Exes

by Max Winter

  But it wasn’t long before we moved on to my father’s secretary, whom Kit and I were both convinced he was fucking because that’s just what happens. She’s more or less my age and we have pretty much the same silhouette, minus the tits. Kit smiled at me and said, “Well, they all have bigger tits. Some things oughtn’t surprise you. Not at your age.” I didn’t hate my dad’s secretary because of her looking like a more perfect me; you should never hate people for things they can’t help. And she was just the latest in a series. Plus, ew.

  So I can see now how Eli and his dirty poems and creepy music and perfectly puffy upper arms came along at just the right time for a girl like me with a dad like that. But unless you are a mathematician or a life coach, maybe, patterns are only so interesting. It’s moments that I miss. A specific choice. A surprise.

  Eli showed me all kinds of places cool to bored teenagers like me and overgrown teenagers like him—the then-unsealed train tunnel, the rusted-up drawbridge, the cursed fountain on Benefit, Lovecraft’s grave: obvious spots, sure, but I was just a girl, and it was all still new to me, even though Viv had shown all of them to me first, a good six months before Eli had so much as brushed against my thigh.

  _____________

  A couple days later, after getting off a brunch shift, I stood outside my front door and listened to Kit and someone else inside, chatting but with the kind of gaps that indicate thought. I wasn’t having a hard time with the key on purpose—it was fresh-cut; I had left my old one with Kit, not that she was going anywhere—but my struggles quieted them down all the same. I switched hands and managed, at last, to unlock the door, and it swung open on Kit and Viv, sitting on the couch, drinking what I should’ve known wasn’t tea. Of course, the key was now stuck, so I had to stand there and jiggle it free while they sat and smiled at me from behind their cups.

  “Hey, Alix,” Viv said.

  “Hi, dear,” Kit said. “Why didn’t you tell me what a hoot your friend was!”

  Because she isn’t my friend? I thought. And I did tell you? All through high school? Plus, you met? Twice? “That’s great,” I said, meaning it, because, again.

  “We’ve been having such fun. And listen to this, there’s a spot in her marvelous new collective. I could paint!”

  “Oh, yeah?” I said.

  “Her experience will go a long way,” Viv said. “She’ll be a big help.”

  They both smiled at me. Their teeth were black from wine. I could’ve cried.

  _____________

  Eli and I kept at it through the summer and into the next year, even after everyone found out about us, because Eli never stopped loving me, and at that point I was like, fuck you, to everyone else. I deferred enrollment at the Université Paris X-Nanterre for a year—even though it was too late to back out of the lease on the studio apartment in the Marais—and moved into Eli’s new place, on Smith Hill. It was a grim one-bedroom on the third floor of what had once been a rich man’s home. Presumably, this was where the help had lived. There was no door to our apartment, and a dog tied to a pole in the backyard—which was its bed and its toilet—and only one tree on the whole block, a honey locust that had been planted the year before, backed into from a couple different angles, and wouldn’t make it through the winter. Eli took a job at the Borders in Cranston, and I became a nanny. We never got unpacked or put anything on the walls, and I never learned which way to turn the downstairs key, but to this day, if I smell something that smells even remotely like the shampoo we used then—which smelled like nectarines and their pits—or like the bread we bought, my throat cramps. “You will miss this,” Eli had told me when we blew a fuse with our fan and the stereo and a lamp. “You will miss all of this,” he said again, like a curse. Then we made our own noise in the dark, still air. “Oui, oh, ouais,” I said, practicing my French.

  One morning in the late fall, after he had hit snooze for the third straight time—it was one of those weeks when he couldn’t get out of bed, and he had them more and more—I sat up and squinted at his name tag on the kitchen counter, glary in the early morning sun, and I wanted to climb onto the roof and scream. So I did. The window slammed shut behind me, and I got shingle grit under my nails scooting up and behind a dormer. I screamed differently, and Eli got up and joined me, propping the window behind him with that year’s doorstop hardcover. He didn’t ask what I was doing, which made me realize why I loved him but also why I couldn’t stay. “You know,” he said, handing me the bowl he had packed at some point between getting up and climbing out the window, “I’m still not sure if I did or didn’t fly to work all last week.” His face was squinty and pale in the sun. I passed him back the bowl, and he took a hit. “Or if I did or didn’t quit drinking.” He looked at me, then exhaled. “I know I can’t fly, but did I drink last week?”

