by Jayne Tuttle
A black rat runs across the tracks. I wonder if it was black to begin with or is white beneath the soot. A man in a dark trench coat comes to stand next to the snack machine, putting his briefcase down with a sigh. Corporate Prince. He sees me looking and moves away down the platform. I wonder whether the Prince ever saw me looking at him those years ago. Perhaps he had all kinds of fantasies about me too. Perhaps he still does. Come on, train.
It crawls to the platform at last and reluctantly opens its doors. I sit facing a beautiful elderly lady in a brown fur jacket, violet stockings, and just enough makeup to accentuate eyes overflowing with the excitement of life. She looks at me like she has a secret to tell. I receive the secret and put it inside myself. We hold eye contact way longer than is customary, then she gets off at Pigalle. The stations rattle by, Montmartre tourists get on and off, a Middle Eastern busker sings ‘Isn’t She Lovely’ to a backing track playing from a little amp on wheels.
At Asnières station I walk up the stairs and out to a large concrete wasteland. Buses pull in and out of a huge bay in front of a smoggy highway with trucks roaring past. It’s the most remote space I’ve seen in Paris. I can’t see any of the landmarks Adrien mentioned – the supermarket or the cinema or the café. A lady is pacing back and forth screaming blue murder at a man on a bench. But there is no man on the bench.
Adrien sounds slightly annoyed when I call, though he laughs. ‘I said train, not métro, from Saint-Lazare! About ten times!’
‘Oh no, I’m so sorry. I thought it would be quicker from the Place de Clichy.’
Ten minutes later a small blue car comes flying into the bus terminal and pulls up beside me. Adrien looks flustered in a racing driver sort of way. I apologise again and give him a kiss on the cheek and he smiles a little tightly and pulls out. I try not to bounce up and down on the seat. Here I am inside his life, inside his car, inside his normal him. His thick, veiny hand shifts the gearstick in concentrated fury – he’s a wild driver but I feel safe. He screeches to a holt at a set of lights and puts his hand on my leg, turning to smile at me. He leans across and kisses me. Then the lights change and he screams off, negotiating intersections and bends around the village, tailgating and honking.
‘Sorry,’ he says in English, before breaking back into French as fast as his driving. ‘It’s just my mother breaks my balls when I borrow the car. That’s why I said to take the train, it arrives right near my house.’
‘I’m really sorry,’ I say again. So it’s not his car. He tells me he lives just down the road from his mother: a coincidence, he assures me.
I look out the window to see where I am. The streets are wider here, the buildings lower and cleaner. The apartment blocks are bigger and there are even stone houses and walls with trees peering over them, and creepers and flower gardens. Lots of flowerboxes in windows, more than in Paris itself. It’s so different and yet just over the périphérique.
We come to a lovely street with an old château on it and turn down a stone driveway. He hits the brake, propelling me forward, and says, ‘You can get out here.’ Then he whips the car into a tiny carport, squeezing himself out to meet me in the driveway.
‘This is where my mother lives,’ he says, running a hand through his hair. ‘Want to meet her?’ There is apprehension in his voice.
‘I’d love to,’ I say, shifting in my shoes.
Séverine lives on the first floor of a quaint old apartment building with white wooden shutters and a flower garden. It feels more like a country manor than a surburban block. The elderly gardienne swings open the downstairs door and pinches Adrien’s cheeks, saying lots of cute words like titi and mimi. She bows at me and says, ‘Bienvenue mademoiselle.’
‘Madame Debreuil has known me since I was a baby,’ Adrien explains as we climb up to the first floor. ‘My grandmother lived here before my mother.’
The door to his mother’s apartment is half open. We creak through the hallway towards the back of a black bobbed head. The head turns to reveal a striking face with a cigarette dangling from the mouth. She looks like a character from the jazz era. Her face is angular, almost masculine, with no trace of makeup, her expression dry but not humourless. Her teeth have the same brilliant gap as Adrien’s.
‘Bonjour,’ she says, stubbing out her cigarette as she stands up. ‘Séverine.’ We kiss on both cheeks.
‘Jayne,’ I say. My introduction feels abrupt for the circumstances but I’m not sure what other words to say.
‘Hello toi,’ she says to Adrien, giving him a loaded look.
