French Kissing

by Catherine Sanderson

  I’d imagined a cosy tête-à-tête, and had chosen my outfit and applied my make-up with seduction in mind. After I’d left Nico, I’d dashed to the nearest branch of Comptoir des Cotonniers on rue Saint Antoine and bought a grey silk tunic dress, despite a price tag that would give me palpitations every time I thought about it for months to come. Whiling away the hours once I got home, waiting for Jérémy’s rehearsal to end, I’d tried on my new dress with every imaginable combination of underwear, tights and shoes, eyeing my silhouette critically in the mirror. After much vacillating, I’d worn it with a push-up bra, opaque grey tights and black knee-high boots, added a touch of smoky eye shadow and twisted my hair into a loose chignon.

  Walking down rue de Belleville to catch the métro, the caress of the silk dress against my thin tights made me feel sexy: my powers of seduction were at their peak. But from the moment I caught sight of Elsa, effortlessly elegant in worn jeans and barely there make-up, my confident bubble burst. I felt overdressed now, and as painfully self-conscious as if I’d walked into the bar wearing my birthday suit. I’d misjudged the context, badly, and my efforts reeked of desperation. It was all I could do to prevent myself executing a swift volte-face and slipping back outside before anyone could recognize me.

  Elsa saw me first, looked me up and down unhurriedly, then smiled a knowing smile and leaned forward to murmur something in Jérémy’s ear. He whirled around to face me, beckoning me closer and grazing my cheeks with his lips. The fine lines around the outside of his eyes crinkled as he smiled, reminding me for a second of Nico. My legs turned to cotton wool, even though, on the inside, I was cursing him internally for looking as irresistible as ever. ‘Viens rencontrer mes amis,’ he said gaily, oblivious to my discomfiture. ‘Les amis?’ Jérémy paused to ensure he had everyone’s attention. ‘This is a new friend of mine: Sally. She’s a petite anglaise, and she teaches business English, like Thomas.’

  I hadn’t expected Jérémy to introduce me as his girlfriend. ‘My new friend’ would have sufficed. ‘A new friend of mine’, on the other hand, was so dismissive, so impersonal, that he might as well have slapped me in the face. His choice of words told me everything I needed to know about the coming evening: I shouldn’t expect to receive any special attention or preferential treatment. For whatever reason, Jérémy was holding me at arm’s length. His careful use of the indefinite article had made that excruciatingly clear.

  Elsa required no re-introduction, but Jérémy reeled off the names of his other friends one by one, working around the group in an anti-clockwise direction. To his left there was Théo, an attractive – possibly gay – twentysomething who worked as a junior concierge in a well-known five-star hotel. By his side stood Kamel, a Tunisian bar owner whose recurring sniff and frequent trips to the toilet suggested an unhealthy fondness for white powder. Then there was Max, a set designer with a long ponytail and metal-rimmed glasses, and his spiky-haired girlfriend, Marina. The irony of the situation was that if I hadn’t been so set on having a romantic one-on-one ‘third date’ with Jérémy, I would have loved meeting this eclectic crowd. They made a refreshing change from the teachers, lawyers and bankers who made up my own circle of friends and I was curious to hear how they’d all met. With the exception of Elsa, who shot me hostile sidelong glances from time to time and refused to leave Jérémy’s orbit for even a moment, his friends were welcoming and friendly.

  But instead of relaxing and allowing myself to enjoy the novelty of meeting new French people, I smarted from Jérémy’s lack of attention. Once he’d dispensed with the obligatory introductions, he left me to fend for myself, remaining deep in conversation first with Max, then with Elsa. I refrained from shoehorning myself into their conversation – I suspected they were talking shop, in any case – and kept a dignified distance instead. If Jérémy wanted to seek me out, all well and good. But I wasn’t about to make a fool of myself by fawning all over him in front of an audience.

  So for the next hour or so, while I propped up the bar, I chatted to Théo, who had met Jérémy when he worked as an extra on a short film. Théo had some fascinating anecdotes about some of the rich and famous clients who patronized his hotel, and his deadpan delivery and sense of comic timing suggested he’d fine-tuned his material over many tellings and re-tellings. But even as I giggled at his descriptions of a well-known American singer and her extended entourage or feigned shock at his tales of male clients ordering in high-class escort girls for ‘room service’, in truth I was having problems staying focused. Every so often my eyes would dart towards where Jérémy stood to steal another glance at his profile.

