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i. --the place where in the end, we find our happiness, or not at all!
Paris, 1957
“Listen!” Wilbur says, stalking over to grip Inez by the shoulders. “Each man has an aim in life, a leading motive, does he not? I didn’t give a damn about wealth, or for love. I aimed at being a real man, a tough one, as they say. I staked everything in life on the same horse--”
Never has the fact that the Théâtre de l'A.B.C. is nearing the vicinity of its seventieth birthday made itself so painfully obvious to Wilbur than right now, when its doors groans open in the middle of his monologue. And during the final, climactic moments of the play, too. He glances back to see a man hurrying to his seat, shoulders soaked through by the storm outside.
He turns back, continues, “How can I possibly be a coward when I’ve deliberately courted danger at every turn? Can you judge life by a single action?”
Inez struggles against him under the flickering stage lights. “Why not? For thirty years, you dreamt you were a hero--”
As if on cue, a deafening thunderclap sounds. The lights, already dodgy under the best of circumstances, surge bright for only a moment before shorting out in an impressive sparking display. In the mere months since he’d begun his stint at the A.B.C., this was not even the second or the third time that something similar had happened. Living in the Ronsin and working in a dilapidated theatre was only fractionally exciting. Most of the time, he thinks exasperatedly as part of the ancient lighting rig crashes down to where he was just standing, it is only exhausting.
“Marie?” Wilbur calls unsurely, when the house lights don’t come on again and the audience switches from murmuring to yelling. Carefully, he feels his way down from the stage, squints through what little he can see from the crowd for a familiar flash of blonde. It only takes a few seconds for him to regret his decision. Somebody squeezes around his back. Somebody else--or maybe the same person--treads on his feet. Wilbur stumbles forward without choosing to, until he collides with somebody’s rain-soaked back.
“Sorry--”
He’s cut off by the flick of a lighter, and the man says, “You seem like you need a light.”
Wilbur blinks at the flame, then automatically cups a hand around it. “I did.” In the dim lighting, he remembers the layout of the theatre again, and motions ahead at the door. “There’s the exit.”
“Thank you,” Wilbur says as they step out under the awning, waiting with the rest of the audience for the rain to stop.
The man--the boy, really, because on a stormy night in Paris he looks as young as Wilbur often feels--waves a hand dismissively. “Not a problem."
Wilbur opens his mouth to thank him again, only to hear Marie calling Will and rushing up to him. She looks a little worse for wear, but not seriously injured.
“Thank god you’re alright,” Marie says, relieved. “You looked so awfully close to getting hurt.”
“It’ll take more than that to get rid of me,” Wilbur jokes. He turns to thank the other man once more, but he has since crossed the road, making his way eastward.
“What did you think of the play?” Wilbur asks Marie, walking home in a drizzling rain. What did you think of me, is what he really means. Marie makes a big show of scrunching her nose and considering his question.
“I haven’t seen all of it,” she says. “So I don’t know.”
“But you saw most of it. You saw the most important parts.”
“I did?”
“Yes, you did--” Wilbur cuts himself off, slinging an arm over her shoulders. She wraps his coat securely over herself. “There was that moment, near the end of the play, when Garcin finally manages to open the door to hell, right? Except, now that he has the chance to escape, he simply chooses not to. That’s the most important part.”
“So? Why is that so important, anyway?”
“Because it’s--”
Marie nudges him and laughs. “I’m teasing you. It is important, I’m sure.”
“It is,” Wilbur grumbles.
She leans the side of her head against his shoulder. “For now, though, what is most important is finding some way to make our friends cover rent for the next month.”
The crease in her brow deepens at the thought, and she fiddles unconsciously with the ring on her finger, buffing at its dull brassy glint (not gold--they’re still just barely kids, there was no way Wilbur could have afforded real gold without raising the alarm).
“D’you--” Wilbur pauses. “Do you ever...regret it? Coming here with me. I only ask because--well, we would not be worrying about such things, if we had stayed in England.”
Marie stiffens slightly and she lifts her head from his shoulder. For a moment, neither of them say anything. Then, she says, “I don’t really think about regret, I suppose. Don’t you drive yourself mad, wondering if you made the right choice? I’m here now, and that is all that matters. And I count myself lucky to have you here with me.”
She slips his hand through hers and squeezes it, then says, rather vaguely and mistily, “Life is not a story, but an experience.”
Wilbur tries to let himself be comforted by her words, by the weight of her hand through his.
ii. something in my heart // told me i must have you
Paris, 1959-60
Tommy,
Happy Christmas. I shouldn’t be surprised that you’ve already heard the news about Marie—the grapevine moves far too fast now, and dear Auntie Norma could never pass up a chance to slander the least-favorite of her sister’s sons. What you’ve written about her and the liquor cabinet made me laugh aloud. I would pay a pretty sum to hear you say it to her face.
But yes, Marie. What a shame. I know you adored her, and who wouldn’t have? It’s been but weeks since she left, and I still see her outline around the house here and there. Not like a ghost, more like a sneeze that refuses to come. I keep expecting her, and I continue to disappoint myself. Christmas was uneventful without her. Paris itself is uneventful without her.