  He called in sick, which he was, and we spent the rest of the day smoking weed and making what felt like love. I was nineteen.

  The next day, when he was back at work, I called Kit and told her I wanted to go to Paris after all, that Eli and I were through, and more or less why. “I just can’t see myself with him,” I said.

  “Men live in the past,” she said. “Women in the future.”

  “I thought men only cared about what they want right now.”

  “Oh, it’s the past. They just act like it’s the present, which is worse. Women, we can’t help it. We’re always looking ahead. Watch how we drive.”

  I packed my two suitcases till they could close only when I sat on them, but left most of what I owned behind, including that box of photographs, and I started to write a note but got lost in the words and my handwriting, which suddenly looked small and girlish and dumb, and shoved it into my pocket. So I left us—I mean Eli—a message on our machine, which was now his machine even though he’d never wanted it. “Do you think I’m afraid of missing things?” he’d asked me in the store. Buying the damned thing was my answer.

  It took a couple tries. “It’s me. Going out to the ’Rock,” I said onto the tape, meaning Twinrock. “Will basically just leave for France from there. So, bye, I guess.” On a piece of paper I wrote, “Eli—Listen to the message,” and put it next to the phone along with the instruction booklet, which I had stashed in a drawer and luckily found. Bye had two syllables the way I said it over the phone—by-eeeee—and that was all I would admit to regretting for a long time, even though it immediately felt like I had vomited my heart. He was dead afraid to fly, so I figured that was it. I mean, that had to be it. This was exactly how and why I thought such things ended. My whole life was ahead of me. I was just a girl, right? I couldn’t wait to get out. Nineteen.

  On the plane, I cut all my food in half and just looked at it. I asked for a third and fifth wine and eventually got cut off. The last time we fucked, he had been late for work as usual, and I didn’t come. On top of everything else, that must’ve killed him. “This isn’t interesting,” he’d say, holding up the fingertips of cum he’d just wiped from the wall or my belly. “I want to know about you.” On the plane, while some lady slept beside me, I thought about the one time on the ski trip and on the bus ride back, and then the other time at school, behind the curtain during Quaker Meeting, and got myself off under my plastic-y airline blanket. I crackled with static. I turned on the air and pointed it at my head.

  For the next three months I had what couldn’t possibly still be jet lag. I’d fall asleep whenever and wake up early and suddenly. I lost track of time. It all felt like one long day. The heart I no longer had hurt.

  The teacher in me is now writing show don’t tell in the margins, but some things can’t be seen. So you’ll just have to take my word about how it felt. I felt broken. I wore thick-soled boots to make up for the height I felt I’d lost.

  My place was a forty-five minute Metro ride from La Défense. School started up again in January, and I got lost in schoolwork and in people I had just met. It took my mind off. Okay, I thought, this is who I am. This i
s what I want. Look at these pictures I took in my head: Me at the Gare du Nord. Look. This is me at Beaubourg. And on the Rue des Rosiers, eating a merguez and trying not to make a mess. Tahini running up my arm. This is me avoiding le 16ème. This is me dancing however I dance at les Bains Douches. Two of Lenny Kravitz’s flipped-back dreadlocks wind up in my mouth, and he yanks them out as if I had wanted them there. They taste like cigarettes and white musk. He sneers in my vicinity. Here I am in the Marais, at a party thrown by Claude Picasso or France Gall’s son. Daughter? By Charlotte Gainsbourg? I can go home with anyone I want, I think. Meanwhile, I get good at telling guys on the street to go fuck themselves. “Dégage, connard!” I shout, loud and cold. I don’t wear a short skirt in the nineteenth arrondissement. Never linger alone in public. I always look like I know where I’m going.

