Paris Red: A Novel, page 1
To be accurate is not to be right.
~SHIRLEY HAZZARD
That day I am seventeen and I am wearing the boots of a whore.
I wear the green boots of a whore and I stand with Denise outside a shopwindow. Behind the glass, scissors hang from hooks. Large shears on top, then a row of smaller scissors, then tin snips, pruning shears, pocketknives and switchblades. A few round silver plates and bowls mix in to break up all the sharpness. The man who owns the coutellerie told us he was from the Aveyron. The capital of knives, he says.
I stand in my bottle green boots and I am drawing a cat asleep on a shelf in the store window, just behind the R and the E of Repassage Tous les Jours. It is some cat, I think, to sleep so calmly among all the blades. The owner says he does not care that we stand there, drawing. We make people pause or stop by the store, which is fine by him.
So it is a white cat, the same white as the color of the letters on the shopwindow—except how do you draw white with a pencil? I consider that, guessing at how to draw the cat and what is around the cat, but it is not as if I know anything. Denise, either. But we draw anyway. It makes us unusual. Two girls with tablets and pencils. But Denise with her faraway eyes and me in the green boots of a whore, what we mainly draw is attention. I tell people that when they ask, and they laugh. But it is true. What I do not say is that drawing helps me see things, that it is a record of the day. Yet it is true, too.
So we stand outside the coutellerie and I am in my boots that are the color of grass, and I am trying to get the cat right as it goes on sleeping behind the R and the E, but my mind is elsewhere. I am looking at the cat and the scissors but in my mind I am thinking about my soldier, the one I stood kissing in the street the night before. The base of my tongue is still a little sore, that little ridge underneath, and I cannot help but run the tip of my tongue over the sore spot. It is peaceful to be standing next to Denise, absorbed in the cat but with my mind elsewhere, remembering the kiss. The soldier held me, and he leaned back against the stone of the building as we kissed. Even though the soldier was my cushion, I could feel the stone through his chest and his thighs. As if it were a wall in our own private room. I do not know how long we stood there. Long enough for the night to chill. But I was not cold and neither was he. At first his mouth tasted like him, at first he had a taste—smoke and alcohol and the taste of his mouth. But then his taste became my taste, and I could not tell us apart in the kiss.
“Look,” Denise says. “It’s going to stretch.”
The cat opens its eyes a little and extends all four legs, pushing back against something invisible. Then it relaxes again. The only thing that changes is that the cat tilts its head to the side and shows the underside of its chin and throat.
“Now I have to change what I drew,” Denise says.
So I look at my own pad, at the rounded shape I drew, and that is when I feel him. Not my soldier—a stranger.
He is standing somewhere behind me, off to the side. I feel him before I see him, and then I see him out of the corner of my eye. And I wonder how long he stood there, watching as I drew and daydreamed. Any other day I would have felt him as soon as he approached, would have felt him at my back and over my shoulder. But today I was thinking about my soldier and the way his thighs were like a cushion, and I did not feel the stranger approach. Was not aware of anything except my own sore tongue.
Behind my shoulder, in the vestibule of my eye—that is where I feel the stranger. He observes Denise and me the way we observe the cat.
But I am seventeen, in leaf green boots, and I know he will come over to us. And I know that when he comes over he will find a way to ask something. Anything.
And that is what he does. He moves out of the vestibule of my eye and he comes to stand beside us. He picks me to talk to, my shoulder to look over.
I know he has no interest in my pad or the shopwindow or the glob of a cat. I know it is just a way to stand close and begin talking. And I know that when he says Pardon and May I, that it is just a way to go on talking. But it is part of the reason Denise and I draw things: to be noticed, to be talked to. Because at the same time I know there is nothing at all special about me, I am seventeen and also know I am different from everyone else.
When he asks for the notebook, I give it to him. And when he asks for my pencil, I give him that, too.
“I’m no artist,” he tells me when he takes my pencil.
I think about charming him. I think about telling him I have been drawing all my life. I think about saying how, when I was little, I used to beg pieces of charcoal from the coal man so I could draw on the pavement. But I do not say that. I do not say anything. Maybe because my tongue is sore and I am still thinking of my soldier. Or maybe because I know I do not have to say anything, and he will go on standing there. So I am silent and I watch him the way he watched me when he first came up and I didn’t know he was there, when he was just a shadow in the corner of my eye.
He looks at the shopwindow and then looks down at my pad. In a moment he adds in shadows behind the cat. Which I would have done. But then he does something I would have not thought to do no matter how long I stood looking at the cat asleep on the shelf. After looking back at the store window, he adds a crosshatched mark above the cat, up in the right corner.
It is a surprise, that mark. As soon as he makes it I cannot stop looking at it, and yet he did it without hesitation. Without thinking.
If I look at the crosshatched place one way, it looks like a smudge on the paper, but if I look at it another way, I see it makes the paper a window. The drawing now looks exactly like what it is supposed to be: a picture of a cat behind a glass window. Except that it is all on paper, and paper should not be able to look like glass.
