In Paris With You Page 5

  Her thoughts are like a Hollywood film.

  On the black screen of her white nights,

  Tatiana, still a little naïve, keeps fading to black:

  at the moment when Eugene unclips her bra

  fade to black

  at the moment when Eugene’s lips brush her collar bone

  fade to black

  at the moment when Eugene unbuttons his jeans

  fade to black

  We always fade in again

  the next morning,

  when Tatiana is fully clothed,

  when they are eating breakfast together,

  when they’re chatting in the garden, united

  by the knowledge that something’s happened

  and no one knows.

  black/white/black/white

  black/white/black/white/black/white

  One can only admire it, this innate self-censorship,

  this discipline within;

  but despite the chastity of her dreams, Tatiana still doesn’t

  fall asleep until dawn.

  And when she sleeps, she thrashes about,

  and when she wakes, she feels like

  she’s spent the whole night fighting her covers,

  which are wrapped tight around her

  like an octopus.

  And these thoughts barely have time to stagnate:

  every day, they are refreshed by something new.

  Something Eugene’s said,

  a lock of hair he’s put back in place,

  the arm of his glasses that he sucked, deep in thought,

  the hint of a hesitation on his face;

  Tatiana hoards all these little Eugene treasures

  in the storeroom of her dreams, a shop

  where she is the sole customer,

  the sole vendor.

  hello madam I would like to buy

  the little mole from Eugene’s neck please yes that one

  yes yes the one that looks like a peppercorn

  thank you kindly

  it’s to decorate my daydream where I kiss him just there

  you see

  would you by any chance have a jar

  of his favourite expressions?

  that’s right

  I’m planning an imaginary conversation

  with him tonight

  Sometimes these treasures prove explosive, intoxicating,

  a detail marked with DANGER;

  let’s say, for example,

  that one afternoon he took her hand

  in order to look at her watch,

  then, that evening:

  I’d like a copy

  of the sensation of his two fingers on my wrist.

  Oh dear!

  Are you sure?

  Absolutely.

  You know this guarantees you won’t fall asleep

  until three or three-thirty in the morning!

  I know, but I need it.

  I should warn you, it’s highly addictive.

  I’ll be careful with it.

  All right.

  If you say so. But please follow

  the instructions.

  I will, I promise. Thank you.

  The most dangerous of these treasures

  gets delivered to Tatiana on the day that changes her life.

  That day, while deep in conversation,

  as she’s explaining something

  very interesting

  about butterflies at the time of the Industrial Revolution,

  the world is suddenly torn apart:

  Eugene takes off his sweater, and his polo shirt is lifted

  up –

  and

  she

  sees

  a

  fine

  dark

  line

  of

  hairs

  running like a pencil shading

  from his navel to his belt buckle.

  And then beyond.

  Down to where?

  down to his damn

  she was in the middle of explaining

  something very interesting

  about something

  white butterflies no, they were black no, hang on

  in England during the Industrial Revolution

  the butterflies were white

  but, you see, there was lots of soot,

  she tells Eugene because of the factories

  the butterflies were white, before but then, because

  of the soot oh God, where

  was I? oh yes, so to clarify

  so it was the time of the Industrial Revolution in England

  are you with me so far?

  ‘I’m with you so far,’ Eugene smiles.

  And so, in fact it was it was all dark I mean

  oh I can’t explain it

  ‘It was all dark because of the smoke from the factories,’

  encourages Eugene.

  The fine dark line of hairs has disappeared again

  under the polo shirt

  but it remains imprinted

  on her retina,

  seared to her poor stunned brain.

  ‘Yes,’ says Tatiana, ‘that’s right,

  so in fact – concentrate – the walls of

  London were white before, and so were the butterflies,

  but when the walls became black because of the soot, the

  butterflies evolved and they became black too.’

  bravo Tatiana, she congratulates herself,

  that was a more or less coherent explanation

  now get thee behind me, fine dark line,

  come back tonight when I’ll need you

  as a prop for my dreams

  ‘It’s proof that a dark world

  makes you dark,’ concludes Eugene.

  ‘Yes,’ stammers Tatiana. ‘I mean, no,

  it’s actually proof of Darwin’s theory, so …

  I mean, don’t you think it’s amazing, that

  whole thing about white butterflies becoming black?’

  Eugene laughs. ‘I don’t know

  about the butterflies, but you

  are bright red, suddenly.’

  And indeed our poor Tatiana is vermilion.

