Sin and Zen, #1

by S. W. Stribling

  I still felt bad for the guy and told her she should stay and sleep with him tonight. She just looked at me as if I was crazy and I said, ‘Okay, let’s just go to sleep.’

  THE NEXT FEW DAYS THE shit hit the fan. Eeva was asking me if I thought it was right how Claudia was treating me and Vasile and her boyfriend. Eeva then confessed she had feelings for me and Claudia had known. That in fact, it was a dog and pony show those nights ago before Christmas. That she can’t believe her ‘best friend’ from here could fuck me in the one week she went home to visit for the holidays. Claudia politely told her to fuck off.

  Even more so my overly intrusive South African friend, the great Mr. Easterhouse, forced his way into the middle and confronted her as well about what her intentions were with me. She impolitely told him to fuck off.

  All these people fighting over my well-being and interest, I felt so loved, so special, almost a charity case.

  Claudia ended things with me there. I said fuck off to everybody.

  4

  A girl I had met in Lyon was having a birthday party and invited me to come up. I had met her on a drinking weekend playing pub quiz when I came to visit the previous fall. She was English and taught English to Chinese people over the Internet. She was fun to talk to, and she liked a lot of the same things I did. I also loved hearing her rap ‘Gangster’s Paradise’ with her thick southern English accent.

  So I said I’d go if I could bring a friend and stay at her place. She said sure. I think she thought we were becoming something. We weren’t. And I hoped that Murphy might cock block us over the weekend. We had slept together before, but it didn’t leave me excited enough to want to do it again. The first time I understood why it was dull: she said it had been a while. The second time just felt like a burden. Also, Claudia and I kissed and made up the day after she broke us up. Though, we still weren’t ‘together.’ Despite not being officially an item though, I still didn’t feel right about sleeping around and it made a good excuse for why I couldn’t sleep with Louise while we were there.

  The food she cooked was lacking any flavor and I’m not sure if the stomach was the way to a man’s heart, but it was definitely important to have something to eat in the house. She was sensitive physically in every way. In bed, it had to be slow, and it almost seemed painful for her. With food, she could only eat raw vegetables. Or cooked. Something strange like that.

  But she was a great laugh and easy to get along with. I just wouldn’t marry the girl.

  Murphy jumped on board to the idea. He had family friends in Lyon due for a visit and we never needed a reason to go piss it up somewhere new.

  THE WEEKEND IN LYON was brilliant. Murphy and I stayed in a drunken stupor the entire weekend. We made friends, we laughed, and I got behind a bar and served drinks. The girl behind the bar, and owner of the place, was patient with me trying to give free bottles of whiskey away and even let me play the music.

  Photos of shitfaced grins were taken, and I learned to really love the magic of booze. Friends, girls, and an absence of thought to the rest of the world.

  We went as visitors; we left as conquerors. I bet my green Legionnaire beret is still hanging up behind that bar.

  MY PHONE HAD DIED AFTER the first day I was there. We were supposed to stay just for the weekend but ended up staying until Thursday. Alcohol, it frees you of all sense of time and responsibility.

  I charged my phone and noticed I had a few missed text, calls, and emails, mostly from Claudia. The email was serious.

  ‘I think we should stop seeing each other.’ She wasn’t much for words. She wrote it in English though. She’d been speaking to me in English since I found out that she could, or at least some variation of French and English known as Franglais.

  In my mind, I was thinking ‘Jesus, what now? We aren’t together but you want to stop fucking each other. Is there another? Are you bored?’ Maybe she’s just falling in love and wants to stop before she does. I thought I was, but if she asked I would lie.

  I texted her and asked if we could talk about it in person. I’m not much of a phone person.

  She said no, but after a few convincing words, she agreed.

  I MET HER LATER THAT night after she had put Léa and Emma, the two little girls she was au-pairing, to bed. The parents were still home and awake so I couldn’t go in, even though they lived on the second and third floors of the house. Claudia lived on the 1st floor where the guest room and pool storage was. They didn’t know I existed yet and Claudia didn’t want them to. I really didn’t either. So I just met her outside at the gate.

  We talked. She stood her ground.

  ‘So, why this sudden change?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I was just thinking while you were away.’ she said, ‘This has been going on for a while now, it’s been great, but I just don’t want it to get confusing for you.’

  I knew this was about her too. She was in a committed relationship with a man back home. A rock star of sorts. They had some understanding that when they were together; they were together. When they were apart; they could sleep around. Too mature for me to understand, but it seemed to work for them. Either that, or she didn’t think she had a choice. I knew she liked me. I had seen it on rare occasions when the walls were down and her eyes said, ‘Hold me.’ I wanted to tell her she was the kind of woman that needed a good lover. That she shouldn’t hide from her feelings.

  ‘I won’t fall for you.’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, actually. I mean to do it every week.’

  ‘Yeah, but every week you call me to come over.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘The day I tell you I love you, you have all permission to leave me and say ‘I told you so.’’

