Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost

by David Hoon Kim

  “Henrik, let it go.” He sighed. “Gaëtane has worked with a lot of—”

  “Gém isn’t like other kids! If you spent more time with her, you would understand this.”

  “Like you understand, right? The thing is, Henrik, you can take her to supermarkets and puppet shows and pretend all you want—you’re never going to be her father. You need to get that through your head.” He raised his eyebrows—a bit condescendingly, I thought. “It’s fun to pretend sometimes, but sooner or later you’re going to have to face the truth.”

  In the end, I didn’t tell him what I had seen in the kitchen. I talked to some more people—I couldn’t tell if they were colleagues or former colleagues of René’s, and, frankly, I no longer really cared. I realized that I had never gotten myself that drink, which I needed rather desperately. Then disaster struck: the toilet—which had never been very robust to begin with—got clogged up. Too much toilet paper, a sanitary napkin, who knows what had caused it. The floor was a swamp, brown water everywhere. I wondered, distractedly, if René had been able to use the bathroom—unless this was his doing. In the hallway, I watched with the other guests as Nunzio jabbed at the opening of the bowl with the cleaning brush. A plunger might have been better suited to the task, but there wasn’t one to be found, and the shops were all closed at this hour. Standing behind him, Gaëtane urged her assistant on, all the while chastising him for his ineffectiveness; Nunzio didn’t reply, though his thrusts became more and more violent, sending up little splashes each time. Every once in a while, he tried pulling the lever. It was no use; the water refused to go down. Finally, Gaëtane said, “Stop, stop! You’re getting that filth on me! What’s wrong with you? It’s obviously not working. You’re going to have to pull it out manually.”

  “What do you mean, ‘manually’?”

  “I mean with your hands.”

  “I know what the word means, thank you.”

  “If you can’t do it, just say so.”

  “I didn’t say that…”

  As I listened to their exchange, it dawned on me that Gém wasn’t with them. No one was watching her. Moments later, I found my godchild asleep, fully dressed, in her room. Her ridiculous hairdo had come undone at some point, but there remained a few sparkles on her flushed cheeks. I noticed that her soles were black from walking around barefoot all evening. On the wall above her was an old poster of Corto Maltese en Sibérie. For a moment I stood watching her sleep. An outcast at her own party, I thought to myself. In the past, I had watched her sleep countless times, but for some reason I felt a wave of sadness wash over me, as though I had come to say goodbye. When I roused her, she was awake instantly, like a cat.

  “We’re moving to Rome,” she said as she sat up in bed. Her voice was deprived of emotion, but when I met her eyes I saw the sorrow written there, visible in the slight tremor of her pupils. She went on, “It was Gaëtane’s idea. Is she Papa’s new girlfriend now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said softly.

  She stared down at her toenails, which were painted to match the sparkles on her cheeks. “Will you come see me in Rome?”

  “Of course. Now follow me,” I said, and she complied without asking me where we were going.

  The only way to leave the apartment was in plain view of everyone, but it didn’t matter: the important thing was to act like everything was normal. With Gém beside me, we made our way down the hallway, past Gaëtane and her boy Friday, who was still struggling with the toilet before an audience of fascinated and disgusted guests. There were kids running around chasing each other, and one person was trying to rouse the others into starting a conga line. As I made my way through the living room, temporarily empty as if everyone had already left, I lifted Gém up and put her on my shoulders. It was hard to believe, but there had never been a reason for me to carry her on my shoulders, though I had seen René do so more than a few times. In that manner, we strode out of there and onto the landing.

  “Elevator or stairway?” I asked her.

  “Stairs!” she said, and so stairs it was. We made our way down the two flights, and the night air greeted us like a warm friend, a soothing hand. There was a small park nearby, only a few streets away; sometimes the gate wasn’t locked at night. I had just stepped out onto the sidewalk when I heard something, a movement, in the alley next to the building. I lowered Gém to the ground and quieted her with a gesture. Then, slowly, I peered around the corner and that was when I saw René. On reflex, I took a step back, though it was unlikely that he had seen me. He was squatting, his pants around his ankles, and underneath his pale, hairy thighs I could make out the semi-transparent shape of a grocery bag dully reflecting the light from across the street. Only then did it dawn on me what he was doing. I heard him let out something between a grunt and a sigh.

