After I escaped my tyrannical captain in Dutch Harbor, I went straight to France to a small music festival in Normandy. I was super excited to see cool music and meet beautiful French women after months of isolation.
But I never could have expected to meet somebody like Céleste.
On the second day of the festival in the early evening I was waiting in line at the beer tent and the girl of my dreams was suddenly there right in front of me. It all felt designed.
I was waiting in line and a girl next to me put a little sparkly gemstone sticker on a guy and I watched her do it. And she looked at me and said something in French. I suffered through my little spiel, “desolée, je ne parle pas plus de Francaise.”
“Ahhh,” she said. “Do you want one?” she held out the sheet of gem stickers.
I said, “sure, yeah,” and offered her my cheek.
She stuck it on my cheekbone. “You’re American?”
“Yeah,” I said.
And then there she was, next to the girl with the stickers.
“You’re American? And you came here just for this festival?” She’d overheard me talking with the girl (who turned out to be her cousin Jeanne) who put the sticker on my cheek. I looked over and there was this was this beautiful girl! With long wavy brown hair I could already see in my hands. And deep, bright brown eyes. She wore a motorcycle jacket on top of an oversized red turtleneck, wide, worn black Levi’s, and classic Doc Marten boots.
I was mesmerized. I stared at her for a long time with a look on my face like I was trying to pop my ears. Really I was trying to think of anything but “wow she’s cute” or “wow I love her style.” Eventually I said, “yeah, pretty much. I don’t know, it seemed like super cool music and a cool festival!”
All I could think about was how pretty I thought she was.
“Where in the U.S. are you from?”
“Seattle,” I said.
“This is crazy! You come so far for just this tiny festival. Most French people don’t even know of it. How did you hear of this in the U.S.? I just want to understand,” she said.
“I’m sorta friends with a guy in one of the bands so I kinda made that an excuse for a trip.” I said.
“So cool! Which band?”
“Acid Tongue.”
“Oh I don’t know this band,” she said. “Are you only visiting France or will you go to other countries as well?
“Yeah, Paris for a few days before and after this and then I’m going to Lisbon. After that I don’t know where I’ll go but I have a few months to travel.”
“Ahh this is so cool I want to do this SO much!” she said. She was gushing. I blushed. “Sooo, what did you do in Paris before you came here?”
“Oh, you know, just the tourist things. I went to the Pantheon and the Eiffel Tower, and I had to see Jim Morrison's tomb in the Pére Lachaise obviously. Lizard King lives!” I said, and knew it was a bad joke. “It’s right next to the place where I got a tattoo.”
She was nodding along and then brightened. “Ahh oui you get a tattoo! Where is it? Can I see?”
I told her it was on my thigh and that I’d have to take my pants off to show her, she blushed again. But I pulled up a picture on my phone instead. And as I held it out before her, my arm came slightly around her and her body moved slightly against mine. “I think this is really nice.” she said, beaming up at me from under my shoulder. “A really good tattoo.”
“Thanks,” I said, unable to suppress a juvenile smile, like a shy little kid getting his birthday sung to him. “It’s my first one. I’ve been pretty excited and nervous about it.” Suddenly, I remembered myself, and stuck out my hand in awkward ceremony, “my name’s _____ by the way.”
She looked at me, laughed at me, and then offered her hand too, “so formal!”. She had small hands with long fingers and a medium-length white nail job. “I’m Céleste,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”
I suggested that they go back over towards the music, since cousin Jeanne with the plastic diamond stickers had already left.
She waited while I bought another beer and they went over to the outdoor stage. The festival was hosted at an old viny farm with old buildings with old red tiled roofs in the countryside of Normandy and they walked in the mud over hay alongside the festival’s namesake brick and plaster barn.
“Is this your first time at Rock in the Barn?” I said.
“No, no, I was here last year as well. I think this is so fun here.”
“It’s super cool. I love this old farm way out here in the middle of nowhere. It’s really beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it before,” I said. “What did you think of the shows last night?”
“Ahh I missed them. I was so sad. I work last night so I came with my friends from Paris this morning,” she said. “Was it good?”
“Ohh noo, what a bummer! It was super good!” I said. “All the bands were way, way cooler than I expected. It was almost overwhelming,” he laughed. “You have to check out Lebanon Hanover, they were so weird and crazy, kind of a little bit like The Cure.” And then I paused thinking of what to say next. “That sucks you had to work last night. What do you do?” I hated myself for asking what might be the most boring question in the world.
“Ah mhmm, I work in the music industry,” she said. “For a—I don’t know if my english is good—a record company.”
