We'll Always Have Paris (31 page)

But in the weeks when the boys are with Olivier I have none of that routine or certainty and now not even a job to give my days structure. I go out as much as I can because the house is too
quiet and too empty; it isn’t home without their trails of discarded toys and clothes, without the elaborate
tableaux vivants
of soft toys on the sofa. Whenever I can, I leave the
country altogether, raiding my already depleted savings in order to run away to London and Paris.

I run away so often in this period that the Eurostar terminals become a second, third and fourth home. I know which of the border control officers is ponderously, pedantically slow and the
corner behind a pillar where you can always find an empty space. On the train, I have a preferred carriage and seat and I weave efficiently, powered by muscle memory, through the Disneyland crowds
in London and the stag parties in Brussels, the packed ticket hall at Gare du Nord. My passport becomes dog-eared from constant handling and the gilding rubs off the front. I like the way that, on
the train and in the terminals, I can choose to be whomever I want that day: friendly, aloof, French or British. It’s what my friend Helen calls ‘identity tourism’. Who
are
you when you are no longer half of a couple? This is what I have been so anxious to find out.

Most of the time, my assumed identity of choice is Londoner. I have pined so hard for London over the past few years and it still feels more like home than anywhere else. I have no idea now why
I thought we should leave. When I visit, I want to gobble the whole city up, even the worst bits: maimed pigeons and discarded copies of
Metro
, slow moving crocodiles of language students
shuffling down Oxford Street and the Northern Line. I stuff my bag with magazines and packets of chocolate digestives, spend hours in Liberty and John Lewis just wandering the aisles, drink pints
and pints of tea (with real milk, not UHT), sit in Bloomsbury squares and linger in the streets inhaling bus fumes. London is where most of my friends, old and new, are: I sleep on Helen’s
sofa, hang out with Tom, visit Kate, and organize drinks with Internet acquaintances. These are the good bits; the happy bits. The bad bits are when I try and see the married man.

This episode is already ridiculous. There is nothing really going on between us, but he represents some kind of ideal for me: the easy, teasing familiarity of Englishness; a shared cultural
shorthand. I know it’s daft, but I can’t help myself: I’m infatuated, not with him but with the
idea
of him, the path not travelled. He has come to represent something
more than he actually is.

My idiocy reminds me of Stendhal, a man who knew something about behaving like a fool in the grip of a powerful cocktail of emotions and his theory of
cristallisation
. Visiting
Salzburg’s salt mines in 1818 (nineteenth-century tourism certainly knew how to have fun), he was struck by the glittering crystalline formations on every surface and the way in which the
most unexceptional twig was transformed by this improbable chemical reaction into a gem-encrusted marvel. Human sentiment, Stendhal realized, could effect something similar and in his 1853 treatise
on love,
De L’Amour
, he describes
cristallisation
as the process by which, when you fall for someone, you idealize them and reshape them in your own mind in the way that
suits you best, so that everything they are and everything they do, even their defects, take on a treacherous fairy sparkle bearing little relation to reality. This, I think, is what has happened
to me. My skewed perception ‘crystallizes’ this ordinary chap and he sparkles even brighter for his unavailability (‘
une frequentation discontinue de l’être
aimé
’, infrequent contact with the loved one, is one of Stendhal’s conditions for this alchemy to operate). Something similar is happening, I realize, with London itself,
longed for and far away. The maimed pigeons glitter like birds of paradise; rude Tesco Metro cashiers become sparkling wits.

Of course, you can’t be dazzled by a heap of salt crystals indefinitely and I’m not; it fades. Beyond a shared fondness for grubby indie boy bands of the nineties and a sort of
dissatisfaction at the way we have led our lives up to this point, the married man and I don’t really have any kind of connection and soon I stop hoping; stop trying, stop crystallizing.

Before I get to this point, however, I find out that I was wrong about the most fundamental part of what attracted me to him: communication. Because it turns out that even in English, where I
master every bloody nuance and subtlety, I don’t know how to express my feelings. If anything, I’m worse, and on the rare occasions we actually meet, I become increasingly clipped and
silent, spitting out the occasional tiny haiku of a sentence, heavy with unexpressed feeling. Mostly my mind gallops and churns just as fruitlessly as it did with Olivier. It seems I am just a
terrible communicator in
any
language: I am the problem, not French. How can this be? When did I start to believe spoken words are as powerful and impossible to control as bullets?

