Paris or Die

by Jayne Tuttle

  ‘Why you no eating meat before?’ he asks.

  ‘Oh, many reasons. The taste. Also, I figured if I can’t bring myself to kill an animal myself, then I shouldn’t eat one. And it’s bad for the planet.’

  ‘But good for the taste,’ he says. ‘You like it now?’

  ‘I have a taste for it now. I’ve changed. I could kill a cow. Have you ever killed a cow?’

  ‘I have kill a chicken. And goat. Oh – lots of things. You change?’

  ‘I feel different recently. Rawer.’

  ‘Roar?’

  ‘Raw,’ I say. ‘Umm … bloody.’

  ‘Bloody! Bloody ’ell, mate!’ Adrien says, in a Crocodile Dundee way.

  ‘Zut!’ I say.

  He takes a swig of his beer. ‘Do you ’aving the sister and brother? What is your family?’

  ‘I have two brothers and a sister. What about you?’

  ‘Just a mother. I am boy unique.’

  ‘You certainly are!’ I joke and he smiles, though I know he doesn’t get it. He stubs out his cigarette.

  ‘So, your parents split up?’

  ‘I never know him. I know he is half Egyptian. He pay for me to go to a – how do you say – boy school that cost lot of moneys, but that is all. He call me one time, on my eight birthday. Very strange. He and my mother they were very young – he just my father because he make me, nothing else. I am have a lot of fathers.’ He laughs. ‘And you?’ he asks. ‘Your parents are together?’

  I find myself nodding. I suppose in a way they are. It feels too heavy to tell him anything more right now.

  ‘Are you angry?’ he smiles.

  Yes. I am so angry I don’t know how to begin. But he means hungry, and I say, ‘Oui. Starving.’

  We walk out into the freezing night and wander tipsy up the cobblestoned laneways of the canal to the Cambodian restaurant on the avenue Richerand. It’s nine o’clock and the restaurant is complet, ending our idea of a cosy meal. The little Cambodian lady suggests takeaway, so we order bobuns and wait in the cold by an outdoor table with a vase of frozen flowers on it. An old man wearing an outfit covered in navy glitter tips his hat as he walks past us. He has a silvery moon painted on his forehead and long painted silver shoes that curl up at the ends like moons too. He enters the restaurant and begins performing magic tricks for the clientele.

  ‘When I see magic tricks,’ I tell Adrien, ‘I believe them.’

  ‘Why not?’ he says.

  ‘Tell me what you think of this,’ I say. ‘I had a penny once. When I came here as an au pair. It was on a string – my sister had put a hole in it. And then one day the penny was gone but the string wasn’t broken. What do you think happened to the penny?’

  He asks, in French, ‘What happened to you before the penny disappeared?’

  ‘I’d just found a job and a place to live, a chambre de bonne.’

  ‘So it’s clear. The penny wasn’t needed anymore.’

  I like Adrien’s theory. I’m sure drunk Kevin who gave it to me would agree.

  ‘If,’ Adrien adds, ‘it was there to begin with.’

  ‘Good point.’

  The magician performs something low over a table and people clap and cheer. The scene inside the restaurant is warm and inviting, intensifying the cold outside. But I’m fine being out here. Adrien warms me from behind with his coat. His breath on my neck makes me tingle.

  ‘Why don’t you stay at my place tonight?’ I mumble. ‘I don’t mean … In fact I’m indisposed, I just … thought we could spend the night together.’

  ‘It is possible,’ he says.

  My studio room is warm and the dinner tasty and the Chinese beer relaxing, and when we’re full we lie on our backs on the floor watching clouds puff past the window.

  ‘Try to imagine it’s us moving and not the clouds,’ he says in French.

  The idea is great but makes me dizzy and I have to sit up. He sits up too and laughs. The kissing begins, restrained and gentle at first, then more urgent. He pulls me closer to him. I curse with all my might the monthly curse.

  ‘Want to see E.T.?’ I ask, as things heat up. ‘He lives in my room.’ I lead him upstairs to the mezzanine and lie on the bed, pointing at the old beam running across the ceiling.

  ‘Can you find him?’ I ask.

