I had to tell you right away: It's 1 A.M. in
Paris when Henry calls, the alcoholic fumes from his warm breath travel
fast across the ocean. I can always tell when he fakes his confidence,
he can always tell when I fake mine. He asks me questions he already
knows the answer to, they're only smoke screens and my heart is beating
in a vacuum.
"I went to New York" he says, "over Christmas. I
went to your address and stood outside your building for an hour" (he
talks as if to an answering machine). "I only went there to see you and I
didn't because... well". He breaths heavily into my ear, Stephanie
frozen like a marble statue on a kitchen chair.
"You should come
to Paris" he says, then hangs up. It's as much a question as an order
and it echoes through the noise from the traffic outside. What should I
do?
She's really there when I wake up, Stephanie, a
Christmas miracle in Dolce&Gabbana. She knocked on my door early
Wednesday morning, I've asked her a million questions but not why she
came or what she left behind. It doesn't matter and the smell of her
hair makes me wish we were immortal.
We first met ten years ago
in La La Land. Our mothers pretend to like each other but hers is a
worse actress than mine (I overheard them talking on the phone once, she
called me Antichrist). "Don't give me away" she moans plaintively,
striking a pose as if nailed to the cross, and I won't. Not as long as
she promises to stay.
Nine more days, hour after hour flickers by
like scenes from a silent movie. I'm somewhere else, watching things
happen as from outside of something. Reality I guess. I can't recognize
myself in the mirror and sometimes in the dark I feel him standing next
to me, his arm around my childish waist, my heavy head resting safely
against his shoulder.
They say that New Year's is a chance to
start all over. It never made sense to me in the past but my memories
are slowly fading and once they're gone I will have nothing left to
fight for. Maybe I need to stop talking to myself here, stop trying to
put my nothingness into words on this blog.
Mother is on her way
to London with Frank. "I thought I told you" she says when she calls me
at 8 A.M. from the airport. I'm watching her from outside my body, the
girl who's left alone for Christmas, and what frightens me the most is
that nothing really seems to get to her.
I slept through most of the snowfall, it
doesn't mean as much now as when my father and I would escape together. I
think of it as our summer house but we would spend time there during
winters too, him and I, just to get away from Los Angeles and the
plastic.
It would always be months since we closed up and left,
the chairs in the living room would be covered with heavy fabrics and
the air would smell of ice and charcoal. We would pretend it belonged to
someone else and move carefully to keep from leaving any traces in the
dust on the cold wooden floors.
I would sometimes wake up in the
middle of the night to that soft snowfall silence. I would get up and
watch him in secret from the top of the stairs as he sat there quietly
alone by the fireplace. All that moved was time and the sparks from the
fire reflecting in his eyes.
I don't remember my skin being this pale,
almost transparent. Since Chloe left I sometimes feel as if I only exist
in between these lines I'm writing, but then someone send me an email
saying they saw me in the street somewhere. "Outside Gusto on Greenwich,
you wore a sand colored trench coat and your hair like a plundered
bird's nest".
Lunch with mother and her friends was a Catholic
wake on Mescaline (you'd have to be there). She had the salmon, I
happened to mention that Christian Dior died choking on a fish bone.
"You know how that story saddens me" she said, her voice imperceptibly
trembling. "Also, it's highly disputed".
She's recently changed
her afternoon drink from Brandy to Champagne and the silence from Paris
is getting increasingly intrusive.
A second weekend without her, staying sober
seemed even more laughably absurd than emptying the last bottle of clear
Russian vodka alone, so I did. Mother talks more to her flowers than
with me and in this apathetic state of mine it makes perfect sense.
She's calmer than usual, if it wasn't for the tranquilizing effect her
Cartier de Lune always has on me I'm sure I'd be worried.
Last
night I slept in Henry's Givenchy cardigan, the silence from Paris
disturbs me more than I imagined. I dream about him reading my letter
just before fucking a willowy French girl with wavy ginger hair and
lavender satin underwear. She giggles femininely at his jokes and he
promises to take her to New York over Christmas. I wake up outside my
body, in the pale winter light my collarbones look just like hers.
Seeing
me standing by the window in his little Brooklyn apartment reminded him
of an undiscovered Vermeer painting. At least that's what he said.
I envy Chloe for doing this to me. The ghost
of her still grips me in its arctic breath and my sheets smell more and
more like snowfall. She's been gone a week but I can still feel her
dragonfly fingers weightlessly resting between my thighs and the smell
of her hair in the morning.
She read the letter I wrote to Henry
and last night I posted it. "He deserves to know" she said, but I don't
want him to come back to me. I want my absence to feel like hers, I want
him to remember the touch of my hands and the warmth of my skin and I
want it to hurt him.
I know it's selfish but hearing him say it would make me feel alive again and since she left that's all that really matters.
A first weekend without her and everything
seems different. My dresses are a lighter shade of black, the flowers in
the window have lost their scent and the marble in the hallway absorbs
all the light from the morning. Even the wines taste differently, more
like metal and minerals than they used to
It takes me a hazy
Sunday to realize what it is. Nothing has changed, it only went back to
the way it was before she came. Her wardrobe is filled with mother's
clothes, I look for traces of her but all I find is the numbing fear
that maybe the time we spent together was nothing but a dream.
I
browse through the pictures I took and there she is again, in my
father's tuxedo shirt on my bed, naked in the early backlight from the
balcony door and asleep in the park that summer morning. Her absence
isn't just the void I've gotten used to, this time it actually and
physically hurts.
