Paris or Die

by Jayne Tuttle

  The sun is going down over the railway tracks in the boulevard Barbès when I finally hit redial. Adrien answers with his chocolate voice and we try to make small talk, but I keep talking over him when he goes to say something and then he does the same to me. I manage to ask if he wants to meet for a drink. He says he’s working until eight. I say eight’s not too late. But he suggests we meet instead on Sunday for a balade au Louvre.

  ‘Disons fifteen o’clock.’

  A Sunday walk around the Louvre? It’s only Tuesday! My skin pinches with the wait ahead.

  But suddenly it’s Sunday and I’m tearing my room to shreds trying to find the right thing to wear. Day balade at the Louvre: not formal, but where will we end up? I settle on the trusty black top with the open back and a pair of black jeans. Mum’s coat. A smear of Kiki’s green eyeshadow that she says looks better on me.

  I wait for him beside the inverted glass pyramid in the Carrousel du Louvre, trying not to eat the inside of my mouth. I love that, instead of somewhere dark and intimate, he arranged to meet me beside a great big overpopulated upside-down shard of light. The sky outside, reflected through the glass, is a deep, freezing grey.

  Will it snow? They say it doesn’t snow every winter in Paris but I dream of seeing it in real life for the first time.

  As I’m enjoying an image of Adrien in front of a log fire he appears in front of me, all eyes and hair and gloves and wool. He kisses me on both cheeks and gives an additional arm squeeze, which fuels my electric charge.

  He’s forgotten that the first Sunday of the month is free, so there’s a queue all the way out to the rue de Rivoli. He suggests we ditch the museum and go to Le Marly, and I say, ‘Bon!’, though I have no clue what Le Marly is.

  He leads me through a secret door and out into the Louvre courtyard, which is veiled in mist. It’s empty and quiet due to the cold and he takes my hand and guides me up the steps of an opulent old restaurant. Inside, the place is loud and cosy and bustling. Adrien suggests we sit outside, where we’ll have the terrace to ourselves. I know the cold may kill me but I agree – maybe he’ll put me under his big warm jacket. I need the Ladies first, so I walk through the warmly lit room, past decadent men and women and pedigree dogs on velvet chairs beneath chandeliers to the bathroom, where an elderly lady smiles at me as the hand dryer splits patches of mink in her coat. I can see the dead animal skin underneath. I wonder if I’ll wear fur now, now that I’m a meat-eater, a blood-guzzler, a baby-deer-killer, Satan. Vegie girl in her Room of Good feels far, far away. I piss violently and feel hot blood course through my veins. Life is fucking good. The old lady’s perfume is still in the room as I wash my hands and I breathe it in, rich and long – I will be as vile as her, fur or no.

  Back outside I need that fur more than ever. Adrien has ordered two café crèmes, which puff their hotness away into the air, leaving but a trace for my insides that need it so badly. The scene is a painting, and I try to forget the petty limitations of the body, taking in every little bit. As I can’t relax in the cold, every moment is alive, all is magnified. The top of the glass pyramid glows in the middle of the vast, empty courtyard in front of us. We sit close, but not too close. His shoulders are up and he has one hand in his warm pocket, cigarette in the knuckles of the other. He smiles at me as he raises his cup to his lips. I try to talk but I just keep stammering, so I stop talking and so does he. We sit smoking and watching the tiny birds hop across the balcony near our table. I have no intention of complaining about being cold.

  Just as I’m starting to freeze solid, Adrien pays the bill and we walk out along the rue de Rivoli towards the Palais Royal, past the beaded sculpture I sat next to on my first day in Paris six years ago. I don’t know why I thought it was an octopus; it’s more like an exotic crown or a headdress. I would like to stop and tell Adrien about that day but it’s too cold, and he wants to show me the Colonnes de Buren, a series of striped columns of different heights poking up from the ground. In the low afternoon light it looks like a field of poker chips. He explains the story of the columns but I can’t understand him, so I just nod and ah appreciatively. He leads me around the gardens and through the arcades of the Palais Royal, telling me about the history of kings and queens, and showing me the beautiful antique shops and fashion boutiques and fancy restaurants. We stop outside a sumptuous old restaurant called Le Grand Véfour.

