Work in Progress

by Paul Thomas

We ate bread, paté, fruit and cheese, and started a second bottle of wine. She’d miss France, she said, but not the French; she’d overdosed on the French.

  ‘You should try a New Zealander,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We have more romantics per capita.’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Really? Do you think Patricia would agree with that?’

  ‘She should. She just happened to be on the wrong end of it.’

  ‘Well, that’s the thing,’ said Samantha with another ironic smile. ‘Someone always is.’

  As we were doing the dishes, I asked Samantha what she was most looking forward to. Surfing, she said. Also shop assistants who treated people as potential customers as opposed to a pain in the ass, Mexican food, milkshakes, spa baths, cable TV and household appliances designed in the twentieth century.

  ‘I sure as hell won’t miss washing up. We may be ignorant, we may be greedy but one thing we Americans are good at is labour-saving devices.’

  ‘The slave, for instance.’

  ‘Don’t you start, Max. I’ve never considered myself particularly patriotic but after two years of Serge and his buddies I feel like John Wayne. Why do the French hate America?’

  ‘It’s a love-hate thing,’ I said. ‘Love the movies, the jazz, the wild west; hate the wealth and power and predominance.’

  ‘And the people.’

  ‘I’m not sure that Serge and co are representative of the entire French nation.’

  ‘Oh, come on, you have to admit they think they’re superior to us.’

  ‘They think they’re superior to everyone. Look around: they’ve got a reasonably strong case.’

  Americans are bewildered by their unpopularity. Understandably, since what others often despise most about them is the very thing Americans regard as their greatest virtue (and the wellspring of their plenitude): their ardent optimism. Europe has embraced pessimism as a rational response to history so when America insists that anything is possible and refuses to contemplate or be restrained by the possibility of failure, Europeans hear the thunder of guns and the rumble of cattle trucks. To add to their gall, their impotence is a rubbed-in fact of life since this infantile giant, this nation of sunny simpletons and righteous killers, seems impervious to outside influence.

  But Samantha hadn’t evangelised for the American way or tried to change Serge, wean him off his earthy rituals and dubious pastimes. On the contrary, she’d embraced him and France, warts and all. And still they’d patronised her and used her and, eventually, pushed her away. In the end she might as well have been an ugly American because being beautiful hadn’t stopped them telling her she didn’t belong there.

  ‘What do you want from me, Max?’

  We were drinking cognac, about to call it a night. It had been a strange and disheartening few hours and we were back to where we’d started: friends of friends reduced to each other’s company in a foreign land.

  What we had in common above all else was Serge, her ex-lover, my ex-friend, our perverse and persistent Cupid. This was the last arrow in his quiver. He’d thrown us together once before but that had been a crude manoeuvre, based on the flimsy assumption that Samantha would be a sucker for a shoulder to cry on. But he’d learnt from that mistake and this was the culmination of a long, subtle and ruthless campaign. He’d embarked on a reverse courtship, an anti-romance, to force Samantha out of love, and he’d ushered Patricia out of the picture. So here we were, sharing another apartment, but this time with empty hearts and nothing to lose.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Let me re-phrase that: what do you expect from me?’

  ‘When I woke up this morning, as far as I knew you and Serge were going strong and there was no particular reason to think I’d ever set eyes on you again.’

  ‘Well, you know better now and you’ve been looking right at me for the last …’ she glanced at her watch ‘… six hours. You’ve had plenty of time to get used to the idea.’

  ‘Sam, you know how I feel.’

  She nodded slowly. ‘I’m all out of love, you know.’ She was both defensive and defiant, apologetic and self-justifying, like a hostess fallen on hard times serving up an austere meal. ‘That’s just the way it is. Serge didn’t factor that in.’

  ‘Serge is clever,’ I said, ‘maybe too clever for his own good, but he doesn’t understand the meaning of the word.’

  ‘And you do?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Would you follow me?’

  ‘If you wanted me to.’

