Little Death by the Sea by Susan Kiernan-Lewis Page B

with her.
    When he approached her table, gently tossing
down his cigarettes and matches as if to claim possession of it and
her, she had kept her smile far away from her eyes.
    “You are an artiste, oui ?”
    He was narrow, almost delicate, with strong,
white teeth. The better to eat you, she had thought excitedly. His
clothes were shabby but clean. He was a student, like herself.
Young, good-looking and in Paris with no job or responsibility to
make him boring. They both had the freedom to flirt and make love
and dream unachievable dreams of a life together. A life filled
with healthy, cherubic babies and the world wanting to buy her
paintings and wanting to read his books. Gerard was going to be a
great French novelist.
    Gerard Dubois. From the moment he saw her
sitting there at the famous café—and she never went back again—he
had captured her.
    “I am a painter, yes,” she had responded
carelessly.
    “ Americaine?”
    “I live in Paris.” She loved to hear the
sound of it. J’habite á Paris .
    “In the dormitory, yes?” His eyes loved her,
lapped her up, seemed to glory in her.
    “ Mais, non .” She began sketching him,
afraid her hands would shake too much to make anything but a mess,
but not caring as long as it made her look more the fantasy she
believed he had already created of her. “ Je vis seul .” She
looked up from her sketch to find his eyes. “Alone.”
    “And you are to become a great artiste,
non ? Paris is the city for the artiste and for lovers, of
course. Gerard, he was born in Paris.”
    “How wonderful for you.” And she’d meant it.
How extraordinary to claim this city, the City of Light, as the one
that gave you life.
    “For an artiste , Paris is the only
one, n’est-ce pas ?”
    “It’s why I’m here.”
    “And you must not leave. Not ever.”
    She stopped drawing.
    “I never will.”
    “ Toujours, petite Americaine . You will
always stay in Paris.” You will always stay with Gerard.
    “ Toujours.”
    From there they had been swallowed up in a
spin of activities belonging strictly to lovers. They visited the
flea markets on Saturday mornings, fingers intertwined tightly,
huddled into their greatcoats against the drizzle of winter days.
They claimed quiet, early-afternoon cafés as their special
snuggeries, slept late every morning in Elise’s tiny one-bedroom
flat on the Left Bank near Notre-Dame, and before the gold had left
the autumn skies to reflect the famous green-gray ceiling of Paris
in winter, Elise had stopped attending classes at L’Ecole des
Beaux Arts and had stopped writing or answering letters from
home.
    She had found a world, finally, that
understood her. A world she had defined but never knew existed. She
wore black, as she always had growing up, but now her world
encouraged the black to be the limp, thread-bare ebony fabrics that
draped off one like graceful spills of Spanish moss from a tree
branch. Her new world explained that grime and the absence of care
gave her wardrobe the desired patina that all her painstaking
fashion planning could not. She learned to let go. She had smoked
marijuana in high school, but her new world was too sophisticated
to be impressed. The people in her new fraternity used needles.
Silver-thin, beautiful spines that pierced her unpocked flesh in an
experience that made her high school pot-smoking look sophomoric
and ridiculous.
    She was an artist and she saw the world
differently. Finally, she was living in a world that understood her
vision, encouraged and inspired her brilliance. And Gerard
applauded louder than anyone. Gerard with the milky-white skin, the
doe-brown eyes that spoke love even in the throes of a
crack-induced half-coma, even when he was hurting her. Because that
was a part of her new society too. To be truly wretched, to be
honestly and completely in despair was a feeling of pleasure to
Elise that she found nearly unbearable. And she sought this drug,
the singular intensity of this high more earnestly