Paris or Die

by Jayne Tuttle

  It feels good to be back in Paris, and I spend a few days with Adrien, celebrating New Year’s Eve at Thérèse’s party in her parents’ huge modern flat in Neuilly. Then I go back to the Récollets: Tatiana has asked me to help out with Miru while they prepare for his dad’s show. Makoto does installation art, and for his opening they have another babysitter for Miru, so I can come.

  It’s weird to go to an art thing without Kiki. Adrien’s got the play, but a big group from the Récollets are going, so I throw my leg over the back of Lamine’s motorbike and whiz through the rainy streets, past dim lamps and looming façades, swerving through the narrow streets of the Marais and up the rue de Rivoli to the grand Ministry of Culture in the rue Saint-Honoré, with its gleaming metallic exterior.

  Makoto’s installation is a light-and-sound show in an elevator: each level is a different experience. I like the third floor disco and dance a little in the squashed cabin, then want to get out. In the main gallery there is furniture stuck to the walls, and a giant skull in the centre made of stainless-steel pots and pans. Sleek French people guzzle expensive champagne and eat fish things in pastry.

  Lamine disappears. Tatiana goes off with Makoto. I find myself staring at a prison sculpture with hundreds of illuminated candles inside. I look at the candles and try to think of something significant, a prayer for Mum, who soon will be two years disappeared, but nothing comes so I head to the bar. An attractive dark-haired guy in a stylish suit is sipping wine in front of the skull. Art Prince.

  As I’m about to leave, Adrien calls and we arrange to meet at my place. Lamine is talking to a group of models and kisses me goodbye. Makoto and Chantal are near the exit and I kiss them too before taking the métro back to the Récollets. My studio is silent and warm. I cut up the Vegemite tube Dad sent and smear the remains on the dried-up end of a baguette.

  It’s close to midnight when Adrien finally arrives. He sniffs a piece of the cut-up yellow plastic and makes a disgusted face. I pour us both a small glass of beer.

  He complains about the girl playing his lover in the play. ‘She thinks it’s okay to do whatever lines she thinks of. She doesn’t realise I’m waiting for her cues! I lost my words completely!’

  ‘I wish you could have come to the show,’ I say. The beer gives me a bad taste in my mouth and I pour mine into his glass.

  ‘Was it good?’

  ‘It was okay. The best thing about the night was the motorbike ride through Paris. It was worth going for that.’

  ‘You went on a moto?’

  ‘Yeah, with Lamine.’

  Adrien is silent. I go and brush my teeth and he sits finishing his beer. As I’m spitting, he comes into the bathroom.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asks, holding out Harry’s photo of me in front of the desert.

  I wipe my mouth. ‘Harry took that at his place. See,’ I point, ‘from where I’m sitting I look a bit like Uluru – you know, the big red rock in the middle of Australia.’

  ‘When were you at Harry’s place?’

  ‘I don’t know, back in summer. Remember? We watched a James Dean movie.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me you went there.’

  ‘Yes I did – I called you from there, remember? You had that audition for the gangster show!’ He is annoying me.

  ‘No, you didn’t tell me you were at his house.’

  ‘Yes I did. It was after he did that crazy jump into the canal, we watched Rebel Without a Cause – I told you.’

  ‘You are lying to me.’

  My head hurts. He looks ugly, the gentle carving of his face turned hard, his eyes wild.

  Controlling my voice, I say, ‘What does it matter anyway, Adrien? Don’t you trust me?’

  ‘How can I trust you when you lie to me?’

  ‘I don’t lie!’

  ‘You’re lying to me right now.’

  My face is hot. ‘Look, Adrien, I’m sure I did tell you I went to Harry’s, but if I didn’t I’m sorry. But what difference does it make? It’s you I love. Harry and I are just friends.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’ He softens slightly.

  We climb into bed and lie side by side, silent, staring up at the rafters. After a while he rolls onto me and holds my head tightly in his hands, looking deep into my eyes, and says, ‘Do not fuck with me.’

  ‘I won’t!’ I say. I feel scared, like he might hit me. We lie staring at each other, not blinking. His eyes fill with water. So do mine.