  ‘Where eez ’e?’ He looks around the room and gives up, flopping beside me on the bed. He’s looking straight at E.T. but doesn’t realise it. I stand on the bed and point out the curls in the wood for eyes, the indent for a nose, the lines of his alien forehead.

  Adrien cocks his head. ‘Mmm,’ he says. He can’t see him yet.

  We kiss again for a long while.

  ‘We should sleep,’ I say.

  ‘I’ll put myself en caleçon,’ he says, beginning to undress. His body, until now obscured under so much wool and denim, is revealed to me part by part. His frame is smaller than I imagined, more athletic, and he has very long arms with thick, ropey veins protruding all the way from the tops of his shoulders to the tips of his big butcher fingers on his big butcher hands. His skin has tiny white hairs all over it and he has little freckles on his back and shoulders. A welcome-mat of dark hair trails down to his stomach, disappearing at his bellybutton to reappear and lead down behind his caleçon, which I now know means underpants. There is a gruesome scar on his right inner thigh, which he tries to cover with his hand.

  I touch his hand and move it away.

  ‘It so ugly,’ he says.

  It really is ugly, and so beautiful, like strawberry and vanilla ice-cream frozen mid-churn.

  ‘I fall from my moto.’

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘Non, it’s just feel strange.’

  I touch it lightly.

  ‘It’s feel nice when you touch the borders.’ He lies back on the bed. I strip down to my knickers, mortified that we are doing this tonight, even more so because I have the terrible undies on that I reserve for this time of the month. I angle myself so he won’t notice.

  ‘Oh! I see him!’ Adrien exclaims, pointing at E.T. And I am on him.

  He kisses me hard and I nibble my way down his chest and stomach. I don’t want to go down on him but I feel like I should – I have to do something. Should I ask him? Or just do it? The lights are on. I don’t want to make him uncomfortable. Is it too soon? I touch his caleçon; a thousand thoughts collide in my mouth and I say, ‘Is there something …? Could I …? There is something I could … do.’

  But he doesn’t understand me. I decide to just go for it. He seems nervous but also to be enjoying it. Then he grabs my head.

  ‘Arrête, stop, non, non Jayne.’

  I look up, confused.

  ‘I am too … excité.’

  ‘Good!’ I resume, but his hand comes back, stronger this time.

  ‘Non, non, arrête!’

  I smile and continue – I’m going for gold when he wrenches my head away and roars, ‘Pleeease!’

  But it’s too late. He has spurted across the room, slashing the painting Miru did of me as the serpent girl, sticky-taped to the wall.

  ‘Pourquoi?’ he whimpers from under his hands, which are firmly clamped across his face. ‘What were you doing? Ça me gênait … ça me gênait …’

  Now I’m worried, as I think gêner means to be annoyed, and also shocked: doesn’t every man like that?

  ‘It was too good, I couldn’t hold on!’ he moans, peeling his hands away from his blushed, glistening face.

  ‘I didn’t want you to hold on!’

  ‘Oh mon dieu.’ He rolls over onto his side.

  I put my face in the top of his back and slide my hand onto the centre of his chest. ‘I’m sorry, I really wanted you. I couldn’t have sex so … I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  ‘You did not have to do that.’

  ‘But I wanted to! You didn’t like it?’

  ‘Yes I liked it,’ he says.

  ‘What then? You were worried about me?’

  I suppos
e I wouldn’t have wanted to be gone down upon on our first go. But that’s me. I thought all men loved it, any time, in any circumstance.

  ‘I’m sorry I made you feel weird,’ I say.

  ‘It’s okay.’ He rolls back towards me with soft eyes, then covers his face with his hands again and makes a moaning sound. When he takes his hands away he’s smiling. We laugh.

  ‘You’re sensitive, aren’t you?’ I say, tracing his face with my finger.

  ‘Tu me perces à jour,’ he says.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Nothing, it does not matter.’

