One Morning in Paris

One

“I should go home soon,” I said to the man. We were sitting on his red sofa.

“But I want to sleep with you,” the man retorted with a sweet, flirty smile. His face came nearer again to kiss me. His skin had smelt soapy and his lips had felt soft. This strange electricity was going up my spine, gentle and spiralling.  It tingled right through me, all golden and warm.

It was early morning. The blue had crept into the sky. I’d not noticed time passing. Earlier the gases of the sun simmered like a cooker with a warm glow of excitement and the fun of talk and attraction had made me too ecstatic to sleep.

His bed was near the sofa and I wanted so much to lie in his arms on that bed. The walls were painted mustard, and like icing sugar gone white, and the dawn sun spread over the wall. His eyes were so caring and soft and when they came closer we kissed again and I felt another dose of the elixir, filling me with sweet happiness.
“It feels so different now,” he said, as if it puzzled him. I looked at his face, as if he might know what was going on better than me.
“I don’t even know your name,” I murmured
“Daniel” he replied
“Daniel?” Something in the name made me sit up. I looked out of the window and now noticed the courtyard bricks and the branches of the trees gone black with rain.  

I looked back at the man.  Suddenly he had a pixie sweetness and was full of all the forms of the enamoured man: the cunning fox, the hungry wolf, Pan or Silenus or a crafty, duplicitous imp. He was also Romeo and the smitten, fairy prince and my heart was on my sleeve for doves to peck at. I pulled down my sleeve and watched his crooning and purring, his feathery hair brushed upwards so cutely, making him even more attractive, along with the pink adrenalin in his cheeks.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” I said, pulling away.

I turned my head from him. Muddled thoughts all scrambled for a say in my mind.

 “I don’t know what I’m doing here” I murmured to him and felt this emergency siren inside telling me to leave.
“How come you live in Paris?” he asked, taking my hand gently.  I felt the warmth of his touch and looked at his eyes. They were so friendly and kind and I wished to trust him but suddenly a whole lot of junk about my life threatened to pour out: how I felt lousy, full of shame and hate and resentment and hurt and I couldn’t open my mouth and instead looked out of the window.
“So you’re Daniel?” I said.

I began to look around for my things. My coat was on a chair by the door, and my bag beside it. I moved to get up. His face had greyed a little.
“You’re not going?” he asked flatly. “Did I say something to upset you?”
“No, nothing” I shrugged. I was putting on my coat and scooping up my bag. “I’m just tired and need to sleep,” I said. Unlatching the door of his apartment, I thanked him for dinner and left.

Two

The telephone’s bell burst into the silence.
“A man was asking for you,” said the voice. It had that playful tone of voice, the teasing, excited voice of someone playing a game. It was Trudy.
“Which man?”
“A Daniel Levine?” said the voice, teasingly.
“Oh him?” I answered absently. “I met him at the exhibition yesterday.”
“And?” she probed.
“We had dinner together,” I answered. A dreaminess came over me, as I thought of the early morning. Driving home from his flat in the taxi, I’d felt so prematurely ripped from him. The Paris streets had fallen helplessly by: boulevards, squares, cafés, all the places tattooed with some poignant memory.
“And?” she urged.
“We were in some restaurant somewhere,” I told her coyly. “We talked art – nothing intimate.”
“Did you go to his place?”
“Yes…” I began, “but then I left. Nothing happened,” I could hear my own voice was puzzled.
“And why not?” she asked. I shrugged.
“He reminded me of someone… someone I’d met before… “ I said. I pictured Daniel Levine’s handsome eyebrows, his brown hair, so soft and feathery and the way it fell in a wave at the back of the neck. But I just felt frightened.
‘Why did I feel so afraid of him?’ I wondered.  ‘of someone who was so attractive?’

