Coq, page 18
“Sorry,” I say to Felix. “Could be my kids.”
He gestures for me to take the call. He does not look the least bit offended, which is endearing. Most people without kids would find this interruption inappropriate, even in a clown bar. The missed call is from Wes. I fire off a quick text asking him if everything’s okay. He wants money. Célestine has come to Disneyland and he’d like to buy her something. Correction: he’d like me to buy her something.
Ask your dad, I text back. I’m in a meeting.
He’s on the Tea Cups with Joan.
Glen’s there? Glen hates the Tea Cups. Glen hates tea. Roundabouts make him dizzy. And 3-D? Forget it.
How much?
Hundred bucks?
What the fuck is he planning to buy her? Mickey’s index finger? I quickly EMT the money and apologise to Felix. I expect this is just the interruption we need to steer the conversation into a more pragmatic direction: hobbies, favourite movies, a smattering of stories from work or childhood, but before I can say anything, the bartender asks, “Do you want him too?” and instead of Felix or the dreadlocked-woman or anyone else in earshot condemning the bartender for his rudeness, the audacity of posing such a question, the whole restaurant falls silent and waits for my reply.
I gulp my wine and stare into Felix’s eyes. I feel a spinning in my chest, like the oversized wheels of a bank vault. I very much wanted him on the plane. I slide my hand across the table and he takes hold of both my wrists. It’s a bold and dominant grip, as if I’m dangling from a trapeze. And then, I ever so slightly dig the tips of my fingernails into his forearms.
“Well?” the bartender says, rimming a glass. “Do you?”
A fatherly thing my mother used to say: you buy the ticket, you take the ride. And here I am, strapped in. The elephant’s already left the big top.
“I do,” I say, shooting my wine. “I want.”
Mussels in sake arrive and the mood shifts to something lighter, even though I can still see the faint indent of my fingernails on his right forearm. We talk about his work here in Paris, my attempts to memorialize my mother in the Catacombs and Versailles. I tell him about Émile and Mona and Célestine. As the courses progress, we dig deeper into each other, removing layer upon layer of face paint, costumes, masks.
I barely think about Glen. But I am thinking about Glen spinning in a teacup. We’ve been stuck on this ride for ten years.
“Why didn’t you remarry?” I ask Felix as a magnificent tart au citron arrives with a razor-sharp lemon leaf garnish. He mentioned his divorce on the plane. He’s been single longer than I have. Fifteen years.
“I couldn’t have kids,” Felix says. “That’s why my marriage ended. I tried dating, but kids were what most women wanted back then. After that I poured myself into my work.” He pours himself another glass of wine.
“That’s it?”
“I was briefly engaged to a woman twenty years my senior, but she changed her mind. Picked up and bought a condo in Tucson instead.” He forks the scorched surface of his crème brûlée and it shatters like puddle ice. “I kind of swore off relationships after that.”
The bartender freezes, mid-pour. “Pourquoi?”
Yes, I think. Pourquoi?
Felix doesn’t respond. At least not verbally. He just gives a melancholy shrug and dives into his dessert. My phone buzzes from my purse. I discreetly check my messages, concealing my screen beneath my napkin.
Joan: are you almost done your meeting
Soon, I reply. Do you need something?
Dad was asking.
I ignore this and wait for the message-in-progress.
Grandpa said we could go to the protest.
Felix pushes his plate aside. “Claudia, would you like to come back to my hotel?”
The dreadlocked women raises her brow. She’s dressed like a cocky bird. I admire her.
“You should go,” says the bartender.
“I have to get back to my kids,” I say.
“You don’t have to stay the night. In fact, you don’t even have to come to my room. We can just continue our conversation in the hotel bar.” He motions for the bill.
I don’t offer to pay for half. I pretend for a minute it’s 1902. He’s more than welcome to fetch the bill, my coat, push me up against a wall and force his hand up my skirt, slip his fingers between my blouse buttons. I check the time. Still early. Disney’s not shutting down for another hour.
“Why don’t we walk and talk?”
He nods, slips a wad of bills from his wallet, tucks them into the billfold.
