In Paris With You Read online

Olga has a whole battery of imaginary adulteries

  to hand

  and has no trouble hearing

  the creaks and moans, picturing the multiple positions

  of the two of them – or three,

  if that’s the kind of thing he likes, Lensky.

  It’s been an hour and ten minutes since she sent her last

  message –

  Hey babe what r u doing?

  – and Olga is starting to think that, by now,

  it would be better

  if she heard on the evening news

  that he’d been killed

  in a train crash

  or blown up by terrorists.

  So Olga’s jealousy flashes up scenes both sleazy and morbid

  (she will find out later that he left his phone at home)

  while Tatiana, for her part, turning pale

  as she holds back a diarrhoea of daydreams,

  is waiting for just one thing: to be in bed.

  Spare a thought here for the girls’ poor mum,

  trying to make conversation with the two of them.

  *

  Meanwhile,

  on the train that’s taking them

  to the Gare du Nord,

  Lensky tells Eugene all about Olga,

  but his friend says hardly anything at all

  of any consequence,

  even drifting into a bored silence,

  as if he found the subject of Lensky’s beloved quite banal:

  Unable to stand this anymore,

  Lensky says at last:

  ‘So … so come on,

  tell me mate,

  come on, tell me, what

  do you think of her, huh?

  Olga,

  I mean … I mean I know it’s not really your thing,

  girls and all that … I know you’ve given up on …

  [chuckle] matters of the heart,

  but seriously

  mate,

  tell me, what do you think of Olga?’

  Eugene’s mind swings like a pendulum.

  He really likes Lensky but also the truth, you see.

  The first demands compassion the second, honesty.

  To start with, he thinks he’ll just say something weak:

  ‘Olga? She’s nice.

  Yeah, mate, she’s really nice and that.’

  ‘And that? Don’t you think she’s beautiful?’

  ‘She’s … honestly, she’s fine.’

  She’s got her legs in the right place.

  Two eyes and one nose on her face.

  There’s nothing wrong with her,

  as far as I can see.

  Eugene hates himself a little

  for being incapable of hypocrisy.

  Lensky fiddles with the wheel of his iPod Mini.

  ‘But, you know,’ says Eugene,

  ‘I didn’t really talk to her.

  I spent most of the afternoon with Tatiana.’

  ‘That’s true,’ mutters Lensky.

  ‘You got lumbered with her sister. I’m sorry.

  I should have let you talk to Olga more,

  then you’d have seen …

  you’d understand …’

  ‘Don’t apologise,’

  replies Eugene. ‘Really, I mean it.’

  And he sounds like he really does,

  this time.

  ‘Honestly, it wasn’t bad at all. She’s actually fine,

  Tatiana.

  I mean, honestly, if I were you,

  I don’t know

  which of the two sisters I would choose.’

  Silence, then the train wheels

  squeal.

  Inaudible announcement: a suspicious package

  or an incident on the line.

  Lensky frowns as he disentangles

  the wires, entwined,

  of his earphones.

  Eugene suddenly remembers the ‘compassion’ side

  of his inner pendulum:

  ‘But hang on,

  mate, I mean,

  I’m not saying you made the wrong choice.

  I’m just saying

  that Tatiana is, you know, all right.’

  As Eugene digs and digs with his spade of words,

  the hole growing ever deeper,

  the sides plunging ever steeper,

  Lensky lapses into a cold silence

  that lasts until his second mojito, one hour later,

  when at last the rum, the sugar,

  the mint and the lime,

  the crushed ice,

  revive his generous, loving, joyous,

  seventeen-year-old poet’s soul.

  He remembers what exactly it is about Eugene

  that he likes:

  this is a boy who says what he thinks.

  Who cares if he doesn’t love Olga?

  Lensky loves her and that’s all that counts.

  So they dance,

  and Lensky slaps his friend on the back

  as Eugene moves on the dancefloor,

  daiquiri in hand:

  he dances well enough,

  not Michael Jackson, but nothing to be ashamed of;

  he dances the way he might

  tell some old aunt about his holidays:

  conscientiously, but without passion.

  (In the years that follow,

  in rare moments of reflection

  about himself, and Lensky, and the two girls

  next door,

  about that fateful summer

  when everything was ruined,

  Eugene will sometimes recall that silence

  on the train to Paris,

  Lensky’s stiff expression,

  Plasticine skin,

  his gaze coiled

  in the twisting wires

  of his headphones,

  lost in the music within.

  With hindsight, that silence will seem

  to Eugene like a warning,

  a foreshadowing

  of doom,

  as in a tragedy of old;

  a brief chill heralding the long dark winter cold.)

