In Paris With You Read online

  Apparently it’s an aerodynamic phenomenon

  related to the positioning

  of the towers.

  A small architectural mistake.

  And everyone complains about it, everyone bellyaches,

  but no one thinks of the joy

  of those four buildings

  playing ping-

  pong with the wind,

  lifting up skirts,

  artistically swirling the leaves and dirt.

  It’s too bad

  how the happiness of some makes others sad.

  Eugene and Tatiana walked through this whirlwind,

  and between them brief electrifying glances

  darted and fled,

  the way little crabs dart and flee

  when children touch their fingers

  to a rock pool by the sea.

  Their little dance of glances

  might have gone on like this forever,

  but someone got in the way.

  He was a tall man,

  handsome,

  perhaps,

  if your idea of beauty is the cold hard

  ice of marble, if your idea of beauty

  is the tough leather, scarred,

  of tree bark.

  He was a powerful man,

  sensual,

  perhaps,

  if sensuality for you

  is a craggy mountaintop

  in the wind-lashed dawn.

  I believe it was Edmund Burke who used the word sublime

  to describe that beauty, cracked and mineral,

  that wild beauty, rough and material,

  which not only attracts but terrifies.

  ‘How glad I am to see you, Tatiana!

  I’d wondered if our paths might cross today,’

  declared this man, who was, it turned out,

  the supervisor of her thesis on Caillebotte.

  She hastened to introduce him to Eugene,

  who caught only brief snatches of their words,

  Mr Leprince

  well-known specialist

  French Impressionism

  preoccupied as he was by other things:

  made notable discoveries

  about Renoir

  Tatiana’s pink, chapped lips, her dimpled chin,

  a few white cat hairs on her raspberry scarf,

  her posture, curved to the left

  was the curator

  of the exhibition at the

  Musée du Luxembourg

  by the weight of her bag,

  presumably stuffed with books and notes.

  ‘That’s very interesting,’ said Eugene,

  who really couldn’t have cared less about Caillebotte

  or Renoir

  or Monet

  and analysed

  Degas’s correspondence

  or Degas.

  Bloody Degas,

  with his stupid ballerinas.

  But just to participate in the conversation, he said: ‘Hey,

  that reminds me – it’s been ages since I went to the Musée

  d’Orsay.’

  It was then that Eugene noticed Tatiana’s dark

  shining hair,

  blown by the wind

  into delicate arcs.

  And what, my dear,

  are your plans for the day?

  He also noticed that she had very pretty teeth,

  small, pearly, with nice little spaces –

  he hadn’t realised that back then.

  Hang on,

  didn’t she used to wear braces

  before?

  Before: ten years ago, she was … Hang on …

  Fourteen!

  Well yeah, there you go: fourteen.

  At that age, you’re still under construction.

  I’m going to reread Valéry

  as you suggested recently

  And now, it had all changed: her hair, her skin, her teeth.

  I remember how young she seemed,

  like a little kid.

  I didn’t take enough notes before.

  And it’s always useful to return

  to sources that you think you know.

  And I was practically an adult, thought Eugene.

  And suddenly

  he remembered: fuck, I was seventeen. Seventeen!

  Seventeen years old! Christ, that’s beyond belief.

  Did it really exist, that age? Seventeen!

  It’s impossible, seventeen. It’s pure fiction.

  It’s an age dreamed up to make old people believe

  that they used to be adolescents.

  Whereas in reality, it’s absolutely certain

  that no one in the whole wide world

  was ever seventeen.

  Eugene, however, was beginning to realise

  If you ever need to see me,

  just drop by

  that this thesis supervisor, sublime

  in the Burkean sense of the term,

  was, quite calmly and casually,

  your brilliant work

  is always a pleasure to read

  but very clearly, trying to pull Tatiana.

  It was obvious that he, too, had seen

  the interlacing of her hair in the wind,

  her white teeth, those nice spaces in between,

  and I am of course eager

  to hear you speak

  at the museum

  next week

  and he suddenly wondered if there wasn’t something

  going on between those two

  that he should

  have been told about,

  before remembering that, only this morning,

  as recently as quarter to nine,

  he hadn’t thought about Tatiana more than five or

  six times

  in ten years.

  He’d tried his best not to; whenever he’d got close,

  anywhere near,

  to thinking of her, by chance – of her, of that summer –

  he’d tiptoed back,

  clicked shut the door,

  again and again,

  on that room in his mind where he’d stored

  that July, that August, those joys. That pain.

