Monday, January 27, 2014

Treason

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.




Wednesday, January 22, 2014

A new secret

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.




Saturday, January 18, 2014

Iris

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.




Sunday, January 12, 2014

À bout de soufle

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.




Thursday, January 9, 2014

Nocturne

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.




Friday, January 3, 2014

Real as real can be

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.




Share