‘HOW DO YOU say stapler?’ asks Kiki. We are hunched over a table near the window at Chez Jeannette. Our coffees are down to the grainy bits.
‘Agrafeuse,’ I say, exhaling smoke away from her. ‘As in agrafes – staples.’
‘Aggerfuse.’
‘No agra-feuse. Think agro furs.’
‘What about lightbulbs? I need screwy ones.’
‘Ampoules, but I don’t know screwy, you’ll have to mime.’
My phone rings as I am miming the lightbulb turn and I show Kiki the caller. She raises her eyebrows twice and coughs, turning to look out the window at a couple having an argument.
Adrien talks in his syrupy murmur and I say oui a few times and hang up, flushed.
‘The Frenchman is in the 10th for a casting. He wants to come to my place.’
‘Ooh la la.’
‘He says he’s in Paris,’ I wonder aloud. ‘But he says dans. I always thought you said à Paris, not dans Paris. I thought dans meant literally being inside something.’
‘Maybe he wants to get dans you.’
‘Maybe,’ I say, examining the grit in my coffee cup. ‘No,’ I realise, looking up at her. ‘I’ve got my period.’
Kiki considers this, then shrugs. ‘So what?’
I sprint home wondering if it is the moment for him to get dans me. It would make for an awkward first time. No, I decide, it’s been this long, we should save it.
I shower and change and run down to the Gare de l’Est, but he is not at the little exit in front of the restaurants so I run across to the big exit, but he isn’t there either. I ring him and he is at the little exit, standing in front of the Indiana Café, smoking a cigarette. He kisses me intensely on the lips.
‘Comment ça va?’ he asks once we’ve pulled away, and I say fine thanks and ask how the audition went. He says it was a casting, not an audition, which is slightly different, but he got the job. It’s a magazine shoot for a sportswear editorial – modelling but kind of acting, he tells me. Anyway, it’s a little bit of money. He’s wearing the long black woollen coat from that first night in Martine’s doorway and his hair is neat and brushed. I lead him across the traffic to the big white convent and the big iron gates.
‘Waouh!’ he says, looking up and around him at the arcades and tall stone walls with their white-shuttered windows. He knows the building but didn’t know what it was.
I tell him about the monks and the hospital and the Angels of the Récollets. He listens in silence as I lead him up to the second floor. In the corridor outside my door we stand for a moment, watching the insane traffic outside the Gare de l’Est. He notices the postcard of the stuffed koala I’ve stuck on my door and laughs, reminding me that they scratch.
‘Not that one,’ I say, and put my key in the lock, heart pounding. Cramps thud in my belly.
My studio is messy but the lights are dim. He sits on the Louis XIV chair and I sit on a plastic chair and we drink vanilla tea. I wish I had beer. He is fascinated by how I came to have a residency here and I tell him about the mysterious scholarship and the single email to the embassy and about the mothership near the Place du Colonel-Fabien, where every month they give me a pile of cash to cover living expenses. I still go along expecting the bubble to burst and for them to arrest me and send me home. He tells me I must have sent the email at just the right time.
We lean out the window and smoke, though it’s fine to smoke inside. The limbs of the chestnut tree are completely bare now and I point to where we can just see the water of the canal through the park. As we shut the windows, something flies past my face, giving me a fright.
‘What was that?’ I ask.
‘A papillon de nuit,’ he says, going to look at a moth that has landed on the wall.
‘Is that the word for moth? Night butterfly?’
I go and stand by him, looking closely at the moth. It has silvery patterns on its wings. I reach out to touch it and it flies off towards the ceiling.
He turns to me. ‘Shall we part?’
We walk side by side down the rue des Récollets towards the canal. As we approach a bar called L’Atmosphère on the banks of the canal he says, ‘You know why this bar it’s call itself L’Atmosphère?’
‘No,’ I say, looking up at him.
‘You see this bridge there?’ He points to the pretty wooden bridge stretched over the dark canal. It’s painted green and two men are kissing at the top of it, amidst the naked limbs of the gnarled winter trees. ‘You know the film Hôtel du Nord?’
I don’t.
‘Well, inside this film, Arletty, she stand on this bridge and she is crying, “Atmosphère, Atmosphère, est-ce que je n’ai pas d’atmosphère?” Édith Piaf she sing in this film too.’
I don’t understand why someone would ask, ‘Do I have no atmosphere?’ and it is one of those annoying moments when I’m not sure what I’ve understood. How can you trust your comprehension when there are so many senses to so many words, and so many expressions with all sorts of meanings? Adrien is painting pictures in my head. I’ll need better French if I’m going to go out with Frenchmen, I decide. But if I do make the jump to French, can I keep the image of Édith Piaf standing on the Bridge of Atmosphere singing out into the night, and some lady wanting atmosphere?