  Making the most of my strategic position at the bar, I sank several bottled beers in quick succession before making the ill-advised switch to vodka and tonic, my previous resolutions about alcohol on dates going out of the window. In my excitement I’d skipped dinner, and it wasn’t long before the alcohol I was pouring into my empty stomach began to make its presence felt. Instead of numbing my disappointment, the drink only served to exacerbate it. Why had Jérémy even bothered to invite me here tonight if he’d intended to ignore me? said a belligerent voice inside my head. The more I drank, the more difficult I found it to keep a lid on my growing resentment. If I didn’t take myself off home soon, I knew it would only be a matter of time before I started berating Jérémy in public, making an undignified scene I’d come to regret.

  ‘I think I’m going to head home,’ I said to Théo around midnight, loud enough – I hoped – for Jérémy to overhear. I grabbed my coat – which I’d made the elementary mistake of hanging from one of the pegs protruding from the side of the bar, and which now smelled of spilled beer – and bent to pick up my handbag from where I’d wedged it between the rail running around the base of the bar and the floor.

  ‘Tu pars déjà?’ Jérémy had broken off his conversation with Elsa, as I’d hoped he would. As I straightened up, head spinning, handbag in hand, I had his undivided attention for the first time that evening. ‘But I haven’t even had a chance to speak to you yet, Sally,’ he said, looking genuinely bewildered. ‘Why leave now? Is something the matter?’

  ‘If you want to talk to me, you can walk me to the métro,’ I said curtly. Taking my leave from Jérémy’s friends with an apologetic collective wave and a vague excuse about an early start the next morning, I strode out of the bar, with Jérémy hot on my heels.

  The haughty, reproachful monologue I’d been finessing in my head for the past twenty minutes or so, while listening with half an ear to Théo, had began to unravel a little by the time I came to perform it for Jérémy. My sentences tumbled out in quick succession and my tone was drunkenly petulant, reminding me of the night I’d stayed over at Manu’s.

  ‘I thought you were so special, when I first met you,’ I said wistfully, fixing my eyes on the still, inky water of the canal up ahead and quickening my pace so that Jérémy had to trot to keep up with me. ‘Things didn’t move along the way I hoped they would, but we shared that amazing kiss and you wanted to see me again, so I thought you must be feeling something too… I made excuses for you. I told myself maybe you needed to take things slowly, maybe you’d had an awful experience in the past that made it hard for you to trust someone again…’

  The road in front of us was empty, and I strode across it. We’d arrived at the cobbled towpath, and I paused for a moment, putting a hand out to steady myself on the leather saddle of a parked motorbike, which was cold to the touch. Jérémy said nothing, waiting for me to finish. The fact he’d made no move to contradict anything I’d said so far didn’t bode well at all. So when I took a deep breath and continued, my voice was filled with self-loathing.

  ‘I see now that I’m an idiot,’ I said savagely. ‘I’ve been deluding myself, and tonight I finally understood that you never saw me as girlfriend material. I think maybe you’ve enjoyed having me around. It must be gratifying to have an infatuated woman to wheel out whenever it suits you to show off to your friends, or to make Elsa je
alous, or whatever tonight was supposed to be about…’

  Jérémy sighed and put a hand under my chin, lifting it so that I had no choice but to make eye contact. His gesture reminded me of the way I’d forced Lila to look at me when we’d spoken about her bad dream, but there was something phoney and rehearsed about the way Jérémy did it, and I wondered whether it was a choreographed move he’d used on stage. ‘Je suis désolé, Sally,’ he said earnestly, his eyes sombre. ‘I never meant to upset you like this. I like you a lot – although perhaps, as you say, not in quite the way you were hoping – and I really thought we could be friends. I didn’t realize it had to be a relationship or nothing…’

  ‘Well, I think you ought to have considered spelling that out to me two weeks ago.’ I jerked my chin out of his hand and took a wobbly step backwards. ‘Instead you’ve been sending me mixed signals, stringing me along and wasting my time. I mean, there was no ambiguity on my side: I made it pretty obvious I was interested. I even kissed you, for God’s sake!’ I was past caring that my tone was now openly belligerent and accusing. What more did I have to lose? A sudden image of Matthias, smiling at my dishevelled appearance as he handed me a cup of coffee in bed, floated to the forefront of my mind. ‘And to top it all off, because of you, I even turned someone down,’ I cried, suddenly remorseful. ‘Someone I liked; someone who liked me back. But I was too busy obsessing about you.’