Well, dear brother, I won’t bore you with talk of that. All you should know is that once you come of age (by which I do mean when a girl breaks your heart for the first time), friends and acquaintances will appear out of the woodwork and spend all day trying to convince you that bachelorhood is the most wondrous thing in the world. I am far from happy with it.
One day, we’ll find some way to smuggle you across the channel and into France, right out from under Mother’s and Father’s noses. You’d have a grand time here, Tommy.
Write back soon—I mean it. If you forget, you will have to duel me, and I know that you’ll lose.
Your brother,
Wilbur
29th of December, 1959
Wilbur rings in the new year staring into the middle distance, alone for the first time in four years. As he walks from the speakeasy to another bar, hunched into his coat, the Conciergie strikes twelve times, incessant. What a cruel way to remind a man that time will pass, with or without him.
When he forces himself to think about it, he comes to the realization that he is a divorcee. At twenty years old, no less. How banal—far far less romantic than what he’d imagined in the summer of 1956, running off to Paris on a whim, hand-in-hand with a person he thought he’d known as well as he knew himself.
A cigarette advertisement across the street—two people draped over each other, sharing one between them. The woman’s a cinema actress that Wilbur recognizes from somewhere; the man, staring hazy-eyed past his audience, has a face that feels so strangely familiar. Gauloises: liberte toujours, it blares. Wilbur wants to set fire to it.
But time moves on, and Wilbur is ringing in the start of a new decade trudging through the narrow, snow-clogged streets of Montparnasse, utterly alone.
He doesn’t even have the ring, he thinks morosely, nursing a glass of cheap cognac in the stifling warmth of the Brasserie L’Entracte, because when he had taken it off to clean the radiator pipes, Marie had swiped it from the kitchen counter. That brassy, dull ring. Maybe it said something about the state of their relationship by that point that Wilbur hadn’t even noticed its lack until the girl herself and all of her belongings had disappeared along with it without so much as a goodbye.
He slumps down. Some kind stranger comes and rests a hand on his shoulder.
“Are you alright?” The man asks in stilted French. Wilbur squeezes his eyes shut and looks again. The liquor must be getting to him. It’s the boy from the cigarette advertisement. It’s official--he’s going mad.
“I’m going mad,” Wilbur mumbles.
Gauloises--it really is him--looks caught between amusement and concern. He says, “All by yourself?”
“Normally there would be a girl with me, but she left with all her things three weeks ago.”
Gauloises boy blinks. “I’m sorry,” he says. Wilbur stares at him through narrowed eyes (where do I know you?) waits for more of the same--a thumping on the back, women only make you unhappy and there are plenty more fish in the sea and the like--but he only settles into the seat next to Wilbur and asks, “May I treat you to another drink?”
He has these bright eyes that dart here and there even as he sits still, a little half-smile catching the corners of his mouth. Nobody looks for him, but Wilbur has a hard time believing that he arrived on his own.
He says as much to Gauloises, whose smile broadens as he shakes his head. “Don’t get the wrong idea,” he says. “You look a sorry sight to everyone here, you know? Getting drunk alone on New Year’s Eve. I’m doing you a favor right now.”
“Of course.” He musters up a smile. “Thank you.”
Rosy-cheeked from the liquor and glassy-eyed with the self-pitying grief of a newly-minted bachelor, Wilbur makes a quick decision. “Screw the drink, actually. Will you take a walk with me?”
“You’re not from here, are you?” Wilbur asks. “You don’t sound French.”
The cold stings his cheeks, his fingers, seeps into his socks through the holes of his worn shoes. Gauloises boy cocks his head.
“No,” he says, and doesn’t elaborate any further.
“I’m intrigued,” Wilbur teases. “You speak French like a foreigner and the only other time I’ve ever seen you around is on a cigarette advertisement, of all places. Who are you?”
“You’ve seen me before then,” he corrects. George scrubs the heel of his natty winter boot through the snow, the litter. “Two years ago, the Théâtre de l'A.B.C. had a blackout.”
Wilbur ignores the way his heart stumbles over its beat. “Don’t dodge the question.”
“I’ve seen you perform Huis Clos two more times since that night.”
“Are you a Soviet spy?” Wilbur asks. It startles a laugh out of Gauloises, loud and high. Without warning, he turns and ducks into an alley.
“So what if I was?” He asks over his shoulder.
Wilbur scoffs and widens his strides to catch up. “Please. I live in Ronsin and I star in Sartre’s plays. You think I have a problem with Moscow, of all places?”
“That is encouraging. No, I’m not a spy,” Gauloises admits. “I’m from England.”
Wilbur stops again at the end of the street, where they’ve reached the Seine. “Really?” He asks in English. Gauloises mirrors his look of pleasant shock.
“How serendipitous.” He looks Wilbur up and down, as if something about the language he speaks, or the way moonlight reflects off of the frozen shores has changed anything about his internal self. He sticks a gloved hand out. “I’m George.”
“Wilbur.” They shake. George has the sort of prim, received South London pronunciation that he’d never expected to have to hear ever again.
“So why are you in Paris?”
“I’m an actor.”
“So am I,” George says. “Or I would be, if I was any better at French.”
“Then you must have some idea of why?”
“Are you chasing something, or are you running away?”
