Michel had been apologising for a week. He had sent flowers, brought flowers, had turned up unannounced with chocolates, wine, and bread. She was beginning to thaw. She knew this, was consciously aware of it, but felt fine, and had no more use for anger. She let him in on the seventh day.
He thanked her profusely, rubbing her hand in his. She smiled from the weight of affection. She no longer even wanted to ask what that package was, no longer even cared. It was good to have him back, and good to feel his hand.
He insisted on using his English, and she listened and didn’t correct.
“I have been speaking with my mother yesterday,” he said.
She boiled the kettle and reached for cups, and he took coffee and she tea. His mother had asked after her.
He went to the kitchen for more sugar, and right then the thought rose again. What had it been? She suppressed it after a second. He returned, sat down, and she felt herself stiffen as his leg touched hers. She did battle with her anger, wanting to feel nothing but joy. She had thought this was behind her, but…
Why had he sent her up there for some package? Begged her to go, and meet this guy. She was baffled and still upset.
She heard him drinking beside her. Michel Rigaudeau. He slurped his coffee gently, in a way that was normally endearing, and today she wanted to like it too, but couldn’t. She had to be honest with herself, and admit she was still resentful. She sighed and drank some tea.
“So how is your mother doing? Had she anything else to say?”
“No, not really. I think that mostly she was just to say hello. Oh, and that she has bought a new car. From German.”
“Germany.” She couldn’t help herself.
“Yes, that’s right. Germany.”
Karen drank more tea.
“I have always liked this picture,” he said. He must have been looking at the wall behind. “I like the water, and the boats, and the…how do you call the sun when it’s in water?”
“The reflection.”
”Ah yes, of course. The reflection. Yes, this I like.”
She heard the fabric of his jacket scratching, as he turned back around beside her. Then he took off the jacket, and placed it on the sofa arm. She listened as he folded it carefully.
His leg started jumping, and he sniffed and rubbed his nose. She put a hand on the leg, exasperated. These French boys could be children.
They were silent for a while, and she took her hand away. She listened to her fridge. The gentle easy buzzing always put her mind at rest, like a Zen recitation, or a child’s friendly hum. She sat back, loosening her shoulders. Yes, that picture on the wall, she liked it too, and this man beside her also. She breathed deeply. She re-placed her hand, the warmth of his knee assuring, and they sat together on the couch, in daytime.
“Je veux etre avec toi,” he whispered. “Je t’adore.”
She put her head on his shoulder. There are moments to be angry, and moments to be soft, and she touched his face, his neck, in softness. Comfort from skin. Curling into him further, she smelled his familiar smell, and Michel who’d made her travel became Michel who made her safe. They were together in a simple moment, entwined, and hurt and dislocation seemed to melt like passing snow.
Hot Parisian summer.
February 15, 2010
Part 3: Blue, July – Sept 2002 (scene 12)
February 7, 2010
Part 3: Blue, July – Sept 2002 (scene 7)
Karen dressed in silence. Her body registered the covering of clothes. She had awoken in plenty of time, did not feel pressed or pressurised, and dressed with deliberation, the day all fresh and new.
She ate the muesli, drank the fruit juice. The washing of the breakfast implements took maybe two minutes, and she placed them back in their drawers and shelves and presses. She wiped down the surface. Her mother leapt into her mind, and there began a conversation therein that came increasingly to resemble an argument. She wiped the surface and did battle with her mental mother, but then cut loose and suppressed these thoughts, for there is no greater stressor than internal conversation. She put the cloth down in the sink.
The morning feel was soothing, imbuing her with a sense of calm, wise, melancholy. If our lives are free from evil, well is this just the best that we can do? She brushed her hair and teeth, combated wrinkles and dryness, and applied lipstick and perfume.
She was ready to leave the flat. The lift hummed in old familiar compliance, and she reached the bottom and the street. A bus or something roared by. She swept the ground with her stick, advancing easily, mounting and dismounting kerbs and steps. So Karen, in her time, reached the St. Sulpice metro.
She was never at her most comfortable on these trains. Of course, they were fine, nothing had ever gone wrong, not really anyway, but they were firmly classed under ‘necessary evil’, and she took a bus, or buses, if time or route would allow.
She sat there amidst the rattle and the din. The human noise of coming, going, shifting, talking was everywhere. She had thirteen stops, heading north, before she got to Chateau Rouge. She was on an errand for Michel.
She had met this man before. Once, at Christmastime. She had touched his weary face, had heard his rumbling voice. Had listened to the rasp while he murmured in his phone. He would be here now, at the Chateau Rouge metro station, because he had stuff for Michel, and Michel was in Bordeaux.
The call had come the night before. Michel, sweet, pleading, on the phone from his parents house, with his please, it would mean a lot. Collect some stuff from this guy, you remember him, cause I can’t make it back, and he says he can’t wait. Karen had wondered why, where was the urgency in this, but Michel said I don’t know, and he’d sounded so sincere.