  ‘Je suis désolé,’ said Jérémy again, shrugging his shoulders. ‘I don’t know what more I can say.’ His apology didn’t even ring true any more. It was as though he was tiring of our little scene and had decided it was unworthy of his acting talents.

  ‘I’m going to go.’ I took a step backwards, moving out of range of the light cast by the street lamp overhead, taking refuge in the shadows. I could feel angry tears welling up, threatening to spill over, and I didn’t want to give Jérémy the satisfaction of seeing me cry. ‘There’s no need to walk me to the métro,’ I added, although I suspected his offer had been tacitly withdrawn. ‘And I don’t think there’s any point in you calling me again…’

  It required a superhuman effort not to turn and steal one last glance at Jérémy’s retreating form as I zigzagged along the towpath. It was when I veered left into rue du Faubourg du Temple and saw his name on the interphone button outside his building that the tears began to overflow. Head bent, hands balled into tight fists deep inside my pockets, I drove myself forward, trying to attract as little attention as possible. I cried without making a sound, saline tears trickling down my face and dripping from my chin.

  Over the past few days I’d felt like I was on a roll: everything in my life had fallen slowly into place, with Jérémy’s call as the icing on the cake, filling me with false hope. I hated the way I’d let myself get carried away. Jérémy had been nothing but a mirage. With every step I’d taken towards him, he’d receded, just a little, until tonight, he’d disappeared altogether.

  I was drawing close to Belleville métro station, when my stomach began to heave. Stepping off the pavement, I paused in the gap between two parked cars, hands on knees, head drooping towards the gutter, willing the queasiness to pass. Straightening up again, I could have sworn I heard someone call my name and, for a brief moment, I entertained one last fantasy. Jérémy had returned to La Patache and realized he’d made a terrible mistake. Dashing back out into the night, he’d managed to catch me up and now stood a few metres away, poised to make a heartfelt declaration. But when I lifted my head, there was nobody in my line of vision. Aside from a couple of Chinese teenagers, their hair gelled into stiff, gravity-defying peaks, withdrawing money from the hole in the wall outside the Crédit Lyonnais, the pavement was empty. My imagination was playing evil tricks on me. I was drunk, nauseous and alone and now apparently also suffering from unusually vivid auditory hallucinations.

  ‘Sally?’ This time the voice was accompanied by a very real and very concerned clean-shaven face, which appeared, as if from nowhere, inches away from my own. A loud, strangled sob welled up from somewhere deep inside my core, and I staggered forwards, propelling myself into a pair of waiting arms which closed around me with comforting force.

  ‘I got everything wrong,’ I sobbed, pressing my face against a warm chest, with little thought for the damage my teary mascara would wreak on his crisp white shirt. ‘I’m drunk and I feel like a fool and I just want to go home.’

  ‘I’ll take you home,’ a voice whispered soothingly into my hair. ‘T’inquiète pas, Sally, ça va aller…’

  27

  The first thing I became aware of the next morning was the smell of freshly brewing coffee. The second was the dull pain pulsing behind my eye sockets and the unpleasant sensation of eyelids gummed together with congealed make-up and stale tears. The third was the plink as a large disc of soluble aspirin made contact with the bottom of a glass of water. While the tablet hissed and fizzled its way into oblivion, I felt the bed shift under the weight of someone, as he took a seat on the edge, by my side.

  ‘Before you ask,’ Matthias said hastily, ‘nothing happened last night. We talked – although I doubt you remember much of what was said – and then you kind of passed out.’ I suspected there was more. I seemed to be wearing a T-shirt, for one thing, which suggested I’d been helped out of my silk dress. And I had a momentary vision – not quite a memory, more like a fleeting image of myself seen from above – of a woman crumpled over the toilet bowl while hands that were not her own held her hair back from her face. ‘I’m so sorry you had to see me in such a state,’ I moaned, eyes still clamped closed, paralysed by humiliation.