  I heard different things about Eli. The bookstore fired him, he was gay, he was basically homeless. He exposed himself to a nurse. He spent a night in jail. I screen my calls, put his letters in a box, put the box in the closet. I laugh a lot in public. I laugh in French. I learn how to spit.

  Tense slips, I’d now write. Watch out.

  _____________

  “Alix,” Viv said once Kit had gone to the bathroom.

  “Mmm-hmm,” I said, pretending to be interested in something in the sink even though it was empty and clean, finally. I scrubbed it anyway.

  “You’re not going to want to hear this, but . . .”

  I stopped scrubbing nothing. “Are you going to tell me?”

  “It’s about Rob.”

  “Oh, Christ—really, Viv? Rob?”

  “Not about him—well, wait, no. I mean . . . It’s about where he is.”

  “Jail? Detox?”

  “Twinrock. He’s the caretaker. Your uncle hired him.”

  My throat cramped.

  “Kit didn’t want to tell you,” she said.

  “But you did.”

  “Someone needed to. Do you really think I want to be talking about Rob?”

  “I don’t know what you want, to be honest.”

  “I’m trying to help.”

  “Got it.” I picked up Kit’s and Viv’s cups and put them in the sink.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “We both fell for him.”

  “Is that supposed to bring us together?”

  She made a disgusted noise. “That’s not what I mean. I mean—I just want to talk to you, okay? I want to see how you’re doing.”

  “I’m going out,” I yelled so Kit could hear me, ostensibly. Then I grabbed my old keys, and not my waist apron, and almost ran to the door.

  “We all have our own messes, Alix,” Viv said, her voice following me down the stairs. “We don’t have to be friends past the pole!”

  At the bottom of the stairwell I caught my breath and waited for the sound of Viv closing the door. I smelled like brunch.

  _____________

  In late March, in Paris, I got a call from the phone booth below my garret. “I’m outside,” Eli said.

  “Of what?” I asked.

  “Look,” he said. “I can see you. Across the street.” I looked out the window. It was true. His grin was wild. He had hangover hair. He had flown? The least I could do was tell him the code to the front door, so I did. Then I looked in the mirror, lit a cigarette, and took out the copy of I Would Have Saved Them If I Could I bought at Shakespeare and Company, then put it back, then took it out again, then put it back. Then took it back out and left it there until Eli knocked, at which point I hid it under the latest Marie Claire. He found it later, and smiled. “Well, I’ll be,” he said, and sat down on my bed and poured himself another drink. He read me his favorite sentences, which were my favorite sentences, while I did something—anything—at the sink. I banged the teapot around while he read, wanting him to stop but also not to stop. My tea had tears in it. I didn’t offer him any.

  He stayed for three or six days that felt like a year and a half. We fought where people usually fucked, and fucked where people did neither. He fucked me in the sink, banging his head where the ceiling slanted with the roof. We barely left the apartment. When we did, he bought me a scarf that I would later make a point of using only to stop the door gap when smoking pot, or hash, actually. In Paris we all smoked hash. I was just trying to look tough for my new friends. There were new ones almost every week. I forget more names than I remember. The scarf smelled like horse and roses and gasoline and was covered with little mirrors that could cut you and got snagged on whatever else you or someone near you was wearing, but it made hundreds of little whoever-was-looking-right-at-you’s and wildly caught the light from across the room or street and flashed it back at them like something they weren’t meant to see but were thrilled they had. On the way back from the market Eli tore it off me and wrapped it around his neck and ran, laughing, an explosion of the whitest light in a rare sliver of afternoon sun. I laughed so hard people gave me dirty looks. I shot them right back, threw in “Ta gueule.”

  On what turned out to be our last day in Paris, we fought about me telling him exactly how many men I had fucked since I left home—nine, eighteen, if you counted everything but—just because he hadn’t asked. I had wanted him to ask. “Blow jobs don’t count,” I said. “You could have at least taken pictures,” he said. “You could have at least written.” He took his belt out, and his pants fell to the floor. “The mailman avoids me.”

  I went for a walk. When I came back, he had pulled all the books off my shelves and made two piles. “This pile is true,” he said, pointing to the far smaller pile. “And this pile,” he said, shaking, “is lies.” His grin was screwed on wrong. I saw different teeth in it. His sex was pointed at me.

