Paris or Die

by Jayne Tuttle

  Groups B and C move off into other rooms, leaving my group in the foyer. We have to form our own subgroups of seven and, unlike in most theatres, it’s a democracy, with no designated director or writer or actors. An awkward shuffling finds me with two Greek girls, a Japanese guy, a Canadian guy, a French girl and an English girl, both called Elodie. To separate them I call them Élodie France and Elodie England. Then I just call everyone by their country names in my head; it helps me remember them. Elena and Caterina Greece and Elodie England don’t speak French. Élodie France doesn’t speak English. Yoshi Japan speaks neither French nor English. We spend the entire hour and a half trying to figure out how to communicate. After autocours we move into the Grande Salle for movement class with Claude, who is wearing a pilled black tracksuit. He tells us he has taught at the school for many years but that he doesn’t know anything, so don’t ask. Then he sends us running around the room, spreading to each corner, meeting each other and moving away. The pressure of our feet on the sprung wood floors makes a piano somewhere tinkle.

  Later, sweating, we move into a smaller room with green vinyl floors; they call this one the Salle Verte. Angela, Ju-Yong and Boris are in there. Angela speaks French with her whole mouth, like she is eating Italian food.

  ‘If you don’t want to work, and work hard, you should go now,’ she says. She talks about listening, and about being present, and then my French hits maximum capacity and I neither retain nor understand a single word more.

  Towards the end of the class she asks us to pretend that there’s a pool in the room and to mime taking off our clothes, jumping in and swimming from one side to the other. Two French guys and Ravi Canada, who have understood the instructions, get up. An Italian guy called Romeo gets up too, but he hasn’t quite grasped it, and to our horror actually starts taking his clothes off, exposing his impressive abs and his dick stuffed in a pair of green Y-fronts. He jumps frantically into the imaginary water. Nobody dares laugh, and Angela, bewildered, says something along the lines of she wonders what school he thinks he has come to.

  The first week is like drowning. Each of us, with our own languages, with our own levels of French and acting experience, is alone, yet surrounded by bodies, on us, around us, all over us. We each have our stories and our current situations. Some of us are living on floors, one of us sleeps on a pull-out shelf in a kitchen, another has no running water and showers weekly in a gay sauna. One of us is forty-four and has a nine-year-old son and a loft in Belleville with a stocked kitchen and a living room we can rehearse in for autocours. Lots of us are called Marc. Some of us are bossy, some too shy to stand up in improvisations, some annoyingly unafraid to jump up before everyone else has had a turn. Some are social, some aren’t sure if they’re in the right place, some suck up to the teachers, some have excellent flexibility, some are already acrobats, one of us is a famous film star from Spain. Some of us throw parties in the first week, some of us stick to those who speak our own language. But all of us want one thing: to survive the first term, and hopefully the first year. We have come this far.

  On Friday afternoon, all the first-years and teachers gather in the Grande Salle for the presentation of autocours. The students sit on the floor to watch, the teachers on the long bench seat that Claude has started putting across the doors to shin people who rush into class late. The groups get up one by one to perform their scenes. We have decided that our place is to be a café and the event is Yoshi having a heart attack and dying. Before we even get to the heart attack Angela waves her hands above her head and says, ‘Okay, merci!’ We are creamed, as are most of the others, for being too complicated, too small, not creating space, being in our heads. We slink back to sit on the floor, broken, but also broken in.

  There’s a party afterwards at a bar called Chez Jeannette a few doors down, but I am so exhausted I stagger home and pull the curtains shut before sleeping all night and most of the weekend.