Inside, L’Atmosphère is so smoky it stings my eyes and I smoke several cigarettes in a row because I might as well. It also gives me something to do with my hands. It’s dinnertime and the restaurant is full of people eating foie gras and steak tartare, clinking and murmuring and chewing. There are no seats left so Adrien grabs two from outside that are so cold they pinch my derrière as we sit at a wobbly table near the door. We drink two demis each and talk of politics and jobs and weather and traffic and the 10th arrondissement and food.
‘Why you no eating meat before?’ he asks.
‘Oh, many reasons. The taste. Also, I figured if I can’t bring myself to kill an animal myself, then I shouldn’t eat one. And it’s bad for the planet.’
‘But good for the taste,’ he says. ‘You like it now?’
‘I have a taste for it now. I’ve changed. I could kill a cow. Have you ever killed a cow?’
‘I have kill a chicken. And goat. Oh – lots of things. You change?’
‘I feel different recently. Rawer.’
‘Roar?’
‘Raw,’ I say. ‘Umm … bloody.’
‘Bloody! Bloody ’ell, mate!’ Adrien says, in a Crocodile Dundee way.
‘Zut!’ I say.
He takes a swig of his beer. ‘Do you ’aving the sister and brother? What is your family?’
‘I have two brothers and a sister. What about you?’
‘Just a mother. I am boy unique.’
‘You certainly are!’ I joke and he smiles, though I know he doesn’t get it. He stubs out his cigarette.
‘So, your parents split up?’
‘I never know him. I know he is half Egyptian. He pay for me to go to a – how do you say – boy school that cost lot of moneys, but that is all. He call me one time, on my eight birthday. Very strange. He and my mother they were very young – he just my father because he make me, nothing else. I am have a lot of fathers.’ He laughs. ‘And you?’ he asks. ‘Your parents are together?’
I find myself nodding. I suppose in a way they are. It feels too heavy to tell him anything more right now.
‘Are you angry?’ he smiles.
Yes. I am so angry I don’t know how to begin. But he means hungry, and I say, ‘Oui. Starving.’
We walk out into the freezing night and wander tipsy up the cobblestoned laneways of the canal to the Cambodian restaurant on the avenue Richerand. It’s nine o’clock and the restaurant is complet, ending our idea of a cosy meal. The little Cambodian lady suggests takeaway, so we order bobuns and wait in the cold by an outdoor table with a vase of frozen flowers on it. An old man wearing an outfit covered in navy glitter tips his hat as he walks past us. He has a silvery moon painted on his forehead and long painted silver shoes that curl up at the ends like moons too. He enters the restaurant and begins performing magic tricks for the clientele.
‘When I see magic tricks,’ I tell Adrien, ‘I believe them.’
‘Why not?’ he says.
‘Tell me what you think of this,’ I say. ‘I had a penny once. When I came here as an au pair. It was on a string – my sister had put a hole in it. And then one day the penny was gone but the string wasn’t broken. What do you think happened to the penny?’
He asks, in French, ‘What happened to you before the penny disappeared?’
‘I’d just found a job and a place to live, a chambre de bonne.’
‘So it’s clear. The penny wasn’t needed anymore.’
I like Adrien’s theory. I’m sure drunk Kevin who gave it to me would agree.
‘If,’ Adrien adds, ‘it was there to begin with.’
‘Good point.’
The magician performs something low over a table and people clap and cheer. The scene inside the restaurant is warm and inviting, intensifying the cold outside. But I’m fine being out here. Adrien warms me from behind with his coat. His breath on my neck makes me tingle.
‘Why don’t you stay at my place tonight?’ I mumble. ‘I don’t mean … In fact I’m indisposed, I just … thought we could spend the night together.’
‘It is possible,’ he says.
My studio room is warm and the dinner tasty and the Chinese beer relaxing, and when we’re full we lie on our backs on the floor watching clouds puff past the window.
‘Try to imagine it’s us moving and not the clouds,’ he says in French.
The idea is great but makes me dizzy and I have to sit up. He sits up too and laughs. The kissing begins, restrained and gentle at first, then more urgent. He pulls me closer to him. I curse with all my might the monthly curse.
‘Want to see E.T.?’ I ask, as things heat up. ‘He lives in my room.’ I lead him upstairs to the mezzanine and lie on the bed, pointing at the old beam running across the ceiling.
‘Can you find him?’ I ask.
‘Where eez ’e?’ He looks around the room and gives up, flopping beside me on the bed. He’s looking straight at E.T. but doesn’t realise it. I stand on the bed and point out the curls in the wood for eyes, the indent for a nose, the lines of his alien forehead.
