Lives Paris Took

by Rachael Wright

  He slumped against the desk, paralyzed by indecision. It was comfortable, the way he lived, with its structured routine. The vision of Gilbert looming in front of him, his mouth upturned into a cruel smile as David explained why he didn’t go to Black Paris, fluttered across his mind. With a jolt, David heaved himself off the desk, stuffed the directions in his pocket, and fled the Université de Paris, gasping in relief as he flung open the doors to the outside world.

  The streets were coated in a thick layer of snow. Paris looked like a voluptuous woman, every signpost, street corner, and shrub rounded and curved and cushioned. He walked at a quick pace, the soles of his boots clicking sharply against the pavement. His cheeks and the tip of his nose were bright red. Every few seconds he sniffled as his nose ran, but his eyes were alight, and a smile tugged at the edge of his mouth.

  David trotted up the steps to his apartment. The familiar and welcome silence seemed to cocoon itself around his mind. It wasn’t just quiet here, it was safe, and no one was annoyingly asking for extensions on homework or inviting him to office parties. It was exhausting, feigning excitement and interest for their little social gatherings and gossip. He would have preferred to slink into the classroom undetected and leave again just as undisturbed. Being forced to converse with Gilbert was something he didn’t expect and therefore couldn’t prepare for. There was something about this club … this Black Paris.

  DAVID LEFT HIS APARTMENT late Friday night, fingering the sheet of paper with Gilbert’s directions in his jacket pocket. January’s winds rushed through Paris, tugging at awnings and coursing through clothing. He stepped aboard a bus, stomping the cold from his feet. The street signs flew past in flashes of blue.

  The bus was warm and smelled of damp bodies. David stood near the door, clutching one of the metal railings and peering out at the gloom. As the bus chugged down the streets, a strange feeling scurried up his spine—a feeling that he’d gone too far. He jumped off at the next stop. A chilling wind hit with the strength of a typhoon. David stumbled around, his breath coming in small gasps, looking for the landmarks Gilbert had written out. Just as his feet began to throb painfully, a door loomed out of the darkness like a monolith. A door with peeling black paint beckoned with yellow tinged fingers, for him to turn the knob.

  He paused in the alleyway; it smelled like a mixture of éclairs, piss, and rotting oysters. With a din, a trashcan collapsed, and out shot a mangy tabby cat. David flew backward against the alley’s brick wall. In a fit of fear, he grappled for the doorknob and catapulted himself through the entryway. The hundred odd people, crammed into the uncomfortably warm suite of rooms took little notice of the arrival of a one-armed white man, until he bumped into a couple dancing at the edge of the revelry. Slowly, like honey spilled on the floor, the dancers stopped and turned his direction. The band stopped playing. The silence was unnatural. The eyes focused on him held a range of emotions from confusion to mistrust to outright contempt.

  Out of the murky silence the lone trumpeter in the band tooted his horn and bowed as though he were introducing royalty.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen! A white man in Black Paris! Let’s give him a round of applause!”

  Spurts of laughter rang out and in the blink of an eye; the stationary figures became a seething dancing mass again. There were smiles on more than a few faces, but they went right back to their revelry, taking as much notice of him as they did the light fixtures.

  “Bienvenue, mon ami,” a gravelly voice said from behind David.

  Behind the counter stood a tall black man, boasting a large stomach that hugged the cabinets with gusto. He was smiling so widely each one of his white teeth showed. There might have even been a glint of gold in that million-dollar smile. He reached across the bar with short sausage like fingers, his eyes looked out beneath eyebrows that seemed to grow out of his forehead like bird plumage.

  “Bonjour, monsieur,” David said, reaching out with long lean fingers and shook the proffered hand

  “Louis, just Louis. And we get a lot of whites here, don’t mind Henri, he likes to joke,” the barman said, beckoning David to the closest stool.

  David sat at the bar, fingered the mahogany counter with its many dings and divots and smiled at the quality of the wood and woodwork.

