We sat down and looked at the menu, and I translated what I could. Beth wrinkled her nose up and said, ‘Don’t they have anything for vegetarians?’
Laurent heard her, laughed and said, ‘You are in Paris now. We do not have this vegetarian shit.’ And then he ordered snails and entrecotes and red wine for all of us.
Beth looked at me and said ‘Oh God, please don’t tell Yaz.’ And then her foot found mine under the table, and when the steak came she ate it with all the relish of a pale girl who hadn’t seen red meat in a year.
Did we go to La Tartine next, to drink the black wine of Cahors, sitting on the same banquette once perched on by Lenin? My memory wants to say yes, but common sense says that must have been the next night, because the club was in the other direction from Chartiers. Whatever, we went somewhere and drank a verre and Laurent asked if we would like to go dancing, and we both said ‘yes’; then, ‘What about the time, we must get to the forêt,’ and Laurent gave us the look that said we were in danger of becoming bourgeois again and sighed and said, ‘Maybe you have time to catch your train. If not you stay with me, pas de problème.’
So we went dancing. I never found the place again. By day I suspect it looked like a hundred other restaurants along the boulevard Sebastopol, one of central Paris’s least charming thoroughfares. By night, though, it was African. We were amazed. This was before world music was invented, you understand. Reggae was as exotic as things got, as far as we knew. Yet now we were in Africa.
Up till then we – well I at least – had barely registered the city’s African population, and now we were surrounded by them: fresh-faced young guys in suits, women in smart dresses. I felt shabby and pale, but I didn’t care, I was too busy trying to take in the music. There was a band playing, I’d like to think it was someone legendary, Dr Nico perhaps. Whoever they were they were great, the circling guitars and the ease of the bass and drums. I was intoxicated three times over: by the music, by Beth next to me, her feet starting to measure out the beat, and by way too much red wine.
Things blurred a little. We sat down for a while then we tried to dance. An African guy came up, laughed at us, then offered his hand to Beth. She smiled at him and took his hand and he moved her round the floor. I sat back down next to Laurent.
‘You look tired, my friend,’ he said, ‘maybe you’d like something to pick you up?’
‘Sure,’ I said, for a moment thinking he meant a black coffee, but not demurring when he slipped a wrap into my hand and suggested I make the acquaintance of M. Cocaine.
It would be nice to blame everything on that old cocaine. Certainly it didn’t help, but just as in vino veritas is basically true – you may say things you regret but the reason for the regret is their truth – so cocaine may turn you into an asshole, but that asshole is your own inner asshole.
And let’s not forget it’s also really good fun. I took a toot in the toilet and the blurring went away and later on, on a nod from Laurent, I introduced Beth to my new friend, and she liked him pretty well too, and the night wore on the way you can most likely predict. And yes, of course we did, and not in the toilets but in some kind of pantry off the deserted kitchen, her elbows resting on a marble shelf.
It was lucky we had taken our chance when we did though, as Laurent’s place turned out to be no more than a one-room eyrie on the Ile de la Cité, fabulous views but no privacy, and no bed either. Laurent was no gentleman, he took the big dark wood sleigh bed and we took the blankets on the floor, holding each other at first for warmth, then pulling apart, lost in our own private battles for equilibrium as the chemicals fled our systems.
Next morning was awkward and sore-headed as you might expect. We fled around eleven leaving Laurent still in bed, a vague promise to meet in the bar by Parallèles that evening.
We found the others outside the Beaubourg. They looked a sorry crew without us. Em had taken my role as leader and her fitness for the job can be gauged by the fact that this is the first time I’ve mentioned her; a nice girl but dull. They were pleased to see us at first, relieved I suppose, then angry at our thoughtlessness. We tried to slot back into our roles, and succeeded more or less. It was OK, the sun peeked out in between shows, we made lunch money then dinner money, but the harmony was off, and later on I raised the status of meeting Laurent to an obligation.
‘You coming back to the forêt later on?’ asked Don.
‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘expect so, but if not we’ll see you here. Usual time, usual place, yeah?’
‘Fine,’ said Don, ‘see you then,’ and we fled, relieved, back into our new Parisian life.
That night Laurent took things up a notch. We exchanged Chartiers for Bofinger, still, then and now, the best of the big old brasseries. You could, if you wanted, find me there from time to time even now, maybe on a Sunday evening late, but you might, I must confess, regret it.
That first time it was sublime. Laurent ran into friends there; beautiful people, film people. They’d been working on a Rohmer movie earlier in the day. Was one of them the lost girl of French film herself, Pascale Ogier, soon to be dead of a heart attack at twenty-five? Part of me would like to think so, to think that I was not the only one whose stars were so far out of alignment. I read once what her mother wrote after Pascale died. It trumps my own self pity every time.
En ce moment, je joue au théâtre avec des acteurs très jeunes, qui ne I’ ont pas connue. Et tous les soirs, je salue. Quatre fois, cing fois, six fois. All bout de la sixième fois, je regarde les visages, dans la salle. Parmi ces visages, il y en a toujours un, un peu pâle, entouré de cheveux noirs, qui sourit. Une jeune fille. Il y en a toujours me. Et pendant un court instant, je pense: ’Tiens, Pascale est venue, ce soir. Elle aurait pu me prévenir. C’est très bref.
Jesus.
I’m delaying things now as you can see, reluctant to move forward. Tiens indeed. After dinner we – Beth and me, Laurent and his friends – walked through the Marais till we came to Les Bains Douches. It looked from the outside like what it was, an old swimming pool. Except there was a man on the door checking names and a gaggle of beautiful people offering themselves up for his approval. We had no problem, the guy on the door even favoured Beth with a small bow and a Bonsoir Mam’selle.
It was a vision of the very near future. Inside a year there would be places like this in London, New York, Berlin, but right then there was nowhere cooler on earth than Les Bains Douches, nowhere where the new worlds of fashion and music and film were more inseparably intertwined, creating what… ‘The Eighties’, I suppose, with all their flash and filigree.
I loved it. I was in raptures. I could see everything ahead of me. I was talking to a friend of Laurent’s, he said he was sure he could find work for a cool guy like me, making music for films. I wanted it all, to swallow it whole. I wanted to live here forever and I was so grateful to Laurent, so in awe of his command of this world, and so coked off my face that, later that night, when we were sat there on a banquette, watching Beth dance to Grace Jones, and Laurent leaned over and said, ‘You mind if we share?’, I didn’t even hesitate, just nodded like I’d known all along that this was the price on the ticket.
I mean, I should say I knew she liked him, and it wasn’t as if I forced her. It’s only that when she looked at me, like she was asking if I was sure this was OK, I just smiled again, a smile I hope to Christ has never passed my face again.