Paris or Die

by Jayne Tuttle

  The end of summer is cold and rainy. Séverine returns from her long shoot and we arrange to go to the country house. We walk towards her place hand in hand, not talking. Adrien seems nervous.

  Séverine’s lips are tight when she kisses me hello, and she is steely in the car. On the highway Adrien sends me a message from the front seat: I feel my mother may not support our marriage.

  I thought it was strange that she hadn’t contacted me since Adrien told her the news. I assumed there was bad reception in Algeria. I feel gut-punched. What happened to her enthusiasm about me having babies? I’d have thought she’d be thrilled we’re heading in that direction. What is she afraid of? That I’ll be too old to give birth? That I’ll take Adrien away to Australia? Did she find out I pissed in her bath?

  It’s cloudy when we arrive at La Grange. It is starting to look like a real home, but weeds have sprung up in just a few weeks, and there’s still a lot of clearing and pruning to do. Séverine heads straight inside to keep working on the floors. Adrien and I garden into the night before falling into bed, oversleeping and waking after eleven. The bed is cold and damp from the overnight rain; water leaks down the wall opposite. I dreamt of Mum on a highway, walking towards me but never getting closer. Again, though the dream is frustrating, the worst part is waking having forgotten she’s gone. I cling to Adrien but his back is stiff.

  After breakfast, discouraged by the garden having turned overnight to mud, Adrien and I decide to go to an antique fair in Gien. He’s in a terrible mood. I hug him as he bends over to tie up his shoes and he jolts me off. I can’t remember the last moment there was softness between us.

  He’s probably upset about Séverine, I tell myself. It must be terrible to feel that your mother isn’t happy about your engagement. Does she think he’s doing it to help me stay in France?

  It’s deserted in Gien and we park on a muddy slope just near the brocante. He asks if I want a chichi. I say what’s a chichi. He says, like a churro. I say what’s a churro. He hands me a paper bag of greasy donut sticks dipped in sugar. I eat one, then go to hand the bag back to him so I can take a closer look at an old clock, but the chichis drop in the mud. He huffs and picks the bag up, tosses it in the bin.

  The brocante is boring. I buy a pair of books on saints for ten euros and we leave, stopping on the way home at a pretty fortified town called Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois for groceries. We walk back to the car across a lovely bridge surrounded by fragrant flowering bushes. I think of Mum and my dream, and of Dad throwing her ashes into the river beside the holiday house we used to rent. We’d all stood on the bridge and tossed flowers we’d picked from the hill behind the house, watching them drift with her dust out to the sea. On impulse I pick a flower now, close my eyes and throw it in the water.

  ‘You shouldn’t do that,’ says Adrien beside me, and my face gets hot. I watch until the flower is gone from sight, then turn and walk silently back to the car. He cleans the mud off his shoes with a stick and gets in, slamming the door.

  Mum wouldn’t have liked it either. She hated it when I picked flowers from other people’s gardens, or public places like hospital driveways. I got a beautiful collection from outside the cancer unit once and she made me not only throw it out, but hide it in an outdoor bin so nobody would see. ‘You mustn’t do that!’ she said to me when I returned to the room. But I always thought flowers were meant for everyone.

  ‘You’re right,’ I say, anger in my voice. ‘It was a really dumb thing to do.’

  This gives him the permission he needs to let off some steam. ‘You don’t take care. You just fly around, do what you want. But some things are important.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You just do what you want,’ he repeats.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But what about what other people want?’

  ‘What do you want, Adrien?’

  His hands clench the steering wheel.

  ‘Perhaps you don’t want to marry me?’

  He lets out an exasperated sigh. ‘I want to marry you, Jayne.’

  ‘But you don’t trust me! You think I’m a whore of the night! And I can’t even show you the dumb photos Al took of me and Kiki, because you’ll think we’re lesbians! You think I’m careless when I throw flowers! I kissed Harry! Well, he kissed me and I didn’t really kiss him back, but still! I feel like a bad person! Like I’m cheating on you all the time! And I’m not! I’m not!’

  He hunches over the wheel, breathing hard. I don’t know which of those comments hurt him the worst.

  ‘And your mum hates me.’

