(2012) Paris Trance Read online

  Yes, he could go back to England – and it was that phrase that made him stay. Going back to England: it was difficult to think of four words more redolent of defeat because what they actually meant was going back to living so deeply within his limitations he would not even be aware that they were limitations: they would pass themselves off as contentment. Not that he had ever felt content in England, more like a perpetual rumbling of discontent . . . And yet, at the same time, he thought constantly about going back to England. Returning was a tormenting possibility, simultaneously to be resisted and to draw strength from. How comforting to have been forced into total exile, forbidden to return on pain of death. To know that there was no choice but to begin a new life, to learn a new language, to start over definitively and construct a mythic, idealised vision of the homeland that could never be challenged or undermined by experience.

  The weeks passed and Luke stayed in Paris. More exactly, for the experience expressed itself negatively, he kept not going back to England. He stayed by increments, in exactly the same way that, until a few months previously, he had kept up a programme of boring weight training. He’d hated it, hated turning up at the gym and going through the funless routine of warming up, reps, and warming down. He’d known that at some time in the future he would give up but had forced himself to keep going in order to postpone the day when he would give up. He remained in Paris – where he made no attempt to join a gym – in the same way: putting off his return on a weekly, sometimes daily basis. In this way, although he was not happy, he was able to hold out for happiness, for the happiness promised by the city.

  His knowledge of which expanded daily. Crucially, he discovered the 29 bus which ran from the Gare Saint Lazare to Montempoivre. Though impressive, the route itself – past the Opéra and the Pompidou Centre, through the Marais and round the Bastille – was less important than the design of the bus: a small balcony meant that a handful of passengers could stand at the back and watch the life of the city unfurl like a film. Luke often rode the 29 from terminus to terminus, glimpsing hundreds of little incidents whose origins (he could only see what lay behind) or consequences (the bus, in this traffic-free month, moved swiftly on) were revealed only rarely. Under the influence of Alain Tanner’s In the White City (which he had seen a few weeks earlier) Luke formed the idea of making a film comprising super-8 footage shot from the back of the 29. He would call it Route 29. All he needed was a camera and a Carte Orange.

  In the meantime he received an unexpected, very welcome phone call. Andrew, the one person he (vaguely) knew who was in the city for the summer, invited him to a party. A party! This, he was sure, would prove a turning-point.

  He spent a long time in the shower, shaved carefully, chose his clothes carefully, checked to see that he had a pen and paper – for phone numbers – and set off early to catch the Métro and arrive at the party in good time. He had walked down the stairs from his apartment and was out in the street when he realized he had forgotten the condoms that he had bought weeks earlier, in London. He walked back up, unlocked the door, put the packet in his pocket and set off again.

  The party was in the courtyard of a house in the south of the city. Andrew welcomed him and was immediately called away to the phone. Luke scanned the women and felt immediately deflated: no one caught his eye. Nothing about his life was more depressing than the way variants of that phrase – catching his eye, catching her eye – had come to occupy a position of such prominence in it. He stood drinking. After half an hour he spotted a woman he had not seen before. She looked Brazilian, was wearing a brightly patterned dress, orange mainly. He looked for Andrew, hoping he could introduce them, but the host was nowhere to be seen. Luke manoeuvred so that he was close to her but she was cordoned off by the two men she was talking with. He was unsure what to do next: talk to someone in the vicinity and have his freedom of movement restricted, or stand on his own, feeling conspicuous, awkward and alone, but ready to move when the chance arose to introduce himself to her. He compromised in the worst possible way, by talking to another English guy who was also standing on his own: a young banker who was just beginning a six-month stint in the city. Together they gave off a double helping of solitude. One of the men talking to the Brazilian woman went to get a drink. The other was briefly distracted by an Italian in an improbable cravat. Luke abandoned his new friend and stepped in front of the Brazilian without having any idea of what he was going to say. Opting for boldness he offered her his hand and introduced himself. Somewhat startled she shook his hand and said her name, which Luke did not catch.

