by Jayne Tuttle
All I see on the way back to the manor are sex spots; ferny dens, thick tree trunks and even a hedge maze, but I can’t get Adrien away from Nico and his friends, so my heat goes slowly cold with the disappearing sun, leaving me with gritted teeth. I spend the remainder of the day alone in the shadows, feeling awkward and vulnerable. By the time evening has set in and we get into Fab’s car, I’m in a dark mood.
‘What a magnificent day,’ says Fab as he pulls out.
Adrien agrees, wiggling his hand behind his seat and into mine.
‘And for you, Jayne?’ asks Fab.
I tell him it was okay and when he presses I relent and say I found it hard to fit in.
Fab laughs. ‘These are probably not your sort of people.’
He may not have meant that in a rude way – perhaps he doesn’t see himself as one of them either. Regardless, I feel the urge to tear up his pristine back seat with my fingernails.
I squeeze Adrien’s hand hard and he turns around.
‘Sorry, chérie. They are particular.’
I stare out the window the whole way home. A house is on fire somewhere, trucks race. Adrien’s hair flicks above his headrest. I feel the urge to pull it but then he peeks between the gap with a complicit smile: somehow we are in this together.
Back in Asnières we wave Fab off and I am glad he lives in the Maldives. Adrien and I stand in an awkward silence in the lift. In the apartment he opens the blinds and we go out onto the balcony where the air is still warm. He fills a watering can and waters his plants as I watch the man in the building opposite watch his TV, slumped in his chair.
‘Sorry, ma chérie. I didn’t realise everyone would be there.’
I try to explain how I felt. He must have felt strange too, surely.
‘No,’ he laughs, putting the watering can back in its place. ‘Yes.’ He turns to me with a soft look on his face. ‘But that’s not because of you. They’re very old friends, old families, they are very … shut.’
‘You say “they”, but you’re one of them.’
‘No, I’m not.’
He’s always been on the outside, he says. Artistic at school, in the theatre club, the only one not in line to take over the family business, inherit the fortune. An only child, fatherless, with a mother who was a costume designer in cinema.
‘They keep me around as their toy. And they liked my old girlfriend, so they were being cold with me today.’
‘She was French?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why didn’t you stay with her?’
‘Because I didn’t like her. I want you! I love how you are, you’re so weird. It was so funny when you talked about the leap-sheeping.’
His arms wind their way around my waist. I like that he likes me weird. But being on the outer is not fun. I bury my face in his neck.
My initiation to Adrien’s friends was, to say the least, shaky. But in the following weeks he involves me in more social events and things begin to thaw. One Saturday he invites me to dinner at a fancy restaurant on top of the Samaritaine building with the group from the château. The restaurant is called Kong and they all pronounce it Kon-g, and the chairs are made of see-through plastic with the faces of supermodels on the backs. I’m a little more at ease in my Nadine-approved black dress, and even when I complain to the waiter in Paul’s three-year-old voice that my fish is dégueulasse, nobody minds; in fact the table agrees that the food is shit and they wish they had the guts to use a word like that to describe their own meals. Though I still feel like a curiosity, I’m getting beyond the surface of these people, who are all looser beneath their taut exteriors.
On the way back to Adrien’s in the car, Raphaël sings along to an English pop song on the radio, mimicking the language with a whole lot of made-up words and exaggerated vowel sounds. Apparently this is called ‘yoghurt’, and Adrien does it all the time when I play him a song, or when he wants to take the piss of out something I’m saying. Raphaël’s girlfriend, Thérèse, who is driving, turns the music off and he goes on singing his own made-up song, something about a spanking, enjoying making us laugh.
Raphaël commutes to London a lot with his work, so his English is mildly better than the others’. ‘Oooh, spank me, baybeee, get that spankeee vibe,’ he sings. The more it tickles me, the more it eggs him on, until tears are falling down my cheeks.
‘You should put that out as a single,’ I tell him.
A few days later he invites Adrien and me to dinner, but I have late rehearsals. As it seems like we’re becoming friends, I decide to send him a personal message.