  ‘You say that now.’ she said.

  I knew this would not work out between us. I knew that the day I woke up, fucked her, and then she pulled out her computer to Skype her boyfriend. I told myself every week that I should end this too. But it was good. We were good. And I wanted it to last as long as possible. I wanted to know that I got to her the way she was getting to me. Valentine’s day was around the corner and I was telling myself not to do anything stupid.

  THE WEEK LEADING UP to Valentine’s Day, I was so full of charm and romantic thoughts. I planned to shower her with them and expect nothing in return.

  The family was away yet again and so we had the house to ourselves for a long weekend. I made her something to eat with candles and soft music. I have always enjoyed cooking. Especially for someone else. She hated cooking and did the bare minimum for survival it seemed, so she enjoyed watching me work.

  She showed me around the house as the meal cooked and we looked at the family pictures on the walls and end tables. They looked happy.

  ‘So, are they really that happy?’ I said.

  ‘They are,’ she said, ‘but separately most of the time.’

  I laughed.

  ‘I heard them arguing once over me.’ She said.

  ‘Because you’re a young, attractive woman living in the same house.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Has he ever tried anything?’

  ‘No.’ She said. ‘Not really.’

  That disappointed me.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘he seems to purposely take a shower when I am here and his wife isn’t and struts around in just a towel until I see him.’

  Then I laughed again, imagining the man in the picture doing just that. He wasn’t ugly, but his wife was definitely better looking than him. French men. Every woman thinks they are the most romantic breed of man and the French men even believe it themselves. I wonder why all these French women are running to me and my foreign friends if they are. Stereotypes are usually disappoints I thought. That and having such expectations is usually a recipe for disappointment. A double-edged sword. It cuts both ways.

  We did our Valentine’s dinner, and we did it all with a laugh. Poking fun at Valentine’s, but secretly
enjoying it. She accepted it and just her smile was more than the reward I was looking for.

  We later made love around the house - in the kitchen, on the sofa, even on the balcony overlooking the pool below. There was romantic music playing in the background, and we pretended we were really a couple in love.

  The whole weekend was full of little surprises to follow it up. Chocolates. Flowers. All the shit I hand never done before; I was doing it now. I didn’t know why, really. It wasn’t me. And it was cheesy and probably disgusting to anybody watching from the outside, and after a few days, I pulled myself together and told myself to cut it out before she saw the truth behind my playful romantic gestures and ran away.

  It wasn’t me to be like that. And it wasn’t her to accept it like that. But we did, and it made sense and it made us happy, at least for a moment.

  The weekend ended, and I didn’t stop the cheesy storybook romance I pushed on to our ‘just friends’ relationship. I had figured she deserved to be treated special. For a month and a half, I had been laying her down, most of the time coming home to her drunk, and she would always take me in. So I felt she deserved more than just a special Valentine’s. I had made it sexy. I had made it sweet. But I also told her I had feelings for her. Then I told her I needed space, or I’d fall in love.

  It was another scholastic break for the kids in France as it always seemed to be, and when the kids don’t school, the parents don’t work. I was not sure how anything ever got done in this country. So Claudia had the week off; she was going on her own vacation for a week to visit a family she stayed with before in Perpignan. We decided it was a good thing.

  5

  Claudia left, and I was exhausted from it all. The week off from regular sex would allow me to screw my head back on. Only it didn’t.

  She thought she was pregnant.

  Great.

  Now, I was broken foreigner, knocking up a different foreigner. I was too young for this. I could barely take care of myself. What was I supposed to do? The only job I ever had as an adult was soldiering and continuing that career seemed less and less likely. I worked in a garage in high school. I also spent two years working at a Subway. I was more of a sandwich-thief than a sandwich-artist though.

  But hell, maybe it would be a good thing for me. Sex hadn’t made me feel like any more of a man. Neither had going to war. Both made me feel even more infantile. What would happen to me as a father? Is that what I needed to grow up? To take life seriously, you must create life? Or would another cliché step towards manhood bring me so far up my mother’s uterus that I would just regress to the point I’d divide into two small microscopic puddles of my mother’s egg and daddy’s fastest swimmer?

  I wasn’t sure what would happen. It was an overload and the whole system of thoughts just crashed and broke me down. I would just mirror Claudia and hope for strength from her. Through her.

  We talked every night on the phone. We hardly talked about the potential new life growing inside her. It was a relief. I had no idea about her passions before. Yeah, she was smart. She was ambitious. But I never really knew about her until these late-night talks. Talking was not something we did a lot of before.

  She wanted to get into movies and more involved with all aspects of the big screen and small screen. She wanted to maintain her small puppet shows and one woman acts for kids. She introduced me to some music videos she acted in and the modeling she had done and gave me a lot of the behind-the-scenes information about that world.

  She wanted to go back to school to get her masters in audio-visual. And do it in French at a French university, the Aix-Marseille Université in Aix-en-Provence. I couldn’t even imagine surviving sitting in a classroom in my language. It was well beyond my capacity to do it in a foreign language.