Forced to contemplate my own failings yet again, the puffed up daring that has carried me through this early part of my grown-up single life deflates. All my feelings about the separation, my
mother, the last five years, the mess I have made of things and the trail of hurt I have left behind coalesce and swirl around, threatening to engulf me. Finally – and I suppose it’s
long overdue – I feel truly sad.

That sadness makes me stupid. I lose things – wallets, tickets, shoes – and even when I haven’t lost anything, I think I have, checking my bag over and over again for passport
and keys. I fall over frequently, as if unhappiness has gone to my inner ear. On one London trip, I take a train out to see Kate and her new baby (I mainly cry when I get there, in her lovely,
warm, pretty kitchen, which feels so much like a home compared to my grubby, cold Brussels house, as she feeds me home-made cakes) and on the way back I fail to mind the gap and fall from the
carriage, misjudging the distance from train to platform. I scrape my leg right open and walk around the city bleeding and confused, tears trickling unchecked and making my make-up run. Another
time, I break the heel off one of my fancy shoes and end up with both knees bloody and gravel-filled, like a kid in the playground; I even drive a borrowed car into a wall in a fit of particularly
awful distraction. When I tell Olivier my misfortunes (which I am often tempted to do, although I know that really I shouldn’t), he makes some mild expression of concern, which I find
momentarily hurtful, but my problems are my own now, this is exactly how it is supposed to be.

In this state of mind, London itself feels spoilt to me too; the shine wears off its streets and parks and shops. I have messed the city up for myself and now it is associated with this awful
mixture of regret, bad behaviour and longing, my trips there freighted with hope and disappointment. I find it almost physically hurts to go back to some parts: Spitalfields makes me cry, just
because it’s still there, living its life, and I wish I were too, wish we had never left. Out west, my father and stepmother are lovely, just lovely, when I arrive at their house late at
night in a whirlwind of smudged make-up, drunk and chaotic, and they never make me feel anything but welcome, but I feel keenly how much of a worry I must be in my current ridiculous state.
‘I’m such a mess,’ I cry to them over lunch on one trip, head bowed, fringe dangling in my spaghetti, disarmed into candour by tiredness and alcohol. ‘I’m a
disaster
.’ Madevi and I coin the term ‘facepasta’ to describe this self-loathing low and we use it again and again: my life seems to lurch from one facepasta event to
another.

Brussels, meanwhile, is as messy and cluttered with chores and responsibilities as my kitchen table: my heart sinks when the train comes through the unlovely architectural mess of the suburbs
and into the low-ceilinged concrete chaos of Midi Station. I feel constantly nagged by an endless cycle of unfinished admin and perplexing household maintenance: the overgrown garden I need to
tackle because the neighbours are unhappy, the mysterious smells and the non-functioning dishwasher, the lost pieces of paper that must be provided to some obstructive Belgian bureaucracy or
another. The landlady comes round uninvited, purses her lips and makes warning noises about my deposit. I feel embattled; judged and found wanting.

The house doesn’t matter so much, but the boys do and I worry about them constantly. Are they coping? How badly have they been affected? Can I do this alone? On weekends with them, the
expanse of empty time to fill frightens me. It’s not that they are terribly demanding – they would happily stay at home and watch TV in their pyjamas, all they really need is me, sane
and stable and comforting – but I doubt my own ability to give them that basic comfort and with good reason: my track record thus far has been pretty shitty. I don’t feel as if I am
enough on my own and Olivier is such a solidly good father, certain of his own abilities. I miss that. I miss him. I don’t let myself think it very often; I try not to think it, but there it
is.

I shouldn’t be thinking of it, because here I am,
une femme seule
after all these years. I could do anything! I tell myself, and then all I actually do is sit in my dirty house,
hunched over my laptop in pyjamas for eight hours at a stretch without speaking to anyone, eating Bonne Maman Crème Caramels for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Thank goodness, then, for Paris.

The first time I go back to Paris I am on a mission: I am finally going to meet Madevi.

