Paris or Die

by Jayne Tuttle

  ‘You smell nice,’ I slur. ‘I’ve never known a man-perfume that smells nice before.’

  ‘Oh, you are so drunk,’ he says, half laughing.

  ‘I’m not,’ I say, putting my face on the seat of the red chair. ‘I am not drunk.’ I turn and smile at him. ‘What’s drunk in French?’

  He passes me a cup of tea and sits on the chair. ‘Bourrée,’ he says. ‘And you are – you are bourrée, tu t’es bourré la gueule!’

  I’m drunk off my face, in other words. They use the word ‘face’ a lot for things. ‘To do the face’ is to be angry. ‘Your face!’ means shut up.

  I gulp my tea and scald my mouth, squealing, then push my fingers into the fold of skin that has come loose on my upper palate. He looks at me with a pretend look of reprehension and I look back like a naughty child.

  ‘Kiki, she is lesbienne, non?’

  ‘What?’ I laugh. ‘Kiki is the reddest-blooded heterosexual I know. Are you serious?’

  ‘Well, she is bi, alors.’

  ‘Oh my god,’ I say. ‘Where did you get that idea?’

  ‘I see Kiki with the girls. And Martine, her friend from the party where we meet, she is bi. So, I just thinking …’

  ‘Did you think I was a lesbian then too, at the party? You’re so funny!’ I giggle, rolling onto my stomach. ‘Hey, loosen up! Look at you, sitting there on my throne. Come down here with me, you big, gay-scared —’

  ‘Hmm,’ he says, dropping to his knees.

  ‘Was one of your exes gay or something?’

  ‘Non.’

  ‘Well, I can assure you that I am very heterosexual. I even kissed a girl once to find out.’

  This wasn’t the right thing to say.

  ‘Oh, man,’ I say. ‘I just wanted to experience everything. But when it came down to it, I wasn’t interested. I was doing it to be cool, and to tick it off. Didn’t you have your obligatory gay experience? At your fancy boys’ college?’

  He looks shocked. ‘Non.’

  ‘Okay then, fine. Can we just agree that we’re not gay? And be together?’

  He smiles. ‘Okay. We’re not gay.’

  ‘And can we just speak French? We’re so formal in English. I can speak your language better now – let’s do that?’

  ‘D’accord.’

  Mayday

  IT SEEMS HARRY and I have the same trajectories around the 10th and I bump into him four times in the following week: in the boulangerie, by the canal, on my way to school, and in the supermarket. After that one I invite him up for a beer and to show him the Récollets, and he can’t believe how many times he must have walked past it and not seen it.

  Nadine is the same. For some reason, the majestic old white building just seems to miss your eye if you’re not looking for it. I notice this phenomenon with a lot of people I mention it to. Perhaps it’s a portal.

  She invites me over one morning, to recover after a night out with Harry and Kiki at the hip bar-gallery the Point Éphémère. Adrien was invited, but for some reason he hadn’t shown. When I called, he simply said he wasn’t coming, without feeling the need to offer an excuse.

  Nadine shares a luxurious top-floor apartment with two wealthy French people, and I’m sitting on her sunlit balcony drinking coffee when Adrien rings.

  ‘Yes?’ I say.

  ‘Ma chérie,’ he says, sensing my attitude. ‘Are you doing the face?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘What are you doing today?’ he asks, ignoring my tone. He tells me his friend Fabien is back from the Maldives, where he runs a fancy resort, and they’re going to drive to another friend’s château in the country. Nadine has a lunch date, the sun is shining, and I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than drive out to the country. I’ve been dreaming for a long time of French countryside, the grass, fresh air.

  ‘Maybe,’ I say.

  ‘Come, ma chérie, you’ll like it.’

  I give it a few more seconds before agreeing.

  ‘Come now, because Fab will be here in half an hour.’

  Nadine smiles at me as I hang up. ‘Nice try.’

  ‘Jesus, look what I’m wearing,’ I say, looking at her. All that was clean this morning was a vintage floral pinafore, a worn black tunic and high red socks, which I paired with my over-the-knee brown suede boots. Raggedy Ann chic. I was hungover and running late for Nadine’s. I hadn’t even showered.