  ‘Are you Brazilian?’ he said in English.

  ‘I’m Italian.’

  ‘Ah, Italian.’

  ‘What about you? Are you Brazilian?’

  ‘Me, no . . . Though I am a great fan of that Brazilian drink: caipirinha.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ she said, exactly like the man on the ferry. On this occasion Luke prolonged their non-exchange for a couple more minutes until, the instant a pause afforded her the opportunity, she excused herself and moved away.

  After that encounter he felt that he was treated suspiciously by the other guests, as if they regarded him as the most pitiful of individuals: a loser on the make. Already slightly drunk he made his way to the kitchen to get another beer. Going to a party to pick up women demanded a single-mindedness of purpose that he didn’t have. He relaxed, drank, talked to anyone who came his way, indiscriminately. It was easier like that, and far more enjoyable. On his way to the toilet he saw the Italian-Brazilian woman again, chatting in Spanish or Portuguese to a man with chubby fair hair and a baggy suit.

  In the toilet Luke reminded himself that this party was his one chance of the summer, there would not be another like it, and admonished himself to pursue his original intention. Within minutes of coming out of the toilet his resolve had collapsed. It was futile, this self-inflicted ruthlessness. He thought about leaving and then forced himself to stay, hoping crazily that he would be able to get the phone number of the woman he had talked to earlier. One look at her told him it was impossible: she was laughing with the man in the baggy suit, liking him, and he was leaning against the wall in a way that suggested they were already on the outskirts of a kiss.

  Luke left the party and walked to the Métro. The station was closing, the last train had left moments before. He began walking home. It had been his chance, the party, and he had blown it. In spite of this he felt happy to be walking, relieved to be free of the tension generated by impotent prowling. He knew that in the morning he would wake up feeling abject but now, as he walked past benches and parked cars, as he saw the yellow lights of traffic coming towards him, as he passed couples walking home and old men walking their dogs, he did not feel unhappy. There were lighted bars and late open shops on each side of the street. He would stop and have a beer before he went to bed but he wanted to get near home first. He headed north, feeling neither tired nor depressed. His fingers touched the packet of condoms in his pocket. They reminded him of an evening when he had bought tickets for a concert and then, due to a catalogue of mishaps, had failed to get there. He was still miles away when the concert was due to begin. When he realized he would not make it he had thought, calmly, that it didn’t really matter because in two hours the concert would be over and everything would be the same anyway, whether he had been there or not. Ultimately, it was futile, self-defeating, this logic of negative consolation, but it was difficult to be depressed while walking. He passed another Métro station and found, to his surprise, that this line was still running. Within seconds the last train arrived. As soon as it left the station the train pulled above ground. Suddenly the train was passing over the Seine and there was a perfect view of the Eiffel Tower, its reflection lying on the water like a pier. Everyone in the train was looking across at the Tower and Luke felt his relief turning to elation.

  It had been years since he had felt as wretched as he had at the party, as he had on afternoons in the Tuileries. He could not remem
ber a time when he had felt so lonely, lost, but that isolation had now been redeemed by a simple Métro journey. The two sensations, the two states, were linked, dependent. You could not experience one without the other. He looked at the lighted windows, hoping to see a woman undressing or combing her hair in front of a dresser. He saw nothing like this but he was happy. No day was uniformly terrible. Even the worst days had moments of relative happiness. And if there were not these moments of happiness then there was always something to look forward to in the coming day. There may not be anything to get up for but there was always this urge to wake up. Like this, life went on, tolerable and intolerable, bearable and unbearable, slipping between these extremes. It was not a question of hope, it was part of the rhythm of the day, of the body. And it was part of this rhythm that tomorrow he would wake up with desolation lying over him like a thin blanket, would try to remain asleep a little longer, wanting to put off the claims of the day, to prolong the comforting sense of not yet being quite alive. But there might be a letter in the mail box and that would be enough to get him out of bed . . .