‘Sorry I can’t make it on Friday Raph,’ I text. ‘But spank you very much for the invite.’
A few days later, Adrien brings it up.
‘Raph told me about your message,’ he says.
‘What message?’
‘The spanky message.’
‘Oh!’ I laugh.
‘He was embarrassed about it – he said he thought I should know, and showed me the text.’
‘Hang on. He didn’t think it was funny?’
‘It wasn’t funny. You were coming on to him?’
I feel stunned. Of all people, I thought Raphaël would be able to take a joke. I sigh, and put my head in my hands. ‘I don’t know how to be!’
There is a line somewhere that I keep tripping over. Landmines everywhere.
In a bar in Saint-Germain-des-Prés one night, I manage to offend Nico too. He and Adrien are going away the next day on a weekend hike, and, overestimating my easygoing friendship with Nico, I drape my arm around him and tell him that I won’t mind if he and Adrien need to cuddle up at night together in the tent, to keep each other warm. It is such a cute and innocent image, I think it will make him laugh, but he goes red in the face, and so does Adrien, which, instead of making me shut up, only makes me drive the joke harder. My sister would be rolling her eyes. Let it go, idiot. But I’m circling the bar, quizzing the French population on whether they think it’s funny or not. Most look at me as though I’m insane.
After almost falling off my bike riding too fast across the river, I get home to a message from Nico: Just for you know, I like Adrien as friends, friends only.
Aargh!
I don’t understand why it’s not obvious to them that I know Nico wouldn’t be having an affair with Adrien, or that I wouldn’t so brazenly start something with Raphaël. It’s only funny to me because it seems so ludicrous.
They both accept my apology, and Adrien laughs. ‘You’re crazy. But I like you.’
To like something is to aime it. Like an apple. But to love someone is to aime them too. When he says he likes me he says, ‘Je t’aime beaucoup.’ Which means ‘I like you a lot.’ You have to add a word at the end to dilute it.
I tell him I love him at Le Sporting, the restaurant down by the canal with the black-and-white photos of boxers on the walls and the weird name. Then I lean across the table and look into his eyes.
It feels good to speak the words. Saying them in French provokes a different sensation than in my own language: there is flair and colour and danger in the foreign words, and also a touch of Godard film intrigue. I have been curious to know if they might break me from this sensation of living in a dream. They don’t, but hearing him say the words back creates a massive spark.
He leans over the table to give me a long, sultry kiss as the waitress looks on, revolted.
Twenty Movements
A MAJOR PART OF our end-of-year assessment is the famous vingt mouvements. Individually, in front of the entire school, we must perform our own sequence – or enchaînement – of Jacques Lecoq’s twenty mime and acrobatics moves, which we’ve been learning to master since the first day of school. It’s the first time in the year we will choreograph and perform something on our own. It is said that no two enchaînements have ever been the same.
I am extremely proud of mine: it has a flowing logic that moves each gesture gracefully to the next, from the cartwheel to the harlequin, from
the handstand to undulation. I have practised and practised in the cellar at the Récollets, the spirits of the monks urging me on.
It’s my turn. I take my place in the centre of the Grande Salle, breathe. I feel nervous but strong; my body has developed new muscles that ignore my nerves and do their own thing. The students and teachers, seated, are dead silent.
I begin with the éclosion, moving from the tightest ball and opening out as far into a star shape as my body will reach, then I ease fluently into the cartwheels, and on goes my fluid enchaînement. My handstand is perfect: I hold it for several seconds before falling down into the warrior pose and undulating. As I move into ‘climbing the wall’ I think I hear a sniff and what sounds like a giggle. I push on. Clean, precise. Another giggle. Am I hearing things? I stay focused and end up back in a ball, just as I began. The metamorphosis is complete.
Raucous clapping. I stand in front of the group, proud and shy.
‘Bravo, Jayne,’ says Claude. He has a strange smile on his face.
Angela is open and warm. ‘This was very good,’ she says. ‘Un bel enchaînement.’
Boris, I now see, has dewy eyes like he’s been laughing, and has his hand over his mouth. ‘There is this thing,’ he says. ‘It’s hard to explain.’