So here she was on the train. Friday morning. They got off, they got on, they shuffled here and there, finding seats and excusing themselves. She was sure some eyes were on her. This was the tenth stop she counted, so this was Gare de l’Est, with three more to go. She thought of the El back in Chicago, those childhood trips downtown with her mother, and then later with friends, or alone. The strangeness of her first drink. She remembered just how cold, just how to the bone freezing, that city got, and however bad Paris was, ice and snow in Chicago made for nightmares without end. Temperatures of death, and streets of crystal traps.
The train reached the stop. She moved through the exit door, and people pushed past, surging, the many who don’t pay and evade the dumb control. She heard others jumping over the barriers.
Coming up the stairs and into the day, the sound of markets – fish, carpets, fruit – was everywhere. Her left hand gripped the rail. There was the feel of other bodies, other human beings, clambering about. The heat of breathing souls. As she reached the final step, she heard a sudden cough, and turned to face this man, knowing who it was.
February 1, 2010
Part 3: Blue, July – Sept 2002 (scene 2)
They lay in bed together. Softness. She felt his breath against her right cheek, and moved closer. Was he sleeping or not?
“Michel?” she intoned gently, not wishing to wake him if he was sleeping, seeking a response if he was not.
“Hmmm,” he murmured.
She got up for a glass of water. The sound of the tap. It touched her lips in coolness, the water from the tap, and in her mouth, in her throat, was the liquid joy of living. The fullness and the peace, and the mystery of drinking water.
She returned to him. Pulled the sheet over her body, their bodies, and lay still. She thought of that junk TV, sitting in an old box in the living room, and it probably wouldn’t even work when she tried to plug it in. Why she took it she couldn’t say. That poor old man, Boulier, his leathery face and calming foyer touch. His paternal grace.
“Bonjour Mademoiselle, il fait beau aujourd’hui, non?” His laugh, and his fingers on her wrist.
Karen cried there in bed, the Monday morning news of his death absorbing up to this point, and now being accepted. The tears released the pain. She cried on this Wednesday afternoon, and Michel slept alongside, his easy nasal breathing a partner to her sobs.
January 28, 2010
Part 2: Aria (scene 4)
Michel sat down beside him and they talked of this and that. Johnny wanted full payment for last time before he gave any more. He spat, and reminded Michel of his aversion to mixing business with pleasure. Coke was not discussed when the guitar was out. Coke was not dealt at Beaubourg. Coke was purely a minor activity to pay the bills, he was not a coke dealer, and if Michel wanted a coke dealer he, Johnny, was sure there were plenty to be found.
“Je suis chanteur,” he barked. “C’est tout.”
Michel, smiling to himself, shifted position on the ground. C’etait chaque jour la meme chose, and cajoling and haggling would be needed to derail Johnny’s righteous conversation train, and still leave with the necessary. He lay down on his back. Johnny’s guitar case served as a functional pillow, and he closed his eyes easily and thought of darling Karen, almost immediately beginning to worry after her well-being.
*
Karen walked the sunny street slowly, taking in the day sounds. Her stick tapped lightly. She held a bag of groceries in her left hand, and expected to be back at the flat around 11.40. The morning air was sweet and pleasing. Friday, February 6th.
She was glad of this change in the weather, what with winter’s wily treachery. Slippy and rushed, with invisible collisions potentially imminent, everywhere. Ice on pavements, and your stick can slip. Other people can slip, and hit you falling. You can have a nasty accident that way.
She reached her building and punched the code, and the lift brought her up to the third floor landing. Exit lift, turn left, first door on left. Her key had her name inscribed in braille – a gift from Michel. She turned on the TV, and could hear twelve year olds squealing as they were remade as sexy popstars. Could hear their talk of favourite lipsticks.
Karen ate and listened to TV. Warmth on her face through the window. She turned down the sound, left the TV on, and heard birds. There was a plane flying somewhere overhead. With the television sound gone, the room settled into the atmosphere of daytime. The fridge hummed in the kitchen area. She turned the TV off, and there was stillness.
All alone in the afternoon light, she finished the tuna. She exhaled and leaned back, slowly. Whenever Mom called it was to worry. Whenever Michel called it was the same. They’d never met one another, but in ways she felt they bore so much in common. They worried. For her.
The sunshine threw crystals on the vase by the window, but Karen on the sofa doesn’t care for light refraction. It isn’t pertinent. Way back one time when, and she fell on the Chicago street, someone had expressed horror at all that red. Of course Karen knew what she was talking about, even as a little girl, but she’d decided quite soon after that colour didn’t matter. Colour wasn’t there. Yes her stick was white, and yes her hair was brown, but what’s the use in knowing, if knowledge brings a blank. She stuck to the relevant, the pertaining. There was feeling, there was sound, there was touch and smell and moments. There was love. There was healthy eating and newspapers.
There is an exception to all of this. An important part of Karen, illogically so. She got a glass of water and returned to the couch. Sat there thinking calmly. There is a photograph above, above Karen’s head right now, in colour. It’s there for all to look at, and for her to know it’s there. It’s framed. There is a boat out on a harbour, and distant glinting shoreline buildings, the sea all speckled randomly with golden frozen jewels. The camera-captured sun on the blue Lebanese ocean. “Fishing In Beirut,” the taker called it.