Wilbur looks at George. “Straight to the point, Gauloises,” he remarks. (Off to his side, George mouths the pronunciation to himself. Gauloises.) “Both, if I’m being truthful.”
“The girl?”
“Naturally.” There is a lump in his throat at the thought of Marie. “We left Brighton together, and it might have been for forever, if I was smarter about it all. If she is gone, I don’t know what is left.” He resists the urge to fling himself into the river, cracking through the ice. It would be so cold and with the pigs patrolling the streets for drunkards he’d be fished out within the hour. At most, it would be humiliating.
George stays quiet for a little, considering. “There must be more to it than that, you know? You chose to come here for a reason unto yourself. I think that all you need to do,” here George taps at Wilbur’s chest with a gloved hand, “is remember exactly why that is.”
Here is a boy with his face plastered around the city, who knows exactly what to say and when to say it, who is inadvertently spending the first night of the new decade with Wilbur, of all people. How long have they been walking? This close to Montmartre, this late in the night, the streets are empty, with everybody clustered in the warmth and the bustle of the inner city.
What do I have to do to keep seeing you? Wilbur wants to ask, but he feels as if that would be too easy. George seems like the type of person to break your back over.
“Do you like to gamble, George?” If he is bothered by the non-sequitur, George doesn’t show it.
“Only when I win. And I often win. Why?”
“I want to play a game with you--a game of probability.”
“And chance?”
“Everything in life is a game of chance,” Wilbur says, just to hear him laugh. “Here is the game. I’ll bet on the likelihood of an event, and so will you. And if either of our wagers come true at the end of three days, we have to wait for the other on the Pont Neuf.”
“I like it,” George says. He shuffles further into his coat and looks past Wilbur, thinking. Then, he nods. “Okay. I have my wager ready. How are we to confirm that we aren’t cheating?”
“Word of honor?”
“Is an actor’s honor worth anything?”
Every time Wilbur smiles, it feels a little more genuine than the last. “Fine.”
“We’ll do this.” George takes the glove off his right hand before kissing the tip of his little finger. “Now you do the same.”
Wilbur takes his right hand out of his pocket and shakes some feeling back into it. He extends his little finger and presses his lips to it.
“Now this--” George gently presses the tips of their fingers together. George’s hand is still warm, and Wilbur marvels at the way his own ice-purple blood seems to crackle back to life at their proximity. “There. That is a promise worth more than anybody’s honor.”
“Oh,” Wilbur says, quiet enough that it is half-swallowed by a gust of wind.
They detach far too soon.
“Well,” George says, stepping back. When had they stepped so close together? When did it feel so natural? “Happy betting.”
Wilbur mimes doffing his cap. “Good luck to you, sir.” I hope we both win big.
The apartment is empty when he gets home, a rare luxury in a home shared with five other people. Wilbur kicks his shoes off before falling into bed. In a few hours, when everybody else stumbles in, he knows he’ll be jostled awake, but for now he enjoys the silence.
He reaches behind his headboard, feels around for the twine-bound stack of photos, and clutches it to his chest. The edges are worn, from hours upon hours of sequestering himself in the room with them for days on end, unwashed and on his sixth or seventh pack of Gitanes. How cruel of her to leave behind only the photographs. Wilbur isn’t sure if she had done it to hurt him, or if she’d really simply forgotten about them. Neither prospect is particularly comforting.
The walk home did next to nothing to clear his mind. It clutters with thoughts of Marie and vague little tracts of philosophy and now, the image of George, who should be only a footnote.
You chose to come here for a reason, George’s voice says. Wilbur’s heart tugs in all sorts of painful directions when he thinks of the curve of George’s smile.
Lying there in the dark, still fully-clothed and thinking, he feels the stirrings of a decision come to mind.
Three days later, Wilbur Soot, stage actor and twenty-year-old divorcee, sits on a bench at the banks of the Seine with a pack of old photographs under his arm. He sits and he waits until the Conciergie strikes twelve again and he resigns himself to the fact that George won’t be showing. For what reason, he can’t begin to guess, other than the general understanding that sometimes, people do that.
Wilbur stands and brushes off his slacks--his best pair too, in burgundy--and tries not to feel foolish. For the first time since 1959, the Seine has finally thawed. He drops the photos into the water, watches them sink and drift away.
iii. waitin’ round the bend // my huckleberry friend
Loire Valley, 1962
Wilbur stares, determined, into the contemptuous eyes of the man in front of him. This man killed your father. This man ruined your life.
The man across from him, blonde and a little older, lights a cigarette and crosses himself in the direction of the pews, sneering. “Don’t embarrass yourself.”
“You’ve wronged me for the last time.” He pulls the gun into his jacket and with an empty click, the man flies back exaggeratedly, hitting the carpet, cigarette going flying. Wilbur turns and exits the chapel, leaving him sprawled and coughing on the ground.
“Guillaume!” Niki yells, high-pitched, from further in the church as she rushes out to follow him. He storms out and away from the prone body, trapped in the open doorway.
The director yells coupez. Wilbur relaxes and turns around, but Niki is already helping his co-star back onto his feet.
“That one was not bad,” Phil says, good-humored, free of all the overblown pomp in his performance.