As soon as he had smiled at me, I had liked his smile, but why had it also made me feel threatened. Why? I wondered. ‘What was so dangerous about a smile?’ I recalled that smile on his face as his lips had approached mine. It was so handsome and I had felt a fluttering sensation and yet why had it had made me flinch too? Why did its deliciousness concurrently fill me with suspicion?
“He reminded me of someone who hurt me once,” I explained.

I pictured Michael Bentley. I pictured the same sparkling eyes, his goonish grin, his pony tail and black shirt and how he’d hurt me. How much like Daniel Levine Michael Bentley had looked.  Even after all those years, I could remember Michael Bentley to every detail. I recalled his monkey boots that night, as they clacked over the sticky floor of the college union bar.
“Perhaps it’s an ancient custom for people to splatter beer all over the floor,” he had said to me, grinning, “like a kind of baptism or sacrifice” I couldn’t help smiling at him. “I suppose Southern beer is strange to you too?” he added. I looked down at my bottle of Newcastle brown. “Where are you from?” he’d asked.

It was so strange to remember him so clearly, from all that time ago. Michael Bentley. He had walked over to me, as if to hear me better. It was so loud upstairs. There had been a band booming that night at the College bar. Everyone was wearing their best clothes. I felt in disguise. My face had been a thing to paint on, examining it in the mirror, making me into something, an image of desire. I made myself into a flower, to attract all the bees. I had worked on my eyes: lilac, mascara, eye liner, skin foundation, powder puff, rouge, lip gloss, hairspray, gel, clips…. My will was to attract love and the student union bar was as busy as a market, with some things to interest everyone: so many people, bringing that tingling of interest. It was like an Arabian bazaar selling different kinds of love. I was totally dressed up like a doll to buy, an offering, but to whom? Who would buy me? Who would love me? Who would fill the echoing dark vaults within me?

Michael Bentley was grinning at me affectionately.
“Where are you from?” I asked him.
“The Midlands” he replied, “I have twenty five brothers and sisters”
“How come that many?” I asked, surprised.
“My parents are foster parents,” he explained.
“Many mouths to feed” I said.
“Yes,” he murmured, but he grinned a little darkly and didn’t reveal more than that. I found I had leant against him a little drunkenly and was flirting.

He stooped quickly forward and we snogged. I was impressed at his gumption.
There was a song ringing from above.
“It’s got to be…eee….eee perfect! Too many people take second best, but I won’t have anything less…”
Everyone was new to the game of love, new to the sale, to the recognition of value. Everyone danced so carefree without knowing yet if they would take second best or the perfect one. There were pint size transparent plastic beakers of beer, Truman’s bitter, lager. I got admiration for drinking the enormous pints, but whose admiration was gained? Not the bright ones, the ones who worked out those essays never got done on lousy hangovers.

Drunken students were like wild animals let lose to chase the butterfly disco lights, an aurora borealis, gone insane to the music, the Cure, the Sex Pistols, T Rex and the DJ, stood like a vicar at a lectern, ministering lyrics about these new wild feelings entering the teenage years.
Music with words that had no meaning ‘This is a happy house, we’re happy here… in the happy house’

I was used to snogging at parties and school discos but had never gone further than a quick snog. Almost at once, I was amused to feel the jerk between his legs, the rising of the toughened part, appearing from nowhere, that all girls felt very flattered to have had the power to awaken. I enjoyed this power and felt in control.
But then he said: “Want to come home with me?” he’d said it with such a soft voice. I considered. He liked me, I was sure, and I just thought him a bit of a goon and harmless to my feelings, for I’d had never been hurt by a man.

I looked about me. My coat was upstairs. Should I go and fetch it? I had only descended to the toilet to check my make-up and scout around. The beer had become like black pritt-stick glue under my feet. Like rabbit droppings, the toilet water bowl was full of cigarette butts. It smelt of goats cheese vomit and had graffiti on the door. It was a haven for gossip to flourish, just like cockroaches flourishing behind a fridge. All the cubicles quietened either the pee or the rustling of the toilet paper.
“Harriet’s going out with a lecturer”
“How do you know?”
“I saw them together,” came the anonymous reply from a toilet cubicle. I took awhile to neaten up my eyeliner at the mirror, before leaving the toilet, but when I came outside the toilets, Michael Bentley had been there. Someone else lay further up the steps, comatose, and standing over him, muttering to themselves was a rescuer, their concerned friend.