  ‘We are not going here,’ he says, pointing at the menu price. One day, he tells me, when he is rich, he’ll bring me. I note the use of the future tense.

  He notices that I’m turning blue so he says, ‘Come with me,’ and we march soldier-like over to the Marais and step into the first place we see. Perhaps it’s somewhere he knows but I don’t think so – I can’t imagine him frequenting a loud and touristy Spanish bar like this. He goes to the bathroom and I order the first thing that comes into my head: a litre of sangria. It’s definitely the wrong choice for a winter tête-à-tête but I don’t care: I need to smash the barriers between us, culture, language, sex. He raises his eyebrows when he returns to the table, then pours us both tall glasses and we clink them.

  Sure enough, the lower the level of sangria in the jug, the lower the barrier between us.

  We start saying things in mixed language.

  He says I have beautiful eyes.

  I tell him he has beautiful hands.

  I go to reach out for one but a bartender approaches our table – he needs to open the trapdoor under my seat so he can go downstairs for ice. I stand up and pull my chair around to Adrien’s side. The bar is now crowded. He stands. We are close, but at an awkward angle. I can smell his musky perfume and see dark hairs sprouting from under his top button.

  Bam – the man shuts the trapdoor and stands smiling at us, swinging the ice bucket onto his head. ‘Ah, l’amour.’

  Adrien’s phone rings and he takes it outside. His jaw clenches and his entire expression changes as he talks to the person on the other end. When he comes back in his entire face is flushed.

  ‘I have to go,’ he says, sitting back down. ‘My mother she call me – ma grand-mère, she is here from the … campagne. She is old. I am sorry. I must return.’

  ‘Ça va,’ I reply, masking my disappointment. ‘We can see each other next week.’

  ‘I walk you to the métro.’

  Outside, the cold is like being stabbed in the stomach. I grab his arm without thinking – it’s life or death – and he grabs mine back. Finally, we’re touching. We walk, huddled together, past the Hôtel de Ville, where an ice-skating rink has been set up, the ghoulish silhouettes of skaters dancing against its looming façade.

  He holds me a fraction tighter as we cross the street to the Place du Châtelet. The two ancient theatres cast their shadows across the lamplit square, and the angel atop the fountain sculpture reaches her wreaths high into the night sky. Then, just as I stop to admire the beauty of it all, he turns and kisses me, like a character in an old black-and-white photograph, as snow, on cue, feathers down upon our heads.

  Narnia

  I WAKE TO A bizarre stillness. It’s silent outside. No kids in the park. No early-morning traffic. The world feels paused. I know this feeling.

  The morning after the night Mum died I woke in our old living room on a raft of cushions. Relatives were scattered around me on couches and blow-up mattresses. I’d forgotten for a moment what had happened. As I realised where I was, the most familiar place on earth, it seemed as if I were waking on a new planet. The air was different. It was as though the molecular structure of the air had shifted overnight. I lay breathing on the cushions, trying to calm myself.

  Now I lie in my bed in the Récollets with the same sick feeling. What has happened this time?

  The phone rings beside me. I grab it.

  ‘Have you seen it?’ says Kiki.

  ‘Is it the end of days?’

  She suppresses a laugh. ‘Go look out the window.’

  I sit up on the bed for a moment, then walk careful
ly downstairs and pull back the curtains. What I see takes my breath away.

  Narnia.

  ‘I know,’ says Kiki, hearing my sharp intake of breath.

  The park is a fairyland of white. The trees are marshmallows, the buildings wedding cakes. There is no dirt, no rubbish, no people, no dogs, no rushing, no yelling, no bouncing balls. The world has been erased overnight, replaced by sugar candy.

  ‘The Seine is a magical land,’ says Kiki.

  ‘It can’t be real.’

  ‘It’s real.’

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘Because you’ve never seen snow.’

  ‘I’m going out!’

  I hang up and throw on all the clothes I can find and run down to the park. Some kids have arrived and are playing with little plastic sleds and snowballs. I run back upstairs and drag Miru away from his breakfast and down into the Récollets courtyard.

