Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost

by David Hoon Kim

  “Are you OK?” René turned to me. “Is she OK?” Then, before I could answer, “Why didn’t you say something earlier?”

  “It slipped my mind.”

  “Is there anything else you haven’t told me?”

  I forced myself to return his stare. When the moment was right, I would tell Gém that she wasn’t to call me “Papa” unless it was part of the game. As for the game itself, I didn’t know if I was capable of putting an end to it just yet. The thought that she might for a little while see me as her father left me feeling happy and despondent at the same time.

  René shook his head. “This city gets worse each year. When they’re not overturning cars and setting fire to them…”

  Only last week, he’d gone on about the Forum des Halles under construction, the black tarp covering one of the towers in Montparnasse, another Starbucks that had just opened near Opéra. He had even misquoted Baudelaire (“le coeur d’une ville change plus vite que la forme d’un mortel”) while mourning the end of an era, a Paris that had become unrecognizable, the shadow of its own shadow.

  “… and I started thinking about what a bad father I’ve been lately.”

  He was still staring at Gém, and as if on cue, the two of them started pumping their fists in the air for a game of pebble-leaf-scissors.

  “That’s why,” René went on, distracted, “I took … a leave … of absence…”

  I watched them play. Real father and real daughter. This was their little thing: each was the other’s mirror. Pebble for pebble, leaf for leaf, scissors for scissors. The two of them could keep it up for far longer than should have been possible. I had once attempted the same thing with her, but it amounted to me guessing what hand she was going to play, and nothing more. Perhaps, in the end, that was all it was.

  * * *

  The next day, sitting on the steps of the BNF, I reached into my pocket and took out Gaëtane’s card. Below her name she had written down a phone number—her personal line, no doubt. When was the last time a woman had given me her number? Next to me, my lunch, a formule from Paul, lay mostly untouched. Even if it didn’t mean what I might want it to mean, I couldn’t help but let my thoughts wander. Down below, on the sidewalk, people walked past—locals, tourists, students—a continuous stream. Every day I took my lunch here because it was easy to find a secluded spot, and it wasn’t far from the pharmaceutical firm where I worked, in the translation department.

  I turned the card over, but there was no additional message on the back. Danish visiting cards were often printed on both sides, so that if dropped they would land right side up. I let the card slip from my fingers and watched it flutter to the ground near my feet. Bending down, I saw that it had landed right side up. On an impulse, I picked up the card and dropped it again. Right side up again. I dropped it a third time, and a third time it landed right side up. My neck prickled. I looked up, half expecting to find Gaëtane standing there, but there was only a group of students at the far end of the steps, taking a break from a study session in the library’s rez-de-jardin. Their voices, the sound of their laughter, reached me as if from an impossible distance.

  All of a sudden I felt utterly alone, condemned to nothingness, like the last of the Mohicans. Back in Denmark I used to watch a show called Sporløs every Sunday. Each episode featured a guest whose close one had disappeared, and who, with the host, passed most of the hour communicating via satellite with a reporter in some far-off country (because Denmark was too small for anyone to disappear within its borders). By the end of the episode, they were able to locate whoever was missing—as if anyone could be found when one made the effort—and it was obvious that only the success stories became episodes, which made me wonder about all the failures, the relatives who remained missing.

  Seeing people reunited after being apart for many years left me with a strange feeling of emptiness. I remember an episode in which they tracked a Swede to a small Japanese town where he was the owner of a French restaurant. He had mostly kept to himself and never married—no dutiful Japanese wife for him. The townspeople thought he was French. The episode concluded with a shot of two Swedes embracing at the French restaurant. The Japanese staff could be seen at attention in the background, and I remember thinking that tracking down a blond-haired Swede in Japan couldn’t be all that difficult, a much simpler task than looking for my biological parents, which would be like looking for a piece of hay in a haystack.

