Paris Trance (2 page)

What hell it was, this park! It was so different from the parts of the Seine frequented by cruising gays. Walking along the river on his way to the park Luke always felt uncomfortable, obscurely offended by their stares, by the flagrant desire conveyed by their looks. They made him feel prudish, affronted. Then, when he reached the park and began looking at women with exactly the attention that, a few minutes earlier, had been focused on him, that gay world seemed nothing short of idyllic. He envied the men their common currency of glances and desire. How perfect it would have been to have caught the eye of a woman who was hoping to catch his eye, to have exchanged a few words, to have walked back to his dismal room and ripped each other’s clothes off. His thoughts were as crude as a prisoner’s but as strong as these desires – far stronger in fact – was his acceptance of the idea that it was not on to disturb a woman when she was pretending to read, that she had a perfect right to sit on her own in a park reading a sexually explicit book and not be pestered by men. A couple of times he had seen men make approaches but the women on whom they had imposed themselves had never seemed flattered or pleased by these attentions. Or almost never. On one occasion he had watched a tanned American sit next to a woman with short blonde hair and a lovely shy laugh. Luke heard that laugh a lot in the next half hour and then he saw them gather up their things and leave together.

It never happened like that for Luke. Even on days when the park was ablaze with women he left as he’d arrived, on his own. On the way out of the gates he always passed an old woman who sat patiently in a chair, holding a card on which was written ‘
DITES MOI
’ in thick black ink. She seemed happy enough, sitting there, announcing her wish to talk without any hint of pleading or supplication. So matter-of-fact was the announcement that it seemed as if she were not requesting conversation but providing a service: ‘If you need to speak to someone, here I am.’ Perhaps that was why no one ever took her up on her offer. Luke had never seen anyone speak to her: people were embarrassed by her loneliness because it so frankly mirrored their own. And the sign itself was strangely off-putting. Having externalised her desire for speech in this way she was left in the most complete silence imaginable. The card rendered her mute, dumb; all the language of which she was capable had been set down, framed and preserved in those two words: dites moi. Luke was fascinated by her, by the way that she had decided what she wanted, did what she could to obtain it, and then sat and waited, apparently without desire or hope. He wanted to know her story but, oddly, he never considered asking her, speaking to her. Instead he walked back to his stained apartment, lay down on the unerotic bed and masturbated – an act that left him feeling sadder than ever. If an orgasm was a petite mort then this was petite suicide.

Instead of spending his afternoons prowling the parks and jerking off like this he should have been working on his French which was so poor that even the simplest tasks – deciphering menus, buying bleach to clean out the toilet, ordering sandwiches – became major exercises in pantomime diplomacy. Rarely understanding how much shopkeepers and waiters were charging him, he paid for everything with fifty- or hundred-franc notes and came home with sagging pockets of change. The most efficient way to have used this money would have been to enrol in one of the many courses in French conversation and grammar but Luke persuaded himself he could absorb the language passively, by osmosis, without effort, by reading the French subtitles of American films.

Even more than learning French he should have been making progress with the book he had come to write but what in London had seemed a romantic, attractive option immediately took on the character of an arduous, pointless task that he had no idea how to go about. Which made it all the more important that he found a job – but during the summer there was no work to be had and since he was unable to find a job, incapable of learning French or getting on with his book and was, in addition, lonely, bored and consumed by sexual frustration, he seemed better off going back to England.

England: as featured from the ferry on the day he left. A rare bright day in the Channel. Breezy (to put it mildly). He had stood at the stern and looked back at the Dover cliffs, yellow in the sunlight. Then he had turned to the man next to him – a stranger – and said,

‘There you are: the teeth of England.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I said “The Bowmen of Agincourt”,’ said Luke, and headed back inside the chip-smelling lounge . . .

