Lisette's Paris Notebook

by Catherine Bateson

  After about two hours of walking, the paintings began to blur. I was arted-out. It was clear that others felt the same – there were people sitting on bench seats, dazed expressions plastered on their faces. Couples were okay – they could hold each other’s hand or kiss. I wished that I were part of a couple. I contemplated that as I sat beside some girls who were checking their phones and talking in both French and, perhaps, Italian at the same time. The three of them wore wedges – no wonder they were sitting down!

  Why don’t I have a boyfriend? An essay in one hundred words by Lisette Addams.

  I don’t have a boyfriend because Sally, my mum, was ditched by my father before I was even born and hasn’t trusted heterosexual men ever since. Also, she doesn’t go out much, so snogging opportunities were strictly limited in our house. Who wants to make out to the sound of your mum’s sewing machine? Plus, she’s on a lifelong quest for perfection and no member of the male gender is ever going to cut it. Then there’s me – I wasn’t brought up to know about football, camping holidays or other team sports. I can set a table for four courses, recognise a fish knife, a Chanel and a bias cut. Ami, my best friend, calls my home The House of Estrogen. I’d say those are major hurdles when it comes to the opposite sex.

  Despite that I did have a boyfriend briefly but it ended when we tried to have sex. I still don’t want to talk about it.

  I improved my mind for two days. It was extremely tiring. Every piece of art was so big, so important. I couldn’t understand how anyone could be an artist in Paris. Everyone had already painted, sculpted or printed everything you could think of – and they were all famous for it. If I were an artist in Paris I’d be suicidal. I told Madame Christophe this over croissants on the morning of my first French lesson.

  ‘It is true,’ she nodded, ‘it is all in the past,’ and she sighed and fed Napoléon – who I’d won over with croissant tidbits to the point that he now sat between us. ‘We have made haute couture our contemporary art. You should see that exhibition – it will be superb!’

  ‘A fashion exhibition? I’d love to see that!’

  ‘There is still time. It is at the Hôtel de Ville. I was waiting for you to see the billboards. You must walk with your eyes closed!’

  ‘I do not,’ I said, ‘but Madame, I have only been in Paris three full days.’

  She may have sensed the fact that I was cranky – she was a clairvoyant after all – because she patted my hand and smiled. ‘We will see it together,’ she said. ‘I have two hours this evening.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I could hardly believe the pat and the smile. Were we becoming friends?

  ‘It is nothing,’ she said and stood up, ready to take Napoléon for his morning promenade. ‘Enjoy your class.’

  It might have been nothing to Madame Christophe, but I was fed up with visiting museums and galleries by myself. The first time had been a bit of a novelty. I’d enjoyed pretending to be a serious international art student. By the time I’d got to the Centre Georges Pompidou the previous afternoon, I’d longed for someone to nudge or exclaim to, and envied the tourists taking each other’s photos in front of Marc Chagall’s The Wedding.

  I practically skipped along the route to my French class. It was in the basement of the ugliest building I’d seen in Paris. The receptionist took my money and my name and gestured me languidly towards some stairs. In honour of the occasion – and in anticipation of the friendship material – I was wearing my skull maxi skirt. I paused to smooth it down, took a deep breath and pushed the door open. Half a dozen or so students, most a little older than me, glanced up before returning to their conversations. English was the dominant language. I plonked down in a spare seat between a guy and a very cool-looking girl.

  ‘Bonjour,’ the guy said, ‘you are English?’

  ‘Australian.’

  ‘Ah, unusual. I am Anders.’ He held out his hand.

  ‘Lise,’ I said, shaking it firmly.

  ‘You are an artist?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said and was saved from saying more by the entrance of our teacher. Fabienne was around my mother’s age but her lace shirt revealed a black bra and she wore it with matador pants and impossibly high red stilettos. She exuded confidence and launched into French without any preamble.

  I was at least three sentences behind, and grappling to catch up, by the time she said something I did understand. ‘We have a new student today. Please welcome Lisette to class.’