“That did it,” Denise says. “Now it looks real. Don’t you think?”
She is right—without the crosshatched mark there is no window, and without the window, the picture makes no sense. And now I wish the cat was better. It looks all wrong, as if a child drew it. But I nod and say, “Ça marche.”
Denise keeps turning her head to look at him, and by the way she holds her chin close to her shoulder I can tell she likes him. Likes the look of him. He is slender and has longish hair brushed back on the sides. He is older than we are but he stands with his shoulders back, the way a young man stands. I cannot tell exactly what his face looks like, not with the mustache and beard, but there is something raw about his eyes. They do not match the rest of his face, and he cannot hide them the way he hides his mouth, just as he cannot hide what he is doing, which is taking the time to stand talking to us. Girls in the street.
“How did you know to put it there?”
“What?”
“That shadow,” I say, because I cannot stop looking at that spot, or how it has made the cat look flat, like an outline.
“It’s just a reflection. That reflection,” he says. He looks at the shopwindow and then looks back across the street to the pale building making the reflection.
As soon as he says it, I know that is the word I should have used—the mark is not a shadow at all. And I see what he means about the building across the way. But the shine of the building across the way is white, and the mark he made is gray, and it does not make sense to me. It does not make sense how a black pencil mark could show a white reflection. But it does. And then it comes to me: however white the reflection is, it is not as white as the paper. Nothing can be as white as the paper.
“The paper is the glass,” I say.
I know he does not understand what I mean. The paper does not matter to him and the reflection does not matter to him—it was all just a way to take something from my hand, to go on talking to Denise and me. But he nods anyway, and that is when I know he is kind. At first I thought he was older but I see now he is not so old—it is just the beard and mustache, and the way his hair is carved away above his temples. His eyes are young and the skin around his eyes is young. I already know Denise likes him, so I decide to like him, too. That is how we pick him.
Or he picks us. I do not know. It does not matter.
I am still thinking of my soldier and the hard way he held me against him, but I choose this one, too. Because I am wearing the bottle green boots of a whore, because I am seventeen and I can choose who I like.
There on the street beside the shining knives, we all pick each other.
“I’m from Gennevilliers,” he tells us at the small café down from the coutellerie.
He ordered for us, baba au rhum, and when the plates arrive, I glance at Denise. We both would have rather eaten a meal instead of dessert, but he invited us and is paying so there is no way to ask for it. Still, it is better than nothing, and when Denise will not catch my eye, I look away and begin eating.
“I’ve never been anywhere but here,” Denise says.
“You could go to Gennevilliers. If you wanted. It isn’t far.”
“What do you do in Gennevilliers?”
“I’m a tax collector,” he tells her, then gestures to our plates. “It’s not enough, is it?”
At first I think he read my mind about the dessert, but just as quickly I realize it is not that at all, he is just watching us wolf down our food. So I make myself put my fork down as if I am getting full.
“It’s delicious,” Denise says.
I do not want to seem piggish, so I say, “I like it, too.”
He smiles and looks away, into the smoke of his cigarette, to the other tables. And I wonder what we must look like to him. B
You’re mixing them up, my soldier said. The brunette is Denise. Louise is the redhead. But instead of pointing with a knuckle, he lifted his chin, first to Denise and then to me.
“Do you want coffee?” Eugène asks us now when he sees the waiter coming our way. Eugène—that is his name, or what he tells us is his name.
I do not even have to look at Denise. If he is going to spend any more money on us, we want some say in it. When we first sat down, we did not know which one of us he liked. I kept thinking it was me, but then he would turn his attention to Denise. And in a little while, I understand.
He likes both of us. The two of us, red and brown.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “I’d rather go for a walk.”
A walk is free. No one is beholden to anyone for it, and at any point it can be broken off. If something does not please you, you use a corner and make excuses, which is easier to do if you are moving. Or you keep going, talking and dawdling. I walked with my soldier until I liked him well enough to kiss.
“That suits me,” he says. He stubs out his cigarette and stands. Leaves some coins on the table.
Outside, he offers us each an arm. As we start to walk, Denise keeps the conversation going. I have words in my mouth, but they never seem right, and by the time I work out what to say, the conversation has moved on and I cannot say the thing I planned. So it is easier to be silent. To let myself go quiet and wait. I am just beginning to understand there is a power in being like that, in keeping things to myself. Yet without Denise it would be awkward. Without her I would have to talk.
“If he thinks life is so tragic, then he should kill himself,” he tells Denise. “You know, kill yourself and stop pulling the rest of us down. Don’t you think?”
They are talking about a play, I know that much, but when he turns to me for my answer, I just say, “No one needs any more sadness. It’s better to laugh.”
He looks at me as I say the words. I let him—I don’t care if he knows I have not been listening. It does not matter to him. I see that. I have been holding his arm, walking beside him. Those things matter.
“I don’t know,” Denise says then. “Tragedy has a place.”
