One o’clock in the morning. Still no luck. I’m going home.
I live near the Montmartre cemetery. I’ve never walked so much in my life. I had a bike—named Jeannot—but I lost it the other day. I’m not sure when, exactly. After a party at the house of some people I didn’t know. They lived over by the Gare Saint-Lazare, I think.
Some guy had taken me back to his place. I was fine until we were in bed, and then I wasn’t. The cat’s litter box, the patterns on his quilt, the Fight Club poster above the Ikea bed . . . I . . . I just couldn’t.
I held my liquor better than expected.
It was the first time that had happened to me; sobering up in one fell swoop like that, and it upset me. I’d have liked it, anyway—to just let go a little bit. I liked that. You could do worse than Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, as third wheels go. But my body let me down.
How was it possible?
My body.
My pretty body.
I wouldn’t have admitted it then, but tonight, after all these miles of solitary walking, and this emptiness, and this nothing, and this lack of anything, of everything, everywhere, all the time, I can admit it. It was him.
He was the parasite, and I saw his energy-sucking for what it was, for the first time, between those ugly sheets.
Nude and disappointed, my back to the wall, I was puzzling over it when I heard a voice thickly reassuring me:
“Hey, you can stay anyway, okay?”
If I’d had a gun in my hand I’d have blown his head off for that anyway, for the contempt, the favor he was doing the bitch who hadn’t sucked him off.
Bang.
I quivered with it. On the stairs, and out in the street, and while I looked for my bike under the streetlights. Quivered with rage. I’d never felt like that before.
My mouth tasted like puke, and I spat on the ground to get rid of it.
But I can’t work up a gob of spit worthy of the name, and so I ended up drooling on myself, on my sleeve and my pretty scarf, and that was fine, because how else could I explain so much hate?
I was only living the way I deserved to, and I was living . . . anyway.