by
Lauren Elkin
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Looking out the kitchen window, across the street, there is a light on in the chambre de bonne. As I stare at it, in the building dark but distinct against the sky, it seems to me that I am suddenly seeing the light on in that room as others have seen the light on in that room for a hundred years. The light itself no doubt changed from candlelight, to gaslight, to electricity. The change would have been subtle, the movement of the candlelit shadows giving way to the fixity of electric shadow. I feel unmoored from time.
I mirror this feeling of drift in my habits. I avoid my phone. I watch television on the TV instead of my laptop. It’s a real psychological shift, to give myself over to the unpredictability of programming after the specificity of the series (Let’s watch The Wire. I’ve never seen The Sopranos. Is it time to watch Breaking Bad?). It feels like wandering through a crowd, or some kind of county fair, people getting up to things I didn’t know they were doing (and all this time that I’ve been living my life in these apartments, they’ve been out there doing these things. At the very same time!). I click through people gardening, people making jazz music, experts in space travel speculating about what the Americans will do next, a documentary about the TGV, an old film about Vincent Van Gogh that has a very young and very beautiful Elsa Zylberstein in it as a prostitute in some kind of riverbank bordello. I land on a talk show in which women talk about the tribulations of new motherhood. About the way our society has transformed motherhood into a capitalist institution, how it is both competitive and possible to outsource. The guests talk about alienation from their labour and lament the loss of their jobs, their bodies, their identities. I change back to Elsa Zylberstein.
Some days I lie on the bed immobilised for hours, as if a large sheet of cling film were pinning me in place.
Or I stand at the window as the sky does its daily thing.
In the shower, I turn down the hot and turn up the cold, and it feels good and alarming at the same time.
god
I wake in the middle of the night from a bad dream that was actually a good dream. In my dream I was pregnant. It was before and I was still pregnant. I was so relieved to find out I hadn’t lost the baby after all. And then when I wake up I am devastated all over again.
Have you read Deleuze and Guattari? she asks, and I have to hide a smile; she hasn’t acquired the defensive veneer that would prevent her from asking open-ended questions like that. There is something so earnest about her, a yearning for connection on some other plane than the everyday, or that she’s not getting on an everyday basis. I take a wild guess that her partner has not read Deleuze and Guattari, and that she wishes he did.
channel earnestness
The light in August brings the street together. When the sky goes deep blue, earlier than it has been, you can either turn on the light, and decide it’s evening, or sit a while longer, watching everyone else turn on theirs, creating orange pools in the dusk spill. The light recedes from the street, replaced, slowly, by windows like beacons. You can stand at your window and not be surprised to see your neighbours standing at their windows too, pausing to watch the conversion from day to night.
def rohmer but also akerman! (toute une nuit)
Near the Lacan books I spot Max’s and take it down, remembering vividly the nights I spent underlining it, copying out passages to get them into my body. His book changed so much for me, it helped me understand Lacan to begin with, and I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that it saved my life after Jonathan left me. In it Max wrote something about desire and original loss, and it stayed in my mind, le fait de jouir n’étanche pas le désir original, the act of coming does not quench the initial desire. Desire stems from foundational loss, the moment of separation from our mothers, from being cast out of that oceanic dyad into our own distinct individuality. Mother becomes other and we are from that point on forever adrift; but it is that loss that triggers desire, all our desires forever after. In those early days after the break-up, it was consoling to think that it wasn’t just him that I missed, and that if he were to return to me, the void would remain. Jonathan was the malady, and Max’s book, Lacanian psychoanalysis more generally, the remedy – though not an absolute cure.
Today Clémentine is wearing blue eyeliner today she’s wearing pink lipstick today her nails are painted today they’re not today she’s wearing lace tomorrow leather and then a massive hooded sweatshirt. I can’t pin her down, she is simply, and thoroughly, herself. I see her pretty much every day now. She knows what time I get tired of being alone, and turns up. Sometimes she’s on her way out to meet a friend, and just wants to check in. Clémentine goes places. The theatre, the cinema. Out for drinks. Once: bowling. I just run in my circles around the Buttes-Chaumont. She’s taken the place of all the friends I don’t see any more. The ones with kids (can’t bear it). The ones who are pregnant (fuck them). The ones who are trying to get pregnant (don’t want to hear about it). I figure she’s too young to know what she wants kid-wise so it’s perfect. One night we take a selfie with her Polaroid, she kisses my cheek, my smile makes my eyes squish shut.
cute
Walking downhill from the métro I encounter two more signs:
STOP FÉMINICIDE
NOUS SOMMES
LA VOIX DE
CELLES QUI N’EN ONT PLUS
I realise I have recently seen someone on the métro reading a copy of Le Parisien, with a headline about how many women have been murdered this past year, and how many more it is than last year. All of a sudden the signs begin to make sense.
When Clémentine comes over I ask her if she’s seen them. Seen them! she says. I was out there a few nights ago pasting them up.
You should come with us next time, she says.
<3
can’t imagine what it would be like to be together without having children in front of you, it just sounds like a big blank. What are you going to do, travel? To see what? What would you be moving toward? What else would you be living for? Sex? Companionship? Being? Without the forward straining what is there to give you urgency? Just an inevitable end to everything? I’m talking too much, I don’t know why it’s irking me the way it is that she doesn’t want children, who cares, what is it to me? Plenty of my friends and patients don’t want them and it doesn’t put me in this state.
It occurs to me that maybe I’m the one who doesn’t want them.
Love isn’t about straining toward something, she says. Other people try to move you forward. And then I never think I love anyone enough to want to tie myself to them for all eternity, Clémentine says. It never feels like enough. But at the same time once I commit I have trouble leaving. Or at least I’ve had trouble in the past. I worry I might marry the wrong person merely because I couldn’t leave them.
Sunday night and I’m in the kitchen, washing the dishes that have piled up for far too many days. The wine glasses have reached the point where it looks like I’ve had a party. The biggest items are the last to do, the heavy pot I made pasta in, the wooden cutting board I sliced the cherry tomatoes on. No more room left in the drying rack so I leave things on the counter. The Brita’s empty again. All I do with my days, it seems, is drink water, piss, and refill the fucking Brita. I’m still thinking about my conversation with Clémentine. About the point of love, where we want it to take us, what we want from it. Everyone I’ve loved, I’ve loved with obsessive focus. I need an object, any object. If they resist, or try to leave me, I dazzle them with the power, the never-before-encountered power of my love. They have never seen love like that before, been loved like that before. It is irresistible to them to be loved in such a way. I point everything I’ve got at them, I shoot it all, until, one day, it’s over. I can’t stand to be around them.
It feels like Clémentine is helping me confront these things more than Esther.
While we wait in a long queue, my bakery friend gestures at the walls. Des petites annonces, he says, thoughtfully. That’s what’s missing. You used to have loads of little notes tacked up on the walls of the bakery, people selling things, or offering their services. Tutors, he says. Learn Spanish! Learn Greek! I wonder when they stopped having notes like that on the walls of bakeries. It’s probably the internet’s fault.
But on the internet you can learn Greek, I say, because I can see the line is going to take a while longer. They have apps for that.
Oh, apps! I don’t want to learn Greek from a bot. That owl! I want to learn it from a young Greek student who’s trying to make ends meet while he does his masters. Or an old Greek woman who’s lost her husband. A real person, with a story. Maybe I will just move to Greece.
so true