There were five people in the Flore. I recognized three of them, although they didn’t me. One was a TV fashion commentator. He stood in the stair well, his tongue wrapped around the arm of an ochre-tinted set of sunglasses, eyes rolling imploringly, while he tried to placate a clearly dissatisfied dyke comedian with a sour grimace on her face that said Paris didn’t measure up to her own virtual realities. A high profile philosopher known for his anti-American jingoism was intently scribbling his next piece of vitriol. That left her and me. The only illustrious unknowns in the place.
We were made for each other. I had been sliding into a posture of indifference for years. Nothing was real to me, except the strong smell of grains in the whisky I drank, or the nicotine stains on my fingers. Those were my faithful companions. They would lead me to premature death, but in the meantime, they allowed me to navigate through my personal mental wasteland of scrub and savanna. I, at least, knew my gaoler, whereas the great mass of humanity had not yet even realized they were in prison. It allowed me clarity, if not liberty.
Any thing I did had no meaning, other than as a means of marking time. From one cigarette to the next, or one drink to the next. Or one cunt to the next. The only remaining issue was to see how things played out. Occasionally, I would latch on to the illusion that I could accomplish something useful. Those inter vals were short-lived, and led nowhere. A decent poker game would pull me back to reality. Or a month or two with any given woman.
At least that was my state of mind until I spotted Sheba. The second I caught sight of her, I knew I had fallen onto terra incognita. I sat down at the table beside her. Asked her who she was. What brought her there. Her nationality. All of it in a deliberately slow, plodding accent as if I had just wandered in from Cracow or Prague. I had no idea what effect I had on people, didn’t really care at that point. It was a weak, clumsy ploy, but tactics were a secondary issue when people didn’t really exist. I offered her a drink. Watched her consider giving me the brush-off, then decide she would put up with whatever I had to offer. After some small talk, I could see she was in for a few more, provided I paid. We moved up the street to a rum bar.
When the rum bar shut down, she offered to take me for a spin in her car. We took a fast, rain-slicked drive up the rue de Seine, onto Vaugirard, and alongside the Luxembourg gardens. For those of you who have never tried it, it’s a hell of a lot of fun to whiz along Parisian rain-driven streets at high-speed with a French broad stripped of the usual moral scruples, and not a clue where you’re headed. Type of thing that can make you forget you’ve been up for thirty-six hours. We raced the wrong way up Soufflot, higher than kites, thanks to some ecstacy she had stashed in her purse, then did a few 360s around the Pantheon. Not a soul to be seen. The pillars of the austere law faculty staring down at us. The Pantheon, and a slew of famous men’s graves — Voltaire, Montaigne and Pascal, the foolish experimenter and conjecturer — Foucault’s pendulum, Ste-Geneviève du Mont. We were higher than the philosophers, macrocosmic. Nobody could touch us. We had been sprayed with human repellent.
It’s prett y difficult to describe your state of mind when you find yourself in these regions. From the outside, it definitely looks like insanity. It’s not, though. It’s just not caring anymore. Outside of ever ything else, Sheba had provided me with the perfect excuse to write off humanity once and for all. That’s how I felt when we jumped out of the car and entered a bar on Mouffetard. “Bartender, for those in attendance who are interested, one round of cranberry vodka martinis or Black
Bush coolers or other poison of their choice.”
I must have said something like that as we took our seats. If Western Union had walked through the door just behind us, in that hole in the wall on Mouffetard to announce that America had been destroyed by nuclear holocaust, I would have turned my back and ordered another round of cranberry vodka martinis for the house. To celebrate the event. Or more precisely, to get on with it. Or just to keep the chaser rinsing my vocal chords between the lines of coke we snorted. Or to underline my core belief that all life had now magically been compressed inside the bodies floating within my spongiform cerebral universe. But more than anything because Sheba had become magnetic North, and the sound of that siren voice cooing in my direction just sent me right off whatever was left of my head. But, it was voluntary. Consensual synallagmatic every step of the way.
And not a single redeeming feature to her. Unless you call a cunt like a pocket warmer a redeeming feature. Or a superhuman ability to perform fellatio better than a piccolo player in the Orchestre Nationale de France a redeeming feature. Or an assassin’s smile, and an attitude to match a redeeming feature. Lucifer’s daughter was perched in my lap and I felt the date was long overdue.