“To hell with tragedy,” he tells her. “Life is tragic enough.”
The words that come out of his mouth—I know they are real and that he means them. But to me they are only sounds in the air. The only real thing is how his arm feels against my side. First there is the smooth cloth of his coat, but underneath I can feel muscle and even bone. He is slender but his arm is hard the way mine is not, the way a woman’s cannot be. When we pass by people on the street, he draws Denise and me close to his sides, and that is how I begin to get a sense of him, of what it feels like to be close to him.
“/////////////////////////////////////////////////,” he says then.
Denise laughs and looks at me. I missed whatever he said. Whatever it was that made her laugh like that.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “What did you say?”
“You’ll have to ask your friend.”
“Nise, what did he say?”
“Oh. It’s better coming from him, I think.”
When I look at him this time, he is not smiling but his eyes are kind, and I know whatever he said was teasing—I know that. It is part of the game. He looks at me and then looks straight ahead again.
“I just said a little thing,” he tells me then. “I just said I have one talkative wife and one silent wife.”
When I hear his words, I know something happens in my face. I do not know what it is—I can only feel it inside. I know he is teasing but it still shocks me.
We go on walking then, but it is just a short way to La Maube, and when we get to the bottom of our street, Nise says, “This is us.”
I do not know why she said anything—we could have gone on walking. But he lets go our arms. Any closeness I felt as he held my arm against his side is gone. I feel the loss in my hand and arm and along my side.
“Have dinner with me tomorrow,” he says. But when Nise says yes, we would like that, he makes a point of looking at me.
“What about you?” he says.
“Yes, I would like to.”
He kisses each of us then—a brush and a peck on the cheek—and tells us where to meet him.
That is how we leave him, in the doorway of the building on the corner of Maître-Albert, where the window says, Enseignes Médailles Décorations Spécialité. A stranger, except we do know his name.
All the way to our building I feel the loss of his arm and side along my arm and side. I feel it just as much as I can still feel my soldier’s kiss. My body feels it.
“He’s harmless,” Denise says when we are back in our room, when we are getting ready for bed. She is already lying down but I am still standing, washing my face with a wet cloth.
“I don’t know,” I say. “What does he want?”
“What do you think? He called us his wives. He wants to sleep with us.”
When I do not answer, Nise says, “What? You don’t think so?”
“I don’t know. He’s not in a rush about it.”
“He’s bored. He has time on his hands.”
“Maybe,” I say.
“I liked him. I thought he was handsome.”
“So see,” I say. “Maybe he’s not so harmless.”
“We don’t even have to go if we don’t want to,” she tells me then. “I just meant he doesn’t have to be anything to us.”
I want to say, No one has to be anything to anyone, that’s the problem. But I do not. And when I go on not saying anything, I hear Nise move on the bed.
“So you don’t want to go?” she asks.
“What, and miss dinner?”
She snorts then, the way I mean her to do, and I crawl into bed, too.
But there is something that keeps turning itself over and over inside me. I keep thinking about the way he looked at me before he said, I have one talkative wife and one silent wife. It bothered me when he said it, and it still bothers me. I thought I understood why, but now I do not.
I go on thinking in the dark, waiting to hear or feel Nise move, listening for her breath to change when she falls asleep, but it sounds like she is still awake. Maybe she is thinking about him, too. Maybe both of us are thinking of him and pretending to sleep.
So I try to think about my soldier. I do not remember things the right way, though, and when I climb inside the thoughts to make myself feel the kiss again, it seems faint, and I can hardly feel it. And when I do fall asleep I am not thinking about my soldier but of him. Of him and Nise and me.
We live at 17 Rue Maître-Albert, just at the elbow in the street. The room is furnished with one bed, a deal table, a spidery chair, and a washbasin on an old dresser. We use my trunk as a nightstand, and the first thing I see when I wake up is the blue box of La Favorite candles we keep there. Exiger le nom, the box says. Brûlant sans huile, 8 Heures, Lacorre Frères, Paris. Except the box doesn’t look blue, it looks gray. In the early morning light, things still have not regained their color: not the box of candles, not the dark maroon paint someone used on one wall, not the dirty white of the other walls, not my blue dress or Nise’s brown one—not even my green boots. Everything is gray or black, or a shade of gray or black.
So the room is shit. But at least it has a window. High up—I have to stand on my toes to see out—but it is a window. And if I get up on one of the beat-up chairs and stick my head out, to the right I see Maison Perrier, the Quai de la Tournelle, and the river itself. Directly across the street is the shop that hangs out brushes and brooms and baskets, and if I could somehow see around the corner, around the dogleg the street makes and down to Place Maubert, I would see my favorite shop. Bois et Charbon, the sign for the shop says, but it is the little painted plaques they have all over the front of the building that I like so much. The plaques show cut logs, all sorts of trees, and leaves in every shade of green. The owner stands outside sometimes in his vest and apron, and I do not know which is blacker, his pelt of a beard or his eyes.
