Curio Vignettes 02 Craving (2 page)

I tell him about my new duties at the museum as we eat then the waitress corks and bags the half-empty bottle so we can take it with us. For what it cost we ought to be allowed to keep the stemware.

Didier holds the door for me as we leave, looking like six feet of well-feigned calm. The June evening is cool and smells of spring. I breathe it in, glad to leave the noise and warmth of the restaurant behind. But as my body relaxes, Didier’s surely tenses. He told me once how the open sky feels like a smothering blanket above him, the buildings like fingers, poised to curl in and strangle him. I take his hand to begin the harrowing journey back to his place.

When we reach the first intersection, I ask him which way to go. He stares at the storefronts for an extraordinarily long time, like someone trying to makes sense of words written in a made-up language. As if he hasn’t lived in this neighborhood for over a decade, or this city his entire life.

“Straight,” he finally says. “Straight at the Métro station.”

I squeeze his hand and smile, and when the sign tells us to walk, we follow his directions to the next busy block.

We pass innumerable people and some of their gazes linger. A couple months ago I’d have told myself,
They’re staring because they can’t understand why on earth he’s with you.
But getting frequently and thoroughly laid has been good for my ego, and though those thoughts do still poke and whisper, I can shrug them off. If people stare it’s because Didier’s extraordinary looking. Being the one holding his hand makes me feel as though I’m wearing the most beautiful dress in the world. It makes
me
feel beautiful. Makes me walk taller, as if someone were filming us.

An elegant woman walking a dog smiles at me. “
C’est une jolie robe.
”

I stutter a “
Merci
” and cast my dress another appreciative glance.

Didier’s thumb rubs my palm. When I look to my side I find him smirking.

“Don’t look so shocked,” he teases.

I
am
shocked though. Everything pales next to Didier. This dress must be magical to warrant notice with him so close by. I try to remember if it came in any other patterns. If it does, I’ll buy one of each.

The first dress I recall owning was a hand-me-down from a cousin, a swishy satin thing she’d gotten for a wedding. I’d thought it was the most glamorous garment ever made, and couldn’t believe the shining lavender jewel of a gown was suddenly
mine
. I wore it on picture day in fifth grade, imagining it’d trick my classmates into forgetting I was weird and mean, white trash, that I shuffled through the halls in the same three faded, frayed outfits week in and week out. They’d see me in that dress and think I was bound for Hollywood. If only my parents could afford the cool laser background for my school photos…but that cost an extra four bucks.

My dad was a garbage man then, usually gone hours before I woke. He’s a kindhearted guy. If he’d been there that morning, maybe he’d have gently asked if I really wanted to wear that dress to school. I don’t remember my mom saying a word about it, though it wasn’t rare to come home at three and find her still in bed.

At the time I was madly in love with Jeremy Fournier, the cutest boy in my class. He passed me by the lockers and said, “Nice dress, Aardvark.” That was my nickname, a devilish bit of ten-year-old wordplay combining my last name, Evardt, and my general homeliness. Oblivious spaz that I was, I spent the day thinking he’d meant it. By sixth period, I’d already planned our wedding. It wasn’t until I was home that night, undressing, that I gave any thought to the fact that all the other girls wore their coolest jeans and skirts and trendy sweaters for picture day.

Occam’s razor cut me then, and I realized I’d been the unwitting victim of sarcasm. It became the first social cue I taught myself to diagnose, and as it turned out, I had many opportunities.

Didier’s hand is damp against mine, pulling me from my old, dusty worries to his current ones. He breathes through his nose—it seems to help him avoid hyperventilating—and I can hear the odd inhalation, wheezy and desperate. I glance at him in the streetlights. His eyes jump everywhere, searching for danger. I know his mind is a half block ahead of us, already dreading the next street crossing.

But we make it to number sixteen Rue des Toites Rouges without incident, and though his keys jangle as he unlocks the inside foyer door, relief is written all over that stunning face. Being outside is like holding his breath underwater and now he’s finally breached the surface.

