Fall Paris: Laura

Hail Morning After

Hail.  It's hailing.  Hailing and cloudy cold outside.  I find it hard not to say to myself that Mother Nature's downtrodding feelings mirror my own.  An emotionally syncronous weather system it seems to be here in Paris.  My morning.  What mourning.

The clock's at nearly noon when I finally pull myself up by the frigid bootstraps.  A cold's coming through the windows, both open.  It's a temperature that compliments an empty feeling inside almost perfectly.  "Everything's going to be far away today," I say to myself in a whisper.

"What's that?" Lili's already fussying about.

I shoot back. "None of you're business, Lili."

"Whoa... Easy there Casa Nova.  I think we all had a little too much rage face last night.  What do you want for breakfast."

I look at the clock through squinted eyes, then back at her. "You mean lunch? It's too late for breakfast."

"It's never too late for breakfast, stupid. I'm making eggs," she says pulling butter from the fridge.  She's got the good stuff.  "Get up here and put the kettle on."

I comply, and I swallow down the hard lump in my throat with a deep breath and a long exhale as I rise.  My eyes don't want to be here.  They shift and shudder and take note of everything in between.  Anything that could possibly bring some fulfillment, some ease in the pressure, like a diving to the depths in an upside down fish-tank.  That's the feeling of it.



Montparnasse in the Window

There's something about going through a night of being taken with no way out that makes you pine and implode and reach with the heart's arm out to the one you've loved the most.  Today is no different.  There's a giant cavern in my chest where any type of feeling should harbor itself, but the cavern is empty.  We've just scrounged up a rag-tag half-assed dinner, Lili and I, and she's excited like she gets when there's some great new intrigue in her life.  The kind that locks all the dreaded thoughts in the trunk for the ride.  But with one look she's recognized something she sees in me, I think, because when she goes for her cigarettes she stares at me for two seconds and says, "D'you want one?"  And her voice tip-toes over broken glass. 

"Sure, why not?"  I look her right back, but not with my usual facade.  It's a quick glance.  I don't feel like faking anything right now so I guess I'd look a bit curious to a stranger.  Blank expression.  Faraway eyes with faraway focus.  Lili knows me through, and her brow furrows and her lip quivers almost to quick to catch, but I catch it and hold onto the fact that she just might have some inkling of what it feels like.  

I take my Lucky Strike to my mouth, light it quick, and lean hard out the window with my head as far into the cold evening air as it will go.  Damned servant's quarters.  The new Spoon album is on.  The good song, Goodnight Laura.  Invalides is right there where it's always been all bathed in gold spotlight.  I don't usually see it, but with my head this far out and away, Montparnasse comes into view to the right, off in the distance.  I only see it at this hour because it's not totally dark and abandoned.  There's still lights on scattered sparsely through the fifty or so floors.  Like a black-and-white game of tetris on pause, it is, little squares and rectangles of frozen cold light suspended in the dark night.  There's no stars in the sky, and when I squint at it and close my eyes I imagine that sore thumb of a building is like any other in downtown Boston.

I wonder if she works late nights...
Like this one.

[stop]

Quote of the Day: Josh Brolin Told Me Of Anais Nin

Fall Paris: Robin

"There's a talk on sexual abuse in the Congo tonight," Lil says, "free wine and bread and cheese and shit probably.  Wanna come?"

How could I not?  What self-respecting man on the harrowing edge of broke says no to free wine and bread and shit?  I can stomach a little eye-opening rape talk.  "I'm in."

"Oh, and Adrian's going to be coming in tonight."  He's a friend of Lili's from back in LA.  They played soccer together in the summer and he's studying in Barcelona and he's going to be in Paris for the weekend, staying at Lili's.  It's cool though.  I got a place to stay.  Her name's Lea and she wants to be a fashion designer.

[stop]

"How far's this place?"

"Not far. Just a couple of blocks." 

So we walk.  The night air's chilly the way it was in Santa Cruz in the dead of winter, and I pull the sweater around me tight and the scarf a little tighter. 

"You know it's only going to get colder right?" Lili's scoffing as she walks.  When her parents were in town, she'd went out shopping with Momma and now has this lovely dark royal blue jacket with pure white fur blossoming out at the wrists and collar and below by the waist, like a hum-drum dreary Mrs. Santa Claus coat, but blue and form fitting and made for a young girl's game.  It suits her, and she smiles as the shivers run right through the loose knit California sweater I bought at Insight just before I left LA.

"Shut-up," I say, but I can't help smiling at my stupidity.  It's always been easier to smile than to get angry for me.  Life's a lot funnier when you realize that.  And the banter banters until we turn the a corner and find ourselves coming through a high black metal gate with a sign at the top of the entrance that says AUP.

"Well, here we are. Oh, there's an art show of sorts in the lobby too.  We can check it out after."

"Fascinating."  It's a photo exhibit.

[stop]


Mr. Nobody

The nights with her are slow, quiet times.  I'll go out to the Chinois or the kebab place, somewhere cheap for dinner, and I'll come back and we'll smoke cigarettes and maybe her pretty friend Robin who works at some local magazine will come over.

