Goodbye, Paris

by Anstey Harris

  The Gare du Nord is its usual squash of sounds and smells. Tourists bump by me on their way to the taxi rank on the right; trying to move out of the stream of people into the left side of the station is like trying to swim against the tide.

  I give up fighting and let myself be popped out onto the sidewalk like a cork on the sea. The sunshine is fresh after the cloying air of the train and I breathe in deeply. There is a taste in the air of this city that I’m sure I could identify against any others.

  I walk down the road. This isn’t the most salubrious of areas; in my experience, the parts of cities near stations never are. I walk past a few massage parlors and a row of restaurants that are boarded up. A couple of men are handing out phone cards outside a tabac but they ignore me because I’m white. They assume I have no one to phone in far-off countries.

  The bus system in Paris completely defeats me; even David only uses the few routes he is familiar with. I check on the app I have for the Parisian public transport system, but there doesn’t seem to be a clear route to where I want to go. The app tells me it will take not much more than an hour to walk and I have at least that to kill. My overnight clothes and a miniature version of my makeup kit are all in a small leather backpack over my shoulder. It isn’t heavy or awkward to carry and my shoes are flat, comfortable and sensible. The walk will wake me up and I can make it beautiful by going through Pigalle, up over the hill of Sacré-Coeur and down into the winding streets of Montmartre. The second half of the walk will be far less pleasant, but I’m prepared to try. I think I look sufficiently like a native to risk the bleaker areas out towards Pont de Clichy.

  I’m glad of the exercise; it is probably the hilliest route one could find in Paris and I find my shortness of breath invigorating. I push myself hard up the steps of Montmartre, turning at the top to take in the view.

  I wander into the Montmartre Cemetery; one I haven’t been in before, and I ground myself by looking at the sculptures and the history and the declarations of love or respect.

  I check the time; I can’t put it off any longer. I walk at a decent pace for the next half hour or so. I can tell by the area, the buildings, the people and their purpose, when I’m very close to the restaurant. I go into a pharmacy and pretend to be looking at sunglasses while I check my hair and lipstick in the mirror on the display stand. I look tired. My cheeks are sun-kissed and bright from the walk, but my eyes are dull and puffy.

  * * *

  The heavy restaurant door has a long brass handle running down one side of it. I don’t get a chance to push it open before the attentive maître d’ scuttles forward and opens it for me. I look past him into the gloom of the restaurant. It really is spectacular, all dark green houseplants on mahogany aspidistra stands, and rails of polished copper along every horizontal surface—except the tables, which are draped with starched white napery.

  David is at a table in the far corner. He is tasting wine and talking enthusiastically to the waiter. He holds the wineglass up to the light and swirls the red liquid around in it.

  David looks up and sees me. His face lights in recognition and he stands, his arms out and open. There is no guile, no pretense and no worry on that face, no tension in the skin around those beautiful eyes.

  David is an innocent man.

  I am so relieved I almost cry in the restaurant doorway. I walk towards him and he holds me close; everything is just as it should be.

  “That must have been a rotten journey, Gracie. I’m so sorry to mess you about.”

  “Do you mean I look like shit?” I ask him and smile. I have dropped my voice in case the waiters speak English.

  “You look incredible. As always.” He kisses me and pulls out my chair so I can sit down. “And actually, I have to say—you look incredibly Parisian.”

  “It’s because I bought this outfit here. The shoes and the dress.”

  “The dress is a knockout. You look sensational.” He leans towards me. “And the cello’s a triumph?”

  I grin. “It really is.”

  David rocks back in his chair and shrugs; he is wearing his Paris clothes, he looks every inch the Frenchman. “I knew you’d do it. And you’ll win the competition. I know it, darling girl.”

  He turns his attention to the menu, orders champagne for us both. It arrives swiftly, wrapped in a white cloth. David shakes his head when the waiter offers a taste. He gestures that he should just fill both our glasses.