  ‘La neige!’ he says and throws himself into it. He is excited, but not as much as me. We throw snowballs at each other. One hits me hard in the face and it hurts, but I laugh, tears streaming down my cheeks. Miru flops on his back and moves his arms and legs to make an angel and I do the same.

  The streets are slushy by the time I head to school, and I slip and slide my way down the Faubourg-Saint-Denis, wrong to have thought my sneakers would grip. Everyone in class from a hot climate has the same stupid grin on their face. We spend time learning to mime the different speeds of ice-skating, lowering our bodies and faces closer to the ground as we pick up speed, at first staying on the spot then gliding around the room. Ju-Yong says mine is good and gets everyone to stop and watch. I don’t know why, I’ve only ever ice-skated before in my head. In the change room later, Marie-France tells me about a Marcel Marceau scene where he mimes walking up a staircase, showing himself getting higher and higher using only his regard and the angle of his arm. She tells me to come over and watch it one day and I say I will. Damn that Marie-France, she’s not even an arsehole.

  I’m practising a skating movement in my room that evening, kicking the walls as I push faster and faster, when Adrien calls. In our stilted way we share a mostly French conversation that goes something like this:

  ‘Allo Jayne?’

  ‘Oui?’ (Of course I know it’s him but I’ll pretend I don’t.)

  ‘C’est Adrien.’ (He knows I’m faking that I don’t know it’s him, but he’ll go along with it.)

  ‘Oui. Adrien! Bonsoir.’ (I still can’t stop saying oui on telephone calls.)

  ‘I just finish work. I’m fatigué. I’m go home.’ (Want to ask me over?)

  ‘Oui.’ (Ohmygod.)

  ‘I have not disturb you, I hope.’ (This is terrible.)

  ‘No, not at all. I’m … brushing my teeth.’ (I love the sound of your voice, but not being able to talk properly is making me feel naked, and not in a good way.)

  A great big pause.

  ‘Euhhh,’ I say. ‘Did you see the snow today?’ (One day I will lie in bed with you and watch the snow fall outside our window.)

  ‘Yes. I love the snow.’

  ‘I thought the world was dead!’

  ‘That is funny. Okay, I go now.’

  ‘Okay, oui.’

  ‘Je t’embrasse.’

  ‘Je t’embrasse …’

  Later, in bed, I send him a message saying thanks for calling and that I’m waiting with interest, not impatience, to see him again, because Laurent told me that was the less desperate way to express it. He doesn’t reply until I’m almost asleep, with a message I have to read over and over:

  Ta présence est agréable tout comme ton absence est regrettable.

  My presence is agreeable as much as my absence is regrettable? He is regrettable that I am absent from his presence? His place? I haven’t seen it yet. Or is he calling it off? And feeling regretful? Should I have invited him over?

  This language thing is exasperating. And enticing. Love talk is tantalising enough in my own language, let alone the long hours one can spend deducing what on earth a Frenchman means.

  Night Butterfly

  ‘HOW DO YOU say stapler?’ asks Kiki. We are hunched over a table near the window at Chez Jeannette. Our coffees are down to the grainy bits.

  ‘Agrafeuse,’ I say, exhaling smoke away from her. ‘As in agrafes – staples.’

  ‘Aggerfuse.’

  ‘No agra-feuse. Think agro furs.’

  ‘What about lightbulbs? I need screwy ones.’

  ‘Ampoules, but I don’t know screwy, you’ll have to mime.’

  My phone rings as I am miming the lightbulb turn and I show Kiki the caller. She raises her eyebrows twice and coughs, turning to look out the window at a couple having an argument.

  Adrien talks in his syrupy murmur and I say oui a few times and hang up, flushed.

  ‘The Frenchman is in the 10th for a casting. He wants to come to my place.’

  ‘Ooh la la.’

  ‘He says he’s in Paris,’ I wonder aloud. ‘But he says dans. I always thought you said à Paris, not dans Paris. I thought dans meant literally being inside something.’

  ‘Maybe he wants to get dans you.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I say, examining the grit in my coffee cup. ‘No,’ I realise, looking up at her. ‘I’ve got my period.’

  Kiki considers this, then shrugs. ‘So what?’

