In Paris With You Read online

  Or so I like to think, at least.

  Tatiana is a very old-fashioned young girl.

  I imagine her imagining a rather surly heart-throb,

  dark-eyed, rough, even cruel to start with;

  the kind of man who’s been through things

  that no young girl can even imagine.

  Encountering Tatiana, however,

  this bull of a man,

  transfixed by her beauty and her virtue,

  experiences a pulsating, life-changing love

  which will of course be thwarted by various

  incidents

  and events.

  For example:

  One time, she might be kidnapped by the mafia (or

  some sort of hoodlums anyway) – in the shape of three

  very bad (but not bad-looking) men,

  who want to dig up dirt

  on her mystery man,

  because he’s working as a spy for their enemy

  (or something);

  so they threaten to hurt

  Tatiana,

  to torture her, even,

  unless

  she confesses

  everything she knows about him!

  (Though in fact it’s not the kind of torture

  that would actually hurt her:

  electrical wires that aren’t plugged in;

  ropes not tied so tightly that they burn her skin;

  her torturer too susceptible to her beauty

  to really do his duty.)

  And suddenly one of the gangsters will stop

  and stare

  and shout in a panicked voice:

  Who’s there?

  And she will be saved in the nick of time

  by the man who loves her,

  and they will walk off hand in hand into the sunset

  to be wed,

  but,

  inevitably,

  he will already be married!

  (An arranged marriage, obviously,

  as never, before Tatiana, will he ever have loved anyone

  else at all.

  Ever.

  Tatiana will be his first.)

  And his first wife, who is still alive

  (and whom he hates, naturally)

  will return and try to kill

  them both –

  but she won’t succeed. Because

  Tatiana’s husband will protect her, holding off his

  wretched wife easily at first, but then, distracted by his

  overwhelming love for Tatiana, he will be stabbed in the

  back and he’ll start to bleed profusely; Tatiana, courageous

  and cunning, will bring down a chandelier on the woman’s

  head, before fashioning a tourniquet for her wounded

  husband with a strip of cloth torn from her dress.

  Filled with admiration, her husband will tell her

  over and over again how much he loves her.

  There are, of course, upon this theme,

  an almost infinite number of variations.

  Tatiana does not lack imagination.

  At the Alexander-Pushkin Secondary School,

  where she goes every day,

  Tatiana finds nobody worthy of her love.

  Obviously,

  since the boys are all fools.

  God they’re stupid those boys

  they’re all so dumb

  they’re really annoying

  they pinch our bums

  they’re so immature they fart

  and they snigger

  idiotically they talk about

  whose willy is bigger and that

  is all they think about those pathetic prats

  The girls talk about how boys change

  when their balls descend.

  Apparently, that hasn’t yet happened.

  anyway everyone knows that girls are more intelligent.

  *

  But one day

  everything changes.

  One day, Eugene arrives in the leafy suburb.

  Where does he come from?

  Eugene is from a wealthy background,

  a family based in Paris

  but who are aristocratic,

  originally from the North,

  conservative and Catholic.

  Eugene is the youngest; he has three older sisters.

  He’s been to several private schools.

  He’s not what anyone would call

  a good student,

  even if he ‘has the ability’, as people say:

  in other words, his parents still pray

  that one day he will pull his bloody finger out

  (to quote his impatient father),

  that he will discover the value

  of hard work and deep thought

  (in the words of his more refined mother),

  and that he will pass his Baccalaureate exam, then ascend

  to higher education.

  An icy silence is Eugene’s only reaction.

  He feels lost, in the age of the smiley;

  Heir to a bitter, old-fashioned melancholy.

  Everything bores him; there’s no consolation

  In his arid desolation.

  He’s done all the stuff he’s supposed to, of course –

  Smoking, sleeping around, drinking, drugs, or worse.

  He’s painted, he’s written, he’s roamed the whole planet,

  But nothing gave him any real pleasure, damn it!

  At night, on the verge of sleep, Eugene often

  Imagines it all ending with the implosion of the sun.

  Since everything one day will be this vast absence,

  Why bother trying to give meaning to existence?

  Why expend such futile effort, why get annoyed,

  When everything is doomed to end up in the void?

  How stupid they are, those idiots who strain

  Themselves by working or trying to entertain

  Others or themselves, who seek pleasure and delight,

  Just to distract their minds from the impending night!

  At seventeen, Eugene knows all about the world:

  And as life is so pointless, he does nothing at all.

  The summer before his final year of school,

  in the depths of boredom,

  Eugene considers his options:

  • kill himself

  • stay with Lensky for the holidays

  After due

  mature reflection,

  he chooses

  option number two.