“Oh, yes,” Niki agrees, eyes wide under the thick swooping liner she has on. She holds out one arm. “Very melodramatic. I had the shivers, see?”
Apparently she had been scouted off of the street, hand-picked by the director. Wilbur can see why. He ducks his head, suddenly so aware of himself. “Thank you. I am not a fighter. Or a shooter.”
Phil laughs as they clear out of the chapel for the crew to reset the scene. “That’s alright. Neither am I! But I throw a good enough punch to keep everyone fooled.”
All of this is to say that the next time that Wilbur meets George is not in Paris at all, but in the damp-aired summer of the Loire Valley. Walking down to the river itself from the chapel that acts as the film set, he doesn’t dare believe what he’s seeing at first. He stops in his tracks, maybe a dozen yards away from the sight.
Down there, surrounded by a small filming crew, George stands facing the camera, squinting against the sun. Wilbur watches as he unbuttons his shirt and takes off his trousers, leaving it all in a pile on the ground. He turns and wades into the water in just his shorts, dipping further and further in until Wilbur is momentarily afraid that the current will sweep him away forever.
At the last moment, George looks around and catches sight of him standing to the side, transfixed.
Subtly, he tilts his head in recognition, and a knot of tension that Wilbur hadn’t even been aware of slowly comes loose. Even from this far back, he knows that George is fighting a smile. Whether it is at the expense of him or not, Wilbur can’t say yet.
George looks away and sinks down suddenly, so that only his head and his hands are visible above the murk of the Loire. The camera follows him, swooping upward to capture the image from above.
Wilbur’s hands itch for a pen, or a camera, he wishes he could be sitting in a cafe back in the city again. What he needs is time, time to sort through his addled thoughts, faced with George long after he’d made his peace with their one fleeting encounter.
He doesn’t wait for George to resurface as he turns and chooses to take the long way back up the hill.
Tommy,
Things seem to be going better. They have been for a while, but for once, I’m not writing from a cramped little apartment in Paris anymore. No, this time, I’m writing from a cramped little hotel room in the Loire Valley. Film acting is an entirely different beast--more lucrative, to be sure--but so much faster-moving and profit-focused than I am entirely used to.
You’ll be pleased to know that upon seeing me, the screenwriter for the one I’m shooting for now said I had such a “willowy, lovelorn look” about myself. I try not to take it as an insult, but I include this for your benefit, as I suspect that you might derive some mean-spirited enjoyment out of it.
I’ve been thinking about the past, lately. Do you remember when Marie and I had parted ways? I’m thinking now of that strange part of my life. A great many things have changed in the intervening years, including most of myself. And still, I find myself wanting for some of the same things.
I’m attaching some nice stamps to this letter, as you have clearly misplaced all of yours, judging by how little correspondence I seem to receive from you. As always,
Your brother,
Wilbur
10th of August, 1962
In the evening time, somebody knocks on the door to his room. Wilbur looks up from the ink-stained mess on his desk, Tommy’s letter completed on one side as he loses himself putting his thoughts to paper.
“I said I didn’t want to go out tonight, Phil,” he calls, blinking at the fuzziness in his vision. “You and the rest have fun.”
Phil says nothing, to which Wilbur frowns. When he relents and opens the door, he finds George there, hand poised to knock again.
“Hello,” George says. His hair is fluffy and unstyled, and he smells of soap and aftershave, like he’d thought to shower before visiting. He’s dressed casually, dressed for the heat, in a loose shirt with the sleeves pushed up around his elbows. “You left, earlier.”
“I thought I might return the favor,” Wilbur says, then regrets it at the unhappy tilt of George’s mouth. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it--I’m not angry.”
“That’s fortunate. For me, at least.” Without asking, George steps through the threshold, looks around Wilbur’s room, a small, dimly-lit space. Just large enough to squeeze in a writing desk on one end, a bed in another, and an armoire in the corner. “For a long time, I wondered if you were. I think I would have been.”
“I was, at first,” Wilbur admits, leaning against the writing desk. “Then, I realized that I had made a bad bet.”
George stops his roaming to squint playfully at Wilbur. “What are you implying about me?”
“Nothing bad!” Satisfied, George sits down on Wilbur’s rumpled bed and smooths out the sheets underneath him. “Just that I can’t read your mind, and...that I was always going to find some excuse to try and see you again.”
There’s always a moment of risk, just before saying something like that to another man. It has, admittedly, been a while since Wilbur’s had cause to worry, given that he’d spent the past two years in a reluctant and thoughtful state of bachelorhood, but the sense of shame--of a leap of faith--never quite leaves. Even so, he’s known for a while now that if there was ever a person to leap for, it would be George.
I don’t know what you are about to do, Wilbur realizes.
George says, “You’ve gotten bolder.”
Wilbur smiles, fiddles with his curls. “You bring out the worst in me.”
“What is it that you were doing in the river?” Wilbur asks curiously as they walk down Montresor’s Grand rue.
“Returning a favor,” George says. “I’m shooting a nouvelle vague piece that a friend of mine would die to see completed.”
“And not you?”
George shrugs. “Not really. I’ve seen Á bout de souffle four separate times now, at the behest of four different people. It loses its charm.”