“Sheba, you know what I am thinking?”
She was sizing me up, basically as prey, not because she was immoral, or evil or any of those things. It was just in her nature. She was obeying the voice, or as the new-agers would put it, just following her bliss.
“What are you thinking, Franck?”
“I’m thinking I’m Faust, and you’re Beelzebub.”
“No, it’s far better than that, Franck. You see, I can be anything you want me to be. Anything, Franck.”
The next day, Sheba took me for a spin down the
Quai Jemmapes, which runs alongside the Canal St-Martin. We were more or less drifting, passing a cigarette back and forth between us. She was looking out the car window driver side towards the water slapping against the side of the locks, monitoring something, smiling at some private joke. The soundtrack from Lift to the Scaffold was playing on FIP FM, 105.7. I could see Sheba was happy. There was something else, too. But there was happiness. I was already learning to separate it from whatever the other part was.
The cit y had crawled to its usual Sunday morning halt. It was a grey day, of a kind that only Paris can give you, because even with ten million people in it, the city still knew how to come full stop, shut down and loll like the lazy, self-indulgent whore it was. The Miles Davis track had yielded to the husky reverb of a female voice describing a traffic jam in a tone and cadence that sounded piped direct from a caisson at the bottom of a river.
She turned right, drove onto a curved street, which hugged the edges of the Buttes Chaumont and pushed us through Belleville and further South. Once on boulevard Menilmontant, she pulled over, then parked just outside the walls of Père Lachaise cemetery. The city was grey, overcast.
The street where we parked was a short stretch of alley named rue du Repos. We climbed some steps. Walked through the main entrance of the cemetery. A concierge was sitting inside an office at the entrance, blandly leafing through the daily horse-racing form in le Parisien. Sheba walked several steps ahead of me towards the lower end of the Eastern divisions of the cemetery, just inside the walls. The cenotaphs and shrines, visible at higher levels of the cemetery like contours of a mountain vineyard, yielded to simple headstones, flat tombs, and a few scattered cairns at the sliver of plots where we now stood. The surrounding lawn was neglected. Many of the stones were partially overgrown with thistles, vines, milkweed, dandelions. I followed her along a narrow path between two rows of marble slabs. She eased past an old man, hunched over, kneeling as he lay a bouquet of muguets on a tomb. She wore a thin, gauze-like material as a scarf, over a cream-coloured blouse and a knee-length skirt. Dressed for the role. Woman in a Paris cemetery on another dismal Sunday near the end of the millenium. The sun was creeping through the clouds, casting out thick beams of light.
I watched her buttocks swivel back and forth, taunting death with the projects that still lay ahead. I looked back towards the entrance to see if anyone other than the old man was in the vicinity. A young group of anemic Germans had entered by the main road, looking for Jim Morrison’s tomb, or looking for a place to drink. Or just looking. I looked back at her. She was examining me. Everything else, corpses included, were backdrop. There was only her, and her cunt, and the wreckage of her mind.
>
She bent to her knees, wrenched a sprout of milkweed from the soil. She bit off part of the stem. A lactic fluid oozed out into a rivulet onto her lips, then into an estuary over her chin.
“Look at the area around this mauvais herbe, Franck. Nothing alive. Just to live, it has to suck and choke the life of everything within reach.”
She held a small bouquet of the weed, as if she were a bridesmaid. She turned around and continued her walk towards a vertical mausoleum in the shape of a balustrade. Both the inside and out were covered with graffiti and ivy. She pulled me inside.
“Look, Franck.”
She reached for a stretch of iv y clawing at the wall and pulled it back, revealing an etched inscription on
two drawers: Victor Levy Estelle Goldstein
Rachel Levy [1950-1970]
“a refuge for men in need”
There were several swastikas on the wall. One of the graffiti said: “Mort aux juifs.” Another said: “Juden verboten.”
She leaned backwards against the wall and pulled her skirt upwards, showing her rusty cunt hairs draped between the two white straps of her garter belt. Ready for the matinee performance.
