Kevin P. Keating

Merde at the Place de la Contrescarpe

 

 

-1-

Since neither one of us owned a car we had to walk.  Like children in a fairytale, banished to a forest of twisted black trees teeming with tribes of ravenous nightroaming trolls, we trudged hand in hand silent and alone up the hill, through the ruin and desolation of the old neighborhood, past its crumbling duplexes and boarded-up liquor stores, its gay bathhouses and faded billboards for phone sex and high interest loans.  A dozen blackbirds heckled us from the sagging electrical lines that crisscrossed the street and divided the sky into a curvilinear grid of gray and white squares.  At one point we came across a dead dog in a weed-choked alley behind an abandoned warehouse, its belly bloated with corpse gas, its black tongue angling toward a puddle of oily rainwater.

Monsieur Grat, I remembered with affection. 

As we battled through a thick cloud of buzzing black flies, I turned to the woman, and in the plodding pidgin English of this devastated industrial town--my mother tongue, brusque, arrhythmic, percussive--I joked how the city looked like Montemarte after the long awaited apocalypse, Sacre Coeur bulldozed to make way for a giant tenement building draped in a vast web of clotheslines, a once magnificent view of the Eiffel Tower obstructed by the sulfur-spewing stacks of a distant blast furnace.  The woman, lighting her third cigarette since we started out, didn’t understand what I was talking about and sneered at me with such naked contempt that I turned away and tried to drive from my brain all memories of Paris. 

I was back home now.  Life was different here.  Different languages, different customs, different states of mind.  

 

 

-2-

She pointed the way to her apartment. 

“But first,” I said, “how about a drink?” 

That suited her just fine, so she took me to a corner bar that she knew, a small working class dive next to an old stone church.  Inside, huddled within those cold ashen walls like things not seen in the open air but only in caves that have been sealed up for untold centuries, their skin translucent in the flickering blue glow of the television, their eyes blind to the shock of yellow streetlights that blasted through the open door, a dozen or so men, laborers and boilermakers and steelworkers, bald, bearded, broken, drank draft beer and double shots of whiskey with great industry. 

They knew the woman and spoke to her in a friendly, even a consoling manner, asked how she was getting on, did she have enough money, said they left bags of groceries outside her door, boxes of toys.  They bought her a couple of drinks, handed her a few cigarettes.  But me they regarded with deep suspicion.  Maybe it was because I didn’t look the part.  I was too lean, too clean cut, my hands too soft and white.  After forty years of hard living, I still had all of my hair, but with each passing day it was becoming more and more evident that my ability to persuade certain lonely ladies was fading quickly.  How long had it been since I’d been with a woman?  Three months?  Four?  I used my good looks, or what was left of them, to disguise something ugly and everyone knew it.

The men squeezed my shoulders, patted my back, blew smoke in my face.  “Having a good time for yourself?  You know how to treat a lady?  You gonna behave yourself?”

Because I couldn’t look them in the eye and didn’t find it helpful to dwell on my innumerable failures as a man, my cowardice, sloth, desperation, I smiled at them sheepishly and ordered a vodka on the rocks “with a twist of lime” (I still hadn’t abandoned my more urbane sensibilities), but the men glared at me, began murmuring things, and I quickly changed my order. “Whiskey” I said, “and a bottle of beer.” 

I rested my elbows on the bar and tried to ignore the violent clangor of the church bells outside.          

 

 

-3-

Unlike the usual castaways I chanced upon in hotel bars and restaurants--those long-faced modern day spinsters politely sipping cosmopolitans and still hoping, even well into middle age, to meet someone romantic, or at least kind and respectful, but who in the end always settled for a scamming rogue like me--this woman understood that romance was nothing more than a destructive fantasy, a deadly disease, no different from the black nodules that were spreading through her lungs or the angry sores erupting on her arms and legs.  She told me these things with the indifference of a doctor who’d seen it all before, a hundred cases a day.  She possessed great wisdom.

“Here’s the cure,” she said, raising her shot glass.  “To the fucking extermination of all idiotic fantasies.” 

