Layers

5Paris breeze

5

Paris breeze

Paris, June 1992

Eleni had always found it hard to move about in her tiny cupboard of a room, which was why she chose to sit still most of the time she spent there during the interim semester of her art degree in Paris. ‘The cupboard room’ was not a name she had come up with. Vivienne and Yves had always liked to crack a joke about her room and how only a sweet little girl like her could fit into it. Vivienne had at least made a good job of painting it bright white and matching it up with a narrow white single bed that stretched the length of the long side of the room from door to window. It had been an exercise in intimacy, sharing this bed with Nicolas during the many long weekends they spent together, when he came to visit her from London. His long legs would stretch out on to the window sill where some of her few possessions had been squeezed and squashed. The window sill also doubled as her desk through pushing a white polished board over the radiator and fixing it at the level of the sill. She would then unfold the plastic chair that also lived by the radiator. Thankfully, the small wardrobe across from the bed was fitted. Still, if she left its doors open, they created a tight square blocking the space between the wardrobe and her bed.

She found herself standing in the centre of this square, while slowly and painstakingly packing up all her possessions, the clothes she had worn for the last six months in Paris from heavy winter to a glorious summer. She had to finish packing up almost everything before this evening, as Vivienne and Yves were organising a farewell party for her and Nicolas was arriving before seven the following morning. She had to be ready, as they were setting off early to catch the train to Amsterdam, their first planned stop during a month of travel round Europe by train before finally reaching Greece at the end of July. This was a dream come true, her and Nicolas going travelling together. They so deserved it after all the hard work they had put into their degrees. Especially Nicolas, as he had passed his finals with a First.

Eleni felt a shadow darken her excitement. She had not worked all that diligently in the last six months in fact. She had been too busy spending most of her time in Vivienne and Yves’s flat, partying. Her attendance of university classes had been minimal, and so the few students who had started saying hello to her at the beginning of the semester had forgotten who she was by the end of it. Her dissertation was good though, her tutor had said; her written French was excellent. She was still waiting for her mark, but it would be a pass for sure. Yves had offered to help her out and read through it, but she had surprised herself by stubbornly refusing. In the end she gave it to him to read after she had submitted it, and she smiled politely upon hearing his playful protests about why she had kept all this interesting work away from him.

She was never too sure what to make of him. Vivienne and Eleni had become close, almost from the beginning of her stay in Paris. She always knew that she liked friendships with older women, never being bothered by an age gap. But an older man like Yves, Vivienne’s partner, she did not know what to make of him. She was stunned when he told her during one of the wine and cheese evenings at their flat that he was thirty-seven. Thirty-seven only? Vivienne was not one for revealing her age, but she must be fifty at least, Eleni thought, not that much younger than her mother.

She seemed to have found in Vivienne’s ground-floor apartment her own private bohemian Paris that she had always dreamt of. So many early summer nights, full of electric blue light well into the late evening, she had spent in their flat as the guest of honour. She was the only one invited out of all the tenants. They asked her to be discreet, not wanting to give the impression that she was being favoured. She had even been invited to the big party Vivienne had given for her birthday, full of the Parisian high society of artists and art dealers. She still remembered vividly that larger-than-life guy, apparently an old sweetheart of Vivienne’s, holding her hand open and reading her fortune. ‘Your career will flourish, my darling,’ he had told her, ‘but not many men will truly love you, one or two at most.’ What a thing to say to her – it still hurt when she remembered.

During these nights full of happenings, Yves was always there, at Vivienne’s side, as always cheerful and witty, showing off his multilingualism. It was only Greek that escaped him, he had said to her; six languages he spoke fluently, and now that he had met her he would get to learn some Greek too. He was always busy being the host along with Vivienne, but he would never lose sight of her, never forget to fill her glass with some more red wine. Yet, in quieter moments, when she and Vivienne would get engrossed in one of their long conversations, he would discreetly withdraw.

Vivienne had made no secret of being fond of Eleni from the beginning of her stay. The moment Eleni had walked in accompanied by her mother to view the little bedsit that had just become vacant, Vivienne had known instantly the truth, she told Eleni much later on. ‘I knew you were adopted, sweetie’, she had said, patting her on the shoulder. ‘I have an eye for such things.’ Eleni was not used to people guessing. If anything, most people would make comments about how her mother and Eleni looked alike, out of default, it seemed, as in truth, they looked nothing like each other, Leonora, dark-coloured and small, with delicate, symmetrical facial features, and Eleni, much taller, strong-boned, with a fair complexion, green olive-coloured eyes and her father’s wet-hay hair and oval face.