  He hugs me. I’m confused, shocked, angry and horny at the same time. He takes off my clothes. An achy, but not unpleasant, sensation pulsates through my body. The muscles in our bodies are tight and I grip his biceps so hard I feel my nails break the skin. And then his red face and the veins and the sweat that drops in my eyes, and I die with him but it’s too intense – a machine-like grasping that makes me want to scream. His grip on my arms is as strong as mine, only his nails are short, and I cry out as he expels his breath and rolls off me.

  Instead of the usual calm I feel riled and pent-up. I want to punch something. Him. I’ve never wanted to punch a man. Right now, I want to smack Adrien. I want to kick him and shake him and scream.

  I lie rigid beside him and let the feeling die down. He falls asleep. I toss and turn until morning.

  Our breakfast is quiet. My mind races. What was that? Are we getting closer or breaking up?

  ‘I need to practise my lines,’ he says, stirring his coffee and not looking up. ‘I should go.’

  I can’t have him leave like this. ‘I can help you,’ I say. ‘It’s a beautiful day. Why don’t we go for a ride and find somewhere nice to sit?’

  He pulls on his jeans and big coat and I put on a dress, two pairs of stockings and my doodoona, and we take a long, sullen bike ride to the Tuileries. It’s an incredible day outside, cold yet vibrant sunshine, which of course makes the situation worse. Everyone is happy, rugged up in the sun with their families and lovers and grandparents and friends. We find two old green steel chairs near people throwing pebbles into a pond. Little boys float boats.

  Adrien won’t look at me. He takes out his crumpled script and we start running lines for his play. I find it hard to get my tongue around some of the words and my timing is slow.

  ‘Le médica-MENT,’ he corrects me. ‘Please can you respond quicker.’ He doesn’t look up from his position bent over his spread knees, and we continue. My heart feels limp in my chest.

  When he corrects me again I say, ‘Fuck, Adrien! I’m trying.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he says, snatching the script back. ‘I’ll get someone else to practise with me.’

  My eyes prickle with tears. ‘Fine. Find someone French. A real actor.’

  ‘Okay, I will.’ He rises.

  But I’m not about to let him go like that. My blood is boiling. ‘You know what, Adrien, I think we should spend some time apart.’

  He turns and looks me in the eye.

  I press further. ‘I don’t want to see you for a while.’

  ‘Why? So you can fuck Harry?’

  My fury boils over. ‘Whether you believe it or not, I don’t want to fuck Harry. It’s you – I don’t know you right now.’

  ‘I don’t think I know you either,’ he says. There’s a disdainful note in his voice that hits straight at my heart. It makes me even wilder. It’s his fault he doesn’t know me. He should have asked more questions. And he shouldn’t have made me feel like I have to hide things. I want to provoke him to leave but the last thing I want is for him to leave.

  I test him. ‘Let’s have some time apart.’

  A breath of hesitation. Then he says, ‘Okay.’

  ‘Good!’ I choke and march away, heartbroken.

  I drift around the city for hours, through the quaint, enclosed arcades and mysterious backstreets behind the Palais Royal, ignoring memories of Adrien and Kiki and my early adult self. The air is bitterly cold, but hugged up in my doodoona I only feel it on my face. The sun disappears, and at Pyramides I
walk down into the métro. The carriage is packed, damp and stuffy. I can smell at least five different types of body odour – light and fruity, tangy, rich, aged, fennec. When Adrien rides his bike to my place in the sun he whiffs his underarms and says, ‘Whoo, smell the fennec.’ Apparently it’s a small desert animal.

  My anger with him has already dissipated. We are both afraid. Perhaps neither of us expected to get into it this far; to be going to family Christmases, sleeping together almost every night, and yet not quite being real with each other. Well, me, not being real. And what next – when school is over? I’ll have no visa. No financial support. No Récollets. What then?

