Paris or Die

by Jayne Tuttle

  Oh god, should I tell him about Mum too? Oh god. No no no.

  ‘So. When I came to Paris we decided to stop things and be free. Well, I decided. So. That, well. Anyway. I wanted to let you know about him, because a few of his friends are coming to my birthday dinner next week. I wanted to be honest with you because I like you. Like I said. Did I say that? Sorry. It really doesn’t make any difference to us, it’s nothing.’

  He smiles and the awkwardness lifts completely away. It feels like we know each other a bit better too. His eyes are still and calm.

  ‘Well, it clearly makes a difference to you. Do you still want me to come to the dinner? It’s okay if I don’t come.’

  ‘No, no, of course I want you to come, I just wanted you to be aware who they are.’

  He tells me he appreciates my honesty, and that he’s glad I got it off my chest. I tell him I feel much better and he takes my hand and gives me a stabbing look. Then he orders the tiramisu.

  We kiss in an alcove outside the restaurant, long and steamy. The thick layers of clothes add a bodice-era erotic charge to it all. I understand the game now, and this time it’s me who pulls back and says goodbye. He walks away with a lingering look and I walk in the other direction, towards Kiki’s, to tell her everything.

  The rue de Pont Louis-Phillippe, between Kiki’s and the rue de Rivoli, has become my favourite street, with shops selling old quills and ink and handmade paper and musical instruments. There is a church on the street and there must be a convent, because I often see nuns out walking in their demure blue and white. I nod to them, as though living in the Récollets I have something in common with them. When I relay this feeling to Kiki she smiles sweetly, eyes filling with water as she tries not to laugh. Then I tell her about the head job, to which she replies, ‘Jesus. Glad it wasn’t my artwork on the wall.’ She thinks it’s cute that I told Adrien about Jack’s friends, but that I didn’t need to. Then she goes back to the documentary she’s been watching about Simone de Beauvoir, as I make us cups of tea.

  The show is on French TV, so she can’t rewind, but we keep watching the rest of it together. When it’s over she gets out some red nail polish to paint her nails in short red squares, like the hands of the actress who portrayed Simone.

  ‘“One is not born a woman,”’ I say to her, translating one of de Beauvoir’s major lines in the documentary. ‘“One becomes a woman.” What a load of shit.’

  ‘You don’t think that’s true?’ says Kiki.

  ‘I don’t know. What if you don’t want to become one?’

  ‘I do,’ says Kiki.

  ‘I want to become a man.’

  ‘No you don’t,’ says Kiki. ‘You want little red Simone de Beauvoir nails.’

  I do want little red Simone de Beauvoir nails. I take off my socks and start painting my toenails. Mum used to do hers in red like this. When she was little she wasn’t allowed to, so she painted her doll Sally’s red. Mum had so much weight on her shoulders, though she never showed it. I don’t think I could do what she did, and smile, as she did, raise four kids, keep a clean house, be pleasant and graceful and beautiful and giving, all the time, to everyone else.

  ‘Why toes?’ asks Kiki.

  ‘I can’t do fingers – school.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  Having the red toes under my shoes feels good. A secret piece of woman hidden down beneath the fluff.

  On the way home from the bank on Wednesday afternoon the train stops short between Châtelet and Les Halles because of a suspicious package. It’s already past six and people are coming to my place at seven for apéro before the dinner. The train is crowded and a Latino musician blows an out-of-key trumpet in my face. There is no escape: the doors are jammed shut between the stations. I try not to huff and shift from foot to foot, there’s no point.

  An actor should be able to see the sea in the métro, says Angela in my head. Not just act that he sees the sea, she explained, but truly see the sea. I try to do this, but all I can see is a tide of bodies rammed up against each other, tired, blank, angry; a drunk woman passed out on two fold-down seats. The smell of fresh urine hits my nostrils and I ignore it as I reach for a space on the sweaty pole; there’s nothing to be gained in registering smells. If you do you’ll die at the first encounter of the Les Halles métro warren: the never-changing air of fresh human shit. When I was here as an au pair, I would look around, shocked, to see who else had noticed. Nobody. Now I’m as deadpan as the others. I am becoming Parisian. Here I am, an apprentice Parisian standing in this carriage in which somebody just pissed themselves, and sea water is flooding in, frothing and swirling around our ankles, rising, and we are going under, down and down to the coral and sea creatures, through the clear salty water. I am seeing it, the pissy sea in the métro. A whale swims past. Jacques Lecoq laughs and swims with us all. We arrive at the sandy sea floor with a squeak.