  “Henrik?” Gém, behind me, was tugging at my sleeve. I couldn’t let her see her father defecating into a grocery bag. René had told me that when Gém was three he had once surprised her behind their vacation home in Bourgogne. She had called out and waved, a gleeful expression on her face, as though she’d been waiting for him to notice her, crouched in the shade of a tree.

  This was different, of course. Parents can watch their child defecate, but not the other way around. Never let your child see you naked, as Danish wisdom goes.

  “What is it? What’d you see?” By then, we were halfway to the park. Summer wasn’t far off; I could feel it in the air.

  “I didn’t see anything,” I told her, affecting a nonchalant tone. “There was nothing to see.”

  3. The Loneliness of the Augur

  The crows claim that a single one of them could destroy the heavens. This is no doubt true, though it proves nothing against the heavens, for heaven simply means: the impossibility of crows.

  —Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms

  I saw her before she saw me. She was standing next to a self-service booth in the waiting area of Roma Termini station and looking the other way, as though oblivious to the movement around her. She let fall to the ground her cigarette, then crushed it with the toe of her shoe. Gaëtane, my friend René’s new wife. Gém’s new stepmother. It had all happened so fast that her marriage to René hadn’t quite sunk in yet. She was wearing a sleek little astrakhan coat over her anthracite-blue tailleur. It wasn’t for me that she had dressed up; this was how she looked every day as a manager of young talents. She was no longer a scout, at least not in any active sense, delegating the field work to those below her, though she might still swoop down from Mount Olympus if some young promising thing caught her eye. Even now, she blended effortlessly into the background—like any good scout—though it was no effort for her to materialize, card in hand, should the occasion call for it. I watched her, draped in my own, second-rate brand of invisibility: as long as she didn’t see me, it was as though I wasn’t there. On any other morning, she would be going over the day’s schedule in her office, returning calls to casting agents, following up on appointments with clients. But instead, here she was, waiting for me.

  The previous night, she had called from Rome to say that René had lost the plot, had really gone off the deep end this time. All she would say on the phone was that he had suffered some sort of breakdown. Offering to pay for my ticket (which I made a show of turning down at first), she had begged me to come and talk some sense into my friend. If anyone was going to break the spell, it would be me, she said. Apparently, he wanted to put Gém in a film he was trying to get made with several collaborators “of dubious standing” (her words), among them Renato Amorese, a.k.a. the Prince of Cannibals, as the Italian press had christened him in the late seventies, during his fifteen months of fame. As her first acting role, a début in something questionable, low-budget and no doubt violent could, according to Gaëtane, not only be “fatal” for Gém’s budding public image, but also traumatize her young and vulnerable mind. The veneer of concern for Gém’s welfare was only a façade: above all else, Gaëtane was concerned about her own
career (which she owed to Gém, her biggest client), though I knew better than to voice such suspicions. She needed me; I might be able to use it against her in the future. And so I had accepted Gaëtane’s invitation, despite the fact that, during the whole of our acquaintance, she had never ceased to question the nature of my feelings for Gém. It was obvious that, deep down, Gaëtane was jealous of the relationship I had with my godchild because I had been there from the start, so to speak. It shouldn’t have mattered, but to her it did. Relations between us had deteriorated further after Gém’s modeling career took off. A catalogue spread that she did for Baby Dior was the turning point. The photos showed her lounging around on a giant pouf with several other kids, including some boys, one of whom—Gaëtane pointed out—had to be at least nine or ten. (Gém was six, at the time.) All were dressed in tank tops and gauzy foulards, some of the girls held stuffed animals, but nothing that would make anyone raise an eyebrow. I had taken Gém to the shoot because Gaëtane herself had been unable to go. Bringing up previous occasions when I had volunteered to accompany my godchild (because no one else was available), to photo sessions for so-called art magazines involving five-year-olds made up like drag queens and preteens wearing fake garter belts, Gaëtane accused me of certain unsavory ulterior motives. After that, she began dropping not-so-subtle hints in front of other people, calling me “Henrik Henrik” and citing my fondness for the novels of Gabriel Matzneff as a sure sign that I was a something-or-other who should not be entrusted with the charge of young girls. She had said a number of other things hardly worth repeating here.