“Now, Franck. Now.”
A shaft of sunlight was coming through an open crack in the wall of the mausoleum. She lifted up her left leg and wrapped it around my thigh. I pulled her upwards until both her legs were wrapped around my waist. Over her shoulder, as I felt my cock penetrate past her labia and lodge against the spongiform walls of her vagina, my eyes fell onto the graffiti. Mort aux juifs.
After, for what seemed a long moment, I propped my hands flat against the damp wall, stared at it. She smiled.
Placed her finger in the nucleus of her pursed lips, indicated silence. I peered outside the mausoleum onto the grounds outside. The old man mourning his wife had departed. A Maghrebian gardener, pushing a small cart with a shovel laid flat inside, walked by on the main pathway leading upwards.
Later, we visited a number of tombs of celebrities.
She seemed to have a pre-set itinerary, and I had the impression she had done the routine before. Not that it made any difference, but even then, she didn’t strike me as someone who lost a lot of sleep over others’ suffering.
But, the headstones made good props for her performance. When she described Chopin and Balzac as cuckolds, or cried at Michel Petrucciani’s grave, who she said had been a friend, it was purely a favour for the deceased. Gracing them with her presence so to speak. She stopped in front of the tomb of Abélard and Héloise.
“What should we inscribe on our tomb, Franck?” “What makes you think we will be buried together?” She examined me briefly.
“I hope it’s not all talk, Franck.” “What?”
“I hope you have what it takes.”
The wind was strong, billowing her gauze scarf into bubbled shapes. I felt a sucking pressure pulling on me from my lower torso, as if I had a taut, shredded ligament linking it tentatively to the pituitary gland.
“I want to reveal something to you, Franck.”
Even through the wind, the sun burned harshly. We were passing the Monument to the Dead. The road circled upwards, overlooking the Eastern portion of the city. We sat down on a bench on a promontory, near the tomb of Apollinaire. She walked to the edge of the promontory, leaned over a wrought-iron railing, protecting walkers from a twenty metre sheer drop.
I briefly considered the option of pushing her over, and watching her body and head smash onto the pavement below. She turned around, her eyes probing me, as if detecting something she had been looking for. Then walking towards me, the outside contours of her hips undulating, reminding me of another time, a forgotten déjà vu.
“Do you believe a woman can be fucked by God, Franck?”
The heat of the sun had become unpleasant. Chafing, abrasive. A vapour emanated from the moss clinging loosely to the Monument of the Dead. “I don’t believe in God.” She looked away from me.
“I have a recurrent dream, Franck. It is so real, I wonder whether it might not have happened in a way. A spiritual way. I see something. A person or a presence. But the contours and individuality of the person are not distinct. Like an angel, Franck. Carrying a burning sceptre of sorts. The tip of the sceptre is red-hot, molten iron. The angel approaches me, and plunges the sceptre right into me. Here, Franck.”
She placed both her hands flat on the upper portion of her loins.
“Right into my entrails. The pain, Franck, is absolutely unbearable, yet exquisite. An irresistible force. What do you think it means, Franck?”
“Death.”
“You do understand, don’t you, Franck? It is death.”
She paused momentarily.
“Death doesn’t seem such a bad place.”
When she said it, death seemed like a good place. At least good for the two of us.
“Let’s go back,” I said.
We walked down to the rue du Repos in silence.
IV
A couple of days later, we were exiting the revolving doors of the Hotel Crillon onto the crimson-carpeted steps leading onto Place de la Concorde. She was saying something like:
“You have no idea how to treat a woman, Franck Robinson.”
And, I was responding with something like: “Don’t get me wrong. It’s been a great weekend. But, it’s a little early for diamonds, Sheba.”
I watched her theatrically wiggle that tantalizing ass of hers past the valet and park it on the front seat, driverside of her Audi. And, I recall thinking that this was pretty well too good to be true. Absolute top-shelf cunt, spoil her rotten for a weekend, watch her throw a tantrum or two and then pfft, gone forever, like a spring breeze. I was finally figuring out a basic equation of life.