  The carriage doors open at the Gare de l’Est.

  My studio is a mess, and who knows where everyone will fit. And what on earth should I wear? I decide on the denim skirt and the brown dotty top, which is boring but also just right, and then there’s a knock at the door. Thank god it’s Kiki, holding a basket of food and one of Norbert’s magnums.

  ‘You look amazing!’ she says hugging me.

  ‘Still mademoiselle?’ I ask, tugging at my top.

  ‘Like a beautiful 29-year-old mademoiselle.’

  ‘I got madame’d yesterday.’

  ‘Hair up or down?’

  ‘Down!’

  ‘That’s fucked,’ she says. ‘You must be right on the cusp.’

  In her basket is everything you use to cook a basic dhal. She says she’ll teach me. It’s one of the most considerate gifts I’ve ever received – an education in a basket. Possibly inspired by my call to her last week asking how to boil an egg.

  She pours vodka into two coffee cups and hands me one. ‘Get that in ya.’

  I down it and say, ‘I want Adrien’s arrival to be well timed.’

  ‘I’ll talk to him, don’t worry.’

  Another knock at the door: James, Patrick and Wil, each in a scruffy variation of hipster Melburnian. Faye Ohio is next, followed by Ravi Canada.

  Kiki puts nuts and olives in a bowl and some chips on a platter and I put thinly sliced meats and cheeses on a board and we all talk and mingle, holding our cups and food up close to our chests. Adrien is last to arrive. He has carefully trimmed stubble and is wearing an embroidered black shirt under his jacket. We kiss in the hallway and he hands me a box of chocolates, an enormous bunch of red roses and a bottle of Roederer champagne. I am embarrassed to be doing the birthday thing when we hardly know each other, and blush at the unfettered romance of the gifts. I hide the roses in the shower, making an excuse about not having a big enough vase, before introducing him around the room.

  ‘Here you go!’ shouts Kiki to me, holding the roses in a toilet roll container above her head. ‘This will work!’ She plonks them right in the middle of the desk where the food is. It might as well be Adrien’s and my naked bodies there amongst the hors d’œuvres, but nobody seems to notice. Kiki talks to him for a while in French, then gets shy and moves on to Wil, leaving Adrien alone with the cheese in a sea of Anglophones. Ravi Canada rescues him, then we all walk down the canal to La Marine, the magical restaurant with the fairy-lit windows and mosaic floors and shining brass bar. I can’t afford it, but I’ll eat dhal for a month.

  Meg London and Marc Finland join us there and we eat and drink and I smoke nonstop as my worlds smash together around me. Adrien sits by my side and helps me blow out the candles and lights my cigarettes, one after the other. After dinner he says he has to catch the last train home, kisses me and all the others goodbye, and leaves. I am sad he’s gone, but it’s easier. There is an interested silence around the table before someone orders a round of cocktails and before I know it I am wildly drunk, and we keep drinking until La Marine closes.

  It’s icy outside by the canal a
nd some people go home, but Laurent, Faye, Wil, Kiki and I go back to my place and drink Kiki’s vodka pommes, though I’m so drunk I can’t even taste them, and then she rolls a big strong joint and we laugh and laugh at my ridiculous chair and I eventually pass out cold on a jacket on the floor.

  The sound of water boiling in the saucepan wakes me the next morning. Kiki and Wil’s feet are beside my head. Kiki is jiggling a teabag.

  ‘Where did you sleep?’ I murmur, sitting up.

  ‘Up there,’ she says, and Wil looks up at the same time. He smiles. Kiki’s a dirty dog.

  ‘Stubble boy is nice,’ he says, leaning against the wall with pastry crumbs all over his chin.

  I see the time on his watch. ‘Fuck!’ I yell, pulling on my blacks and running out the door.

  Red

  MY TOENAILS ARE red and I am dead. Of all the days to forget my ballet shoes I had to choose today, with a pounding hangover. I will be seen as jolie. Being pretty at Lecoq is a fate worse than death.