  “To your success,” he says and stares into my eyes. “I’m so incredibly proud of you.”

  “Your wife sent me an email. Dominique-Marie.” It comes out of my mouth without permission. This is not a moment to spoil.

  The champagne is crisp and cold, biscuit yellow and perfect.

  The man opposite me is glowing with love, holding my hand across the tablecloth and sending pulses of electricity through my skin.

  The waiters are dipping and bobbing like birds, arranging cutlery and smoothing napkins.

  “She said she would,” he says. His gaze doesn’t move from mine. His mouth doesn’t twitch. There are no Hollywood beads of sweat on the Cupid’s bow of his top lip.

  “Is it true?”

  “I don’t know, baby. I don’t know what she said.”

  “Have you left her? Them?”

  He clinks his champagne glass against mine again and drinks. “I have.”

  I don’t know what to say. I don’t know why he didn’t tell me.

  A waiter comes past with two menus. He runs through the plat du jour and he and David laugh a little over something. David waves him away.

  “She said some awful things.” I can’t name them. The words are stuck in my throat like cotton wool. My tongue is made of glass and will splinter if I say the words. The shards will choke me, lacerate my throat.

  “She’s angry, Grace. And really hurt.” He sucks his lips together. “This wasn’t what we’d agreed would happen. It wouldn’t have, you know; if fate hadn’t pushed things around.” He gives his trademark sigh and pushes his fringe up from his face. “Shall we forget about it for today? Try and enjoy ourselves? I’ll tell you about all the fucking crap in my life, you tell me about the cello and about what we’re going to do in Cremona?”

  There are vipers crawling through the skin on my face. Tiny malevolent snakes wriggle through capillaries under my eyes. I can feel the pain of their scratching scales as they worm their way across me.

  “Grace?”

  An intense pain runs around the outline of my chin, it settles at the hinges of my jaw. It fights and bulges behind my eyes. I open my mouth to relieve the pressure and words fall out.

  “She said you had a vasectomy.”

  He closes his eyes. I can see his face moving, his thoughts regrouping. I watch his tongue at the very edge of his mouth; I see it rub and wet his teeth. It pulses minutely, involuntarily. I can see the taste buds popping from the end, from the blunt point. His lips are the exact shade of pink a man’s lips should be, his tongue a shade or two darker. His teeth are straight and white and they shine where the light catches them.

  “Grace, let’s take this somewhere else.” He is counting out euro notes onto the table, leaving twice the value of the drinks we’ve had, to signal to the waiters that it is us, not them. We are wrong.

  David is elegant and in control as he helps me out of my chair and takes my arm. He stands back at the door to let me go first and steers me through onto the pavement.

  “Where’s your hotel, Grace? What did you book?”

  My hands are trembling when I take my notebook out of my bag. I don’t trust myself to open it and unfold the printout of my booking. My possessions will scatter onto this Paris street, every precious piece of paper, every ticket, each memento that is tucked into the leaves of this book will blow away.

  David reads the address out loud.

  “It’s OK, sweetheart.” He takes my hand. “I can explain. Please, don’t cry.”

  I am not as frozen as I thought. One tear has me
lted out of me and is slowly threading down my face.

  David wipes it away with his thumb. “Come on, Gracie. Let’s get off the street, talk properly.”

  I have shared the worst moments of my life with this man. There must be an explanation. There must be words and reasons.

  David is the only one who feels the drop I felt, the sheer careening chaos of falling, flailing, into the void we have never climbed out of. He is the only person besides me who knew our babies, who was aware of them, who was physically close to them.

  He is the only person I have been able to use as a foothold, a handhold, a fraction of safety to keep me from hitting the ground. Please don’t let him be the one to cut the rope.

  “Grace, Grace.” He is talking quietly, stroking my arms. We are outside the hotel. “Just for a moment, I need you to concentrate. We’ll check in, find our room, and then sort this out. OK?”