At this point, everybody and anybody’s heard of the new wave, Truffaut and Godard and the rest. It reminds Wilbur of his days shouting over the crowd under the half-broken stage lighting of the A.B.C., that excitement (fractional as it may be) of being a pioneer. There is something so amusing about the idea of George bumping elbows with this crowd and treating it like nothing at all. Like it is absolutely mundane to be asked by somebody on the cutting-edge of art to be filmed taking a swim in the Loire. Does it infuriate them? No--far more likely is the possibility that they fall over themselves at George’s feet for it.
“This one is certainly more interesting than the others. I’ve never shot on location before. It’s always in some sordid corner of Paris that we do everything.”
“You know, I know a great many people who would kill to be in your position right now. To get to work with that crowd...you’d be torn apart at the Café de Flore if you admitted that you didn’t much care. They’d be so jealous.”
“What about you?”
“Hm?” Wilbur glances away from the view, moonlight glinting off of the water in a familiar way.
“Are you jealous?” George asks. He watches carefully for Wilbur’s answer.
“Do you want me to be?”
George thinks, sucking the side of his lip into his mouth. “A little bit, I think. But only for a little while.”
Wilbur thinks on it, and finds his feelings about George too muddled for him to pick out anything as malformed as envy. He says, “Okay. In any case, I’m not jealous. I have no reason to be. Mostly, I’m...curious.”
“I like that more.”
They stop at the steps of Montresor’s other church, one of the Baptist denomination, according to the sign.
George scrunches his nose. “Was this your motive all along? To get me to pray again?”
Wilbur blinks. “I thought you were leading the way. I’ve never been here before.”
“I--Well, let’s take it as a sign.” George unrolls his sleeves and cuffs them almost unconsciously. Wilbur does the same out of habit, rubbing uselessly at a scratch on his watch.
“You must have grown up Anglican, then,” George says in English.
“Of course.”
“And how did that work out for you?”
“How do you think?” Wilbur huffs. “I haven’t gone to church for years.”
“Right.” He’s looking up at the swooping, high ceiling so far above, shadowed by the dimming evening light. But enough about the heavens--down here, the way the yellow tungsten glow catches on George makes Wilbur think that divinity might well exist.
Before he knows of it in time to stop himself, he’s saying, “George, I need to know. Back in Paris--what was your wager?”
It’s been on his mind for a while. Less so than it had been months before, but still there. George frowns, confused, almost sheepish. “I hope you find this funny.”
“I probably will.”
He pauses and stares intently at a bookshelf. “It was that the Seine would stay frozen.”
“Oh.” Wilbur remembers now, dropping a stack of photos and watching it sink under the newly-thawed river.
Their laughs echo through the high arches.
“Today was my last filming day here,” George confesses, sitting out in front of the church. “I’ll be back to the city by the morning.”
Wilbur says nothing. He has several weeks ahead of him here in the damp summer heat. It rises off of the dusty ground in waves, even in the nighttime. “That was fast, then.”
George shrugs. “Things move fast in these circles. I don’t know. It’s why I came tonight.” He looks troubled as he knocks his elbow against Wilbur’s and says, “You know, that day, I did go to the Pont Neuf. I had to, to check if I won my side of the wager. I left because I knew, somehow, that we would be seeing each other again.” He continues like what he’s said weighs nothing at all. “I propose another bet--that we’ll run into each other again before the year is up.”
“Am I betting against you again?”
“No. This one is for both of us. If you win, then I win as well.”
Wilbur stands now, paces the length of the church’s doorway, then back again. George watches him, head turning this way and that. He doesn’t stand, doesn’t try to stop him. Wilbur doesn’t know if he wishes that he would. He says, “I need some way to be certain.”
“But you can never be,” George argues. He remains sitting, Wilbur keeps pacing.
“I’d still like to try.” Wilbur hears the desperate edge in his voice. Part of him despises being out in the countryside. The humidity does things to his curls and the gas-powered lights cast strange, interesting shadows over George’s face.
“Just trust me,” George says, emphatic. “I promise you.”
Is an actor’s promise worth anything?
George says, “Trust in the wager.”
Wilbur scrubs a hand through his frizzing hair. “Someday, every gambler’s luck runs out.”
It’s then that George finally stands and walks to Wilbur, who stops in his tracks as George runs a hand through his hair. It is an eternity before he stops, fingers snaking down against Wilbur’s nape. He takes it in--how George has to crane his neck back to look him in the eye, the faint shadow of stubble on his jaw. He says, “Someday, yes. But I know that this is not the day.”
iv. this charm about you // will carry me through, yes
Paris, 1962
So much of Wilbur’s life has been spent telling stories to himself. The worst of it is far enough away for him to admit now that it kept him from succumbing to the awful dreary reality of a wretched finishing school in the middle of nowhere, miles and miles away from anywhere he could call home.
It was why he threw everything he had back in England, to perform for the stage and for the screen. The promise of being part of a good tale was never something that he could ever resist.
As he grows, he goes from telling stories about places--sitting in the darkness under his covers, tracing the world map on the worn, mildewed atlas nicked from the school library--to stories about people.
This is part of the reason why he finds himself in the back row of a matinee screening of A Wild Life, Truffaut’s newest creative endeavor, hours after receiving his new glasses from the optometrist. On-screen, as George steps into the river, Wilbur realizes that he recognizes this shot. He recognizes it because he’s replayed it in his head about a thousand times from a different angle, edges fuzzy.
