Paris or Die

by Jayne Tuttle

  I dream of babies, fat ones, tiny ones, of miniature girls in prams and sons dressed in tutus and babies that speak perfect French and give me very serious information, and babies that are dead and floating in the sea.

  One is not born a woman. One becomes a woman. My nature is not calibrating with my brain. It is independent. An alien growth.

  Help me, Simone de Beauvoir. Help me know what it all means.

  Summer

  THERE ARE SIX whole weeks off school. I line up at the mothership to see if they’ll keep paying my monthly cash support, and to my astonishment they hand over the envelope. I look around to see if I’m to be handcuffed, then slip out past the security man who says, ‘Au revoir mademoiselle.’ It’s enough money to almost get by, but certainly not enough to go on holiday with, much as I long to put my feet on sand or green grass, which Adrien reminds me is a summer luxury reserved for the rich, not theatre students and out-of-work actor/models who can’t pay their hot-water bill. None of his friends have invited us to their houses in Saint-Tropez or Biarritz, but he says there’s always hope.

  I can’t go away anyway, I have to find a job: the small inheritance Mum left me, which has been supplementing my survival over the past year, is almost gone. Nadine gives me her acting agent’s number, but the woman hangs up on me when I tell her I’m still studying. I need to think of something creative, short-term and flexible. I could write stories for the newspapers back home. Or be a DJ, like that girl at Martine’s party. Or an English teacher. This seems most logical. I put up a notice at the Récollets and the Cité advertising private English tuition, but Kiki reminds me that most of the residents speak English, and that we’re in France. I put up another notice advertising French tuition, saying Study French with someone nice, because learning French can be so boring and oppressive. Then I take it down because I don’t want to be nice, and also that’s offensive to those French people who are also very nice, like Marie-France.

  Marie-France appreciates that I’ve taken it down. She loathes the myth that French people are rude. They’re just honest, she says. I agree, but now my marketing angle is shot. Tatiana says she’ll give me regular babysitting with Miru when they get back from Japan. That can hold me until something magical happens.

  Kiki goes away on a yoga retreat, Nadine goes to her rich housemate’s place in Normandy, Harry goes surfing on the Atlantic coast, and Marie-France goes to live at her grandmother’s down south for the whole of summer. Adrien is stuck in Paris with me. When we’re not mooching around the parks or standing under mist machines on Paris Plage, the sandy ‘beach’ Mayor Delanoë has installed along the Seine (which Harry likens to the carpark at Bondi Beach, minus the beach), we take cold showers and lie in swimwear on his balcony, smoking hash and imagining we’re looking at the Atlantic Ocean rather than the banal brick block across the way. He teaches me more slang and street expressions and how to swear in French, which I practise for tone and attitude. I teach him how to speak Australian, helping him master ‘Go and get fucked’ (the cornerstone of the dialect and key to mastering the accent, according to Ravi Canada, along with the word ‘party’ and the expression ‘park the car’).

  ‘Guwan git fukkered.’

  ‘No’, I coach. ‘Garn git fukd.’

  ‘Garren geet fukk.’

  ‘Closer.’

  ‘What is this in English?’ he asks, handing me a piece of melon.

  ‘Honeydew.’

  ‘I need you?’

  The idea of a fruit called I Need You pleases me on so many levels I pledge to keep it.

  In the following weeks we lose all trace of English as I disappear into Adrien’s world. He inducts me into his extended family, taking me to lunch at Séverine’s cool younger sister’s modern loft in Montmartre, and to dinner at her bourgeois older sister’s penthouse near Trocadéro, with its spectacular view over the Eiffel Tower. There was a clock under it when I was an au pair, counting down the days to the millennium. Adrien remembers that too.

  Weeks go by when I speak and listen to nothing but French. I no longer remember which language I’m speaking, and Adrien says I talk French in my sleep. When it becomes too hot in the daytime to sit outside, we stay in with the shutters closed, in underpants in front of his television set, having sex and watching everything from Wife Swap to French Temptation Island to dubbed versions of Adrien’s boxed sets of Scorsese and Tarantino films, which I justify as all valuable language education. Séverine invites us to dinners and lunches in her air-conditioned salon, and even her French starts becoming clear to me. Like a photo developing in a darkroom, she becomes clearer too: more vulnerable than before, and softer, making more conversation with me and giving me the impression that we could be friends.