It is a strange thing, meeting your best friend for the first time. I get the train from Brussels and make my way to the Tuileries, where I sit on some dusty steps nervously waiting for her,
clutching a poster of mythological creatures we have been laughing over online and a bar of Côte d’Or chocolate (the caramelized almond variety, with a touch of salt – she has
been very specific). We are like naïve Internet daters who have become soulmates over a series of increasingly fevered emails without ever actually meeting, and there seems to me to be a very
real danger that we might not get on, a pair of prickly introverts forced, blinking, into the daylight. I might come over well virtually when I can pick and choose my words, but in person I know
all too well how stilted and uncomfortable I can be: shyness can come across as coldness. What if I have nothing to say to her? What if she doesn’t like me?

It is strange, too, coming back to Paris. I am not sure, before I get off the train at the Gare du Nord, how it will feel to be back as a tourist, but it’s nice, actually. The sun is
shining and the familiar forecourt of the station with its angry ballet of taxis, drunks and fast food joints is a jolt of adrenalin after stolidly predictable Brussels. I like how the city makes
me stand up straighter and move faster, and the crackle of my synapses remembering short cuts and métro lines I haven’t taken in years is strangely satisfying. I make my way down to
Châtelet and along the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, past cheerful groups of tourists taking photos of the window displays at Colette, then I walk through the beautiful Place
Vendôme, where my mother once got the giggles taking pictures of a rowdy demonstration of striking lawyers (‘you should be a lawyer here, Em, it looks much more fun’).

Madevi appears from the Rue de Rivoli and even from a distance it seems as if she just fits in. I don’t know why I think that, exactly: the set of her jaw perhaps, the pace of her walk or
the take-no-shit aura she gives off. Momentarily, this makes me more nervous still, but she catches sight of me and laughs at my gormless expression and my silly bag of presents. We hug, she
brushes dust off the back of my coat (‘Have you already been rubbing yourself up against the park ponies, you pervert? We were supposed to do that together!’) and I know it’s
going to be OK. We eat tempura in a basement bar on the Rue Sainte-Anne, Paris’s Little Tokyo (I nearly drop a prawn in a woman’s handbag), then we walk through the Passage des
Victories covered nineteenth-century arcade: I have never been in all my years visiting Paris and it’s so beautiful. Finally, we hop across to the Left Bank to buy the definitive cappuccino
éclair we have been discussing for weeks and slump in a café to eat it. My first impression is right: even though she hasn’t lived here for years, Madevi passes as emphatically,
perfectly Parisian. There is no excessive politeness or apology with her, just a brisk efficiency that commands respect. I feel gauche and clueless trailing in her wake, but my confidence is
bolstered by osmosis to the point that when an elderly lady tuts and brushes at the back of my still-dusty coat, I laugh.

Madevi and I come to Paris a few times together and when we are not there, we egg each other on to greater heights of longing for the city, a latter-day Masha and Irina languishing on Google
Chat. I see it through new eyes with her: greedier, happier, sillier ones. We drag our wheeled cases through the drug dealers and pavement hissers of Barbès and eat Vietnamese food, full of
fresh mint and coriander, straight from the containers. Madevi takes me to an unmarked outlet shop out in Mouton Duvernet where they sell cheap Maje dresses and to Du Pain et des Idées, her
favourite bakery, with its baby-blue and gilt exterior, the scent of butter and yeast carrying all the way down the street. We buy still-warm croissants and neat, salty goats cheese parcels and eat
them on a bench next to the Canal Saint-Martin, then python-stuffed with carbohydrate, we try on dresses we can’t possibly afford under the censorious eye of etiolated salesgirls in empty
boutiques. We go to La Grande Épicerie and to Lafayette Gourmet to buy Christine Ferber jam (Madevi has instructed me that these are the only jams worth eating) then eat large steaks and
drink Bordeaux in the food hall brasserie like proper grown-ups. Madevi drags me, intimidated, into Hermès to relive her scarf-folding student job glories and to Printemps Beauté to
test lipsticks. One sunny afternoon, we sit in the Jardin des Plantes under the low branches of a flowering cherry tree Madevi remembers from her undergrad days, then take pictures of the
‘
manège du dodo
’, a weird carousel where you can ride on extinct creatures of every imaginable variety: the horned tortoise, the sivatherium (a sort of giraffe-deer) or
the Tasmanian wolf. Best of all, we go to Stohrer.