Outside the air has that dreamy autumn quality of new beginnings. We stroll toward Boulevard Voltaire until we reach a small city park with cobbles and gardens. The walkways are graffitied, the playground equipment tired. We sit on a bench.
“If you swore off relationships,” I say, watching a sparrow hopscotch across a cement block, “why this?”
“Fate,” he replies, his hands in anxious fists.
“That’s dramatic.”
“Completely,” he agrees. “But what were the odds of you getting switched into the seat next to me on the plane?”
“Odd.”
“Exactly.”
“And so that’s it?” I don’t expect this kind of talk from a scientist, but then nothing about Felix has been predictable. I’m antsy and stand. I need to move. He follows and we continue down the pathway, streetlights and pigeons blinking around us. A skateboarder swerves by. Just outside the park, a woman laden down with a month’s worth of groceries hobbles toward a bus stop.
I pause, note that we’re standing across from the Bataclan Theatre. All of the romance bleeds away. A short gasp. Felix recognizes it too. The death. It’s out there mingling with the stonework and the sidewalks. It lingers on the naked trees and cracked monuments. A sudden image of my mom’s shaved head, her stitches red as fire alarms, slices into my mind’s eye. And yet neither Felix nor I can look away.
The chatter of a squirrel interrupts my free-falling thoughts. I started out this morning at the “happiest place on Earth.” I stand here now at the site of a terrorist attack, with a stranger with whom I feel an almost Godly connection. Is this what happens when you meet on a plane? Your relationship becomes unearthly? Spiritual? Supernatural? Unnatural? Is this why the origami is alive in my purse? Why my cell phone suddenly has no service?
Felix turns around, his back to the Bataclan. We stand like this for a minute, shoulder to shoulder, but facing opposite directions. I think of all the life cut short in that theatre. They were mostly kids, really, not much older than Harrison or Liam. Not much older than Wes. I feel the strangest desire to live in the moment. Like Rodney. Like Glen. To really live. For them, for Mom. There’s terror in that, too.
I tilt my head towards Felix’s ear. He smells like a magic trick. “Let’s go back to your hotel,” I whisper. When I pull away, I touch my face. My cheek is damp.
“Felix?” I say, now stepping back so we are face to face.
A tear drips from his face. He swallows. “I’m sick,” he says.
“Sick?” I reply.
The streetlight flickers and I feel the teeth of a ghost saw touching down on my abdomen. Back and forth it goes, long rhythmic strokes, sawing me in half. Claudia, in pieces.
thirty-four
I want to go home. I don’t want to live in the moment. I don’t want sick people or Leavers. I want to be single for the rest of my life. Like Georgia. Like Cathy. No more husbands, or partners. No more dates. I’ll surround myself with family and friends and coworkers and pets. I’ll make lonely, wretched love to myself. Maybe I’ll never have sex again. I could sell my clitoris on Kijiji: excellent used condition, no longer need, best offer.
I don’t ask what kind of “sick.” I know enough that it’s not just a cold.
“You’re an asshole,” I say.
Felix abruptly stops fiddling with the sleeve he’s been using to wipe his face. “You can’t call a sick person an asshole.”
“You can’t go on dates with healthy people.”
“I just did.”
Tears gather behind my eyes like drops of lava as the wind picks up and begins whipping the trees and debris. Leaves and litter scatter. A bus pulls over and swallows the woman with the groceries.
“You can’t love a sick man?” Felix shouts.
“Absolutely not.”
Felix steps into me, as a leaf blows onto my face and catches on my lip. I try to spit it off, hiss the dirt from my tongue, but Felix plucks it away, releases it back into the wind where it loops and skitters. We watch. He’s millimetres from my face. His heart knocks against mine. I smell Syrah, brown sugar, dominance.
“You can’t love a sick man,” he says, teeth on my ear lobe, “but can you fuck one?”
Oh boy. This is . . . what is this? Can forty-somethings fuck? Can mothers? Can sick people? My mind blusters, flatlines. I imagine broken joints and stents and seizures and vomit. Gurneys, gauze, pins. But my body intervenes. Give me your tired, your poor, your tumorous masses. My body, it seems, is here for the sick. I drive into him, my tongue a dark web, and we kiss and kiss and kiss. It’s crude and triumphant; an astronomer spying a black hole. A mathematical proof.
