For Hippolyte’s benefit—and to hear the words myself—I volunteered the information that I had a boyfriend. And Daniel, everywhere at once, had parties cracked. The secret was exchanges averaging ten seconds or less. When I considered what I would manage to say in that time I felt like not bothering.
—Bloody parties, I said.
Hippolyte laughed and I felt proud of myself for doing chit-chat. He placed a glass of something dark under my nose with a solemn nod, only removing it when I went to exhale. Whatever it was I wasn’t going to have any. My mind wasn’t on wine nor the juice Ségo had forgotten about. I wanted to know if he knew Eagleback.
—Ask a question, I said. Do you know a man with a T-shirt with an eagle on it?
I described Eagleback as best I could. The beard, the blotches, the arm hair—I went into some detail there. I did not want to say that I had chased him fruitlessly along Chanzy, so I made out we were old friends.
—What’s his name? said Hippolyte.
—That’s kind of private.
—You know where he lives? Where does he work?
—Don’t know.
—What else do you know about him?
—What do you want to know?
—What do you know? he said.
—That depends.
—How do you know him?
A crowd had gathered and I had to face in too many directions. I couldn’t concentrate—my brain was always a smoothie for a day or two after a migraine, anyway. An old fridge, a loud one, would hum in my head all that time. I found myself regretting that I had asked the question about Eagleback.
When the room fell quiet, and all I could see was Hippolyte’s peering face, I knew I had been expected to speak.
—Why do you want to find him? he said.
Neither of us said anything else—he was mistaken if he thought I would speak first—until Daniel simultaneously darkened the kitchen and illuminated it with a cake aflame with more candles.
—How many? said Hippolyte.
My answer was drowned out by the singing, harsh at first. Accepting that the song and the cake were for my benefit was the first thing. I smiled in all directions. They were singing a song called ‘Happy Birthday’ and there was confusion over the line which was supposed to contain my name. Most people sang the words La Plongeuse Irlandaise. Everyone being stoned meant they found this highly amusing.
At the song’s crescendo I focused my eyes on the candles—I couldn’t bear to look at the adoring faces singing waywardly for me.
—Let’s see you, Ségo said.
Daniel’s palm on my back encouraged me towards the cake.
—Blow, he whispered. Blow, blow.
—Why?
—The candles. Look, they’re going out.
Phone Home
I left the party, walking fast, attempting to outpace myself—there is that strange word again. Being on Saint Maur was relief, my legs picking themselves up into a run, the way running regulated my breathing and emptied my mind, air rushing towards me and away from me at the same time, loosening the soft, smoky sound of the city at night.
Other questions I could have asked Hippolyte or one of his real doctor friends: my shins are sore—am I running too much? Am I running enough? Why do I smell of bananas? Where have my headaches gone? What if they come back? What if they come back stronger? This mole on my neck, what’s it doing there? I had my period. Will I have another one? What age do you think I am? Am I in good shape for my age? Was I a virgin before I met Daniel?
I ran all the way home—a bad idea, of course, to be in Buttes Chaumont at this time of night. There were all sorts of stories of people being dragged into bushes. But it was my park to run in if I wanted to. I had walked there so much so that, following Daniel’s advice, I once tried out for a job walking dogs, but French animals seemed to dislike me as much as I feared them. I once spent a day with a cocker spaniel who expected to be carried across the road, an hour—a terrifying hour—with a young bloodhound who wanted to hump me. Poor thing, I should have let him.
When I got to my place, Daniel was cycling in loopy circles by the front door. Some kind of magician, he had left the party after I did but got to my place before me.
—As if a girl like you doesn’t enjoy birthdays.
—Didn’t ask for any parties, I said.
—Who is Eagleback?
—Someone.
Daniel was smirking.
—He’s that guy from the pâtisserie, right? The guy you chased after?
—Fully aware of what happened, I said.
Daniel galloped through question after question. His way of flooding you with questions followed by little huffs that made it easier to say nothing at all.
—Haven’t we been over this? I said. He’s some guy.
—Does that mean I’m some guy too?
Somewhere in all of this I must have seemed ungrateful when that wasn’t the case—I was just confused and there we were failing to clear it up.
I headed inside. There was nothing in my apartment to suggest that anyone lived there. Nor was there much space to work with and I found myself making my own laps around Daniel, who was standing directly on a spot where I had wet myself the day before. My relationship with my body was very don’t ask don’t tell. My vagina—in the hand-held mirror—was always perfect but the colour of my teeth was progressing from parchment to wood.
If Daniel had a problem with my stinky feet he kept them to himself. But my hairy legs and pits, he did pass comment there.
—It’s like fucking a wolf, he would say.
Okay, I would think.
Under the carpet lay bare cement and the scorned mattress looked fit for burning and was probably cursed. In winter, the place warmed up when you opened a window. Other things I attempted to ignore were the exploded oven and the smeared glass giving on to the squalid gardens which had been described so breathlessly by the landlord, another regular at the restaurant. There was an old bath with worn-through ceramic as well as a wheel-less bicycle that had been on the property longer than any of the residents. What foliage remained out there—a balding pine tree—looked forsaken rather than verdant as had been promised. Verdant!