Robin has this Lea's dream job I imagine, up in the rafters of the fashion industry, going to shows and exclusive events that require press tags.  I can see the glow in her eyes when she talks to Robin.  Prying, almost wistful, soaking up each vicarious detail, cigarette in hand on a slow pinwheel to and from her mouth.  But tonight's my last night, and she's quite adamant that we watch this movie, it's her favorite right now, Mr. Nobody.  I've never seen it, and by the looks, it might be all right.  Jared Leto's in it and so is that beautiful blonde from all those movies - Diane Kruger I think her name is - so it can't be that bad, or at least I hope it's not.  From what I can remember from any sort of release in the States, the movie had been small time, if that.  Maybe I saw a preview online on some slow weekday at home, back in LA because it sounds vaguely familiar, like one of those thousands of forgotten dreams that I didn't really care for, but I'll try to pay more attention this time around.

She puts her laptop on the tiny table by the tiny window across the room from her bed.  She barely has to lean and stretch from the edge of her bed and over my mat on the floor to reach it.  My mat - or I should say her mat, she's just letting me borrow it - pretty much covers the entire floor save for a tiny section of old worn hardwood by the door, and it's a twin-sized skinny mat at that, parallel to hers, (which is about the same size only a mattress on a tiny plain bed frame) with the head of it, along with my backpack, up against the cupboards below the tiny sink.  These are true servant quarters.  I feel taken back to an older time, when things were simpler, but at the same time much more dire for those living up here in the rafters.  The servants, bound to their servitude by nothing else than the impossibility of ever escaping it or ever being able to leave it and survive on the mean dirt streets of Paris.  Maybe it's the construction going on in the hall and down the stairwell, the stripped floorboards and the bare primed walls just about to be painted.  Maybe it's the bathroom down and around the corner with no shower and only a toilet with room for nothing else, but I'm beginning to understand her need, much more than mine, for an escape of the mind.  A transport, even if only for two hours, into a life that's not this one.  

So I sit down with my legs crossed on my mat and my back against her bed frame, and we race each other to the end of a Lucky Strike as the movie loads and the title starts rolling.  I let her win because hey, I like the taste, and I'm fuckin' out of weed so why not enjoy this stick a little.  The movie's a trip.

Why Mr. Nobody?

He's about to be the last man to die, the oldest too, and nobody knows who he is.  When they ask him, he could be anyone, well he is, but he's also whoever he wants to be.  He doesn't stray far though, and it's a bit confusing, but everyone will live with that story forever.  Because in this future, everyone is immortal.


Spliffs and Daywalks

She's a student, I wouldn't say like Lili.  True, Lili's in a graduate program, and this one's fresh on the university scene, eighteen, but that's not the difference I'm implying.  Lili's in school for a job.  Now Lea on the other hand, is in school for a dream.  She loves it, and she tells of all the hard work and the deadlines, but mostly and much more over of how she loves it.  There's that small-town twinkle in her eyes like everything is possible, anything at all.  Lili doesn't have that, and I don't think she ever has.  After all, we're big city kids, Lili and I.  Another thing Lili doesn't have though is that subtle slightly hesitant desperation.  It's there when Lea shows me her pieces.  Her sketches.  Designs.  Dresses and the such.  Women's fashion.

I think she's beginning to realize that an aspiring designer is one most likely not to succeed.  That unfortunate reality that isn't so real in her small German town in the Rhineland, where the only clues she had were written and shot in the magazines, and her dreams flew on fairy wings, and fairies don't fly so high here and many of them die.

She's a student still, and in a student, no matter how low the fairy flies, the dream strives on and nothing's impossible, not yet.  As long as she's in class, and today she leaves early in the morning (as I guess she always does on a school day).  And there's no way in hell I'm going to stay locked in this room.

[stop]

I gotta get out.  I gotta get out.  She gives me her key out of what I think is way too much trust, but that's just the way some of us are.  She says I need to be back before she gets back from school though so she can get in.  

"What time's that?" I ask.

"Oh... I should be back around 6:30 or 7:00," she says.

"Yikes! Long day, huh?"  It's a few minutes past 9:00 in the morning at the moment.  

She sighs, "Yes," checks her watch and rushes out.  She's missed the metro before, she's told me so, and she wasn't going to have that happen today.

With her gone, I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and envision the room being bigger than it is.  Not different, just bigger; taller, longer, and wider somehow with nothing changing, and it makes me feel better.  The tightness in my chest isn't so tight anymore.

I scan the room quickly with a twist and my arms out and they grab for my camera, my black leather-bound notebook, my pencil and the spliff I'd rolled as soon as I woke up.  Where are the keys... my pocket, yes.  And my wallet... back pocket, perfect.  I'm out the door now, down the stairs, and more stairs and more stairs, a right at the courtyard and down the hall to the heavy wood door and the old latch that came across the whole frame an clicked open with a loud guttural noise like the whole building giving a cough, ready to expel me.  It's going to be a good day.