by Mary Fleming
For a couple of years, though, it was okay. We went to the cinema a lot, we talked and talked. I was having regular sex with someone other than myself, and that seemed pretty cool. I was happy enough at the Sorbonne, studying literature, especially since on the side I was taking photos. But after I’d graduated and just before the show of my Bercy photographs, I had an accident for which I’m afraid to say Jacqueline was directly responsible. Besides the canceled show and a subsequent loss of belief in True Purpose, it resulted in my developing a firm belief that Love was not and never would be for me. Now, maybe even the casual variety was doomed.
By the time I got to Saturday, I was feeling like a ghost. The shop was quieter than any other weekend day I could remember. It was as if the place had already been reclaimed by the insurance company, and I was just a specter floating around inside. Except for the thoughts in my head, I did not exist. At one point, remembering the proverbial tree falling in the forest, I spoke out loud to myself for confirmation. I can be heard, therefore I am.
When the phone rang, my blood turned icy, my heart pumped in my ears. I stared at the grey object, terrified. But I answered it, just as irrationally terrified of what would happen if I didn’t. It was Stephanie reminding me about dinner and the bicycle. Like an automaton, I said okay, I’ll be there, either because that was the passive path of least resistance to which I had grown so accustomed. Or because I’d done a lousy job dismissing the bourgeois values, such as personal responsibility, with which I’d been raised. Anyway, I rationalized as I wheeled Caroline’s new bicycle into the street, wishing I were still flat-backed on my mattress, I’ll get a check, which might me make me feel less of a ghost.
The rue des Martyrs was always dead quiet in the evening. A small grocery store, run by two Algerian brothers, was open until midnight, but otherwise, metal grilles were pulled down on all the shop fronts, with café chairs stacked inside dark windows. In my still delicate state, I imagined the ghost of a headless St. Denis appearing at any moment—I pushed the bike faster to the métro. Underground, I entered a stormy, choppy sea of humanity. As the evening news had announced, the first train drivers were going on strike; the transport system was beginning to clog. I squeezed onto the platform with the bicycle, and the crowd shifted irately to make room. An angry woman next to me grumbled about my “heap of metal.” When an already loaded car finally arrived, I barely managed to push my way in. The doors closed hard on my back; more passengers complained about having to share precious space with a vehicle that should have been above ground, rolling itself to its destination.
I was the last to arrive, but after parking the bike in the front hall closet and walking into the living room, I wished I were even later. Days, months, years later. Standing next to the fireplace with a glass of red wine in her ringed hand was Jennifer, about the last person in the world I wanted to see.
But my policy was to face the music when it was blaring in my ears. I shook hands with four other guests, then walked right up to her at the fireplace and kissed her, like a friend, on both cheeks. “Hello, Jennifer.”
“I haven’t heard from you in a while,” she said, stepping back from me abruptly.
“Yes, well,” I answered and turned to the woman with an amused smile on her face standing next to her. “Hello.” I offered my hand. “Trevor.”
“Béa. Béa Fairbank,” she said with an English accent similar to Camilla Barchester’s. “I’m a friend of Jennifer’s,” she added. I nodded warily. In my experience, the friends of the offended could be more vindictive and vicious than the offended themselves.
“Béa’s painting me,” Jennifer said through clenched teeth, a forced smile. Posing as a live model for artists was how she paid the bills.
“Ah,” I said as Stephanie placed a hand on my shoulder from behind: “Sorry not to greet you at the door. What can I get you to drink?”
“If you’ll show me where it is, I’ll get it myself.” I turned to Jennifer and her friend. “Excuse me.”
“Don’t count on it,” said Jennifer.
Various bottles were laid out on a table. I poured myself a glass of white wine, but it was too dry and I added a little crême de cassis to sweeten it up, spilling a drop of the sticky red liquor on the white tablecloth. As I was trying to dab it up with a cocktail napkin, there again was Stephanie at my back. “That’s not how to make a kir. Look,” she pointed, “all that heavy cassis is globbed together. You have to put it in first.” She was right; the cassis hung like blood in the glass.