It was Vivienne’s dreadful history that had helped her guess the truth about Eleni. She had been the adoptive mother of a baby boy who was no longer there, as after her acrimonious divorce with her ex-husband, apparently a well-known art dealer, he removed the child and flew to another country, to live there with his biological son and his lover who was the child’s birth mother. The privilege of owning a three-storey house near the vibrant Jardin du Luxembourg was the only remaining trophy out of Vivienne’s failed marriage. ‘Ten years of mothering my son,’ Vivienne had said to Eleni during one of their long conversations, ‘and look, I am now left with an empty nest. There is no day that passes by that I don’t miss him.’

It was the first time Eleni had heard a story so similar to hers. She had cringed at the idea that her own story could have had the same outcome, her father fleeing with Nefeli and taking her along with them, when she was too young to have a say. She could barely begin to imagine how unhappy this would have made her. She depicted living with her father and his mistress as living with two people completely blind and deaf to her needs.

Vivienne had not given her much more than the basic outline of what went on. Eleni could see how painful and raw it still was for her. ‘He took my son away’, she kept saying to Eleni, as though she had found in her not only an eager listener, but a temporary replacement for her loss too. Was it more comfortable, Eleni wondered later on that night, to focus on Vivienne and her story than to see clearly what was coming?

***

‘Chérie, un peu du boeuf?’ Vivienne offered, holding a piece of extremely rare roast beef over her plate.

Eleni cringed. She had nibbled on crumbs of cheese and some deliciously mustardy lettuce salad for most of the farewell dinner Vivienne had organised for her, allowing Yves to fill her glass again and again with ruby red wine. Her mind was like a cinema screen, one scene following another in quick succession. All the little wonderful moments filling the canvas of her stay in Paris, and now it was all coming to an end. She had no appetite for food, just for wine.

‘Non, merci, je n’ai pas faim.’

She sensed Vivienne giving her one of her piercing looks. ‘You have lost so much weight lately, Eleni. I hope you are not becoming anorexic. It is a bit of a trend nowadays, you know. Young, beautiful girls like you, losing their appetite and then their health.’

Eleni did not like that side of Vivienne. She found her superior gaze, full of ‘I know it all from experience’, distasteful and intrusive. She had noticed before that Vivienne assumed she had the right to exercise it on her younger guests.

‘I am not an anorexic. It’s just that I don’t like anything bloody on my plate’, she dared to reply, and almost instantly regretted her rudeness. She had indeed lost a lot of weight in the last few months. Some of the summer trousers she had brought with her had become so loose around the waist that they were in danger of rolling off her hips unless she kept them in place with a belt. She could never eat much when in a state of infatuation, and she had grown deeply infatuated with Paris as the time wore on.

‘Eleni has had to become slight in order to fit into her room’, Yves jumped in, and everyone round the table burst out laughing.

Was he trying to save her, or embarrass her even more? Eleni wondered; but she could not help but feel grateful that the tension between her and Vivienne had been diluted.

It was a few minutes past midnight and the party had just dispersed. Eleni was pottering about in the little kitchen upstairs across from her bedsit, when she heard steps coming up. It must be Vivienne coming to say goodbye, she thought. Vivienne had retired early saying that she was tired, and the party went on for a little bit longer without her, but Eleni could not shake off the feeling that she had retreated into her bedroom because she was furious with her.

‘Fixing yourself another drink?’ Yves’s smooth accent came from behind her left shoulder, close to her ear.

‘Oh God, no! I was just tidying up. I have an early start tomorrow.’

‘Oh … I was wondering if you would fancy a drink downtown, a last-night-in-Paris drink?’ he said.

Eleni could hear his breathing and hers for some time, as though they were both suspended in space, before he lifted his hand and very gently and slowly removed a lock of wavy, sun-touched hair from her face, his eyes focusing gently on hers.

‘Oui’, she heard herself saying. Had she really said yes?

After the two of them sneaked out of the house well after midnight, he took her bar-hopping to the kind of bars only locals know about. By the time they reached the second bar, he was visibly drunk, talking manically to the fellow customers about his trips to Africa. She seemed to have missed most of what he was saying about Morocco. By this time she was tipsy herself, although she had hardly had more than a few sips since they left the house. In the intoxicated state of mind she was in, alcohol was not necessary or desirable.

