by Jayne Tuttle
‘I shouldn’t have drunk all that wine and stuff. I didn’t need to. I just —’
‘Shhh, sweetie, come here. It’s all fine.’
I put my head on her thick, strangely comforting shoulder and she strokes my head. For some annoying reason I begin to cry.
‘Paulina!’ she calls. ‘Bring the photos from today. Paulina!’
The androgyne comes rushing in with an orange envelope.
‘These are for you, sweetie,’ oozes Al. ‘They’re beautiful. If we use them, the studio will call you. I love them. You and Kiki are sooo beautiful.’
I thank her and leave, opening the envelope by the canal, careful who might be looking over my shoulder. The photos are funny but I hate them so much I want to throw them in the water. I take them to Kiki’s.
She moans at the sight of me. I hug her.
‘I just took the cat back.’
‘How was the slut-hole?’
‘In afternoon happy phase. She gave me the photos.’
Kiki tears them out of my hands and sits down. A crazed laugh bursts from her as she looks at the shot of her and Manu kissing in bed. ‘Yuk,’ she says, flopping backwards. She seems drunk. ‘I like these secret garden lesbo ones. Look at your sweet little nipples!’ She tosses the photos aside and covers her face with her hands.
‘What are you going to do?’ I say.
‘I quit,’ she says. ‘Of course.’
My throat tightens. ‘So what will you do now?’
‘Do my show then go, I suppose. I don’t know. I have to move out of here soon. I was going to look for a place, but now …’
‘You’ll really go home?’ I try to mask the panic in my voice.
‘I think so. I miss my studio – I’m tired of sleeping where I paint. And I want babies. Not now, but soon. And I miss the sea! Don’t you?’
‘No,’ I say, seeing home flash before my eyes. ‘I don’t miss the sea at all.’
Back in Black
MY BLACK SCHOOL clothes are looser after the loss of muscle tone over summer. Our reduced group of thirty feels strange at first and we stand looking at each other, assessing the gaps, survivors of some war. We need to recalibrate but there’s no time; as in first year, we are catapulted into action like highly trained robots. This year we’re at ground level, exploring the grand theatrical territories of comedy, tragedy, buffoonery, the absurd and the grotesque. We organise ourselves immediately into groups for autocours, according to the strengths we now know well in each other. I make a pact to try to work with new people instead of the small company that was naturally forming between me, Faye, Meg, Ravi, Étienne and Marie-France.
Marie-France pouts at me as I move off towards Marc Finland. Thank goodness Marc New York didn’t get through, or Marcs Northern England, Denmark, Seattle or France. Now I can just call him Marc. There’s only one double now: Sarahs Israel and England. But there’s no trouble telling them apart: the former is six feet tall and the latter a dormouse.
Kiki’s exhibition is on the third Thursday night of term. Friday is still autocours performance day and the looks I get when I cut out of rehearsal are so dark they could kill. Tomorrow we will be murdered. But I would rather get kicked in the shins by Étienne and slaughtered by Angela than miss Kiki’s show.
The night air is cool when I mount the métro steps at Pont Marie, and the long bland façade of Cité des Arts looks almost beautiful, its utilitarian windows reflecting the lights along the Seine. The sound of voices and clinking glass spills from the downstairs gallery, whose nondescript white box has been transformed into a world of colour by Kiki. She is in the corner in a red sequinned dress talking to a small group, and I can see Nadine and Harry and some of Kiki’s other friends from the Cité moving around the space, taking in the paintings of misty rivers and floating trees, houses, windows, rain.
Adrien is in the centre of the room, transfixed by a triptych in watery greens and blues and browns. The colours, he says, remind him of the house in Fontainebleau where he lived with his mother for a while when he was little. We kiss and walk around the show together, spending time in front of each piece. I have seen them all before, but watching Adrien look at them gives them new life.
There is champagne and light music and I keep expecting there to be a speech but it doesn’t come. I drink two glasses of champagne, which makes me dizzy as I’ve barely eaten all day – since school began, meals have been rare, there just isn’t time. Adrien pulls me outside and we kiss and smoke.