  I threaten to go down and look it up on the internet, so he explains that it’s like someone putting a hole in you so the daylight can be seen shining through from behind. I don’t know if this means I’ve hurt him, or exposed him, or drilled through him, or if it’s something positive. From his soft face I assume it’s nothing terrible. He moves me onto my back and explores all the available parts of my body, complimenting each as he goes, in his language. When he arrives at my centre, he places his warm hand right on the most tender part of my lower belly and holds it there until the pain subsides. A glimmer of moonlight catches his forehead, the ends of his eyelashes. Eventually he rolls over and falls asleep.

  The morning birds start to chirp in the park. I look at E.T. The moth, perhaps the one from before, rotates on the ceiling above him, flicking its wings and circling before returning to stillness. I change places with the moth and look back at us on the bed, me starfished in underpants, earthy, hair wild over the sheets. Adrien, naked, dark hair on the white pillow. The image is so sexy I want to fly down and fuck us both.

  I swap back. Now I’m me again, looking up at the moth. In English, so banal. A plain old moth. In French, a night butterfly. An exotic nocturnal explorer.

  Old You

  THE BARRIO LATINO is smoky, loud, and packed with glitzy women and arse-grabbing men in business suits. Kiki squeezes my wrist hard as we move past the bouncers. But she owes me one after Martine’s party, even if it was a success.

  ‘One hour, promise,’ I shout in her ear. I don’t want to be here either. I want to be in Adrien’s bed with my good undies on. Off. But he is away on the shoot for two days. A fortunate thing because I’m not sure how I would explain that I am meeting up with Jack’s friends.

  James, Wil and Patrick are seated at a private table up the back, drunk amongst the remnants of dessert. My heart leaps at the sight of their familiar faces. It wasn’t long ago we were drinking beers together at my farewell, recovering the next day in Jack’s backyard. That day I had felt for the first time a desire not to leave, to stay in that familiar place, marry Jack, find a way to make it all okay.

  You’re just going to run off with some Frenchman.

  The three men look out of place in their grungy shirts and jeans, beards, and hair reminiscent of 1970s pop-rock bands. James actually is a musician and has been shooting a film clip in Paris with his band. Wil and Pat have been in London on tour, acting in a play. They stand and cheer as we arrive and ply us immediately with champagne, cake and a cannon of questions: ‘Do you like it here?’ ‘How’s your French?’ ‘Do you like the French?’ ‘Are you coming home for Christmas?’ ‘Are you ever coming home?’

  I down two glasses of champagne to make the questions easier, and fire a whole heap back to divert their attention from me. They’re happy to be in Paris, in a nonchalant kind of way. I can’t imagine feeling a breath of nonchalance at any single moment spent in Paris, and wonder what it would be like to not feel so excited all the time. Are they feeling it but can hide it better? I feel a warmth rise in me, both from the champagne and the familiarity of these boys I know well, but not too well.

  After more champagne and some shots of something indecipherable we go to the dance floor to throw our bodies around to the Latino-techno fusion. James does a strange, bendy, rubber-man dance and Wil does a four-step on repeat. Their dancing is ironic, like their outfits. They could not look less Parisian. Ironic fashion and behaviour is not something I have seen here at all.

  A wiggly worm of a man in tight leather pants with a visible boner works his way into my rear and starts gyrating, putting his hands on my hips, which makes me gasp and jump and fall on Kiki in fits of hysterical repulsion. This only entices him more and he comes back for seconds before James gives him a look that sends him dancing madly away.

  Hours later we stumble to a darkened bar on the corner of the rue de Lappe, full of velvet furniture and old lamps. The boys keep ordering drinks until the dusty night sky starts turning blue. Wil and James needle me with drunken questions about men in Paris, on a clear mission to get information for Jack. My wingman is long gone, the Cité walking distance away, but it’s still only five am and I have at least half an hour until the first métro. I do my best to dodge the questions.

  ‘How long are you here again?’ I ask Wil, propping my head up with my hand. Patrick has fallen asleep on a chaise longue.

  ‘Another week,’ says Wil.

  ‘It’s my birthday on Wednesday. I’m having a dinner. You’ll all have to come.’

  ‘Long as you don’t make us eat frogs’ legs,’ says James, swirling his ice cubes.