Adrien cocks his head. ‘Mmm,’ he says. He can’t see him yet.
We kiss again for a long while.
‘We should sleep,’ I say.
‘I’ll put myself en caleçon,’ he says, beginning to undress. His body, until now obscured under so much wool and denim, is revealed to me part by part. His frame is smaller than I imagined, more athletic, and he has very long arms with thick, ropey veins protruding all the way from the tops of his shoulders to the tips of his big butcher fingers on his big butcher hands. His skin has tiny white hairs all over it and he has little freckles on his back and shoulders. A welcome-mat of dark hair trails down to his stomach, disappearing at his bellybutton to reappear and lead down behind his caleçon, which I now know means underpants. There is a gruesome scar on his right inner thigh, which he tries to cover with his hand.
I touch his hand and move it away.
‘It so ugly,’ he says.
It really is ugly, and so beautiful, like strawberry and vanilla ice-cream frozen mid-churn.
‘I fall from my moto.’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Non, it’s just feel strange.’
I touch it lightly.
‘It’s feel nice when you touch the borders.’ He lies back on the bed. I strip down to my knickers, mortified that we are doing this tonight, even more so because I have the terrible undies on that I reserve for this time of the month. I angle myself so he won’t notice.
‘Oh! I see him!’ Adrien exclaims, pointing at E.T. And I am on him.
He kisses me hard and I nibble my way down his chest and stomach. I don’t want to go down on him but I feel like I should – I have to do something. Should I ask him? Or just do it? The lights are on. I don’t want to make him uncomfortable. Is it too soon? I touch his caleçon; a thousand thoughts collide in my mouth and I say, ‘Is there something …? Could I …? There is something I could … do.’
But he doesn’t understand me. I decide to just go for it. He seems nervous but also to be enjoying it. Then he grabs my head.
‘Arrête, stop, non, non Jayne.’
I look up, confused.
‘I am too … excité.’
‘Good!’ I resume, but his hand comes back, stronger this time.
‘Non, non, arrête!’
I smile and continue – I’m going for gold when he wrenches my head away and roars, ‘Pleeease!’
But it’s too late. He has spurted across the room, slashing the painting Miru did of me as the serpent girl, sticky-taped to the wall.
‘Pourquoi?’ he whimpers from under his hands, which are firmly clamped across his face. ‘What were you doing? Ça me gênait … ça me gênait …’
Now I’m worried, as I think gêner means to be annoyed, and also shocked: doesn’t every man like that?
‘It was too good, I couldn’t hold on!’ he moans, peeling his hands away from his blushed, glistening face.
‘I didn’t want you to hold on!’
‘Oh mon dieu.’ He rolls over onto his side.
I put my face in the top of his back and slide my hand onto the centre of his chest. ‘I’m sorry, I really wanted you. I couldn’t have sex so … I didn’t mean to upset you.’
‘You did not have to do that.’
‘But I wanted to! You didn’t like it?’
‘Yes I liked it,’ he says.
‘What then? You were worried about me?’
I suppose I wouldn’t have wanted to be gone down upon on our first go. But that’s me. I thought all men loved it, any time, in any circumstance.
‘I’m sorry I made you feel weird,’ I say.
‘It’s okay.’ He rolls back towards me with soft eyes, then covers his face with his hands again and makes a moaning sound. When he takes his hands away he’s smiling. We laugh.
‘You’re sensitive, aren’t you?’ I say, tracing his face with my finger.
‘Tu me perces à jour,’ he says.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Nothing, it does not matter.’
I threaten to go down and look it up on the internet, so he explains that it’s like someone putting a hole in you so the daylight can be seen shining through from behind. I don’t know if this means I’ve hurt him, or exposed him, or drilled through him, or if it’s something positive. From his soft face I assume it’s nothing terrible. He moves me onto my back and explores all the available parts of my body, complimenting each as he goes, in his language. When he arrives at my centre, he places his warm hand right on the most tender part of my lower belly and holds it there until the pain subsides. A glimmer of moonlight catches his forehead, the ends of his eyelashes. Eventually he rolls over and falls asleep.
The morning birds start to chirp in the park. I look at E.T. The moth, perhaps the one from before, rotates on the ceiling above him, flicking its wings and circling before returning to stillness. I change places with the moth and look back at us on the bed, me starfished in underpants, earthy, hair wild over the sheets. Adrien, naked, dark hair on the white pillow. The image is so sexy I want to fly down and fuck us both.
I swap back. Now I’m me again, looking up at the moth. In English, so banal. A plain old moth. In French, a night butterfly. An exotic nocturnal explorer.