Empire of Light (13 page)

Still gripping my hand, she begins to lead me away from the Caravaggio, looking at it with disgust before turning away.

“I’ve never liked that painting.”

Before I can get into why she’s doggin’ my boy’s work, she drops the bomb on me.

“Let’s duck into the men’s room and you can try your best to warm me up.”

I laugh, until I notice that the crazy bitch is really dragging me towards the men’s room.

I snatch my hand away.

“Whoa!”

“What?”

“What are you, lit? You can’t be serious!”

“Absolutely, I am.”

“Don’t they have security and shit around here?”

“Well, yeah. The Mona Lisa is right
there
,” she says sarcastically. “Of course there’s security. This place is
lousy
with security. But they tend to keep cameras out of toilet stalls. Can’t get around that nasty right to privacy thing. Come on, cowboy! Are you game for some adventure or not?”

“Absolutely. But—”

“But what?”

“I’m kind of on a budget here. I didn’t have a line item for getting my rocks off in the Louvre toilet stall.”

“No worries, big spender. It’s a freebie. Welcome to Paris.”

She grabs my hand again, but I stand my ground.

I’m just not buying into this. Of all the eligible hipsters currently beating the pavement in Paris, why is she going after some idiot in a piss-yellow Old Navy jacket?

“What the hell, man?” she demands. “You come all the way here to Paris and a pretty French girl asks you to screw her in a men’s room stall in the Louvre, and you pull away? What? You’re holding out for something better to do with your hour?”

Ok, I have to laugh at that.

“No! Look. I’ve only been in this town for a day and I’ve already had the Eiffel Tower police haul me off an elevator at gunpoint! So maybe you could cut me a little slack, here?”

“Oh, like you’ve never been harassed by cops before.”

“No. I haven’t, as a matter of fact.”

“Christ. Another bourgeois American black kid. Don’t you people live in ghettos anymore? So maybe you have friends that have been harassed by cops?”

“Yeah.”

“Your friends were harassed by
local
law enforcement. But you, you bust your cherry under the Eiffel Tower, in Paris, by elite French military guards. How cool is that? You’re gonna get a free beer out of that story.”

You know, my grandfather Haywood always said that when it comes to putting things in their proper perspective, there’s absolutely nothing like a wet Paris whore.

“Look,” she says quietly. “As you can see, I have not had a good day. It’s absolutely the worst, as a matter of fact. Some short-dicked asshole tries to drown me, then I walk around the city, watching all of these couples enjoying it like I never have. Let’s do each other a favor, Jason. I’ll give you one more incredible Paris story to tell your friends back home, and all you have to do is give me your heart for an hour. Let me see this city the way those couples see it.”

“And screwing in the Louvre toilet is what you think most couples do?”

“It’s what most couples would
like
to do, were they not so scared. It’s what I’d do if I had a boyfriend,” she says looking down at her shoes, third time my count. She grinds the ball of her left foot into the parquet floor, squishing water up and out of the porous canvas sneaker.

Goddamn it. She’s probably suckering me. I’m going to follow her into the bathroom where some effeminate goon named Gaston is waiting to beat the hell out of me with his engraved mahogany walking stick.

“I’m tired of being scared, too,” I respond.

“Fearless,” she says quietly before kissing me and dragging me into the bathroom.

It’s off-season, so the joint is dead empty.

Thank God.

We head to the very last stall, push through the door, close it and lock it. Without a word we both begin to strip like newly weds. She peels her wet jeans away from her legs and throws them on the floor, inundated with water they hit the ground with a SMACK! I sit on the toilet and she straddles me. As I enter her she exhales slowly, breathing into my mouth. Her breath is oddly cold, but not strange enough for me to stop getting down with this babe.

“
Ti voglio bene,” 
I whisper to her.

She stops moving.

“
Ti voglio bene,” 
I repeat.

The Italians have this phrase,
Ti voglio bene
, which literally translates,
I want you good.
The true meaning of the phrase hardly translates directly into English. If you ask a dozen Italians from different regions and various ages, you’ll get a dozen different variations.

I care for you.

I’m fond of you.

I want you to be well.

I want to have you.

I’ve always loved the phrase because it seems to encompass so much. I always imagined that in the right situation it could mean a dozen things all at once.

What makes me think this girl knows Italian?

Well, she is in the service industry, right? Working in an international city like Paris, she’s probably had to entertain an Italian or two. And excuse me, but if the bitch knows, “Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner,” then it’s a good bet that she’s familiar with,
“Ti voglio bene.”

That’s my logic and I’m sticking to it.

She grabs my head and looks me squarely in the eyes.

“What did you say?” she whispers.

“
Ti voglio bene?”

Is she crying?

Shit! She’s crying. Oh, now that’s just great! What can of worms did I just open? Now I have to sit on this damn toilet, limp dicked, as this chick straddles my lap and lays some sob story on me about how
Fabrizio
broke her heart at a goddamn Cold Play concert.

“
Anche, ti voglio bene.”

What?

“
Anche, ti voglio bene,” 
she repeats.
“Tantissimo.”
She presses her lips to mine.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I like to pull victory from out of my ass.

We finally exit the stall after, to my surprise, some pretty romantic love making, and we find a little boy standing there, staring at us as if he heard every damn thing.