Just before he ducks in, pale back splayed out in the stark sunlight, George’s head turns and for a split second, Wilbur can see a smile flicker over his face, before he sinks down into the murky water. Only minutes later, the film ends. As an attendant turns the lights on again, Wilbur wonders what it was that Truffaut saw in this take that made it go all the way to the final cut.
With Marie, everything had built to one great Homerian epic, only for it to end in bathos. Clearly, Wilbur hasn’t learned his lesson.
“And why is that?” Niki asks, fanning him with the newspaper they’ve been pretending to read. The camera flashes bright behind them. Wilbur blinks the drowsiness out of his gaze--understandable, perhaps, loafing around in the park in early autumn, but it wouldn’t do to fall asleep at the job--and looks up at her, posed effortlessly against the tree. The sunlight dapples through the leaves.
“Because I suspect that I’m doing it all over again. And this time, I know even less. What if he doesn’t want to see me?”
“What do you mean he doesn’t want to see you? He told you so, didn’t he?”
“Yes, but--” What if he’s forgotten? Or he chooses not to show? He’s only known Niki in a professional capacity. Putting his head in her lap for a photoshoot is one thing, pouring his heart out is another.
The camera flashes again, capturing Wilbur mid-frown. Niki presses the pad of her thumb between his brows, smoothing it out.
“Don’t do that,” she says. “Wrinkles are so unflattering on you.”
Wilbur pulls a face, all wrinkles.
“She’s right,” the cameraman says, as Wilbur looks directly into the lens. Niki giggles and blows a kiss to him. “This is your picture that’s going in circulation. I’m just doing my job.”
“Thank you, Floris,” she calls. To Wilbur, she says, “You poor thing. You just want your life to be one grand tale, don’t you?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“Maybe some of us are content with a photoshoot in the Bois de Boulogne with her grand copain.”
“...Me?”
Niki smacks him on the forehead with the newspaper. “No, the sun.”
They rearrange themselves so that Wilbur is reading the paper with Niki’s head on his shoulder.
“What’s so bad about wanting a grand tale?” Wilbur frowns again, but he smooths his face out before either Floris or Niki can berate him for it.
That night, in the Baptist church, George looking every bit as beautiful and terrifying as the biblical angels. It’s his face that Wilbur sees in the shadows of every cramped alleyway, in the background of every verdant scene, echoed in the sculpted moues of the statues around the city.
Wilbur says, perhaps a little petulantly, “I just want to know what happens next.”
“You must know that things will happen, whether you dream about them or not,” Niki says, adjusting her head further into the crook of his neck at Floris’ behest. “There is little point in trying to read the future. If you see him, then you see him.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then you don’t! What kind of question is that?” Niki laughs, carefree, and so does Floris behind the camera. Begrudgingly, Wilbur smiles as well, but the thought doesn’t leave his head quite so easily.
Niki nudges him as they help Floris pack his equipment. “Let’s go out tonight, the three of us. Phil’s offered to take me to a new place, up in Marais. One of his producer friends’ side projects.”
“I guess I could,” Floris says. “All I have to do tonight is develop the films for Cahiers.”
Wilbur puts his glasses back on his face, crumples up their prop newspaper, presses it into an overflowing trash bin. “Huh. I’m not one for dancing. I don’t know.”
Niki sighs long-sufferingly. “You do know. Out of good conscience, I can’t leave you to think about some boy all on your own tonight. And besides, Phil says it'll be fun.”
Floris snorts. “Fun? In Marais?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Niki says. She lays a hand on Wilbur’s arm. “Hey. You’ll come out with me tonight, promise me.”
Is an actor’s--
Wilbur shakes the thought out of his head. Maybe he does need a night out, just so he’ll stop searching for once. “Fine.”
Contrary to the unfortunate classical connotations of its name, Pandora is a quiet little nighttime cafe next to a charcuterie on a block of grimy tenement buildings, the sort that might have held several starving families during the Depression, filled with university professors and people that Wilbur can only refer to as the elderly.
Floris eyes the crowd rather skeptically. Phil leads them to the bar, where he whispers a few words to the bartender, who hands him a set of keys.
The three of them trail along after him as he fits the keys into a side door, which opens onto a spiraling metal staircase, tucked in next to what looks like a trash chute and water pipes. One by one, each of them climb up. Wilbur polishes his glasses and tucks them in the inner lining of his wool jacket, before ascending after Niki. They climb for what feels like hours.
Things will happen, whether you dream about them or not.
All the same, Wilbur can’t help but feel that same horrible sense of hope that he always does, mixed with a heady blend of excitement and trepidation. Half-slipping up a rickety metal staircase, squinting through his near-sightedness, he can’t help but think--
It’s in times like these that Wilbur asks himself if it would be cheating to seek George out on his own. Paris is only so large, after all, and it is only a matter of time.