‘Thanks for the car,’ he says abruptly, dropping the keys on the table.
‘Oui, merci Séverine,’ I say, apologising clunkily for taking the métro instead of the train. ‘I didn’t realise there were two stations.’
Séverine waves my apology away, smiling. ‘Sit down,’ she says, gesturing to a sofa, and these are the last two words I understand as the conversation takes off at the speed of light. She and Adrien occasionally glance towards me and I squawk a oui or shrug or smile stupidly, but I’m way out of my depth. I sip the delicious white wine she pours and smoke so hard I get a headspin.
‘I do not speeking Inglish,’ she says at one point, with an exaggerated frown.
‘Ça va,’ says Adrien, ‘Jayne parle français.’
Perhaps, but not this fast. All I know is they’re having an argument. Feigning understanding, I use my peripheral vision to take in the tasteful apartment, with its rustic floorboards and high old windows. We are sitting in the salon, which adjoins a dining room full of plastic mannequins and torsos and heads on poles, with tape measures and exotic fabrics in all sorts of colours and textures draped over them. A modern sewing machine sits on an old sewing table on a white lace doily. Film posters and etchings and beautiful paintings adorn all the walls. Fairy lights are draped over the windowsills, and even though it’s early afternoon and not quite dark yet they are lit. A slender grey cat leaps up and nestles into my lap, then leaps off.
‘Shall we go?’ asks Adrien suddenly.
Séverine and I kiss on the cheeks and Adrien whisks me out of there.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says as we walk down the street. ‘My mother is driving me crazy at the moment – she’s annoyed at me for a stupid reason.’ He stops and turns me to him. ‘I’m happy you’re here.’
‘Me too! I’m impatient to see your place.’
‘It’s very small and merdique,’ he says and I guess that means shitty.
We walk down through the village with its larger footpaths and cleaner cars, passing a huge white cinema called the Alcazar. We stop in at a butcher’s, where an energetic old man hands Adrien a cooked chicken, calling him by his name and raising his eyebrows towards me. The fruit shops are wider and the boulangerie more nondescript and there are big supermarkets and restaurants.
‘It’s nice here,’ I say, as we head off the main street.
‘It’s okay,’ says Adrien.
It’s an eight-minute train ride from Asnières to Saint-Lazare, right in the middle of Paris. I can see why people live here. It seems easier; fewer people, more space. But I find myself already missing the intensity of the 10th. Here the architecture, the elements, are all similar to dans Paris, but it feels a lot more sane.
His apartment is in a pleasant street just off the main thoroughfare. The buildings are more modern, and Adrien’s is a tall, flat building with balconies and automatic glass doors downstairs. The lift is clean but smells like cat food and has a big mirror in it. The picture we make is all contrasts. The near-black of his hair and eyes, the blond and blue of mine. His white shirt and black jeans, my red dress and brown boots.
His place is far from the boyish den I’d imagined: a small, neat studio with a tiny kitchen and a real-sized bathroom and balcony, all immaculate and smelling of lavender. Books are lined up alphabetically on shelves, he even has house plants and candles. There’s a black-and-white photo of him as a baby, asleep on his mother’s naked belly. I move aro
und, picking up objects and turning them over in my fingers, discovering his world. On the bookshelf is a beautiful box with gold embossing that I want to open, but it looks private. Further along the shelf I find a red stamp that reads Adrien and stamp it all the way up my arm.
‘It’s lovely here,’ I say, sitting down on his comfortable red sofa, which must double as his bed.
‘Thanks.’ He goes out onto the balcony and I follow him. The air smells sweet with the distant budding of spring. There’s a table with a big fold-out chair and lots of plants, and the balcony faces a beautiful old red-brick apartment building alongside an ugly modern grey one. A man in the ugly one is watching TV with a glass of wine.
‘Rub this in your fingers,’ Adrien says, passing me a leaf. ‘It’s verveine.’
‘What’s verveine?’
‘I’m not sure in English. It’s a herb.’
The lemony scent is familiar but I can’t place it. It takes me back to a corner of our garden at home, where Mum planted herbs and scented flowers. Adrien senses a shift in me and suggests we go back inside where it’s warm.