  ‘You look great,’ she says, admiring my stupid outfit. I rush out the door before I’m tempted to start ransacking her wardrobe, which is much more appropriate but two sizes too small for me.

  It’s hot on the train and a man plays a trumpet loudly in my ear. I give him two euros to shut up but it just encourages him. The sun lights up the Seine as we cross, the trumpet man gets off, and by the time I reach Adrien’s I’ve forgiven him. He kisses me passionately and gives me a hug that lifts me off the ground.

  ‘T’es jolie!’ he says, standing back to look at me.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting a date,’ I say, clutching at myself.

  A well-groomed guy exits the bathroom.

  ‘Jayne,’ says Adrien, ‘Fabien.’

  ‘Bonjour,’ says Fabien, kissing me rhythmically on both cheeks. He is dapper – dark hair slicked back and a mauve polo shirt with the collar pulled up.

  Fab has a cool car, cool hair, and speaks with a cool aristo-drawl. He and Adrien went to boarding school together – one of the best schools in France, Adrien has told me – along with Raphaël and Nico, whose family owns the château we’re going to. Adrien was a poor boy amongst the richest boys in France – not that he was actually poor, he just wasn’t from a family de nom. He doesn’t have a de in his surname, or a champagne named after him, or famous paintings that have been handed down through his family for centuries. I’m not sure Fab comes from one of those families, but judging from his loftiness he seems to. Though he gesticulates a lot, and that, according to what we’ve been learning at school, makes you lower status. The higher the status, the slower the movement and the less frequent the speech. At the highest status, people barely move or speak at all. While Fab moves his arms around, it’s in a very fluid and confident way. He speaks down to Adrien, booming over him. I don’t exist. Instead of fighting it I let myself disappear, along with Paris, as the city opens out into the suburbs, then towns and then lush green meadows. It’s the first time I’ve left the Paris region and I’m glued to my window, oblivious to the conversation in the front seat.

  When we reach a rolling part of the countryside, Fab pulls the top down and I can no longer hear their conversation at all. The wind whips at my ears and the earthy smell of fresh-cut grass and cow shit fills my nose between blasts of smoke from Fab’s joint. We drive and drive, past fields and through little glades and tiny stone towns where, if I block out the parked cars and advertising, I can imagine it’s the year 1700. We pass a big zoo and Fab and Adrien point at it and laugh. Adrien turns around and tells me a story about it but I can’t hear so I just nod and smile. He passes me the joint. Fab closes the roof and asks me about Australia and why I am in Paris and I try to explain, but it’s too complicated and he can’t hear me anyway so we all just give up and go back to what we were doing.

  On the outskirts of a village, Fab pulls off the road where an elderly couple are selling little posies of white flowers on a card table. They smell divine – lily-of-the-valley, or muguet, as Adrien tells me. The couple are poor and humble and kind. Fab buys the two loveliest posies on the table and the sweet-faced couple put a bit of crêpe paper around them, wrap a ribbon around the paper and tie it in a bow. Fab flings the posies in the back seat as we tear off, leaving the couple in a cloud of dust.

  After an hour’s drive we pull into a stone driveway and Fab yells something into an intercom in front of two enormous gates. They creak open and we drive slowly along a vast field with a château in the distance that has all the chimneys and turrets and statues and shutters of fairytales. My mouth is agape as we approach an
d veer off towards the right, beneath a forest of trees. Adrien tells me the building is usually open to the public, but today it’s closed for the holiday. Nico’s family live in an elegant, hedged-in house beside the château. We emerge from the trees at the open front door and walk through the opulent yet homely rooms to the kitchen, where we can see people milling outside. I put the flowers in glasses of water on the marble kitchen table, not in a hurry for the introductions.

  Adrien grabs my hand and we step through a doorway onto a vast stone terrace with an outdoor table under luxurious umbrellas. Beyond is a vast manicured lawn with a tennis court, farmland in the distance. A parade of young women and men file one by one past us. Eight girls and seven boys kiss me on both cheeks and say, ‘Sabine,’ ‘Agathe,’ ‘Thérèse,’ and so on, to which I reply, ‘Jayne, Jayne, Jayne, Jayne.’ Adrien has told me that on such occasions you don’t have to engage with each person and say something like ‘Nice to meet you.’ It only slows the process down and is insincere. ‘You don’t know them yet,’ he said. ‘How can you be sure it’s nice to meet them?’