The origami horse bursts from my purse and gallops down the street. Felix and I pull away from each other. He fist pumps the air as if we’d just made the discovery of a lifetime and it’s over now. We can go home. Our work here is done. He takes my hand, brings it to his mouth, kisses it over and over. Gratitude. My body twitches.
“I don’t remember a kiss ever feeling that wonderful,” he says. We pass a homeless woman, bent like a vowel over a cardboard sign. Felix removes a hundred euro from his wallet and drops it on her blanketed lap. Then we pass a weary couple with twins — triplets? Felix pats each child on the head in succession, a walking duck-duck-goose. The parents don’t seem to notice, and the kids don’t mind. Only the last one, the short one, turns around in search of meaning.
My body still wants his sick, but the moment’s blown away. We’re too old to be making out in a park. Too old for one-night stands.
Aren’t we?
I don’t know where we’re going. We reach a huge intersection. Cars move like schools of fish, swerving, zooming. An ambulance honks, its sirens keening. A late-night tour group shuffles on a crosswalk into a headwind. I check the time on my phone. My family will be on its way home now. On the corner, an entrance to the underground. They may be beneath me right now, their bags stuffed with funnel cake and souvenirs. I wonder if Glen is with them.
“Claudia,” Felix says, stopping in front of a military statue. “Thank you. I’ve been wanting to kiss you like that since the plane. It was even more than I imagined.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were sick?”
“I wanted to, but I didn’t think I’d see you again. I didn’t think I’d have to.” He starts walking. “Besides, you didn’t tell me your ex was going to be in Paris.”
“Neither did he.”
I want to go back to Felix’s room, ask him if he’s dying and if so, how long he has to live. What does a man who knows he’s going to die think about? I don’t think my mother knew she was going to die when she had the stroke on the flight home from Cuba. There may have been a moment when she was recovering in hospital from the banana boat accident, but likely not on the blue carpeted floor of the airbus, where she was flanked by emergency lights, pretzel dust and the discarded shoes of squirmy passengers. When Dad hovered over her, did she see him? Did she wish he was Émile? Or was she thinking about her grandkids, the running toilet that needed fixing in the ensuite or the mole on her back that had recently changed colour?
Felix hails a cab. A bronze Peugeot slams on its brakes, performs a reckless U-turn, and pulls over, bumping the curb. Felix leans in the window, gives instructions to the driver that I can’t hear. I freeze on the sidewalk.
“Will you come with me?” he asks.
I shift, uncomfortably. It’ll be a matter of minutes before the texts start: where r u? when r u coming home? how was your meeting? Then the requests: can I download a movie/have twenty bucks/buy this game/eat these chips on the dresser/switch math classes.
“Where?”
“I want to show you something.”
“Is it far?”
He leans back through the cab window. The driver puffs out his lip, shakes his head no. Soca music plays from his stereo. He’s a fan, or he’s a long way from home. Like me.
“Twenty minutes,” he says. “We could walk it, but . . .”
His voice trails. But he’s sick.
Spirit Cathy hollers over my shoulder to just go home already, to my kids. So practical. So right. Imaginary Georgia makes popcorn, takes a seat, crosses her legs. “I don’t have long,” I say.
Felix looks me dead in the eyes. “Neither do I.”
I climb into the back seat. The cab makes another U-turn and I feel the Clown Bar tilt-a-whirl in my stomach. Felix rests his hand on my knee. His hand doesn’t look sick. It looks strong. I open my legs a whoreish inch, as the first text signals from my purse.
“Sorry,” I mutter, cheeks flushed.
“All good.” He plays with a lock of my hair and the intimacy of his fingertips grazing my neck is almost too much. I want to be both his nursemaid and his concubine. I want to gag on his fingers and also wrap them tenderly in a splint. I feel like the kind of man who whacks off during a Zoom meeting. I finally fish out my phone, doing my best to shield the screen.
How was your meeting?
Glen.
Good thanks, I type.
Felix places his hand back on my leg. Higher this time. Mid-thigh. His pinkie dangles dangerously on the inside, a leg over a cliff.