Then I nodded at Michael Bentley, seeing no problem with jumping right into bed with him. If the mood was good, why not?  There had been an immediate liking, I felt it must be a sign that something good was going to happen. He grinned like he was a winner when I said yes and we went to his flat.

At his flat he showed me his poems. I was in awe of him, living alone. I had never made love with a man who lived alone and we made love. He had marched with enthusiasm in his monkey boots, leading me by the hand. We ran to the bus stop and I laughed in the wind. It was a cherry red bus with big open holes at the back so you could leap on one or off at traffic lights. Our seats were carpet covered and people huddled in them like eggs in a box, the air all steamy and smelling of beer. There was a smell of brewery breath and the windows were all steamed up with the light bulbs on, so it seemed like a flying cafe room. Voices were louder, more slurred, everyone’s alcoholled courage more outright. People swaggered their way down the aisles, clinging like monkeys to the metal handlebars.

Being a virgin, I pretended to be raucous, but part of me was scared. I felt shy and embarrassed. A conductor rang a bell which clanged and somewhere in a little encasement sat a driver, who made the engine trumpet alive, vibrating and shuddering, as the bus snorted and blubbered over the bumps of Lewisham Way, to where we got off the bus at Lewisham.
He took me down a back-alley, which went on and on. It led behind one yard after the next. I kept saying: “Are we there yet?” I had sore feet and though it was dark, and menacing dustbins surrounded us, I felt safe with him.

Finally he said,
“It’s here” He lived up a metal fire escape above a fish shop. He picked me up like a baby and carried me up the fire escape. I was so impressed by his strength. Through the tressels of its railings, I could see the yard below, full of junk and cans. High at the top, you could see the railway, where the train went through Catford. It arrived, like a sudden burst of applause and then was gone.

His bed was a disarray of tea towels and grimy sheets. Clothes, shirts, trousers, littered the floor. Chips in newspaper, a can of lager, cold white walls, and no curtains and just the barren metal frame of a window. Outside, taxis drilled by the window on Lewisham High Street. From his window, a council estate metal frame, dingy and unwiped, you could see Lewisham Clock tower, the Lamb and Flag pub, and the red brick shops opposite.  Just one desk for his books, a few I was studying too, Lawrence, Shakespeare; he was doing the same course. It was cold in his room. The floor was coated in half written stories, like autumn of fallen leaves of paper from his mind.
“Cravings” one poem was called. He read me the poems with his northern accent, and I listened. My heart was really titillated. He gave me his full attention and suddenly I thought we were made for each other, for I had always wanted to date a writer. He had poems all over the floor

The beer had made me forget my nerves. Intoxicated there was no anxiety about those body parts been seen, those wobbly thighs and nipples. I was swept onto the bed and undressed very rapidly by him, so he didn’t notice my naked parts anyway. Despite all the warnings of the Home Economics teacher, I had let him enter my secret tunnel. I’d given him free roaming, like a sewer rat, free to do as he pleased. He seemed so enthusiastic and desirous and liked me so much I gave him the right to pull off my clothes until I was wrapped in the toga of his sheets.
He had a thin scattering of fair hair on his chest. His charm and ease for talking for flaunting his perfectly at ease. His arms were on either side of my head, milky soft skin holding up his biceps, which were potato large and healthy. He reared forward and enjoyed the sensual thrusts, kissing me on the mouth occasionally.