  Lensky is his only friend, kind of.

  He met him first on a forum and then in real life.

  Eugene likes Lensky because they’re

  like brothers:

  both live at a distance

  from the world of others.

  Lensky lives metaphorically. He doesn’t care

  about things; he dares

  to love madly,

  to transcend the ordinary,

  to create his own world of drama and poetry.

  He’s a wild-eyed optimist, a daydream believer.

  In Lensky, Eugene sees himself flipped

  like a reflection in a mirror.

  So in early July, Eugene tells his parents,

  in their apartment

  in the eighth arrondissement,

  that he’s made an important decision:

  he’s going to spend the summer with Lensky

  and not in a coffin.

  His mother, sitting on a blue

  Louis XVI chair, can only nod

  her approval of this choice.

  Living in the suburbs,

  though not without its faults,

  is generally preferable to lying dead in a vault.

  And as he seems in a good mood,

  she decides to add:

  ‘I bought some past exam papers

  for business school; you can pack them in your bag.’

  Arriving at Lensky’s place, Eugene qui
ckly notes

  that his friend now has only one thing on his mind;

  one word, obsessive and grandiose:

  Olga Olga Olga Olga Olga Olga Olga Olga Olga Olga Olga

  And even though Eugene thinks all love is dumb,

  he adores seeing Lensky so possessed by this girl.

  It thrills him to think that one day the sun

  will implode, swallowing up the world

  and everything in it – including this reason-defying love,

  this love as pure as dreaming,

  as bright as a window’s reflection.

  For Eugene, this thought is

  perfection.

  For him, it’s the ultimate proof

  of the absolute insignificance of being.

  *

  The day after Eugene arrives, Lensky persuades

  him to go next door to meet Olga,

  because he’s sure they’ll get on well,

  and most of all because

  he wants to hear him say

  that she is the most beautiful, intelligent girl

  in the known universe

  (and also because he hasn’t slept with her

  for two whole days

  and he feels like his balls are about to burst).

  Eugene is not

  expecting much from this meeting,

  but then he never expects

  anything much of anything.

  For Lensky’s sake, he composes a socially acceptable

  expression,

  puts on a pair of 501s, white Converse trainers,

  thin-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses.

  Stifling a yawn,

  he follows his friend out onto the lawn.

  In the garden next door, Olga and Tatiana await

  unseen.

  Tatiana’s nose, as ever, is buried in a book.

  Olga: split skirt, sandals, magazine.

  ‘Mesdames,’ Lensky bows, with a look

  of pride, then kisses Olga’s hand

  and Tatiana’s cheek,

  before introducing them to Eugene, who claims he is

  enchanted

  to meet

  them both. ‘Enchanted, truly,’ he lies,

  this boy who has never been enchanted

  by anything in his life,

  and certainly not by the mundane sight

  of two suburban teenagers in their garden,

  sipping Coca-Cola,

  crossing and uncrossing their long slender thighs

  to the background hum

  of buzzing bees

  in a honeysuckle mountain

  that crowns a wooden pergola.

  All this too will be swallowed by the sun.

  As Lensky recites his latest poem to Olga in a

  corner of the lawn

  (‘I love you from dawn till dusk,

  from dusk till dawn!’),

  Eugene feels compelled by the rules of decorum

  to talk to Tatiana, who would have been perfectly content

  to continue reading.

  ‘What you reading?’ Eugene enquires.

  It’s La princesse de Clèves, one of the most

  boring books ever written

  in Eugene’s opinion.

  ‘I haven’t read it,’ he claims. ‘What’s the story?’

  Studious Tatiana, who has read the book ten times,

  gives him a passionate account of the plot,

  with its unconsummated romance

  (‘That’s true, I’d forgotten,’ Eugene recalls.

  ‘They don’t even get in each other’s pants.’)

  between the Princess of Clèves and the Duke of Nemours.

  After listening to this for ten minutes –

  and it wasn’t such a chore,

  in fact, when he thinks about it –

  Eugene decides it is his turn to entertain the young lady, so

  he begins

  to tell her about his life, employing all his charm

  and skill at conversation,

  with his number one weapon:

  the power of exaggeration.

  ‘I’ve just come from Paris,

  where my uncle kicked the bucket.’

  ‘Oh, that’s awful! I’m so sorry,’

  says Tatiana, who’s easily impressed.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’

  says Eugene. ‘Fuck it –

  we needed the rest.

  We’d spent months plumping his damn pillows and

  bringing him cup after cup

  of lapsang souchong tea –

  it smells like smoked salmon,

  you know the one I mean?