  ‘She doesn’t hate you, Jayne.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter now anyway. You hate me.’

  A pause. ‘Maybe you’re right.’

  Yes. Now he’s said it. He actually hates me. And I hate him. I still want to fuck him. But I hate him. Great place to start a marriage.

  My lips are tight and my eyes well with angry tears. ‘Did you mean that?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he says, distant.

  ‘Maybe you should have thought about that before asking me to marry you.’

  ‘Perhaps I should have.’

  He pulls up at the house. Séverine is chopping wood and waves to us. ‘She is not part of this,’ he says. ‘She is not part of us.’

  I push the onions off my knees and storm off into the forest, staring blankly at the apple orchard, looking for a deer. The sun comes out and shines on my face. No more slave labour. I go back to the house and pull on my swimsuit and lie in the garden in the limp rays of sun, drinking a beer, watching him and Séverine hoe together. Fuckem. Tom Waits growls into my earphones.

  Adrien comes over, drenched in sweat, and takes a sip of my beer. ‘I like your bikini,’ he says.

  Like nothing has happened.

  The Pussy Knows

  GETTING STUFF OFF my chest was a relief but it doesn’t make things better. Adrien doesn’t want to see the photos, though I pull out the orange envelope. They’re probably worse than he imagined. I store them as deep as I can in my shallow storage. We are on edge. Engaged still, by a membrane. Still fucking and dying. Talking little. Wondering if this is the start or the end.

  I get three new English students through Sophie, the jewellery maker. Adrien gets a new job in an exclusive restaurant where all the big stars and producers and directors go, and he can get them drunk and high and make them fall in love with his waiterly good looks and give him roles. He is the whore of the night. I’m jealous. I never used to get jealous. I want to be the starlet on that velvet couch. But Daphné has nothing for me, even though our marriage-intention papers are in. Adrien works late. I give my English classes and watch reality TV.

  Gabriella, my best friend from drama school in Melbourne, comes to Paris to celebrate her engagement to Marcus, an Australian soap star who has been also living in LA. Their ballet-pink ‘save the date’ card with our names in calligraphy is stuck to Adrien’s fridge. They are staying in the 10th so we meet them at La Marine, the magical restaurant where I had my twenty-ninth birthday, a lifetime ago. Adrien was so sweet that night and we were so soft, touching each other’s hands beneath the table so nobody would see. Now the tension between us is palpable, exacerbated by the ease between Gabriella and Marcus, who understand each other without explanation or compromise. Their effortless banter bounces back and forth, and conversation between the three of us flows like water. We’re relaxed in our own language, fluent in our own culture. Adrien has the pleasant, distant face I so often have with his friends. Nodding, smiling, not quite there.

  On the back of the toilet door is some excellent graffiti: Exterior wealth can never camouflage interior poverty. True, I think to myself, but it would pay for this dinner. Nik tout feels more relevant: Fuck everything.

  In bed that night we lie stiff beside each other. My hole seems to have closed up. The pussy knows.

  I push Kiki out of my head. This has to work.

  Adrien has a small role in a film being shot at V
ersailles. He sends me a photo of himself smiling in his decadent costume: he could not be better cast. I am on an aimless bike ride around Paris wearing Mum’s Special Dress, which is completely impractical but was all I had clean. It flies out behind me like a colourful ’70s sail.

  The sun filters through the trees along the busy boulevards and narrow streets. I follow my nose down to the Seine, and find myself at the river past Notre-Dame, where I first really saw the view that day at twenty-two, but it seems the spot has disappeared, like a portal.

  I end up near the Pont Neuf, where the river cruises take off every hour. On a whim, I lock up my bike and get on one. Without the trees for protection the sun is potent and I sweat in the dress, sun stinging my forehead. It’s lunchtime, and this is a French-language cruise, so there are only two other people on board: a couple of American tourists who got it wrong. The young Russian hottie reads her script into the microphone with as much enthusiasm as if the boat were full. A hot breeze moves the light silk fabric around my legs as we skim across the water. I’ve never seen the city from this angle, peering up at its backbone, ribs and lungs. It feels intimate, like I’m inside her.