  “The twenties were better days, all anyone’s interested in now is blues and rock and roll,” Louis said with a nod, as though this was some sort of explanation for the state of the club. Without bothering to ask David’s order, he slid a whiskey across the counter in a delicately wrought crystal glass. “What brings you here?”

  “David. I came to Paris to get away from … I mean, I have a grant, teaching English at the Université de Paris.”

  “Ah, we have an érudit with us tonight,” Louis said, touching his head in salute.

  “Hardly, I hope to run a business someday, teaching English.”

  Louis didn’t comment but bustled off to fill a shouted order for champagne, surprisingly graceful for a man of his size.

  As David swirled the thick amber liquid, he closed his eyes to savor the sound of the music, as his heart beat in time with the soul rousing tones of the jazz. It electrified his soul; every beat meant more, every breath was deeper. All that mattered at that moment was that the music continued on forever.

  “So, fresh off the boat?”

  Louis was back, refilling his water glass at the tap behind the bar.

  “Pardon?” David asked, still concentrating on the sensuous tones of the band behind him.

  “You just arrived in Paris?”

  “Oh yes … well no, 10 years ago,” David said, reluctantly turning his back on the band.

  “Musician?”

  “I sing. On occasion,” David said. He looked down at the dark wood floor of the club, scuffed by many thousands of feet, but they were sound and sturdy. Someone took great care of this establishment.

  “It must be on more than just an occasion. Why else would an American be here, of all the places to be in Paris on a Friday night? You should sing for us.”

  “I was referred, by Gilbert de Granville.”

  “Ah, Gilbert. He’s in here more often than not,” Louis said with a wry smile.

  “What is he like?”

  “Well, he’s from an old family, wealthy, his parents think he’s just going through a stage, rebellion and such. Gilbert has his own demons. Take yourself for instance, how’d you lose that arm? Not in the war,” Pierre said, his thick fingers grasped the side of the bar and the stare that he fixed David with seemed to bore into his soul.

  “It’s not one of my demons,” David said, trying and failing to add conviction to his voice.

  “N’imports qui,” Louis said with a dismissive wave of his hand and slid off to serve some sweaty dancers who had collapsed against the bar.

  David moved from the bar, disgruntled by Louis’ questions, to find a corner table where he might nurse his whiskey and be able to listen to the band without interruption. As he navigated the floor, the mass of bodies moved with the grace of a single organism. Even as much as he disliked the pressing of bodies and the multitude of conversations and querying gazes … the mass took the shape of a strange sort of family—a family joined in a single pursuit, but where you might be able to slide into the background if you didn’t want to participate too much.

  David was almost across the dance floor, staring with ecstasy at an empty corner table, when he was thrust forward and into a full table of champagne drinking friends. His left wrist gave a protesting jolt of pain. The two exuberant dancers who had slammed into him shouted ‘excusez nous’ at David and then whirled away in a flurry of fabric. David muttered a hurried apology to the shocked faces at the table and skirted away. He sat down at the haven of the corner table, rubbed his wrist up against his jacket, and frowned at the dance floor.

  In the safety of the corner, he had a much better view of the club. It was well proportioned, longer than it was wide. The bar took up much less space
than the stage; it was clear what Parisians came here for. David sat in the corner; his glass mysteriously filled every so often, and listened to the music. He slumped in the chair, surprisingly soft with its well-worn red cushions, and let his eyes close. He could pretend, if he shut them out, that the swirling tipsy club-goers had gone and he was alone … alone with the music.

  It may as well have been a thousand miles or a thousand years that separated these happy couples and him.

  DAVID AWOKE THE NEXT morning, curled beneath the worn quilt, which Madame Jeanne had given him years ago when the boiler went caput. Joyous morning shouts rang up from below, punctuated by the sharp whistle of the espresso machines. David padded out of bed to lean against the frosted windows. Yesterday’s snow was now a dingy gray. The city now looked as though it had been bathed in ash.