  ‘Actually, it’s Lise.’ I spelled it out in the French alphabet, aware that my face was as red as Madame Fabienne Fontaine’s high heels.

  ‘Australians shorten everything,’ she announced to the class, making a cutting motion with her fingers. ‘Nothing can be allowed its full size. The French, we lengthen everything.’

  The guy called Anders raised his eyebrows and said, sounding out the words with deliberate care, ‘So that is why French men are supposed to be such good lovers?’

  ‘Very funny, Anders.’

  ‘Excuse me, Fabienne, but I don’t understand.’ The girl sitting next to me looked worried.

  ‘Anders was making a joke,’ an American girl next to her said and she whispered something that caused Goldie to clap one hand to her bright lipstick and laugh.

  After this strange introduction, things proceeded more normally. Fabienne asked each of us in turn what we had done on the weekend and we all answered in our different levels of French. She wrote what we had said on the board, sometimes changing the construction we’d clumsily put together so it was more grammatical.

  That was all familiar to me. What was completely different was that Fabienne offered her opinion on every activity – and she had strong and always correct attitudes to everything.

  The American announced that she had gone to see some experimental dance troupe who did a ‘mathematics dance’ and Fabienne’s finely plucked eyebrows rose to her hairline.

  ‘Mathematics dance? Please explain more, Mackenzie. Naturally this sounds like a joke to me.’

  Mackenzie waved her graceful arms around trying to describe the way the dance had been performed. Anyone could tell she was frustrated by her lack of French vocabulary. She managed to convey that the dancers performed in a kind of grid, but the only person who really understood was Anders, who had seen the same performance.

  ‘The dance,’ he explained, ‘was experimental and meant to be both expressive and not always beautiful.’

  ‘Why create something that is deliberately not beautiful, particularly in the medium of dance?’ Fabienne asked and promptly answered her own question. ‘Of course, young artists feel the need to go against the tradition of beauty and the classic. They think they are creating something new simply because it lacks beauty, but in reality all they have done is reveal their own failure to understand the complexity of the classic and build on it.’ She didn’t stop there, however, and went on to explain this problem with contemporary dance prevented her from ever seeing a performance. I wasn’t sure how much of her rant Mackenzie had even understood, but Fabienne’s tone made it clear she was dismissing Mackenzie’s weekend activities.

  Mackenzie was perplexed. ‘It was just a dance. I didn’t take it too seriously.’

  This did not appease Fabienne. ‘So you wasted your creative time on something not to be taken seriously?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that.’ Anders stepped in. ‘There was a group of us. One of the dancers is the new girlfriend of someone we know. It was more for that we went.’

  After Fabienne had corrected some of what he had said and written it on the board, she returned to Mackenzie and asked her more about her weekend. If I had been Mackenzie I wouldn’t have been able to put together a proper sentence after that attack, but Americans must be braver than that, although when her turn was over she seemed relieved.

  I wasn’t looking forward to being in the hot seat. When I admitted I was having a gap year between finishing school and starting university, Fabienne declared this concept nonexistent i
n France, a ridiculous waste of time, and I would have been better served had I begun uni and applied for an exchange, which I surely would have got because my French was surprisingly not too bad, considering I was an Australian. Well, merci for that! I tried to explain gap years were common for Australians. It was a chance to travel before settling down to more years of study.

  ‘Imbecilic,’ Fabienne said with unshakeable certainty. ‘As if you have really studied before university. Now in France, maybe. Le Bac is difficult. But in Australia? I don’t think so.’

  ‘So what else do you do with this year?’ Anders was on another rescue mission.

  I turned to him gratefully. ‘I’ve worked,’ I said, ‘in hospitality, at a French restaurant, Le Voltaire. Now, I’m in Paris to – well, go on learning French, I guess, look at art, and because my mother wanted it.’

