But here’s the thing about Paris: it is forgiving of those who come to it looking for adventure and fail to find it. (Paris is not equally forgiving of everyone, obviously. Its unsurpassable walkability — the sheer reasonableness of the size of its centre — is made possible by the shoving of huge swathes of its population, including many generations of immigrants, to the outskirts.)
No one can live up to their expectations of Paris. The precedents are simply too insanely unachievable. But Paris forgives you for not living up to it. It is the most merciful of cities. That said, I’m glad I had tried and failed to measure up to the possibilities of the city before I ever read Geoff Dyer’s 1998 novel Paris Trance, which plays on exactly this conundrum, of the gap between the expat fantasy and the reality. What would have been the killer would have been the realisation that, not only could I not live up to the Parisian adventures of the early- and mid-twentieth century, I couldn’t even live up to the failed adventures of that second fin de siècle.
The Au Pair
Emily S. Cooper
I got off the overnight bus. You met me, jeans tied together at the waist.
You took me to the Amélie café and told me under her face
that sugar sticks were designed to be snapped in the middle and the inventor
killed himself when everyone ripped them at the ends.
The family left for summer. You moved from your apartment to the 16th.
Their kitchen counters tortured you. Liquids seared the wood.
We slept in the children’s beds, toys arranged neatly on parquet floors.
We never fucked. Even though it was Paris.
Even though, when I was a teenager, you told me in the John Street taxi queue
that you loved me and that I must, must love you too.
Even though we fought for hours and you told me that your philosophy degree
qualified you to tell me that I was terrible at arguing, I still did not fuck you.
We bought cheap wine from Carrefour and went into an expensive cave à vin
to ask them to open it for us. At the fountain, you confessed your crack habit.
On the Métro I told stories about the other passengers. You cut me off.
That’s weird. Stop it. Nobody does that. We squeezed through the barriers.
I got to the bus station and found that I had printed the receipt and not the ticket.
As I hugged you goodbye, each rib under your coat bent away.
French Lessons
Heidi James
Gemma’s son has died, tragically and out of the blue. I don’t have the details, though I’ve seen photos of the memorial service: held out at sea, the mourners floating on surf boards in a bobbing, shifting circle. From the comments it seems he went to bed one night and just didn’t wake up. It happens sometimes. He was only eighteen years old, strong as a bull. Even so, it’s not as rare as you might imagine.
She found me through Facebook: liked some of my photos, made comments about my weight, the usual. She was always posting about her husband and his successful business, photos of her huge, immaculate house by the beach, her beautiful kids smiling with their tanned arms looped around her neck. I hate how social media does that, returns people you hoped you’d lost forever; reveals your hiding places, their gilded lives — but how do you avoid it? You have to at least try to take part or what’s the point?
I’m still not sure why she messaged me about her son; it’s not like I live nearby and could drop round a casserole or anything. Perhaps she just wanted to share her grief, dilute it a little, have it witnessed. It was heartrending. The broken syntax and fragmented phrases too painful to repeat. I even cried, though I’d never met the kid, but then I cry about other people’s children I read about online all the time.
She was the first one to like me at school. I was a weird kid. A joke really, desperate to fit in, to be liked, morbid and maybe a fantasist. Maybe. I remember that time mostly through the clothes I had to wear and my total discomfort. My aunt gave me sacks of my cousin’s cast-offs: old-fashioned, hot nylon, itchy wool or too tight. I hated the rub of waistbands, cuffs or collars. I just wanted clothes that didn’t show how poor we were or how disgusting I was. I just wanted loose things that didn’t remind me I had a body; a shameful body that invited hurt and ugliness. I remember a fist around my foot, holding me still, tugging at the lace on my ankle sock. I remember a lot of things lately. Not all of them correctly. Gemma had great clothes. She was tall and slim and had great teeth without having to have braces. She was popular, even though the other girls called her a slut behind her back, and she sat next to me in French class. We were in the top set, and I was top of the class.
