Chapter 1
The Last New Year's Eve Party in Paris
December 31, 2015
It's ten to midnight in Paris. 2015 is due to expire at the top of the hour, and only the hardened and foolish are out hitting the bars of the Bastille district.
My fiancée, Monica, and I had earlier in the evening left the foolish at a packed Australian pub on Rue de la Roquette, opting instead for a seedy joint called "Objectif Lune" located just a few doors down. The bar's name is the only Tintin reference to be found inside because both the decor and the clientele seem to be doing their best to answer a casting call for a 1980s Luc Besson movie: Leather jackets, wild punk hairdos, graffiti on the walls, and shabby multiethnic chic all around.
We order two shots of clear Pastis with Belgian beer chasers. You can always get Belgian beer in Paris, even in the grittier bars of Rue de la Roquette (a narrow street with rows of bars, sushi joints, and cafés that runs from Place de La Bastille to Boulevard Voltaire, and eventually up to the main gates of Père Lachaise cemetery).
Monica seems to have Père Lachaise on her mind tonight. She keeps talking about a poem she's writing about Père Lachaise's many illustrious guests, like Jim Morrison and Chopin, between her sips of Belgian Saison. But Monica's not a writer; she's an actress. You've probably seen something she's in—a little something called The Show. A sleeper hit that's become the hottest streaming show on the planet.
"Jim Morrison died of an overdose in an apartment building within walking distance of here, you know," Monica says loudly and drunkenly, trying to be heard above the 80s French punk rock blaring from the speakers. I recognize the song. It's from a band called Indochine. The song's called "3e Sexe."
Some punk girls in fishnets and leather at the back of the bar are singing along, repeating the chorus like a drunken lullaby.
"Des garçons au féminin...Des filles au masculin!"
We're hanging by the bar (as we do). The bartender serves himself a shot and raises a glass—the clock chimes midnight. Paris's annus horribilis has just come to an end. An Irish couple and a group of Parisian Algerian girls at the bar hug us and then each other. It's way too soon to celebrate anything, but all of us, in a way, probably feel that the reason we're out tonight is to not give up on our freedom to celebrate. The foolish and the hardened together for one brief moment. We are like the cockroaches that are supposed to survive a nuclear blast, only that nuclear blast-like events are now becoming practically routine. Only six weeks ago, a group of terrorists massacred ninety people just like us at the Bataclan Theater, and about forty more in cafés not far from where we now raise a glass to celebrate our last New Year's Eve party in Paris.
It's after midnight. We walk out into the now busy Rue de la Roquette. We've stepped into a river of brave and foolish souls that must have suddenly decided to leave the apparent safety of their own bedrooms and take the Metro to the 11th arrondissement and venture down its boulevards as a final act of defiance. After all, the Metro is free for the night, as the Algerian girls told us earlier at the bar.
We're walking against the foot traffic, getting further away from Place de La Bastille until we reach a corner café called La Fée Verte. It definitely feels like a green fairy sort of night, unseasonably warm for January and still young (the night, not us particularly).
Despite the crowds outside, the bar at La Fée Verte is almost empty. The staff is wearing colorful clown wigs in a last-ditch effort to stir a sense of cheerfulness to the proceedings, but they aren't fooling anyone. However, their green liquid on offer is just the thing we need to help ease our strange and unwarranted feeling of survivor's guilt.
The young woman behind the bar pulls out a pair of absinthe glasses and spoons as we settle in our stools. We know her from previous visits, but she's trying her best to pretend not to know us and failing miserably at it. She's originally from Morocco and had told us on previous visits that she'd learned English in our hometown of Los Angeles, so we'd bonded over that.
Monica smirks dryly and sits on the stool next to mine to watch the ritual. The Morrocan girl grabs a bottle from the counter, and coyly smiles back. She pours the green spirit into the absinthe glasses. She then grabs two flat silver absinthe spoons with stylized holes in them and places them atop our glasses. She follows this up with a pair of sugar cubes, one for each spoon. She sets our glasses and spoons under a Belle Époque water fountain with tiny copper taps. I stare at the Morrocan girl as she adjusts the taps like a nurse fixing a patient's drip, until the drops begin to land on the sugar cubes at a perfect rate. Her skin is creamy olive oil and butterscotch brown, and she's wearing a breezy summer dress that highlights her long, tall frame and black wavy hair. In fascination, we watch how the green absinthe slowly turns milky white, and the sugar cubes melt into nothingness.