  The following weeks are a haze of school, coffee, beer and sleep. The internet is connected in my Studio of Good, which leads to much research and exploration, including my first porn download. The result is thrilling but ultimately lonely, and I fear that the director of the Récollets and the administrators of my grant are watching, so I clear my history and make a pact not to do it again. I will be a Franciscan monk with my grey hoodie on, and engage in spiritual reflection. I do this for five minutes. Then I google my teachers from school: a story comes up from the 1970s about Claude, with a picture of him in a leotard. The film actress from Spain is a serious star, and now I recognise her from some of my favourite films. She is so gentle and understated, you’d never know. The internet death clock says I will die on Saturday 4 April 2048. Not bad considering I clicked ‘smoker’. There’s an option to delay your date of death, but when I click on it, it just takes me to health sites. In my inbox is an email from Dad with a photo of the family sitting around at a Sunday lunch with too-wide smiles on their faces. An old friend of Mum’s is sitting a little too close to Dad. An email from Gabriella saying she’s got a new agent and is moving to LA. An email from Jack saying French people smell like cheese and that I should just come home. An email from a friend of a friend, an Australian called Kiki who is also living in Paris. She sounds nice. I write back.

  The Hanging of the Cream Bulb

  I DON’T WANT TO go to the party. It’s a cold, wet night and Kiki’s studio is warm, my belly full of her spinach pie, my head woozy on wine. The muffled wail of a trumpet floats from a dusty radio under piles of paper and crayons and art books. We are seated at her easel as she teaches me to blend oil paints.

  ‘I’ll call it Rain on the Seine,’ I say, wiggling on my stool. ‘It could be a masterpiece.’

  ‘Maybe,’ says Kiki, standing up and sculling the last of her wine. ‘But your lights are dull as dogshit.’

  It’s true. But if they take me hours to finish we can stay in here all night and drink more wine.

  ‘Come on,’ she smiles, and, sensing my game, takes the brushes from my hand and tosses them in turpentine. ‘I’ll be your best friend.’

  She already is, a thousandfold. Since we met a few weeks ago, we’ve spent almost every spare moment together, mainly here in her studio in the Cité Internationale des Arts, with its ugly lino floors and beautiful view over the Seine and the Île Saint-Louis. She has a residency here from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and she not only paints, she cooks. There’s always something bubbling away in the cluttered kitchenette, with some exotic root vegetable or chickpeas in it. She doesn’t even use the tinned ones.

  ‘Shine, shine,’ I say, grabbing a cloth and pressing the paint into the canvas. If I can draw it out until nine-thirty maybe she’ll give up on dragging me out.

  She pulls on some stockings and starts applying eyeliner to her wide Middle Eastern eyes in a mirror on the wall. ‘It’s perfect now,’ she says. ‘A masterpiece.’

  Kiki must be my complete physical opposite, all curves and dark curls, a goddess from a Fellini film. With her pale skin and deep eyebrows she can wear earrings with beads and jewels, and headscarves, and dark red lipstick that looks like it should be there.

  ‘I’m trying so hard to make it juste,’ I complain in an exaggerated voice, continuing to blend. This is the it-word at school, and Kiki and I have been having long discussions about it. It’s hard to translate: something perhaps between ‘true’, ‘right’ and ‘faithful’. What is juste or pas juste can make or break an artwork, whether a painting or a performance, and when I explained the concept to Kiki she had plenty to say about art that was technically great but not juste. My autocours this week had fallen majorly flat because it was pas juste. The subject was ‘A Day in the Life of a Square’ and we had to observe the movement in a Paris square and then recreate its dynamic as a theatre piece, using the whole Grande Salle. My group chose the Place des Abbesses, a quaint, shady square in Montmartre with a merry-go-round in it and wandering, blissed-out tourists, and benches with people kissing and ar
guing and eating pastries on them. In a small adjoining park is a wall with I love you written on it in all different languages. We rehearsed night and day for the entire week but our piece was stopped after only a few minutes and labelled a ‘giant soup’. It wasn’t enough to recreate the stories from the square, the teachers said, there was no theatre, no dynamic. It wasn’t juste. I had no idea what any of this meant.

  To create something that is juste, they told us, we first need to learn how to observe. I go to the window and try to truly look at the lights. There is a lot of white and yellow to them, some blue perhaps, too, amidst the yellow, but that brightness – my brain can’t seem to understand how to capture it. I go back to the canvas and dab on more white, blending it with the yellow and grey and some blue, with my fingers. It helps slightly. But mostly the painting looks like a smudged impression of outer space, a pallid shit smear amongst Kiki’s exultant abstracts.

  ‘I’ll owe you one,’ she says. ‘Pleeease.’