  A large group of women roll in from what looks like a hen’s night and the boys fire up. I kiss them goodbye and snake my way through the calm, early-morning streets to the métro, drunken me managing to beat down the speck of sober me who is saying, Jesus, you idiot, you invited the Frenchman to your birthday dinner, how is that going to work? Ah, peaceful drunk me, with lovely soft brain, riding the warm carriage home with all the grey morning faces, to pass out on my floor like someone who’s just spent a month in the desert.

  Adrien is back for an evening but has to leave at five the next morning for his last day of shooting, so we arrange to see each other for dinner. We meet at the place we first kissed, and, though it’s freezing outside again, I begin to sweat as I run from rehearsal at Marie-France’s near Bastille. I’m running late but slow down to breathe and collect myself as I approach Châtelet.

  As I cross into the square, dark amongst the golden lights and bustle of the theatres, I see him. He sees me, and I see him seeing me but he pretends he hasn’t seen me. I pretend not to have seen that he saw me. I walk up and tap on his shoulder and he acts surprised and we kiss awkwardly, he going central, me towards his cheek. Then we kiss again, longer, and my shoulders relax. Now I know what’s under all those layers I want to wriggle my hands up there and touch his warm skin, but I don’t. I need to keep my head on.

  We hold hands as we walk, but it doesn’t feel right so we let go. The Hôtel de Ville looks hauntingly beautiful against the almost black sky, and it thrills me how such an imposing and vast building can also seem so warm and welcoming. But anywhere is calmer right now than my own insides. I chew frantically at the inside of my mouth, though I keep telling myself to stop. We make small talk about snow and I use some of the vocab I’ve learnt from school and local discussions. Things are more comfortable when we speak in French, so I keep speaking it, flipping back to English when I don’t have the words for something.

  Kiki suggested we try Le Bûcheron on the rue de Rivoli, as it’s warm, cheap and delicious. As we approach, the restaurant looks so dim inside we think it’s closed, but a door opens and a man ushers us to a table down the back. Adrien gestures for me to take the cushioned banquette.

  He orders wine and my stomach tightens further at the thought of bringing up Jack or anything from home at this early stage. Ah, why had I let Kiki convince me to have a birthday dinner in the first place?

  I try to order the most elegant thing on the menu, but it’s a pasta restaurant and my tagliatelle is impossible to eat without slurping it all over my face. I can’t digest anything anyway, so I pick around my plate as we discuss theatre, work, n’importe quoi. This is my favourite new expression – ‘nothing of import’. I also suddenly know how to use il faut in a sentence, and it makes sense to me in
a peculiar, physical way – I can’t translate it into English words, but I know it. This is a strange phenomenon and tells me that a French part of me is opening up that I didn’t know was there. It makes me wonder if all languages live inside of us and we just have to unlock them. How else is it possible to understand and express something without being able to translate it into your native tongue?

  The conversation keeps spurting like diarrhoea as I spout n’importe quoi and avoid bringing up what I know I should, blabbing all sorts of nonsense about knowing what kind of actor you want to be and never compromising, etc, etc. I don’t have to tell him anything – I could wing my birthday and let Adrien and Jack’s friends just meet. But it feels mean for Adrien not to know who they are. It’s okay if the boys go running back to Jack and tell him about Adrien – we agreed we would see other people – though it would be less cowardly if I told Jack first. But what’s the point in telling Jack before I’m sure it’s serious? It may not last. The boys are unpredictable, especially after a few drinks. Oh god. How did things get so complicated so quickly?

  Le Bûcheron is yet another restaurant with toilets à la turque, and though my aim is good I feel the warmth of my own piss hitting my stockinged ankle. Then I bump my head really hard on the low ceiling of the stairwell as I walk up, and conclude that this is not my night. Just tell him.

  I slide back into my seat. ‘I should tell you something.’

  He looks relieved, like he knew something was up. Or perhaps it’s my correct use of tenses.

  ‘Oui?’

  I scramble for the words and he encourages me to just come out and say it, but trying to explain this sort of thing is hard enough in my own language.

  I manage something like: ‘It’s nothing really, it’s just that I had something before I came over here. A someone. An Australian. It was. He was. We were … It was complicated.’