I resemble neither the people in this café nor the people in the café across the street.
Despite being worse than the café across the street, this is not a cheap café, but I am getting good value. What am I paying for? The view of the cathedral (which is not so good from the better café)? Do the tourists worsen the view? I don’t think so. They make me sure the view is a view, even though sometimes they are in the way of it.
A few hours ago I was on a plane. I have time to kill, too much time in the wrong place. The day has stretched and I have baggy hours that should be taken in, taken up. There is nothing to do with this time but put some alcohol into it.
The tables in this café are close, very close. A man sits down at the table next to me. I wonder whether he is French, whether he is foreign, whether he is a tourist. I also wonder whether I could say hello to him, in French or in English, whether we would like each other, whether we could sleep together. Two days ago I was in a hotel that reached the sky: 37th floor, half the world over. My spine is compressed after the flight, my legs unwisely crossed. I have never felt like this before. It feels old.
The man, who is older than I am and not particularly attractive, orders some food in English. On the plane I ate things I had never eaten before, things I didn’t particularly want to eat at times I didn’t want to eat them. The more of the things I ate, the more I accepted them, and the more angry I became in the times between, when they did not appear.
I order. Madame, says the waiter, Mademoiselle (more of the Madame nowadays). I am careful to speak French with an English accent. It would be disrespectful to the waiter who wants to practice his English, to the foreign man at the next table, to show too much proficiency.
The man’s order arrives quickly. It is a steak. Portions in this café are large; portions on the plane were small, but still I feel full. I can smell his steak. It is the steak I did not order, both for financial reasons and because I thought it might be too filling. He eats his steak quickly with no wine. I eat a croque monsieur slowly with a glass of wine that is not the cheapest on the menu. I drink so the scum of things rises to the surface. I spent my money on wine: he spent his money on steak. Who got the best value? He takes a bottle of Coca-Cola out of his bag and, when the waiter goes away, takes surreptitious sips. Perhaps he is economizing too.
The man with the steak looks at my legs, which gives me permission to look at the message he is typing into his mobile phone. I cannot see it as the glass reflects. I feel cheated.
I am tired and slightly drunk and still hungry. He is full of steak and Coca-Cola and, presumably, energy: enough energy to cross the road and walk up the steps inside the tower of the cathedral, which I have never entered.
In a few hours I will travel back to the airport to take another plane. Sitting here I am already waiting to wait. I have had so many last times here, it is impossible to tell whether this will really be the last. Time, when it is limited, is more beautiful. My wine tastes of smoke, incense. How can I leave this place? How can I stop watching the flow of tourists across the road? (Look! That one dropped something. It catches the light, shines! A valuable or just a cellophane wrapper? She does not notice, does not return to pick it up.) I drink my wine. I eat my bread, put Paris into my mouth. Look! Look at the bread, the wine, the tourists! I cannot stop looking at them.
The man at the next table takes a large, black camera from his bag and photographs what remains of his steak with a lens so long he can he barely fit it between himself and his plate. The camera makes a soft expensive click. As soon as I hear this I know I could never talk to him. He finishes quickly, and quickly asks for the check. He gets up from his table and leaves.
He has hidden the remaining part of his large steak under his napkin. Our tables are close, so close I can still smell the steak, so close I could reach across and take it, eat it.
SUMMER STORY
It’s the dry point of the year, and I’ve been waiting for an answer for some time.
No one’s doing anything. There are not enough people left in town to eat all the fruit in the supermarkets. It piles up, 2/3 price, then 1/2 price, then finally returns to the back room on tall steel trollies.
The night I slept with him, it rained. He wore a shirt that, although we’d only met a couple of times before, I felt was unusual for him. He wore a jacket with a mend on the elbow that spiraled in concentric circles. Then in the morning he looked not as he had looked the night before, but as he had the other times we’d met, and he smelled slightly of cigarettes and furniture polish.
In bed he asked whether I wanted to do what I was doing every time I did it. As if he couldn’t tell without, as though he’d checked himself and remembered some rule. And he laughed small and inward each time I said something to him, each time he said something to me. At the end he said, wow, like someone smacking his lips after a meal.
The next morning I told him I have children. And he said, oh, and he asked me their names, and that was all the mention of them, though the mention of them had been waiting, not insistently, all that time.
The river is at a high point now though the weather is finally hot.
D took me walking by the river. There are women it is dangerous to talk to. D is one. You try to tell them something and they start telling you a story about yourself. Before you know it you are pinned, can’t move. I wanted to tell D everything, including about him, but I didn’t. Feeling the wet air suspended all around me, I closed myself down like windows before a storm. Afterwards, I’m glad I did.
I heard he was having a party. He arranged to meet me twice but cancelled both times. When he sent a message saying he could not meet me, his tense slipped. He said he’d really wanted to see me again. I’d feared it was too true. There’d been a point at which he’d wanted to see me, but it wasn’t now.
He has invited my friend to his party, but not me, the friend of whom I said that I wondered that he didn’t like her, not me: she is prettier. And he said, oh the British and their blondes.
He is not British. He is from elsewhere. His party is for a holiday from elsewhere. I thought he was not the sort to celebrate, but it seems he is. I haven’t heard from him for a week, haven’t seen him for almost a month now. My blonde friend, who is not British, will ask whether he will see me at the weekend. I will find out what is happening — perhaps. And maybe we will meet next week.
He is having another party. This time he has asked me. I’m wary. It was a general invite sent out to friends. The email came only an hour ago: there has been an age of strategy since then. How to reply?
I don’t. But I go.
On my way to the party I expose myself to the point between work and social in which nothing can happen. The libraries have closed; the cafés have closed. The bars are open, but I don’t feel like drinking; the restaurants are open but I don’t feel like eating — and I don’t want to spend the money. Should I have a cocktail before the party, for courage? Or would I arrive with too much of its evidence on my lips, in my cheeks? Should I walk the streets (if it is not raining)? Could I read, write, in the corner of one of the big café-like bars, inconspicuously enough? Could I shift time from this moment to add to other times, times spent — speculatively — with him? With all the time I have, I could learn a language, I could read a book, I could write a book.