  As he got off the train and stepped up into the street he was already looking forward to checking his mail, to buying a paper and ordering coffee, to sitting in the same chair he always sat in, the chair he was heading for now, where he would have one drink before going back to the sad apartment, where he would undress, splash water on his face, and climb in his bed to sleep.

  The body has its own economy. Faced with extreme sexual recession Luke’s lust gradually diminished until, by the time of his birthday on 20 August, it had all but vanished. By then he had become sufficiently accustomed to loneliness that an absolute lack of birthday cards did not seem particularly demoralising. He spent the morning checking his mail box; in the afternoon he walked over to Invalides where football matches – kick-arounds, really – allegedly took place on Saturdays. The Esplanade was occupied by the usual assortment of sitters, readers and sleepers and it seemed unlikely that any kind of game ever took place on these traffic-surrounded squares of grass. He returned home, checked his mail and took a nap.

  In the evening he went to see Brief Encounter. It was a tradition: on his birthday he always saw Brief Encounter in one form or another. Usually he had to settle for video; seeing it on the big screen – albeit a tiny big screen – was enough of a treat to compensate for the fact that he was spending his birthday alone. He loved everything about the film: Milford Junction, the boring hubby with his crossword in the Times and The Oxford Book of English Verse, the woman with ‘the refined voice’ who works at the station buffet, the irritating Dolly who gabbles away and blights Laura and Alec’s final moments together. He loved it because it was a film in which people went to the cinema, and because it was a film about trains. Most of all he loved Celia Johnson, her hats, her face, her cracked porcelain voice: ‘This can’t last. This misery can’t last. Nothing lasts really, neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts long . . . There’ll come a time in the future when I shan’t mind about this any more . . .’ What Luke loved more than anything, though, was Trevor Howard’s final ‘Goodbye’: the way he managed to strangle his whole life into that farewell (‘no one could have guessed what he was really feeling’), to make that last syllable weep tears of blood.

  After the film he walked across the Pont des Arts where four friends – two men, two women, French-speaking, younger than Luke – had prepared a lavish candle-lit dinner on one of the picnic tables. A lemon-segment moon hung in the blue-dark sky, glowed faintly in the river. The young people at the table were drinking wine from glasses, laughing, and when Luke had passed by he heard them singing: ‘Bon anniversaire, bon anniversaire . . .’

  Luke drank a beer over the zinc at a café. A sign behind the bar read ‘Ernest Hemingway did not drink here’. Then he went to the Hollywood Canteen, a burger place where you could sit at the bar and not feel – as you did in restaurants – like you were eating conspicuously alone. The burgers were named after Hollywood stars. Luke ordered a Gary Cooper, fries and a beer. The burger, when it arrived, tasted weird, not like beef at all. He mentioned it to the guy serving.

  ‘Mais c’est pas du boeuf, monsieur. C’est de la dinde.’

  ‘Dinde? Qu’est-ce que c’est?’ said Luke falteringly.

  ‘Turkey,’ said the grinning barman. ‘Turkey.’

  And in this way, Luke’s first summer out of England – and his twenty-seventh birthday – passed.

  It is impossible, obviously, to believe that anyone’s life is predestined – but who knows what is programmed into an individual’s chromosomes, into their DNA? Perhaps each of us, irrespective of class and other variables, is born with a propensity towards a certain kind of living. Each of us has a code which, in the right conditions, will be able to make itself utterly apparent; if an individual’s circumstances are far removed or totally at odds with that initial biological programming, it may hardly be able to make itself felt circumstantially – but all life long that individual will feel the undertow, the tug of a destiny rooted in biology, urging him, only slightly perhaps, away from the life he has. The dissatisfaction and pointlessness that a rich and successful man feels on contemplating all that he has achieved in life is perhaps the faint echo of an initial code that he has thwarted, evaded, but can never quite silence. But a certain way of life will enable you to get closer to that initial blurred blueprint. Perhaps this is what it means to live in truth, even a disappointed truth.