He pushed his penis in carelessly, ruthlessly, everywhere, leaving a gluey film and now he had a cocksure grin. I’d let him shock me into being ‘tumbled’ I felt a helpless, awkward sensation and nothing like I dreamed ‘making love’ would be like.  I lay still, ignorantly wondering what he was feeling. I was rather like a lobotomised carrot. I had been most embarrassed to reveal my vagina. His penis had been pushing, swelling and forceful and I wondered, a little, why he didn’t say anything about my body? Why he took me so rapidly, not engaging those cherished parts of me? I laid myself out for him, allowing him to do this strange thing: these press-ups upon me.

Did he like the shape? My skinny shoulders? I toasted myself in the warmth of his body, then felt the gravy of his sperm roll down my leg. But I didn’t realise how fragile I felt, how vulnerable I felt, naked and opening my virgin body to him. I didn’t realise how smitten I really was to have given myself to him and now that his penis had finished, it seemed to forget me.

All night I had lain in awe of him. I had never slept all night with a man before. I felt shy, overcome and suddenly I was in love. Serotonin or dopamine must have filled my head in the night. Within moments of feeling this man a clown, he had awoken a sensation of affection, infatuation. He had the allure of Don Juan and he’d risen above me on a pedestal, from being just a court jester at my throne.

I was suddenly feeling so in awe of him. I was suddenly so proud of him. He was independent, had his own flat and his own mind and was doing so well. I had developed a crush instantly.

Suddenly, in the surge of feeling and liking for him, my own sense of self diminished. Facing love, my sensation was anxiety. Why? Anxiety made itself felt by ponds of sweat in the palms of my hands, under my armpits and the soles of my feet, so that my grubby plimsolls with their holes would get sticky. It attacked my natural flow of talk; the confidence with which its current normally flowed (from source of thought to outpour) was suddenly damned by boulder type fear, the thick sediment of doubt and self-consciousness.

In the morning I expected him to want to see me more. But to my surprise, he had lost interest. It reminded me of my cat. Once the mouse was dead, he didn’t even eat it. It had lost the excitement of the chase.

In the morning he went to the toilet. I heard him fart, a loud blubbery one, rubber loud and I felt shocked, impressed by his absence of embarrassment when he came back. He soared in height, impressing me. It made me shy after – suddenly lying with doting eyes. He even seemed disappointed that I didn’t know what to do next. I’d thrown myself away in his sheets; I’d given up the best part of me, my editorial status and revealed insecurity and I wanted to hide in his arms.

I froze and went blocked. I watched him blankly in amazement as he steered himself around me and overlooked all my worth, seeing none of it now. He passed me by like someone unnoticed, someone invisible. I was still in the dripping grey of his sheets the next morning.
The toilet was empty. It echoed, chill as a fridge. There was no toilet paper.
“I might be pregnant,” I said, biting my lip. He seemed disinterested in my anxiety. Now I was anxiously small, measuring my value by his reactions to me. I was in need of his assurance, suddenly I felt alone inside, empty and hollow. There was a dismal, distant look in his eye, and it coldly dawned on me there might be no next instalment.
“I’ll make you a tea, but there’s no milk,” was all he said.

Then it just got worse and worse.  I saw that the proud look he’d had of winning me, achieving me, had gone. Instead, he seemed far away. I was now to him like a dead mouse to a cat. A vague hope was ‘Maybe I assumed he was in love too and playing hard to get?’ But it was a foolish hope.  Puzzled I went home, but I thought about it. I felt insulted, humiliated. I was still in love. My love obscured my sense. 

In the student coffee bar I waited for him to go with me to the college nurse to take the morning after pill. I waited a long time. The walls of the coffee bar were greasy yellow. It seemed to have fog as air. It sold ham sandwiches in baps, coffee in polystyrene cups and paninis with burning melted cheese in. Students gave out leaflets, people made announcements, groups collected together and everyone was calm. It was full of smokers excited talking and everyone crowded into it, huddled onto the chairs or passing through it, seeking out affinities and fellow sparkling eyes.