After the gallery closes a group of us go up to Kiki’s studio and drink vodka pommes and more champagne to loud music. The room gets crammed as residents from the Cité file in and people’s bodies become looser. Harry moves the furniture to the walls to make a dance floor, and Kiki’s party playlist gets everyone wiggling and jumping around. I finally spy an opening and corner her.
‘You’re a raving success!’ I slur. ‘You can never go home!’
She smiles and hugs me.
‘Oh love, I have to go.’
‘No you don’t! You have a following here now. You can’t abandon your following!’
She hugs me tight. Then Nadine hugs us hugging. A whole lot of other people join in. Then I’m being spun around by an Asian guy wearing pyjamas, then I’m dancing with Harry and he’s making me laugh with his stupid moves. The dancing and laughter continue for so long it takes me a while to notice that Adrien isn’t in the room.
Sometime after midnight he walks back in. The party is winding down and people are splitting off to nightclubs and bars, onto bikes, into the night. Kiki and I are scooping scraps into a garbage bag.
‘Where have you been?’ I ask.
‘For a walk,’ he says.
We decide to walk to Châtelet to get two taxis, as he has to work tomorrow. It’s a clear night, the last remnants of summer hanging on just tightly enough to make me not regret leaving my doodoona in the cupboard. The moon is full and bright, illuminating the edges of the clouds. The bars are closing, the streets quiet.
‘Let’s sit by the river for a moment,’ I suggest. ‘It’s too pretty to go home.’
We walk across to the Île Saint-Louis and hoist our legs over the bank. His shoes are smooth and pointy and tap together lightly. My sneakers are grimy.
‘Are you jealous?’ he asks out of the blue.
‘Of what?’ I ask. ‘Of whom?’ My heart speeds up. Has he been with someone else? Is that why he disappeared earlier in the night?
‘No, I mean, are you jealous.’ It takes a long time for me to establish he means jealous by nature, and not of something specific. I tell him I’m not at all, I never have been. I’ve always thought that if someone wants something else, well then, they should have it.
‘Why, did something happen?’ I ask. My mind is spinning.
‘No, of course not.’
I have no idea where this is leading.
‘I’m jealous,’ he interrupts as I go to speak, as though it’s something he needs to get off his chest.
‘But why? I don’t understand.’
He says he just is. Just jealous.
I don’t know what to say. It feels like a threat.
He turns and looks at me. There is something definite in his eye. I scan the landscape of his face in the lamplight, the prominence of his cheeks, the sprouting grass of his sideburns, the line of his jaw, tight. He wants to own me. A deep fear throbs in me, dredging up an unfamiliar lust. You caveman. Owning me. Clubbing anyone who comes near. My blood runs hot and thick with danger, my insides are a freefall, like one of Kiki’s paintings.
The kiss has a primal feeling to it, like he’s letting me see his insides. It’s not so pretty in there, not so cardboard cut-out. It scares me, but my skin sizzles and my heart pounds. I want it.
Bird on a Cob
IF I STAND outside Kiki’s door long enough, perhaps she won’t go. A woman mopping the floor moves closer to me, before stopping and giving me a pointed look. I have to go in.
She i
s sitting on the windowsill looking out over the river, where the trees are almost bare again. I take off my doodoona and hang it on the door handle, its shoulders slumping like mine. The studio is almost bare too, except for a big purple suitcase.
‘Look at those fuckwits,’ she says, pointing at a group of tourists walking along the quai, licking Berthillon ice-creams in the icy wind, coats up around their ears.
‘If it’s pear and blackberry they’re not insane.’
‘Coffee and tiramisu …’
‘Don’t go, there’s ice-cream!’ Tears come.
‘Don’t, you’ll make me cry.’
We hug for a long time.
‘I’ll be back,’ she says, turning to me and brushing the dust off her skirt. ‘You’ll be Madame Masson with little baby croissants running around.’
‘Don’t wait that long,’ I say.
She doesn’t want me to come with her to the station, but I scamper along anyway like a nervous puppy, trying to be of use, cramping her. The escalator down to her train is very long and I watch her slow descent from the other side of the turnstile. After the initial wave and blown kisses it is awkward – all she can do is shift on her step and let me watch her. I keep waving until she has no feet, no legs, no body, no head.