We sit in silence and sip our drinks. The milky white liquid tastes of aniseed and wormwood, but it helps lift the general doom and gloom around us, even if just for a moment.
"I think I need to go to the Bataclan."
Monica's words hang in the air like the last milky droplets of absinthe in her glass.
"When? Tonight?" I ask incredulously.
"I just want to pay my respects," she says. "I'm done pretending that it didn't happen and that we didn't lose any friends…"
I know her too well to respond with a retort. It wasn't “friends.” Just a friend. Moreover, the friend in question was an ex from college that she hadn't seen in ten years, but that was beside the point. The whole thing would have hit home anyway. We'd begun to think of the area around Bastille and the Voltaire Metro station as our little piece of Parisian home. Just far enough from the tourist trap cafés of the Trocadéro and Champs-Elysées, but not quite far away enough to be in the outer banlieues, where the beauty of Belle Époque Paris dissolves into a mid-twentieth century dystopian nightmare of concrete flats.
A dark woman wearing a white Spanish shawl draped over her shoulders walks into the bar with her arms full of red flowers. Monica motions to her and whispers some words in French. Euros are exchanged for what looks like at least a dozen roses individually wrapped in cellophane. Monica's French is good; she could at least pass for French Canadian on account of her Montreal-accented French. She'd swapped sunny Southern California for the rolling vineyards around Lyon as an exchange student during her last year at UCLA, followed by two years in Montreal working in movie production. That's where she met Jean-Jacques, the dead Frenchman.
Monica drains her last drops of absinthe and rushes outside, flowers in hand. I ask for the bill, and the Morrocan girl hands it to me in a small silver tray that also has a little cupcake wrapped in cellophane. "Happy New Year," she whispers in her heavily-accented English. I don't have to ask her what flavor the cupcake is. I know that its main ingredient is hash.
"Merci," I reply, and she gives me a fiery look.
"Go to her," she says impatiently. I blow her a kiss and turn around to follow Monica.
Rue de la Roquette is completely packed with revelers as if the veil of sadness that descended over the city for the last six weeks has been allowed to be lifted, even if just for one night.
Monica is walking a tad unsteadily in her black riding boots. She looks like the thinking person's indie-rock girl wet dream in her 1950s cat-eye specs, vintage motorcycle leather jacket, and knee-high black riding boots over tight blue jeans. Her snow-white skin and jet-black hair make her look like she'd just stepped out of central casting for a 1950s mod-girl moped gang movie (if there's such a genre).
I follow Monica along the closed and darkened stores of the Rue Popincourt, knowing better than to say anything at this point. I catch up with her and hold her hand as we continue along the narrow and dark street towards the bright lights of Boulevard Voltaire up ahead. Monica is balancing her dozen roses in one arm as if holding a baby. We've been living together for the last four years and are sort-of unofficially engaged on account of that, but something has always gotten in the way of setting up an official wedding date. Either our careers or her mother's illness or whatever else seems to always pop up to conspire against it. Me not actually officially asking her to marry me, and then us relocating from Los Angeles to Belfast to work on her hit TV show for the last two years certainly hasn't helped. The culture shock of Belfast, coupled with 18-hour workdays, has strained us and our relationship. This trip to our apartment in Paris over the New Year's break was supposed to be our way to reconnect with the city we loved and one another, but after the massacre six weeks ago, we're as broody as the rest of the city.
We enter Boulevard Voltaire. There's a small crowd surrounding the burnt-out and still smoldering shell of a police van. Parisian firemen in their shiny metal helmets are putting out the last of the flames as a police detective interviews the shocked neighbors. Typically a fire-bombed police van is treated as an everyday occurrence in Paris, particularly in the outlying suburbs of brutalist flats surrounding the city. But nerves are frayed this close to the Bataclan. One of the neighbors is crying. She's an old woman in a nightgown. A policewoman comforts her. It looks like the van exploded right under her balcony.
We pass the smoldering police van and the crying neighbors in silence. Nothing's shocking anymore; it's the end of the world, and everyone knows it.
The Square du Bataclan is dark and silent. A small group of people mill about, looking at the mementos and homemade posters pinned to iron railings of an improvised memorial people have created. It's a heartbreaking scene, with flags from several countries and handwritten messages in several languages. Hundreds of photos of young people smiling for the camera in the months, days, or weeks before being cut down in the prime of their lives.
Monica kneels and places the flowers on the sidewalk next to a colorfully painted acoustic guitar onto which someone has scribbled, This machine kills terror in black felt-tip pen and, Love is all we need. Rock n' roll will never die.