  And now, if she was pregnant, she was thinking of keeping the baby. She was already thirty and didn’t know if she would have another chance. I was afraid. The hormones were obviously doing something to her. We were talking, and we never talked much before.

  She said she would keep it herself and expected nothing from me, but her tone was loving. The only time I heard feelings like this before was after my trip to Lyon. She showed a few signs of jealousy at the thought of me sleeping with somebody else despite us not being together. And when my phone died and she couldn’t contact me for three days, she showed real concern.

  I knew she felt something but wouldn’t show it. Once you say it, everything changes.

  So I said it.

  I wrote her a poem for her Romanian valentine, Dragobete. I enjoyed writing bad poems that I would send right away and then feel ashamed about a week later. In it, I dropped the dreaded ‘L’ word. She said she ‘likes me very much and passing time with me.’ I think that’s the worst thing you can say about a man. If that’s all you can say about him, then you may as well just be alone.

  I guess I didn’t have much choice now though; she was carrying my little vampire baby in her belly.

  CLAUDIA CAME BACK. She got her period. The world was back to normal. Though it wasn’t. The scare and the late-night conversations changed her. Now she wanted me to sleep over after our rodeos and I would wake up to breakfast. Usually leftovers from the kids' dinner the night before. Still better than the chow hall on base.

  It was usually fairly easy to sneak in at night. The front gate was a bit of a walk from the front door. And her room was on the ground floor of the house right beside the front door. It felt so excluded from the rest of the house, not even a picture up. Yet, we still always made sure that I came after the parents were down and left after a few hours before we fell asleep.

  Now, parents there or not, I would be in her bed and leave early in the morning before they got up. We made love, we cuddled, and we slept together every night. How fucking romantic.

  I was losing myself and started thinking like an idiot. Thinking about the fact that she still had a boyfriend. Thinking about what the fuck that meant for me. He’s back, I’m gone. Why do I care?

  So, I stopped caring or tried to.

  6

  The days of spring rolled by smoothly. Claudia and I were no longer just seeing each other at night. We were hiking, going to parks, and spending time together with clothes on; drinking with the guys, BBQs, and we hadn’t had one argument about love or relationships.

  It was kind of nice. Talking on the metro or the bus as we went on one adventure to another. Exploring the city and the surrounding nature. I would speak to her in English; she would respond in French. The people would stare and we would just laugh.

  After one of our days of visiting Les Calanques, we were back at her new place. She was still working for the same family, but she finally realized how strange it was to be a 30-year-old woman living with a family in a small little room for no pay and no privacy. I’d like to think her wanting to spend more time with me was part of the cause.

  So she moved out and made arrangements to be paid for her work in money rather than living space. The fille-au-pair title got her foot in the door, now she was here and proved irreplaceable enough to be promoted to la garde d’enfants. The pay wasn’t amazing but considering the work was just glorified babysitting a few hours in the afternoon; it was perfect for her. She could focus on her other things during the day and make a little survival money in the afternoon.

  Given the difficulty of finding a place to live in France without having a traditional work contract with three times the rent in wages that most people ask for, nor did she have a co-signer of French origin, she was quite limited on where she could go. The French were racist I learned. A very subtle, almost British covertness, with their indirect discrimination. Or maybe it wasn’t racism, just a blinding arrogance how much better they believe they are than the rest of the world. As my Belgian friend once told me, ‘Comment un Français se suicide-t-il?’ How does a French person commit suicide? ‘Tirant dix centimètres au-dessus de leur tête.’ Aiming four inches above their head.

  So, she moved
in with the middle-aged crying man still in love with her. Well, he was no longer in love with her by word, but still fawning over her by action. I didn’t care; I knew she didn’t like him and I stayed with her most nights. Things were tense between him and me, but never to the point of open hostility. I’m sure Claudia enjoyed it.

  The apartment wasn’t the nicest place in the world, but it made staying with her easier. Given I had to commute more than a walk down the street to see her now though.

  An idea of us hadn’t come up for some time until one evening I was laying there naked in her bed watching her get up and put on some pajama bottoms and a shirt. No bra and nipples showing, she sat at her computer as if I wasn’t there. Her Eastern European coldness was getting more normal for me.

  She clicked and read, clicked and read. This email and that. And then I watched her face become somber. It was a face as if watching a terminal patient die.

  Her boyfriend had just broken up with her.

  It was a letter attached to an email. A letter to break up with her that was dated a year before and sent with an email to tell her he had written it a year before. What a winner. He couldn’t break up with her in person when they were together, but wrote the letter, said ‘see you soon,’ then sent the letter a year later when she was far and away.

  She opened up then; she told me they had barely even seen each other over the past three years, and that she knew it was over the last time they had seen each other. She talked about how she had fallen in love with him. They had met through mutual friends. She hated him in the beginning and then that hate turned to attraction and later, love.