Henry sits at the foot end of the bed,
watching me from the corner of his eye while absently playing with a
vintage gold cigarette lighter. His personality dissolves when I write
about him, here he seems unreal and without form. Maybe it's because I
know so little about him, as little as he knows about me. We only talk
about trivialities and other people, never about ourselves or each
other.
His mother died in a car accident when he was fifteen,
he's only mentioned his father once and he seems to regret that he did. I
told him about mine because he wanted to know, it's one of the few
things he's ever asked me.
He doesn't know about this blog, if he
did he would kill me. As would my mother. I don't use their real names
of course, everything is encoded to protect them and myself. I sometimes
think about what he would do to me if he found out. It's almost like a
drug, the excitement: to leave him with my laptop open, to come back and
to find him reading what I've written about him and the second that he
looks up and sees me standing by the door, helpless.
We meet them again, his friends, this time for breakfast behind the Panthéon. Henry orders a bottle of Krug Grande Cuvée,
he loves to corrupt me. The girl examines me carefully when she thinks
I'm not looking, her pretty cobalt eyes running down my spine like
fingertips.
They live near Saint-Sulpice, after the men leave for
the morning's first lecture I follow her through the Luxembourg garden.
"You remind me", she says, "of someone I used to know. But she had a
different name". For a fleeting second I want to break down beneath the
magnolias and tell her everything, but I don't.
Later, looking at myself in the mirror at home, I try to figure it out. Who am I? It's been so long since I last remembered.
8 AM on a Friday. "Do you want to see them
again", he asks, I tell him that I do. He sits down with me on his way
out, I'm wide awake but still in bed. His scent is Bleu de Chanel and
morning air, my hair a train wreck on the pillow.
"What are you
afraid of", he asks. I lie and tell him spiders, he smiles politely and
puts his hand on my knee underneath the covers. I ask him the same
thing, his warm hand on my thigh, fractions of an inch away. "I always
wanted more from life" he says, "I wanted to have everything". He looks
me straight in the eye, his fingers inside me. "I'm afraid of what will
happen if I already do."
They left just before the sun came up behind
the Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, his friends. The girl in her little black
velvet dress, hair tousled, maroon lipstick smudged across a thousand
empty glasses. Her man by her heavenly side, stoic and close like birds
on a telephone wire.
I stayed up until the last darkness had
gone, then closed the blinds in the morning and pretended I was dead.
Henry went to school early in a gray felt jacket and Fedora hat, he
thinks it makes him look like a young Hemingway (at least while he's
still drunk). I let him believe it because it makes him happy.
Everywhere
in Paris are relics from the Belle Epoque, the both of us were born a
century too late. At Café de Flore later in the evening: me in emerald
silk from Dior, he's changed jackets and shoes and leads me through the
crowds of tourists, his steady arm soft around my waist. Everyone is
looking, outside is rain and traffic and sudden flashes of neon light.
He's having friends over tonight, I didn't
know he had them in plural. He says he met them at Sorbonne, that their
parents had known his mother before the accident. "By the way, you need
to wear something blue."
He watches me with the critical eyes of
an examiner as I model a set of silk dresses worn by my mother sometime
between 1978 and 1982. The way they made me feel when I used to try them
on as a child, in another life back in Los Angeles, I feel it now too.
Maybe that's why I brought them with me when I came here.
Later,
just now: he cuts up lime fruits for the welcome drinks, tells me how he
learned to use knives one hot, drunken summer in Cuba. "Can I lick the
blade" I ask and he lets me. The sensation is arousing, almost sensual.
All it would take is one slip.
I'm still here, in Paris and alive. Whatever
that means. This spring I overslept and missed the cherry blossoms, it
always feels like the end of the world somehow.
I spend a lot of
time on my own while Henry is away. I take walks and read books in bed
and at clichéd cafés by the river, I drink too much Champagne and when
he comes back home he wakes me from violent dreams. He fucks me
passionately and I let him, but it's only in the mornings that I'm truly
there.
When I leave the apartment I hide his bite marks on my
neck, it's easy when the weather allows me to wear scarves. I've fallen
in love with his black from Givenchy, maybe because Bambi is so damn
relatable. It will be harder soon, summer is coming. I can feel it in
the air.
All my life I've been looking for a place to
belong. It could have been Paris without the bad memories, just as Los
Angeles will never be home to anything but my childhood nightmares.
I've
had my heart broken in Monaco and Nice, I feel for London but not so
much for Londoners, Tokyo still eludes me after all these years. Don't
even get me started on Chicago.
There has to be a reason why I
keep coming back to New York. Whenever my mind starts to wander I end up
on Fifth Avenue, in the snow or the afternoon haze or the colored
lights after dark around Christmas. I feel safe there, as if nothing bad
can happen. I miss the park and the skyline, I miss mother's apartment
and I miss Chloe. Maybe it's time to go back home.