  Gaëtane finally noticed me and called out my name. I called out hers, and she surprised me by kissing me on the cheeks. The gesture was brusque, almost convulsive, as though she had decided on it at the last possible second. In the past, we had always greeted each other with a perfunctory handshake. She walked ahead, her high heels making a clicking sound, and I stared at the nape of her neck, which her fashionable haircut left bare, as she led me outside, past the rose sellers, the limousines lining the curb (but not a single taxi), and into a cobblestone alley I would never have noticed on my own, where a green Citroën Méhari was parked next to an overflowing trash receptacle decorated with an effigy of the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus. The air had a peculiar, cabbagelike tang and felt as cold as the air I’d left behind in Paris.

  We left the orbit of the train station, and even at this matinal hour there were pedestrians, scooters, buses vying for a place in the narrow one-way streets that Gaëtane seemed to know well, as if she had lived in Rome all her life. I watched her extract another cigarette from a pack of Muratti as she steered with the other (manicured) hand. Next to me, she gave off an impression of both indolence and impatience—a case of suppressed nerves, perhaps. In Paris, I had never once seen her take the wheel; I hadn’t known she had a permit. (I myself had never gotten mine.) Several times, I was sure she would hit someone as she took one turn after another—burning a red light at one point—until I was no longer sure if the train station was behind us or in front of us, and I had the thought that she was purposely trying to disorient me, like an unscrupulous driver with a hapless tourist.

  “Listen,” she said, interrupting the silence, “I know we’ve had our differences in the past, but I’d like to put all of it behind us.”

  “Well, I’m here, aren’t I?”

  We were driving past the university, La Sapienza, where a crowd had gathered for a demonstration of some sort next to a statue of Minerva holding aloft a lance on which sat a lone crow, as though presiding over the proceedings. I glimpsed more crows along the top of several buildings, and I couldn’t tell if they were all subservient to the lone crow, or if the latter, for reasons unknown, was being shunned by the rest of his brethren.

  “This is hard for me to admit, Henrik, but a part of me always knew that you weren’t capable of hurting Gém.” She kept her gaze focused on the road. “I saw how fond she was of you, and I became a little jealous. But I shouldn’t have reacted the way I did.”

  “How is she?”

  “Her grades are nothing to write home about, and she hasn’t made any friends since arriving in Rome. The others make fun of her, according to her teacher, for speaking differently and for being the only blond-haired kid in her class. Who would have thought that she could be singled out for having blond hair, of all things?”

  “In Denmark,” I said, “I was singled out for not having blond hair. I suppose it’s the same thing, in the end.”

  She honked at a man on a scooter. “What was that?”

  “Nothing. It was nothing.”

  A memory, one I hadn’t thought about in some time, came back to me: a kid I had never talked to punched me in the face because—he explained afterwards—he wanted to see if I could see his fist through the slits I had for eyes. That was how it had started; I was eight years old. Soon after that, I left the Kildevæld Privatskole and Copenhagen for the International School in Stockholm.

  “She cried when we left Paris,” I heard Gaëtane say. “For weeks, she was inconsolable.”