  One mild August night she asks us over to share a summer pot-au-feu with a group of her cinema friends and Gigi, a sweet older gent who is ‘best friends’ with Séverine, but as far as I can see mainly listens to her problems and performs her errands. He pats my head and calls me beauté or princesse, which is nice in a grandfatherly way.

  All are amazed I’ve never tried pot-au-feu before. ‘I was vegetarian for a long time,’ I tell them. The table goes silent.

  ‘But why?’ asks Julie, a petite brunette.

  ‘It’s hard to explain,’ I say. ‘I didn’t like meat. I still don’t think we need to eat it and that it’s bad for the planet. But now I eat it, just a bit.’

  Their faces remain blank.

  ‘Well, in that case,’ says Séverine, ladling a generous portion onto my plate. ‘L’os à moelle.’

  I look down at the heavy piece of bone in front of me. Bone marrow? I look pleadingly at Adrien.

  ‘You take a piece of toast,’ he demonstrates, ‘and you scoop out the marrow and smooth it on like this.’ He raises the toast to his mouth, rubbing his tummy. ‘See? Mmmm.’

  The guests murmur, not taking their eyes off me. I put the grey goo in my mouth and swallow it down with a swig of red wine, suppressing the urge to retch. A beat. Then a roar of laughter and clapping.

  ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ says Gigi, coming over to kiss me. ‘Welcome to delicious!’

  ‘Do you like it?’ asks Rémy, a man with a pencil moustache. The table goes silent. I search for a phrase that, to surprise them, will express that I loved it. And then it comes out:

  ‘C’est un truc de ouf quoi.’

  There’s a pause. Then the entire room erupts in laughter. People bang on the table with forks and spoons. ‘Ha ha, truc de ouf!’ Adrien is prouder than ever and Gigi says over and over, ‘Elle est magnifique, MAGNIFIQUE!’ We laugh and laugh and clink glasses and talk and share and eat wondrous cheeses and an incredible tarte tatin made by Gigi’s mother. Each time he mentions her a tear comes to his eye, and he looks down at his lap and puts his hands close to his body, as though she is dead and sacred, although she’s alive and well and living in Courbevoie.

  When we’ve finished eating, Séverine and Gigi clear the plates and we move back to the salon to drink digestifs and smoke more.

  ‘So Jayne, tell me, what is your family heritage?’ a short grey man named Gérard asks me. It’s clear I’ve become the entertainment at this party, and the guests all smile at me as they find their comfortable positions on the couches, poufs and armchairs.

  ‘Um, I don’t know. English, Irish, Scottish. A bit of everything. Pioneers … I don’t know much about it.’

  The room stiffens.

  I’ve never given my heritage much thought. And then it hits me: these people all know their history. They know they belong here. That the land is theirs. I’m not a native of Australia. I am ashamed of what my ancestors did to the indigenous people, and I felt terrible every day for living on their land. And yet I am not English or Irish or Scottish. I don’t belong there either. And I have never travelled the real Australia, the centre. I’ve lived only a city life, sipping tea and tending my English garden, eating Asian food, Italian, Greek, Indian. The people at this table eat and speak French in
France and are French.

  I’m not from anywhere.

  Yet, I feel more French than ever. My language is now a colourful pastiche of street Étienne, sultry Séverine, sweet Marie-France, cutting Lecoq teachers, and vulgar Wife Swap characters. But mostly I speak Adrien. His expressions, his shoulder raising and huffing, the way he rolls his ‘r’s and says oui sometimes on an in-breath. But also his argot, his high French, low French, French for the café, French for his friends, French for the hot-water guy on the telephone.

  A few weeks after the pot-au-feu Adrien takes me to a concert in Bastille. Since that night at Séverine’s, I’ve been enjoying the feeling that I’m disappearing into French, indetectable as a foreigner. But in the toilets when I ask a guy if there’s any paper in the men’s cubicle, he answers me in English.

