She's my sister. Well, sort of. She's the girl I've lived with longest aside from my actual sister and mother, and our relationship's always been like this. From the get go. Since that last year of university in Santa Cruz when she came charging into all our lives like a raging red-haired wild bull, she'd been my sister and I'd been her brother somehow.
To be certain, we look nothing alike. Her firey red long locks would probably look strange on my dark skin (although it isn't so dark here in Paris, and it's only getting lighter now that fall's marching towards winter and the sun only kisses the skinny streets here for a few hours a day). They fit her freckles well though. And her crystal blue eyes are all the bluer because of it. Electric. No one that's ever met her can deny that. A young hot body, she dripped sex from the tips of her tippy-toes to the end of her longest red strand in the wind, which you would think is strange to say about one's sister but hey remember, she's not my sister stupid. Not really.
Weird, it seems (or I thought anyways), has been her perpetual state of mind ever since I'd first met her. She was a weird girl - and I only say girl because she's younger than me, and that's how I see all of them, the young ones. Girls. And when I say weird it leans much more towards a positive and hardly at all in the other direction. Weird to me is magic. It's intrigue. It's suspense. It's a wild line with infinite possibility, and nothing's out of mind. It's a timeless mythology to seek weird, because then everything's normal and you only bother with what pleases to bother you. Or you please to bother.
I'm not sure.
All I know is that she's in Paris now with some friends. And they're living bourgeois. Two room suite in a 5-star hotel just off Champs Elysee. Towards the Arc de Triomphe end.
[stop]
Versaille
"Where are you?"
"I'm here."
"Where?"
"The Arc de Triomphe. Like you said. Where are you?"
"We're here too. On the corner." It's a crawling realization, slow and steady, but it's beginning to take shape. There's a fuckin' mess of corners at the Arc de Triomphe. Champs Elysee strikes it at the front and splinters off to seven points of the city like a great north star grounded. With seven streets comes fourteen or so corners to choose from.
"Which corner?"
"I don't know. We're by the metro," she says, which helps, but only slightly. The Arc is surrounded by no less than four metro stops, so I pick them off one by one and with a quick step too because the rain's started. What promise this is.
In that tiny place in my head that remembers everything that's said to me I hear Julian tell me about how the Arc was made to be the most defensible stronghold in the city because no army could approach without being seen coming from a long way off in any direction. On a map it looks like the star atop a Christmas tree, and from here on the ground it take some great effort to look away. It's a grand work, and I wonder what it's seen as I wander around it and finally pick off the firey red mane of my long lost sis among the sea of bitter wet Parisians. She's keeping dry under a white umbrella just big enough to cover her and her two girlfriends.
A young man a little fresher than I stands solemnly by their side. His hair's as wet as mine and there's an air of "I'm better than you" in his furrowed brow and his antsyness. He might not have wanted to meet me perhaps, but whatever. He's got a name that's not too common and sounds worldly a little and probably impressive. I forget it though. Maybe it's Forrest. I run right up to Erica and squeeze her tight. "Hello, sis."
I say it with a bubbly rain-soaked smile because that's how she makes me feel, and she smiles right back, "Hello, brother. How are you?" It's a feeling like home flooding back. We exchange quick pleasantries and catch-ups and she introduces me to Jacqueline and Elise who are studying abroad with her in Barcelona. And to the stoic American boy who, it turns out, goes to university with Elise back in the States, and is studying abroad here in Paris. How elegantly demur. Bleh.
"So what's the plan, Stan?" I ask and I huddle close to try and steal some cover.
"We're going to Versaille," says Erica with a can-do Julie Andrews in her voice even as the rains fall down around us. When I eye the skies intrepidly, she scoffs. "It's either now or never." Then a pause. "Or not for a long, long time. And I want to see it!"
"We'd better get moving then," I say. "I don't think it's anywhere close."
"Brint knows the way," says Elise (so his name is Brint), and we rush down to the metro. The mood is light, all things considered.
[stop]
Barca Crazy
"So how is it."
She's glowing from the question, and she sighs a long drawn out sigh at something far, far away (which is funny because she's as blind as a bat). The sigh's just a shade under sarcastic. The most real and true kind of sigh that comes naturally when one's completely enamored with life. "Oh, brother. It's been a dream, I love it. The city. The food. My friends. Mon espanol. Everything."
She's living in Barcelona at the moment. Studying abroad. This was just Paris for the weekend with the girls, two friends from the program, Jackie and Elise. They're Erica's age, both juniors at the University of Washington. Dolls, the both of them. Pretty blonde skin and all pale hair or sandy curls, take your pick.
"You know, sis. I love to see you like this. You're glowing. You're like a woman here," I say. "A hot mess of a hussy woman. All grown up."
"You know, I FEEL like a woman," she says upright before laughing. "It's so FUN!" And right there we go back. Right there by the train tracks at la metro a l'Arc de Triomphe (or whatever it's called). We'd just missed our train. In Paris though, you never have to wait long for a train. Not in the city anyways. It's not long before the next one, but just long enough. We go back. Me farther than her. She tells me about all the clubs and the drugs and dancing 'til dawn breaks and it's sunny outside. About Munich and Oktoberfest. Her roommates (not her travel mates). Wild nights by the bushel. A handful of trips, this just one of the many with more to come. There was Dublin, her red-haired homeland. London, obviously. Amsterdam, of course. Prague and South France. Perpetual restlessness, and a naturally curious soul. A kindred spirit. Except that she's blind as a bat, and Mad Hatter crazy. In a refined sense.
"I didn't sleep with anything though," she says pointedly. She's finger-pointing and daring me with her eyes to say it isn't so.
"Uh-huh. Sure you didn't."
"I swear, not one." Matter-of-factly she says it.
"Baseball boy?"
She smiles and blinks slow and sings, "MY baseball boy," slow and drawn out smooth.
"Well fancy that. Sounds delightful. So does this mean no more hustle-hustling for Monster then? You're a good girl now?"
"Oh, this girl can still hustle. Free drinks? Yes, please. Cigarettes? Thank you." And she plucks them right out of the air. "And sometimes a girl just needs to dance dirty with somebody. But that's all they get. That's all I need really."
"Girl there ain't nothing wrong
With a little bump and grind
(with a little bump and grind)"
I sing the back -ups too. And she does too, and she smiles.
"That's right." That's resolution. A fuck-around independence and resolve. She's got more she-swag than anyone I know. "I've been sitting for an artist a few times," she says.
"What? Sitting? Sitting on what?"
"On whatever. Like a chair or something. A stool."
"Wait. What are you doing?"
"I sit still for about an hour in certain poses and this guy paints me. He's really good."
"What the hell? How did you meet him?"
"He just walked up to me on the street and asked me if I'd like to sit for him at his studio. And I said, 'Sure, why not.' So we met at a cafe by his place a few days later and he walked me there and just told me to sit in a chair by the window. None of the lights were on, but the room wasn't massive and light from the window filled it strangely."
"Weird."
"Ha! Yeah. I let him paint me topless once."
"Ha! What?!"
"From behind! Like my back. Look." She has pictures on her phone of the pieces. There's a few of them, and they're all quite decent actually. With each one she excitedly shows me how she posed and tells me for how long and how big they were, holding her hands out at approximate width each time. "Like... yay wide," she says. "And I had to hold it FOREVER."
"And he never tried to get with you? Never made a move?"
"Just once. So I told him I had a boyfriend, and that was that. Easy-peasy." She cleans her hands of it in the air.
"Well, he is good. I'll say that. That's pretty cool, Monst."
"I KNOW right?"
[stop]
