Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost
Page 22
It was decided at the last moment that the ending with Hugin and Munin would be filmed at a location in Paris, a cheaper alternative to building a large-scale set at Cinecittà, and which had the added benefit of René’s absence. I was to accompany Gémanuelle there, but I let Gaëtane convince me that she should go instead. Of course, it made more sense that she be with Gém, the two of them sleeping in the same hotel room, in the same bed, sharing the same pillow—she was her mother, after all, whereas I was … nothing in particular. I would stay in Rome and look after my friend, who still couldn’t leave the bed on account of his gout. (I didn’t know that Renato had rewritten the ending.) I remember telling myself that I was doing the right thing—René was having a hard time, he was my oldest friend and he needed me—but I’m not sure if I believed this, even then. To this day, I can’t help but wonder: if I hadn’t backed out at the last minute, then Gaëtane might not have gone, she and Renato would never have become lovers, and maybe, just maybe, René might not have lost custody of Gém.
One of the last times I saw her on the set at Cinecittà, the light technicians were setting up, the mic operator still getting into position and the ground beneath me a mess of cables. At the center of it all was Gém—or should I say Maya—illuminated from several different angles. Her blond hair was glowing, slowly pulsing, a few strands starting to rise, as though charged with static electricity. I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed, but I seemed to be the only one looking directly at her. I wondered if the effect was intentional, or if I simply happened to be standing in the right spot—a trick of the light, a trick of the mind. Not only her hair, but even her skin seemed infused with the same mysterious incandescence, like a manifestation of her telekinesis, I thought, not what had been written for her character but real magic, emanating from her body and with which she could annihilate us all in the blink of an eye. I hadn’t yet told her that I wouldn’t be going with her to Paris, and I found myself wondering if, somehow, she already knew. I waited for her gaze to cross mine, but it was as though she couldn’t see me with all the lights shining in her face.
* * *
The morning after René’s housewarming party, I took the 1 Line all the way to the terminus, La Défense. I walked around a bit, until I came to a terrace overlooking a courtyard surrounded by shops and cafés and high-rises. Behind me was the Grande Arche and the commercial center. Below me, in the courtyard, was a group of kids engaged in a game of football. Around me, the buildings, their façades once white, or almost white, had gradually yellowed and blackened over the years. Farther on, beyond the line of high-rises, I could make out the skyscrapers of the business district.
The Wall Street Institute—where I taught Wall Street English, four times a week—had a branch nearby, but this was the first time I had ventured into this particular complex. (Until now, I had avoided it altogether.) It wasn’t hard to see why Renato had wanted to film the climactic scene here. With only minor adjustments, some clever camera angles, the cluster of residential towers could be made to pass for a futuristic redoubt in a post-apocalyptic world, among the curved pathways and marmorean walls.
I hadn’t seen her since she had left with Gaëtane, Renato and the rest of the crew to finish the film. Soon afterwards, Gaëtane and Renato had moved in together, and now she lived with them in a well-to-do neighborhood of Rome. A quiet little street, I am told. Somewhere near the piazza del Popolo, with cobblestones and ivy-covered balconies, one of the few spots in the city where the clamor of traffic can’t be heard. In a few days, it was going to be her eleventh birthday. My father had once told me that eleven was the age at which one was least likely to die, coming as it does after the dangers of early childhood but before the vicissitudes of adolescence.
From the terrace, I continued to watch the kids, and suddenly one of them stopped running after the ball and looked up at me. For a moment, it seemed like he was going to do something, make a sign, a gesture, but in the end he went back to his game as though nothing had happened. Only then did it occur to me that he might have been staring at something else altogether. I made my way down to the courtyard, giving the players a wide berth. This was where it had happened, the final confrontation against i due corvi, Hugin and Munin. In my head, I tried to reenact the scene. Maya is taken by surprise, despite her ability to sense the presence of other humans from their psychic signatures, despite everything Niko has taught her during their all-too-brief time together. Once again, I ran through the scene of her demise, her death, which I had imagined so many times that it was like I had already seen it, countless times, in an endless succession of screen tests and failed outtakes.
At one of the cafés—Le Fleurus—I walked in, greeted the proprietor, and ordered a coffee, which I drank standing up at the counter, taking my time. Afterwards, I asked the proprio if he by chance remembered an Italian film crew in the area about a year ago. He didn’t seem in the least surprised by my question, as though I wasn’t the first to ask. “Afraid not,” he answered after a moment’s reflection. “I wasn’t around then.” He gestured with his chin at the restaurant across the courtyard, Le Chien de Fusil. “Momo might be able to tell you something. Unfortunately, he’s not here, and I can’t say when he’ll be back.”