She told me that actually, if I tried, I could be pretty. I laughed at her; and focused on translating the sentence Madame Walsh — who was really French but had stupidly married an Englishman — had chalked on the board.
“No,” Gemma said, “I mean it. Come stay over and I’ll show you.”
It turned out that she was right. She smeared stuff on my face, and shook out my hair, and replaced my clothes with some of hers, and just like that people seemed to forget I was weird and ugly underneath. She took me out with her, to watch boys play pool at the youth club and then later to hang around outside the Chinese takeaway, and even though I didn’t say much and just waited for her while she got off with a couple of boys, nothing bad happened.
Gemma and I had plans to move to Paris when we were sixteen. She said we were too good for our shithole town. We practised our French and choreographed dance routines in her bedroom to songs by Prince. She’d seen a TV show about the Moulin Rouge and decided we were going to be showgirls, shimmering in sequins and living in a chic flat in Pigalle. We were going to be bad and glamorous. We were going to be sexy. We were going to party and drink and have lovers. I had read a couple of Jean Rhys novels and had started listening to music by Bikini Kill and L7, so it seemed like a good idea. It might seem a strange way to go about it. The other girls were talking about hairdressing, or office work or even going to university, but they were just choosing a career. I felt that I had a choice about what kind of girl I would be, about the persona I could inhabit. That I could choose a me.
It was around this time that I first met my father. He drove a cheap sports car, drank a lot and had a beautiful girlfriend who wore tight black clothes and red lipstick. They talked about sex like it was architecture — an essential infrastructure, but one that was aesthetically pertinent. They would pick me up from school, the top down on his car, and the other girls turned green with envy as they climbed into their mother’s Volvo estates. They loved dogs too, and I would go visit them and sit on the floor of their untidy cottage with their three Great Danes and dream that I could move in with them and never see my mother and her pristine flat again.
They took me to a party to meet their friends, it was boring until everyone jumped naked into the swimming pool. A famous boxer laughed at me for keeping my underwear on, then put his arm around my waist before shoving the meat of his fingers inside me. That’s not important and not what I want to tell you, so forget I mentioned it.
They wanted to meet my friends, so they could know me better, so I took Gemma along one night. They made us dinner and let us drink vodka and coke. They told Gemma she could be a model. I just sat and listened and watched. I watched the way my father looked at his girlfriend, the way he laughed at her jokes. I watched him stroke her thigh under the table as she parted her legs. Something twisted in my gut and I felt sick. I could watch him undetected because he didn’t really notice me.
“So, Gemma, what can you tell me about this one?” he nodded in my direction, “Is she really naughty in school?”
“As if! She’s top of the class,”
To which my father replied, “She gets that from me. I’ve got a very high IQ, haven’t I, babe?” His girlfriend nodded. “I never bothered with college though, the school of life has taught me all I need. I bet you’
re naughty though, aren’t you, Gemma?”
All my other choices — frumpy scholar, cloistered penitent, wife and mother — disappeared. I don’t know when it became an option to choose being broken, but it seems I did. If I really chose at all.
He let us choose the music for the drive back home. Gemma put on The Cure. He drove fast, overtaking two cars at once on a narrow lane. Gemma laughed hard, her wide mouth exposing all her teeth. He laughed with her, and watched her in the rear-view mirror, before accelerating harder. I let my head fall back against the seat and gave in as the vodka pressed me into a new shape. He asked if we wanted to smoke and chat for a while and when Gemma nodded he turned the car off the main road and parked outside the supermarket. Dark and locked up for the night, the trolleys corralled like cattle — we were the only ones there. Then we were talking, as he rolled a joint and so that we wouldn’t be sick, he blew smoke in our mouths, his face kiss close. I could smell his lemony cologne, and a heavier, animal scent. My hands were numb. Then he asked if we’d ever kissed each other, and we laughed and said no. He said we didn’t know what we were missing, and that we should try it. He wasn’t looking at her, but me; he was watching me and so I kissed Gemma’s soft lips and she kissed me back, her tongue broad and metallic in my mouth. After a few seconds I started to pull away, but he pushed me back, his hand cupping the back of my head, saying “Don’t stop, you’ve only just started”. So, we carried on. Apparently, we were so beautiful he could hardly breathe, we were the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
He dropped me off two streets away from my mother’s in case anyone saw us, then took Gemma home alone.