She drank her whiskey like a man, throwing her head back, never wincing, nodding with some vague sense of accomplishment, her eyes flashing like strobe lights.  Watching her was like watching a high priestess perform an unholy and slightly sinister ritual, and I felt something stir in the dark and pestilential pit of my trousers.  Granted, it didn’t take much to arouse the evil homunculus that plotted night and day to further complicate my life, even a woman who was sweating and trembling and grinding her teeth because a potent cocktail of chemicals from a nearby basement lab had just kicked in, cascading over her brain, baptizing her in a river of endless possibility, making her smile at her own reflection in the dusty mirror behind the bar as a child might smile at a bright and shiny object of obscure origin. 

It was impossible to judge her age.  She may have been thirty or fifty. 

“What did you say your name was?” I asked her.

“What I tell you a minute ago?”

“I forget.  That’s why I’m asking now.”

“Francine.”

“Francine?  You sure?  I thought you said it was Helen?”

“Why’d you ask if you thought it was Helen?”

“Because I forgot.”

“Fuck.”

I looked over my shoulder.  “You know these people?”

“Yeah, real nice guys.  They make sure no one screws me over.  Know what I mean?”

We finished our drinks, and before we left the bar she waved to the men who put down their pints and followed us out the door, their arms crossed, cigarettes dangling from their mouths.  I was more than a little nervous and kept looking back over my shoulder.  I’d been beaten before, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not, and as I prepared for the worst, I took solace in the fact that, though my nose was now just a little crooked and my left incisor was chipped and I had a small but noticeable scar under my right eye, I always managed to recover.  Once we turned the corner and I knew the danger had passed, I took the woman’s hand and kissed it, a charming European gesture that made her yank her hand away in disgust.    

 

 

-4-

She led me to a small building overlooking the muddy river.  She lived on the third floor, and by the time we reached the landing she had her blouse unbuttoned and began either to kiss my neck or lean on me for support, it was difficult to tell which, and after she managed to regain her balance, she opened the door and staggered into an apartment that was nearly as filthy and disordered as my own, though instead of a dozen wobbling towers of books and magazines, there were hillocks of dirty clothes in every dusty corner and a hundred toys scattered on the floor, a doll house that looked like it had been ravished in a fire, a blonde baby doll that had undergone several painful amputations only to be hastily reassembled with glue and tape.  The doors, I noticed, had locks on the outside, making the apartment look almost institutional.  Like a madhouse or a dungeon.

“Nice place,” I said.

“Screw you.”

She went to the kitchen where she pushed aside a pile of plates that went crashing into a sink already overflowing with bowls of soggy cereal and sour milk and grabbed a bottle of booze off the counter. 

“Just in case we need a little more fuel.”  She stumbled toward the bedroom.  “Now, let’s get down to business.” 

“Fine,” I said.

“I think two hundred oughtta cover it.”

“Two hundred?  I don’t have that kind of money.”

She sneered.  “You a deadbeat or what?”

I opened my wallet.  “Let’s see.  I have one hundred here.”

“Hand it over.”

I gave her the money and she counted the bills one at a time and then counted them again.  “You sure that’s all you got?”

“That’s what’s left.  I have expenses, you know.”

“I thought we agreed on two hundred.”

“We never talked money.”

She sniffed.  “Fucking loser.”  Then she pointed to the bed. 

I did bizarre and terrible things to her, things prohibited by law and scripture, and the woman endured them all without complaint and at times even taunted me, told me to stop being such a homo, a fucking pussy, to “do the job right, goddammit!”  I thrashed and bucked and moaned, and with my eyes clamped shut I could almost imagine that I was back in Paris, in some swanky brothel near the Place de la Contrescarpe where in the summertime the streets swarmed with curious tourists from the crude backwaters of my hometown and where the lovely young whores, instead of ridiculing their clients, brought them to climax with all the solemnity and skill of a Japanese tea ritual.  Afterward, stewing in the aromatic fumes of la petite mort, the whores, who believed that sex was just as cerebral as it was sensual, talked breathlessly, dreamily about the soul and whether or not animals possessed one, the most sublime of conversations, and for a moment I imagined I was in the very center of heaven. 