  I consider leaving my socks on in the Grand Salle, to keep the toenails well hid, but I’ve seen what happened to Amy Beijing’s right hip on these hardwood floors. I can’t risk it. So when warm-up begins I take off my socks and pray hard. Oh god, let them not see, and please god, let it not be true that the teachers sit up in their hidden staffroom, high in the rafters, watching us all. If they see my jolie nails, I’m sure not to make it through to second year. And I will die if I don’t make it through to second year.

  Ju-Yong puts us in pairs. We learn to mime paddling a boat, plunging an imaginary oar deep into the water to push us across the pond. Étienne is next to me and points at my toes. Shut the fuck up, I say to him with my eyes.

  Ju-Yong claps his hands and we start running around the space. He claps and we stop and mime throwing an imaginary net out as far as we can. I’m right at the back of the room, thank goodness. Marie-France has seen my toes and moves in front of me, trying to cover for me. I smile at her and she gives me a serious nod. He claps and we’re off again. I avoid the front of the room. Clap. Damn, I am dead centre. Ju-Yong points straight at my toes.

  ‘Ah, Jayne. Very beautiful.’

  Everyone looks. He lets the silence sit. Bright red nails detract from the idea. It’s not about us. It’s about what we’re creating. Painted nails draw attention. They are womanly. And dressed in our blacks, we have no gender, no detail to differentiate us except our drawn, pale faces and varied body shapes.

  Once Ju-Yong is satisfied that my face has turned as red as my nails, he claps his hands and the lesson continues.

  Later, in neutral mask class, I’m up the back watching, pants pulled down over my feet, when a dumpy Brit called Peter lets out a high squeaky fart in a silent, serious part of the mask journey. The mood is so serious it makes me want to burst with laughter, but I hold it in and run out of school straight afterwards and call Kiki, knowing she’ll see the humour in it. She almost does, any fart story is funny to her, but she can’t quite picture the solemnity of the deadpan leather mask, the almost meditative silence of the classroom as we watched each actor make their journey over the plain and across the river and up the hill. With our faces covered and only eyeholes to look out of and a small slit to breathe through, our bodies are our only means of expression and each gesture is magnified. It’s a weird sensation, both to watch and to wear the mask. The teachers say the mask has a powerful effect on the psyche and can provoke strange dreams.

  Kiki tells me the sex with Wil was tops – a straight-up drunk fuck, which she needed because Zahir’s meticulous sensitivity has started to become annoying – and asks me to come and see Zahir’s play with her tonight, to which I say no because I’m too hungover, but she says I owe her for the happy future with Adrien and also the Barrio Latino, to which I say but you get a happy future with Wil out of that, and she says no, that was just a drunk fuck, to which I say touché. I go home and throw on an outfit with way too many colours in it and run back out to the métro.

  The play is extremely good, and very boring. A woman twirls for twenty minutes in a circle of white eggs without getting dizzy while a guy does some jerky dancing next to her, like he’s having a fit, and Zahir moves around randomly, speaking Arabic with a grandiose air. Then he takes off his shirt, which makes it all truly wonderful. Zahir is a sort of bald god.

  Afterwards the three of us go to a bar shaped like a horseshoe in the Marais. Kiki and I drink beer. Zahir drinks tea and shows me a photo from back in Palestine when he had wild, fuzzy black hair.

  ‘You look so different,’ I say.

  ‘As an actor in Palestine I get typecast. So I grow my hair. It help.’

  ‘Really? How?’

  ‘To take focus from my beautiful face,’ he says with the utmost solemnity. I see his point.

  Kiki asks me to come back to her studio, as she doesn’t want to spend the night with Zahir. We lie on the fold-out bed and smoke a joint, watching Rain Man dubbed in French. Then we eat miso soup that she’s made with vegetables and noodles in it and afterwards she makes hot chocolate with real chocolate and we suck on sweet, juicy clementines.

  ‘Pull my finger,’ says Kiki, and her fart is joyful with a little question mark at the end. I cry with laughter into the pillow.

  ‘Farts are very funny,’ she says, and lights another joint.

  ‘Why do they so often go unacknowledged?’

  ‘If someone had laughed, then everyone would have.’

  ‘I should have laughed.’

  ‘But then if nobody else laughed it would have been embarrassing.’

  ‘Which I guess is why nobody laughed.’