  I sprint home wondering if it is the moment for him to get dans me. It would make for an awkward first time. No, I decide, it’s been this long, we should save it.

  I shower and change and run down to the Gare de l’Est, but he is not at the little exit in front of the restaurants so I run across to the big exit, but he isn’t there either. I ring him and he is at the little exit, standing in front of the Indiana Café, smoking a cigarette. He kisses me intensely on the lips.

  ‘Comment ça va?’ he asks once we’ve pulled away, and I say fine thanks and ask how the audition went. He says it was a casting, not an audition, which is slightly different, but he got the job. It’s a magazine shoot for a sportswear editorial – modelling but kind of acting, he tells me. Anyway, it’s a little bit of money. He’s wearing the long black woollen coat from that first night in Martine’s doorway and his hair is neat and brushed. I lead him across the traffic to the big white convent and the big iron gates.

  ‘Waouh!’ he says, looking up and around him at the arcades and tall stone walls with their white-shuttered windows. He knows the building but didn’t know what it was.

  I tell him about the monks and the hospital and the Angels of the Récollets. He listens in silence as I lead him up to the second floor. In the corridor outside my door we stand for a moment, watching the insane traffic outside the Gare de l’Est. He notices the postcard of the stuffed koala I’ve stuck on my door and laughs, reminding me that they scratch.

  ‘Not that one,’ I say, and put my key in the lock, heart pounding. Cramps thud in my belly.

  My studio is messy but the lights are dim. He sits on the Louis XIV chair and I sit on a plastic chair and we drink vanilla tea. I wish I had beer. He is fascinated by how I came to have a residency here and I tell him about the mysterious scholarship and the single email to the embassy and about the mothership near the Place du Colonel-Fabien, where every month they give me a pile of cash to cover living expenses. I still go along expecting the bubble to burst and for them to arrest me and send me home. He tells me I must have sent the email at just the right time.

  We lean out the window and smoke, though it’s fine to smoke inside. The limbs of the chestnut tree are completely bare now and I point to where we can just see the water of the canal through the park. As we shut the windows, something flies past my face, giving me a fright.

  ‘What was that?’ I ask.

  ‘A papillon de nuit,’ he says, going to look at a moth that has landed on the wall.

  ‘Is that the word for moth? Night butterfly?’

  I go and stand by him, looking closely at the moth. It has silvery patt
erns on its wings. I reach out to touch it and it flies off towards the ceiling.

  He turns to me. ‘Shall we part?’

  We walk side by side down the rue des Récollets towards the canal. As we approach a bar called L’Atmosphère on the banks of the canal he says, ‘You know why this bar it’s call itself L’Atmosphère?’

  ‘No,’ I say, looking up at him.

  ‘You see this bridge there?’ He points to the pretty wooden bridge stretched over the dark canal. It’s painted green and two men are kissing at the top of it, amidst the naked limbs of the gnarled winter trees. ‘You know the film Hôtel du Nord?’

  I don’t.

  ‘Well, inside this film, Arletty, she stand on this bridge and she is crying, “Atmosphère, Atmosphère, est-ce que je n’ai pas d’atmosphère?” Édith Piaf she sing in this film too.’

  I don’t understand why someone would ask, ‘Do I have no atmosphere?’ and it is one of those annoying moments when I’m not sure what I’ve understood. How can you trust your comprehension when there are so many senses to so many words, and so many expressions with all sorts of meanings? Adrien is painting pictures in my head. I’ll need better French if I’m going to go out with Frenchmen, I decide. But if I do make the jump to French, can I keep the image of Édith Piaf standing on the Bridge of Atmosphere singing out into the night, and some lady wanting atmosphere?

  Inside, L’Atmosphère is so smoky it stings my eyes and I smoke several cigarettes in a row because I might as well. It also gives me something to do with my hands. It’s dinnertime and the restaurant is full of people eating foie gras and steak tartare, clinking and murmuring and chewing. There are no seats left so Adrien grabs two from outside that are so cold they pinch my derrière as we sit at a wobbly table near the door. We drink two demis each and talk of politics and jobs and weather and traffic and the 10th arrondissement and food.