Neither of us trusts the creaky old elevator in his building, so we hike up four flights, winded as we reach flat 5C. Inside Didier sheds his fear like a jacket, hanging it beside the door for the next time I make him leave. The surety returns to his posture and gait, and from the couch I watch him putter for a few minutes, in awe of the transformation.

He brings me a glass of the wine and sets his own on the coffee table.

“Thanks. Can I ask you something?”

“Always.” He sits and unlaces his shoes.

“Have you ever considered moving out of Paris? To somewhere calmer, with less traffic and fewer people? It seems strange you’ve chosen to live in such a crowded and chaotic city, and so close to its center.” Not that I want him to leave—quite the opposite. But I’ve always wondered what keeps him here, like someone who’s afraid of drowning living on a houseboat. Maybe the thought of making a jump for the dock is just too terrifying.

He pushes off one shoe, then the other, blinking thoughtfully. “I suppose I never considered it a choice.”

“No?”

“This city has always felt like a spider’s web to me. This is just where I landed.”

Where he got entangled.
It’s only fitting, considering what a struggle it is for him to move from thread to thread, always seeing shadows scuttling out of the corner of his eye.

“I wasn’t always this bad,” he reminds me. He was functional up until his mother passed away three years ago. “By the time I
was
this bad, I was attached to this flat. And to my job, and my routines.”

“Of course.”

“This is all I know.” His mother was agoraphobic as well and rarely took him beyond the city limits. Paris constituted what a psychologist would call her “safe zone”, and it sounds as though she managed well enough inside its bounds. Checking on her had been Didier’s main outside obligation toward the end of her illness, and his safe zone quickly contracted to the size of his flat after she died.

He shrugs. “I’ve been to the countryside and the ocean, and to Portugal when I was young. But nowhere outside Paris since I was seventeen. And not outside the Latin Quarter since my mother’s funeral. Except that trip to your museum.”

“That counts.”

He sighs, and I feel badly. I forced him into exposure therapy for the sake of our date, and now I’m grilling him about his life choices. We’re in the only place where he gets to feel secure, and I’m opening a window to let his troubles blow inside and disturb the calm.

I remember something, a convenient distraction to take the edge off our conversation. “I got you a gift.”

“Oh?” That brightens his expression, and I know he expects a clock or watch or some other broken refugee from a thrift shop. It’s something a bit different, and I feel my chest tighten, hoping he’ll like it.

I lean over the couch’s arm for my tote and fetch a drawstring bag, heavy and lumpy, and a flat, wrapped box.

He accepts them with a raised eyebrow and I settle closer beside him.

“Open the bag first.”

He tugs the bow loose and uncinches the mouth, draws out an old padlock, then another, and two more. He studies the final one and gives me a curious look.

“Now open the box.”

He strips its paper and lifts the lid, taking out what looks like a thin leather-bound journal. He frees the tie, unfolding the case in quarters to reveal two dozen small, gleaming instruments, slender steel rods each in its own tiny pocket, and all with different heads—diamond shapes and circles and hooks.

For a moment he stares, then the warmest laugh tumbles from his mouth. He holds one of the locks up and smiles at me. “No keys, then?”

“I have the keys. I had to make sure none of them were rusted shut or broken. And I’m not cruel, so there’s one more thing.” I reach for my bag one last time to retrieve the book I had to special order, a slim guide to lock-picking.

“Yes, this would be useful.” He flips through a few pages, his gaze catching on this diagram and that. He loves the insides of complex objects, queer little puzzles in need of solving. Hours a day he sometimes spends fixing broken things, and it doesn’t take a psychiatrist to find the metaphor. He sees himself as broken, and I don’t like that. There’s no perfect shining part you can order that’ll make him tick like a so-called normal person. I’d prefer he see himself as a keyless lock—a conundrum, but one that can be solved with patience and gentle experimentation.

He inspects one of the instruments.

“Do you like it?”

“I do.” As he stares at the largest lock, I know what he’s thinking. He wants to see inside and understand how it works.

“I bet they’re really hard to take apart. To look inside, I mean.”