  I had meant to say ‘because my mother wanted me to experience the world more’, or something like that, but the truth had slipped out.

  ‘Your mother wanted it?’ Fabienne repeated. ‘She came with you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘sorry, I meant something else.’

  ‘Your mother wanted to come to Paris and sent you instead?’ she persisted.

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘Your mother works?’ Anders offered. ‘So she sends you to travel for her – lucky for you!’

  ‘She’s a seamstress,’ I said.

  ‘Ah,’ Goldie, the girl with bright lipstick, said, ‘did she make your skirt?’

  ‘I made it, with her help for the lining,’ I said.

  ‘Your mother is a seamstress.’ Fabienne pulled the conversation back to order. ‘That explains why she wants to be in Paris. There is no fashion in Australia. And the prices of European clothes there – shocking! You must all buy when the sales start – but you must not go to the Champs-Élysées or rue de Rivoli. The shopping there is no good.’

  ‘What about Les Halles?’ Anders asked with an odd smirk.

  ‘Les Halles is a disaster,’ Fabienne said with a theatrical shudder. ‘You must certainly not shop there! You come to France for quality. You come to the famous sales for quality that is affordable. I buy shoes, of course.’ She stuck out one high heel to show us, as if we hadn’t already seen them.

  After we’d admired her shoes, she returned her attention to me and demanded to know what I’d done so far in Paris. I told her I’d seen a lot of art and listed the galleries I’d gone to.

  She approved of this. ‘Of course, in Australia, you learn about art from books,’ she explained to the rest of the class. ‘Oh yes, I was there. Briefly. Very clean toilets – and as far as I am concerned you can tear those art books up and use them in those toilets. You cannot learn about art like that. So you are right to see as many masterpieces as you can while you are here. But for contemporary art, Paris is no good. It is surprising, but Australia is much better. There is good contemporary art to see in Australia.’

  I had studied the reproductions she so contemptuously dismissed and although I knew now they were nothing like the real thing she made me feel deeply sorry for myself – and my mother. Mum had bought art books and we’d studied them together, Mum pointing out details of each painting – how the colours in this one shimmered with light, and those in another were separated and flat. She’d told me stories about the artists until some of them were nearly as real to me as our neighbours.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said, trying to sound calm and dignified while I seethed, ‘it is that which allows us to create good contemporary art. It must be difficult to be an artist in Paris when you are surrounded by such magnificent examples of everything.’ What was the word for suicide? I didn’t know. ‘I would want to murder myself,’ I said and my words seemed a little too loud and more emphatic than I’d meant.

  There was a moment of silence and then Anders clapped. ‘Bravo!’ he said. ‘I feel like that here also. I work and work and work and still I question what it is I am working so long at, and why, when the others have done the same before me.’ He turned to Fabienne and said, ‘I think the Australian is sensitive.’

  I wanted to tell them that my father had been an artist but the words stuck in my throat. I couldn’t answer any questions about my father’s art. I had only seen one painting. Instead, I studied Anders. He was a few years older than me but had an air of authority and was clearly not afraid of Fabienne. He matched her shrug for shrug. She flirted with him and I could see why. He was tall and muscular. An abstract, serpentine tattoo ran up his forearm. He wore a much-washed shirt with rolled-up sleeves as though he had come to the class straight from his studio. His ruddy blond hair was slightly longer at the front and slicked back. He was undeniably hot, and Fabienne with her pencil-thin eyebrows, look-at-me shirt and heels was definitely cougar material.

  ‘So, Anders, you worked on the weekend?’

  ‘I did, Fabienne. I worked. But I also went to a party and I drank a lot.’

  She laughed. ‘I think you always drink a lot, you Germans, when you party?’

  Anders shrugged. ‘It is the only way to escape the problems of the life of an artist that Lise talked about. We work, we see our work and then we drink.’

  ‘But then you work again, the next morning.’

  ‘For there is nothing else,’ Anders said and his tone was serious, almost grim.

