I met Céleste for drinks in a punk bar in Paris with big red candles and a taxidermied goat head on the wall. The bartender wore all black and had cool tattoos and he was playing a bunch of Lou Reed and projecting some insane surrealist film on the wall.
I picked the spot because some guys I met on a bus had said it was the coolest bar in Paris, and I wanted it to seem like I was finding cool places.
She was late. I drank half my beer before she swung in the door. I saw her come in and she saw me and we both had big smiles on our faces.
I told her I had a tab open. She got a glass of red and sat down with me and we made small talk, first date stuff.
I was nervous and quiet and I wasn’t sure if it was going well until she said we should go somewhere else after two or three drinks. I said anywhere. She said there was a nice place to sit outside and have a drink and watch the city nearby. She went to the bathroom, and I closed my tab and then went to the bathroom too. And found her waiting in the little space where people smoked between the bar and the two bathrooms. She wore a pearl necklace with a gold pendant on it, a black lacey tank top, baggy blue Levi’s and her Doc Marten boots. She was leaning daintily against the wall, she smiled when she saw me. It was like she had a gravitational pull and I was in her orbit. I didn’t say anything and I leaned in and kissed her hard and pressed her up against a wall and then I knew that it was going well.
When we left the bar, I bought a bottle of wine from a convenience store and we walked up to the top of Paris’ only hill and sat up at the Sacre Coeur, her ‘nice spot.’ We drank the wine, the worst and sweetest bottle of wine there ever was, and we looked down on the city without any awkwardness between us. I put my arm around her back and she pressed her shoulder into my chest. We sat there and watched the Paris city lights. And we were distracted by all these guys with huge motorcycles revving around and making tons of noise.
“They are French red necks, I think you call them.”
“Ahh I see, they’re hillbillies.”
“Yes, they are crazy.” She gave me a playful look. “Let’s do a bet, and whoever loses has to go for a ride with one of them.”
I thought if Céleste got on a bike with one of those guys, he probably wouldn’t bring her back. And I was afraid of riding with them myself.
“Sure,” I said. And she showed me how to place this game with your fingers where you pick a number and then you choose either a bigger or a smaller number and if the other person guesses the number you picked you lose.
Luck was on our side.
We both won.
We Ubered back to her place. It was exactly like I’d hoped it’d be, old white plaster and cool posters on the walls and big windows. We went straight to her bed. We got each other naked and I rolled on top of her and put my face into her great big nest of hair and wrapped her body up in my hands.
I’d expected her to make me wear a condom since she wouldn’t fuck the other night at the festival because we didn’t have any condoms, but as soon as I was on top of her she put my dick inside her. It surprised me. We’re having sex, I thought. She was so beautiful and she was French so I really wanted to prove myself and perform well. I twisted her all around in all kinds of different directions and tied her legs into pretzels, and landed back on top of her, my necklace bumping again and again and again into her face. It felt so good I couldn’t believe it. Everything about our bodies fit together perfectly—like good jeans or your favorite sweatshirt, you would never want it to be another way.
“Wow, so good,” she said after I came, when I was trying to figure out if she came too.
I looked at her, I was nervous. “You really think so? It was good for you?”
“Whaaat? Oui, yes, when I was on top and you had your hands all over me, this was crazy.”
I smiled. It was crazy. The first time having sex with Céleste and it felt like we’d already been doing it together for lifetimes.
“I have a little ouuueed if you want to smoke,” she said.
“Do you really?” I said. She was the greatest girl in the world.
I sat on her balcony in my underwear with Céleste next to me wearing my t shirt like a dress and we smoked pot and traded her phone back and forth and played songs.
“Is it my turn to choose?” I said.
“Yes, okay,” she said, and passed her phone to me.
She’d made fun of me for my last selection of Neil Young “See the Sky About to Rain.” So I put on ‘Moonlight’ by XXXtentacion. “Do you like him?” I said.
“Mhmm it is difficult with him. Yes but also no.”
“Because he was so fucked up?”
“Well yes, and because he did not treat women well.”
“Yeah, I don’t really know much about it. He was kind of a monster, wasn’t he? But his music is also SO fucking good”
“So good. That’s why it’s difficult.”
I launched into the division between art and artist rant which had taken me down a million misadventures since college. “Don’t you think that no matter how bad a person was, if they made good art, they kinda die and take the bad stuff with them and the art stays. You can’t take it away. Good art is just good art. It doesn’t really matter how awful a person they were, because the art is still good. Don’t you think?”
“Mhmm no, not really,” she said. “Because there are some, like people who have raped women, or beaten them, or things like that, I look at their painting or listen to their music, and all I can see or hear is that horrible thing that they have done. It makes the art bad, for me. It ruins it. Because I cannot appreciate it for what it is any longer.”
I looked at her and I didn’t know what to say. Nobody had ever said anything like that when I said there should be a division between art and artist. Nobody had ever made the most obvious and important point you could make—that some things can’t be ignored, that there are things bad enough to suck the beauty out of anything.
“I don’t know how I never thought of it that way,” I said.
“Mhmmm,” she said. She closed her eyes.
We were both starting to fall asleep. I looked at her sleepy face laying in the bed next to me, trying to suck up every detail, trying to remember every particle of her face. Eventually, I said “do you want me to turn off the light?”
“Mhmmm,” she squeaked, without opening her eyes. Then propped herself up and grabbed her phone, “do you want us to wake up with time for coffee and perhaps chill a bit? Or do you want to get more sleep?” she asked as I got back under the covers and wrapped an arm over her waist and snuggled against her.
“Mmm coffee and chilling,” I said.
“Okay, good,” she set the alarm, pushed her warm ass into me.