Gone.
I stare into space, listening to the world going on as normal around me, until a woman with a pram hits my ankle. I limp out to the rue de Dunkerque, grateful for the pain, but it’s not enough to break me from the fog. My chest is rigid as I walk in the grey day towards the boulevard de Magenta, knowing that if anything should enter my cloud between here and home I shall shatter to the ground, like the window pane we’ve practised at school. It could be a smile, a slight trip on the concrete, or even the sky opening up a fraction. It happens to be a bird. Outside the Terminus Nord. Or what was once a bird. A bloated, perfectly intact feathered body with just the bloody red spike of its spine coming out the top, where its head should be: a sort of candied-apple bird on a stick. A bird on the cob. I don’t understand how the bird got like that. Tears sputter from my eyes, my nose, my mouth.
People cry here, in the streets. It’s okay to cry in the street. Before spring broke last year, the grey winter days drew on so long people would simply walk around crying. They also fight in the streets. They shout. I am crying loudly now, in the street. I make no effort to stop.
I walk down the boulevard in a daze. A man is passed out on the steps of the Marché Saint-Quentin, his hands and feet black and crusted over, a wet line trickling from beneath him down the steps. I cry and cry and cry. A little girl swipes past me on her scooter. I drift into the bike lane and a loud ding jolts me back onto the pavement.
I buy a packet of Marlboro lights and smoke one outside La Strasbourgeoise, watching the waiters in their traditional black-and-whites dash in and out, opening bottles of Orangina and beer, handing out little bowls of pretzels, emptying ashtrays. One of them asks if I want a table. He calls me mademoiselle.
Back in my studio I lie on the bed and stare at the rafter. The moth is gone from the ceiling, gone on with its life, moving forward. Or dead, probably. I remember a funny poem I read about a moth saying that fire is beautiful, and that he’d prefer to singe himself on a cigar lighter for one moment of beauty than live a long life of nothing much. I’d forgotten that poem until now. For some reason it comforts me. When Chris dumped me before I first came to Paris, I told Mum I would never love anyone again. I had decided I would go through life contentedly without love, because if love had to go then it wasn’t worth having in the first place.
She disagreed with a passion. ‘But love is all there is!’ she said. ‘You have to love hard. Love as hard as you can. Even if it goes, having love, even for a short time, is worth more than a lifetime of not loving.’
I swore the same thing to myself after she died. To lose people is too hard, I thought; better not to love at all.
Kiki leaving is like losing another layer of skin. But I’m not sorry for loving her.
Thirty
IN THE ‘MAKE US CRY’ autocours, I make everyone laugh. In ‘Make us Laugh’, I make everyone silent, except Claude, who gives a loud sigh. But I am working something out. I like the place between tragic and funny – that awkward place where you’re not sure whether to laugh or cry. Though we flunk a series of autocours together, Marie-France, Faye, Meg and Sarah (and sometimes Étienne) are all into the same thing. For the next autocours, instead of being so intent on following the rules, we branch out into a new, weird place that feels risky, and the result is far from successful but the teachers see something building and encourage us to explore it further. We smash together different kinds of text and create scripts with funny parts, silly and painful parts, using the tragic chorus and acrobatics and even song to make mad little pieces that make no sense. It doesn’t matter. An aesthetic is coming – we can all feel it. And we’re having fun.
Late one Friday night at the Mauri7 I need to pee. I stumble down the grotty staircase to the festering bathroom, but the queue is long and I can’t wait so I run out into the freezing night to the kebab shop, ordering hot chips to soak up the alcohol as I run to the back of the shop.
Back at the bar with my chips, revived, I squeeze onto the banquette next to Marc, who helps himself to a fistful. Faye is laughing so hard at something she is holding her stomach, eyes streaming with tears. Tim sets down a round of beers. Glasses chink, Étienne says santé, I light another cigarette and suck the salt from between my thumb and finger, glancing up at the clock behind the bar. The skinny hand disappears behind the big hand on twelve.