  A busker hops on with a set of speakers on a trolley and a rusty trumpet. He has an enormous black beard and is wearing patchwork jeans. A tourist and his teenage son stand shifting from foot to foot as the busker starts playing in their direction and dancing weirdly. He turns to blow the instrument towards me and I try to look away but it’s a relief to have at least some airflow, and that’s enough for me to give him the few centimes kicking around in my pocket. At Chaussée-D’Antin a huge swell of Galeries Lafayette shoppers get on, removing any relief brought by the previous exodus of passengers. When the doors shut I’m up to my eyeballs in shiny cardboard and strong perfume. The tourist and his son assume a new position closer to me and I notice that the man is dressed strikingly like my dad.

  Dad. What will he be doing right now? Taking the dog for a walk on the beach? Sitting on his rock? Watching the footy replay?

  As if hearing my thoughts, the busker begins singing an ear-raping baritone version of ‘Non, Je ne Regrette Rien’.

  It’s uncanny how much the tourist guy resembles Dad. He couldn’t possibly be French, in his baggy stonewashed jeans. A surge of affection rises inside me. I want to run and jump on him, bury my face in his strong, sure chest.

  The busker exits with his jingly cup at Le Peletier and the tourist turns around to face me, relieved.

  ‘Hey, are you Australian?’ I blurt before I can think.

  The man looks confused, then says, ‘I – sorry,’ with a thick Eastern European accent.

  He and his son get off at Cadet, with an uncomfortable backwards look at me through the window. I collapse onto a newly empty seat.

  For several days I do nothing but go to school, come home, get into bed with the curtains drawn. Nadine asks me to a party and I say yes and then don’t show up. There’s drinks at Faye’s on Friday and I go for an hour then walk home in a daze, bumping into Harry, who is off to a bar to meet friends and invites me, but I say no. When he asks why, I choke up and tell him about Adrien. He calls the next morning and tells me to meet him downstairs in ten minutes with my bike. I say I don’t want to go for a ride. He says get your bike. I say why. He says because I’m going to show you some Paris. But I’ve already seen Paris, I say. Go get your bike, he says. But it’s cold, I say. Rug up, he says, and hangs up.

  He leads me down the canal towards the Bastille. I’ve done this ride a million times and when we stop at the lights I pull up next to him and give him a bored look. He doesn’t acknowledge me. We ride down the boulevard de la Bastille and across the river and into the Jardin des Plantes, which Kiki and I used to walk through before going to the Paris Mosque for mint tea and couscous. Harry gets off outside the Ménagerie and chains my bike to his.

  I have never been to the Ménagerie. He buys two hot chocolate crêpes from the little stand outside and hands one to me. We go in and he shows me through a series of beautiful old pavilions containing crocodiles and monkeys and a lion, past flamingos on a lawn. He has a trajectory. At an outdoor enclosure with nothing in it he looks proud and points.

  Huddled in a pack in a far corner is a pile of greyish fur. Oh god. Kangaroos. One stands and shakes all over before resuming her position in the pile of warm pouches and feet and fur. They shudder; the few of them that are awake look pissed off. This is BULLSHIT, they seem to be saying. They should be bounding across their scorched continent, annoying farmers, getting grilled on barbecues, not cowering here in Paris without doodoonas. What are they doing here?

  I begin to cry. Bawl. Disgustingly. Crêpe hangs from my mouth. I want to reach out to the kangaroos but they are as far away from the fence as they can possibly be. I don’t even particularly like kangaroos, but they suddenly look so familiar to me. They seem so clichéd when people speak of them in relation to Australia, I didn’t realise I had a relationship with them. I can’t believe I could feel this close to a kangaroo. And so far away. My hands clutch at the wire.

  The tears won’t stop. I am a marshmallow clutching wire and crying so hard my cheeks are freezing over. Harry doesn’t know what to do. He stands near, with his hand on the back of my doodoona. I am choke-crying like a child.

  ‘Fuck. I’m so sorry,’ he says quietly.

  I pull myself back together and give him a wet smile. ‘It’s not your fault.’

  ‘What a dumb idea,’ he says. ‘I thought it would make you feel better.’

  A kangaroo stands up from the pack and jumps around a bit. Then she stands in the middle of the field, looking at us. She has a joey.