  “So?” I said, grabbing him by it. “So what?”

  “We are going to fuck now.”

  It was our last time, and it didn’t last long, but at least I came. We were both pretty worked up.

  But we were also hungry and needed a drink, so afterward we went out for a change. I chose an unself-consciously ratty bistro in Pigalle. At the table next to ours sat two men, one older and gray as ash, the other young and black. They leaned over and talked to me while Eli drank carafe after carafe of house rouge and listened for words that sounded sexy or mean, at which point he’d butt in, but in French that’s like looking for a certain needle in a stack of needles. One and a half carafes of wine later, Eli asked, “What’s French for ‘fuck’?” I could tell by looking at him that he was trying not to see double and, for the time being, more or less succeeding. I could also feel him slipping away. There were two of him now, and they were both slipping away.

  The black guy looked at Eli and said, almost without accent, “It depends. What kind of fucking?” Then to his friend and me he said, “Bah, alors, ça explique tout! Les Amerloques ils ont qu’un seul mot pour dire baisser.”

  “Come again?” Eli said, squinting as if the sun were in his eyes.

  “I said, you Americans are puerile—all you think about is fucking and yet have just one word for it.”

  Eli told him we’ve got plenty of terms, like hate fucking. And regular fucking. And stuff. And everybody laughed except for Eli, who just flagged down the garçon for some brandy. Calvados, Hors d’Age. “Tell your friend,” the black man told me in French, “that we would both very much like to fuck him.” I felt hot. “You could watch, of course,” he added when I didn’t respond right away. But by the time I leaned over to pass the message along to Eli, he was gone.

  “Where did he go?” I asked them in French.

  “Il s’est cassé,” the black guy said, shrugging. “Just fucked off. Pity.”

  I threw down way more francs than our meal could’ve possibly cost and ran out onto the street. The waiter yelled after me. “C’est là. C’est là! Tout est là!” I yelled back. The drinks, I remembered. We had a lot of drinks. I felt inclines where there were none. The waiter’s mademoiselles turned into salopes. But in France
, cursing is the sound of someone giving up. So I slowed down. Then I heard thin soles slapping against sidewalk. He grabbed my arm just above the elbow.“Regardez!” he said, shoving the billet into the side of my face. “Vous me devez quarante francs!”

  “Ça va, ça va,” I said, reaching into my purse and pulling out a fifty.“Putain! Voilà!”

  He let go of me with a little push. I stumbled into a bitte, which I then used to straighten up. “Cunt,” he said. I spat more or less at his feet, missing him by a good foot or two. The waiter looked down at his shoes, and Eli flew out of nowhere and straight into the wall between us. “Mais, vous êtes completement fous,” the waiter yelled at Eli’s heap, shuffling backwards. “Ça va pas la tête!”

  Eli got up and smiled blood at him. “No,” he said. “Ça va pas.”

  The waiter turned and ran, and Eli chased after him. “I’ll show you cunt!” Eli yelled. “Look, you dick!” Eli stopped long enough to punch himself in the face and tear at his hair. Then he took off down the street.

  I took a deep breath—leaded gas, sewer, creosote—and followed them.

  Two streets over, past the bistro, the waiter had lost us. Eli teetered blank-faced over a man who bent stolen café forks into gargoyles. “Look,” he said, shaking. “Demons.”

  The man bent a tine into a snake tongue. “I don’t want to always help you,” I said to Eli, turning to leave.

  “Wait,” he said. And then, a little too clearly—as though he had suddenly come to, which he hadn’t—he said, “Do you think I need you?”

  “Fuck you,” I got out. Eli just looked at me with what I think I now know to be confusion. It was a question after all, not a point he was trying to make, and I had somehow forgotten that Eli never asked questions that he knew the answer to. In class, he always wanted us to talk among ourselves, but our conversations never went anywhere without him at their center. “You don’t need me,” he would shout, pulling on his tie.“Go on! Talk! For christsake, talk! Talk, you babies.”