‘This proves what they say about French culture,’ Marsha said.
‘What’s that?’
‘That half of it is cul.’
Luckily, I was able to laugh at her linguistic joke. Cul, the French word for arse, is also a slang term for sex. It was a word I’d learnt early on, when someone explained to me that I was mispronouncing ‘merci beaucoup’ as ‘merci beau cul’.
In one corner of the studio, an ugly man of about fifty, in a creased black shirt and white silk scarf, was holding court before a gaggle of admirers. The artist, I guessed. I just hoped he’d be keeping his trousers on for the evening.
‘“The artist masturbated every day for a year and got a woman to take a photo of each orgasm. Fifty-two women, one per week of masturbation,” ’ Marsha read from her booklet. ‘ “If a brothel had fifty-two prostitutes, servicing seven clients per day, each one would have to experience 2,555 orgasms per year, a total of 132,860 orgasms. The artist’s aim during his residency at the One Two Two is to produce 2,555 photos.” ’
‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but what a wanker.’
‘He won a prize,’ Marsha said. ‘The Prix Guy Étalon, a very respected art prize in France.’
Hang on, I thought, I know that name. Marie-Dominique had mentioned it. Yes, that was it. Her new artists’ residence was going to be named after him. Who, I asked Marsha, was this Étalon guy?
‘He was a French performance artist. Big in the nineteen seventies and eighties,’ she explained. ‘He disappeared for a while, then got himself arrested outside the American Embassy in Paris during the Iraq War for pulling a Stars and Stripes out of his butt. He’d stuffed it up there, a whole square metre of silk. He went to the Embassy gate, dropped his trousers and pulled it out. There was a big scandal in France. He died of a ruptured colon while he was under arrest inside the Embassy, and later he won a posthumous medal as if he’d fallen in battle. Légion d’Honneur or something. The Americans kicked up a fuss. They said giving him a medal proved that France regarded them as enemies at war. You seriously never heard about all that?’
I admitted I hadn’t. People pulling things out of their backside isn’t my kind of art. I tend to draw the line at sawn-in-half cows. He had given me an idea, though.
‘If you want to create a buzz about your bookshop,’ I said, ‘maybe you ought to set up a book prize. Publish a shortlist and then have an awards ceremony. Could be great publicity.’
‘Yeah,’ Marsha agreed, her nose almost pressed against one of the hideous photos. ‘Worth thinking about. Shall we get out of here before I decide I never want to see one of these things ever again?’ She gestured towards a pink scrotum. ‘God, it all reminds me too much of Jake’s poems.’
I took her hand and steered her through the crush. We’d just escaped from the penis room when I was surprised to see Amandine walk up and grab Marsha. Marsha screamed with delight and they kissed each other madly on the cheeks.
They noticed me staring.
‘Paul? You know—?’ they said simultaneously, and started laughing.
Marsha explained that Amandine had done a stage – an internship – as her assistant when she was working for a magazine a few months earlier. In a previous life, Marsha had been a culture writer at an American fashion mag, apparently. I felt guilty about not finding this out before. It was only while they caught up on each other’s news that I remembered I was angry with Amandine.
‘Her boss wants to turn my tea room into an American diner,’ I told Marsha. ‘And you agree with him, don’t you, Amandine?’
I stared at her accusingly, my glare tempered only slightly because she was looking even hotter than when I’d seen her in her work outfit. Her hair was loose, her blouse tight, and her skirt would have made Jean-Marie faint.
‘Don’t you think a diner is a good idea?’ she asked me.
Her question deflated me a little. I’d had time to think about it, and had come to the conclusion that, in fact, a diner was a bit of a brainwave – as long as it wasn’t in my tea room.
‘Diners are hip,’ Amandine went on. ‘Much hipper than ordinary, old-fashioned cafés.’
Unfortunately, I agreed with this, too. Traditional Parisian cafés all had the same furniture – those heavy marble-top tables and uncomfortable fake-wickerwork chairs that pick holes in your trouser seat. What made things worse was that a Coke was often twice the price of a glass of wine, and half the waiters were manic-depressives. Young Parisians were boycotting them in droves.
