housepainters? Your graduate students?”
“They are beginning to think that you are becoming an illustrator. You used to be the one who was shooting from within the crowd and not focusing on the pageantry.”
And on they went, the two wings of a cornered moth, beating furiously while I rinsed the dishes.
Finally, Clarence broke from the argument and told me he loved the honey I had bought.
“It’s from the farmers’ market on Raspail,” I said.
“I thought so. Best market in town.”
In the wake of his cheerful comment, I began to tremble. I was guilty, and not only of letting him believe that I had bought the honey when Olivier had. I was guilty, like capitalism itself, of not being solid, of transgression, of dissolving into version after version of a person depending on what was before my eyes. I was living proof of why aesthetics are more important than morals in the modern age, why they are the major component, according to both Clarence and Lydia if only I could get them to listen to one another, of the truth as we now know it. I was diaphanous and I was nervous and if I wasn’t careful, I was going to break a precious teacup right here in the sink.
“I’ll be right back,” I said.
• • •
I left the apartment, and flew up the five flights of the escalier de service. Only as I slid my skeleton key into its hole did my hand and arm begin to solidify. The rest of me followed until the weight sunk back into my shoes. I was a person, a distinct one, a person loved by a boy named Olivier. And in order to celebrate this being, not to pierce her new skin, I moved, with slow and comic delicacy, toward the secret place that was my sock and underwear drawer. There, buried at the very back, tied with a ribbon, were three letters. The first was the note in the red envelope that I had not been able to throw away. The second, Olivier had left for me at the Petit Fer à Cheval the morning of his departure. He had written it while he was waiting for me to show up. “Where are you, Kate?” The third letter he had mailed from the airport, also to the Fer à Cheval.
I melted into my futon to reread.
Olivier’s letters covered the time we ought to have spent together, his last night and morning in Paris before returning to the States and working life.
While his handwriting was beautiful, the actual contents of the pages were not what I might have expected had it been a good idea to expect anything in particular. The letters gave me virtually no information about the promised breakup with Portia and suggested no plans for us to meet again, but they were affectionate. The last one was my favorite because it ended with a pastel rendition of an elongated me, flawless as an ad, reading a letter on a bench under a tree with the red brick and black iron detailing of the Place des Vosges in the background. “J’imagine Kate” was penned below. It wasn’t a real drawing but a pastiche of symbolic shortcuts, the sort of thing I would never dare to do but that I admired the way nerds admire hip kids, with grudging confusion. Where did he find such ease?
In his image, I was groomed to a sheen, reading his words in the most picturesque square in all of Paris, wearing a long fitted dress that washed over the edge of the bench. My hair was down. The toenails resting in my delicate sandals were painted a soft pink. If this was how he saw me, then maybe I would be perfect someday.
“A bientôt, ma beauté.”
Ma beauté folded her letters back into their envelopes, retied the ribbon, arranged undergarments and closed the drawer.
What the hell was I doing?
Although I was beginning to understand that Lydia and Clarence could be unkind, that they often fed on a desire to humiliate each other, I still hoped they would love me. I felt myself on the verge of folding into Lydia’s rich and textured family, so different from my own white-walled mother-daughter starkness. And this feeling gave me moments of utter
“They are beginning to think that you are becoming an illustrator. You used to be the one who was shooting from within the crowd and not focusing on the pageantry.”
And on they went, the two wings of a cornered moth, beating furiously while I rinsed the dishes.
Finally, Clarence broke from the argument and told me he loved the honey I had bought.
“It’s from the farmers’ market on Raspail,” I said.
“I thought so. Best market in town.”
In the wake of his cheerful comment, I began to tremble. I was guilty, and not only of letting him believe that I had bought the honey when Olivier had. I was guilty, like capitalism itself, of not being solid, of transgression, of dissolving into version after version of a person depending on what was before my eyes. I was living proof of why aesthetics are more important than morals in the modern age, why they are the major component, according to both Clarence and Lydia if only I could get them to listen to one another, of the truth as we now know it. I was diaphanous and I was nervous and if I wasn’t careful, I was going to break a precious teacup right here in the sink.
“I’ll be right back,” I said.
• • •
I left the apartment, and flew up the five flights of the escalier de service. Only as I slid my skeleton key into its hole did my hand and arm begin to solidify. The rest of me followed until the weight sunk back into my shoes. I was a person, a distinct one, a person loved by a boy named Olivier. And in order to celebrate this being, not to pierce her new skin, I moved, with slow and comic delicacy, toward the secret place that was my sock and underwear drawer. There, buried at the very back, tied with a ribbon, were three letters. The first was the note in the red envelope that I had not been able to throw away. The second, Olivier had left for me at the Petit Fer à Cheval the morning of his departure. He had written it while he was waiting for me to show up. “Where are you, Kate?” The third letter he had mailed from the airport, also to the Fer à Cheval.
I melted into my futon to reread.
Olivier’s letters covered the time we ought to have spent together, his last night and morning in Paris before returning to the States and working life.
While his handwriting was beautiful, the actual contents of the pages were not what I might have expected had it been a good idea to expect anything in particular. The letters gave me virtually no information about the promised breakup with Portia and suggested no plans for us to meet again, but they were affectionate. The last one was my favorite because it ended with a pastel rendition of an elongated me, flawless as an ad, reading a letter on a bench under a tree with the red brick and black iron detailing of the Place des Vosges in the background. “J’imagine Kate” was penned below. It wasn’t a real drawing but a pastiche of symbolic shortcuts, the sort of thing I would never dare to do but that I admired the way nerds admire hip kids, with grudging confusion. Where did he find such ease?
In his image, I was groomed to a sheen, reading his words in the most picturesque square in all of Paris, wearing a long fitted dress that washed over the edge of the bench. My hair was down. The toenails resting in my delicate sandals were painted a soft pink. If this was how he saw me, then maybe I would be perfect someday.
“A bientôt, ma beauté.”
Ma beauté folded her letters back into their envelopes, retied the ribbon, arranged undergarments and closed the drawer.
What the hell was I doing?
Although I was beginning to understand that Lydia and Clarence could be unkind, that they often fed on a desire to humiliate each other, I still hoped they would love me. I felt myself on the verge of folding into Lydia’s rich and textured family, so different from my own white-walled mother-daughter starkness. And this feeling gave me moments of utter
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