  Being off the land gives me a new perspective and I feel present in the moment. Just here, right now, empty seats all around me. The city stretches out on both sides, modest and grandiose, aloof and inviting. She likes my dress. In this moment, alone with Paris, everything feels perfect. I’m at one with the city, not pretending to be someone else, not trying to be French me or Australian me, just me. Adrien asked me to come to Versailles and spend the day with the cast and crew, Séverine being one of them, but I told him I had class at the Sorbonne, which I did, but I didn’t go. If he knew I was here right now he’d think I was having an affair. Am I?

  I flash back to the night I met Adrien, the enigma of him in the doorway. The dashing Frenchman. Did I translate him into what I wanted? Now that I’m no longer peering through the veil of culture, I see the outlines of a sensitive young man, who loved me at first too, but who also translated me into something he wanted, a nice young lady who would fit into his world. I try to picture Adrien in Australia. I can’t. Or myself in a nice apartment in a nice Paris suburb, doing nice things. Paying bills, feeding children, doing dishes. No. It doesn’t hold. I’m trying to put bricks and mortar around a fantasy world.

  I think I want to be real again.

  The weather starts getting cold again. Daphné sends me to an audition for a marionette theatre in the 20th. It’s a long ride, involving Ménilmontant, a steep hill that reminds me of the one the man heaves his wretched body up in The Triplets of Belleville, training for the Tour de France. But I could use the train money and, though it’s chilly, I need the air.

  ‘Merde,’ says Adrien as I leave, which is how you say ‘good luck’. You’re not allowed to say merci in return, so I give him a tight smile and leave.

  Paris is shrouded in a thick, cold mist. I push hard and fast through it, getting damp and sweaty, all the way to Belleville. On Ménilmontant, I ride for as long as I can before I’m forced to dismount, somewhere around the rue de Tourtille – it’s just too steep. Even pushing the bike is torture. The pavement is narrow. I pass the Chinese restaurants, trying not to knock over their A-frames advertising the day’s lunch menu. An old lady swears at me and gestures wildly with her arms when I almost hit her as she steps out of a doorway.

  The theatre is old and dusty, like the puppets. A family of meticulously crafted dolls that, even as they lie in their boxes, look alive. Antonio, the director, takes us through a warm-up and then shows us how to work with the different characters, their joints so refined that when manipulated correctly they move with lifelike precision. We spend hours experimenting with them and afterwards I am exhausted. The physical effort and concentration required to be a marionnettiste is immense – you must become the puppet. There is nowhere to hide. As in the neutral mask, every small shift in your being is magnified in the doll’s. You have to be juste.

  Antonio shakes my hand afterwards and offers me a job, starting January. I say yes without hesitation.

  I’m in a very good mood when I leave the theatre. The sun has come out and cleared the mist, leaving the air sharp and the sky a stunning winter blue. My heart is full. I have a job! At the top of the hill everything seems perfect for a moment, and the glorious feeling stays with me as I sail from Saint-Fargeau along the avenue Gambetta, right past the rue Pelleport, where Sophie, my favourite English student, lives.

  I think about calling in. We’ve become more like friends than teacher and student, spending most of our class time chatting over drinks in cafés around her neighbourhood, or in her apartment, which is full of light and dainty things. Sophie is the most genteel woman I’ve ever met: she says, ‘Mince!’ when she drops a pencil – ‘Drat!’ I love exploring her place, with its high bookshelves and interesting artworks and the delicate jewellery she makes, hung on nails in the wall. Last week I stayed for dinner after class, making friends with Lou, her shy little five-year-old, who has the same pale skin and delicate demeanour. She asked me to bathe her that night and I did, creating underwater kingdoms with her mermaid and ship.

  Sophie would be happy to see me, but I decide not to stop. I want to get back and tell Adrien about the job. This regular money will change things for us. Things are back on track.

  I turn into the rue de la Chine, a one-way street with a mismatch of old and new buildings, and am riding up the footpath when a handsome, forty-something man steps out in front of me.

  ‘Désolée!’ I say, dismounting just before I hit him.

  ‘Op – pardon,’ he says, wiping his brow. He is renovating a corner restaurant and is covered in plaster. In the window is a notice that reads Appartement à Louer. He sees me looking.