  ‘I was sorry to see you in that state, but I wasn’t sorry to see you,’ Matthias said simply. He teased a few stray hairs out of my face with his fingertips, then traced the contours of my right cheek with his thumb. ‘You asked me to wake you.’ I heard him swilling the water around in the glass, hurrying along the last of the remaining aspirin. ‘I think your daughter is due back this morning,’ he added. ‘But I’m not sure exactly when.’

  ‘Merde!’ I wrenched my eyelids open and heaved myself upright, almost knocking the glass of opaque liquid out of Matthias’s hand. ‘Nico’s supposed to be bringing Lila over at ten.’ My voice was filled with panic. ‘What time is it now?’

  ‘Du calme, Sally,’ said Matthias in a soothing voice. ‘It’s only nine-thirty. All you have to do is drink this, take a shower and get yourself dressed… I’m sure you’ll look more presentable than me.’ He gestured at the charcoal-coloured smudge on the front of his white shirt with a rueful smile. ‘And there’ll be a mug of extra-strong coffee waiting when you’re done…’

  ‘I think I could get used to this,’ I said, taking the glass he held out to me and steeling myself before I knocked back its contents. I wasn’t sure what was worse, my blinding headache or the bitter aftertaste of French soluble aspirin. But I was certain of one thing: facing the day hungover with a compassionate Matthias by my side wasn’t nearly as depressing a prospect as facing the day alone.

  ‘I think I’d like that,’ Matthias replied. ‘Now come on, be brave. Let’s see you down this cul sec.’ My eyes locked on to his, and I obeyed, knocking back my medicine in one gulp.

  Looking back on that Sunday, weeks later, I knew it had marked a turning point in my post-Nico life. Physically, I was in such a mess that even the phrase ‘death warmed up’ didn’t begin to do justice to how vile I was feeling. But despite the glancing pain in my head, despite the late-onset nausea which plagued me all afternoon, I was aware of something else too; something that had crept up on me by stealth. I’d freed up the space that Jérémy had been occupying – under false pretences – at the forefront of my misguided brain and I was beginning to see, now, what should have been staring me in the face all along.

  Under the pretext that he had a couple of errands to run, Matthias left me alone nursing my coffee just before ten. I heard him taking the stairs instead of the lift, minimizing the possibility of a premature encounter
with Nico and Lila. When he returned an hour later, he knocked first, before letting himself in with a borrowed key. He smelled fresh and soapy and wore a clean T-shirt. In addition to my keys, he carried a bulging bag of groceries.

  Prostrate on the sofa, a fleece blanket wrapped around my shoulders, I must have cut a sorry figure. Lila, who had understood within seconds of her arrival that all was not right with Mummy, was ministering to me dutifully with her plastic doctor’s kit. When the front door creaked open she paused, her hand pressing the yellow plastic chest piece of her toy stethoscope to my T-shirt, pretending to listen to the beating of my heart. But her hazel eyes were riveted on Matthias. She frowned, as though trying to locate the precise memory of where and when she’d seen him before, and then gave a tiny, almost imperceptible, smile of recognition.

  ‘Tu n’apportes pas de fleurs pour ma maman aujourd’hui?’ she asked him slyly, removing the stethoscope from her ears and letting it fall to the floor.

  ‘Pas aujourd’hui, Docteur Lila,’ Matthias replied, closing the front door behind him and glancing over at the flowers he’d brought the other evening, which had begun to wilt in their water jug. ‘But you know what, I may not have brought any flowers today, but I’m going to make your maman some lunch instead. Perhaps you could help me find everything I’ll need? If you’ve finished tending to your patient, that is?’

  I watched with amusement as Lila, puffed up with her own self-importance, fetched a miniature wooden chair from her bedroom and carried it to the kitchen so that she could elevate herself to the level of the countertop and give orders from her new vantage point. Meanwhile, Matthias unpacked his groceries: half a dozen eggs, a packet of the round slices of the cured ham that passes for bacon in France, and a loaf of sliced bread. ‘I’m going to attempt to cook you an English breakfast,’ he explained, hunting around in the metal drawers under the hobs for a frying pan. ‘How do you like your eggs, Sally? Fried or scrambled?’