We never got to Paris, but I was a stripper in Soho. It’s not as bad as you think. It was an old club run by two men who’d been there since the Fifties when the girls had to stand still and could only switch pose when the lights went down for a second. They would joke about the good old days and how professional the girls used to be. John would crank the dusty red curtains open and the lights were bright enough to cocoon you in your own light, naked and dancing, perfectly alone on the little stage.
I made a lot of cash and there was no touching which made it ok, and why shouldn’t it have been? I wasn’t sure. There were the conflicting feminist arguments about who was exploiting who, but the details interested me and I learnt so much. Like how to cut tampon tails so they don’t show when you’re on stage, how beautiful the body is — cellulite, stretch marks and all. I learnt how to be liked, by the other women, and the men in the audience. I learnt to be quiet but not stand-offish; to look people in the eye and just tell them what I wanted, what I felt. The women were a mixed bunch: single mums, artists, out-of-work dancers and actresses, a couple of academics — all interesting, intelligent women. The audience was mostly made up of men. You’d get the occasional woman, usually there with her partner for a kick. We’d always flirt with her, pay her the most attention: that brought in a lot of tips. Mostly the men were sweet, respectful; a few dickheads, and the odd one or two so lonely they believed they loved you. At Christmas, all of us girls would go on stage together, wearing cheap red Santa outfits and pelting the punters with polystyrene snowballs.
My friends said I changed, that I seemed hard. I stopped seeing them. I’d already stopped seeing my mother and father. I made a new choice, and then another and another.
A French girl joined the strip club. So thin her veins crossed under her skin like a macramé basket holding her together. She could do the splits, her bush fuzzy between her legs. She took a lot of coke, and she was beautiful even though her hair was always tangled. Sometimes we spoke in French together, when she was too fucked up to speak English. It wasn’t Paris, but who gets the life they wanted? I’ve learnt to want what I’ve got.
I’ve left a lot out, but this is close enough. I got the life I chose, and Gemma ended up unhappily married in Hawaii, mother to a dead son.
Some Standard Paradise
Nathan Dragon
He splashed it on and Paris flashed in his head. Something residual. Sprinklets sitting on the surface of his skin.
At least the word — PARIS — at first.
Pointing towards something sparsely surrounded with whatever came with it.
He did what amounted to some research so he could picture it better. And this so he could tell everyone about his trip there, or trips if he wanted to. Sometimes he’d go through a few pages about it in a magazine, some photography books — this one photographer from there he liked with a name like a street. Then it was there when he was standing in front of the mirror or looking out the living-room window. In the comfort and discomfort of his own home.
He’d realized that the label on the bottle of the Florida Water was probably why. He’d been relieved to see, on the back of the bottle, the recent indication, his incantation of this, specifically: Eau de Cologne. To himself: Ahhh, right.
Whatever he seemed to know of it he couldn’t help. Or what came first.
A place has its placeness, its repertoire of place-things: things you think about if you hear someone talking about some place. Things stick and have the potential to stay stuck over time.
This was an explanation for it.
And how bits dislodge from a focal point, make a mound and scatter; get stuck under those top notes, lose saturation.
Or — something got stuck in his mind that was a miniature bit dislodged from some other original, or archetypal thing, combined with something else. Like three famous monuments from different parts of town stuck in a snowglobe all next to each other in yellowing water.
He could revisit any way he wanted, the way he wanted to, without ever thinking of actually going. None of the fuss and bustle.