—Maybe it’s time to move from here, I said. Everyone knows.
—Knows what?
As far as I had been concerned, no more than three people, Ségo and Daniel and Amadou, knew my story, what there was of it.
—Ségo’s friends. Your friends. They were all looking at me.
—Because it was your party. You should have worn a sign. Given them something to look at. I was looking at you, anyway.
Daniel was already undressing. His presence here usually signalled one thing. Funny how we could make love without a single troubling thought crossing my mind.
For the same reason as Daniel always initiated our lovemaking, my desires developed more or less in proportion with his. I guffawed at his cock the first time I saw it—but I wasn’t slow to catch up. Imagine you liked someone and they aroused you so much that you wanted to be near them and you put yourself on top of them—as though you were trying to protect them or hide them from someone else—and you lay there at the risk of them suffocating. Sex was the act of making someone else invisible. I never thought of it as desire. We never did it like the dogs I’d seen in Buttes Chaumont but I would think of the dogs anyway and make dog noises. No barking—just a yowl so that Daniel would know I was having fun and, before I knew it, the burning between my legs would turn to something else and I would be enjoying myself. One time he got excited and I went headfirst into the wall. He thought I was concussed but I wasn’t even though I couldn’t quite see straight. I didn’t care what we did, anyway, as long as there was kissing. Tongues going so hard they could clean a bathroom.
Tonight I trembled in his arms, his buttocks as cold and white as a sink, his breath on my face—the sourness of wine on it—and the exposed-elements glow in his eyes I hadn’t noticed before. This aroused me, the very thought that something had brought on an unexpected surge in him as it had it in me.
The one time Daniel suggested we research my past I froze him out so badly that, in the end, I felt pity for him. When he said that he was going to post my picture online, I wouldn’t acknowledge anything else he said for more than forty-eight hours. As he seemed to hate silence more than anything else—Daniel actually looked lonely when he was not talking—this did the trick better than I could have expected.
To make it up to him, I agreed to visit Galignani, the smart bookshop in the arcade on Rue de Rivoli. There I felt uneasy surrounded by all these names and titles other people took for granted. I made a smooth circuit of the room without once feeling curious enough to pick up a book.
Daniel glanced my way. Seamus Heaney? Nope. He laughed when I said I hadn’t heard of James Joyce.
—Do I need to?
—What about cookery? he said.
I stared at the shelves as though I was a donkey that had been dropped off in the reception of a grand hotel.
A few more minutes pretending to browse and then we’d be outside again. From where I was standing, by the books dedicated to Paris—I shoplifted one, for reference purposes—I could see the arcades outside the shop and the grey sky above the Tuilieries, which is where I would rather have been. At my insistence, we walked around the corner to Faubourg St Honoré for a waffle.
Daniel compiled a list of the things I was better off not knowing about and better off not having. 1) No need to read the great books. 2) No need to lie about reading the great books. 3) No need to vote. 4) No need to pay tax. 5) No phone. 6) No data. 7) No emojis. 8) No identity meant no identity theft. 9) No PIN numbers. 10) No passwords.
—What’s a password? I said.
—You don’t need to know.
—What if I need one?
—You don’t have a bank account. Or an email address.
—When can I get one?
—You can’t.
—Why not?
—Because you don’t exist. You totally exist, but not in the eyes of the state. So let me ask you, sometimes it’s like you don’t want to know about yourself?
—I don’t.
Daniel sighed roughly then disappeared into a shop selling vintage walking sticks. I was holding my waffle on a paper plate. I wasn’t going to eat any more but the food meant I couldn’t cross the threshold. Inside, the salesman—a small Japanese man with bandy legs—was cooing at Daniel as you would to a child emperor.
The skin on my palms was chapped and trying to keep one hand behind my back while balancing the paper plate gave me a scolded look. I dumped the waffle and began to read the book I had shoplifted. Just Do What We Do offered exactly the kind of advice I had no use for. I had been doing okay without mediation by Parisians who took a special pleasure in being graceful while vomiting up their two mouthfuls of calves’ liver. To put it another way, I didn’t understand any of it.
Daniel liked to educate me. He couldn’t believe that I had never seen a movie. He wanted to watch me watching E.T. on his iPad, but I was dozing after what had been quite an adamant orgasm.
—I don’t want to watch, I said. Can’t you just tell me what happens? Describe it to me.
—Watch.
The film came upon me slowly. This walnuty creature appeared and there was something so touching about the delicate way he rotated his head. Not knowing much about them, it was clear to me that E.T. was a good film—a sedative and stimulant all in one. I don’t know how many times I told Daniel I was enjoying it.
—I heard you, he said.
Films allowed you the space to think about yourself. If once I lived on Rue de Bac, as the notebook said, if I had frequented places like Schiste, then it would be little more than following the signs. I could retrace my steps—recognition would replace discovery—and the scenes in my mind would sharpen.