I sit on the sofa, hands between my knees. I want to make small talk but my French seems to have disappeared.
‘Shall I make you a tisane?’ he asks, putting water on to boil. When he hands me the tea, there’s that scent again – he has put the verveine in it, with honey. I sip, it’s delicious, but my heart feels weird. I suppress the feeling and say, ‘This is lovely tea.’
‘Tisane,’ he says kindly. ‘Not tea.’ He explains that tea has theine in it, tisane doesn’t.
For dinner he makes a simple pasta with fried zucchini and parmesan on top. We drink red wine as we eat and later we open out his red sofa into a yellow bed and take our clothes off. Adrien is right here with me, looking into my eyes, and I want to be inside my own body and with him, but I’m not. I try to focus on his smooth skin, the tiny freckles on his shoulders. His ceiling is white, his sheets are soft, he is trying to find me. But who is he? His eyes are dark like Mum’s – it’s strange, they look so familiar and yet so foreign. His face is soft, but still turns a powerful red as he dies his little death. I stay alive. He strokes my back as I fall asleep close to him.
In the morning he gets up in his underpants and puts birdseed in little dishes on the balcony, making kissing noises until tiny birds come. The curtains are open, it’s a cool, sunny morning with a new kind of light, a golden colour of early spring, and I watch from the bed as the birds hop and flit around. Coming back inside and seeing that I’m awake, he kisses me, then brings me a croissant and a bowl of coffee. My hair spills into it; Adrien pulls it back for me as I dunk, and kisses my forehead. I ask him about the gold box and he takes it down and opens it: inside is a pale white crystal. I put it against my cheek, then my forehead. It feels cool.
‘You talked in your sleep,’ he says.
‘Really? What did I say?’
‘You said – I wrote it down – “There is no ‘no’.” What does this mean?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Then you whispered, “Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone.”’
‘Did I have my eyes open?’
‘No.’
‘I sometimes sleep with my eyes open. It used to scare my parents.’
He kisses my face gently. ‘Do you want to go to Saint-Cloud?’
Yes, I say, without realising what he’s talking about. Sun Cloo? Séverine doesn’t mind us taking the car this time: it’s Sunday and she’s sewing.
Saint-Cloud is a posh suburb with a steep park with lush, manicured grass. Adrien holds my hand and we walk beneath tall trees to a hill that looks out over Paris, sit in the sunshine and talk about our friends. I tell him about Marie-France’s grace at school and how she cooked me dinner in her gorgeous little Bastille apartment, and showed me her favourite Marcel Marceau and Charlie Chaplin videos. Adrien has a group of friends he wants me to meet.
At lunchtime we drive back to Asnières and he takes me to where the train leaves, the proper train. We share a croque-monsieur at a little bistro below the station.
On the platform, he kisses me intensely as the train pulls in. I feel a mess of excitement and profound disorientation. The doors open and I step into the carriage, where a guy in torn jeans is shouting at a drawn-looking woman covered in piercings. I lean back out and kiss Adrien until the doors beep and the guy jumps off. The pierced woman scowls at me all the way back to Saint-Lazare.
Friday
THOUGH IT’S BEEN a tradition since the ’70s for Lecoq students and teachers to frequent Chez Jeannette, the Albanians from the Mauri7 bar across the road, with its Madonna posters, Mucha frescoes, and sticky tables with heavy-set men huddled over them, tempt us across the street with their cheap drinks and cool attitude about us eating our student lunches at their tables. Qui a bu, boira reads a plaque behind the bar – ‘Who has drunk, will drink’ – and we do, on Friday afternoons that spill into Saturday mornings, and on many other nights of the week. But on Friday nights the students from Gaulier, another physical acting school in the suburbs of Paris, come to party with the Lecoq students. Tim, the manager of Mauri7, lets us play our own music and generally own the place, to the bewilderment of the regulars.
I invite Kiki and Adrien to come one Friday night when the bar is particularly steamy and jam-packed with students from both schools. Meg introduces me to a friend of hers from Gaulier, a petite Australian with bright white teeth and a perfect blond bun who I’ve seen on television back home. Her name is Nadine and she’s also on a scholarship. Nadine is with her friend Harry, a documentary film-maker born in Australia and raised in Paris, who with his sand-coloured hair and relaxed clothes looks like he’s just emerged from the surf. They both live in the area: Nadine in the 9th and Harry around the corner from me in the rue de Marseille. Neither has heard of the Récollets, and don’t know it even when I describe it to them.