In the morning when the alarm went off, I had to shake her to get her up. I sang into her ear, “Cece, Céleeeeste, it’s your alarm. It’s time to wake up.” She rolled back toward me, burrowed into my chest, and we went back to sleep until her next alarm went off. I didn’t know about the next alarm. And then it went off and we went back to sleep one more time, with my face against her cheek and our knees stacked like lincoln logs. When the third alarm went off, we fucked and then chilled in bed and drank coffee with cookies. And then it was time for her to go to work, so we dressed and walked to the métro.
Before we left we both checked ourselves in the mirror. Céleste was showered and dressed for work and had put on makeup, she looked like she could go down a runway. She was wearing her a white tanktop with a butterfly on it, and dark super baggy jeans, and hoop ear rings. My hair was messy and greasy and my clothes were dirty. I had an old Metallica shirt and a pair of dirty black levi on’s and the jacket I thrifted in Lyon because I didn’t have any winter clothes. We looked in the mirror and saw who was who. And I saw that I had a giant hickey on the left side of my neck.
“Ohhhh Céleeeessste, look what you diiiid,” I said.
She gasped, “ahhh no.” She winced, “I’m sorry. Are you mad at me?” She touched it like she was touching a wound. She cowered a little bit, and really looked worried. She’d put on her big pink and yellow fleece jacket and she looked like an adorable little pink bunny interrogating my face nervously to see if I waspissed off.
“No, I don’t care, it’s ok. I really don’t care. I’m proud to have a hickey from you.”
“Pssssssh,” she laughed and rolled her eyes.
We walked to the metro. And rode together for six or seven stops, thighs close tight on folding seats, her head propped on my shoulder just below my hickey. When we got to her stop, she kissed me hard and fast, and walked out the metro doors, wand left me alone with nothing but her old copy of L’Étranger which she had given to me as another keepsake. She walked off and I opened it to a random page. It was in French and I couldn’t read it. And I remembered that I was not home, that I was alone in a foreign place.
That whole day I walked across the city of Paris drunk on exhaustion and thoughts of Céleste. In the evening time I went to see a band called Guerilla Toss at a bar called the Supersonic that had free live music every night—and overpriced beer.
I texted Céleste that she should meet me there. She was too tired, she said, but she still wanted to see me. I immediately called an Uber. When I got back to her place she wanted to walk down to the little island on the Seine, Swan Island, which was close to her apartment. We brought beers and walked down, sat on a bench on the quiet path overlooking the river.
“What’s your shirt?” she said, leaning against me, and traced the album cover design on my chest with her fingers.
“Oh, it’s just a record I like.”
“I don’t think I know of it. Can you show me?”
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “But I don’t think you’ll like it.”
“Whaaaat, why?” She was offended.
“Just wait, you’ll see.”
The album cover was The Late Great Townes Van Zandt, a favorite of mine for many years. I turned on ‘Fraulein,’ felt it fitting for the moment:
“Fraulein, Fraulein, walk down by the river
Tonight when those stars start to shine
By those same stars above you, well I swear that I love you
For you are my pretty Fraulein.”
“Do you like it?” I said. “I don’t think most people in Europe like country music.”
She laughed and said emphatically, “oh no, no, no. We don’t listen to country at all.” Then she looked at me with that burning look, “but I like this.” She turned away, looked at the river, and her smile became a grin, “even though it’s SO American. Like so much. Really. Even more than the song you played for me last night.”
On the way back I made us stop a minute in the middle of the Pont de Bir Hakeim under the métro rails, because I wanted to look at the lights on the Eiffel Tower, and disrupted what had been a private night on the bridge for a newlywed, and obviously American, couple who had hired some poor violinist to play ‘La Vie en Rose,” over and over again.
And then, we walked the few blocks to her apartment and repeated the night prior. We fucked in her white room with the windows open and the curtains fluttering in the hot summer breeze. We smoked pot on her cute balcony with just enough space for the two of us to sit down with our knees touching. We fucked and smoked pot on the balcony and fucked again. I’d roll us another spliff and we’d go out and smoke it and then sit there and play with each other's hands. We’d hold hands and lean away from each other and stand up into a hug. And then fuck and go back out to the balcony.
Sitting out there late in the night, I scooched forward, my knees moving past hers, my arms wrapping around her bent legs, and rested my head on her knees. She put her arms around me and leaned down and kissed me on the top of my head. We held each other like that, held tight against time. We hardly knew each other. We were hardly more than strangers. But it didn’t feel like strangers. It felt so good and right. I let her go reluctantly, said softly, “I think I have to leave soon, my flight for Lisbon takes off in a couple hours.”
She sniffed, “ok.”
“Ahh, this sucks, I don’t want to go.”
“I don’t want you to go either,” she whispered.
“I’ll come back to Paris to see you before I go home, I promise.”
“Ok,” she said.
“Would you want that?”
“Yes, of course. I would love to see you again.”
“Ok, then I’ll come back.”
I didn’t know if she believed me but I really meant it. I never meant anything more than I meant those words. I would come back to Paris just to see her. I promised myself as much as I promised her.
Around 3 AM, I finally called an Uber and got my shoes and pants and everything put back on. The air felt heavy and glum. For a moment we just sat at the corner of her bed and stared at my phone and watched the Uber making its slow progress towards us on the map.
“This is dumb. We are wasting our last minutes,” she put her arms around me and kissed me.
If a kiss could tell a story then this one told me Jitterbug Perfume. It told me about Kudra and Alobar. About knights and satyrs and mystics and powerless gods. It told me about hot summer nights and buzzing bees. She let me go and blew me a kiss so I could take it with me and shut the door and suddenly I was standing alone on the hallway stairs with my head full of stories about French perfumes and immortal love. I still have that kiss somewhere, I just can’t find it anymore.