It was when they left that second bar that the inevitable happened. They stopped in the middle of a wide pavement and started kissing passionately. Eleni could sense the few remaining late-night pedestrians passing close by and gazing at their intertwined figures. She could feel her braless breasts loose under his touch as he fondled them, only her fine black T-shirt separating her skin from his hands. Then he had her lying down on an old wooden box abandoned on the side of the pavement, leaning over her gently until she could feel his erection between her legs. They kept stopping to kiss and touch before ending up in another bar off Pont Neuf. Eleni could not help but wonder if their next stop after this would be his pied-à-terre, as he called the little flat he had insisted on keeping, despite Vivienne repeatedly telling him, even in front of Eleni, that it was a complete waste of money.

It must have been past four in the morning when they started looking for his car. ‘I have lost my mind with you’, he mumbled, clearly in a drunken state. ‘No woman has made me forget where I have put my car before.’

She was feeling much more distant now. The alcohol had worn off along with her arousal and she was beginning to be painfully aware of what she had done. When she had left the house, she had been so anxious not to encounter Vivienne that she did not stop by her room to grab her watch or her purse or even to put her shoes on. Her alcohol-induced euphoria had made it okay to walk out of the house penniless and wearing her plastic summer slippers, but it now began to dawn on her how vulnerable she had made herself. She was completely dependent on him. What would Nicolas do when he arrived, if she was not there to open the door for him? He would have to wake Vivienne up.

‘I really have to head back very soon’, she told him as they walked up and down the cobbled streets holding hands and looking desperately for his car.

It must have been around then that it happened. They were suddenly circled by a gang of young North Africans. It was possible that they had been following them for some time – neither of them would have noticed, oblivious as they were to the outside world. Eleni was reduced to a wordless infant as they talked to him, pushing into his space, asking him for something again and again. She felt terror like a hand clenching her stomach. Her legs felt frozen, paralysed. Finally, it dawned on her that they were asking him for money and he was trying to talk them out of it. They were surrounded, and there was nobody else around to call to for help. They were at their mercy.

One of them finally turned to her and said in heavily accented French, ‘Do not worry, we will not touch you. It is only the French we have it in for.’

How did he know she was not French? She had not talked at all. Had he assumed that she was a prostitute of some sort? She started hoping that Yves would just give them the money and it would all end, but then she saw the first punch go into his face. Blood ran down his nose and she screamed. She tried to go to his side, but they were all around him, not letting her get any closer. The circle had closed around him, leaving her out. She thought there might have been another two punches after that, and suddenly they were off, as abruptly as they had come. He was doubled up on the pavement in tears, his face covered in blood. ‘They took all my money’, he wept. ‘I had a month’s earnings in there.’

She helped him up, trying to steady him. ‘Yves, you must remember where you put your car. Please try to concentrate’, she told him as gently and firmly as she could. They both started at the noise of the brakes of a taxi turning the corner and stopping right in front of them.

‘Do you need a ride?’ The taxi driver popped his head out of the window. ‘Are you all right, man? Do you need me to take you to hospital?’

‘Oh, no, I am all right’, Yves mumbled. ‘But yes, please, we desperately need a ride.’ They both got in and he leant forward to give the taxi driver instructions, keeping one arm round Eleni’s shoulders.

‘How are we going to pay?’ she whispered to him once the taxi set off. ’I have no money on me.’

‘Don’t worry, I will sort it out’, he reassured her, while still visibly trying to find his bearings. He held her and kept her tight by his side. ‘Je suis desolé’, he kept saying to her. She felt like giving him something, she didn’t know what. She kept kissing him on the mouth as she squeezed into his side during the twenty-minute ride home. She was not sure, in the darkness of the taxi’s back seat, if it was saliva, tears or blood that found its way into her mouth.

***

It was 6.10 a.m. Eleni was lying in her narrow single bed, now in her pyjamas, not having bothered to cover herself with the duvet, although she was shaking all over. With the curtains drawn back as she had left them the day before, she saw the sun rising and breaking through light white cloud. Nicolas should be here any minute now. They had just about settled into coupledom, settled into seeing s*x not as novel and exciting and something to experiment with, but as an expression of the intimacy they felt with each other. It was not long ago that her body had finally got used to his, and she was looking forward to the familiar routine and the exciting pleasure of their union. How had she managed to break all this in three hours? She did not believe that it would feel the same ever again.