  In September the city began coming back to life. Traffic and noise increased. Delivery trucks blocked the streets. Tanned women hurried to work. Restaurants opened. Office workers returned to their favourite bistros and Luke returned to Invalides where a couple of games of six- or seven-a-side were in progress. He sat behind one of the goals and watched, gauging the standard of play, checking to see he wasn’t going to be helplessly out of his depth. He asked the young Algerian who was keeping goal if he could join in. After some discussion among the older players Luke was granted permission to play on the opposing side. Many of the players were extremely skilful and apart from an ongoing skirmish between a couple of Senegalese the game was played in just the right spirit: competitive without being aggressive. The fact that the ball bounced into traffic every five minutes – and threatened, on each occasion, to cause a three- or four-car pile-up – was an added attraction. Luke concentrated on not making mistakes and learning the names of his team-mates. A few called out his name but most settled for ‘Monsieur, monsieur!’ or ‘Monsieur l’anglais!’ It didn’t matter. Once he had made a couple of tackles, headed the ball and, crucially, hit the ball into the path of a passing BMW, Luke felt quite at home. After only half an hour, unfortunately, the police came and brought the game to an end.

  ‘C’est chaque semaine la même merde,’ Said, the little goal-keeper, explained. ‘On joue ici et puis les keufs se pointent et nous embarquent, ces bâtards!’

  Luke said goodbye to his team-mates, some of whom waved back or shook hands or smiled and called out ‘À la prochaine.’ He walked home happier than he had been at any moment since arriving in Paris: for the duration of the game and the brief interlude after it had ended, as they gathered up their belongings and pulled on jeans and changed shoes, he’d had friends – from Algeria, Africa, Poland and France.

  Back home he got a call from an English friend, Miles, who had lived in Paris for ten years. He had been away all summer, he said, was glad to hear that Luke was in town. He invited Luke to dinner on Monday, the first such invitation he had received in almost two months.

  Miles lived in the Eleventh, a part of the city Luke had never visited before. He turned up half an hour early so that he could explore a little – and decided immediately that this was where he wanted to live.

  ‘You’ll be lucky,’ said Miles, opening another bottle of wine (he was finishing off the first as Luke stepped through the door). Ten years ago, when he and Renée, his wife, had moved here there had been nothing. They had bought this p
lace because they needed space for their kids and this was the only part of central Paris they could afford. It was a neglected working-class area but in the last five years it had begun to change. Following the well-established trajectory of neighbourhood-enhancement the world over, artists had moved in, a few galleries had opened, then bars, clubs, restaurants, more expensive galleries, more bars, more clubs. Rents were going up. As befitted a man who had anticipated a trend Miles explained this dismissively, contemptuously, even though these developments – for which he was partly responsible – suited him nicely. He was fifty, the father of two children. He had lived in Afghanistan and claimed to have slept with his sister even though, as far as Luke recalled, he had no sister. He lived on red wine, cigarettes, coffee. He drank beer like water, to clean out his system. Food wasn’t important to him. Mainly he ate omelettes. Luke had met him in London but had not seen him for two years. If he looked only slightly worse now that was because he had long ago achieved the look of definitive decrepitude that would last him a lifetime. Luke had assumed that Renée would be around, but there was no sign of her or the kids. Come to that, there was no sign of dinner.

  ‘They’re off at something at the school,’ said Miles. ‘Some loony play or other. Would you like another drink, Luke?’ It was one of those houses, Luke realized, which relied on its own internally generated chaos to function happily.

  ‘Are we thinking of eating something?’ said Luke.

  ‘How about an omelette? Would you like an omelette?’

  ‘Perfect.’

  And what an omelette it was: an egg base with everything in the fridge thrown on top, in no particular order (the onions went in last, as an afterthought) with the flame turned permanently to maximum. Miles was a messy chef. In the process of cracking the eggs he smashed the cup he was banging them into. By the time they sat down to eat, the cooker, work surfaces and floor were awash with debris.