‘It’s her feet,’ says Ju-Yong.
‘Yes,’ says Angela. ‘You have this strange thing with your feet. And perhaps your neck – the way your head sits on your neck. It’s a very small detail, but quite specific.’
‘You don’t mean to be funny,’ says Boris, ‘you are so serious. But something about the way your body is put together, the angle of your feet – it doesn’t match up with your seriousness. So it comes across as funny.’
My classmates agree by smiling. This appraisal is not, of course, what I want to hear. I want to be taken seriously. They liked my enchaînement but my feet are weird? I feel weak at the thought that my weird feet and head may stop me getting through to second year.
The other students’ pieces are fascinating. Each movement is technically the same – the cold, precise executions we have all learnt throughout the year. And while there’s nothing emotional in a handstand, or miming rowing a boat, somehow, in putting together a piece, the actor’s personality comes through so clearly it moves people to tears. It’s as though the soul shines through in the gaps between the movements.
Marie-France’s sequence is sad in its perfection, each movement beautifully executed, but somehow she feels like a lost ballerina, searching for something. Ravi Canada’s is vulnerable in its playfulness. The Spanish Amélie’s is hopeful in its messiness.
Afterwards it doesn’t seem to matter whether we are accepted into second year or not: we have seen each other. We drink ourselves into a stupor at Mauri7 and sing on the tables into the night.
The next day, everyone is pale as we sit in the foyer waiting to be called in and told our destiny. I have no picture of what I’ll do if I don’t get into second year. I just see black. I face my fate with the knowledge that I’ve done all I could. I have bruised and blistered and calloused my body, pummelled my ego, almost broken a finger, been bashed in the head with a broom. I’ve pushed, relented, made a fool of myself over and over and over again and occasionally got a silent nod or a bien and one pas mal. I’ve stayed up all night trying to juggle three balls, got up at four am every day for a week to follow Paris streetcleaners as research for a piece, done two thousand handstands, mastered a solo saut-demains. I’ve tried dominating, yielding, going too far and not doing enough. I’ve worked well with people I don’t like and horribly with those I like. I’ve done my absolute best. If they tell me it’s over, I will go into the abyss knowing I had nothing more to give.
Almost all of us want to do second year, but everyone I talk to has a plan B. Marie-France will go back to being an intermittent du spectacle, a supported government actor doing regular gigs, or perhaps teach, although it’s hard to imagine her not getting in. Umi and Yoshi Japan will go home. Ravi Canada will start his own company.
The faces begin to drift down from the top of the stairs. It’s easy to read the results. Anja Sweden is in. Jamie London is in. So is the Spanish Amélie, but she tells me she’s returning to Madrid: she has a theatre back home waiting for her and never intended to stay. The other four Spaniards are in. Bethany Scotland isn’t, and is in tears in Lara Dublin’s arms. Meg London, Faye Ohio and Marie-France are in. Laurent is not in and is furious. Neither of the Greek girls are in, and are ashen.
I want to be in. I want to stay here where the trees change. Where it snows. Where nobody wears helmets or obeys the road rules. Where killing yourself by smoking is a fact of life, where being an intermittent actor is a normal job. Where being alone isn’t lonely anymore, where I can just walk and walk and look at things and come home feeling full on life, like I’ve gorged myself just from looking. Where the language sounds like velvet and water and caramel and honey, and letter-writing is still a normal form of communication. Where chequebooks will never go out of fashion and nor will inkwells and quills and calligraphy artists. Where bookbinders and button-makers and violin-shapers still work away quietly in their shops, where Sundays are still Sundays and the city is calm. Where some days I dress up for the city and not for anybody else, put lipstick on for her, some eyeshadow, my nicest shoes, and just walk in her. Where the completion of a task as menial as buying a stamp and sending a letter feels like a major accomplishment. Where I feel alive, more alive than ever before.
Please, let me stay in Paris. I will be good.
‘Jayne?’ calls the voice from above. Marie-France squeezes my hand as I head for the stairs and then sit to wait on the same fold-down chair I sat on the day I enrolled. The Grande Salle is empty, the wind outside blows leaves against the skylights.
