Henry's sister, if she could read my mind she
would hate me more than she already does. I can't blame her, the perfect
poster child for everything ordinary. I'm Marie Antoinette to her
vanilla revolution, she secretly dreams of seeing me on the guillotine
but lacks the courage to put me there. Not that she doesn't try.
It's
adorable in an Amish sort of way. She goes through my things when we're
out, throws away my darkest lipsticks and the opium cigarettes Chloe
left me, then pretends as if she doesn't wish we were the same, she and
I. It's there in her eyes when we pass each other in the hallway, that
silent envy she tries to pass off as contempt.
"Let them eat
cake". It would have been the perfect thing to say and I remember my
disenchantment when mother told me it wasn't true.
He catches me off-guard in a lenient Champagne
haze outside Les Deux Magots, it keeps me warm in the light afternoon
rain (I'm wearing a cream white babydoll underneath my coat like a
prostitute) and the high-pitched rush hour voices around us. "I love
you" he says outside the bubble, methodically penetrating the membrane
and the state I'm in.
He follows my stiletto footsteps down the
Boulevard Saint-Germain to the open space by the river where the wind
catches my coat and rips it apart. A family of Chinese tourists gasp at
my nakedness, he laughs softly and it sounds like music. His arm around
my waist and the concrete paving beneath us.
Eventually we get
back home, the silence reminds me of childhood and his eyes glow like
fires in the dark. I tell him not to turn on the lights, he carries me
into the bedroom and there on a rococo bureau lays the letter I wrote to
him. "Read it to me" he says.
Mother took me to Paris once when I was 12,
she said we could use a change of scenery. I remember her browsing
through the airy light-colored spring dresses at Le Bon Marché and
Lafayette, carelessly careful as if they were pages in a glossy
magazine. I remember her smiling elusively, stroking them sensually with
her fingertips as if my father hadn't killed himself a few months
earlier.
There's too much space here. I hate the Champs-Élysées
and the way we turn to grains of sand, Henry and I. I hate the Place de
la Concorde and how it leaves us adrift in the winds and the hours, how I
struggle to focus on anything on this side of the horizon.
"Why
are you always so cold", he asks me. I'm not sure what he means but I
know it has nothing to do with the weather. He takes my hand and puts it
to his chest, I feel his heart beating through the soft layers of
fabric before the moment passes and drifts away.
I've known his sister for five days and I
already hate her passionately. She's the sort of person that lives by a
manual, thinking it will somehow help her escape her anxieties, hoping
that nothing will go wrong when everything already has. She listens to
Bruno Mars, pretends to be religious and wears beige in an endless
variety of shades.
Henry takes me to dinner at La Coupole in
Montparnasse, orders too many oysters and addresses the waiters in a
surrealistically cinematic version of Belle Époque French. It all makes
perfect sense. He goes down on me in his bed just after midnight but my
focus is on his copy of The Great Gatsby, placed alone like a monument
on the night stand table. I have a feeling this is not going to end
well.
I keep picturing myself tumbling down a rabbit
hole but Paris doesn't look anything like Wonderland, even after too
many Vodka Gimlets and a mild jet lag. Henry told me I looked pale when
he picked me up, it must be the understatement of the century.
He
lives with his sister, just before Christmas they moved to a quiet
street in Saint-Germain-des-Prés to be closer to Sorbonne. Not that any
of them go there. He disappears in the morning, calls me at lunch and
comes back stoned around 6 in the afternoon. He talks to me about
Riccardo Tisci, naked men at the Musée d'Orsay and about Los Angeles,
but never us.
I'm writing this on his laptop, in his bed, in the
dark. He's in the shower, the sound of the falling water reminds me of
something but I can't remember what it is.
He doesn't get to give me orders, Henry, no
one does, but that inimitable sound of his voice is like burgundy blood
rushing through my veins every time he talks to me. He is a poison or a
drug, an invisible substance that keeps my body warm and my mind awake.
It's
not just the sex, I need someone to fuck me like I need to go to
Macy's. It's in the way he does things as though they were extensions of
his most honest fantasies. The way he waits so long to undress me,
leaving me covered and exposed in equal amounts while he looks at me
from above. The way he confidently lies down between my legs and just
breathes slowly with his eyes closed, a fraction of an inch from my
panties.
He makes me feel alive. When he touches me, even from
across the ocean in a dream, he makes me feel as if I have something to
live for. That's how I know I need to go to him.