There were a few specific things he could think of if he tried. There was perfume and he knew this for a fact. Some other elses, a lot of substitution.
Only to conjure up the idea.
Capital I idea, he thought.
And maybe another one to hold it up against.
Once or twice it had been Key West up there, but it was mostly Paris in his head or out his window, right. He couldn’t blame himself for the fact that it was, after all, all in the name.
He had all that he needed there to be.
Some standard paradise to agree with, quietly put.
He tried to picture the types of things the people at work talk about wanting to do when they talk about going away. And who talked about what exactly so that way he had something to impress all of them.
He knew about the lack of love in a dream.
Like a hill in front of the sky.
An old cloudless daydream in the shade, but bright in the hollowy breezy way it was. A sip of Vichy water, right?
That’s something he’d read.
He would have to take time off at work to pull it off. So that he could mention that he was taking a trip to Paris and he could chime in sometime that he had gone before. Glad to go back.
Glad for himself, glad to have something to tell them. At work they joked with him, how he needed a change, at least a break. How he had to do something, like really get out.
There was pity.
So he got the idea and the Florida Water in the section of the store with all the bath stuff so he could smell different. A change, there it was, like a shrug. Refined.
When he thought about the whole thing, the combination reminded him of that one famous marine biologist with the musically-named boat. And citrus.
A conflation of all citrus into only limes, he guessed.
He needed to use a specific word or phrase, of course — needed to. For effect. It was easy after that.
Getting to be at home with a new bottle of Florida Water. Get a little fragranted and think about it. Learn the name of something else there.
He could picture himself walking by the names of things. He remembered all the bones they had there underneath. Like an island on top of a reef — another thing.
Once mouthing himself off in the
mirror, he pushed all the way through gliding rays in the Keys, to drying himself off in the bathroom of a big hotel on the Seine. The Seine it’s called, right?
He figured it was a good start. A perfectly good start. That he could get himself there at all.
No, when he thought back and had a chance to correct himself, not a hotel but a hostel.
A place made romantic with anything enough.
Just name the thing.
He had a gist of it now. It passed through him like a membrane. He was osmosissing. What’s a place there he’d heard of without having to look it up? Testing himself. Rain falling on him walking his way up the Champs-Élysées. Like a film scene go-to. To get another bottle of parfum. He was impressing himself.
Also the Left Bank and whatever that could mean, he thought. Because it depends on which way you’re facing on any river.
Just imagine this, but on a park bench, just like his park bench here, the only place out that he seemed to go. Staring at the roots of a tree. A honey locust? No, correcting himself again, a chestnut tree of course.
He could imagine anything already given to him, but nothing from scratch, being a part of a thing or a copy of it. Everybody, anybody there from the neck down when he pictures being there, otherwise he can’t picture it. It’s a lot to make up faces.
He even thought about dumping out the screw top bottle into a spray bottle and covering his life in it.
A prayer to his fraudulence, that it might make him happy.
Parc des Princes
Wendy Erskine
Bus is rammed, always full on the wet days with the blazers stinking of old dogs’ blankets, and that nutter three seats behind him, the heavy guy who elbowed him in the face so his teeth snagged on the inside of his cheek. Had been sucking a big sweet at the time so the slobbers he spat out were blue and red. Doesn’t like the two teachers he had this afternoon, Miss Hinds and Madame McGuigan. Hinds didn’t let them do a practical today. Come on Miss like! What’s the point if we don’t make anything? Did about food safety instead, don’t reheat this, don’t reheat that, but she was pissed off because somebody messed about with one of the bread sticks that was there from the other class, carrying on like it was his dick. Quit that, she said, quit that, you think somebody’s gonna want to eat that after your dirty paws have been all over it? Another class made stuff but some of them chucked it in the bin at the bus stop, white sauce, lumpy white sauce running onto the concrete. Then on came the rain.
We'll Never Have Paris Page 5