  ‘Out of interest,’ I ask him in French, ‘how did you know I speak English?’

  ‘The smile in the voice,’ he says, checking his teeth in the mirror.

  I’m astounded and confused. Back at the bar I recount the story to Adrien. He laughs and says, ‘Yes that’s right, you have a smile when you talk.’

  This is astonishing to me. I had no idea. As we walk down the busy canal back to my place I demand Adrien cure me of the smile. After I’ve said bonjour and au revoir at least fifty times he is exhausted.

  ‘I’m sorry, but no matter how low you make your voice or how arrogant you sound, the smile is still there. Even when you sound angry you have the little smile.’ He takes me in his arms. ‘I like the smile.’

  That’s a nice thing to say. But how irritating not to be able to control my voice. I’m supposed to be an actress. I should be able to play this part.

  ‘I don’t want the smile,’ I say, looking at my shoes and saying bonjour again.

  ‘See? Even when you’re sad you have the little smile.’

  I try to frown at him, then mimic what he just said.

  ‘You have too much enthusiasm in your voice,’ he says. ‘Try to speak as if you don’t care.’

  As if I don’t care.

  But I do care. Intrinsically. That’s the problem.

  I pledge to go deeper. I’ll iron the goddamned Australia out of this body if it kills me.

  My friends float back, first Kiki, then Nadine, and finally Harry, and Adrien and I spend more time at my place, lying on the cool floor, or at the canal with whoever’s around, eating I Need You because it’s cheap and delicious. On money days we wrap it in ham. Sometimes Raphaël and a few of Adrien’s other friends join us, kicking off their espadrilles and untucking their shirts to fit in. We sprawl over the dirty banks on pieces of fabric and put cheeses and chips and cheap bottles of rosé on them, sharing cups. A man pushes a shopping cart around selling cold Tsingtao for two euros, and if we’re lucky someone will have the foresight and bank balance to go over to Pink Flamingo and bring back fresh pizzas. We eat, drink, smoke and talk with our legs dangling over the water, musing about jumping in, Adrien with his neat jeans tucked up above his handsome ankles, Harry in his array of ’80s board shorts, Kiki in her long beaded skirts, Nadine in cute vintage wear. Kiki brings me a bag of old dresses and I pin them in around the boob area and wear them with a pair of thongs Nadine was going to throw out. We are definitely bobos, except probably Adrien with his clean shirts and boat shoes.

  During the day we sometimes walk up to the Buttes-Chaumont and sit under a tree by the stream: the feeling of my feet in water and on grass gives me a feeling I hadn’t realised I’d missed, the simple connection with nature and the vibrations of the earth beneath all that concrete. It brings out a yearning in me for fields and beaches, stretches of emptiness, but even a train ticket out of Paris is beyond our reach. Anyway, Harry says that Deauville, the nearest beach to Paris, is like swimming in dishwater.

  One stifling day, when Adrien is at an audition, I’m at the canal in a deep conversation with Nadine when I notice a guy climb over the barrier on the top of the Bridge of Atmosphère and start taking his clothes off. Harry.

  ‘Jesus … no!’ shouts Nadine, and the entire crowd of bobos looks up to stare. There has been much speculation as to what lies beneath the murky green depths of the canal – dead bodies, shopping trolleys, pets, bikes, car parts, toilet seats and a lot of rat skeletons is the word. But I understand Harry’s thinking: on days like today, with beer-blurred eyes and heat stroke, the water can look like a crystalline Swiss lake. Still, I agree with Nadine and call, ‘Don’t j—’

  Too late. The crowd gasps. I pray he’s not dead, or skewered on something. But then he’s up, smiling, and swimming towards the bank. Women rush to him; he’s now a local hero, the stupidest man in town. There’s no sign of embarrassment or shock on Harry’s face, he is wholly glad he did it. He looks refreshed, if gooey, and in no hurry to get out. Pushing himself off the grimy wall, he backstrokes into the middle of the canal, to a chorus of cheers.