“Doesn’t matter.” I shrugged. “Cheers.”
“Cheers,” she said, clinking her glass against mine, that ripe fruit-slice smile opening up on her face. She gestured to the closet where I’d put the bicycle. “Thanks so much for lugging that thing all the way over here.”
“No problem,” I said.
“And don’t let me forget to give you a check for it before you leave.” She put her hand on my shoulder.
“Okay.”
“So,” Stephanie said, turning to the room, “we’re going to eat in just a minute. Drink up.” She and Edward had much the same farmer’s approach to social events as my mother: feed and water the guests, then let them quickly back out to pasture. “Dolores,” she called to the Filipina maid as she strode toward the kitchen.
In order to keep my back to Jennifer, I turned to the two couples sitting on the sofas. I recognized them from another party. They were church people, and I assumed from their intent, exclusive huddle that they were hotly discussing church business. It struck me that Stephanie had made a mistake. Dancing Jennifer, with her ringed fingers and sexy prowl, would not mesh with the church folk. Neither would her friend the painter, who was dressed in a flowing, après-yoga outfit. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the two of them still standing by the fireplace in their own intense huddle, probably smoldering over my hard heart and cruel ways. Jennifer had her shapely back to me, but it looked rigid and angry. The painter was looking sympathetic.
Stephanie clapped her hands to call us in to dinner.
“Where’s Edward?” I asked, suddenly realizing I hadn’t seen him.
“On the phone.” Her eyes narrowed and her mouth tightened. “You sit next to me,” she added more cheerfully, patting my chair back.
It was a squeeze, with nine people around the sleek table made for eight. Perhaps Jennifer, who commandeered the seat on my other side, had insisted on coming with reinforcements.
“We’re destined to be together, one way or another,” she said as we sat down.
Edward entered looking distracted. Stephanie looked at him, and her fine nostrils flared, but he did not look back at her.
The table arrangements were lopsided. The churchgoers flocked together at one end, with Edward, while I had the disturbed females at the other. The chatter and insouciance on their side made the silence in our corner even weightier. We proceeded with our slices of smoked salmon. I turned to the painter, the only woman at my end not fuming. “Do you live here in Paris, or are you visiting from Britain?”
“Mostly I live in the south of France. But I move around a lot.” She looked me straight in the eye but no daggers. “We have friends in common, you know.”
“We do?”
“Viviane and Cédric.”
“Really? What’s your name again?”
“Béa Fairbank. I’ve known Viviane and Cédric since the summer they met in Aix-en-Provence. I couldn’t make it to their wedding, and now I mostly see them down there, when they come south in the summer.” She paused. “I’ve heard about you, though.” The wry smile implied she’d heard quite a bit. I didn’t say anything, just rolled my eyes, and a most extraordinary laugh emerged from her. One that started deep down and exploded in many bright pieces when it reached the surface. Her eyes glittered. What a shame she was on the chubby side.
“I’ve just bought a bicycle for Caroline from Trevor,” Stephanie said, emerging from her gloomy silence.
“Sometimes I think I c
ould use a bicycle, but I move around too much,” said Béa.
“He’s got anything you want, I’m sure,” added Jennifer with a proprietary edge. She reached forward to pour herself more wine. “But just stick to bicycles, is my advice to you, Béa.”
“Careful what you say about my brother-in-law,” Stephanie said with her fruity smile. She put her hand on my thigh under the table, then removed it.
The meal went on, through the stuffed guinea hen that had obviously been prepared by the butcher, the wild rice, which must have been bought at an American store, the cheese and salad, and the bakery-bought chocolate cake. Dolores the Filipina maid continued to move in and out, clearing plates, replenishing platters. But it was like two different parties, with Edward and the churchgoers babbling about the shocking number of face-lifts in Paris, while Stephanie on one side lavished me with attention, and Jennifer on the other threw verbal darts at me. Fortunately, as the meal went on, the wine dulled their tips, and by dessert Jennifer’s missiles were as soft as warm wax. Béa, on the other side of the table, said little. She observed the scene of the two women and me. Stephanie ignored her, and Jennifer spoke pointedly to her, when Stephanie was speaking to me. All through dinner, Stephanie kept glancing at Edward, and he never once looked back.