I swooned. “Whoa! What a neat job!”
“Neat?” she said. “I don’t know this word.”
“Oh it’s like a dorky”—she raised her eyebrows—, “or funny, way of saying cool.”
“Cute.” She smiled a cute smile. “And you, what do you do?”
“Right now I’m a fisherman,” I said. “I work on fishing boats in Alaska most of the time.”
“Ah wow, okay!” she said. “So crazy, I would love to learn about this. How long are you on the ocean? Do you go far away?”
“Uh yeah, we go pretty far out, and all over Alaska. It’s called longlining because we tie lines—I mean ropes—with hooks on them together to make a really long rope that lays on the bottom of the ocean.” I held out my hands in ‘okay’ signs, pulling taught between them an imaginary string.
“Wow, and you sleep on the boat?”
“Yep, we’re usually out there at least a week?”
“A week!”
“Sometimes two.”
“This sounds so crazy. I’ve never met a fisherman before.”
“So, I’m your first?” I said.
She smiled big and bright, exposing the tiny star-shaped golden tooth jewel which was plastered to her upper left incisor.
“I like your tooth gem.”
“Ah thanks,” she said. “You should get one! I think this would look really cool on you! No really, it would fit your style a lot I think.”
“Maaaybe, my old roommate had a heart-shaped one,” I said.
“Oh! A heart! Perhaps he is—how do you say— a bit of a slut?”
“Yes!” I said, smiling. “He is.”
She shook her head, “men, pppsssshh.” She laughed, and then thought for a moment. “What I want the most—like so much—is a greel.”
“A what?”
“Greel? A greel?”
I shook my head.
She showed her teeth and pointed at her mouth “greel! Like a greel for your teeth, you know, like rappers wear. Is my english bad?”
“Ohhhh,” I said, “a grill. My bad. No, no, I’m just dumb.” I wished he could record her speaking a few sentences so that I could study the way she talked later.
“I think it would be SO cool looking. Not one of the big greels that goes over all your teeth, no. Just a little one for one tooth.” She posed and pointed at one of her canines.
I was fucking googly-eyed. But I snapped out of it in a sudden realization and bumbled, “your english is really really good, you’re way better than most of the other people I’ve met here.”
“Really? Are you making fun of me?” She looked almost offended.
“No, no! Not at all. You’re actually very fluent and you have a good vocabulary! Super good!”
“Wow, ok! So nice. Thank you! No really, this means a lot to me because I worked so hard on my english. It was very important to me when I was growing up that I would be really fluent one day, because I knew that you just have to be good at english. You know? It’s really important. So, I always took my english very seriously, even as a little girl. Like I always studied the most for english classes and really tried so hard to do well in them. Moreover, I came to America to study in Massachusetts during high school.”
“Oh no way, that’s awesome. With a host family? Where in Massachusetts? One of my friends I came here with is from Mass,” I said.
“Ah, no way! Yes, I was with a host family—in Stoughton, do you know if it? The family was nice but it was kind of strange. They had a son who was a few years younger than me and became really, I mean really—what is the word in english, oh yes—obsessive with me. Like totally in love. He followed me around everywhere I went. On the way to school and when I was…ahhh so weird…..when I was in between classes. Even in the afternoons when I would go with my friends. It was SO awful.”
“Oh go-o-0-d, that’s sounds fuckin’ terrible. You must have been miserable! I’m so sorry you had to deal with that.” I reached out and cupped her arm, didn’t know the right words. But I could see how someone could fall dangerously in love with a girl like her. “Nope, I don’t, I haven’t heard of Stoughton, I can ask my friend. He grew up in a super fancy yacht club kind of town somewhere in Mass. I’ll ask him about it.”
Suddenly, she looked over her shoulder as a haphazard procession of concert-goers migrated away from the outdoor stage and into the barn. I looked too and suddenly noticed that the crowd was no longer around us and that the band had left the stage, taking the chance to continue talking aimlessly with them. The ongoingness of our conversation became impossible to ignore. Unease crept into the open space around us. “I think the next show is about to start,” she said. “Perhaps we should go over there?”
Holy shit. I’d fully expected her to say she had to go find her cousin so she could disappear from me forever.
“Yeah, sure, let’s go check it out,” I said. Casual. No pressure.