  This is known as tragic irony. I am pointing it out here

  so you will appreciate just how neatly

  this story is tied together;

  how completely

  reality mirrors the laws of fiction.

  I can say this without fear

  of being thought immodest, since this story

  is not my invention.

  As for the hows and whys of this wintry silence,

  of this fountain that will soon run dry,

  of Lensky’s eternal fade to grey …

  well, we’ll come back to that.

  For the moment,

  Lensky is happy,

  Eugene distant,

  and Olga and Tatiana think about them

  as they pick at their rillettes.

  So everything is fine, more or less.

  *

  The summer drifts on, and the boys

  visit the girls in their garden almost every day.

  For an hour each afternoon,

  Lensky and Olga sneak up to her attic room,

  and Eugene is stuck with Tatiana.

  Which is not necessarily a bad thing,

  since Eugene thinks she is –

  allow me to remind you –

  all right.

  So he makes himself presentable,

  and as he is perfectly capable

  of being thoroughly charming

  when he wants to,

  and as he wants to

  quite often

  when he’s with Tatiana,

  for her, those afternoon visits are like

  the visits of a magical, sensual being,

  as if it were a prince or a centaur she were seeing.

  The hour always follows the same pattern:

  The forged-iron garden gate

  creaks

  on its hinges;

  Olga uncrosses her long thi
ghs,

  slender and sleek,

  shades her eyes with her fingers;

  Lensky arrives first, and the four of them

  talk about the weather

  until Lensky and Olga go upstairs because

  she has something funny to show him.

  So Tatiana is forced to abandon

  her fantasies of Eugene

  and make do with Eugene

  in person.

  They sit in the gossamer shade of a tree

  and talk. That’s all.

  About literature, cinema, music, poetry,

  but most of all about the world in general,

  and their feelings about it,

  a little bit.

  Their first conversations are clumsy,

  Tatiana flaky, Eugene overbearing,

  the two of them stumbling, interrupting each other,

  not

  But quite I think yet No go on

  No no you were saying Oh all I was saying was

  able to speak in sync,

  Eugene always wanting to say more, Tatiana less;

  she a flute,

  he a bassoon,

  he booming above,

  she whispering below:

  at first they talk at cross-purposes,

  but soon,

  little by little, as in a game of pick-up sticks,

  with infinite precaution,

  the two of them learn

  to lift, one by one,

  taking turns,

  their frail criss-crossing ideas,

  sharp and light,

  sometimes confused,

  and some fall off and roll away,

  while others get caught,

  and some of them they use

  to pick up other thoughts.

  Little by little, too, they each learn to anticipate

  the other’s foibles. Tatiana watches out for the double

  dimples

  that bookend Eugene’s lips like quotation marks

  whenever he cites a line of poetry

  or some captivating phrase

  Summer’s lease hath all too short a date I will show

  you fear in a handful of dust Life is what happens to

  you while you are busy making other plans More than

  kisses, letters mingle souls The child,

  a monster that adults fashion from their regrets

  Eugene knows dozens of such quotations; the diligence of a

  wax memory, stamped by everything that touches it;

  generally, he uses this ability to shine in society,

  but with Tatiana, it’s different; what he likes,

  when he reels off lines,

  is not the idea of impressing her,

  it’s not that … it’s

  the way she takes the time to think

  about the meaning of the quotes,

  the way she picks them up and examines them,

  these thoughts

  which he hands to her still in their shell,

  till, freshly peeled,

  she hands them back again, their fruit revealed.

  Whenever Tatiana thinks out loud, she has a strange habit

  of placing an insect on the back of her hand;

  a ladybird, a beetle, an ant:

  any bug will do.

  Mechanically, she grabs some passing creature by chance

  and as she speaks, fully focused on her words,

  she watches it crawl from hand to hand, from skin to skin.

  Eugene watches Tatiana watch the insect and wonders

  about the meaning of this miniature marathon,

  the tickling of those tiny feet;

  perhaps somehow that stubborn,

  relentless linear charge,

  that furious forward march

  helps her to trace the path of her own thoughts?

  Her thoughts,

  they’re not the thoughts of someone who believes

  that the sun will implode.

  Her mind is full of hopes

  and fears;

  Eugene likes the jolting way she expresses her ideas.

  But like you see the other day my aunt told me

  I should enjoy my youth while it lasts and I don’t know

  about you but personally I find that a bit artificial it

  makes me kind of anxious in fact I think it’s impossible

  to deliberately set out to enjoy something it just happens

  on its own and it’s only afterwards later on that I think to

  myself that moment was important for me because in the

  moment itself I’m not concentrating on it being important

  because that would make me anxious

  you know what I mean?

