A Novel Set in Paris ~ Chapter 2
Read Chapter 1 here ~ https://medium.com/@lavigne-dr/a-novel-set-in-paris-chapter-1-3869c661cd78
CHAPTER 2
On the way home I’m lost in reverie, displacing the present with the past, not noticing which streets I’m taking as I relive the kiss, almost missing the shortcut behind the Pantheon, walking past the Sorbonne and its flocks of students, a blurry bokeh of color and noise. I see Jason lean in, taste his mouth, remember the swell of warmth between us. Climbing the steps to the apartment I try to shake it off, feeling something like guilt as I put my key in the lock and push the door open.
I wonder if Luc will smell Jason’s cologne or notice that I’m wearing another new dress. Part of me wants to be found out. Out of all the people in Paris, Luc is the one I feel closest to, even with this distance between us. There is no one else I could tell, no one who would listen without some sort of judgment or maybe even jealousy. How easy it is to wander toward a man whose chief allure is that he’s not the man you’ve been sleeping next to for years, sleeping next to, but not sleeping with.
Luc and I are essentially inn keepers of a small Left Bank apartment. We share a bed and some meals but little else. We are writers who don’t really write, professors because it’s the only thing we’re trained to do, both of us comfortably numb to how little there is between us that really matters.
The lover is the one who waits Roland Barthes wrote in A Lover’s Discourse. Because I have to wait until Thursday to see Jason, all the days of the week are endured just to get to that one. Each day valuable only in that it brings me closer to the one that really matters. Closer to him.
I put Jason’s name into my phone as “Allergy Doc/ rue Dragon” and erase his texts as soon as I read them. I can feel myself falling for him, falling as if it’s a gravitational pull that I can’t resist. I know there’s no future, not really, there is only the present, which never feels like enough. The time we spend together evaporates so quickly and every meeting is surrounded by his overwhelming absence. Every other part of my life feels tedious and banal, because he isn’t in it. The rest is just space and time without him, a crown of thorns surrounding his absence.
In my journal I start writing fragments of poems, something I have not done since I first met Luc. Even in absence there is presence. A periodic table of longing. The abbreviation of desire.
The wait until next Thursday feels interminable, but it finally arrives, overcast and chilly as Novembers in Paris are. Jason texts me to meet by the beehives in the Jardin du Luxembourg, a part of the park that’s less crowded. We kiss and walk past a man and a woman locked in a desperate embrace. He murmurs, Tu me manques and she purrs Moi, aussi, moi, aussi. We smile at each other knowingly. Yes, we know. Before we can find an empty bench rain starts coming down in big dollops so we leave the park and run into a café on the rue de Vaugirard.
Jason swings the door open and as soon as I step in, it looks familiar: the color of the booths, the ornate gilt molding on the ceiling. Suddenly I recognize it, the small marble table at the back where I used to sit. “I know this place. This is where I used to write when I first moved to Paris but I used to come from the Rue de Rennes. I didn’t know you could get here from the park.”
He scoots into the booth next to me and wraps his scarf around my shoulder without saying a word. It’s warm and smells of him. He puts his arm around me; his taut, muscular arm, the one that lifts heavy canvases and makes art. A carapace of protection from a man I hardly know. “You look cold.”
“I am.”
“Let’s get hot chocolate, then,” he says looking around for the waiter who is outside wiping down the wet tables. “So, what were you writing when you used to come here?”
“It was like four years ago and I was trying to finish a novel I started when I lived in New York.”
“What was it about?”
“Thinly veiled autobiographic drivel. 750 pages about the years after university when I worked at a bookstore in the East Village and had dysfunctional relationships with bad boyfriends. My friend said I should call it ‘Too Little, Too Late’. I mean, who wants to read about that?”
“And what are you working on now?”
“I’m about 3 months late on an essay about the Avignon Festival for my friend who has a travel site and at this point we may have to run it next year and I’m completely stalled on another piece about what it’s like to date French men.”
He leans in, “I want to hear about that one.”
“Well, the main thing is that they speak French beautifully. In general, they’re very well read, very cultured and they’re all foodies, amazing in the kitchen and they have a penchant for wearing pastels in the summer and…um…they’re not as…good in bed as one would hope.”
Jason grins. “But they can tell their fois gras from their pâté.”
“They can. Is your girlfriend American?”
“No, she’s from New Zealand and she’s my fiancé.”
“Oh.”
“There’s a lot of backstory, but we broke up for a couple of years and got back together, and she kind of gave me an ultimatum: either we get engaged or it was over. So, I caved.”
I smile over the uneasiness. At least he’s telling me the truth. I think. “But did you cave with a ring?”
“Yes.” He looks around. “Where’s the waiter?” He puts his hand in the air and gestures toward the bar. The international language of changing the subject.