It was easy, just so long as nobody got inside the inner enclaves. Stick to hotels and whores, Franck, and everything will remain incredibly cool for the duration. After the Audi spun around the Place de la Concorde twice, then evaporated into a cloud of exhaust on the Quai des Tuileries, I looked to the left, lit a Marlboro, then scoped out the situation stage right. A CRS type, standing outside his van near the Palais de l ’Elysée, had obser ved the whole thing played out. I shrugged my shoulders. He laughed. He’d probably seen the scene played out three or four times that morning. Suddenly, I recalled that I was within walking distance of some old cronies who never ventured further than Wee Willie’s Bar up on the rue des Petits Champs on Sunday afternoons. Wee Willie only caters to wine traders, charcutiers and local restaurateurs. Last time I’d frequented the place, Willie the Wee in person was handing out Louis X III cognac, and Hoyo de Monter reys gratos to a l l present. The best way to finish off a Sunday afternoon in my books was a little visit at the Vincennes track, a few Quinte and Quarte bets, preferably with some shortskirted tart carrying a tray in her left hand filled with 51 or Calvados. In short, the slate was being cleared and, as I crossed the arcade of the Palais Royal, things were looking more than up, and time stretched out into an infinity of low accountability and high-grade sensorial enjoyment.
I was working my way towards the Galéries Vivienne, the idea being to pick up some champagne and Medoc for the post Wee Willie’s phase. I casually reflected that I was within walking distance of the Madeleine, a neoclassical temple erected by the French to honour a whore. It was a private joke and I was glad to be alone. Then, I looked up and there she was again. The first thing I noticed were the tears running down her mascaraed eyes.
“Oh, is it really you, Franck?”
“What the hell are you doing here?” “Me, can’t a woman take a stroll in Paris, it’s still a free country and, what a coincidence, how did you show up here? For all I know, you were following me.”
Dab, dab with the handkerchief, she went, paying her dominical respects to the gods of hubris and artifice.
“How could you have hurt me so?”
She stopped short, recalling something. Her tears now yielded to a slight smile, as if there was still slight
recompense in a world of injustice and unspeakable pain.
“By the way, I had a little discussion with the concierge during our brief separation, Franck. Olivier of course recognized me, he knew you were being unkind to me, so he, at least, was correct enough to give me your plane ticket, passport and a few other items. You know, Franck. Bank cards. Mementoes. I think there might have been a few pictures too. You know the ones, Franck.
If the law society ever saw them, I wouldn’t want to be in your position. All of which, of course, I have stored in a safe place until I decide what to do with them ... Frank, one of these days you must learn how a real French woman deserves to be treated.”
The anglicism oozed out in a stipply gallic roll, as if she were Kiki of Montparnasse herself stepping onto stage, back in the nineteen tens, pre-American invasion, and not a late millenial whore who spoke a very creditable version of Kensington English whenever she put her mind to it.
One thing you should never do if you’ve decided to break with the past and devise your own life plan is introduce people from past lives. But, I didn’t want her any where near Wee Willies. That was sacred territory.
On the other hand, I had a dinner date with Laraine Sandusky back in the Flore towards the end of the day.
I had fucked Laraine one night in her New York condo while her accountant husband was sleeping upstairs, and felt bad enough about it to avoid her unless absolutely necessary. On the other hand, Laraine always had some scheme up her sleeve which involved easy profits. The agenda was rapidly evolving, and some decisions had to be made. I invited Sheba to come along for the ride, thinking she might be a good deflector if Laraine got any funny ideas on the personal level. Sheba magically produced my wallet, and suddenly the world was a brighter place. Not quite as good as ten minutes previous, but not bad.
As Sheba and I entered the Flore, Laraine was creating a made in New York moment, railing at the waiter in her brassiest Manhattan moxy for passing off Bleu de Gex for Fourme de Montbrison. I recognized the waiter, Cédric, who sodomized by night, and made the general public pay for his excesses during daylight hours. But Laraine had the type picked off on sight, and, either for her own amusement or as a sideshow for us, performed her usual number on him with extra flair, punctuating her moral outrage with a piercing scream until Cédric volte-faced and heeled it back to the kitchen to ricochet Laraine’s wrath onto the cheese cutter.
Leper Tango Page 4