  So she’d been wiped from his memory for years,

  and now here he was, full of fears,

  like some jealous husband,

  a member of the Taliban,

  some big macho idiot: the kind of guy who appears on

  TV at one

  in the morning

  to explain why he can’t stand the fact that his wife is

  a fan of Simon Le Bon.

  And yet it was interesting for Eugene, who had hardly ever

  experienced this kind of feeling before,

  to sense the overwhelming power of his desire,

  when he looked at this man (sublime

  in the Burkean sense of the term),

  to murder him

  in a very aggressive way.

  by the by, I heard that a wonderful article you wrote

  is going to be published in Art History?

  Eugene was overcome by the urge to provoke him

  to a duel,

  like they used to in the olden days.

  If Lensky was here, he’d have been his second.

  Shit, he hadn’t thought about Lensky in years!

  I’ve really got to go, I’ve booked

  a desk in the library for half past nine.

  It was Tatiana who’d said those words.

  Until soon, maybe, Eugene …

  Tatiana was leaving. She’d booked

  a desk for half past nine.

  The library awaits!

  The library awaited.

  It was nice to see you again.

  Really nice.

  It was nice. Really nice.

  A kiss on the left cheek, a kiss on the right cheek.

  The smell of cold,

  cigarettes, bergamot.

  Time to get back to my Cai
llebotte.

  What a stupid name, Caillebotte. Really, it was the

  stupidest name ever.

  He watched

  with wonder

  Tatiana

  descend

  the stairs

  in the gusts

  of the architectural blunder.

  As Eugene was about to leave, feeling a bit flat,

  tired and sad,

  the sublime (in the Burkean sense of the term) man

  suddenly said

  in his guttural voice –

  the kind of voice you hear on posh radio stations

  like France Culture;

  a voice drowning in static; rough, gravelly,

  the kind you want to sweep like a driveway –

  he said in this voice to Eugene:

  ‘And how is it, sir, that you know Tatiana?

  I don’t believe she has mentioned your name.’

  ‘I was friends with the boyfriend of her Olga sister,’

  replied Eugene, forcing himself to use the same

  rhythm, but getting his words mixed up.

  ‘I mean, her older sister. Olga,’ he corrected.

  ‘Ah! A genuine, longstanding connection!

  Then I’m not telling you anything new if I say

  That she is the brightest student in my collection;

  From the indistinct mass of my PhDs,

  She emerges, like a beam cast on the sea

  By a lighthouse, its dazzling reflection,

  Or the little firefly hovering softly

  In the dark night; incandescent perfection …’

  ‘What the hell is he on about?’ thought Eugene.

  ‘This is a public declaration of love!

  Live from the steps of the National Library!

  He might just as well

  yell

  very very loudly through a megaphone:

  I love Tatiana! I love Tatiana! I love Tatiana!

  Is he mad or what? Why tell me that?

  Oh, this is torture.’

  And he stood still as stone,

  stunned by the truth of this idea.

  ‘The bastard.

  He is torturing me.’

  The man droned on in his voice from France Culture:

  ‘I had forgotten all about the pleasures of the mind

  And was calmly drifting to the end of my career

  When Tatiana appeared and magically undermined

  The daily trudge and drear …’

  ‘Lensky was a poet,’

  Eugene thought.

  ‘But not this kind of poet.

  Not like this pompous Leprince.

  Is he sleeping with her?’

  At nine thirty-five in the morning, logically,

  this question should not have entered his head.

  But now it was

  the most important question in the world.

  The key question.

  ‘Is he sleeping with her?’

  Eugene discovered that he had other questions too.

  Hundreds of thousands of questions,

  which he asked himself feverishly

  while Leprince did his worst,

  spouting declarations of love in rhyming verse.

  She didn’t ask me what I did for a living – doesn’t she care

  is she still angry

  with me

  who could blame her after what I said

  is she sleeping with him

  how

  in whose bed

  what exactly did I tell her

  I can’t even remember now

  dear Tatiana

  no, not even a dear I don’t think I even said dear

  I was a little turd back then

  I was hardly even me back then

  has she thought about me recently

  did she recognise me straight away

  why has she changed like that

  has she really changed

  as much as all that

  was she that pretty before

  was she that witty before

  was it the brace on her teeth that hid her soul from me

  is thirty-five minutes enough time

  to fall in love with a girl

  or fall back in love

  was I in love with her back then

  did I have a personality back then

  was I really a human being back then

  was there anything inside my head

  is he sleeping with her

  is he sleeping with her?

