by Jayne Tuttle
I tell him about the theatre school and he hasn’t heard of it, but that doesn’t matter. I can’t take my eyes off the gap between his two front teeth when he smiles. He says he likes my hat. We talk about the cold outside and how winter seems to have come early, in October. I act as if I know that’s unusual. He asks about the paint on my jumper and I tell him about Kiki and lead him out into the entranceway to show him her painting. It’s an early work of a tree in a bleary, ice-green landscape. The figure is limp inside the thick distortion of colour, white melding with muted blue and hints of yellow. It’s as though we’re looking at it through a dirty lens or a fogged window or the blurred vision of age. He says it gives him chair de poule. I don’t know what that is, so he shows me – goosebumps, all the way up his forearms. I have them too, not just on my arms, but my neck and back and other places, and I’m not sure if it’s him or the painting or the combination of both. I love that he can see the terror of Kiki’s work, even in the simplicity of a tree.
He pours me more champagne and lights my cigarette with a match from a little matchbox that has a picture of a skier on it and the words Style. Fun. Gliss. We laugh at the dumbness of the words. I do some funny skiing actions to show what I think the word gliss might mean and he laughs again. He says he likes Sweden. I tell him I’m from Australia. He wants to hug a koala, he says. I tell him they scratch. He raises one lovely eyebrow and leans against the wall, exhaling a plume of smoke above my head, cigarette at first knuckle. We stand talking for longer than I think and make our voices louder as the music gets louder, and I want to ask for his number but can’t seem to find the right place in the conversation.
It’s suddenly late and Kiki wants to leave. Adrien and I say goodbye and again there’s the tiny cheek antennae as I wind my scarf tight around my neck. He waves from the doorway as Kiki and I stumble down the stairs and out into the inky night. The rain has stopped and a cloud of mist hangs in the lamplight.
Kiki huddles my arm under her jacket as we walk towards the métro. ‘Not going home with Paco Rabanne then,’ she says.
‘No,’ I say. ‘But now I know how to paint a Frenchman.’
‘Did you get his number?’
‘No.’
‘What?’ She stops. ‘Why?’
‘Wat? Hawaii?’ mocks a passing motorcyclist in a thick French accent.
‘I don’t know,’ I moan. ‘Surely he has a girlfriend.’
‘He doesn’t! I asked him.’
We walk a few more steps before she stops sharply. ‘Ooh!’ she says, feeling around herself. ‘I forgot my umbrella.’ And she turns on her heels and leaves me stranded in the mist, returning moments later with a Cheshire grin and a number scrawled on the back of an old métro ticket.
‘Voilà,’ she says. ‘Ring-a-root.’
The phone wakes me the next morning.
‘Did the sausage digest?’ says Kiki.
I curl up, still half in a dream. ‘Don’t know yet.’
‘Did you ring the Frenchman?’
‘No. I had weird dreams. An orange beach, a desert. Mum’s butterscotch pudding. I was in it, I couldn’t breathe.’
‘Can you write it?’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘Well, get your crayons out and draw it, call that Frenchman, then meet me at the Montreuil markets. I want to go and buy a whole lot of junk I don’t need.’
I lie in bed wondering if I really want to ring Adrien. I don’t want to get into a relationship. No relationship, says Kiki in my head. Good Time Fun Experimentation. She’s right. What harm can it do?
I eat two mini toasts from a box, which tear at the roof of my mouth, and try to draw the butterscotch-pudding tower asphyxiation, but I can’t, so I write some words with diagrams and arrows. Then I pull the métro ticket from my jacket pocket. You’re just going to run off with some Frenchman, says Jack in my head. We were at the beach the day before I left. He said he would come with me if I wanted him to, be my maid, eat pastries. I laughed. Though Jack made the world feel warm, I didn’t want him to come. And though there was no Frenchman whatsoever in my mind, something rang true in what Jack said. I was going to run off into the darkness and never look back.
Drawing breath, I dial the number. Message bank. His voice is chocolate. I leave a confused message in terrible Franglais, suggesting we meet up to further discuss ‘methods’, and hang up, feeling like an idiot. But it does feel good to engage in some seduction.