  I move up the stairs without speaking. I follow David into the hotel room like I’ve followed him into a hundred hotel rooms before. If I speak, if I open my mouth, I will shatter.

  The room is remarkably good for midrange Paris. In any other circumstances I would be impressed. Instead I will just remember the Louis Quinze sofa, the thick red drapes with gold rope ties, as the room where I lost my life.

  The themes of art, of classical music, fly through my mind. Man against man. Man against nature. Man against himself. For each theme I see a piece of my life fly away; I am flayed by the loss of my career, my children, my future.

  David sits me on the bed, moves closely in beside me.

  “It’s not what you think. I swear to you.”

  I spread my fingers on my knees, straighten them out as far as they will go, feeling each knuckle press rigidly into the finger next to it. I stare at my fingernails. I try to breathe normally.

  “It was before I met you, three weeks before I met you.” He springs off the bed, falls to his knees in front of me and takes my hands. As he kneels he looks up at me. “Don’t think I’m not really fucking ashamed of thinking they weren’t mine. Of even telling you that they weren’t mine on that first day. I replay that conversation over and over.” His head drops down; I see the swirl of his crown, the few gray hairs that spiral out from it.

  “I’ll never forgive myself; it was an utterly brutal thing to say. But at the time I believed it.”

  He lays his head on my lap. “I had a checkup that week, a routine follow-up. They warned me, no—they didn’t fucking warn me—they reminded me. They’d already told me once that I mustn’t have sex without contraception for weeks, not till the last . . . well, you know. Till they’d all died, gone.”

  My fingers are still. They are white and I am cold. My legs have goose bumps. The short dress seems ridiculous now; childish and frivolous.

  “And then you were broken. So completely fucking destroyed. What could I do?” He looks at my face.

  My mouth wobbles, my chin is shaking. There are no words.

  “I asked them at the hospital; I made sure there are ways to still have a baby. To get around it. They can stick a needle into my balls, pull out swimmers.” His face twists into a peculiar smile. “They do it under a general.” He wants that last piece to be a joke.

  Words roll out of my mouth. They are diminished; we both have to strain to hear them. “Have you any idea what I’ve been through. The invasion? The tests and the scrapes and the fucking pain?”

  “I’ve been with you at most of them, Grace. Of course I know.” He stands up, strides around. “Don’t you think that fucking hurt me? Can you imagine how it felt to watch you stirruped up and poked and prodded? Knowing all the time that I could stop it, but that if I did, I would cause you the most pain possible?”

  He slumps into a chair on the other side of the room. His head is in his hands.

  I stand up and open the door to the en suite bathroom. I am sick before I even have a chance to shut the door behind me. Vomit splatters into the lavatory bowl as if all the poisonous years are erupting out of me.

  I don’t want to lose my poisonous years. I don’t want to lose our past—however fictitious. Without it I have nothing.

  When I come back into the room David is openly crying. It occurs to me, for the very first time, how easily he cries. How sexy he looks when he does it. No rivulets of snot, blotched skin or racking, gut-spilling sobs. David cries softly; fresh, straight tears lengthen his perfect eyelashes and then light two trails of sadness down his blemish-free cheeks like a well-set varnish.

  “I was going to get it done, one way or another, as soon as my kids were old enough. As soon as the time was right for us to start a family.” His eyes are pleading with me.

  I wonder if my heart has stopped beating. I can hear nothing from my own body.

  “I was going to get it reversed or—if it came to it—we’d have IVF and use the harvested sperm. It was always going to work in the end. In the meanwhile, it just meant that no one would get hurt.”

  I sit back on the bed and he comes over. He rolls me gently onto my side, lies beside me and scoops me into his arms. I can smell his beautiful scent and his neck is soft against my skin.

  “I’m so fucking sorry, baby. I loved you too much to tell you.”

  He kisses my face, tiny butterflies of kisses landing and leaving, leaving and landing.