So we walked the fifty meters or so (which Fleur had estimated the distance to be) over to the barn. And we stepped into the large doorless entrance and could see that the barn was already pretty full of people, the band already aggressively engaged in their set, ancient straw and raw timber in the roof reverberating with the clang of guitar and the eruption of drums. Conversation impossible. I looked to her and her to me, then back to the stage, and like a pair of marionettes moved forward together into the crowd towards the stage. We stood in the crowd and moved beside each other and nodded our heads side-by-side to the drum and guitar. I pretended to pay attention to the music. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t help himself—I didn’t care about the band at all—I looked down at her, but as I turned to look I caught her mouth swinging into mine, her arms reaching out for my shoulders. Lightworks. Kaleidoscope. Soft, full lips. I had a fistful of her beautiful thick hair in one hand and it felt even better than I’d imagined it and I pulled it and tilted her head back. I pulled her close. The music faded away into the background until all that was left were her lips against mine, her faded perfume and stale beer sweat, and hands, and heat.
The rest of the night was no longer about music, and became an indistinct fugue of kissing Céleste. We went from one stage to the next, to stand and sway before the collision of drum-machine—as the night transitioned to more of a Euro-techno sound—or sat off to the side, anonymous in the crowd, alone in our embrace. An older man heard us speaking in english back inside the barn and was curious about what was going on. She explained the situation to him in french. He looked at them for a long while and seemed very drunk and his dirty black crewneck looked soaked with beer. Then said to me in a thick accent, “you are an American,” he paused, “here,” he pointed at the barn floor, “and you met a french girl?” He raised his eyebrows, lifting along with them the small orange beanie atop his hairless dome.
“Uh yeah, I guess so,” I said.
The older man grinned and nodded, making me and Céleste uncomfortable.
Soon we forgot about it and kept on dancing and kissing.
When the music was over we sat in the muddy grass among the tents with the straggling few who were too stubborn to give up on a good night. She spoke in French to another guy who sat beside her. And I suffered in my attempts to understand what little french I had learned after so many years of study—middle school, high school, college. Eventually I abandoned my manners which instructed me to wait patiently for them to finish speaking and touched her arm, “you want to go walk around a bit?” I asked.
“Ah oui, yes let’s go.” She bounced right up.
They walked around a tall tent and instantly embraced in feverish kissing. “I want you so much,” she whispered in my ear.
“Where can we go to be alone?” I asked. I was sharing a tent, and the other guys were already sleeping in it.
“Ah, I know, this is just the problem,” she said. She paused for a while, then said, “do you have a condom?”
My legs nearly buckled, and for the first time in my life, I genuinely prayed: ‘dear lord,’ I thought, ‘please don’t let me fuck this up.’
“Ohhhh fuck” I said, thinking hard. “I don’t buuut….”
“Ah it’s ok, we can still have sex if we find somewhere we can go, if you want to. Just no penetration. You can fuck me if you come see me when we’re back in Paris.”
I didn’t push it, only looked around desperately. And there, bright under the lights in the distance down the field, saw it: “we could go in one of the showers in the trailer over there,” I said, “that might be the only option.”
“Yewwww,” she groaned, “but they are so dirty. No, I don’t think so. I don’t think this is a good idea. But Jeanne is at the private afterparty with the bands, perhaps our tent is empty but I don’t know. We can go see I suppose. But I don’t know where our friend is. If he’s inside I think I will have to just go to sleep.”
“Ok, let’s try.”
Her tent was much farther than I thought. She explained that because of her various ‘industry connections’ she was allowed to camp among the band members in a separate area. It took maybe ten minutes for us to walk there through a small path in tall grasses, in silent, boiling, hopeful, expectancy.
We finally got to the tent, saw it illuminated before us like a Guadalupe by the light from an adjacent farm structure which seemed to burn all night long. We were utterly alone except for the captive shadows imprisoned there past their time by that little light. “Ok, wait here just one second,” she said. And approached, cat-like, opening the tent zipper with extreme care, inch by agonizing inch. I waited and watched and held my breath. After what seemed like eternal minutes, she stuck her head inside and turned back to me with a big, excited grin, “it’s empty. Ok, let me just text Jeanne. But I think you can come in for a bit.”
I looked up into the cloudy night sky and nodded a silent ‘thank you,’ proceeded with her quietly towards the tent, quaking with anticipation. My legs felt weak and my stomach felt like I’d swallowed bees. She reached for the zipper to open the door the rest of the way and stopped, turned back to look at me. “No penetration, though, remember,” she said.
My body sagged slightly but I said, “that’s ok. I don’t care.”
“Ok good.” She disappeared inside. I almost fell over in his urgent struggle to kick off his mud-encrusted shoes. And then dove into the tent and started rolling around with her.