I turn away from Square du Bataclan and face the venue. It looks like a building after a fire; dark, boarded up, and stitched up with police tape. A large white sheet covers the main entrance as if the venue itself had also died but was still lying on the sidewalk, waiting for the coroner's van.
"We always talked about coming to Paris and going to a punk rock show."
Monica's voice is faint and hard to hear due to the two-tone wail of a Parisian firetruck barging up Boulevard Voltaire. Perhaps another police van is on fire somewhere. It feels as if the whole world is on fire.
"He was the only man I've ever loved," Monica continues. I realize she's not talking about me. "I mean, really, truly loved...because you never forget your first anyway."
I let her words hang in the air. Her exquisitely pale face is framed by strands of jet-black locks that pour out from under her wool beanie, and her gray eyes are damp with tears as they flicker in and out of sight in the dark corner where she's standing.
I know she wants to hurt me with such statements, so I try my best not to take the bait.
"Come on, let's go. You've done your part, paid your respects. Besides, it's the absinthe talking..."
"You'll never understand how I'm feeling right now. Come to think of it, you never understand how I feel most of the time," she snips, rejecting my hand with a swiping motion of her arm.
"Are we back on that trip now?"
"It's not a trip...sometimes I really feel like you're...I don't know…emotionally autistic."
"Emotionally autistic? Why? Because I'm not ready to fawn over some dead guy whose only claim to fame is that he...he deflowered my fiancée?"
"Oh, so you're using big words now? Deflowered? Really? Who uses that word anymore? Why don't you go full Jane Austen on me and call it 'taking my honor?'"
"I'm a writer, sorry if I know how to use certain words in the English language."
"Writing for a sitcom on cable TV hardly counts as the great American novel."
"Calling The Show a sitcom is like calling Les Misérables light summer reading."
"Whatever. You're no Whit Stillman, no matter how much yuppie angst you force into that stupid TV show. Jean-Jacques was the man you'll never be...and while we're at it, why don't we just use the 'correct nomenclature.'" I hate it when Monica starts using air quotations, and I know I'm in trouble when she starts quoting The Big Lebowski. "He didn't just 'deflower me,'" Monica continues, "he FUCKED me, you hear? He fucked me a lot, and It was GOOD..."
I wait a beat, determined not to take the bait.
"Why are you doing this?"
"Do you have to ask?"
"I thought we had agreed not to bring it up tonight, to let this be our last New Year's Eve in Paris together..."
"Agreed to what? To forgive and move on and forget? Forget that while I was back in LA, dealing with my mother's death, you were back here fucking, yes, let's not get all Jane Austen about it, the word is 'fucking’ that slutty Moroccan waitress from La Fée Verte."
"You've lost your mind."
"Oh? So I've lost my mind? Did you ever consider my feelings? 'Oh, her English is sooo good' you kept saying the first time we went in there. Hope her blowjobs were as good as her syntax!"
"I knew it was a bad idea to go back there...I told you so. Your idea of a 'last New Year's Eve' in Paris together as a couple, pretending it's all hunky-dory, even though we both know it's over, is as bad as it gets."
"I just had to see her with my own eyes again. I wanted to see what kind of whore sleeps with an unavailable man while his fiancée is away because her mother has just died. I think you'll find her picture right next to the definition of 'monster bitch' in the dictionary."
"You know as well as I do that I never, quote, unquote, 'fucked her.' Never happened. You were back in LA; we were shooting in Belfast all month; I couldn't get away 'cause of all the rewrites... we'd been working 18-hour days. I finally got two days off and decided to come down to our place here, and I just couldn't stand being alone in our apartment. I was emotionally distraught about your mother too, you know. Then we'd had that long video call after you came back from scattering her ashes. I was feeling really drained. Contrary to popular belief, I have feelings too, you know. So I remembered La Fée Verte from last summer...When I went in there, sex was the last thing on my mind...I figured that a whole bottle of absinthe was the only cure for my depression. Who would have known that half a bottle later, a bunch of assholes would decide to shoot up the city?"
"Oh, so you happened to stumble upon the one bar in Paris where we both had commented that the waitress was hot? Of all the bars in Bastille, you walk into that one...and not only that, you just happen to invite her back to our apartment...yes 'our,' let's not forget that. Next time, if you're gonna pick up some bar floozy, take her to a sleazy hotel where she belongs, not to our home. Oh, I just remembered, there isn't going to be a 'next time' because I'm moving back to LA as soon as this season wraps. You can stay here and sleep with all the slutty bar whores that you want!"