  “I can’t believe I’ve hurt you this much. That I let it go on so long. I’m so sorry.”

  “Eight years.” I have shut my eyes against the pain, the weight of it all, and my words echo out into the purple darkness of my closed eyelids. “Eight years.”

  “I’m so fucking sorry.”

  “She said you have a girlfriend.”

   Chapter Fourteen

  I know I will hate myself for sleeping with David, but I am too tired, too punch-drunk, not to. I need someone to hold me, to press their skin against mine and reassure me that I’m still alive. Despite the fact that he is the reason I am so totally destroyed, he is the only person I can think of to protect me.

  As soon as I say the word “girlfriend” I know it is all true. I accept the fact slowly, in drips that mottle all our previous conversations like mold. My conscience dashes backwards and forwards; looking for a clue here, a suspicion there, finding a cold, hard infidelity at the end of my search.

  The scales slip from my eyes one by one. Not the scales that blind me to him; the way I feel about David will take more than one day and one conversation to dismantle, but I can suddenly see the situation and its bleakness as surely as if they were standing in the room.

  I need to put off speech for as long as possible. I need to stem the relentless shower of words that threatens to submerge me, that already cuts off my air.

  I yield to David’s tentative kisses. I allow his mouth to move from my neck, to my face, to my mouth. And then I am kissing him back with a hunger, staving off the fierce pain of having already lost him, of having never really had him.

  We do not speak except in gasps. He tells me he loves me. I answer. It would not be true to say I don’t love him.

  This is my last of him, I think as we make love, and I cannot imagine how life will work without him in it.

  * * *

  I wake in half darkness, in the hotel bed. The curtains are still open and the sulfur light of streetlamps outlines everything in the room. David is sitting up; his feet are on the floor and he is doing up his shirt.

  I have woken up heavy with knowing and full of shame.

  Before I speak to him, I tell myself that I had little choice, that the alternative to sleeping in this hotel with David was sobbing my way—alone—back to England. That is what I tell myself, but the truth is that I just wanted a few more hours, minutes, of him.

  “David.”

  “Sorry, darling, I didn’t mean to wake you. I have to go.” He turns and touches my arm. It is a gesture I know well, one from my every encounter with him. David touches me as if nothing has changed.

  He takes my hand and kisses
it. He holds it for a second afterwards, breathes in my skin.

  “I’ll see you soon. Really soon. I’ll come to England as soon as I can. I’m sorry I’ve cocked all this up.”

  I feel dizzy, as if I have imagined every part of the day and night.

  “I thought . . .”

  He smiles at me, kisses me softly on the cheek. “God, you’re beautiful. What did you think?”

  “Your wife said you have a girlfriend.”

  He hasn’t confirmed or denied it, and I hold that fact to me like a talisman. It slips through my fingers like smoke.

  “Look, nothing’s changed between you and me. We’re the same as we ever were.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” My head aches. I need the loo but I can’t get up. If I move he will leave, I know it.

  “Gracie, I have a wife. That didn’t affect us, did it? Not ever.” He turns up his collar to put his tie on underneath it. “Nothing’s changed. I love you. And . . .” He puts his hand on my shoulder. “I don’t want to lose you. I never have.”

  “You are sleeping with someone else, aren’t you?”

  “It’s not that. It’s not a sexual thing. Look, fuck, this is hard to explain—I need more time. I have met someone, yes, but it’s different. It’s different from my marriage and it’s different from us.”

  Cold air blows in through the open window, but it isn’t that that makes me shiver.

  “I thought I could live without you, darling girl, I was really going to try. I thought I was. I promised Marie-Thérèse that I would give you up. But I can’t.”

  I sit up in bed. I put both my hands over my mouth and try to hold in the disbelief.

  “When I saw you in the restaurant, looking so fucking beautiful, I realized I could never give you up. You’re totally fucking unique.”