 

 

-5-

All night long I tossed and turned, my belly bubbling with a devastating blend of booze and a sandwich purchased at a gas station hours before, but I must have fallen into a deep sleep and continued to dream, as I usually did when in my cups, of the Place de la Contrescarpe and of the sidewalk café below the whorehouse where my fellow scribblers and I, a loose association of America’s most middling expatriates, feted each other with pints and pipes and carafes.  Absinthe was all the rage again, frog green and bitter, illegal of course, wreaked havoc on the nervous system, like syphilis.  In a creative haze I tried to finish my long overdue assignment for the travel magazine that in those days gainfully employed me, a snooty publication whose shriveled septuagenarian editor wanted a feature on the Museé de l’Homme, a cavernous building where for a small fee tourists could view Descartes’ brain in the Cabinet of Curiosities.  “On my desk by tomorrow morning,” the editor snarled, “or you’re finished!”  I took this threat seriously, but the drinks were too strong and the conversation too outrageous and I found it impossible to get any work done.     

Had it not been for my wife I would have stayed there all night long, for the rest of my life in fact, but her sudden appearance was a bad omen.  The dream was about to turn sour.  She sat on the edge of the fountain in the square, her long legs bronzing in the sun, and in a voice that was simultaneously sweet and masterfully manipulative and so very typical of Parisian women, she directed my two darling boys, ages five and six, to “attack, attack, attack!”  She had them trained to despise me, and the boys descended like gargoyles from the cornices of the great cathedral, armed with sticks gathered under the chestnut trees and sharpened to lethal points.  They ran wild through the medieval square and poked at me until they drew blood. 

When they grew tired of this game they threw down their sticks and whistled for Monsieur Grat.  Ah, yes, old Monsieur Grat, how my boys loved that insolent cross-eyed poodle.  It came bounding across the square, ran in circles, licked its balls, and happily manufactured piles of fetid shit, which they scooped off the cobblestones and flung at my face.  The café was abuzz with laughter, applause, enthusiastic whistles of approval, and I endured the ferocious hailstorm with a stoic smile.

 

 

-6-

Shielding my eyes from the first gray light of dawn, I rolled away from the woman and eased out from between the sullied sheets and stepped onto the cold hardwood floor, cringing as the boards groaned like the planks of a ship.  Bleary-eyed and whiskey-dicked I stumbled around the room, gathering up my shirt and pants, turning my face away from the old familiar reek of cigarettes and sweat. In the dresser mirror I caught a glimpse of the woman.  Her mouth hung open like a Venus Flytrap, better to capture the brown spiders that dropped in the nighttime from the blades of the ceiling fan.  Her lips were dry and crusted over with an unidentifiable white glop, her face pale, swollen with drink, a tapestry of despair stretched across the iciest trenches of hell.

I hovered over the bed, pinched my lip, smelled the woman on my fingertips. Looking at her I got a funny idea.  I crouched in the middle of the room, tongue flitting in and out of my mouth like a snake trying to taste the early morning air--the scent of sulfur from the nearby blast furnaces, the graphite dust sparkling in the sky--and with my eyes closed tight and with a pleasure more exquisite than last night’s wild hours of drunken lovemaking I squeezed hard, grunting with the effort of it, and felt my bowels rumble and then suddenly, blissfully, empty.

In this world few things are as satisfying as the beer shits, and I enjoyed every moment of it, and as a long, soft, stinking coil oozed out of me onto the floor, forming a great, terraced ziggurat, I took inventory of the room--the half empty bottle of booze that had rolled under the bed, a few scented candles on the window ledge, and on the nightstand, placed there like some sort of talisman to ward off evil spirits, a box of grainy photographs.  I flipped through the pictures.  The same man appeared in most of them, bearded, gray, compact and muscled like a bulldog.  He stood in a stream, holding an enormous catfish by its gills.  He sat on a beach, drinking a bottle of Tecale.  He was riding a motorcycle, climbing the rungs of a smokestack, posing with a group of men, a forlorn bunch wearing filthy denim coveralls and pissed off sideways scowls.  A few of those faces I recognized from the bar last night.   

On the floor next to the bed I spotted the woman’s purse and quietly dug through the compartments until I found the wad of five and tens that I gave her before we fucked.  I intended to count the money over a feast of bacon and eggs and a strong cup of coffee.  By now the diner down the street would be open, the griddle sizzling with grease.  This morning I would sit by the big picture window overlooking the steel mills and read the travel section of the Sunday paper.  Smiling, I reached over and used the down comforter to wipe myself.  A fine start to the day.

 

 

-7-

The woman rolled over and shouted something in her sleep.