  Like those little butterflies,

  she would like to disappear at the end of the garden

  (and I too must admit that I find it surprising

  that we so want to blend into the background,

  that we wish to vanish into the door,

  the wallpaper, the carpet on the floor,

  and that so often this chameleon desire arrives

  at the very moment when we might blurt out:

  I was troubled by the fleeting vision of your body;

  in those very moments that could change our life,

  we want to hide, in order to survive;

  in order to avoid

  being eaten by birds,

  we wish ourselves carpet, wallpaper, doors,

  instead of the great scandal that our words

  might cause.)

  It is perhaps that vision and those regrets that force

  Tatiana to pace up and down in her room tonight.

  She’s trying to exhaust herself so she can sleep.

  For days now she’s stayed awake till dawn.

  All this love and tiredness make her want to puke.

  She tries to count her steps, but the hope’s forlorn:

  she has no self-discipline at all.

  A hundred steps a hundred and one a garrison of

  steps she is an army just her alone she’s the military

  march of her beating heart she’s the general at its head

  it is she who decides she won’t let her emotions walk

  all over her she wants order in her organs calm in her

  cardiac rhythm she wants to sleep perchance to NO no

  dreams she is in charge here not her ventricles not the

  tentacles of her octopus bed she needs to sleep her

  m
ind a blank no images of pencil shadings NO

  steep dark line of hairs going down to NO please

  just sleep just sleep let her sleep please sleeeeeep

  But trying not to think about something

  is a battle lost in advance; your brain

  will just keep asking you –

  what was that thing again?

  Now Tatiana’s feet

  are aching and her head

  is still filled with pictures of Eugene.

  And she still hasn’t fallen asleep.

  Yet another sunrise to be seen

  from her window. She’s high

  on exhaustion and suddenly feels

  invincible.

  The truth is, she thinks,

  I missed my chance, earlier today;

  I could have I should have told him.

  And yet …

  And yet … why not!

  Here, now, she will do it, she will be

  the person she wants to be: someone better.

  I am going, she tells herself, to write him a letter.

  A letter of unspeakable beauty. A letter

  that is honest, true, real;

  lines written straight from her heart

  like the straight dark line of hairs that NO NO

  DON’T THINK ABOUT THAT. I said NO.

  So …

  write this letter now, Tatiana, in haste,

  instead of imagining the path of that dark line

  below his waist.

  Tatiana runs to her desk and picks up a pen.

  Intelligent, she thinks, be intelligent.

  She thinks she’ll write something full of references.

  Something spiritual. Subtle. Something to impress Eugene,

  who loves quotations more than he loves his parents.

  Yes, that’s it!

  She’ll compose a letter littered with quotations.

  He can have fun spotting each one

  and at the same time

  admire her sophistication,

  while simultaneously guessing

  at her feelings.

  Tatiana makes several failed attempts,

  which we won’t list in detail right now;

  it will be the task of future archivists

  to decrypt those crumpled scripts.

  The last one, written around three in the morning,

  reads as follows:

  Dear Eugene,

  I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages hence:

  How I saw a proud rider on a horse’s proud back;

  Oh, how his broad clear brow in sunlight glowed!

  And from underneath his helmet flowed

  His coal-black curls, his flashing eyes,

  For he had fed on honey-dew, and drunk the milk of Paradise.

  My love, had we but world enough and time …

  Alas! At my back I always hear Time’s chariot arrive!

  And as love is life, and life hath immortality,

  Let me wake forever in this sweet unrest,

  And so live eternally – or else swoon to death.

  Tatiana contemplates her shanty-town verse,

  cobbled together from others’ words.

  In itself, it has to be said,

  the poem is not

  especially good.

  Put it this way: if Eugene does not spot

  the references, he might well wonder

  what exactly she’s been sniffing.

  And as the original verses were not all in the same

  meter,

  she had to plug the gaps with words of her own:

  an oh here, a how there,

  an alas where it does not belong,

  and to make it rhyme,

  she had to alter some of the lines,

  and you can tell, a little bit, she thinks.

  (Who is she kidding? It stinks!)

  But the biggest problem is that none of the thoughts

  are really hers.

  It is the work

  of a thousand others, and yet of no one.

  It is half past three in the morning when she scrunches up

  the sheet of paper.

  She sits down at her desk again,

  concentrates and at last frees herself.

  Sometimes, she realises, you can try too hard

  to be perfect. Reaching for rhymes and rhythm when you

  could write freely. Being clever when you could be sincere.

  Writing a letter with ink and quill, when you could just

  Open a New Message.