Jennifer settled in an armchair and threatened to go on to cognac. I pulled up a straight-backed chair and told her what I should have told her weeks before: that she wanted more than I could or would give. That, as I’d warned from the beginning, this meant the end. I avoided phrases like: “Don’t take it badly” or “We can still be friends.” Experience had taught me such words of comfort were taken to be patronizing and had an explosive effect. Instead, I spoke softly and firmly, and in her drunken state, that approach fortunately appeased her. Dissuading her from a cognac, I fetched her a verbena tisane, and by the time I returned with it, Béa was at her now quietly teary side. I took refuge with the churchgoers: Diane, Leslie, and Don. Guillaume, Diane’s French husband, had stayed in the dining room to smoke a cigar with Edward.
“So remind me, Trevor,” Leslie said as I sat down next to her, “what work you do.” She and Don, sensibly dressed, community-minded people, worked at the Embassy, I remembered.
“I run a bicycle shop,” I answered, already regretting my move to the sofa. I wanted a cigarette, and smoking would not be a crowd-pleaser here.
“You don’t see many bicycles in Paris,” Don piped up, with a hairy hand propped on his perma-press khaki knee. “Where do you drum up business?”
“Here and there.” I shrugged.
“Here and where?” asked Leslie, just short of mockery.
“The few you do see on bikes never wear helmets, that’s for sure,” said Diane. “I’ve had ridiculous arguments with Guillaume about the children wearing them in the park.”
“Crazy.” Don shook his head.
“It depends on your point of view,” I said.
“And what is your point of view?” Leslie asked.
“Besides looking silly and ruining the hair, helmets don’t fundamentally protect you.”
“Well,” she said, “they protect your head, where injuries do the most damage.”
“I mean that what’s going to get you will get you, whether it’s a bicycle accident or a cancer or a falling meteorite.”
“Ah, I see,” she said. “A fatalist. I guess you don’t work the law of averages into your calculations. The fact, for example, that your chances of being mowed down by a French driver are considerably greater than the possibility of your getting in the way of a stray heavenly object.”
“To me,” said Don, leaning back on the chair that looked too small for his simian body, “it’s just plain stupid. Especially, as you say Leslie, with the way people drive here.”
“Exactly,” said Diane, as if finally, someone had understood what she had to put up with, day in day out.
“The incredible thing to me,” said Don, “is how rules and regulations generally are just thrown to the wind in this country.”
“Well, it’s not for any shortage of restrictions,” added Leslie. “Our children are having real trouble adjusting to that at school— and the school is supposed to be bilingual. We incorrectly assumed that also meant bicultural.”
That was it. They were off, launched like a rocket into the wide open space of French Bashing. Leslie and Don, having been in Paris only a year, led the attack, at moments with a viciousness I found most un-Christian. Diane, married to a Frenchman and, minus long summer vacations in Vermont, probably stuck here for life, veered from commiseration to explanation to mediation. She was keenly involved in several volunteer associations promoting better understanding between the two countries. No wonder she found the inability to reach an agreement with her French husband on the utility or futility of bicycle helmets so troubling.
At some dinners I leapt into these debates with vigor, contrarily defending my adopted country tooth and nail. But tonight, after a morose week and a four-course meal sitting between Stephanie and Jennifer, I didn’t have the energy. I listened as they hammered the French school system—how inflexible, unwelcoming, unencouraging, unimaginative it is—in bored silence.
Stephanie plopped down next to me and started telling me about a book she’d just read and that she thought I’d like. I was surprised. Even though we often discussed books, she was an inveterate French Basher and was usually only too happy to jump into the fray. But not tonight. The book, I remember, was Independence Day. She looked at me playfully and said: “The main character is rather like you.” Her hand alighted on my knee. “Disaffected. A bit cynical but basically endearing.”