  ‘What if I was lukewarm?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because that’d be asking for a broken heart.’

  ‘Well, you see, that’s the point, Max: if you’re really in love with someone, you don’t let that put you off. You take the risk.’ Now there was warmth in her smile. ‘That’s okay, I’m not offended.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s the only definition of love.’

  ‘It’s the one I use. Okay, we’re making some progress here; we’ve established what you don’t expect, right?’

  I said yes because there was no point in saying otherwise. She was travelling light, leaving behind everything that didn’t have a place in her new life.

  ‘So back to square one,’ she said. ‘What do you expect of me?’

  ‘A few days of your life.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem too much to ask.’

  ‘What would you like to do?’

  ‘You wanted a few days of my life, you got ’em. Now you’ve got to decide what to do with them.’

  She was still asleep when I looked in on her the next morning, her face buried in the crook of her arm and smothered by golden-blonde hair. Her hand was balled into a childish fist, hopelessly inadequate for warding off predators. She defined love as the willingness to follow someone to a strange land, whether they wanted you to or not. Another manifestation, surely, is the terror you feel for them and for yourself when your unquiet imagination puts them in harm’s way.

  I’d volunteered for the sofa and she was too tired to argue over what she seemed to regard as a temporary arrangement. ‘If you insist,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose it’ll be an issue for long.’

  She cleaned her teeth, kissed me firmly on the mouth and went to bed, leaving behind the impression that she’d decided to make me a gift of her body in acknowledgement of the love she was, regretfully, unable to reciprocate. And what would it be to her — another bawdy traveller’s tale with which to one-up the Cindys and Debbies and Mary-Anns? My days and nights in Paris. With a writer yet. Drunk the entire time and fucked every which way. Another item crossed off the list of

  things you’ve got to do once in your life.

  I returned from the patisserie with an outline of the day: the Louvre, a long lunch, a walk through the Jardin des Tuileries and along the river, some stocking up from the food stores on Rue de Buci, a long dinner.

  She sat up in bed, enviably clear-eyed. There wasn’t a trace of the previous night’s wine or world-weariness and my suggestion was endorsed with a luminous smile.

  As I went to leave her to her breakfast in bed she grabbed my hand. ‘You have no idea how much I’m looking forward to this,’ she said, already slipping back into overstatement. ‘It’s going to be so good.’

  All she had to do was exert some gentle pressure, like a canny angler testing the fish’s will to resist. After a night squirming on the sofa I was ready to abandon my various dissatisfying roles — considerate host, caring friend, love-lorn wretch — and swarm all over her, making a minute comparison with the perfect specimen of my imagination. But she withdrew her hand, replacing it with the empty café au lait bowl, and asked, ‘Any more where that came from?’

  It took almost three hours for Samantha to confess that she’d exhausted her capacity for appreciating old paintings.

  ‘I’ve worked out what I feel like,’ she said. She sounded relieved, as if she’
d no longer have to strive for something that would always be out of her reach. ‘I feel like a laboratory rat eating itself to death. You know those experiments where they keep feeding rats to see if they know when enough is enough? Except that to a rat there’s no such thing as enough. Even though they’ve blimped out to twice their normal size, they can’t help themselves; if it’s there, they’ll eat it, and they’ll keep on eating until it kills them. You see all these paintings that kind of look the same; then you go into the next room and there’s another bunch of paintings that kind of look the same. Then you go into the next hall and there’s a shitload more that look exactly the same as the ones you just saw in the last hall. But because this is the Louvre and you’re an airhead from California, you keep on staring at them with that “Oh, wow, isn’t that just so fucking amazing” expression, even though deep down you never want to see another painting as long as you live. Is it just me? Please don’t answer that if it’s a yes.’

  ‘High culture gives you headaches,’ I said. ‘That’s official. They did a study on it.’

  ‘Does it give you a headache?’

  ‘You bet. It kicked in an hour ago.’

  ‘But you’re a writer,’ she said. ‘An artist.’