Kiki wades through the seething mass of bodies to join us, and I direct everyone down the back, to where Adrien sits sandwiched between a group of Lecoq actors and a couple engaged in a passionate kiss. His back is very straight. He smiles and stands as we approach and I introduce Nadine and Harry. They all kiss and Nadine is pulled away by a friend, leaving Adrien, Kiki, Harry and me standing in an uncomfortably close formation until the kissing couple conveniently leave and we have room to sit down.
‘It’s my birthday!’ Kiki says to Adrien with glee, holding up the bracelet I bought her.
‘Ow hold are you?’ asks Adrien politely.
‘Old!’ she says and jumps up to grab a waiter, leaving me sitting between Harry and Adrien on the banquette, unable to talk to both at once. I hold Adrien’s hand as I talk to Harry about the recent Australian election, trying to communicate at the same time with Adrien with my back. After a while I make an excuse to go to the bathroom, so as to change the formation, and when I return Adrien and Harry are talking in French. Relieved, I go to find Kiki. She’s in the corner talking to Marc Finland.
A waitress comes over with a tray of shots.
‘Down the hatch!’ says Kiki, and we throw back the spicy vodka, which makes me prickle all over.
A tap on my shoulder. Marie-France. I hug her and introduce her to Kiki, handing her a shot. She looks at it like she doesn’t know what to do with it.
‘Drink it!’ I say.
She puts her velvety lips to the glass and takes a tiny sip.
‘Oui,’ she says. ‘It’s good.’
‘You tasted it?’
She doesn’t understand what I mean and hands the shot back to me. Kiki lifts it from my grip and slams it down, turning back to Marc.
‘Come and meet my boyfriend,’ I say, leading Marie-France away.
Adrien is still talking to Harry on the banquette. ‘This is Marie-France,’ I say. ‘The one who is good at everything.’ They kiss on the cheeks and start chatting in French. With her beautiful black dress and silky hair, she and Adrien look like the perfect Parisian couple
. His shoulders relax as soon as they begin to chat and an uncomfortable feeling passes through my body: shouldn’t he be with someone like her? I brush it off. The vodka has hit and my spirits are only lifting.
Harry gets up and we join Kiki and Marc, who have begun to dance, and we jiggle and jump around with them. I am quite drunk. Kiki is dancing like a maniac. Marie-France comes to join us and starts moving like a cat, the animal she had chosen this week for autocours (and got slammed by the teachers). I flap my wings and gyrate my neck like my equally failed chicken. The music gets louder and Tim keeps giving everyone free shots, turning all the Lecoq students into animals, jumping and gyrating and slinking around like a freak circus. The Gaulier students do the same. If an alien walked in they would categorise us as some kind of horny, stinky, half-human, half-animal tribe. I’m swept up in it and then Adrien is with me and I tone it down a bit to meet his gentler pace. I’m dripping in my skimpy dress and his face is flushed in his heavy cream knit.
‘Take it off!’ I yell, tugging at it.
He yanks it down. ‘No, no.’
‘You’ll die!’ I can see he has a T-shirt on underneath and I tug again.
‘No, I can’t,’ he says, looking uncomfortable. ‘I would feel naked.’
The music changes. Kiki is dancing like a wildcat. ‘Adrien!’ she yells. ‘What animal do you do?’
‘A human!’
There is a strange energy between the two of them, but I’m not sure what it is. All is blurred by booze.
We dance until my mouth is dry, and Adrien squeezes my hand. ‘On y va?’ he asks, and we kiss everyone goodbye and leave.
Out in the crisp night air I lean on him and we stumble side by side up the Faubourg-Saint-Denis to my room, where I fall on the floor and splay out my legs and arms. Adrien goes to make a tisane.
‘No, come here,’ I call, floppy arms flailing. ‘Come here.’
He puts the saucepan on and comes to kneel awkwardly on the floor, allowing me to fling my arms around his neck. I plunge my face into him, drinking in his perfume.