, I would revisit it, stay with it, I wouldn’t deny it. I loved her, I could feel that I loved her, that I was attached to her; I gave her a knuckle-head, and she laughed while she cried.
Meat House
In front of the Hagia Sophia the woman’s skirt billowed, the pleats of houndstooth becoming a momentary jellyfish bell, before the woman ran from the gust, flattening the fabric with her forearms, holding tight her modesty. Lane looked at him then: Luke was looking at the woman’s legs. He was always looking at women’s legs and then breasts, breasts that burst from small waists, small waists that led to long, lean legs – it was cyclical. It’s just men, it’s natural, everyone had said. But it had been the undoing of Lane, the surest nail that protruded from the coffin of them. Curiously, it was he who held the hammer, every day.
‘Nice legs?’ Lane enquired.
‘What the fuck, Lane! I was looking at the mosque!’
‘This is our HONEYMOON!’
‘I know it’s our honeymoon, my bank balance reminds me every fucking hour! What do you want from me? Do you want to break up? Do you want a divorce al-fucking-ready?’
‘Do you really remember our love? Do you love our love?’
He said, ‘Of course I do!’ Luke yelled it into the wind.
She yelled back, ‘I bleed for this, bleed my brains out! Every finger is a nozzle waiting to turn and drip blood.’
She didn’t really know what the hell she was talking about but couldn’t stop herself: ‘I’m a strung eel!’ ‘I’m the sun and the hangover!’ ‘I’m the market fish and you have gutted me, you’re gutting me, I’m gutted!’ When Lane said the bit about being gutted she punched herself in the stomach with both fists held together, and began crying. Some people came to their aid, or to tell them with shaken heads and tsk tsk tsk to please stop fighting in front of the children. He always blamed her, it was her problem – her imagination gone wild. He was looking at the place of religious worship? Not up the woman’s skirt? She knew him better; his place of worship was more carnal. He’d even become one of those men who dropped their sunglasses down their nose to stare; bare-eyed goggling was what he did, unabashedly at everyone but her.
Luke left, he told her he’d had enough of the hysterics, the life of:
Where are you going?
What are you doing?
What are you reading?
What are you thinking?
Who are you texting?
Who are you looking at?
He’d admitted the one transgression and it’d been ten months of fighting about the fact. They’d married hastily and come on honeymoon to try to paper maps over it all. He retrieved his backpack from the hotel room and left her there, sobbing at the dresser. She pictured him taking the taxi to the ferry and the ferry to another taxi and that taxi to the airport. The aircraft wheels leaving tarmac. Their lives now played in rewind through her mind.
Lane went to the Meat House restaurant opposite the hotel, the scene of most of their fights for the previous week. ‘Pretty lady, please come, sit, you want to eat some vegetables?’ The Meat House owner, Hamid, was fascinated to have a vegetarian as a new, temporary regular. Lane opened her laptop, placed the plate of eggplant and the tumbler of red wine to the side, and composed a new email, a final missive.
To dear me, I’m sitting here now writing this so I don’t forget everything. I feel like I’m going mad in this relationship, it makes me forget everything. Sometimes I can’t remember the feeling of my name in my mouth, it’s all been Luke, Luke, Luke, her, her, her. Two days ago I purchased a niqab from a women’s clothing store from some nice ladies who showed me how to button the sleeves, how to pin the fabric at my temples, I walked out with my clothes in my h
andbag and strolled around the city and finally felt hidden enough in my complete sadness, felt smothered enough in my despair. I felt like nobody looked at me, nobody noticed my red watery eyes, nobody insulted me and called me blond girl, white girl, nice girl, beautiful woman – could men yelling at me in the street decide once and for all whether I’m a woman or a girl? Today I do feel like a girl, flimsy, young, full of fresh wounds, like a child discovering for the first time that people die.
I just want to analyse a little, work out what went wrong. I guess we fought more when we got to Istanbul, but we’ve been arguing for the best part of three years, about what to do next, what we are doing with our lives, when we are ever going to have children, get married; we fought about jealousy, envy, distrust. We’ve grown a little older together, we’ve achieved very little really, we were, we are, I am, alone now, facing the sure prospect of being unremarkable.
It didn’t start out like this. Luke Tesselar and Lane Alberts (me) met after a month of staring at each other in silence. The first time I’d caught him staring into my eyes was the first day after orientation, in the Main Shrine Room. We were both shaved-headed, yet possessed the other hallmarks of appearing handsome or alive – tall, bright-eyed, nice teeth. We were dressed in the long storm-grey robes that were standard for monastics at the Buddha’s Light International Association. The day’s meditation sessions would total around five hours, roughly thirty-five metres separated us, the men on one side of the shrine room, the women on the other side and five ten-metre Buddha statues looking down on us – and for those unbroken hours we simply stared at each other. Sometimes we made long, slow blinking eyes, the type cats make when they like a human. Sometimes someone would press their lips together, sometimes a tongue would appear just to wet the corner of the mouth, sometimes a hand would appear to scratch at a jaw, an earlobe, the neck. And on a few separate occasions the subtle upturn of a mouth would appear, the faintest of smiles.
After the Carnage Page 7