But maybe he doesn’t have to search at all, he thinks as the sound of big-band music seeps through from way above them. Maybe, he thinks to himself, sweaty fingers fumbling to put his glasses back on his nose as they reach the trapdoor at the top of the stairs, George was right, they’re both going to win--
“Welcome to Pandora’s Vault!” Phil yells over the sound of the band, and throws the door open. All four of them tumble in. It is a marked difference from the ground floor--here, a band playing upbeat jazz is in full swing, loud enough to just barely mask the squeaking drag of shoes on hardwood. The room is stiflingly hot. It takes Wilbur back to his first few years trawling around town, when he and Marie would spend the early hours of the morning curled up together on a doorstep like tramps, just for some respite from the heat in these speakeasies. He hasn’t truly missed them until this exact moment.
In his smudged, crooked glasses--oh, he still isn’t quite used to them--he sees George whirling across the dance floor. In sharper focus than Wilbur has ever been used to, he watches George turn and catch sight of him, eyes wide and face so, so pleased.
Frozen in the doorway, Wilbur waits for the other shoe to drop. For George to wave and return to mingling. Instead, he watches as George excuses himself from his dance partner, threading his way toward him through the crowd.
“I told you so,” George says, barely distinguishable through the noise. “I’m always right.”
Wilbur smiles, vaguely registers Phil shepherding the rest of his friends to go introduce themselves to Sam. “Maybe you are.”
“Hi again,” George says. He looks Wilbur up and down, touches the bridge of his nose. Cataloguing the changes. “Those are new.”
“I used to insist on reading by candlelight, as a boy. Now I’m paying for it.”
It makes George roll his eyes. “Of course you were that child.”
“What? What did you do, then?” (In the privacy of his own head, Wilbur revels at how effortless it is for them to slip into familiarity.) George abstains from answering right away, instead taking Wilbur by the elbow and guiding him to a quieter corner out on a small balcony, away from the noise.
“I slept,” George says at a normal volume, “Would you know, I hardly ever read as a child. I was always wandering off, and my mother hated me for it. I must have gotten lost in Hackney about a dozen times.”
Wilbur blinks at him. He takes his glasses off and polishes them on the hem of his shirt. “I think that was the first thing you’ve ever told me about yourself. The first real thing.”
“Really?” George frowns. His face is a little damp from dancing. George is the same as he’s always been--still perfectly well-dressed, still seemingly unapproachable or unassuming until the moment he speaks and smiles and looks at you.
All of a sudden, Wilbur feels stupid and unkempt, not having bothered to change from this afternoon. He finds himself unaccustomed to it, as he often looks stupid and unkempt with no qualms. But in many ways, for Wilbur, George is unprecedented.
“Really.”
George says, slightly impetuously, “Well, it’s hardly as if you’ve done the same.”
It takes only that for the words to spill out of his mouth. “I’ve got a brother. Back in England, called Tommy. He’s in finishing school now. He might be my best friend.” George looks at him with renewed curiosity. “We write to each other in secret, even though our parents hate me now. On the rare occasion that he writes back in time, he tells me all the family gossip, even when I don’t want to hear it.”
It was difficult to tell whilst climbing, but as he looks out over the balcony, he realizes that he’s never been this high up in Paris before. It must be seven, eight stories high. The night sky is clear enough to see the Eiffel Tower blinking in the distance. Wilbur says, “There. Now you know that.”
And then, maybe it is because he’s never had the luxury of seeing the city that’s become the closest thing to home from above before, or maybe it is on account of how even after only a few brief meetings, Wilbur is still so keenly aware of George’s presence. He’s not had anything to drink--Pandora’s Vault opened its doors to him and he went straight to George--but he feels intoxicated nonetheless.
Whatever the reason, something possesses Wilbur to say, finally, “I want to get to know you. I want to see you again. Is that so unreasonable to ask?” Because I’ve been meaning to ever since you kissed your little finger.
“Not at all,” George says, voice strangely soft. He moves closer, pressing a warm line of heat in between them like a hand to a hot iron. “Maybe I wanted you to. Maybe I’ve been waiting for you to.”
“Oh.” Wilbur says, “You might have asked, Gauloises.”
George laughs, bright and shaking all the way up and down Wilbur’s side. “But isn’t gambling so much more fun?”
The foolishness dissipates into a familiar, fluttering feeling in the base of his stomach. Once upon a time, it would have been accompanied with the sting of heartache, the worn, folded edges of a stack of photographs. Now, though. Well, now Wilbur just wants his camera.
“Dance with me,” George says. Not a request, or a question, but a demand, one that Wilbur would gladly acquiesce to, if not for the unfortunate fact that--
“I can’t dance.” He kicks his legs out--long, lanky, uncoordinated--to demonstrate. “It’s been years since I’ve tried, and it’s been just as long since I last made a fool of myself in such a fashion.”
“It can’t be that bad--”
“Do you know what the French are like, George?” Wilbur says in English, just to see the delight in his eye whenever they speak in their native tongue. “They like to laugh at people, and they love to laugh at English fools. I can’t fly across the floor as you do. I will be ruined.”
George giggles, as musical as the jazz leaking through the glass. Heaven, I’m in heaven. He extends one hand out to Wilbur. “Fine. Let’s dance out here, then.”
He’s as bad as he remembers, stumbling in and out of time as he struggles to match the grace with which George steps around the cramped space of the balcony. But all the same, he rejoices in the way George giggles in his ear every time he fumbles a step, every time he leads them in the wrong direction.