  Nadine and I accompany him back to his place to drink beer while he takes a shower, and to make sure there’s no lasting damage. Once Nadine is satisfied he’ll survive, she takes off to meet her date, and Harry asks me to stay: he’s got leftover chicken curry, and Rebel Without a Cause is on Arte tonight – dubbed, of course. In French it’s The Fury of Living. When it’s over he gets up to serve dinner.

  ‘Do you know who your ancestors were?’ I ask from his kitchen bench.

  ‘Irish, English. White folk. Murderers. Why?’

  ‘I know both my grandmothers had Scottish maiden names, McLean and McPherson. My surname is Tuttle – my Irish friend says that’s not a weird name there. My nan made a family tree that goes way back to England. But that’s all I know. And isn’t a tree, like, a tree? It forks and it forks, even a few branches up. How can you get a true idea of your identity?’

  ‘You can’t. You can follow one branch, I suppose, and see where it leads.’

  ‘That’s what Nan did. Do you feel weird here for being so British and coming from Australia?’

  ‘No. Yeah. I dunno.’

  ‘It just feels so strange. We’re from there, but we’re not. How many Aboriginal people do you know?’

  ‘I know loads. I spend time in the Kimberley every time I go back. I spent six months there once making a doco. I know some Elders.’

  ‘See, I’ve never made that effort. I don’t know anything about the land. Basic warped Australian history from school, that’s all. I feel so English. I like cities! It feels like home here. But why?’

  ‘You’re talking weird,’ Harry says. ‘But go on.’

  I tell him about Séverine’s friends being so disappointed I couldn’t tell them anything about my heritage.

  Harry laughs and takes our plates to the living room. ‘Putes et criminels. Want another beer?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He hands me a Kronenbourg. ‘Whores and convicts, that’s all they want to hear.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘The French are obsessed by heritage. What family you’re from, what region, what name. There’s nothing of interest to them about Australia other than kangaroos and Aborigines and the fact that we’re descended from whores and convicts. Can I take your photo?’

  ‘But the ancestors on Nan’s chart were wealthy settlers. Although I’m sure some of them must have stolen a loaf of bread.’

  ‘Code for whore. Don’t fight it.’

  He lights my cigarette and snaps a photo of me with his Polaroid.

  ‘Anyway, it’s great to be Australian,’ he says, flapping the sticky piece of paper around and placing it on the arm of the chair before taking another one. ‘Not to have all that bogged-downness of history. The world likes us. Imagine what it’s like being American or English here. One of the Americans at my work got spat on in the street the other day just for speaking out loud. We’re seen as harmless. Our country is too far away to have any significance to anyone in the world, though our fuckwit of a prime minister might think we’re a major player. I reckon we’re lucky. No responsibility. No
weight.’

  He hands me the two photos. Against the picture of desert landscape on the wall behind me, my head looks like Uluru.

  ‘Will you go back one day?’ I ask.

  ‘Hell yeah,’ says Harry. ‘I’d be there in two seconds if I could get directing work. Life’s so much better there. The surf, the air. And easier. You’ve only been here a year, you’ll see. It gets stifling. You start to need the air and the sun. The wild.’

  I consider this as we watch the rest of the film and then I kiss him goodbye. He gives me a slightly longer hug than usual, which feels nice in a brotherly way. He pins one of the photos to his wall with a collection of other random faces and I put the other one in my pocket.

  The canal is quiet. A piece of tissue paper is caught in a tree. The lights are on in the apartments along the water and my outsider feeling returns stronger than ever, that feeling of detachment, the balloon untethered.

  Adrien’s financial situation grows dire, so he takes a job at the FNAC, the audiovisual chain store near Odéon. At least it’s air-conditioned there. Kiki is busy preparing for a show, so I go to Nadine’s and play gin rummy, or hang around the canal and the Récollets, trying not to spend money. August gets even hotter. My kitchen is overrun by ants. The playground downstairs is quiet and the park overtaken by party people playing loud techno music all night long.

  Kiki calls one day and tells me to meet her at the Petit Château d’Eau – she has good news. I am in a thrift store trying on a pink two-euro tank that smells of mothballs and someone else’s sweat, but looks good. Silk, perhaps, or probably polyester. Whatever it is, it makes my nipples stick out and I elect to keep it on and not wear a bra, because why not.