"I never slept with anyone...I mean, we did sleep, but not together...Not in the way you're thinking. I was too drunk to get home. She listened to me at the bar. All I did was talk about you and that I wanted to be with you but couldn't because of work. Then the shootings started. It was out by Place de la République, but people started rushing into the bar in a panic, then some plainclothes cops showed up and told them to close the bar down and to keep us all inside. We were trapped inside the bar for hours. I kept taking swigs of absinthe, straight from the bottle, half expecting that the terrorists would shoot us right through the closed doors at any moment. By the time we felt safe enough to leave, the Metro wasn't running, so she gave me a ride home in her car. I was falling off my stool by that point."
"They have taxis and even Uber in Paris, you know..."
"Not that night. The Metro was closed, taxis were taking people out to the suburbs for free. It was absolute chaos. Took us forever to drive up to our place in La Défense."
"Even if I choose to believe you, which I don't, then why did she have to come up to our apartment?"
"I was having a hard time putting the key into the front lock. She had to help me upstairs."
"Did she also help you put your key into her lock? Wow! Did you 'rattle her lock,' too?"
"Don't be silly. She came upstairs, and we talked. Smoked some hash. That was it. I needed an emotional connection that night. I couldn't stand being alone. Everyone was convinced that the world was coming to an end."
"Emotional connection? Wow, that's a good one. Most people, when they're depressed, call their therapist or chew some Zoloft. Besides, emotional cheating is still cheating...In any case, you know very well that it's all bullshit because I found her panties under the bed, 'our' bed let me remind you. Did she need to take her thong off to give you 'emotional support?' Fuck you and YOUR emotional support. Where's MY emotional support? You should have been in LA with me. Not here with some whore."
"What panties? Those are your panties. Remember when we first got the apartment? We celebrated with a bottle of Veuve and a trip to that lingerie store up in Pigalle? You ended up running around the apartment swigging champagne; the thong must have ended up under the bed that night."
"You think I wouldn't recognize my own panties? Besides, what woman leaves her panties behind in a stranger's apartment? I'll tell you who. A total whore. She was marking her territory. Well, now she can keep you. I'm done."
Monica takes off, running down the boulevard directly into traffic. A Peugeot screeches to a halt just inches from her. I run after her and hug her where she's stopped. The Peugeot owner is beeping and cursing at us in Parisian verlan.
'Bouge toi, Puttane!'
"I love you, Monica. You are the best thing that has ever happened to me in my life," I whisper in her ear as traffic and curses move all around us. "I'll do anything to make it up to you. Anything!"
Monica looks into my eyes. She's deeply hurt and has a strangely determined look on her face.
"Fuck you!"
"I mean it, I'll die without you."
"Then go die. I'm going to jump the wall of Père Lachaise Cemetery and find Jim Morrison's grave."
"But why?" I knew that my answer was weak. But it was all I had.
"Why? There must always be a why? How about because The Doors were an LA band. And I'm from LA. Jim was an American in Paris, I'm an American in Paris...but the real reason, if you must know, it was something that Jean-Jacques and I talked about a lot but never got to do. We would get into these deep, philosophical conversations about the meaning of life and of 'Come on Baby, Light my Fire,' only he pronounced it 'Bebe.' We'd made plans to come to Paris someday to catch a punk-rock show and then jump the wall of Père Lachaise at night to sing to Jim by candlelight. And after tonight, I don't want to have any unfulfilled plans anymore. Look at all the pictures on that corner." She points back to the improvised memorial on Square du Bataclan. "Each and every one of those pictures represents millions of unfulfilled plans. And I don't want unfulfilled plans in my life anymore!"
I feel Monica pushing herself away from me. She's running back to the sidewalk. I follow her closely as she walks fast towards Voltaire Metro station and Rue de La Roquette, the street that leads directly to the gates of Père Lachaise Cemetery.
"Monica, wait. Do you want to sleep in a French jail? Because this is exactly how you end up in a French jail."
"Jail? Don't be stupid. What self-respecting French cop will be working at two in the morning on New Year's Day?"
"We've seen tons of cops tonight!"
"I don't care, I'm going."
With that, Monica takes off running uphill along Rue de La Roquette, towards the dark stone walls of Père Lachaise Cemetery up ahead. It's at this precise moment that I realize that I've never loved a woman more than I love Monica.
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Max Milano is the author of Hollywood Expats: A Story of Hollywood, Death & Love, available on Kindle Unlimited