‘Deux euros,’ says Kiki to the shoe-seller, defiant. Her French is an abomination but that never holds her back.
‘Trois cinquante,’ he says, nudging his skullcap and meeting her glare.
‘Deux euros,’ she insists, mutilating both vowel sounds with her thick Australian accent.
‘Deux cinquante.’
‘Deux.’
They face off, silent. The seller’s wife comes to his side, nursing a knotty-haired baby. The man breaks into a smile and Kiki wins again, this time a pair of vintage silver pumps. She claps and puts them in her hessian bag, along with the array of scarves, beads and an old, rusted candelabra.
‘Montreuil shits on the big puces,’ she says as we walk off to find the crêpe stand.
These flea markets are another world from the famous ones I’ve visited at the Porte de Saint-Ouen. There, the stalls are ordered and neat, and things are expensive. Here, it’s cheap, and mayhem; swarms of people buzz around stalls piled with colourful clothes and junk, the smell of mothballs and waffles and foot odour and roasted chestnuts making me dizzy. A man sits singing on a pile of old bicycles. A gypsy guitarist and a pipe band and two piano-accordionists battle it out for the prime spot. It’s mad and fun but freezing, the blinding sun and clear blue sky belying a cold I can hardly believe. My teeth chatter, even though I’m wearing all the clothes I own on top of each other.
Kiki hands me a steaming chocolate crêpe and a paper cup of coffee.
‘We need to find you some real winter clothes,’ she says, sizing me up. ‘You’ll perish.’
‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘It can’t get colder than this, surely.’
‘Are you kidding? It’s autumn!’
I hug myself tighter. A man begins playing his accordion in front of us. We drop a few coins into his little leather pouch and move away.
‘Has he called back yet?’ she asks.
I check my phone. ‘No.’
‘Intriguing!’ She rubs her mittens together. ‘What else shall we look at?’
‘All kinds of junk we don’t need?’
‘Yes!’ she laughs. ‘How much money have you got?’
‘Twenty euros.’
‘Fucking plenty!’
After hours of rummaging, sneezing and haggling we catch the métro home together, planning a trip to a department store to buy a doudoune – one of the marshmallow coats that have instantly turned the fashionable women of Paris into a parade of waddling Michelin women. I found nothing in the way of a warm coat at the markets, and Mum’s leather trench is simply not doing the job.
‘Merci madame,’ says an African woman in a colourful headdress with a baby strapped to her back as Kiki offers up her seat in the métro.
‘Do you get called madame?’ I ask as we stand clinging to the pole, bags around us. Kiki is four years older than me: is that what makes the difference?
‘Always.’
‘Why? I’m mademoiselle.’
‘I don’t know. The boobs? If I wear a dress and plait my hair I sometimes get mademoiselle.’
‘I thought madame was just when you’re married.’
‘But how can they tell?’
‘Yeah, I guess. So they think you look married but not me?’
‘They think I look old.’
I did get madame’d once. It was when I had my hair up and was going to the bank to try to open an account. Though I had a letter from the government office that manages my scholarship, I kept getting shunted from one branch to the next. After several frustrating days I decided to
try an experiment. I went home, changed out of my janky theatre blacks and into the most presentable clothes I owned, applied makeup and put my hair in a neat bun. Back at the bank, the woman at the front desk called me madame and the manager, though he tried to deny me once more, found me more difficult to argue with. Also, I cried. This, like the Lesson of the Burnt Baguette, I filed away for future reference. Performance is everything. Including costume. In Paris you need to look the part for the audience to which you are playing, otherwise life is more difficult. I will never wear track pants to a bank meeting again. I’ll be as madame as I can.
We pull into the Gare de l’Est and Kiki and I kiss goodbye. ‘Tell me if he calls,’ she says, before the train disappears down the tunnel.
I have way too much stuff. It takes me ten minutes to struggle my way up the steps with my ridiculous purchases, which include a torn, red velvet Louis XIV chair, several random lengths of pretty fabric, a lovely long white curtain with flowers embroidered on it, two tea towels, and a green dress with no zip. Four bags of junk, with a few useful pieces, such as a pilled red cashmere scarf and a furry hat with earflaps. It feels odd to have bought a hat with flaps that have been over someone else’s ears, but it didn’t smell too bad and Kiki said I would be grateful when the time came.