I felt my face go warm. I looked furtively at the churchgoers to see if they’d heard, but they were entirely absorbed in the unforgiveable shortcomings of the French. “Sounds like I should read it,” I mumbled. I did not tell her, as she continued to talk, that my mother had already passed on The Sports Writer to me, that I’d already spent several hundred pages in the company of the dysfunctional Frank Bascombe and was now beginning to feel more like a literary type than a human being.
The evening wound down, ending in a general discussion about the strike that was simmering and the shameful laziness of the French worker. “It’s downright sinful,” said Don. I stood up and said I was leaving; Stephanie said: “Not before I pay you. My checkbook’s in the back. Come with me and I’ll give you the book, too.” I followed her down the dark corridor, past the sleeping children, to my brother’s bedroom. “Let’s see,” she said, eye running over the messy desk. “Here’s the book,” she said, handing over Frank Bascombe’s latest adventures. Then she leaned over the desk, rustling papers. Her hair slid off her shoulder and across her face. Her firm torso that showed no trace of motherhood was outlined in the orb of desk-lamp light. I put my hand on her back, felt vertebrae and rib cage. Without flinching, she said: “Here’s the checkbook.” Her pen didn’t miss a loop. When she’d finished, she straightened, and my hand slipped off but not before it brushed her left buttock. She smiled at me, looked me up and down, then folded the check and stuck it in the pocket of my shirt, with a little pat at my pounding heart. “Here you go,” she said and pulled me into one of those hugs again. “Thanks again.”
I took my leave as if nothing had happened, or ever would. I said good-bye to my brother and chastely kissed his wife’s two cheeks. I walked down the stairs with the churchgoers. All the normal motions, performed in a trance. The chilly walk home did not knock me back to my senses, nor did a restless night’s sleep. Not even the light of the next day, when I went to see Jennifer, so that I could tell her again, while she was sober and I was not under the gun, that our short interaction was over. Not a single question about what had happened with Stephanie in her bedroom reached my conscious mind. Only the memory of her backbone and rib cage. Only the tingle, at her hand on my arm, the smile on her face, the outline of the firm stomach, and the hair falling.
I wasn’t depressed anymore. I
was on drugs.
Monday morning I lifted my head from the pillow, then let it drop back down, while I once again replayed the bedroom scene in my head. But when I got to the check in the pocket and the pat at my chest, the reverie came to an abrupt halt. Money reminded me that today was the day I was meeting Monsieur Petitdemange, my bank manager. It was the day that my accounts would be spread out like tagged pieces of evidence at a trial, exposing my insolvency, my failure.
I got up and marched heavily into my sort-of bathroom, letting the hot water of the shower douse me and douse me again, imagining it was Stephanie touching me all over as I jerked off. It didn’t help. As I got out and dried myself, the bank visit still loomed. I wiped a circle clear on the foggy mirror, started shaving, and cut myself. The corner of the Kleenex I used to stop the blood on my neck wouldn’t stick, and I had to pick up sodden bloody scraps from the floor as I got dressed.
On the radio, the only news was the transport strike. Train service was completely halted, they said, and the métro was at a virtual standstill. As for buses, there were still a few, but nothing you could count on. Out my window, the rue des Martyrs was a solid line of cars, with frustrated drivers hooting for someone to move forward when there was no place to go.
Once I got down to the street myself, I joined the solid mass of foot soldiers. All those who usually traveled underground had surfaced. People walked briskly, without any exterior sign of annoyance at the change in their routine, at the need to take a long, cold walk to work, rather than a crowded, warm hurtle underground.
At the Rendez-Vous, where I stopped for breakfast, Jean-Jacques said: “You should have seen the traffic this morning. It’s going to be bad. I’m taking over the room out back and camping there.” Usually Jean-Jacques took an early train in from the suburb where he lived because, like most café waiters, he couldn’t afford the city.
The strike was splashed across the front page of the newspaper someone had left on my table. “Another 1968?” the headline asked ominously. It was not only the train drivers who were unhappy. Students wanted more teachers and better conditions at the universities. The entire public sector, meaning a whopping one-quarter of the French workforce, was up in arms at the government’s attempt to reform the heavily indebted social security system by requiring fonctionnaires to pay into the system for forty years, like the private sector, instead of their current thirty seven and a half.