  We go back and get our bikes and I follow Harry around the park, beneath the skeletal trees, along the stones and then out a gate, past the light-responsive windows of the Institut du Monde Arabe, along the pale green-grey Seine, then eventually back across the river, through the Marais and up the canal to a bar called Le Jemmapes that Harry likes. We go in and he orders two Affligems from the bartender who knows him and we drink them down with our rosy cheeks and eat little olives from a glass.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ I say. ‘I don’t know what happened. It’s nice you took me there.’

  ‘Just trying to show you you’re not alone here.’

  ‘Thanks, Harry. But man, those poor kangas!’

  He laughs. ‘What a nightmare.’

  To make up for it, he insists I come with him to his friend’s party in the rue de l’Échiquier. I say absolutely not, god knows what he’ll show me. He promises it will be wildlife-free. I go to the bathroom and wipe the mascara from my cheeks. No calls or messages from Adrien.

  I go back out to the bar, where Harry is paying.

  ‘Let me race home quick and chuck on a dress.’

  The party is in a loft that was once a couture factory and has big industrial windows and cement floors. The people are older than me – like Harry, closer to their forties – and their style is more graphic-designer minimal, post-bobo. They lie around on cushions and lounges, comfortable in who they are. Their clothes are edgy, draped on their willowy frames. Clothers, Adrien says – he can’t say ‘clothes’ – and I swipe him from my head immediately, though my stomach is in a knot.

  In the bathroom a man in a bright green V-neck offers me a line of coke and I sniff it off a cover of Numéro. The sweet little rush gives me the confidence to talk to a whole bunch of people, including a Crazy Horse dancer from Bulgaria, a refined old actor with a lined face, a philosophy professor in red leather pants who chain-smokes grass, and a graphic-designer couple from Belgium with a three-year-old girl called Mathilde.

  Harry keeps an eye on me, like a big brother. When hot food comes out of the oven he ushers me into the kitchen to get some first.

  ‘Thanks for inviting me,’ I say, nibbling at a cheese puff, though I have no appetite.

  ‘Better than crying at home all night over your Frenchman.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Just a question, and don’t get me wrong, I like Adrien, but what is it you see in him? Apart from his chiselled features?’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘No, I’m genuinely curious.’

  I don’t believe him but speak the words anyway. It feels good to try put it in perspective out loud. I tell him how at first I liked Adrien because he was so French and foreign, but then there was something else. As I talk about him my body rushes.

  ‘Right,’ says Harry. ‘But don’t you think he’s a bit b
ourgeois? He’s from a different world. I know that’s a fucked thing to say, but things here are so compartmentalised.’

  ‘That’s exactly what his friends at their château thought about me,’ I say, getting angry. ‘I wasn’t from their world.’

  ‘Yeah right,’ he says, backpedalling, ‘it’s all bullshit.’

  I stuff down the pastry. I don’t belong here either, in this million-euro apartment with all these stylish people. I don’t even belong with Harry, in his humble, surf-guy clothes, with parents who own homes all over the world. I don’t belong anywhere.

  Later, after more lines and more vodka, I jump on the back of Harry’s motorbike and we ride behind a group of people from the party to Montmartre, descending into the basement of a modest bar called Le Soleil de la Butte. The music is pumping and Harry and I dance and dance. He is so funny when he moves. We swirl and jump until the lights are up and chairs are on tables.

  It’s getting light outside as we ride down the cobbled streets of Montmartre, pulling up outside a dodgy brasserie opposite the Gare du Nord. We can’t sleep yet and Harry says it’s the only thing open. We sit dunking tired old chips into ketchup and sipping Leffes as the sun comes up. The beer tastes amazing on our dry tongues.

  Harry’s fingers are thin and smooth on his glass, which doesn’t match his stocky frame. It feels good to laugh and mess around with a mate. Adrien and I never feel like mates. Lovers. Not mates.

  Outside the Récollets Harry stops the motorbike and hugs me goodbye. I drink in the hug. My head is in his neck and I get the urge to kiss it. Harry makes sense in so many ways.

  As if reading my thoughts, he starts kissing my neck and jaw. I allow it to happen longer than I should, before pulling away.

  I don’t want things to make sense.

  Harry laughs and I laugh back, still drunk. He holds out his warm hand and squeezes mine.

  ‘Call you tomorrow, idiot,’ he says, getting on his bike.