  I don’t remember what I told her that day

  if only I could remember

  what the hell did I say?

  then I could explain

  perhaps she’s waiting for me to apologise

  but I could hardly apologise to her just then

  down in the metro, on the fourteenth line,

  five minutes after seeing her again

  am I getting myself worked up

  over nothing very much

  did she already possess such beauty

  such intelligence such personality

  is she sleeping with him

  would anyone notice if

  I missed my grandfather’s funeral?

  yeah

  probably

  I think Mum would probably notice

  particularly as I’m supposed to give a speech

  damn

  if I run

  could I catch her

  is she already in the library

  is she waiting for me to call her

  is he sleeping with her

  is he sleeping with her?

  These are just some

  of the thousands of questions

  that we will leave Eugene (for now) to wrestle

  with, alone.

  Because it’s time

  for a brief summary of the facts.

  It’s time to go back

  about ten years

  into the past,

  back to when it all began.

  2

  It all began

  in a leafy suburb of Paris,

  neither poor nor very rich,

  in a white house

  that looks like a Playmobil house.

  There, Tatiana lives peacefully

  with her older sister Olga

  and their mother.

  The fourth actor in this domestic tragedy

  (not counting me)

  is the neighbours’ son.

  His real name is Léonard,

  though everyone calls him Lensky.

  He’s a poet,

  but not the boring sort.

  He does slam – like rap, but slower.

  Like poetry, but with music.

  The kind of poetry that adults don’t consider poetic.

  Gosh, Léonard, it’s not exactly Rimbaud, is it,

  what you do? It’s not exactly Keats.

  Our son is a sort of rapper.

  It’s not exactly poetry. We’re hoping one day he

  might broaden his vocabulary.

  And lose the hip-hop beats.

  ‘It’s just a phase,’ the neighbour bleats.

  So Lensky does slam that’s neither Rimbaud

  nor Keats.

  He’s also sleeping with Olga

  and they love each other.

  They’re seventeen. Lensky pens

  wild declarations of love to his girlfriend.

  I’ve kept every single one, because I like them so much.

  They make me smile.

  But that’s not all.

  What those letters have

  is that sweet shame of things

  we used to find beautiful,

  that sour aftertaste of words we regret

  years later.

  Those overblown oaths,

  those preposterous promises, those demented declarations,

  those metaphors that afterwards make us groan,

  that overheated hyperbole, those ridiculous repetitions

  wh
ich somehow, in the heat of the moment, struck us as so

  beautiful, so true,

  our pens dipped in the ink of our souls,

  our entire beings calligraphed into those curls,

  the whole universe

  concentrated in the verse

  whispered by the lips

  of our beloved muse,

  as they read our immortal prose somewhere,

  rolling our Rs, licking our Ls, wallowing in our Ws …

  It seemed to us that we were nothing more

  nor less

  than their warm breath:

  the sculpture of our words on their tongues, in their air.

  ‘I love you, Olga, I love you so!’

  (So begin most

  of Lensky’s letters.)

  ‘I love you like the moonstruck madman

  loves his lunacy.

  Every hour, every minute, every second, you are all I see.

  As I stare out from my rooftop at the city far below, your

  sweet visage smiles back at me from clouds and sun and

  snow. Ever since that blessed day when your eyes first met

  mine …’

  (Despite his parents’ concerns, there is nothing

  wrong with his vocabulary. Parents often underestimate

  their children. Even more so their teenagers. Lensky, in

  fact, has read Rimbaud.)

  ‘… across the garden wall, when we were small,

  our souls have been entwined. You are the

  essence of my existence. You are my greatest

  experience. I live you like a poet thinks. I live

  you like an alcoholic drinks. I love you, I love

  you, Olga, and I would rather die than live a day

  without you in my life.’

  He sends these lines on paper in the post,

  in emails, instant messages, and texts

  (though not so often, because texts

  are extremely expensive in 2006),

  and he whispers them into her ear,

  on the pillow they share,

  the two of them naked,

  lying in bed,

  skin touching skin,

  their bellies still scaly with bodily fluids,

  their chests still heaving in the muggy gloom

  of Olga’s little attic room.

  Meanwhile in her bed on the floor below,

  fourteen-year-old

  Tatiana

  reads, reads,

  reads, reads, reads, reads, reads,

  reads, reads,

  reads

  books by the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, Zola,

  Boris Vian, Aragon and Shakespeare:

  Pride and Prejudice,

  Wuthering Heights,

  Froth on the Daydream,

  Gone With the Wind,

  Romeo and Juliet,

  The Ladies’ Paradise

  (etc.)

  and as she reads,

  she imagines wild, passionate, heart-stopping love affairs.