  After a decade living above the bistro, David’s apartment had changed very little: a table with two chairs, a stocked kitchen and the gifted quilt. He had meant to furnish it, but to what end? No one saw it. He had no friends, no life beyond teaching English. The empty apartment served to remind him of his inability to change. He’d created a monument to his failure.

  To escape this depressing notion, he hurried through his morning routine, pulled on rubber boots and a heavy coat and sidled down the staircase to walk the streets. It had become a weekly ritual, a chance to view the world he occupied—to live for a moment in the hustle and bustle of families and friends and co-workers. Even the continual throb of the cold was not enough to put him off his long jaunts around Paris. There was life all around, beauty to be seen and felt. Somehow, on the crowded streets, everyone became identically unexceptional. With all the foot traffic and minds distracted with appointments to arrive timely and errands to run, he could slip through their ranks and just watch and listen.

  He walked through the wholesome neighborhoods and those rather less so—areas teeming with immigrants and minorities and corners where prostitution was very much in evidence. He found comfort among the different, those who stood out, as if they were part of a family where everyone had been adopted.

  He walked until the sun dipped toward the horizon and the temperature began to drop in earnest. In the last hour, he had begun to lose feeling in his toes, so he took to stomping and wriggling his feet whenever he was compelled to stop and wait for traffic.

  Stumbling up the stairs, courtesy of his frozen appendages, he shook out his coat, thinking longingly of the leftover sandwich and soup for dinner. As he reached for the doorknob to insert the key a great shout came up from behind him.

  “David! What timing!” Gilbert was stomping up the stairs, in an expensive camel-colored wool coat, a conniving grin plastered across his smug, handsome face. David slipped and crashed against the wall.

  “Gilbert…”

  “Open up the door, this place is an ice chest.”

  David rubbed his shoulder, reluctantly opened the door, and stood to one side so that Gilbert might pass through. He tried to open his mouth, to force the words out, to say that he just wanted to be alone and to enjoy the leftovers in his refrigerator and curl up with Slaughterhouse-Five on the couch, reading until his eyes forced themselves shut.

  But David couldn’t open his mouth. He stood awkwardly by the door as Gilbert took stock of the entire apartment, strolling through the rooms, registering the emptiness of the place. It was rather like seeing a foreign army invade its poorer neighbor.

  “I’ll wait for you to change,” Gilbert said, settling on the couch.

  “Change for what?” David said, still standing to the left of the doorway. He shuffled from foot to foot, his mouth hanging agape at the man now draped over his couch.

  “Dinner first and then Black Paris. Louis told me you stopped by last night. He said you didn’t seem to enjoy yourself at all and that you left to sit in the corner after he tried to pry into your personal life. So David, are you the fleeing type?”

  “I’ll just change my shoes,” David stuttered and fled the room.

  “Bien.”

  David closed the door, let out his breath, and relaxed in the sanctuary of his room. Slaughterhouse-Five sat on the nightstand beckoning invitingly. He looked at the cream and blue cover and sighed. Leaving the apartment was difficult on its own, but the thought of being dragged through Paris by Gilbert, having to make polite and useless conversation with strangers was exhausting. David stared at the mirror hanging on the door of the wardrobe. He wasn’t an unhandsome man, but his ears stuck out too far from his head, and he’d put on weight after living above Jeanne’s café for so many years.

  His was the typical academic’s face, rounded and a little boyish as if he’d never taken part in playground fights and secret boxing matches behind the bleachers. Of course, with his one arm, no one would have expected it. But women didn’t go in for a man who looked weaker than they did. David sighed. The sight that greeted him in the mirror was depressing. He sneered a little, then swung his arms through his Henry a la Pensée suit coat, the one luxury he’d allowed Paris to press upon him. No sooner had he presented himself to Gilbert than he was rushed down the stairway and into a waiting taxi.

  “Why are you wasting your time working for the Sorbonne, David? You could make ten times the money if you went into business for yourself.”

  David fingered the stem of his wineglass and watched as his fingerprints appeared again and again. The restaurant where Gilbert had brought him was flashy, but distastefully so, as if the proprietors sought to mix the worst of international modern decor with all the excesses of the gilded age.