‘There was a survey,’ Amandine said, ‘and people said they were bored with café au lait, wine and bad sandwiches.’ With a click of her fingers, she dismissed everything that tourists have loved about Paris for the past century or more.
‘But the tea room isn’t boring. People love it,’ I said. ‘I love it, too. There’s no way I’m going to let Jean-Marie close it. And anyway, he can’t do anything without consulting me.’
Amandine laughed. ‘You know him. He doesn’t consult people when he wants to do something.’ She gave us a look that made it all too clear she wasn’t only talking about business.
‘Hey, you two have obviously got lots to discuss,’ Marsha said. ‘Maybe I’ll leave you to it?’
‘No, I was just going,’ Amandine said. ‘To a party. You want to come?’ She directed her question at Marsha, but I thought it diplomatic to answer.
‘Let’s stay here,’ I said to Marsha. ‘We can have a look at some more porn and then have a dance, if it is actually music and not just ear art.’
‘OK.’ Marsha looked pleased that I’d chosen to spend some exclusive time with her.
‘You don’t necessarily have to tell Jean-Marie what I said about the tea room,’ I told Amandine.
‘Don’t worry. I’ve forgotten our conversation already,’ she said. ‘When I’m out of the office, I prefer to imagine that he doesn’t even exist.’
Marsha and I spent less than ten seconds in the third artist’s studio. One glimpse of a six-foot-square Expressionist close-up of a vagina was enough for both of us. We pushed our way downstairs, grabbed some more plastic beakers and sloshed them across the room towards the DJ, who was starting to pump out some danceable music instead of the fractured squeaks and heart-attack beats he’d been playing before. Marsha and I danced, drank, danced some more, then kissed and forgot everyone else in the whole heaving building. I noticed the dominatrix staring at me, and at one point I thought I saw Alexa out of the corner of my eye, but I decided not to pay them any attention. And in any case, Marsha was suggesting that it was time to get a taxi to her place.
IV
In my experience, it’s never a good idea to confuse sex with sport. There are, for example, men who get more aroused by a football match than they do by their wives and girlfriends. A woman could leap naked into some guys’ laps during a televised game, and they’d ask if she’d brought a can of beer. With Marsha, it was slightly different. She seemed to think that sex itself was a competitive sport, somewhere between rodeo and synchronised swimming. Every now and again, a leg would suddenly appear over my shoulder or her head would pop up in some improbable place. I almost wished I’d worn a helmet as well as a condom.
And all the time she was chanting yes, yes, yes (or rather yis, yis, yis because of her accent), like an Olympic coach ticking off pre-prepared manoeuvres. I was the team member who didn’t know the routine.
I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but it was all a bit depressing. It involved less love than a game of tennis. Rather than being the physical melding of two souls, it was a bout, and I was the one who was knocked out at the end of it.
Afterwards, as Marsha lay on her stomach, breathing heavily into a pillow, I wondered if she was going to ask me to check the stopwatch to see if we’d broken any endurance records. Instead, she smiled over at me and said, ‘Six.’
So it was synchronised swimming, and she was giving me a mark out of ten. I wondered if it was for artistic impression or technical difficulty. Then I twigge
d. She was saying ‘sex’, presumably to remind herself that what we’d just done had been more than mere gymnastics.
‘Sex,’ she repeated, turning over to look me in the eye. ‘It’s what separates humans from animals, isn’t it?’
Now, normally I am willing to agree with whatever a woman says after we’ve made love. But in this case there was no such harmonious afterglow.
‘Animals have sex,’ I objected. ‘All of them. Even slugs have sex.’
‘Not good sex.’
‘Chimps have frequent sex with as many different chimps as possible,’ I said, ‘and some people think that’s what good sex is.’
‘OK, well argued, Paul, but you know what I mean. Animals don’t make an art form of it.’ (Or a medal-winning sport, I thought.) ‘It doesn’t inspire them to write novels and poems.’