  Eugene’s email address will come in handy, after all.

  Tatiana turns on her computer,

  which takes ten minutes to sputter into life (it’s 2006),

  and she opens her Hotmail inbox

  and finds she has an email from Myspace

  reminding her it’s her birthday

  (it’s not: she gave the website

  a false date of birth;

  her actual birthday is in two weeks’ time)

  and another one, some spam, that yells

  TATIANA1992

  SEND A VIRTUAL CARD

  TO THE PERSON YOU LOVE!!!

  MORE THAN 250 ANIMATED CARDS!!!

  FOR FRIENDSHIP, LOVE, CONDOLENCES

  Tatiana smiles at this coincidence (which is nothing of the

  kind, since she gets messages like this almost every day).

  In a corner of the screen, MSN

  lights up too.

  Sometimes the little men are blue, other times grey or green;

  Eugene

  is a little grey man.

  At this hour of the night, of course, everyone

  is a little grey man.

  (Except for SmarterChild, the robot from MSN,

  every insomniac’s friend,

  always available for weird conversations.

  I used to chat with him sometimes,

  because I liked the odd sensation

  of conducting a discussion

  with someone who couldn’t answer

  any important question;

  just like all of us,

  but at least he admitted it

  instead of trying to bluff.

  Have you ever fallen in love, SmarterChild?

  Robots do not fall in love.

  What should I write in a love letter, SmarterChild?

  If I were to write a letter,

  the first thing I would consider

  is the person to whom I am writing.

  I can’t sleep, SmarterChild.

  I am sorry to learn

  that you are having difficulty

  falling asleep.

  What is the meaning of life, SmarterChild?

  I am afraid that I have not been

  programmed to respond to this question.

  I miss SmarterChild; it’s a pity

  he no longer exists. Siri tries too hard to be witty.

  Even though he sometimes made no sense,

  I preferred SmarterChild and his wise innocence.)

  Tatiana is not done with robotic questions.

  She clicks on Microsoft Word,

  starts to write …

  Dear Eugene

  and right away

  it looks as though you’re writing a letter

  exclaims the animated paperclip, with his bulging eyes

  and vicious smile

  can I help you?

  No, thanks – I’m fine.

  Tatiana clicks on the X in the top right corner of the screen

  and the paperclip vanishes. Now she can proceed.

  She writes her message to Eugene with disconcerting ease.

  No verbal acrobatics.

  It is simply a message that tells him how she feels.

  It’s beautiful, in its way. I kept it. Would you like to see?

  Tatiana’s message

  to Eugene

  Good evening Eugene,

  or rather, good morning.

  It was really ni
ce to see you again today.

  Recently, maybe because of the way

  I’m feeling (bored), or the hot summer weather,

  or maybe some other reason,

  whatever,

  sometimes I just wait

  for you to arrive.

  Then I hear the creak of the garden gate,

  and there you are,

  with Lensky by your side.

  But until you turn up, I’m all distracted.

  I find it hard to concentrate.

  I wait and wait,

  but when we’re waiting, we don’t really live;

  reality seems unreal.

  For weeks now, it’s like reality’s been passing me by;

  I can’t touch it, I can’t feel

  anything

  until the gate swings open and you enter our garden.

  It’s strange, but

  only when you’re there with me

  do I feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be.

  The rest of the time, I’m like a girl at the window

  watching myself live,

  out there, down below,

  with the feeling that life is happening to

  someone else

  and I am trapped behind glass.

  I know what I’m writing is not very elegant –

  I don’t think of myself as poetic –

  and I also know that it’s probably because

  I’m a bit too romantic,

  but

  I just wanted to ask if maybe

  you might have feelings for me?

  I do

  for you

  by the way.

  I’ve known it ever since we first met.

  You’ve probably got loads of girls after you, though; in fact,

  I’m

  sure you have to brush them off your trouser legs

  all the time.

  Maybe you have a girlfriend back at home,

  that you’ve never mentioned?

  Maybe you don’t have any feelings for me,

  after all.

  Or maybe you’re gay?

  Not that I have a problem

  with that – no way!

  But if you’re not

  gay, I mean

  and you don’t

  have a girlfriend

  and you do

  have feelings for me

  then maybe

  we

  could go to see

  a movie

  together, or something, one of these days.

  I heard Spider-Man

  is out at the moment. But it doesn’t have to be

  that film in particular. Anything will do.

  I like pretty much everything, honestly.

  Or we could just go for a walk in the park,