All encounters have a sequel wrote John Berger and this is ours. A crowded café, his slight confession and our tacit agreement. The one that says: this will not ever be anything more than what it is, do not to reach for anything. Jason gives me what Luc used to give me. He gives me his desire, the lusty way his eyes follow me. I carry all our moments back to the apartment, back to bed ~ remembering the feeling of his hand on my waist, imagining the precise weight of his body on mine. I am full of a wanting that has nowhere to go. Imagining has to be meal enough for now.
I lie on the bed thinking of him, noticing the noise in the street below, the wail of a siren from Cardinal Lemoine, the curtain blowing in the breeze of the open window, and the hazy view of Luc’s nightstand as it comes into focus, his stack of books, all the Americans the French worship: Kerouac and the Beat poet, Corso, sitting on top of a biography of Jackson Pollock. He said to me early in our relationship that if we ever had kids, he wanted to name one of them Jackson, pronouncing it with his accent, the soft “J” as if he was saying Jacque-sun, the stress falling heavily on the wrong syllable.
I hear Luc’s keys in the door and run into the bathroom, quickly soaping my hands in warm water and rubbing them over my neck, making sure there is no scent from Jason’s scarf. I emerge and see Luc clutching a few pieces of paper. He holds them up half-heartedly in my direction. “I sat in the library for nearly eight hours and I have written exactly four pages. That’s two hours for each page.” He doesn’t look happy.
“Four pages is better than nothing.” Why is he wearing the black shirt I bought him at Zara last year and his grandfather’s Cartier watch?
“At least you’re writing.” He looks sort of sexy and he never goes to the library. He’s a smoker and you can’t smoke at the library. I have never been more interested in his whereabouts. “Why did you go to the library?”
“Because I can’t write here with all that fucking construction noise and the dust.” He tosses his keys on the table.
“Every time you do that you scratch the table.”
“So?”
“It’s an antique.”
He rolls his eyes and makes that disapproving “tsk” sound French people make. “It’s not antique, it’s vintage; antiques have to be at least a hundred years old. Maybe we should move out of Paris.” He drops his backpack on the floor with a thud.
I try to stifle my shock but why would anyone want to move out of Paris? “To where?”
“I don’t know,” he shrugs, “maybe Neuilly.” He takes off his watch and sets it on the table next to his keys and goes to take a shower.
Psychoanalytically, Neuilly is the nexus of his childhood. Maybe he wants to run back into the apron of his mother. It’s not a terrible instinct. This is where men are perhaps at a disadvantage: they’re expected to go out and make their way in the world no matter what, whereas women, even now, in this post post-modern fairy tale that has gone disastrously awry, are allowed to plot a vague course through university and whatever counts as a decent career on their way to coupledom and eventually motherhood. All roads lead to Rome.
Luc’s inordinately long shower gives me enough time to poke around; in his pockets I find his ID, some cash, a Toblerone wrapper, and his metro card. His backpack is stuffed with papers to grade, books (more Americans: Paul Auster and Kurt Vonnegut), 2 lighters that don’t work, his cellphone charger, notebooks, pens without caps, dried out highlighters
“What are you doing?” he stands with his hands on his hips like a cop in a towel.
“Sorry. I heard a phone ring and I thought it was yours.”
He holds his phone up for me to see, “Nope, it’s right here. I didn’t think you were the nosy type.” He shoves everything into the backpack and walks to the bedroom.
I can see his clothes lying on the floor in the bathroom so I go in and lock the door and pick his clothes up one by one so I can smell them. The scent of smoke mixed with perfume on his sweater and the same perfumy smell on the neck of his t-shirt. Bastard. I pull his briefs out of his jeans, catching my reflection in the mirror before I take a whiff that stinks of sweaty balls. In his jean pocket I find another lighter (this one at least has fluid in it), an acorn and a feather ~ what is he doing, going on nature walks? I smell the inside of the front of his jeans, too. Nothing. How to play this? Accusations? No. Be patient, but build your case: He’s gone for eight hours and the first thing he does is take a shower? He’s gone for eight hours and brings back only four pages that could even be old ones. He’s up to something.
The rest of the evening I check papers in front of the TV while he plays video games in the bedroom, his passive-aggressive way of chastising me with silence. I imagine us from a bird’s eye view, with walls between us, figuratively and literally. And then I imagine what Jason might be doing right now in another part of the city and draw a line between us ~ a bold, bright red one, but just a gray faded one between me and Luc, one that blinks on and off, but mostly off.
Luc is motionless under the duvet when I finally crawl into bed. Whatever he did at the ‘library’ must have tuckered him out. He turns over with his eyes closed and puts his arm around me in a heavy sweep. Usually he’s grumpy for days so I think he must be half asleep until I feel him move closer, his chest hair tickling my back.