  In the past, my thoughts had turned to them at odd moments. Though I didn’t even know what my biological parents looked like, I would wonder if they were happy where they were. Assuming they were still alive, of course. When asked—often by those who didn’t know me—if I wanted to find my “real” parents, I would answer that my parents—that is, my Danish parents—had found me first. They were my real parents. What did it matter that I didn’t share their genes? If anything, I considered myself lucky not to have my father’s unreliable metabolism and absurdly bad memory. Or my mother’s hereditary cancer. I took after them in other ways: a certain Danish shyness and pedantism, a fondness for rainy days, Olsen Gang references and the poetry of Halfdan Rasmussen. As if I had, simply by being near them, absorbed their habits and values like so much discarded genetic material floating around their bodies in the form of dead skin cells and other motes of dust.

  * * *

  I ripped the card into tiny pieces and let the wind scatter them over the steps. In no time at all, there was nothing left. It was for the best, I told myself. In the end, I was doing Gém a service. She needed, more than anything else, a normal childhood; things were already hard enough for her, having someone like René as a father. (Her mother had left when Gém was less than a year old. I had often thought: If Gém had a mother, would she still need me? Then I would think: Does she really need me? Or am I the one who needs her?) Gathering up my uneaten lunch, I noticed that a stray piece from the card had fallen into my jambon-gruyère. I carefully picked it out and saw that it was part of Gaëtane’s phone number—one digit, half of another. A dozen steps farther down, I found another little white speck, but there was no writing on it. I couldn’t even be sure it had come from her card. Though it was already late, I started scouring the ground for other bits of paper. I promised myself that if I came across one more digit from her phone number, or a letter from her name, I would tell René everything. I continued to make my way along the sidewalk, pausing every time I saw something small and white. The shadows had grown much longer by the time I gave up. No point in going back to work now.

  I had combed the entire length of the promenade and was now standing in the quadrangle of the nearby MK2. Without a second thought, I walked in and got a ticket for the film whose poster I had seen in the underground tunnels. Paprika Steen plays an alien who takes over the body of a Danish woman and becomes a teacher at a high school in Viborg. Her character has come to Earth as part of an intergalactic expedition to learn about human behavior and bring back a few specimens to the mother planet for cloning. Perhaps it was the effect of my native tongue; perhaps I wouldn’t have been so moved if the film had been in French. When the lights came back on, I realized that I had wept through the entire thing. My friend trusted me with his daughter. And why shouldn’t he? I was good for Gém and he knew it. Why should that change now? I asked myself this, for the nth time, as I left the cinema. At one of the brasseries along the promenade, I stood at the counter with my half-pint of beer and stared at the scraps of paper laid out like confetti on the zinc. (There was even a chickpea that had somehow gotten mixed in among them.) I would tell him anyway, come what may. I would empty my rucksack, show him everything I’d been carrying around—the woman, the game, all of it.

  I was a little drunk when I reached René’s building and tottered up the stairs to his floor. Standing in front of his door, I tried to make out the voices coming from the other side. Music, a woman’s laughter. I continued to stand there, not moving at all. A man and a woman of a certain age from one of the u
pper floors came down the steps. They nodded and said “Bonsoir.” I nodded and said “Bonsoir.” Then I was alone on the landing again. Did it ever bother me, growing up, not to look like my parents? René had once asked me. The truth was that, most of the time, I forgot that I didn’t look like them. Was it a conscious effort on their part not to put mirrors in the house? I had never asked them about it; the answer had never interested me. The only mirror—that I recall, anyway—was in our bathroom, and it wasn’t until my sixth or seventh year that I was tall enough to look into it without standing atop the footstool that my father had built when he lived in the City during the seventies. I turned back to the door. My secret fear had always been that any child of mine wouldn’t resemble me at all. It was also, strangely enough, my secret hope, my unspoken fantasy.

  René had made me a key when I first started picking Gém up from school, but I reached out and pressed the bell.