  At the end of the line, a guy who knows my name says, ‘Salut Jayne,’ and I reply, ‘Jayne.’ When I realise what I’ve done I let out a loud, ugly laugh. He doesn’t laugh and neither does anyone else.

  Each one of them is wearing a variation of French tennis attire: pastel polo shirts, crisp white shorts, neat day dresses, visors. Not only do they all know each other and speak the same language fast and fluently, they have all been to Ralph Lauren together to buy their outfits. I must look like an alien.

  Adrien doesn’t mind my uniqueness; on the contrary, he seems to step up his public affection for me, playing with the straps on my dress, draping his arm across my shoulder, kissing me lightly and squeezing my hand, trying to involve me in conversations. I feel we are being watched and judged and Adrien looks like he’s enjoying this. I have the sense that his friends are not. They probably all attended balls together; perhaps Adrien lost his virginity to one of these girls, surely at least one is in love with him. There’s a tightness between them all, a sense of ownership, like an incestuous royal family.

  The boys go off to kick a football and I join the girls under the umbrella as they nibble thinly sliced charcuterie and sip glasses of rosé. They are so high-status their faces barely move when they speak, which is softly, in graceful sounds; they sit and smoke and drawl and never, ever laugh loudly or guffaw or tell bad jokes or burp. None of them wear makeup, yet their skin is translucent-smooth; there’s no brazen lipstick or big dob of concealer on a crusted zit. Their hair is neat, it has never once been dyed pink; their skin shows no sign of teenage piercings or bad tattoos. They ask me about Australia and have no interest in my reply. I ask them about Paris and they have no interest in their reply. I am an annoyance to them, a glitch in their seamless party; they just want to catch up on their lives in their silken language, and here is this girl in a floral pinafore raping their language with a hacksaw.

  So this is what it is to be the foreigner, I think to myself. The outsider. I try to imagine Adrien around the barbecue at home and I can’t.

  I stay until it feels physically painful for us all, then go off to join the boys. They’re on a patch of lawn beneath the trees, rolling and ducking and tackling each other like lion cubs. I run in and try to steal the ball. It occurs to me that the game has become awkward and I realise the boys are embarrassed that I’m playing with them. All except Adrien, who passes the ball to me, flushed and smiling. The girls watch from under their umbrella, faces bemused.

  I leave the game and flop on the grass under a tree, rolling my stupid socks down and crossing my arms behind my head. Birds chirp. Cows moo in the distance. The grass smells delectable; I breathe it in. Adrien comes and flops next to me, panting. He turns onto his side and begins caressing my hair. I smile beneath my hand-visor, keeping my eyes firmly shut. It’s better here, where I can imagine I’m inside the world. He kisses me on the lips and pulls me gently to my feet, leading me behind the trunk and kissing me sweetly again. Fab whistles at us on his way to the terrace and we pull apart.

  ‘Want to see my cartwheel?’ I ask Adrien, and when he nods I hurl myself across the grass. Then I stand in a strong handstand, my back and shoulder muscles firm from acrobatics training at school. He comes and puts his hand on my lower back and I ease my weight across his hand and flip over to standing.

  ‘Watch,’ he says, and moving a long way back, takes a run-up and performs a perfect flip, landing on his feet.

  ‘I didn’t know you could do a saut de mains!’

  ‘Mais oui,’ he says, ‘I’m a pro!’

  I get him to stay where he is and I walk back, run up, and spring off my hands, near where he’s standing. He puts his hand in the same place on my lower back and I flip right over.

  ‘I barely touched you then!’ he says. ‘Tiens, regarde.’ He grabs my hands and pushes them down to the grass, showing me how to get more spring out of them. I run back and try to do the flip on my own but land abruptly on my butt. I laugh like a four-year-old before running back to try again. And again. I can’t quite pull it off.

  ‘We will keep practising,’ says Adrien, smiling, flushed.

  I don’t care that they’re all watching, smoking on the terrace. I don’t care that Mum is thinking, Will you ever grow up? I don’t care about anything right now. I can almost do an unassisted saut de mains. Thanks to Adrien.

  ‘À table!’ call the girls.