“One would hope so. I will just have to work blind, I suppose. And see with my hands and ears and these little tools.” He sets the items aside. “Thank you.”

My face heats when he kisses me. When we part, I have to purse my lips to keep my grin from growing too wide and goofy. “You’re welcome.”

“You spoil me.”

“I try to.”

“It’s I who should be spoiling you, to celebrate your good news.”

“You didn’t know.”

“I know now.” He smiles, slow and devious. “Perhaps I’ll find some other way to treat you.”

“Perhaps you will.” I sip my wine, liking the way he looks at me. Liking
him
, just being with him. If this
is
my first boyfriend, our romance doesn’t look like how I’d pictured it when I was that gawky mantis in Goodwill clothes. Our courtship is short on carnations and prom dresses, surprisingly heavy on the wine and antiques and orgasms. I missed out on getting groped in the cab of some redneck hockey player’s truck, but here I am in Paris, about to be taken to bed by a man so good-looking and so skilled at sex women pay for the chance to enjoy him for a night.

My first love came half a lifetime later than I’d hoped, and though it may look a bit twisted from the outside, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Didier takes a deep drink then asks, “Would you like to play another game tonight?”

I nod, suddenly shy. It’s been a couple weeks since our first such game—exploring the sorts of things other women come to him to experience. I know he fuses past and present clients together, composites them into anonymity so he can indulge my desire to eavesdrop on their fantasies. Two weeks ago we went further than just storytelling, acting out the scenario. It was exciting, trying on another woman’s kinks. My own sexuality is still forming, and before it gels I want to sample as many people’s appetites as I can.

“What sort of game, do you think?” he asks.

“I’m not sure.” I cuddle closer, pressing my arm to his and taking another sip. I wish we had a fireplace, just now. I wish we were in some tiny stone vacation cottage in Provence or somewhere, with a hearth and stars and crickets. I wish lots of things, but I know not to hold my breath.

“Tell me about some of your clients. About the ones with the most unusual requests.”

“I find very little unusual, when it comes to sex,” he murmurs, but there’s distraction in his tone—he’s already browsing his memories for stories I’ve yet to hear.

He swirls his wine, speaking to his glass, it seems. “I had a client for a while who only wished to come here and do what we are now.” He drapes a warm, strong arm behind my shoulders. “For hours we would just sit or lie together, and I’d hold her. We would kiss, very softly, but for so long my lips would grow tender.”

“Never anything more?”

“For hours we would do that, and sometimes I would tell her how much I wished we could do more. Be naked together. Touch each other. Make love. She wanted me to say these things, but she would never go any further. Then she’d tell me she had to go home, and we would say goodnight and she’d leave me alone in my bedroom. She would pretend to go, but stay just outside my door, watching from the darkness while I masturbated.”

“Oh.” I hadn’t seen that coming.

“We would pretend this was what happened after she left, that she had me so excited and frustrated I couldn’t wait for relief.”

“And that was it?”

“That was it. I would give her the show she wanted, and after I came I would hear her quiet footsteps and the front door would click shut for real. That was all she ever asked of me. And after perhaps a dozen visits in as many weeks, she never made another appointment.”

“Wow.” Here I’d thought
I
was the repression poster girl.

“And ages ago I had another client, a violin teacher. When she was a few years older than you, she’d had a student in another city, a young man of about fifteen, the son of a close friend. She spent two years so infatuated with him and so disturbed by it, she ended up moving to Paris, where she wouldn’t have to see him. It hurt, she wanted him so badly. And the feelings didn’t go away. She came to me many years later, wishing to pretend I was her old student.”

“To pretend you were a teenager?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes to pretend she was giving in to her attraction. Educating a young man in far more than the violin.”

“Ah.”

“More often she wished me to simply be the age that I was, roughly as old as her student would have been. She would have us pretend to have met after those years of separation, me finally a man grown, and one who’d secretly pined for her with the same ferocity and heartache that she had for him.”

“Gosh. That’s kind of romantic.” And kind of heartbreaking… Mostly heartbreaking. And sad and deluded. But all the best romances are tragedies, I’ve always felt.