Geoff Dyer - Paris Trance

‘A toast!’ he said. Nicole held her glass, waited. ‘To you. . For all your hard work.’ She smiled, held up her glass, sipped from it and then looked down into it. Pierre was sitting on the desk, one foot on the bottom drawer. He poured himself a second glass, angled the bottle towards her.

‘No thank you.’

‘Come on. We’re celebrating.’ She smiled. Took another sip. Looking behind her, through the blinds, she saw a light go off in the office opposite. She heard Pierre moving from the desk. He was standing up. He put the glass down on the desk, quietly, and reached his hand towards her, touched her shoulder.

‘Nicole,’ he said. He moved his hand to her hair, pushed it behind her ear. She looked at him. He angled his face towards her. She felt his breath and then his lips on her. She averted her face, took a step back. Pierre remained where he was, his hand in the air.

‘Nicole,’ he said. ‘The truth is, Nicole. .’ He took a breath, looked at the floor and then at her face again. ‘I am in love with you.’ His words were tender but there was a threat contained in this tenderness. He reached towards her, fingered her hair behind her ear again.

‘Please. Don’t do that.’ It had been so slight a gesture, and her reaction to it so excessive — to refuse him even this! — that Pierre felt as if he had been hit. He was embarrassed and his embarrassment made him angry. He left his hand where it was. With the other he touched her shoulder. He leaned towards her. She turned her face away. On the filing cabinet nearby was a pile of paper and the pen he had bought her.

‘I want to kiss you.’

‘No.’

‘Not even that?’

‘Let go of me.’

‘What do you think I’m going to do? Rape you?’

‘You couldn’t.’

He gripped her shoulder. She craned her head back, pushed him away. He pushed harder. She stepped back and rattled into the blinds. She reached for the pen and held it in her fist, as if she were about to plunge it into his face. His hand was still on her shoulder. For several moments they stood there like that, their faces inches from each other. Then Nicole reached up, moved his hand from her shoulder and manoeuvred past him. She put the pen on the desk and picked up her bag. Pierre had pulled out the chair from the desk and slumped into it. Ignoring him, Nicole left the room and closed the door, exactly as if she had just finished a normal day’s work.

Luke was sitting on the floor when she got home. He was wearing his ridiculous T-shirt, checking film times in Pariscope , munching his way through a bowl of cherries. Spunk was next to him, tail wagging, eyes fixed on the door, awaiting her return. She told Luke what had happened while he held her, his vision focused, for no reason, on a little area of the wall opposite where the paint had been applied too thinly. Women withheld themselves from men and then, for a while at least, they gave themselves to a man, to one man. And what a stroke of fortune it was, what a miracle, if you turned out to be that man! I am her man, Luke thought to himself. But how arbitrary it was, this privilege, and how precarious. There could come a time when he would find himself excluded as totally as Pierre from the invisible field of her consent, her desire, her trust. He held her tighter, as if this extra exertion of pressure could indefinitely forestall such an eventuality. Everything he could think of saying was inadequate. He was her man. Nothing he could do or say could do justice to this fact. He kissed her.

‘You taste of cherries,’ she said.

Nicole was out of a job and, at the warehouse a few days later, Luke and Alex became convinced that they were heading the same way. Unusually Lazare said that he wanted to see them at three o’clock: normally he simply put his head out of his office and shouted to whoever he wanted to speak with — i.e. yell at — to get in there immediately. The uncharacteristic formality seemed ominous and, sure enough, when they turned up promptly at his office everything about his manner suggested imminent redundancy. He was sitting in his chair, smoking one of his non-Cuban cigars.

‘Sit down,’ he said. Luke and Alex looked round. There was only one chair. Perhaps this was how it would be settled: whoever sat down would get the bullet: a comfortable version of Russian roulette. They remained standing.

‘How’s that ankle Luke?’

‘Great. Almost back to normal.’

‘Good. Listen, we’re coming up to a very quiet period. There won’t be enough work to go round.’ The phone rang. He picked up the receiver, hung up, and then left it sprawled on the desk: his own no-frills version of ‘No calls, please. I’m in a meeting.’ The dull dial tone could just be heard. ‘I can’t keep everybody on here. You two were the last to arrive. So it’s you who have to go.’ The dial tone turned to the higher pitch intended to alert the caller that he had taken too long to dial. ‘Which is a shame because I like you both. And the other guys like you.’ He shifted in his chair, a little embarrassed by this admission of affection. His cigar was not drawing well. He stubbed it out and picked up a pen instead. ‘But there’s something I could suggest to you that you might like anyway. I bought this house in the country. A small place, very run down. It’s very pretty. It’s been done up but there are a few things still need doing. A lot of things actually, but nothing too major. Plastering, painting, cleaning, tidying. So if you want to you can do that for me: do the place up. In return you get a nice — well, a place that will be nice when you finish working on it — home for the summer. Plus I’ll pay you something. Not much, but something. Take those sweet girlfriends of yours. By the end of the summer things will have picked up here. You can come back. So what do you say?’

They said they would let him know tomorrow, when they had talked to their sweet girlfriends.

Since she had lost her job and had no chance of finding work before September, Nicole said yes immediately. Sahra, too, could think of nothing she would rather do: there was never much work in the summer.

‘It’s a unanimous yes,’ Luke told Lazare the next day. ‘We’ll do it.’

‘That’s good. When d’you want to leave?’

‘The week after next?’

‘That’s good too because I was going to have to get rid of you then anyway.’

Both couples advertised their apartments in fusac and were immediately inundated with calls from eager sub-letters. They boxed up their belongings and arranged to set off the following Monday: a year to the day, Luke realized, since he had first arrived in the city — just as everyone else was leaving for the summer. Now, by leaving, by joining the exodus that had rendered his first weeks so desolate, he felt he was demonstrating how completely he had come to belong in the city, to feel at home in it.

In the biography of Luke’s time in Paris, the area around his old apartment, the Tuileries especially, constituted his childhood. A few days before leaving he took Nicole there on a valedictory tour. They rode the 29 to the Opéra (the nearest Luke had ever come to taking it with a purpose, in order to get somewhere). Nicole’s hair blew across her face as they leaned on the balcony rail, looking back, watching life recede. A roller-blader clung dangerously to the back of the bus as it snaked along the narrow streets by the Musée Picasso. Waiting on lights, a couple squabbled furiously in the front of their car. An old woman’s shopping bag split, spilling oranges on to the pavement and into the road. Nicole spotted Alex and Sahra, arm in arm, walking along rue des Archives, laughing. She called out, too late. A wild-looking African berated a traffic warden for the ticket she had just written. The balcony filled up and thinned out. Louis XIV and his horse were framed, briefly, against a whirl of blue as the bus nipped around the Place Des Victoires. Something had set off a car alarm; a thin man conducted the noise serenely. When the bus was held up in traffic two workmen crossed the road carrying a large mirror which flashed back the image of Luke and Nicole in the balcony of the 29.