Yes, he could go back to England – and it was that phrase that made him stay. Going back to England: it was difficult to think of four words more redolent of defeat because what they actually meant was going back to living so deeply within his limitations he would not even be aware that they
were
limitations: they would pass themselves off as contentment. Not that he had ever felt content in England, more like a perpetual rumbling of discontent . . . And yet, at the same time, he thought constantly about going back to England. Returning was a tormenting possibility, simultaneously to be resisted and to draw strength from. How comforting to have been forced into total exile, forbidden to return on pain of death. To know that there was no choice but to begin a new life, to learn a new language, to start over definitively and construct a mythic, idealised vision of the homeland that could never be challenged or undermined by experience.

The weeks passed and Luke stayed in Paris. More exactly, for the experience expressed itself negatively, he kept not going back to England. He stayed by increments, in exactly the same way that, until a few months previously, he had kept up a programme of boring weight training. He’d hated it, hated turning up at the gym and going through the funless routine of warming up, reps, and warming down. He’d known that at some time in the future he would give up but had forced himself to keep going in order to postpone the day when he
would
give up. He remained in Paris – where he made no attempt to join a gym – in the same way: putting off his return on a weekly, sometimes daily basis. In this way, although he was not happy, he was able to hold out for happiness, for the happiness promised by the city.

His knowledge of which expanded daily. Crucially, he discovered the 29 bus which ran from the Gare Saint Lazare to Montempoivre. Though impressive, the route itself – past the Opéra and the Pompidou Centre, through the Marais and round the Bastille – was less important than the design of the bus: a small balcony meant that a handful of passengers could stand at the back and watch the life of the city unfurl like a film. Luke often rode the 29 from terminus to terminus, glimpsing hundreds of little incidents whose origins (he could only see what lay behind) or consequences (the bus, in this traffic-free month, moved swiftly on) were revealed only rarely. Under the influence of Alain Tanner’s
In the White City
(which he had seen a few weeks earlier) Luke formed the idea of making a film comprising super-8 footage shot from the back of the 29. He would call it
Route 29
. All he needed was a camera and a Carte Orange.

In the meantime he received an unexpected, very welcome phone call. Andrew, the one person he (vaguely) knew who was in the city for the summer, invited him to a party. A party! This, he was sure, would prove a turning-point.

He spent a long time in the shower, shaved carefully, chose his clothes carefully, checked to see that he had a pen and paper – for phone numbers – and set off early to catch the Métro and arrive at the party in good time. He had walked down the stairs from his apartment and was out in the street when he realized he had forgotten the condoms that he had bought weeks earlier, in London. He walked back up, unlocked the door, put the packet in his pocket and set off again.

The party was in the courtyard of a house in the south of the city. Andrew welcomed him and was immediately called away to the phone. Luke scanned the women and felt immediately deflated: no one caught his eye. Nothing about his life was more depressing than the way variants of that phrase – catching his eye, catching her eye – had come to occupy a position of such prominence in it. He stood drinking. After half an hour he spotted a woman he had not seen before. She looked Brazilian, was wearing a brightly patterned dress, orange mainly. He looked for Andrew, hoping he could introduce them, but the host was nowhere to be seen. Luke manoeuvred so that he was close to her but she was cordoned off by the two men she was talking with. He was unsure what to do next: talk to someone in the vicinity and have his freedom of movement restricted, or stand on his own, feeling conspicuous, awkward and alone, but ready to move when the chance arose to introduce himself to her. He compromised in the worst possible way, by talking to another English guy who was also standing on his own: a young banker who was just beginning a six-month stint in the city. Together they gave off a double helping of solitude. One of the men talking to the Brazilian woman went to get a drink. The other was briefly distracted by an Italian in an improbable cravat. Luke abandoned his new friend and stepped in front of the Brazilian without having any idea of what he was going to say. Opting for boldness he offered her his hand and introduced himself. Somewhat startled she shook his hand and said her name, which Luke did not catch.

‘Are you Brazilian?’ he said in English.

‘I’m Italian.’

‘Ah, Italian.’

‘What about you? Are you Brazilian?’

‘Me, no . . . Though I am a great fan of that Brazilian drink: caipirinha.’