  I had last seen my godchild a year ago, on the eve of her departure for Rome, when Bors suddenly vanished. The cat liked to hang about in the courtyard of René’s building, and Gém had befriended it with pieces of ham, biscottes, even bits of lettuce she carried around in her pockets; the two of them became inseparable. Around me, the animal had always been reserved and circumspect, fleeing when I made as if to caress it, then fixing me with expressionless verdigris eyes from the safety of a window ledge. It was René who had named the cat—all white except for a single black spot on the side—after one of the knights of the Round Table, Sir Bors de Ganis. In the end, unable to console his daughter, my friend had called me—without telling Gaëtane—to ask if I would make the rounds of the neighborhood with Gém (as he himself couldn’t be bothered). We had spent several hours looking for the cat, though it was a lost cause. As we made our way home in the rain, she kept pausing, like Petit Poucet, to leave food on the sidewalk. In the vestibule of the building, as I did my best to dry her off, using my fingers to brush back her wet hair, I could see that she was trying hard not to cry. That was when I told her that it was always sad to lose something, but there were some things that could not be lost. A cat, for example. I told her that no one in all of history had ever lost a cat: such a thing simply wasn’t possible. Because no matter what happened out there—I gestured behind me, at the rain coming down—she didn’t have to stop thinking about Bors, who would stay with her as long as she wanted. And when he did, one day, start to fade away, it would happen so naturally that she wouldn’t think to notice he was gone. It would be like the moon, eclipsing itself in stages, so regular and gradual that she wouldn’t even know to miss anything. I don’t know if she believed me or not.

  “Did you tell her I was coming?” I asked Gaëtane. Today was my goddaughter’s birthday. At exactly four-twenty-two this afternoon, Gém would turn eight.

  “No”—she flicked her cigarette out the window—“you’re supposed to be a surprise.” The streets had grown smaller, made narrower still by the cars parked on both sides, but Gaëtane handled the Méhari like it was a tiny little Skoda. “René is throwing her a party. I know, I know. But it’s kept him occupied until now.”

  “Last time,” I said, “he made all of his colleagues from work bring their kids.”

  She sighed. “Don’t worry. He’s let all of his commissions dry up. Ever since the whole movie business, he’s stopped trans- lating altogether. He has no colleagues left. The only person willing to work with him now is the Prince of Cannibals.”

  She slowed to a stop in front of a porte cochère, but didn’t get out after she’d cut the contact.

  “This Renato Amorese,” she said at last, turning to me, “I know his kind. All he knows how to do is exploit people. To him, actors are nothing more than pawns, a means to an end … I’ve been watching his films, and in one of them, Cannibal Masked Ball, there’s
a scene where”—she paused to light another cigarette—“where a sheep is skinned alive with great care, every effort made to avoid sudden movements, as though for the sake of the animal. This is after they trepan a monkey and attempt to cut a sedated rhino in half. It’s horrible. But I can’t stop watching. The animal cruelty is there only because he could get away with it—back then, at least. He had to fake the human deaths, but he could film the real thing with animals. The thought of someone like that…” She shook her head, as though chasing away a thought. “Anyway”—she opened the door to get out, throwing her cigarette on the ground—“I’ll walk you to the door. Then I need to be going.”

  I followed her through a passage paved with cobbles. It was dark enough that I found myself focusing on the click of her heels, a lonely little sound. When she held open the door of the lift—an ancient and ornate thing straight out of Proust or maybe Huysmans—I caught a hint of her scent, the same one she’d worn in Paris.

  “So what’s he like?” I asked her, as the lift, creaking and grunting, made its way upward.

  “Who?”

  “The Prince of Cannibals.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is he an octopus like Nunzio?”

  For several long moments she didn’t answer. “I don’t know. I’ve never met him.” She was standing slightly in front and I couldn’t see her face, only her breath, coming out in faint white puffs. “I’ve never met him,” she went on, as though to herself, “but I feel that I already know him through his films.”

  She let me into the apartment, then stepped back into the lift. “He’s in the bedroom, at the end of the hallway.”

  I returned her gaze, which was hard, cold. The warmth I had glimpsed at the station was gone. Already, I regretted my words.

  “I can’t promise you anything,” I said.

  “That makes two of us.”