I’ve arranged for Dan to watch the kids. Come meet me.
The next thing that arrives is a geotag, a dropped pin. All I can make out when I zoom in is a hat shop and a creperie.
Can’t right now. On my way back. Felix’s mouth is on the back of my neck. I like it there. The taxi turns onto a busy street. Protesters with placards are shaking street signs and climbing on statuary. I have no idea where we are. A square? I catch a glimpse of a sign being waved by an elderly man with a ponytail. Le climat c’est comme la bière: c’est pas bon chaud! I thought this was supposed to be happening tomorrow. The cabbie watches me from the rear-view mirror. “They are practicing,” he confirms. “For tomorrow.” Red and blue lights. He speeds up for a hundred metres, then peels off on a narrow one-way street.
I’ll wait, Glen replies.
I stuff the phone back in my purse. Felix still has his hand on my leg but he’s looking away from me now, out his window. He points to the moon. “Almost full,” he says.
“And almost there,” the cabbie adds.
I still don’t know where “there” is. We pass gothic churches with pointy spires and complicated steeples, bustling cafés and balconied buildings. We may have crossed a few bridges. We could be driving in circles. We pass a woman, maybe a tourist or an expat, based on her hiking boots and cropped hair standing with a group of kids, finger-reading the menu outside a restaurant with a royal blue awning. Cue the guilt. I should be back at the hotel with Wes and Joan. I should be researching strategies for safe protest, checking in with the kids’ teachers, Joan’s soccer coach. She’s done none of the hotel-friendly fitness drills her coach had suggested she do to stay in shape.
“Here,” Felix says as the taxi comes to a halt. He pays in cash. Here is another park, not unlike the last. Cobbles, benches, and garden plots tucked behind fences and throngs of people. Unsurprising — it’s Friday night. We stroll past leggy trees and squat tourists. I hear soundbites of German, opera, Tagalog, reggae. Laughter.
Felix slows to a stop. “Close your eyes,” he says. I don’t want to close my eyes. I want my safe, boring life back. The one I can see with my eyes closed: the two kids, the kitchen roosters, the kingless king bed. But I oblige because I bought the ticket and the ride isn’t over.
I sense the buzz of oncoming pedestrian traffic. The graze of an elbow, the clip of a knapsack, a woman’s loose hair. Jubilant voices, inflections, whispers. Somewhere, a baby cries.
“Okay,” Felix says, halting me, his un-sick hands bearing down on my shoulders, his scent on my neck. “Open your eyes.”
The Wall of I Love Yous. We’re too far to read the tiles. From where we stand, behind the crowds, the words are indiscernible. An umlaut here, a serif there, a stroke of Cyrillic, but at the edge of the wall, something familiar. Someone.
Glen.
thirty-five
Felix stands with his hands on his hips, chin cocked and chest proud, a realtor assessing the curb appeal of a new listing. “Would you look at that,” he says, sizing up the wall. “It’s much smaller than I imagined. What do you think?”
I think nothing because I’m crouching behind a garbage can, between a tiny black mouse with Swiss Army claws and a scrap of dessert crepe. I can’t let Glen see me. I raise my head high enough to catch Felix’s troubled face searching for me in the crowd. A child in a red windbreaker and rubber boots stares at me, bewildered, but also thrilled with the discovery. Seeing as he’s been dragged to a wall that doesn’t do anything, doesn’t light up, doesn’t change shape, warp, crumble or collapse, finding an adult hiding behind a garbage can, is something. I bring my finger to my lips. Shhh.
Felix calls my name, first as a question and then with the urgency of a parent who’s lost his child in a Walcrotch parking lot. A few tourists look behind them, though most keep their gaze fixed on the glazed tiles. Except for Glen. I see him, still at the wall’s edge, neck strained, brow furled.
“Hide-and-go-seek?”
The kid in the windbreaker won’t leave. He squats beside me, a cat-squirrel, clinging to the garbage can’s rim. I nod. Sure, hide-and-go-seek. This is why I’ve come to Paris. To simultaneously hide from and seek myself. Come to think of it, I’ve been playing this game my whole life.