  2. The Farewell Party

  A month later, I couldn’t help but feel a sensation of déjà vu, of déjà vécu, standing in front of his door again. From within, I heard voices, music, laughter. I still had the key, my key, which René hadn’t asked for, or even brought up, since finding out about “the game” I’d been playing with Gém—most likely, he didn’t realize that I still had it. Gaëtane was now her agent, manager, whatever you cared to call it. Over the past few weeks, when no one was there, I had taken to letting myself into my friend’s apartment, for no other purpose than to prowl around the rooms like an amnesiac burglar, observing all the little changes that had taken place since my banishment (a new magnet on the refrigerator, a cushion that had changed position, René’s sempiternal bottle of Tullamore Dew next to a pack of Gaëtane’s Muratti cigarettes). I knew that Gaëtane hadn’t forgiven me for lying to her about Gém and—in her words—making a fool out of her. I continued to stand there, staring at the door, a typical French-style door, with the knob at the center that didn’t turn. And in my hand, the key that no one knew I had. An image came to me then, a fragment of a dream from a few nights ago. In my dream, I had found myself in the crawlspace under one of the métro grates. Above my head, I could see people walking past, across the grate. Once in a while, a cigarette butt would land at my feet, like a stray flake of snow. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why I was down there, or why no one ever questioned my presence under the sidewalk, but—thinking about it now—I had probably been watching the passersby for months, if not years.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  I looked up to find René staring at me from the open doorway.

  “I almost thought you weren’t coming.” Did he seem disappointed, or simply surprised?

  “Have I ever missed my godchild’s birthday before?”

  “Come on,” he said, ushering me in, “let me show you something.”

  On the kitchen counter, next to the sink, was an enormous white cake.

  “Beautiful, no?”

  I glanced over at René, who wore the faintly satisfied smile of an artist contemplating his handiwork. It was to all appearances a painstakingly detailed likeness of an Haussmann-style building, one I might expect to see in the eighth or ninth arrondissement.

  “Are you and Gaëtane getting married?”

  “Very funny. Our relationship is strictly professional.” He returned my gaze, and I wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not. “She’s Gém’s manager, nothing more, nothing less. The cake was her idea.” From the fridge, René took out two bottles of Grimbergen and passed one to me. “Look closer. Go on. Look.”

  I did as he asked, and it was only with my nose practically touching the frosting that I was able to make out the minuscule writing above each of the doorways. L’ORÉAL, it read. Suddenly light-headed, I straightened up and took a long swallow of my beer.

  “It’s an exact replica of the main headquarters, right down to the sidewalks. Don’t ask me how much it cost because it cost a fortune.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Of course, we could also have gone with the international division in Clichy, but a larger L’Oréal logo seemed, I don’t know, tacky. I think, of the two, this was the better choice…”

  She doesn’t want this, I wanted to tell him, but I held myself back. There had been a moment to say such things, when it wasn’t too late.

  “These past few weeks,” René said, sipping his beer, “so much has changed. Thanks to Gaëtane. She did all this!”

  I knew that Gaëtane would have preferred that I not be present to celebrate her new job at the Ambrosio Group, a talent agency in Rome where she would have her own office overlooking the Tiber. This was her party as much as it was Gém’s. My friend, bottle halfway to his lips, nodded at me. “I told her that you would come no matter what, that you had never missed one of Gém’s birthdays. Frankly, I think she’s a little jealous of what the two of you have. Can you blame her? I’m jealous. She wants what’s best for Gém, the same as you.”

  That day, in the subway, Gém had said what she wanted. She had pointed at the movie posters and said, That’s what I want. What I hadn’t realized, at the time, was that she was addressing not me but Gaëtane, who had followed us and was standing nearby, just beyond my line of sight.

  René went on: “I know you still don’t trust her. But that’s because you don’t know her like I do. It’s true that she can be a bit…” He made a vague gesture with his hand. “At least be happy for Gém. Her face is going to be on billboards all over town!”