  ‘In America,’ I said, ‘you make a TV commercial and you can call yourself an artist; over here they set the bar a little higher.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t creative people call themselves artists?’

  ‘Would you call television an art form? How about Hollywood movies or pop music? Or are they in fact industries in which organisations with R and D departments and budget directors and sales and marketing bullshitters generate and hype product with the aim of making lots of money? If it’s the latter, you have to ask whether that process can produce works of art. The European view is that it can’t — that art and commerce are incompatible for a host of reasons, starting with the fundamental commercial principle that the wider a product’s appeal, the better it will sell.’

  She pulled her scarf tighter. ‘That’s got a familiar ring.’

  ‘Familiar as in the sort of thing Serge would say?’

  ‘Familiar as in the sort of thing Serge did say — ad fucking nauseam.’

  ‘I get the message.’

  ‘If you feel an anti-American outburst coming on, just change the subject,’ she said. ‘I won’t take it as an insult to my intelligence.’

  ‘Be nice, in other words?’

  ‘Be nice, Max. Make me happy.’

  We had lunch at a little bistro behind the Louvre, packed with Paris municipal workers fuelling up on eaux de vie before going back to their man-holes and safety checks. Thirty-odd heads turned as one when we walked in; thirty-odd Gauloises were momentarily neglected. An old boy raised his glass to me with a goatish smirk.

  We sat down; the hubbub resumed. I said, ‘Do you ever get used to it?’

  ‘You wouldn’t go out much if you didn’t.’

  ‘So it doesn’t bother you?’

  She shrugged, her mouth assuming a Gallic shape. ‘I caught on pretty early that being good-looking isn’t all it’s cracked up to be but you know what? The ones who aren’t don’t seem real happy about it.’

  We ordered and got started on the house red. I was playing the old Paris hand, promising Samantha as much authenticity as she could handle, when she burst out laughing.

  ‘I’m not laughing at you,’ she said, sliding a hand across the table. ‘I just had the weirdest thought. You know what this reminds me of? Losing my virginity.’

  I said, sincerely, ‘That’s interesting.’

  ‘I was in a coffee shop with this guy. He’s talking about I don’t what because I’m not really listening. I’m not listening because I’m thinking about what we’ll be doing before the afternoon’s out.’

  I looked at my watch; it was almost 2.30. ‘Does that mean we’ll have to skip the cheese?’

  She laughed again. She still had hold of my hand. ‘Hey, if there’s one thing I learned from Serge, it’s never, ever come between a man and his fromage.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Fifteen. In my circle, if you held out for much longer than that, you were some kind of freak.’

  ‘Who was the lucky guy?’

  ‘Brett Watts. Brett had perfect hair and a killer tan. I’ve seen some impressive tans in my time but he was like straight out of a Coppertone commercial. People were always asking him what his secret was.’

  ‘A full head of hair and latent skin cancer: what more could a girl want?’

  ‘For the purpose under discussion, I can only think of one other thing and the word on the grapevine was that he measured up in that department. My friends fell into two groups: those who’d screwed him and a somewhat larger group of those who were ready, willing and able if called upon. That was a big part of the attraction.’ She leaned back, letting go of my hand. ‘You’ve got to look at it from the point of view of a fifteen-year-old virgin: he came highly recommended, he was much sought after and I felt it was important not to sell myself short.’

  ‘Did he live up to his reputation?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t seventh heaven but, you know, he got the job done. It was better the second time. And better still the time after that. And so it went.’

  ‘So you became sweethearts?’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Who said anything about sweethearts? It didn’t last. I mean, let’s face it, hair is hair; it can only take you so far, especially if there’s not much underneath it. It wasn’t until after I’d dumped him that I realised that San Diego boys were all the same.’

  ‘Hence Serge?’

  ‘Easy on the fast-forward button, Jack — I had some living to do before he came along. Contrary to popular opinion, there’s a reasonable amount of variety on offer in California if you look hard enough.’

