True (21 page)

THE HOTEL IS
more Parisian than any postcard sent from Paris. Narrow hallways, little elevators, steep stairs, cast iron railings outside the windows. The walls tempt us to tenderness, we should be sweating against each other's skin, but we go to sleep like brother and sister. I can't sleep. The room is an abyss.

I get up during the night, go to the toilet, can't find the light switch. I do my business in the dark. When I open the door, I run into him. He's a shadow—I don't recognize him at first.

I yell. My voice shakes the window on its hinges. He takes hold of my shout as if it were a request and takes me in his arms.

“Shhh. It's all right. Everything's all right,” he says.

I'm trembling, can't stop shaking. “You hate me.”

“No.”

“You do, I can see it.”

“I don't hate you. I love you.”

“That's just a word.”

“But it's still true.”

In the morning he's quiet again, as if he's made of wood. He wants to meet some friends alone, to explain to them who I am before they meet me. I'm left with my anger in the hotel room and muster some curiosity to replace it: I'll go out alone.

I spend the day wandering in a museum. I find a painting that I linger over for an hour. It's a Rembrandt. The woman seems to be floating toward me. Her skin glows. No one knows anything about her hopes, her joys, her affections, but they still light up her face as if a lamp were burning inside her.

I go to the movies. I see a film about some people on the run from professional killers who escape from Paris to the south and end up in all sorts of difficulties. The man in the movie doesn't understand the woman, he says that all he sees is an image. Maybe the woman doesn't even want to be understood. Sometimes she goes dancing, sometimes she commits crimes. Sometimes she just saunters around on the shore with nothing to do. She wants to dance and doesn't care about anything else. She just wants to live, but the man doesn't understand that. She's amazed that people in photographs are always thinking unknown thoughts, about the past, the future, basketball, anything, and the people who look at the pictures will never know anything about those thoughts.

I think about Rembrandt's woman at the Louvre, about all that's inside her that I'll never know. I think about the people in all the pictures, in all the paintings in the world. A whole world behind their smiling faces! The crust of bread they ate that morning! A sneeze! A confession of love waiting to be spoken!

After the movie I take the metro north. A smell of toasted sugar and a swirl of stuffy air in the underground tosses me onto terra firma beside a white church. Suddenly the world is filled with song, steam, and rays of sunlight, the shouts and smiles of street musicians.

Men yell after me, a child runs toward me and offers me a piece of her bagel. The church is ridiculous, pompous, shameless. But I don't want a sanctuary, I want the world—splashes on the street corner and smoke curling on the horizon.

I go up some stairs and walk along a little side street and get lost. I arrive at a square filled with a fragile little park. It covers its melancholy in bright colors that are repainted every spring. There's a Ferris wheel, a carousel, and a row of little elephants going around and around in a circle forever. I pay a long-faced man with a billed cap and gray stubble a franc to rent binoculars and climb into a bright green basket. It rises up into the air. Suddenly I have the whole city, the meandering streets and the tower rising up in the middle of it all. People are bustling far below, crying, laughing, loving and betraying each other, making up, eating a meal.

I could live behind one of those windows. I have the language. No one here would smell the barn on my fingers. I could finally learn to pronounce
aujourd'hui
so that not one syllable would sound like I spent my summers and winters next to a pine forest. I would become a woman of today. Yesterday would become a word I pronounced without nostalgia.

THERE'S A MESSAGE
for me at the hotel reception, the clerk hands the note to me ceremoniously, like a jewel. It's an address and an apology. Under the name it says, Will you come?

I go as if I'm a stranger. Paris has wrapped itself around my gestures, the pine woods are just a memory. His friend's art opening is over, and the celebration reaches all the way to the ceiling. Someone has climbed up on the table, someone else is playing the piano, although they don't know how.

He comes over to me. Hands in his pockets, not hesitating but testing the climate.

“So,” he says.

“So.”

“Do you know anyone here?”

“One person. He's an artist. You know the type.”

He sizes me up. This is the moment when he realizes that he doesn't really know what I'm thinking. The thought rises up inside him, stays in his mind, off to one side, like a persistent insect. I might hate him. How would he know if I hated him more than I love him?

He asks, not seriously, just challenging me to a game: “And what's your opinion of him?”

I speak carelessly, as if I'm discussing the endive: “Somebody said that I love him, but that was an exaggeration, because he keeps my heart in a metal box among the dust and the pocket change.”

“A metal box? What an idiot. Someone ought to teach him a lesson.”

“I already hired a few roughnecks I met on the Left Bank, under a bridge. They'll be here at any moment. I sold our whole love story to a street musician in Montmartre for a franc. He's singing it to the tourists for small change now. He gets some of the details wrong—you wouldn't believe the tasteless things he throws in. As lightweight as the bread around here—airy and meaningless.”

He opens his hand in a gesture of surrender. “Then he must have lost the game, this artist.”

I hesitate over my answer. “Not completely,” I say finally. “There's one thing that separates him from the others. He can see me. He can see me better than anyone else can.”

I'm introduced to the others. I meet René and his wife Yvette. Julien and Oscar, who think artists should be involved in politics, preferably by going wild and throwing their clothes in the corner and coating themselves with blood, or why not semen?

Evá
,
they call me, and I like the sound of it. Suddenly our evening is complete. We move our tables and chairs aside and the restaurateur carries a record player out to a side table. We dance.

Finally, when they can't dance any longer, I dance alone. I carry all of Paris in my arms, lift it into the air like a globe and don't let it fall. I stretch out one hand and let my skirt rise halfway up my thighs.

He's thinking that this is how he'll see me if this thing ever ends. The gentle curve of the soles of my feet at this moment, as the balls of my feet lightly brush the floor and then lift into the air until I look like I'm floating. My neck that sparkles, my smile intended for the whole town.

When night comes creeping into the evening and I've danced until my feet hurt, I sit at the table and listen to René say to him: “Your new woman is exquisite.”

He nods, smiles. He doesn't deny it. And he doesn't deny that I'm his. Maybe because René said it in French:
ta femme.

They start to talk about art. I hear someone toss out a pronouncement of what should be done, how the world should create itself again. Maybe it's René or the eager Oscar who seems to have a firm idea about reality: “Not just one image, but many overlapping ones. You have to account for all the layers of reality. Shadows, sadness, seriousness, along with happiness. And don't forget cruelty, comedy, and banalities. No one can afford to fall into the trap of clearly delineated images anymore. Reproduction is the key word. Copy, copy, copy, that's what it's all about. Icons into the Dumpster, and stacks of copies in their place.”

Someone asks, “Do you intend to paint Evá? Do you have any plans to do it?”

I don't see his expression when he answers but I can hear the tone of his voice. There's pride in it, even tenderness.

“Eeva can tell us her hues herself.”

THE MORNING AFTER
the party we walk along the paths that the street sweeper opens up. We come into each other's space. There's no time, no distance between our skins. I come into his arms, he puts his hands on my buttocks. He slides a finger inside me. He opens me completely, that little notch inside me. He works the edge of his hand into the angle of my vulva and for a moment I'm nothing but a rising sound, a bright whirl that rushes from between my legs to the edge of my scalp.

Is it him or me? Do I make him see worlds that he's only seen from outside before, standing at the threshold? Or is he making me real?

I lower onto him, he's deep inside me, the city shelters us. Sometimes we feel like all this is just a dream. But in this city, just now starting to talk about change—a city that in three years' time will shake up the whole world—right now, we are made of dreams and dreams are made of us.

By wrapping ourselves in dreams, we make each other real.