But E.T. made no sense without Eagleback in it. I wanted to see him onscreen along with the little boy, Elliot, and the alien. I wanted him to be walking into Elliot’s school and down the corridors. Elliot seemed drunk except it was the alien who drank the beer. Elliot kissed a girl when the alien watched John Wayne doing the same. Did that mean Eagleback was experiencing what I was experiencing now? Wasn’t he somewhere nearby? Hadn’t I seen him only that morning? What if I got up and began roaming the streets now? What were the chances that I would bump into Eagleback again? If I needed to, I would climb to the top of Sacré Coeur to find him—and this time he would know me when he saw me.
We watched the rest of the film in silence. Daniel had some chocolate-covered raisins and I ate handfuls without looking at them. Elliot was cycling in the air—I was so worried he might fall. It was a just matter of believing he wouldn’t. It was the best worst feeling, with beautiful Daniel dozing on my spoiled mattress.
I placed my hand flat to the screen when the film ended. By then it wasn’t a film anymore, and I knew that in time the alien would get where he needed to go. I thought of his journey home, what it would be like, and mine.
Daniel #1
It made sense that he should tell her to avoid sticking her fingers into the blades of the blender. He warned her to avoid raw chicken, overcooking certain vegetables (since she was Irish), getting jam in the butter, and vice versa. He warned her to avoid imbibing Red Bull after lunch, to avoid the word imbibe, to avoid the gherkin in her burger, any foods prefixed with soy—, mixing her ketchup with mayonnaise. He warned her to avoid being greedy, to avoid eating too much food, or no food at all. Once they got to know each other better, he encouraged her to avoid the wobbly stools at the bar, tables by the bathroom or in open sun. He warned her to avoid the news, it wasn’t relevant, and to avoid people who said ‘that’s so punk rock’ when they weren’t referring to music of the late seventies. To avoid people who used lunch as a verb. Party, too. He warned her to avoid yawning in people’s faces, to avoid expressions like ‘inner peace’ and ‘the system’. He warned her to avoid fear, to take it and fold it and sail it down the Seine, and to avoid anyone who said different. He warned her to avoid people who asked for her number, since she had no number, and people who asked her to show them Her Paris. He warned her to avoid strangers and, most of all, not to trust them.
Her birthday was October 13th. It was months away. And it wasn’t as if he got off on blowing up balloons. Daniel threw the birthday party for Eva in case it might trigger something, knowing very well that it wouldn’t. Would she be ill at the thought or would she describe it as the best ever? However, you are either a birthday person or you are not, and the Eva he knew was not and never would be a birthday person.
At the party, she came across so forthrightly and so outwardly comfortable with her own innocence that he could only assume she was hiding something, and that she was not only deep in crisis but was moving from the end of one to the beginning of another. But Daniel never judged Eva for any of this since he too knew the power of concealment. His real name was Conrad Weston and he came from a dangerously wealthy American family, in that his older brother had died of a heroin overdose and his older sister lived in a Sufi community in Washington State after overcoming her own problems with ketamine and artisanal rum.
Daniel was for that reason the sole heir to a mining and technology legacy that would one day grant him, once he returned to being Conrad, bought-and-paid-for houses in Manhattan, Connecticut, Gstaad, Bermuda, and Île de Ré as well as assets and cash enough to cause a fairground flutter in your stomach. His parents lived in as modest a way as being billionaires allowed, although Daniel was ten until he met someone without a swimming pool on their roof. As soon as he realised tha
t’s what he was, being rich (or being born rich) deranged him. The more unimaginative the expression of his parents’ wealth (his and hers Cessnas, jewel-encrusted Mont Blancs) the better to enchant. Daniel’s stance was fully pro-luxury until an old-fashioned humiliation (falling in love with a Panamanian girl who laughed at his tassled loafers) saw him switch teams overnight. Daniel began to pine for tender nights under canvas; would entertain nothing but Woodie Guthrie songs. When he grew his dreads and changed his accent it could have been an inoculation.
Daniel was one of the lucky ones. He could be whoever he wanted to be. His only problem, then and now, was that he had never known what to do with all the love in his heart. He was born with, in his friend Walt’s words, a talent for euphoria; a conversation which took place in the kitchen of Daniel’s parents’ house in Connecticut that was identical to their kitchens in the city and the other ones, one astounding countertop after another.
—What are we doing this weekend? Walt said.
—I am having lunch with Karen then we’re going to the beach.
—What’s her cute little attribute that’ll have you proposing by Tuesday?
—Her shit smells like air freshener.
—Have you told this poor girl that you love her yet?
—Probably. Yeah. Probably. I have.
—They’ll still fuck you if you don’t say you love them.
Karen was a server in the place where he sommed and on their breaks Daniel took her for drives in his tooth-coloured Prius. That evening they drove to the Shake Shack in Westport where, as they were conferring on the subject of crinkle-cut fries, Daniel told Karen that he loved her and he wanted to marry her. Bullet trains had more subtlety. Maybe it wasn’t the best location; there was a ketchupy waft and everywhere the gargle of teenage voices. No, Daniel thought, you made the right decision; and how could she resist? He counted it was the third proposal he’d made that year, give or take.
One Star Awake Page 4