January 22, 2010
Part 1: Getting There (scene 4)
Karen woke up to the radio. Tuesday. What if God was one of us it wanted to know. What if indeed. She lay silently for perhaps eleven minutes, until the thing had told her it was quarter to ten. She got up and showered.
Breakfast was always muesli and fruit juice, because they all agree this is a fantastic combination to begin a new day’s proceedings. All those authoritative voices on television health shows, which were also quoted by visiting friends reading aloud to her both French and English newspapers. Can’t go wrong with muesli and fruit juice.
Karen’s TV was essentially a bigger, bulkier radio. She often wondered what country had made it, and why the hell she’d taken it when the man upstairs had died and it was destined for the trash. Poor old Monsieur Boulier, who had always been polite.
She listened to it while ironing, or dusting around the flat. It told her many things, and plunged her aurally into hackneyed adventures. When it spoke of healthy eating she listened carefully.
She finished off the muesli and washed the bowl. Started the machine for coffee. It popped away noisily, but coffee machine popping is called percolating. This word had always seemed made-up to Karen, and she had, in the past, conducted discussions with friends on this topic. Everyone had laughed, because think of any word long enough and it’s just a crazy assembly of different sounding letters.
Percolating.
She was wearing the shirt that scratched her wrists while she was reading, which was always second to last on the left side of the shirts and blouses closet. It was next to the one she never wore now.
She went to the fridge and got more juice. Did some ironing. The warm feeling of the fabric where the iron had just been, in comparison with the rest. The warmth of Karen’s clothes. Birds chattered through the open window, some near some far. She leaned her head right out and felt the sun. What If God Was One Of Us came on again. She was on a different station now, but still. He could be just a slob like one of us, and this woman was determined to let us know it.
The ironing got done, and so the board went back into the tiny space between the kitchen table and the wall. It slouched against this wall in relief, free from scalding till the next time. Karen carried the clothes to her bed – she dropped and then sorted.
On the phone she spoke to her mother, enquired after life in leafy Oak Park. Got another call, switched to it, mumbled morning sweetness’s to Michel in French, and switched back to Mom. Dorothy had just adopted an Iraqi baby, who was now to be called Georgie, and Dorothy was Mom’s best friend, having at the age of 58 left husband Archie, and struck out on her own.
Dorothy was Mom’s shining light. She gave hope, while Karen was in France. She had apparently joked about how the Iraqi baby did not need swaddling clothes, because with all the international red tape he had been carried through some had inevitably stuck, and little Iraqi Georgie was now guaranteed warmth for life. Mom thought this was just so funny. Karen laughed a little too.
“So are there any plans to come home honey?” she was asked.
“No, I don’t think so – I still really like it here.”
“And how is the boyfriend?”
“Michel.”
“Yes the boyfriend. How is he?”
“He’s fine Mom,” said Karen. “He’s fine and says hello.”
Later that night, she lay awake and listened to footsteps up above. The not-so-new New Tenant.
Old Monsieur Boulier’s face had felt like an ancient raincoat.
January 17, 2010
Part 1: Getting There (scene 1)
And so that’s a blind girl at the bus stop. It’s windy, busy on the street, and the bus comes along and she doesn’t put out her hand, and the bus doesn’t stop, and her name is Karen. It’s rue de Vaugirard, outside Jardin du Luxembourg, at three o’clock in the afternoon. Her brown hair is blown and whipped, but she has only been told it’s brown, and that doesn’t mean a thing.
Her mother told her age two her hair was brown, and told her many times after. My name is Karen and my hair is brown and my eyes are blue, and I cannot see. But it doesn’t matter.
Karen thinks she hears the bus engine approach and puts out her hand, but it’s a truck, and it’s busy on the street, and it does not stop, because it’s a truck. She is confused and thinks the bus is passing, and calls out stop, holding aloft her white stick. She doesn’t know what’s happening, and people must be looking now. She senses attention, is sure of it in fact, directed at her, but what difference does it make? She pushes back her hair, and moves to the wall.
How many people noticed this? She sighs and coughs, and she’s pissed that bus didn’t stop. Now her boyfriend will be waiting, and he’ll grow anxious, and she’ll grow anxious on his behalf. Everybody tells her to buy a cell phone. Probably she should. She’s twenty-six, and they tell her she’s gorgeous. They told her in Chicago, and everyone tells her here.
Michel is gorgeous. She knows that for sure. The way he feels, the way his breath feels, the way it quickens when they… the way it’s not his skin that’s warm, but more his body underneath. He’s waiting for her now, north of the river, and he’s probably getting worried. She exhales slowly, with shoulders rising falling.
Someone else has arrived beside her. There is the rustle of a jacket, a face being scratched, male, and almost imperceptible breathing. Suddenly a heavy intake and exhalation, nasally, which sounds like a thunderclap as she listens carefully.
The man coughs, sniffs, scratches his face again. Forties? A cougher past his youth certainly. A man with an affliction, an affliction or a prop, born of sinuses, or habit, or tar settled snugly on the lungs. A faint and commonplace prelude of death, and a nag to go along with his having to wait for a bus. Karen rubbed her hands, and waited silently.
Wednesday.
Fishing in Beirut 