When he hadn’t turned up, I finished my overfull coffee and my hand trembled so much the surface rippled as if the earth juddered and leaps of tawny liquid shot on my hands, scolding them.
“Bastard to women” people had said about him. “Didn’t go with you to the college nurse...”

At the disco maybe he recognised my lovesick gaze, for then he ignored me and walked away.
“Hi!” I said. “I took the pill,” I said to him.
“Oh, hi,” he said. He acted as if he’d not heard me quietly and turned at once to speak to another girl. Suddenly she seemed so much more pretty, worth so much more and I felt so small and worthless.

But this made him even less keen on chasing me. He almost looked repulsed. I felt so small. I was at the union disco, three nights later. I saw him. Hurt felt like a clanging, noisy resounding sound, like the howl of a dog who’d been run over by a car, I felt so small as if my hair must have looked like a sheep’s with big hurt eyes and my heart was feeling the red had been stripped off with paint stripper.

I saw him take up his suede coat and so I ran across the room and followed him to the bus stop. I saw him stand alone at the bus shelter, with his hands in his pockets and so I went to join him.
“I like you,” I said. He knew I was following him. He sighed. “I’m afraid I have a girlfriend,” he said quickly.
“Who?” I asked, with a clasping voice, like a jealous parrot
“It doesn’t matter who,” he said, “I like you but not that way,” he explained softly. Like a crush of cymbals on the ears, my humiliation and hurt resounded through every nerve. The swiftness of his escape stung me. I recoiled, and for a few moments felt the clout of rejection clobber me so much I lost track of my thoughts. My quiet inner calm was gone, quite gone and I seemed to fall backwards like a boxer in a ring.

A bus arrived. I climbed onto the bus with him but I had nothing to say. I hoped he might change his mind and like me. When we got off the bus, to my surprise he offered to walk me softly up the street to my door.
I wished he hadn’t been so nice to me, for it would make it more difficult to hate him.
“I just feel really rebuffed,” I said.
“Sorry” he said.
“It’s ok,” I said calmly, not wishing to fall apart in front of him, ‘wait until you’re alone’ a voice said inside, do it in secret in your untidy room, on your unmade bed...’ He had gauged into some naive, puppy fat clod loving in me, leaving a seething, exposed wound.

After he had walked me home, I was so hurt, I promised myself that I would not love again, and if anyone caused me to like them so much, I would keep well away from them.
When he had waved goodbye and turned to go back down the road, free of me, I went up to my room and curled up on my bed, coiled like an adder. In the pink walled university room, I felt a seething hurt as if cut by poisonous tongue of that creature.

I felt my heart broken and really despairing and hurt and lost some strength. Nobody searched me out, nobody knew. I wished someone could take the pain away, but it was not a pain, like a cut knee or a seething blister. It was a pain deep inside, like nothing I’d ever felt before. No hospital had found a remedy for it. I had never felt pain like that. A bee sting once, scraping my thighs on a tarmac while on a go-cart… but this pain was deep inside.
I didn’t want to go through that hurt again?

Suddenly I recalled that terrible pain of Michael Bentley from all that time ago. I had pushed it to the back of my mind, and now it had come up again, as if to remind me it was still there. After Michael Bentley I had decided never to fall in love again. The hurt was too much. Love just made you vulnerable opening to being hurt, and there seemed no good in it.
I realised Trudy was still waiting on the other end of the phone.
“Well, he wants your telephone number from me,” she said. I felt anxious. It felt sore and menacing.
“Oh no,” I said, with a moan.
“I didn’t give it of course,” she added quickly.
“I’m glad,” I said, “Because I’m feeling I’d rather not see him again,” I explained.
“Why?” Trudy asked, but I really could not explain why and we finished our conversation and put the phone down.

https://www.amazon.com/One-Morning-Paris-tale-desire-ebook/dp/B00H6U6U38/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1500479502&sr=8-2&keywords=Keziah+Shepherd