  “Who would I teach? The Sorbonne finds the students to take the class. And it has a certain draw since it’s taught at the university.”

  “Professionals would line up to take classes, you know, business men and the like. Think about the money you could make …” Gilbert said, pulling out a cigarette and leaning back against the plush seat, closing his eyes to savor the idea of so much money.

  Gilbert was dressed in a slim fitting suit and smirked every time a woman turned to look at him. He was the Gallic ideal of masculine beauty, pale with dark features and hair that was combed back with pomade. David supposed that it was the mysterious aura about him that attracted women in hoards. Even David didn’t know what to expect from this glamorous, and clearly wealthy man.

  “I’ll think about it,” David said, pulling off his black-framed glasses and polishing them on a napkin.

  Gilbert stared, frowning. Although he soon cast his gaze on a nearby woman, he felt a twinge, as though Gilbert had been appraising her like an object for sale at auction. It was unnerving. The woman whom Gilbert was trying to make eye contact with flounced off in the direction of the bar and energetically kissed a man who had just walked in. They walked off, arm in arm, toward a far corner. David thought he caught sight of a sparkle on the woman’s left hand as the couple turned the corner. Being ignored seemed to momentarily deflate Gilbert who downed his vodka in one gulp and stood up.

  “Let’s go,” Gilbert said as he pulled a few crisp francs from his wallet, slammed them down by the ashtray, and walked off toward the coat rack without a backward glance. David looked morosely at his half-full glass of wine before heaving himself off the comfortable chair and following.

  The back alley wasn’t nearly as frightening. Raucous laughter could be heard even as they approached. With company this time, David found it laughable that he had been scared at all before. Gilbert skipped as they neared the door with the peeling paint. He hailed Louis for a drink the moment they walked in and then set off across the dance floor in search of a woman. At the entrance, David watched as his erstwhile friend beamed as he was immediately flocked by five women.

  He walked back toward the same table he had sat at last night, feeling a sort of kinship for the out-of-the-way, half ignored table. The music seeped into his soul, a slow but steady saturation, his foot jigged in time to the beat, and, for an instant, he was seized with an almost irresistible urge to jo
in the band on stage and sing with them. It was the lure of music. In this far-flung corner of Paris, away from the glitz and glamour, he was alive. More alive than he had been in his entire life. The music was a sensuous mix of tribal beats and Caribbean sway mingled together with the new era. Paris was more alive in this distant club than it ever was at the Université or La Tour Eiffel or Versailles. The heartbeat of the city lay underneath the streets, in the hands of people she deemed unworthy of the honor. David was completely and utterly in love.

  THE TIDE OF DANCERS and the boisterous sounds of the bar fell away, and all that reached David’s ears were the clear tones of the band and its lead singer. He closed his eyes, drinking in the beat, and sat through two song changes, spirited away by the music to a place where reality was no longer present.

  “Fancy a dance?”

  A clear voice reached his ears. It trilled through the words instead of speaking them, like water falling down a rocky creek-bed. He turned to find himself face-to-face with a singularly beautiful woman. She was thin with long brown hair and an oval shaped face. Her eyes assailed him. They were clear and wide but serious. They were the eyes of a woman who knew what she wanted and never apologized for it. They were eyes that seeped into dreams. She stood in front of him with a quiet confidence, sure of her ability to persuade him out of his chair, his neglected corner of the world.

  “It’ll have to be a faster song,” David said, turning so that his right side faced the woman in front of him. She didn’t even lower her gaze to look, but placed her right hand on her waist, calling attention to how the simple black dress hugged her curves, and smiled.

  “I saw you here last night. I’ve already seen it. My cousin lost his leg and part of his arm during the war.”

  “This isn’t a war injury.”

  “What does that matter? Are you a good dancer?” she asked with her head tilted and her thick brows knit together.

  “I have several sisters,” David said, as way of an explanation, he was eager to see a smile light up the woman’s face.