  ‘Why aren’t more children named after paints?’ I joke, pretending I haven’t heard her as I rummage through a box of paints. ‘Carmine and Umber and Madder Lake …’

  ‘Slut.’ She fastens her earrings.

  I leave the easel and walk around the room, observing her work on the walls exploring dreams and liminal spaces: the deep washes of blues, taupes and reddish-browns studded with the occasional burst of light remind me of the autumnal Paris outside, while also making me feel like I’m looking right inside her. They punch me in the stomach but I can’t say why. They are juste.

  She slings her bag over her shoulder and stands looking at me, eyebrows raised. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Oh dear, I would so love to come,’ I sigh, looking down at my clothes spattered with ultramarine and zinc-white and coal-black. ‘But look at me. I can’t go to a party now.’

  ‘Fuck you!’ she laughs, pulling on her boots. ‘Goddamn it, I want to stay here too. I want to play gin rummy.’

  The party is at a girl called Martine’s, the sister of Kiki’s art dealer in Sydney. Martine has bought several of Kiki’s paintings. Kiki says showing up is PR. Her bosom jiggles in her top as the métro carriage vibrates and sways and I recount my previous night’s dream about a man with a blanked-out face who held a gun in my mouth and pulled the trigger, but the gun didn’t go off.

  Kiki always wants every detail. ‘You didn’t feel scared?’

  ‘No,’ I say, dislodging a piece of corn chip from my tooth with the corner of my métro ticket. ‘Relieved.’

  ‘Interesting that you didn’t die.’

  ‘It was a strange feeling. When I woke up I felt grateful to be alive, but in the dream the relief that I was going to die was overwhelming. Like in a horror film when you’re so relieved the victim is dead and not being tortured anymore.’

  ‘Do you always dream about death?’ Kiki asks.

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘Do you dream about your mum?’

  My throat tightens. ‘No,’ I say. ‘Never.’

  Every night I try. The closest I’ve got so far is a beach with a dot right down the end, moving towards me. Knowing it was her didn’t make me feel any closer to her, or better.

  Martine’s apartment is in a hidden building behind a giant green door in the boulevard de Magenta, not far from the Récollets, which is convenient for when I need to bust out. I am still in a monk-like state of mind. Apart from drinks after school, this is the most social I’ve been since I arrived.

  Her doorway is open and we walk straight in, past one of Kiki’s most majestic paintings. There are creaky floorboards and lovely tall windows, and high white ceilings with frosted curls and angels in the corners. It’s achingly beautiful, and Martine is too, the bowl of her pelvis jutting from her slinky black dress as she sweeps in to kiss us both.

  ‘So glad you could come,’ she exhales.

  The party is throbbing with bourgeois bohemians. Kiki has been educating me on all the Paris types. Bourgeois bohemians, or bobos, are the well-to-do young creative professionals who live on the Right Bank, buy organic food and dress relaxed-chic. For parties, Kiki points out, they usually wear one fancy item, such as a sequinned skirt, matched with a down-to-earth item, perhaps a rough-looking T-shirt or a pair of trainers, or something weird, like a necklace made of a cassette tape. It’s about contrast. No eye makeup, but hot-pink lipstick. High snakeskin heels with casual print pants. The hair has an I-don’t-care perfection.

  Kiki is more bohemian than bourgeois, with her beaded jewellery, embroidered skirt and army boots. Martine looks more bourgeois than bohemian in her dazzling top-to-toe outfit with no contrasting item, her perfect makeup and hair. I look like an unemployed construction worker in my paint-flecked jumper and jeans, frizzy post-rain hair tucked up into one of Jack’s old man hats.

  It’s a house-warming, a pendaison de crémaillère. This literally means ‘the hanging of the cream bulb’. In the old days the guests would bring cream. We’ve brought a cheap bordeaux. There’s an Australian theme: a flag with a boxing kangaroo is draped across the walls, and INXS blares from a mixing desk manned by a model wearing bunny ears. French murmurs are occasionally pierced by the twang of an English vowel. It starts to rain heavily outside, dulling all the sounds to a watery murmur.