I held my breath and skirted the lumpy memento that in the balmy heat of that July morning was already attracting flies, and in my haste I nearly knocked over a little girl in a rumpled summer dress who stood in the doorway, sucking her thumb, staring with strange indifference at the pile of shit next to the woman’s bed.  With her dusky skin--a drop of North African, was it?--and bony limbs she looked like one of those underfed street urchins who lurked in the gloomy carpet shops along the Boulevard Barbes, waiting to accost tourists who’d wandered away from Sacre Couer in search of the Metro.  I used to visit a nearby brasserie there run by a family of Berbers.  The proprietor served a drink called buzo, the best in Paris, and before I departed his little shop he always offered to sell me a bag of hash and an hour with one of “the new girls” smuggled in from Algeria.   “You will find her quite pleasing, monsieur,” he said, picking at his crooked yellow teeth with a curious finger.  Intoxicants and copulation, an illicit trade at which he excelled.  

The little girl took a step toward the bed.

“Shhhhh,” I said, “we don’t want to wake your mommy, do we?”

The little girl blinked, her eyes as large and dark as nighttime in the Sahara.  She scratched her nose, kissed her dolly’s head, and stared again at the shit much as before, though now with a little more intensity, like a patron at the Pompidou confounded by a new sculpture.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

She nodded, slowly, as if not quite sure of the answer, so I took her by the hand and led her into the kitchen.  I cleared away a space at the table and told her to sit down.  After a little exploring I found a loaf of bread, not too moldy, on top of the refrigerator.  I toasted two pieces over the stove’s gas flames and, using a dirty steak knife, lathered the toast with jelly scraped from the bottom of a jar. 

“I guess I should have washed my hands first,” I muttered, setting the plate in front of her. 

She crammed the toast into her mouth, rocking back and forth on the chair.  Then she opened her mouth wide, letting the mush fall onto the table.  She poked at it with her finger, lowered her head, sniffed it, then scooped it up and chewed it again. 

“What’s your name?” I asked.

The little girl started to drool and I knew she wouldn’t be able to answer me.

“I have two boys of my own.  About your age.  I don’t see them anymore.  Sometimes I wonder what they’re doing, wonder what they look like now, how they’ve changed.”

I reached over and touched the girl’s long black hair, wild, curlicued, knotty. 

 “When was the last time your mommy gave you a bath?” I asked. 

She didn’t answer.

“You better come with me,” I said. 

 

 

-8-

The bathroom was small and windowless, its checkered tiles covered with dust and hair.  I opened the medicine cabinet, hoping to find oxycodone, vicodin, praying even for a single aspirin with codeine, but there were only vials labeled setraline, amitriptiline, duloxetine.  Stacked on the toilet were a dozen paperbacks, romances mainly with lurid covers featuring bare-chested men ravaging women in various poses of gratitude and rapture, mouths open, eyes closed in anticipation of long-awaited (and much deserved?) love, shuddering with a passion they never knew possible. 

Rubbing my temples, I instructed the girl to stand against the wall.  I pushed back the moldy shower curtain and plugged the drain in the tub.  It took a little effort but I managed to twist the faucets.  Water trickled from the tap, gray and oily at first, cool to the touch, like the waters of the crooked river after a summer rainstorm.  Debris floated around the tub--nail clippings, pieces of plaster that had flaked away from the wall, a thin sliver of blue soap.

“Raise your arms,” I said.

The girl studied her black toes.

“Hold still.”

I lifted her dress, and as I turned back to check the water I saw framed in the cracked and spotted mirror above the sink the woman’s face.  From the look in her eyes I knew what she was thinking.  Now, I’m a million kinds of monster but I’m not that kind of monster.  Clearly she was still drunk, high, confused.

“Get over here,” she whispered to her daughter, but the girl, naked, filthy, obstinate in her silence, clung tightly to my leg.

“Listen to your mommy,” I said and gave her a gentle push. 

“Don’t you put your fucking hands on her!” the woman shouted.  With a trembling hand she raised the steak knife above her head, the blade still bright red and dripping with jelly.  

“Now just wait a minute,” I said, backing against the toilet.   

She grabbed the little girl’s hand and shoved her out of the bathroom, then she turned the knife on me.

“Stay right there, motherfucker, just stay right where you are.”

“Whatever you say.”