  ‘Which you did?’

  ‘In every nook and cranny. Down every hole. Under every rock. No man was safe from her all-consuming lust.’

  ‘Who’d want to be?’

  ‘I can tell you’ve never been to San Francisco. Here’s another thing: there was no one before Brett, obviously, and there’s been no one else since I met Serge. That’s three and a half years.’

  ‘How does that make you feel?’

  Her eyes glowed suggestively. ‘Like the girl in that song.’

  ‘Which song?’

  ‘“Like a Virgin.”’

  Madonna was still a novelty act then and it would be a few years before Quentin Tarantino explained that the virgin in the song was, in fact, a nymphomaniac who’d bitten off more than she could chew. You never hear that song any more and I, for one, am not complaining.

  I said, ‘As you were thinking about what you and Brett would be up to before the afternoon was out — where, as a matter of interest, given that you obviously didn’t need the cover of darkness?’

  ‘Both his parents worked. A lot of stuff went down in their house that summer.’

  ‘Who did the laundry?’

  She stared. ‘I can’t think of anyone else I’ve ever met who’d ask that. The maid did the laundry.’

  ‘I’m a writer,’ I said. ‘I need that sort of information. It explains how you got away with it. In the movies they skate over that sort of stuff because the audience doesn’t have time to think. So what was the maid doing while all these teenage sex maniacs …’

  ‘Isn’t that what you writers call a tautology?’

  ‘… while all these teenagers were running wild in her employers’ house?’

  ‘Minding her own business, as she was being paid to do by Brett and his buddies. She was from El Salvador, an illegal immigrant, needless to say.’

  ‘That’s perfect: initiative, opportunism, corruption — America in a nutshell.’ She let that one go; she was really starting to unwind. ‘Anyway, what I was going to ask was, as you were thinking about what you’d be doing before the afternoon was out, were you already aware, deep down, that you were doing to dump him?’<
br />
  She frowned. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I’m interested in the workings of a woman’s mind.’

  ‘I wasn’t a woman, Max, and my mind, such as it was, wasn’t a sophisticated instrument. I honestly can’t remember what I thought but I’m pretty sure it didn’t involve us growing old together. I guess you could say I was coming at it primarily from a …’ — she paused, trying to shake loose the right word — ‘… practical perspective.’

  ‘It was on your to-do list, right? Learn the guitar, get a tattoo, lose my cherry.’

  ‘Exactly.’ She mimicked a tick. ‘That’s that taken care of. Now, let’s see, what’s next?’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘Drugs, of course.’

  Samantha didn’t have much to say on the walk back to the apartment. Paris can do that: it can render conversation superfluous and cause the most self-absorbed prattler — which she wasn’t — to ponder their place in the grand scheme of things. But I was buzzing with nervous anticipation and couldn’t help analysing her reticence. Was she having second thoughts? That seemed unlikely. Over lunch she had, in effect, distinguished between romantic sex, which was a big deal, and recreational sex, which wasn’t. The latter was just something you did when you felt like it; not as routine as eating or sleeping but on a par with, say, working out.

  That, coupled with my sense that sex was to be my consolation prize, a sweet coating on the bitter pill, raised the prospect of a dutiful physical engagement preceded by quasi-transactional stiltedness: Do you want to use the bathroom? No, no, you go first. Would I return from my ablutions to find her primly abed with the blankets hauled up to her chin, staring stoically at the ceiling, finger poised over the bedside light switch? Would she hustle through it like someone rugging up on a cold morning, as if there was no percentage in dilly-dallying?

  We were walking along the embankment, between Pont des Arts and Pont Neuf. A sightseeing boat laden with Japanese tourists came chugging up the river. Some of them waved. We waved back. Camera lights flashed in the murky twilight. Samantha clamped a hand on the back of my neck and tilted her face up. Her mouth was soft and hot and wide open. There was a smattering of applause from the boat but when we drew apart it had ghosted into the shadows of L’Ile de la Cité.