  Nothing has made Eugene anxious

  for quite some time,

  and nothing has given him enjoyment either,

  but, for one reason or another,

  he’s reluctant to disillusion Tatiana,

  to tell her that her worries are a waste of time,

  that her dreams are mirages:

  out of kindness,

  he lets her believe that all this stuff matters.

  Once, only once, does he let the truth come out,

  when she asks him the question:

  ‘What would you like to do when you’re older?’

  This question irritates him; he replies that he couldn’t care

  less, there’s nothing special he wants to do.

  ‘When I’m older, I’ll feel just as bored and down

  as I do now.’

  Tatiana is shocked. ‘But Eugene, surely you want,

  I don’t know,

  to do something that excites you or makes you feel

  fulfilled?’

  ‘There’s nothing I like.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing?’ Tatiana’s face falls.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Even chatting with me? she wonders,

  not daring to ask the question out loud:

  Are you bored,

  sitting here with me now?

  ‘But … talking with people,

  or travelling the world …’

  Eugene snaps. ‘Boredom exists everywhere, you know.

  It’s called different things.

  We say ennui, the English spleen,

  the Russians khandra.

  But changing the name doesn’t alter the feeling.

  You can’t escape your mind.

  Boredom is not a place you can just leave behind.’

  Tatiana had no idea

  about this terrible void inside Eugene.

  Up to this point, he had kept it unseen.

  She falls silent. Does this mean that he’s depressed?

  Suicidal?

  She’s heard about people who see the world in grey.

  Does this mean that all this time

  with her

  he’s been stifling yawns every day?

  Eugene watches the worry on her face,

  and is touched, a little bit,

  that she’s worried about him, and curiously he feels a

  twinge of guilt,

  which is not an emotion he’s accustomed to.

  He softens his voice, makes a joke or two,

  tells her that he would actually like to travel,

  to see the Tierra del Fuego

  (total bullshit),

  but that he doesn’t know what he wants to do

  for a job when he’s older;

  his parents are always bugging him about that

  and that’s why he got annoyed

  (crappy excuse),

  but of course he’s not always bored

  (of course he is) here, for example, now,

  he’s not unhappy, he’s fine. Yes he is.

  ‘Khandra cannot enter through that gate.’

  ‘I’ve been spleen-free since I arrived here.’

  ‘This garden banishes boredom.’

  Tatiana
is relieved, she smiles again,

  and ironically Eugene almost believes his own lie,

  in the end,

  whether he changed his mind, alone,

  or Tatiana’s happiness infected him;

  so maybe, in the end, it’s simply true:

  in this garden, you can’t feel blue.

  And so with the passing days,

  Tatiana in a rosy haze

  of love, Eugene, a little amazed,

  finds her increasingly

  charming …

  well, original anyway, you know, not dull.

  Disarming.

  He wonders how

  this Playmobil house could have produced

  one girl full of dreams and ideals,

  fiercely intelligent, sharp and delicate as a needle,

  and another whose Myspace page

  is decorated with a photo of Audrey Hepburn

  in Breakfast at Tiffany’s,

  a reference that is probably, in her estimation,

  the very height of sophistication.

  Eugene is not unhappy to spend his afternoons

  with Tatiana.

  No, he is far from unhappy.

  Tatiana, on the other hand, is so exhausted

  by these brief visits,

  when he sits

  with her in the garden,

  and the dreams that rack her

  before and after

  leave her heart and abs so sore and stiff,

  that she feels like she’s in training

  for the Olympics.

  Her programme of palpitations is packed to the limit:

  • All morning, she thinks about Eugene.

  At this stage, it’s mostly in little bits;

  she remembers his wrist, his ankle, his nails.

  A Eugene jigsaw.

  Each piece makes her heart contract, as if trapped between

  a tiny finger and thumb.

  • In the afternoon, she thinks about Eugene.

  At any moment now, he might arrive;

  her heart pounds so hard it makes the trees shake,

  her throat aches – then –

  • Then he arrives.

  Now she is obliged to think about him

  while he sits there right in front of her,

  which maddens her senses, this superimposition of Eugenes,

  and Tatiana is all internal tension,

  infernal desire, frantic for him to go away,

  desperate for him to stay.

  • And in the evening, she thinks about Eugene.

  Now her thoughts bloom fantastically; in the dark,

  everything is worse – bouncing ball in her belly, skin cold

  and damp as a fish’s scales, forehead hot as lava, and an

  army of pale hairs stand to attention on her arms.