‘No, but apparently, if you gave an infinite number of chimps a typewriter, one of them would end up writing Lady Chatterley’s Lover. After they’d all finished having sex with each other, of course, which could take a long time given that there’s an infinite number of them.’
She laughed, and rolled over to kiss me and shut me up. The first time we’d kissed properly since diving on to her bed. This was more like it, I thought.
‘I don’t think there are any animals that kiss,’ I said. (There are female insects that give fatal love bites, of course, but I wasn’t going to raise that dangerous subject.) ‘And as it happens, kissing is one of my favourite activities.’ I moved in for a smooch.
‘No time,’ she said, speaking directly into my mouth.
‘What?’
‘My friend Philippa said she could get me into La Night, you know, that new club in the Ninth?’
‘You want to go out to a club?’
‘Yeah.’ She had already leapt off the bed and was pulling on a glittery T-shirt.
‘And you just thought of that now?’
‘Yes. Don’t you find that sex helps you think? It also occurred to me that that book prize you talked about ought to be a competition. You know, like, more of an event? A talent contest, maybe.’
‘Oh right, so when you were saying, “Yes, yes, yes,” you were just running through your to-do list?’
‘No,’ she laughed, wriggling now into a pair of tiny denim shorts. ‘Thinking doesn’t stop me enjoying the sex. Honestly, you guys are so sensitive. Come on, Paul, take me clubbing. You like these shorts?’
Using the plural seemed rather generous, but I nodded approvingly.
‘OK, so get dressed, fill me with champagne and then we can come back and you can pull the shorts off.’
Which, on balance, didn’t sound like too bad an offer.
Quatre
‘J’ai libéré Paris une fois. Faudra-t-il que je le refasse?’
I liberated Paris once – do I have to do it again?
Charles de Gaulle, on hearing that the first hamburger restaurant had opened in Paris
I
THE NEXT MORNING, when I woke up, my first impression was a mixed one. I was happy to be where I was (that is, not on Jake’s too-short, creaky, possible health-risk sofa bed), but slightly worried about what would happen when I opened my eyes. Marsha was definitely one of the sexiest women I’d ever met, but I wondered about waking up with someone who thought the mating game was more about the game than the mating. To put it bluntly, I felt like one of Jake’s conquests. I was afraid Marsha would be staring at me, trying to work out how to explain politely that she didn’t want me to stay for breakfast.
So I was a bit nervous about turning over for that first morning-after eye contact. And then confused when I realised that, in fact, there were no eyes to make contact with.
On the pillow was a sheet of paper with a squiggled sketch of a naked female body and a large message: ‘Call me NOW!’
I eventually found my phone in my jeans, which had ended up draped over a shelf of tall art books and battered volumes of classic French literature, and I’d just got back under the duvet to make the call when my phone began buzzing.
‘Oh merde.’ It wasn’t Marsha, it was Jake. Against my better judgement, I answered.
‘Bonjour, man. So did you do the deal with her?’ he demanded.
‘Bloody hell, Jake.’ I shouldn’t have been surprised. Jake is not one of life’s natural romantics. I once heard him talking to a girl he was supposedly dating. She was fishing for compliments, as Parisian women often do, and she said, ‘I’m so scared that you’ll open your eyes and decide that I’m really not that good looking at all.’ And Jake replied, ‘No danger, the lighting in this place is so low I can hardly see you.’
‘Alors, did you do the deal?’ he repeated.
‘You mean did we shag? Yes, if you must know. But if you mean am I going to stay in her rent-free apartment, then I’m not so sure.’
‘No, I mean, will she publish my poems?’
‘Oh. We didn’t talk about that.’
‘But you have promised me, man.’
I should have told him to bugger off and call back when I’d had some coffee, but suddenly I felt sorry for the guy. He sounded so desperate.
‘Well, we did come up with one promising idea. She’s thinking of holding a contest, a literary talent contest, with the winner getting a publishing contract. You could enter that.’
‘Oui, formidable, man. Free expression. Tell her I’m a candidate.’