  Adrien leapfrogs over me as I go to stand up. I leap back over him and we leapfrog all the way to the table.

  Thérèse serves him a golden chicken wing and Adrien and I continue our ridiculous conversation about how leapfrogging in French is called leap-sheeping. Perhaps, I say, it’s because of counting sheep leaping over a fence in order to sleep. I say that I think the French version is more poetic, and keep babbling as they eat with their heavy silver cutlery. Smothered giggles flutter around the table and I’m not sure if they’re laughing at my attempted humour or at me.

  ‘Who wants rosé?’ someone asks. Once the delicious chicken, or pintade, is finished we squash tiny portions of mouth-watering cheeses onto our plates with salad, and then eat berries with cream. A wooden pergola with a pretty roped creeper creates a dappled light over us. Cigarettes are lit, glasses refilled, and a pleasant afternoon drunkenness sets itself into my body.

  Nico comes and drapes himself over the arm of Adrien’s seat and smiles at the sky, exhaling plumes of smoke at it. He looks like someone from The Great Gatsby. His polo shirt is pale mauve, like Fabien’s, and he’s wearing khaki pants and a beautiful white Panama hat. He holds his cigarette in a camp way and I think he’s gay, but then many of Adrien’s straight friends give that impression.

  ‘I have never seen a girl kick a football quite like you,’ Nico says to me, and Adrien laughs.

  ‘She’s Australian,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, a real Australian,’ agrees Nico, as if he knows what that is. I feel objectified, like a curiosity, but I smile anyway, through my sun-drenched rosé haze. I suppose I see them as objects too, pretty snowdomes to shake up and admire. Especially Adrien, with his Ken-doll face looking across the table at me as he smokes his cigarette. Did I ever think he would actually be real? That night I first met him he was like some kind of French mirage, a man I’d invented who then appeared in the flesh, but did I really imagine going deeper inside him, as I am now? Had he imagined that with me?

  ‘Shall we take a little promenade?’ asks Nico. The others are leaving the table for the pool, the tennis court, the kitchen, the lawn.

  Adrien helps me through a secret garden gate and we crunch our way along a stone path to the château grounds. He knows this place well, he tells me; he used to stay with Nico’s family on school holidays when Séverine was away working. Nico and he laugh about something and I walk behind them, tuning out. The white linen of Adrien’s shirt billows behind him in the breeze. Nico has sweat gathering in beads on the
skin of his tanned neck. The fragrant smoke of their pétard blows back in my face. We pass perfect hedges and little ponds with bright red fish swimming in them and a beautiful statue of a woman’s face covered in deep green moss, which Nico tells me is one of his ancestors.

  I am sweating in my socks and the sun is beating down sharply, and in the heat and the beauty I feel a rising horniness. We keep walking, past fountains and through a mini forest, over a rippling stream and into a little glen, the boys murmuring, the sun beating, the birds chirping. My mind wanders across all kinds of situations, sinking into the stream with them both, naked in the glen, rolling in leaves, being discovered by the girls, who, shocked at first, take off their visors and join us …

  As we exit a glade, Adrien reaches behind and touches my hand, as if he has heard my thoughts. Maybe he can feel my heat. I rub my closed hand around inside his fingers in a dirty way; I want to steal him away, devour his body. He is randy too, I can feel it in the tips of his fingers, the way they curl to receive my finger-job.

  In the château the rooms are decked in red carpet and have windows so high the floors are bathed in light. The beauty and history makes me dizzy. I can’t help but imagine the people in here over centuries, having sex, giving birth, dying. Nico gives us the tour and we tag along like first-home buyers, Adrien’s hands behind his back, my hand in his. The bedroom walls are covered in the same material as the curtains and there are chandeliers and bedposts in the shape of ducks. The restraint is making me crazy. As Nico leads us through a dark cellar in single file, I reach my arms around and grab Adrien’s nipples, kiss his neck. He gropes at my thighs. If I had a cock I would push it right into him.

  In an old galley kitchen full of old stoves and ovens and murderous ghosts, Nico turns to us and we pull apart. ‘And here’s where all the food was made. So voilà! Your private tour ends here.’

  ‘It’s very impressive,’ I say.

  ‘I have never seen it empty like this,’ says Adrien, running his hands along the pots and pans strung up on hooks, making them crash loudly.