Having climbed my way out of the station I set my chair on the ground and collapse on it to catch my breath. I take in the view of the old hotels and grand old brasseries with their faded frontages and signs advertising daily formules and specialties from France’s eastern region, sauerkraut and sausage and crisp white wines. The streets are full of the usual hustle of cars and bikes and buses that fart black smoke. Dizzy tourists flap maps like pigeons’ wings, and the pigeons themselves flap amongst the dirt and scum beneath the bins and across the squares. Streetsweepers in fluoro-green stand sipping coffee in a tabac across the road, the floor covered in ash and lotto tickets and peanut shells. Men with smooth brown faces and pale green eyes gather around telephone boxes smeared in graffiti. A waiter in his black and white costume grunts and spits a bubbled glob in the gutter. Bobos clutching baskets full of bread and cheese and wine make their way to the banks of the Canal Saint-Martin. The bells at the fume-stained Église Saint-Laurent in its piss-soaked cement triangle start gonging.
As two gypsy girls approach me, I crush my cigarette with the point of my boot, collect my bags and shuffle towards the Récollets. When I first arrived I fell prey to their ‘Do you speak English?’ routine, and discovered a small hand in my rear pocket before the girls ran giggling away.
There’s no room in my place for any more clutter but I’m pleased with my purchases. The green dress will be a project, and perhaps I can make something with all the pretty fabric. The velvet chair sits in the middle of the room, proud, alone, utterly out of place. The fabric underneath the seat is torn and there’s a stain on its lovely red cushion, which I tell myself is an innocent splash of wine. The white curtain is superfluous, as the window is too high and already has a perfectly measured, long red blackout curtain on it. I will put it in my new apartment one day, I decide, the real, grown-up one with the curled ironwork and window boxes.
I open the window and light a cigarette, letting the freezing night air hit my face. A knock at the door: it’s Miru, the little boy from down the hall. He is five and has a Japanese artist dad and an Austrian film-maker mother and thus speaks four languages: French at school, Japanese with him, German with her, and English with both of them. And with me. We play dress-ups for a while – he likes my new hat, though it messes up his self-styled spike hairdo; the green dress falls neatly over his compact Japanese frame, and he puts on my highest heels to try to get it higher off the ground, sashaying back and forth. His mother, Tatiana, peeks in the open doorway. ‘Miru! It’s dinner time. Stop bothering Jayne.’
‘He’s not at all,’ I say.
Miru gives me a kiss and runs out. I crawl upstairs to the mezzanine with my phone. No messages.
Fire
I AM A BUSHFIRE. Electricity shoots from the tips of my toes to the top of my head. Fits of sizzling. I tear at the air, turning all in my path to dust. My arms flail; I convulse, burn, sting, attack, spin and spit, until finally, exhausted, my fire, having destroyed a small village, hisses at the rain before dulling to a pale ember and disappearing.
‘Pas mal,’ says Claude’s voice from above me as I lie puffing and wheezing on the floor with four of my classmates, also in pools of themselves in front of the silent class. ‘Un bel espace de feu.’
A beautiful space of fire? My face begins to burn on the green linoleum. I haven’t had anything close to a pas mal yet.
Claude starts telling the class things he liked about my fire, which I can barely understand – he talks like a hurricane. When he finishes I pull myself up, trying to hide my red cheeks. But my classmates’ eyes aren’t on me. It wasn’t my pas mal. Like Claude, they’re all staring at Marie-France.
Marie-fucking-France. Perfect, Parisian Marie-France, with her milky skin and straight brown hair. Marie-France has already had several pas mals and even a few biens. She’s not far off a très bien, I imagine, even perhaps an excellent. Marie-France – what kind of a name is that, when you’re from France? Umi Japan, Meg London, Faye Ohio. Marie-France France. In the primordial ooze of the first months of school, she has managed to convey some sort of grace. She does juste without trying.