I have just turned thirty.
Such an ugly number. Adrien can’t say it. He can’t put his tongue in the ‘th’ position, it seems rude and makes him horny. It makes me horny too, seeing his tongue come out of his mouth like that.
I leave the bar and walk out into the night. The street is calmer than usual and the icy air sobers me up a bit as I stumble up the street. A pasty moon hides above the buildings like a milky cheese. The métro rumbles beneath my feet; all those corridors and rails and people, all these nationalities, all this time passing. At the Récollets I stop halfway up the stairs and put my cheek against the cold, sure, stone wall.
Adrien makes the mistake of taking me for my birthday dinner to a restaurant along the quai near the Cité, where Kiki and I used to go for drinks. I’ve avoided going anywhere near the Cité since she left: any place that evokes a memory of her makes me ache.
Her ghost at the table near the doorway keeps me preoccupied for the entire meal, frustrating Adrien.
‘I’m sorry, my love,’ I tell him as we eat a dessert of warm tarte tatin. ‘I’m just distracted with school and everything.’
‘You’re distracted a lot lately,’ he says, putting his hand on mine.
We go back to my place and I die by surprise as he is experiencing a cataclysmic passing. There is something operatic about his death. Mine was a shock, I don’t normally die like that. We hold each other tight afterwards, like we’ve just saved each other from falling over a cliff.
Adrien’s play is a success. It’s one of those ones where the actors start their roles while you’re drinking wine in the foyer, so as Raph, Séverine and I chat, we are harassed by strung-out teenagers begging for money, and mentally ill people asking for cigarettes. The play is performed in the round and we sit on the floor as the troupe act out the devised piece, mixing text from various writers on youth and suicide and drugs. The young woman playing Adrien’s girlfriend straddles and writhes on him so convincingly I feel a strange jealousy prickle up my back and kind of like it. I tell him later and it turns us both on so much we kill ourselves passionately on each other.
Adrien is very good in the awful play and some agents and directors see him and he starts getting more interesting auditions for film roles and theatre. But still he mostly gets cast in TV commercials and magazine spreads, and needs to supplement it all with his boring job at the FNAC stor
e, which emasculates him so much he won’t let me come and visit. They make him wear a little yellow vest.
My work at school intensifies to the point where I have no time to think of anything but rehearsals. Towards the end of the spring term, the class sits in Chez Jeannette with dead eyes: we have nothing left. The first-years chat and giggle like they don’t know the pain of existence. Sarah Israel begins crying over nothing. Nobody comforts her. We are zombified.
For the term presentation, several of my pieces have been selected to be performed, which is the greatest tick you can get. There’s a mysterious moving sculpture that gives birth to itself; a woman having a meltdown inside herself, on the level of Greek tragedy; a redheaded cabaret idiot; an absurd gynaecologist. The performances are the most satisfying acting I have done in my life. Nadine and Adrien clap loudly in their seats.
That night I want to pick every piece apart with Adrien, but he is intent on being polite and positive.
‘Come on,’ I beg him. ‘Give it to me straight.’
But he doesn’t have more to say and gets a little defensive.
I think about what Al said and wonder whether I have pushed hard enough, or far enough, into the uncomfortable place. I don’t know. I guess that means I haven’t.
The Fury of Living
CHRISTMAS IN NORMANDY is quick, sweet and full of strange seafood, like sea urchins. Seafood in French is ‘sea fruits’. There are little shells that you use tiny forks for, extracting little creatures that look like snot. I’ve never been able to afford seafood, so I guzzle it all up, even the snot, which tastes excellent.
I meet Adrien’s grandmother, Georgette, who sits all day at her living-room window, looking out at an old gnarled tree, naming the birds that are, or will be, or have been, in it. I also meet Jacques, her second husband, who looks like Santa Claus. Adrien’s family is sweet and kind; his aunt gives me a hot water bottle in the shape of a love heart. Séverine gives Adrien and me year-long memberships to the Louvre. The snow is magical. We stay for the feast on Christmas Eve, but the next afternoon, after lunch and a walk in the forest, we hightail it back to Paris. Adrien has to work.
