We spend another late Saturday at La Coupole,
my life is a worn out track on endless repeat. Everywhere I see pretty
girls gazing over their thin shoulders, first at him, then me. If looks
can kill I must be indestructible.
His sister is there too,
somewhere in between the oysters and empty Champagne bottles, dressed in
gray and brown and as somber as a Catholic funeral. When we leave I ask
him about her. "I know she's not much" he says, "but at least she's
family".
I sense something coming over us, not a storm but a
menacing void. A gorge forming underneath us as we walk home in silence.
He holds my hand but more out of duty than passion. "Pretend like you
love me" I say, "kiss me like you do". He tastes of Pol Roger and old
smoke, when the moment has passed the sky comes crashing down like
thunder.
A week in and it feels like I never left. I
can tell from the magnolias in the Luxembourg garden that winter turned
to spring, four months without him and nothing else has changed. We
still spend sleepless nights in the shadow of the Tour Montparnasse,
then waste away our Sundays in bed or on the quiet back streets of Saint
Germain.
He's going back to school tomorrow, I make plans to
distract myself while he's away. He gets to me in ways I thought no man
could, not after my father, not after Carl. He knows exactly how to
touch me and he knows exactly what it does to me.
I sometimes
feel the need to tell him, in the mornings when he slowly runs his
fingers up my naked thigh. My skin is like his own, every inch a way for
him to control the way I breathe. Softly at first, then faster until
suddenly he stops. He whispers something to me, then gets up and leaves
me there in the silence and the warmth.
Airports remind me of the cronic state I'm in,
the antiseptic limbo in between a dream and a nightmare. Not quite lost
but never a place where I truly feel at home.
"Spring came with
you" he says when he picks me up at CDG, wearing midnight blue and
lavender. Paris smells the way I remember it, not from spring and cherry
blossoms but a Gaultier-esque vulgarity. Its beauty is raw and
impertinent, nothing like the dignified elegance of Rome or Milan.
The
first time I came here was with Chloe, she wanted to fuck one of the
PSG soccer players after watching the World Cup on TV. It worked better
with the artists in Montmartre, even though they lacked money to buy us
drinks and jewelry. We tried opium and red lace lingerie and promised
each other that for the later it would be the first and only time.
Henry calls me at 2 AM, surprisingly sober (or
so it sounds). "You need to come back to Paris" he says, I immediately
know that he's right. Not because he tells me to or by the tone of his
voice, but because he's still more than just a memory. For too long I've
thought of him as something peripheral, ignoring too many of his calls
and communicating in single-sentence text messages. He doesn't deserve
it, and maybe I no longer deserve him. In a little while I'll know.
It takes an hour or so to walk from her
apartment to the less crowded parts of the city. A little longer in
heels. The wine tastes better there, Stephanie charms the waitors at
bars and restaurants and they bring us more Martini Rosso on the rocks
in branded highball glasses. We stumble home on our bare feet, just
before sunrise, shoes in our hands and cigarette smoke deep infused in
our light spring dresses.
Her father is staying over Easter, he
knows better than to ask questions. I don't think he's ever seen her
with a man, not even the ones she smugles out before he delivers our
breakfast in the morning. Maybe he knows but prefers to think of her as
innocent and pure, the way she always was when we were growing up in
Silver Lake.
Everything and nothing has changed since then. I'm
afraid of what I would find if I ever went back, afraid of what I might
remember.