I understood that this would prove to be the great defining moment of her life, the epiphany that sooner or later rolls around in the life of every drunk, and for years to come, as she sipped coffee in the church basement with the rest of the recovering addicts, she would in a voice that was small and docile and trembling with remorse recount the harrowing details of our night together and vow before god never again to touch drugs or alcohol or men.  By then maybe she would see me not as a monster but as an angel in disguise.  But there were many steps to take before my inevitable transfiguration, and the woman, without taking her eyes from me, backed slowly out of the bathroom and slammed the door shut. 

I heard her leave the apartment and stumble down the stairs.  I knew where she was going and knew I had to escape before she returned, but when I tried to open the door I found that it was locked.  The door was solid, made of hardwood, and wouldn’t budge no matter how hard I kicked and pounded and threw my body against it.  The walls seemed to converge, constricting my arms and legs.  It became increasingly difficult to breathe, to move, to whimper with self-pity.  I pressed my ear to the door and listened.  The little girl was still standing there, I could hear her licking her fingertips and breathing hard as she stared with stupid incomprehension at the interlocking spirals of wood grain in the door.  

“Little girl,” I called.  “Listen to me.  Are you listening?  Unlock the door.  Please.  Hurry.  I have to leave.  It’s very important.  Can you hear me?”

She could hear me but my voice meant no more to her than the buzzing of the light bulb above my head, a thing that glowed faintly in the dark and attracted bugs.  

I slumped down on the toilet and closed my eyes.  Maybe if I slept, maybe if I began to hallucinate in the rollicking sea of my hangover I would again taste the bittersweet absinthe, feel the tender warmth of the teenage whores, hear the shrieks of my children as they dashed around the square and slung dog shit at my face, but Paris wouldn’t appear to me, not in this dank coffin that reeked of death and decay, of worms writhing in empty eye sockets and picking clean the bones of a million moldering sinners. 

 

 

-9-

The day passed slowly.  I don’t know how long I was trapped there, three hours, four, I didn’t own a watch, found that since I had no wife to answer to, no children to care for, no more deadlines to meet, I didn’t need one.  With nothing to do I paced back and forth and paged through the paperbacks on the toilet, rolling my eyes at the absurdity of the narratives, the wretched sentimentality of them, the overwrought descriptions of breasts and thighs and buttocks, the syrupy prose that sounded more ludicrous than lascivious.

With mild embarrassment I wondered what the Parisians, lounging on the park benches that lined the perpendicular walkways of the Jardin du Luxembourg, would say if asked their opinion of these masturbatory epics.  “Why rely on such a poor simulacrum,” they would invariably ask, “when you can have the real thing?  Love is everywhere.  It falls from the Paris skies.”  Ah, the French!   When it came to our national character, they were still very naïve and had a difficult time grasping the fact that Americans absolutely depended on sordid novels, pornographic films, battery-operated toys.  A romantic people we were not. 

Like the public expression of grief, any show of affection was considered taboo, hand-holding shunned, kissing on a street corner or public park denounced as a pathological disorder.  Instead of spontaneity Americans preferred long-term contracts and decadent wedding pageants in which women in ridiculous white gowns--white! in this country!--marched down the aisle toward messy divorce, dysfunctional children, medicine cabinets crammed with pharmaceuticals. 

As the day wore on, a ferocious heat seeped in under the crack near the floor, turning the bathroom into a sweltering blast furnace, something was coming, something terrible, and if I kept perfectly still, if I cocked my head at just the right angle and cleared my mind of every distracting thought, I could make out the sound of distant voices, like the buzzing of wasps after their hive has been smashed to bits, agitated, frenzied, enthusiastic, gleefully descending on their enemies with the promise of swift and pitiless annihilation.  With each beat of my heart the voices grew louder, more senseless and savage, the boom and bellow of a mob that obeyed no law save that of its own implacable desire for justice, retribution, blood.

I heard the woman say, “The sonofabitch is up here.”

She led them into the building, a dozen drunken men stomping up the stairs in their steel-toed boots, a relentless march that ended just outside the bathroom door.  A hush fell over them.  The ritual of death required order, a long taunting silence.  Someone knocked, gently, playfully, not with bare knuckles but with the claws of a hammer, the rough edge of a galvanized pipe.  I closed my eyes, and just before the door burst open, I marveled at how fate swept so many of us up as if by a tsunami and hurtled us toward a wall where we were crushed and impaled by still further people.  Life used us as battering rams, one against the other, and few if any escaped the catastrophe.