  I get up and go to the window and look out. There has been no snow since Narnia and I’ve been praying for it to return. It’s a clear night and I can see all the way down the river to the top of Notre-Dame.

  ‘I could live here forever and become a Frenchy and have little baby croissants,’ I say.

  ‘Not moi. I like it here but I would never stay.’

  ‘Everyone at school says the same thing. They can’t wait to get back to their own countries.’

  ‘I like Manu, my yoga teacher,’ says Kiki. ‘He’s a Frenchy.’

  ‘There you go – marry him and stay here with me forever and ever.’

  ‘He says shanti shanti om at the end of phone calls.’

  ‘You’re talking to him on the phone?’

  ‘And in the classes he feels me up.’

  ‘Isn’t that illegal? In the yoga law?’

  ‘Nothing is illegal in the yoga law.’

  ‘What about Zahir?’

  ‘I’m bored of Zahir. Can’t get it up anymore.’

  ‘He seems pretty turned on by you.’

  ‘I mean me.’

  ‘Oh. With that beautiful dick and all?’

  ‘Yeah. But you know – the pussy knows.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘The pussy knows. I read it somewhere.’

  She yawns and kisses me, going into her little bedroom.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I call out, getting under the covers.

  ‘Nothing else matters,’ she yells. ‘Your pussy knows when it’s over.’

  ‘You’re completely guided by your pussy? What does she say?’

  But Kiki is already doing her lady-snore. I lie awake wondering if my pussy is trustworthy, before falling into a deep sleep.

  Kiki is opening the curtains naked when I wake. She has amazing round breasts and a clipped little bushy triangle. Her nipples are pale pink, which is surprising considering her olive complexion and raven hair. Girls’ parts, evidently, don’t always match their bodies.

  Outside it’s sunny; November is a constant surprise. She stands amongst the curtains looking out at the sky, the river, the trees, closing her eyes and swaying gently, curves bathed in the cool light. When she opens her eyes and turns she looks almost sad. Then she walks towards the kitchen, picking her nose.

  She comes back with coffee and I get up and hug her,
looking out at the windows twinkling over on the Île Saint-Louis, excited by the unexpected sun. She serves a comprehensive breakfast involving yesterday’s baguette toasted and little jars of yoghurt. As always, her coffee, made in a silver contraption, is delicious. It must be nice to be you, I think, looking after yourself so nicely. When I’m on my own I never bother to do things like make a good coffee. I eat the little toasts from a packet and drink teabag tea. I make a pact to make my life nicer for myself, even when nobody’s there.

  ‘Did you sleep well?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah, except for Zahir banging at the door.’

  ‘Wow. I never sleep through anything.’

  ‘His play has been extended! How am I supposed to live my life with all these men wanting to extend their stay?’

  ‘What did you say to him?’

  ‘Fuck off back to Palestine.’

  ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘No. He was drunk and ranting – I can’t believe you didn’t hear.’

  ‘How did you make him go away?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  I poke my head around the corner and, sure enough, there is Zahir’s beautiful face asleep on her pillow.

  Kiki nods. ‘Crazy man.’

  I somehow make it to school on time and get up to do my impression of a plastic cup toppling off a table. I spent an entire afternoon perfecting this movement, watching a cup fall over and over again. But plastic requires a certain tonicity that I don’t have, and mine is floppy and inarticulate.

  ‘Can anybody tell what she is?’ asks Angela.

  ‘Dirt?’

  ‘Water?’

  ‘Wood?’

  ‘What are you?’ Angela asks at last.

  ‘A plastic cup,’ I squeak.

  ‘For me, it is caoutchouc,’ Angela says. ‘Sit down.’

  My plastic looks like rubber. How embarrassing. Angela gives us an exercise in which we wash a T-shirt, then become the T-shirt, then hang ourselves out on the line to dry. After that we practise being paper – small pieces, thick pieces, tissue paper, toilet paper; being scrunched up, torn, thrown. My piece of paper is a letter someone didn’t want to read and is thus savagely murdered. Murdering myself feels great. I tear myself to shreds and lie bleeding in strips of my former self. Angela says it was a bel engagement but didn’t really look like paper. I wonder what it did look like but am too scared to ask. How to find the delicate yet sharp texture of paper? Its flatness and pliability, lightness, fragility, strength. Paper is hard, and I decide that I will practise until I master it.