Angela pokes her head out the door and beckons me in.
‘Sit down,’ she says, and I sit in the big leather chair feeling minuscule.
‘Can I speak in French?’ she asks and I nod, though I instantly regret it as she launches into a discourse I can’t quite follow. She then stops, looks me dead in the eye and says, ‘It’s a oui.’
It’s a oui!
Be calm, I order myself. Be calm and listen.
‘Now you must push … No more time for hesitation … During the year you were like this’ – she draws a chart in the air of ups and downs – ‘next year there is no time for this. We do not take you by the hand. Next year is something else, it is up to you to push your ideas. We can see you know why you’re here. Stop being scholarly. Move more, think less. Don’t look for results in order to grow bigger.’
‘Okay,’ I say.
‘Do you have questions?’
‘No,’ I say, though I have loads, I just can’t phrase them quickly enough.
I leave with her words buzzing around my head. I have been trying too hard to impress them, to be a good student. This, it seems, is not a good thing. But I’m in. I’m in! I breathe for a moment before walking down the stairs in front of the gallery of heads looking up, placing on my face a neutral but open look that reads yes, but not too much.
Dad is happy for me, and says he knew I’d get in. He has decided to retire from the television station and buy a small man-house by the beach we went to on holidays as kids. He has found a rock there he likes to sit on. I think about Mum’s wardrobe. Her old porcelain Sally doll up there with her painted red nails. Her coats that you fall into. The knits with her smell in them.
Kate tells me I suck and she doesn’t want me to come home anyway. Her new housemate actually does the dishes and doesn’t require that she hide chocolate. When she told the housemate I was in Paris, the housemate said, ‘She’s never coming back.’
‘I’ll be back,’ I say. ‘Just not this year.’
‘Good, we don’t have room for you anyway, country’s full.’
‘Why don’t you come here?’
‘Because I don’t want to.’
She will be okay. The boys are
okay. Dad is okay. They are all okay. It’s okay.
Adrien comes straight over and, without a word, tugs off my clothes and we bash around the studio, having a huge little death together on my tiny kitchen-table top, then falling asleep on the floor before he gets dressed in a barman’s outfit and runs out to a one-off catering gig. I lie all night staring at the moth, in its spot near E.T. With the fear of not making it through gone, and with the prospect of a long break from school, I should feel elated. But for some reason I feel strange. Now that I’m in and can see the year ahead, a flood of new questions arrives.
What are you doing? the moth asks. People are calling you madame. And you’re throwing yourself around a room being a camembert cheese, an operatic chicken, a drop of water swept out into a raging ocean …
Dancing around in the city of light, trying to touch it. Paris. The beauty. The grime. The tits-on-end anticipation. The colours and thoughts and songs and sounds and smells and germs and children and dogs. The cardboard beds outside the Gare de l’Est, the taste of strawberries, the sky, last métro, first métro, foamy piles of spit on the pavement, the bells, the dreams, the light in my tree …
Adrien. His handwriting, the new words and expressions, his blank looks after yet another of my faux pas. The grave errors of conjugation. The correctness of things. His hair in the mornings, the taste of his skin, the mon amours and the chérie je t’aimes, the way his mouth moves when he speaks. The misunderstandings, mistranslations, miscommunications, mistrust, mystery. The mist. The missed. The trying and wanting and asking and wondering and spinning around and around and around …
I am the moth. The night butterfly. Turning in circles now on E.T.’s face, saying come on, come on, girl, it’s time to grow up, time to take control.
I’m living. And I’m changing. I’m a child. And a girl. And a woman. And my grandmother. And not born yet. And dead. This biology. The grass-roots, animal baseness of it all. I’m a root machine like everyone else, just wanting to fuck and grow round and shoot out spawn like the rest of the fishes, to hang my eggs over the precipice, to bury my offspring in a warm ditch. I am the cat from the Festi Bazar, with crumbling ears, pumping out litters and litters in cupboards and corners, just shitting them out, spewing forth reams of seething maggots, vomiting up tiny ratty copies of myself and washing their shitty nappies and sending them to school.