‘Excuse me?’ she said, exactly like the man on the ferry. On this occasion Luke prolonged their non-exchange for a couple more minutes until, the instant a pause afforded her the opportunity, she excused herself and moved away.

After that encounter he felt that he was treated suspiciously by the other guests, as if they regarded him as the most pitiful of individuals: a loser on the make. Already slightly drunk he made his way to the kitchen to get another beer. Going to a party to pick up women demanded a single-mindedness of purpose that he didn’t have. He relaxed, drank, talked to anyone who came his way, indiscriminately. It was easier like that, and far more enjoyable. On his way to the toilet he saw the Italian-Brazilian woman again, chatting in Spanish or Portuguese to a man with chubby fair hair and a baggy suit.

In the toilet Luke reminded himself that this party was his one chance of the summer, there would not be another like it, and admonished himself to pursue his original intention. Within minutes of coming out of the toilet his resolve had collapsed. It was futile, this self-inflicted ruthlessness. He thought about leaving and then forced himself to stay, hoping crazily that he would be able to get the phone number of the woman he had talked to earlier. One look at her told him it was impossible: she was laughing with the man in the baggy suit, liking him, and he was leaning against the wall in a way that suggested they were already on the outskirts of a kiss.

Luke left the party and walked to the Métro. The station was closing, the last train had left moments before. He began walking home. It had been his chance, the party, and he had blown it. In spite of this he felt happy to be walking, relieved to be free of the tension generated by impotent prowling. He knew that in the morning he would wake up feeling abject but now, as he walked past benches and parked cars, as he saw the yellow lights of traffic coming towards him, as he passed couples walking home and old men walking their dogs, he did not feel unhappy.
There were lighted bars and late open shops on each side of the street. He would stop and have a beer before he went to bed but he wanted to get near home first. He headed north, feeling neither tired nor depressed. His fingers touched the packet of condoms in his pocket. They reminded him of an evening when he had bought tickets for a concert and then, due to a catalogue of mishaps, had failed to get there. He was still miles away when the concert was due to begin. When he realized he would not make it he had thought, calmly, that it didn’t really matter because in two hours the concert would be over and everything would be the same anyway, whether he had been there or not. Ultimately, it was futile, self-defeating, this logic of negative consolation, but it was difficult to be depressed while walking. He passed another Métro station and found, to his surprise, that this line was still running. Within seconds the last train arrived. As soon as it left the station the train pulled above ground. Suddenly the train was passing over the Seine and there was a perfect view of the Eiffel Tower, its reflection lying on the water like a pier. Everyone in the train was looking across at the Tower and Luke felt his relief turning to elation.

It had been years since he had felt as wretched as he had at the party, as he had on afternoons in the Tuileries. He could not remember a time when he had felt so lonely, lost, but that isolation had now been redeemed by a simple Métro journey. The two sensations, the two states, were linked, dependent. You could not experience one without the other. He looked at the lighted windows, hoping to see a woman undressing or combing her hair in front of a dresser. He saw nothing like this but he was happy. No day was uniformly terrible. Even the worst days had moments of relative happiness. And if there were not these moments of happiness then there was always something to look forward to in the coming day. There may not be anything to get up for but there was always this urge to wake up. Like this, life went on, tolerable and intolerable, bearable and unbearable, slipping between these extremes. It was not a question of hope, it was part of the rhythm of the day, of the body. And it was part of this rhythm that tomorrow he would wake up with desolation lying over him like a thin blanket, would try to remain asleep a little longer, wanting to put off the claims of the day, to prolong the comforting sense of not yet being quite alive. But there might be a letter in the mail box and that would be enough to get him out of bed . . .

As he got off the train and stepped up into the street he was already looking forward to checking his mail, to buying a paper and ordering coffee, to sitting in the same chair he always sat in, the chair he was heading for now, where he would have one drink before going back to the sad apartment, where he would undress, splash water on his face, and climb in his bed to sleep.