She stands there receiving her compliment from Claude. I notice that her two longest toes on each foot are webbed, which makes me feel slightly better. Claude moves on to talk about Laurent Marseille’s fire, which, he says, had no soul. Laurent is defensive and asks questions, and I realise that we non-French-speakers are actually at an advantage: we can’t fight back, so we have no choice but to listen and evolve. The room is tense as Laurent’s veins pulsate in his neck. Claude huffs and says something cutting that makes him shut up and sit down. Claude turns to me. ‘Et toi, Jenny.’
I’ve stopped trying to correct him. I sit forward and strain my entire body to listen. ‘Too said. Telephone? Self-something.’ I’m disappointed; I truly thought I had found something in fire. Air, water, earth – these elements had each fascinated me during our explorations of their physicality, but fire was something else. I really thought it was my element.
Angela stands and turns to the class, her powerful arms reaching out in their expressive Italian way. ‘There was something inside Jayne’s fire.’ I perk up. ‘But why didn’t it work?’
Shrugs all around. One classmate offers that I was too inside it. Shut up, Sweden, I think to myself, your fire was an epileptic dog.
‘You need to work on your feet,’ she says, pointing at my raw, blistered toes. ‘They make us want to laugh, even though you are very serious.’
‘What is fire?’ says Claude to the class. ‘Have you really watched it?’
I have – I’ve lit matches, imagined it, dreamt it, googled it. Perhaps I was trying to paint what I had seen, rather than be inside it. That’s all I can gather from what they’re saying. And that I have weird feet.
Claude claps his hands. ‘Okay. Next.’
Another group jumps up. Their fire is all manner of mush, with the odd flickering ember. Angela sits watching with intense seriousness, chin in hands. Claude sits in his usual position, long, sinewy legs crossed over each other. He smiles, shakes his head, and puts his face in his hands. God knows how many fires he has sat through in his years teaching here.
I wish I’d seen Marie-France’s fire. The physical engagement required to muster even a flicker is staggering – you have to abandon yourself completely, and yet not so completely that you go to the other side, which Steve Dublin is currently doing, making me giggle into my leg warmers. He is so in the fire he’s actually in a spasmic sort of trance. Meg London is occasionally getting it – her engagement is controlled yet wild. Marc Finland does some convincing sparks but is too good-looking to truly summon fire.
The class is exhausting, and at the
end of the day we decamp to Chez Jeannette. It’s been tradition since the school began, for students to come here, with its cracked tile floors and wedding-cake ceilings and cancan-girl wallpaper and beautiful bar lit with squiggly lights reading Chez Jeannette. The scratched mirrors all the way along the back wall reflect the dim light of red chandeliers and long red leather banquettes and old formica tables that, pushed together, can entertain an entire class of rowdy theatre school students.
We post-mortem the day’s efforts with beers and kirs at the bar, smoking and ashing on the floor. There are no ashtrays on the bar, to eliminate the possibility of ashing in someone’s drink. It’s illegal not to ash on the floor, but I still keep expecting Mum to tap on my shoulder and haul me out, saying with clenched teeth, ‘And while I’m at it don’t smoke.’ On Étienne’s Marlboro Light packet are the French words for SMOKING LEADS TO A LONG AND PAINFUL DEATH. I take a drag on mine and think how sometimes you can die a long and painful death from lung cancer even if you don’t smoke. So you might as well.
Étienne is from the Paris suburbs and, chuffed by my intrigue at the rhythmic way he speaks, is teaching me a steady stream of new expressions. When I say this cigarette is truc de ouf quoi he rolls his eyes and laughs. His name sounds like a girl’s, though he assures me it’s a boy’s, as is Camille, the name of a guy in Group C. Étienne says a girl can’t be called Étienne. The Spanish girl who looks like the girl from the film Amélie comes and bums a cigarette off Étienne. She tells me my fire was good, just that it didn’t really work. The Spanish Amélie can say things like that to me because she’s so cute. I make a mental note to work with her on the next autocours.
My stomach growls so I excuse myself and squeeze through the crowd and go next door to buy a hot three-cheese panini from the Lebanese bakery. I take it back to the bar but Jeannette gives me a foul look, so I give the others a consolatory wave and walk up the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, huddled over it, eating.
‘Bon appétit,’ says a woman in a furry jacket standing with her arms folded outside her shop.