  Kiki and I pour glasses of wine from someone else’s bottle and find a place to sit next to a plate of cheese on toothpicks and sausages in bread – an homage to Australian cuisine. I’m not sure why, but for the first time in over a decade, the sausage suddenly smells good. Kiki grabs one and stuffs it into her glorious mouth. I find myself reaching in slow motion for my own.

  ‘Do it,’ she says, eyes fierce.

  I am tired of my old self. My boring Australian self. I want to belong. I want yang. I hold the sausage up to my face and bite off a rubbery end. As my mouth becomes awash with an ungodly saltiness my gaze drifts towards the doorway.

  A guy is standing there. The cardboard cut-out of Frenchman. Tall, dark, rain-slick, a vision in a long black coat. His cigarette is still lit despite the elements: the cliché is that strong. Did the sausage conjure him? I can’t be certain he is real. He peels off his coat, cigarette defying all laws of matter as it’s pulled through the sleeve and back to his lips, still alight, before being stubbed out in Martine’s fancy gold ashtray. She and a flock of females descend on him, and the blond-haired guy he’s come with, and they disappear.

  Kiki nudges me. ‘Good girl!’

  I take another bite and smile at her.

  She continues chewing, eyes wide, watching my mouth before turning to watch the blond wingman, who has just slid back into the room in his socks, brandishing a magnum of champagne.

  ‘C’est la TEUF!’ he shouts. Teuf, I tell Kiki, means ‘fête’ – in verlan. Party. I have been learning this type of street slang from Étienne at school, who I initially couldn’t understand a word of in autocours. Verlan stands for l’envers – the reverse – and there’s a whole language made out of it, originally as drug- and sex-trade code. My favourite expression is ‘C’est un truc de ouf quoi.’ This stands for truc de fou, which means ‘crazy thing’, and you say this sentence when something is amazing. The sentence has a fantastic guttural sound to it, and I’ve been using it as much as I can, driving my schoolmates and Kiki crazy.

  The blond guy approaches and Kiki instinctively holds out her glass. The dark guy follows him as they walk around introducing themselves.

  ‘Raphaël,’ says the blonde, reaching down to kiss me on both cheeks before filling my glass. I know I should stand but I miss the moment, and besides, is he seriously going to kiss every person at this party? There must be sixty of us.

  ‘Jayne,’ I say politely, moving my face left and right of his. ‘Enchanté.’

  Raphaël has a high forehead, dainty lips, and is wearing a pink-and-white striped shirt tucked into high-waisted jeans. I try to imagine an Australian guy wearing pink. He moves on to Kiki, who stands and does the proper kiss ritual. The dark gu
y approaches me and I stand up this time. He turns his head to one side and places his cheek gently to mine, right then left. Our cheeks don’t quite touch but the little hairs on the skin reach out to each other: a thousand pins of electricity.

  ‘Adrien.’

  ‘Jayne.’ I don’t say ‘enchanted’ but I am, deeply. His eyes are almost black and his jaw is wide, with lots of teeth in it. His brows have seen some ancient wars. A piece of hair falls in his eyes and he flicks it back with a sniff, as though he is going to say something, but he doesn’t. When he steps towards Kiki he leaves behind a musky scent.

  I sit down and neck my champagne, wishing I’d at least had a shower. Kiki gives me a look. ‘Aristos,’ she says. ‘Classic ones from the posh parts of Paris. Rarely seen around these parts.’

  ‘Not bobos?’

  ‘Definitely not bobos.’

  Later, as I’m talking to the DJ bunny, Kiki manoeuvres the dark Frenchman towards me.

  ‘Jayne, did you meet Adrien? He’s an actor too.’

  ‘Oh?’ I say, never sure what this means. Kiki leaves with the bunny, and Adrien and I stand in silence for a moment.

  ‘My Eengleesh very shit,’ he says, so we speak in French, despite my not feeling confident at all. I ask him what sort of acting he does, though I hate being asked that question myself – it’s a stupid question. What are you supposed to say? ANYTHING I CAN GET, WHY, DO YOU KNOW OF SOMEONE LOOKING FOR SOMEONE TO DO SOMETHING?! He tells me he’s doing a film course with an American director in Saint-Germain. A method thing.

  ‘Et toi?’