First, I took off her leather jacket. Said, “I love your jacket, you look so cool in it. Like a girl James Dean.” Kissed her deeply.
She rubbed her hands all over my pants and stomach, panting. She said, “thanks, it belonged to my grandfather, my sweater as well.” So the sweater came off too.
“That’s cute….and hot for some reason.” I said.
It didn’t take long before we were fully naked and kissing each other all over, our whole bodies twisted up together in a big knot. Legs with arms, arms with legs, on top of clothes and pads, and bags containing makeup and toiletries. I put my head between her legs and my arms around her thighs and reached my hands up to her breasts. Until she pulled me up, rolled us both over, and knelt, and kissed me down past my waist to put my dick in her mouth. But there was a problem: there was hardly anywhere to get water at the festival and both our mouths were so critically dry that it was inhibiting us from any serious engagement in these, our non penetrative options. Eventually, we were in a missionary-type, not-so-dry hump position. “Arrête,” she said when I rubbed my dick` gently between her legs, ever-so-slightly against her clitoris. “What are you doing?” she breathed.
“Don’t worry,” I whispered, “I promise I won’t, I’m just teasing. You can trust me. I promise I won’t.” I went on, hoping beyond a hope that she would lose control of her desire and allow it to happen. We both began to pant and moan slightly.
“Arrête. Arrête. It’s too much,” she said after a minute or so.
“Ok.” I stopped.
Then we lay there in the tent, nakedly entwined, me on top of her. And blurted out random thoughts: “If you could only eat peanuts for two years or bananas for three, which would you choose?” I said.
“Uh neither, I would die. That’s disgusting.” She was laughing. “Can I eat things with bananas in them or just bananas?”
“It has to be just bananas or just peanuts,” I said.
“Ok, yeah, this is dumb,” she laughed.
“Weeelllll….if you could shake a toe and go anywhere in the world right now where would you go?”
“Hmmm, ok, this is a better question. But so hard! I never had a chance yet to travel the way you do. Attends! Attends. Ok. I would looove to go to South America, all over, and also to North Africa, perhaps Thailand or Vietnam as well. But I think I will go to South America first. Right now, I think maybe Peru. Jeanne, you know, my cousin, she is leaving to go traveling for a year just a couple months from now. I’m so sad she’s leaving, but I’m also so happy for her. I think I will try to travel for a long time too, perhaps in the end of next year.” He moan-grunted his approval, laid my head down on her bare chest. She ran her fingers through my greasy hair. “Where is your favorite place you’ve been, it seems like you travel so much.”
“Hmmm,” I thought about it. “Right here!”
She delicately scratched my back along the length of my spine with one long fingernail. I shivered. “No really, your favorite.”
“Really! This is it.” I looked into her eyes. They twinkled up at me with a radiance that made me melt into a big puddle. Smooched her. Put my hand on her big soft cheek.
After a while she said, “I think I must sleep soon.”
I had no idea how long I’d been in the tent. “Yeah, me too, but I don’t want to leave you.”
“Mhmm, me either.” She squeezed me tight where she held me under my arms.
But it was time to go. We both knew it. And moved slowly apart. Sitting up slightly, I noticed the tent door wasn’t completely closed, and the tiny gap at the top allowed a spotlight beam from the all-night-light outside into the tent. It fell perfectly across her stomach and over her slightly protruding ribcage onto her left breast, up her little neck to the ridgeline of her jaw, and ended on her face. She was stunning. It made me dizzy, gave me this funny sensation way down in my belly like whatever moving parts were in there had gotten confused and worked themselves into a knot. I thought that she really was probably the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. And, seeing her like that, naked in the half-light, I wondered what I could have possibly done to deserve getting to spend any time at all with a girl like Céleste.
I held her chin and kissed her one more time, said “okay, good night. See you in Paris. Sleep well.” Pulled on my muddy shoes. And with one final look at her, stood out the door and zipped it closed. I walked away and I couldn’t help turning back to look at the tent where it sat brightly one last time, right where I’d left it with her falling asleep inside, and I wished I was still in there with her.
The walk back to my tent felt like I was walking on castles in the sky. The name ‘Céleste’ and the image of her sitting up watching me leave with the light falling across her naked body swirled around in my head. I went down the winding skinny path through the head high grass and cried out into the country night. “Life is alive! And I’m fucking real!” I shouted. Dogs barked on the other side of a fence but I didn’t care. Because I’d remembered that I was young and the world was full of magic, that there were ghosts and monsters and fairies and beautiful women, and that miraculous adventures and true love were real and dreams really did come true.