  I had told myself that I wouldn’t make any trouble. If it had been me, no one would have known I was leaving; I would never have given a going-away party, which was like a celebration of sorrow. I put aside my misgivings and helped René carry the birthday cake into the living room, where everyone was waiting. They were all there, René’s guests and their kids. It was quite a turnout. Gaëtane had brought her new Italian assistant, Nunzio, a curly-haired young man with the broad-shouldered physique of a footballer. They stood on either side of Gém like bodyguards. Gém was the only one sitting. As René and I set the cake down in front of her, I tried to catch her eye. Her hair had been done up in a strange fashion, intricately braided, and she had what looked like sparkles at her temples and on her cheeks, multicolored accents that caught the light in the room.

  “I’d like to thank everyone for coming tonight to celebrate this momentous occasion,” Gaëtane began, as I tuned out the rest of her speech, which wasn’t meant for me anyway— I had the impression that she was addressing everyone in the room but me.

  Nearby, two small boys sniggered. I saw them eyeing Gém in a none-too-friendly way, and it occurred to me that having her face plastered all across the city was not going to help her popularity any, among her classmates. Behind her, a homemade banner proclaimed BONNE ANNIVERSAIRE. The mistake in the gender—it should have read BON ANNIVERSAIRE—was René being his usual inattentive self: I had already seen him make the same slip on more than one occasion, possibly owing to a conflation with BONNE ANNÉE. (Even when we were students at the translation school, his work—however brilliant—had often contained elementary spelling errors that I attributed to the privilege of a native speaker in his own language.)

  René had his hands full, laughing at jokes, kissing people’s cheeks. I didn’t know anyone; most of the guests were either colleagues or former colleagues of René’s in one capacity or another. From afar, I tried to keep an eye on Gém, waiting for an occasion to speak to her, all the while talking to René’s colleagues, or former colleagues, fielding questions about translation, sushi and Denmark. Were the Danish really as happy as they claimed to be? I told my interlocutor that it was hard enough answering that question for myself without having to worry about five million other human beings as well. At one point, I noticed Gém at the other end of the room. She was sitting on the floor, sprawled there idly, sluggishly, as though she found her own body a nuisance. The people near her behaved as though they didn’t see her at all. Where was Gaëtane? When I lo
oked again in Gém’s direction a moment later, she was no longer there, as though what I had seen had been nothing more than a vision of her. Not even bothering to excuse myself, I walked away from the person I was talking to and headed towards the kitchen. Intending to get myself another beer (or something stronger), I started to push open the swinging door when I saw them: Gaëtane and her assistant. They were breathing hard, and Gaëtane gasped, “You’re an octopus!” I let the door close silently on them.

  Of course. I might have guessed. Resisting the urge to leave the party right there and then, I continued wandering around like someone with nowhere to go. Like a ghost haunting the remains of his old life. In the hallway, I found René waiting in line for the toilet. Something in his expression irritated me, and I asked him, point-blank:

  “Do you really think she wants what’s best for Gém?”

  “Henrik, we’ve been over this.”

  “Have you seen her card? All it has is her first name!”

  “That’s her thing,” René said. “To differentiate herself from the other scouts.”

  “And following people home? Is that also to differentiate herself?”

  René ran a hand through his hair. “You have to stop this.” He glanced around. “If Gaëtane hears you … This is why she didn’t want you here tonight. You can’t keep accusing her of things you have no proof of. You know what she told me? That you’re the bad influence on Gém.”

  I knew why she didn’t want me here: I was her only real competition for Gém’s affection. Suddenly, the party, the cake—it all became clear.

  “Are you going with her?” I asked him.

  “Huh?”

  “To Rome. Tell me you’re not going.”

  René didn’t answer. He looked uncomfortable, but it could have just been his increasing need for the bathroom.

  “Deep inside, you know she doesn’t want this. The modeling, the billboards, the fancy hairdo with all the little tresses…”