Outside, I peered into the restaurant he had pointed out. The interior was dark, as though abandoned. What was I looking for, exactly? The kids were gone, having finished their game; the late-morning air was brisk, mistral. I turned, slowly, in a circle. Just barely visible from where I stood was the Grande Arche de la Défense, and I tried to recall the name of the architect—a Dane—who had designed it. But the name refused to come, and in the end I gave up. Someone I had met at René’s party last night had told me that the voices of those once closest to us are the ones we forget the fastest.
Forgive me, Gém.
* * *
The last time I came to pick her up at Cinecittà, she wasn’t waiting for me at our usual spot in front of the headless Roman statues. Was I running late? No, I was on time, as always. I looked around. Empty lots, neglected props, expanses of green lawn. All was calm and silent. Not a soul to be seen, not even a solitary crow circling overhead. René had told me, showing me around the first time, that the outdoor sets were most often used by big foreign productions, who came and built everything from scratch, then left it behind—huge set pieces, thereafter forgotten and decaying. Italian film crews had their own studios elsewhere or shot on location, as it was both cheaper and more modern. The era of Fellini was long gone.
I found her among the remains of Pompeii, which had been used for a Spanish television series that had won a lot of awards. At the stone archway with its artificially weathered concrete, we stared at each other in silence. She was upset with me—that much was obvious, even if I couldn’t see inside her head. How had she found out I wasn’t going? Had Gaëtane told her? (I had made it clear that I wanted to break the news myself.) The look in my goddaughter’s eyes said that I was abandoning her, letting her down—all because I was afraid of what I might see, the charred and blackened casserole of my inner self reflected, this time, not in the secrecy of a lavatory mirror but in the openness of her ten-year-old’s face. Confronted by her unwavering gaze, I became convinced that she could hear my every thought, and as I struggled to fight down my panic, it occurred to me: the trick was not to empty one’s mind, which in any case was impossible, but instead to fill it with more thoughts, all kinds of thoughts, crisscrossing and converging. Like typing over a word with another word, then with another, again and again, until there is only an indecipherable jumble of letters, I thought to myself, as I gave her a smile that reflected none of the chaos and turmoil and sorrow inside of me.
Acknowledgments
Thank you: PJ Mark, Mitzi Angel, Molly Walls, Ian Bonaparte, Yves Jaques, Laura Efron, Frances Hwang, Nathalie Ferrier, Margot Livesey, Kevin Brockmeier, Thisbe Nissen, Lan Samantha Chang, Ethan Canin, Frank Conroy, Anthony Swofford, Jim Crace, Cressida Leyshon, De
borah Treisman, Jaimy Gordon, Gabriel Louis, and—most of all—Bosie.
I’d also like to thank the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where I finished writing this book during the most productive (and therefore happiest) seven months of my life as a writer.
Thanks, as well, to the Crous de la rue de l’Abbaye and the workshop of Dominique Barbéris at the Sorbonne. A shout-out to Grégory Bouak, Daniela Bambasova, Namtran Nguyen, Tiburce Guyard, Perrine Rideau (merci de l’avoir lu à ma place, mon texte sur José Bové), Philippe Laurichesse, Lucille Dupré, Marie-Pierre Borniche, Tatiane Thiénot, Sandrine Jacquemont, Ivan Berlocher, Kim Estivalet, and Nate Hoks.
“Crow the Aesthète” is modeled after the poem “Das ästhetische Wiesel,” by Christian Morgenstern. Henrik’s speech to Gém about her lost cat, Bors, contains echoes of Rilke’s letter to Balthus about his vanished cat, Mitsou. I first encountered the word “kærestesorg” in a poem by Henrik Nordbrandt.
Fumiko’s message, in its entirety, reads as follows: “Un revenant dans ta chambre peux faire disparaître le silence”—in addition to the error described in the book, she also left out a “tu” before “peux.”
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Hoon Kim is a Korean-born American educated in France who took his first creative writing workshop at the Sorbonne before attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Brins d’éternité, Le Sabord, and XYZ. La revue de la nouvelle. He writes in English and in French. You can sign up for email updates here.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
I. FUMIKO
Sweetheart Sorrow
Don’t Carry Me Too Far Away
Is It Still You?
II. BEFORE FUMIKO
Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost
III. AFTER FUMIKO
Crow the Aesthète
The Impossibility of Crows
Stazione Termini
The Specialist of Death
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2021 by David Hoon Kim
All rights reserved
First edition, 2021
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-374-72249-4
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