by
Lauren Elkin
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[...] I do not talk about my miscarriage, or the fact that I have been put on medical leave from work. I watch as she lights the last cigarette in her pack, the sun fading in the sky behind her, turning the walls of the buildings across the way their early-evening shades of pink, orange and, finally, deep blue. The dregs of the tea have long since gone cold in the bottom of the pot. I offer Clémentine some wine, but she says she doesn’t drink. I have to go, she says, we’re going to try that Laotian restaurant. Will you be OK?
i just can really picture this. very melancholy but quietly so
[...] Then there are the cabinets, on which we are forever hitting our heads when they’re open. Tear them out (how joyful that day will be). Honest exposed shelving running along the walls. Nothing to hide. Here are our glasses. Here are our plates. David’s mother made little sceptical noises when we mentioned the open shelving. That’s how dust accumulates in your glasses, she said, you’ll be rinsing them out all the time. Not if we use them regularly, we answered, and we had every intention of doing so, but now it’s just me, and I use the same two drinking glasses and the same two wine glasses, one’s in service and the other’s in the sink. The rest of our glasses are safe in the Formica cupboards that were there when we bought the place and by the time we have our open shelving I hope, I hope, David will be back.
It takes me considerably longer to get ready in the morning, or to go to sleep at night. Leaving aside the complicated network of decisions involved in putting clothes on, there are a nearly infinite number of products which must be employed in the ongoing campaign to appear young, thin, well rested, and, if I’m lucky, and all the potions have worked, pretty. Glossing cream (my hair tends to be dry). Some powdery stuff to give it texture (it is too straight, too fine). Micellar water, with a stack of cotton rounds and a cup full of Q-tips. Eye make-up remover, oil-free. Evian in a spray can. Two different kinds of serum. Day cream, night cream (premières rides d’expression). Sun cream, to mix into day cream, SPF 50, I am very fair-skinned, when I was little my mother always protected me from the sun, big hats, big umbrellas, because her mother didn’t, she said, and now she’s paying the price. Eye cream. Thigh cream. Body lotion. Foot cream. One bottle of perfume, used daily. (Three bottles gathering dust.) Two kinds of eyeliner (charcoal and black liquid). Concealer. Pressed power. Several shades of eyeshadow. Lipsticks, several. Lip gloss, several (none new). Liquid blush. Solid blush. Assorted brushes, nail files, bobby pins, barrettes, tweezers, samples of other potions which I might eventually use, thrown into my little shopping bag by a shop assistant when I paid for the potions I do use, in the hope no doubt I would return to buy full-sized versions of the potions.
channel this -- her working harder and harder to stay still [does she decide to let something go at some point?]
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.
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