  Fabienne nodded. ‘We have a saying in Paris, “métro, boulot, dodo”. It is clear, yes?’

  ‘I do not get the boulot bit,’ Anders said. ‘That is what is missing for me.’

  ‘And for you others, you agree?’ Fabienne asked, which raised a flurry of questions as they hadn’t understood the Parisian saying of metro, work and sleep.

  The class went over time. I was longing to get out and eat something. My stomach rumbled embarrassingly during a quiet moment and Goldie laughed at me and then touched my hand and whispered ‘me too’, but in French, of course.

  We couldn’t leave until Fabienne had finished a small rant about books. Mackenzie mentioned that she was reading a writer called Françoise Sagan – a name familiar to me because my mother had read her books. Fabienne told Mackenzie that Sagan was a celebrity but not a good writer and Mackenzie would be better off reading Marcel Proust or Albert Camus. Proust might be beyond her level of French and what a pity to read him in any other language, but Camus was easy because even if you didn’t understand the exact words you could still feel his passion. Mackenzie told Fabienne she read as a distraction. Fabienne indicated this kind of reading was not French. It belonged to the United States. Mackenzie said that she was from Canada, actually.

  ‘But not, alas, French Canada.’ Fabienne dismissed her and turned to me. ‘In Australia, you study Camus?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘or not at the school I went to.’

  ‘That’s a great pity. What philosophers did you study?’

  ‘Philosophy wasn’t an option at my school, actually.’

  ‘Disaster! What did you study, if not literature and philosophy?’

  I decided to take a lesson from Anders and shrugged. Fortunately it was one-thirty by then, so Fabienne slid off the desk and indicated that the class was over.

  ‘I can speak now in English,’ she said, ‘and I want you all to say thank you for Lisette. She has saved our class. I am very grateful because it would have been a financial disaster to not have this in my life. And for you, the class survives.’

  Everyone murmured thank you in English, German and French and smiled at me. For ten seconds I felt as though I was part of the group. The feeling disappeared when we all left the room and it was clear that Anders, Goldie and Mackenzie were going to have lunch together. They drifted to the exit chatting and I walked slowly behind them. I would have something to eat at a cafe, I thought – I’d seen a place that smelled as though it had good coffee. I would have lunch in a cafe and pretend I wanted to be alone.

  Then Anders turned and said, as though it was the most natural thing in the world, ‘And you, Lise, saviour of our class
, you’ll join us?’

  I found myself smiling too widely to be cool but I didn’t care. ‘Yes, please!’

  Anders made a space between him and Goldie where I slipped in and matched my steps to their pace. I had new friends. New friends in Paris, France.

  Fortuny draped, Valentino cut on a bias, Chanel was the suit, Vivienne is England on acid, speed and steroids. These are the things I know. Not philosophy. Not Camus. Hopeless!

  I’d wanted it to be my best afternoon in Paris so far, and it was. How could it not have been, sitting on the edge of the Seine with the artists, chewing on crusty baguettes filled with soft cheese, grilled eggplant and capsicum while Anders ploughed through what he called a ‘meat lover’s delight’, which had two kinds of preserved meat in it.

  ‘That stuff will kill you,’ Mackenzie told him and reeled off a bewildering series of facts about the small and large intestines while Anders ate on, unperturbed.

  Most of the conversation was about art shows I hadn’t seen, friends of theirs who all seemed to be staying in the same block of studios, or artists I wasn’t familiar with – to the point of not being sure whether they were dead or alive.

  At one point Goldie caught my eye and laughed. ‘It’s okay,’ she said, ‘don’t look so worried. Mackenzie and Anders create proper art. Me, I make glass sculptures. My trials are more practical. Where in Paris can I get good glass rods? They worry about their philosophical approach. I worry about heating points and tools. You know, I am currently using an ancient butterknife I picked up in a flea market as the main tool for my work.’

  ‘Pollock used a stick, towels, his own feet if he thought it would work,’ Anders said.