  ‘Looking for an apartment?’ he asks.

  I nod. Am I?

  ‘It’s the American upstairs,’ he says. ‘She put the notice up half an hour ago.’ He buzzes the intercom before I know what’s happening. ‘Carrie? It’s Luc. There’s someone interested in the apartment. Go up,’ he says to me. ‘Have a look.’

  I hesitate, but find myself pushing on the open door to the first-floor apartment, where an overweight American lady in a fuzzy, peach-coloured jumper sits on a worn couch, halfway through a bottle of bordeaux and a Voici magazine.

  ‘Hey there!’ she says. ‘I’m Carrie. Come in, sit down!’

  I look around at the mottled peach wallpaper, the heavy marble tables, the astounding collection of porcelain frogs. Aside from the décor and walls, it’s a lovely little apartment, perfect for one big person or two small ones. The poky salon has old raw floorboards, there’s a separate bedroom for sleeping, and there are plain but pretty windows with curled iron boxes outside to put flowers in. The lady asks if I live around here and I tell her about the audition and Sophie and my recent visits to the 20th.

  ‘It’s a fabulous quarter,’ she slurs, ‘I just lurrve it. I have to go to Spain, then to Texas to play grandmamma, and I won’t be comin’ back here. Can you afford seven hundred a month?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, gulping. Seven hundred is perfectly reasonable but I don’t have a cent. ‘I’d just need a few weeks to get the first month’s rent together, and the deposit. When is it available?’

  ‘Right now, sugar,’ she says. ‘You know, the couple downstairs that run the restaurant, Luc and Clémence, are just darling. They sure have some fine wine down there.’

  ‘Is there anywhere to store things?’

  ‘Oh yes, sweetie, there’s a cave downstairs. Lots of room down there.’

  ‘Would you mind if I moved some of your furniture down there? And painted the walls?’

  ‘Of course not, darling, you can do whatever you like. It would be yours. I understand that you may not like frogs quite like I do.’

  I give an awkward smile and she laughs and refills her glass. ‘You know, honey,’ she says, ‘you seem like you’re somebody I could trust. It ain’t easy to fin
d good tenants around here. If you wanted to go ahead and move in, you could pay the deposit later. And if you need some time for the first month’s rent, that’s okay too. My instincts are good. I know you won’t let me down.’

  This is so kind and unexpected that tears spring into my eyes. ‘Gosh,’ I say. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I’ll be here just a few more hours. You could even move in tonight. It’s all yours, honey.’

  I blink and look at her, wondering if she’s serious or just a bit tipsy. She looks back at me with total sincerity, setting down her glass.

  ‘I’ll go home and talk it over with my fiancé,’ I say. ‘Then I’ll call you. But it really does seem perfect.’

  She gives me her number and a hug, which feels nice – motherly – though her jumper itches like hell.

  ‘Bye, honey, you be sure to call,’ she says as I walk down the stairs. I wave to her as she closes the door. It already feels like home.

  In the doorway I thank Luc, and walk my bike slowly down the street, taking in the buildings around me. It’s a charming, unpretentious street. The neighbourhood is far quieter than the 10th, but noisier than Asnières. Quintessential Paris. Dans Paris. I turn right and walk down a smaller street, past older beautiful buildings and newer plainer buildings like Carrie’s, with their perfunctory Parisian features. I pass a quaint bistro with an open fire lit inside, and a little brocante store selling old furniture and knick-knacks that I imagine filling the apartment with once the frogs are cleared. I turn onto the rue des Pyrénées and walk beneath the tall bare trees, past fruit and cheese and pastry shops, crossing the street to follow the fence line of the Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Adrien loves cemeteries. He will love it here. We can renovate the apartment together and splash paint on each other like in a romantic comedy. We can wake in the morning in a bed that we don’t have to fold up. We can hang up the beautiful white curtain and it will blow lightly in the breeze. We can plant flowers and buy a record player and eat in the bistro with the fire on Friday nights. And after our wedding we can return to the apartment and make croissants on the floorboards in the moonlight. Sophie and Lou can babysit.