The kid looks disturbed, down right demonic, if you ask me.

“
Je vais dire maman que tu es ici!” 
he screams in French.

“
Fiche le camp!” 
Annette screams back at him, her arm cocked and ready to backhand the little brat.

I have no idea what she said, but the kid runs out of the restroom like his hair is on fire.

“So, maybe we shouldn’t walk out together,” she says as she fixes her hair in the mirror.

“Yeah, you go first.”

“I have to pee like a race horse,” she responds.

Charming.

“Okay, I’ll go first. You want to grab a bite?” I ask a bit too eagerly.

“Well, you have to get to the airport, right?”

“Maybe you can go with me? We can spend some more time together on the train.”

“Sounds good, but can I please use the bathroom first? I swear my eyeballs are swimming in piss.”

“Is it any wonder why I like you so much?”

She gives me a peck on the lips before dashing back into the stall. I exit the restroom, careful not to look too guilty or too happy.

I walk back over to the Caravaggio and wait.

And wait.

And wait some more.

Jesus, what is it with dames and bathrooms? I better poke my head in there and see what the hell is up.

Empty.

She’s nowhere to be found. The only evidence she was there is the puddle of water from her soaking wet jeans. How the hell did I miss her sneak out of here?

For a moment, I actually felt like we had some sort of connection, or something. Playing house. Whatever. She got what she wanted. Good for her. Damn it.

By the time I reach the gift shop, I’m already trying to get over it. I pick up a
Death of a Virgin
postcard, drop it on the cashier’s counter and dig into my pocket for some euros.

“This painting always makes me so sad,” says the cashier looking at my card.

I must have an American flag tattooed on my head. She hit me with English at first sight.

“It’s no Lichtenstein, right?” I don’t feel like talking about this painting, but I’m not the type to tell this nice lady to keep her mouth shut.

“I guess it’s the story behind the model for Mary that makes me sad, really. You know, Caravaggio used a real corpse?”

“I didn’t know that,” I say as I count out the correct change.

“Yep. A drowned prostitute. It’s odd that we should be talking about this. There was a drowning in the Medici Fountain just last night. Some creep killed a prostitute, probably a client. Poor girl’s life cut so short. Same age as my daughter. Twenty-one years old…”

I stand there barely hearing the cashier babbling on about her kid. I feel my chest cavity go cold, and I try to wrap my head around what this all could possibly mean.

“You just hope that at twenty-one years, just once, at least once, she felt a sincere touch before leaving this Earth. No?”

And with that, the coldness in my chest leaves me.

“Absolutely.”

***

Searching the web on a smart phone while traveling outside the states is like feeding benjamins to a shredder. When I get home, my mom is going to roll up my phone bill to a point and stab me in the throat while I sleep. But I’m sorry, there’s no way in hell I’m going to go another second without looking up this hooker business. I grab my seat on the train, pull up
the googles
on my iPhone and punch in the obvious key words. As I watch that damn
searching
icon spin, I can almost feel AT&T yanking dough out of my pocket.

The results finally pop up on screen and, sure enough, it seems that Caravaggio really did use the bloated corpse of a drowned prostitute as a model for the dead Virgin Mary. I’m not even Catholic, and even I know that just ain’t right.

Let me get all this straight.

Edge gives me a Brownie, a Brownie infused with the light of Magic Hour, no less. I take pictures of a painting and an element of that painting comes to life. Would Andy not exist had I not taken a picture of the painting in Cleveland? Was Andy even real? Did the camera kill the prostitute just so I could have an encounter? That’s
not
cool! No. No way. Maybe the prostitute was going to drown anyway, and I was the answer to her prayer, giving her one sincere touch, like the cashier suggested. So now I believe in prayer and ghosts? When the hell did that happen? What if I take a picture of something other than a painting? I better not go there.

I fucked a fucking ghost!

I look down at the Brownie sitting innocently beside me and whisper-yell at it, “Oh! What’s wrong with you?”

It would be too much to ask to have a quiet ride to the airport, a calm journey where I can contemplate my absurd life since engaging this vintage camera.

But no. Instead, my trip ends with a big fat cosmic joke.

I kid you not, the only seat I can find on the damn train is next to a bunch of middle-aged, loud English people who have just wrapped up their
Da Vinci Code
trip to Paris. They’re all overweight and boisterous. They wear
Da Vinci Code
t-shirts and painter’s caps with
The Last Supper
printed across the front. Painter’s caps? Who the hell wears painter’s caps these days? And really, if you’re going to relive the 80s you need to go all the way and rock the fingerless gloves, too. Just my humble opinion.

I – fucked – a – ghost!

“These people here need to come to South Sheilds to learn how to cook a proper steak,” says the burly Brit who seems to be the epitome of football hooliganism.

“They’re just too damn lazy to do it right, is what they are,” he continues. “I didn’t care, I just kept sending the bloody thing back until it was cooked proper, I did.”

A gag reflex hits me as I envision the gobs of Parisian spit that probably marinated this poor guy’s meal. One of the gang, a woman with bright red hair, recognizes the Louvre gift bag sitting in my lap. My guess is that the ol’ broad has to buy her ultra red hair dye by the gross, seeing how it’s probably not available after October 31st.