‘OK,’ I agreed, feeling a sudden sense of divided loyalties. Maybe I ought to warn Marsha not to run her competition, or even open a bookstore. Make it a flower shop or a boulangerie, I’d tell her. It might be safer.
Marsha was in fine form when I eventually phoned her. She was at the shop with Mitzi and Connie, and fired up about her opening party.
‘You will be a judge, Paul, right?’ she said. No argument possible. ‘You, me and Amandine voting for our favourite Parisian poets. It’s going to be a blast. Hey, you still in bed?’
‘Yes,’ I confessed.
‘Naked?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you wait there, like, an hour, hour and a half? I want to come and jump on you.’
‘Oh no, I’ve got to go to the Ministry of Culture, dammit.’
‘You sure? You don’t know what you’re missing. Well, yes you do. So why don’t you tell the Ministry to fuck off and stay in bed so I can fuck you?’
‘It’s incredibly tempting, Marsha, but I can’t. I really need this job.’
After we rang off, I had to go to the bathroom to stare in the mirror and make sure that it had actually been me talking. Truth was, I didn’t have to go to the Ministry at all, not straight away, anyway. And it wasn’t like me to lie my way out of sex, especially with someone so beautiful. I didn’t understand it.
II
After a long, hot shower at Marsha’s place – I could definitely relate to one or two aspects of Jake’s ‘find a girl and move in with her’ policy – I headed back up to the 18th. I found the front door of his building wedged open, and a note taped to the wall saying that the digicode was broken. It wasn’t surprising. The keypad was ancient, and the five plastic buttons that made up the code had been used so often that you had to jab at each number with your thumb as if you were trying to punch a hole in the wall.
It was symptomatic of the run-down state of the building, which had seen much better days. It was an elegantly designed six-storey apartment house built, according to an inscription carved into the façade beside the main door, by a certain ‘P. Couderc, architecte’, in 1886, at a time when both Monsieur Couderc and the landowner probably thought that the whole of Paris would become a stylish network of boulevards populated by men doffing their top hats to ladies with parasols. No one could have dreamt that some of those boulevards would one day become semi-permanent traffic jams of honking delivery vans, and that the ground-floor boutiques would be taken over by phone shops with booths rented out by the minute to poor people trying to stay in touch with their families halfway across the world.
>
In Paris, you often see a posh apartment house in the most surprising neighbourhood – a sudden outbreak of Art Nouveau in a street of plain concrete, brick and plaster. Jake’s building had never been quite that stylish, but the entrance hall had some nice nineteenth-century touches: a chessboard marble floor (much battered now, with broken tiles replaced by grossly mismatching colours); an arched ceiling with the remains of a heavy brass light fitting that had probably supported a chandelier before it was replaced by a stainless-steel lamp; and a flirtatiously curved wooden banister rail leading to the upper floors. The concierge’s loge had long ago been turned into the dustbin cupboard, which some of the tenants treated as one big landfill. The concierge herself had been exchanged for a cleaning company, whose overalled employees came in once a week to hose down the hall and landings with a nostril-searing solution of bleach and lavender oil. Once a month they also turned the wooden stairs into miniature ice rinks, so that on polishing days you had to clamber upstairs with both hands on the banisters, your feet shooting about in all directions like a cow trying to stand up on a frozen pond.
Anyway, at some point, the owners must have voted to upgrade one part of the building: the letterboxes. Painted red and cream, they stood out in the dingy entrance hall like a Monet oil painting hanging in a bus shelter. And they were veritable wall safes. The only way to steal a letter would have been to chisel out the whole block and take it away to dynamite it open. The effect was spoiled slightly by the layers of paper labels stuck over the name tabs, as tenants came and went, but it felt good to know that, if ever I did ski down six flights of stairs and fracture my skull on the broken tiles, at least the refund for my medical expenses would sit safely in my letterbox until I was well enough to collect it.
Jake had given me the key to his box, and this morning, in amongst a nearby supermarket’s offer of twelve litres of sterilised milk for the price of six, and an estate agent’s note saying that he would help me to sell an apartment I didn’t own, were three important envelopes.