  The guy was the CEO of an oil company,

  responsible for a dozen spills at sea.

  So he killed entire families of seagulls and penguins and

  other sea creatures, most of them probably very cute!

  Seals, Tatiana, baby seals! This guy strangled baby seals

  with his own bare hands! Surely you can see

  that it’s wrong to mourn the passing of someone who spent

  his time plotting the death of cute aquatic creatures?

  And because he was so bloody despotic,

  he forced all his cousins,

  nephews, nieces and grandchildren

  to visit him

  during his death throes (which dragged on

  for a frankly inconvenient length of time)

  and be really kind and nice and all that crap,

  even though he’d been such a bastard

  all his life.

  This is a man, Tatiana, who gave me a sponge bag

  for my ninth birthday.

  A check, sand-coloured sponge bag.

  What kind of sick jerk does something like that?’

  Hearing these words, Tatiana’s emotions are divided

  between

  horror and fascination

  but she quickly opts for the second

  of these sensations,

  which has the advantage of being

  the same thing she feels

  when her gaze dwells

  on Eugene’s rugged face,

  those precipitous cheekbones, that abrupt

  nose,

  that lopsided smile, those

  beautiful eyes

  so blue … Russian blue,

  Tatiana decides;

  the blue of Russian palaces on pillows of snow.

  She notices the way he crosses his legs,

  right calf resting on left knee, and how

  he has forearms in the shape of triangles;

  the boys she knows at school

  God they’re stupid those boys

  have forearms thin as Pringles,

  forearms that might snap if they tried to lift a heavy tool.

  they’re all so dumb

  And his hands, with their knotty ligaments and veins,

  not like the soft round hands of the boys she knows

  they’ve got no brains

  those rubbery little hands, that doughy skin;

  Eugene’s hands are models of power and precision,

  hands that let you see their structure, their mechanism.

  And those wiry veins bulge and pulse from within

  the muscles of his hands, his arms, his neck.

  (And I think at this point, it isn’t too hasty

  to say that Tatiana is in love already.)

  She and Eugene continue to chat about this and that

  while Lensky does whatever he’s doing with Olga;

  and Tatiana, who adores his presence near her

  and wants him to stay there forever,

  is at the same time eager for him to leave;

  she can’t wait

  to lock herself in her room, alone,

  giddy with emotion,

  to lean her hot forehead on the cold windowpane,

  free at last to imagine herself with Eugene.

  Which is paradoxical, because right now he is with her.


  But she wants him to leave, so she can be with him better.

  Finally the two lovers return,

  Lensky relaxed and smiling,

  Olga warm and pink,

  both calm and quiet, sedated by their love.

  While they pour themselves lashings of Coke,

  Tatiana thinks

  to ask Eugene if he’s on MSN.

  He gives her his address,

  though the idea that she will write to him

  makes him want to spew.

  ‘Hi Eugene, its Tatiana, how r u?

  Smileys make Eugene cringe,

  those pathetic pixelated phony feelings,

  those insipid idiotic infantile emotions;

  he has to remind himself that one day,

  they, too, will be swallowed by the sun.

  But he has a recurring nightmare

  where, with tragic irony,

  those brainless heads with their dumb

  smiling lips,

  sole survivors of the Apocalypse,

  float through a liquid plasma universe

  laughing or crying or blushing into infinity.

  But Eugene has no reason to worry:

  Tatiana has no intention of chatting with him,

  least of all on MSN;

  the address is merely an accessory,

  a prop for her theatre of the mind,

  intended to decorate a corner

  of her cosy dream

  where she could,

  if she wanted,

  spend all night talking with Eugene,

  and where he would be happy to talk with her too.

  The address makes her fantasy feel real

  but with no actual obligation to do

  anything at all.

  *

  And so, in a frenzy of impatience,

  Tatiana goes back into the house;

  there are still

  four hours

  before bedtime.

  At dinner, Olga too is miles away;

  she’s thinking

  about Lensky, who’s gone for the evening,

  about the afternoon they spent together,

  but most of all about the texts she’s sent him,

  and whether

  he will ever reply to any of them, ever.

  She knows he’s going out in Paris with Eugene tonight.

  Maybe – maybe – he hasn’t received her texts because

  there’s no reception on the train?

  She should give him the benefit of the doubt,

  she thinks;

  And yet

  it is almost more probable, for Olga,

  that he’s already with another girl,

  for example in the toilets of a bar

  or out on the street, up against a wall,

  or in some seedy hotel in Pigalle.