“My career,” Wilbur groans as they stumble over each other again. “What will become of me?”
“Fine, then. What if we tried--” George murmurs, so close as they are to each other. He shifts Wilbur’s hand onto his shoulder and clutches him by the waist with one hand. “Okay. Relax.”
Wilbur does, letting his mind drift to the way George’s brow creases slightly in concentration as they attempt to navigate around the cramped balcony. There’s a moment, a lull in the song, when George looks up at Wilbur and Wilbur looks down at George, who asks, “Do you know what this is? I’m leading now.”
Things go smoother this way. They dance the best they can on the cramped balcony. Wilbur’s night passes in the arms of a boy, swaying to the muffled sounds of the real party indoors. Trading secrets and life stories in whispers.
It all ends in a blur. At some point, they find their way back inside and Wilbur says hello to his host, a smiley, kind-looking man who laughs off his absence and plies him with rich alcohol and good conversation into loosening up. George stands nearby and watches him in action, socializing with people in power and teasing him after the fact.
(“Not everyone can be like you,” Wilbur says, voice slurred and hands expressive. “Not all of us have--arthouse directors falling at our feet. Some of us have to try.”
George rolls his eyes, feigns modesty, as if he doesn’t love to hear it as much as Wilbur loves to say it.)
It’s only as he’s stumbling down the staircase with Phil steadying him from behind, the four of them swallowing back bubbling laughter and not a little bit of nausea, that Wilbur realizes--it’s happened again. That George has slipped past. Again. Twice, three times, that could be a coincidence. But this? He feels, irrationally, like he’s been stolen from, even though nothing had been taken in the first place.
He lurches sideways, suppresses the bile rising in the back of his throat. He vaguely registers Phil righting him by the shoulders, guiding his drunk arse down the rest of the steps. When they step back onto the street, he feels in his pockets for...what, he doesn’t know.
Or maybe he does. His fingers close around a napkin that he does not recall having taken with him. There, in an ink- and wine-stained scribble, is a permanent address, and a phone number.
Wilbur clutches his precious cargo tight in his hand, looks up at the sky, clear enough that the stars appear like little white flecks of paint with his new glasses on.
v. la mer // a bercé mon cœur pour la vie
Saint-Tropez, 1963
Hello Tommy,
Writing from the seaside right now. Hope you weep at this postcard, confined as home as you are. Congratulations on your apprenticeship! You’re mad for pursuing that alongside school, but, well. Do write back with more on your mentor. Does he really have pink hair? Is he really called the Blade? How strange.
Your brother,
Wilbur
29th of July, 1963
George,
Lovely to hear from you again. I’m writing from Saint-Tropez. It’s beautiful here--I can practically smell the ocean from the inside of my room. This is for a project that I can’t tell you much about right at the moment, but it is very exciting. It might even lead to my being photographed on the streets as often as you do. Oh well, I can only dream (hah).
The other day, I was taking photos of Niki when, in a fit of carelessness, I dropped my camera into the sea. When we tried to salvage it, the film had already been corroded with seawater. I fear I might have used up all my luck on you--how unfortunate is it that, in my first trip to the Cote d’Azur, I can’t even photograph it? Awful.
Anyway, I miss you. Somehow, it feels less daunting to put that down on paper than it is to admit it to your face. I don’t know how we keep missing each other in Paris--first your trip to Capri, then me coming here. At least we can write now.
Enclosed are the images that I managed to develop before the disaster with my camera. I’ll have to buy a new one soon, not sure if I have the cash for it. Write back soon,
Wilbur
30th of July, 1963
“My God! How do you get any work done around here?” Dream asks.
Wilbur looks up from the letter on his lap. The American is standing on the open edge of the dock, staring at the perfect Riviera coastline, down to the quaint line of fishermen’s boats drifting by the blue shores. Away from them, Niki and Nick are shooting their own scene, arguing on either side of a car.
“Delayed gratification,” Wilbur says. He folds the letter and puts it gently into his breast pocket. Dream smiles and lights a cigarette.
“I’m from Florida, you know?” Wilbur knows. He knows all about Dream, entirely against his will, having listened to the whispers of starstruck extras as they watch Dream and Nick do their double act. “Real backwater swamp country. God bless the place, of course, but nothing compares to this.” At this point, Dream glances over at Wilbur and says almost shyly, “I must sound like a real chump to you right now.”
“Oh, no,” Wilbur says, surprised. “I completely understand. After all, I’m here too.”
“I s’pose,” Dream says around the cigarette. Wilbur eyes the brand. Gauloises.
What strikes Wilbur first about the Americans is how...effusive they are. They throw their wealth around like it’s nothing, which he supposes it is, to a pair like Dream Holland and Nick Langley. Langley comes from money, is purportedly the heir to a gold mine in Texas. And Holland, he’s perhaps the biggest household name that Wilbur has ever met, big enough that nobody bats an eye at the thought of calling him Dream, of all things. Filming with them has been...illuminating, to say the least.
Still, it is disconcerting to be driven down from the hotel and see a great big yacht where there certainly was not one the day before, dwarfing every other boat next to the pier.
“I--” Niki says next to Wilbur in the backseat of the convertible. “What is this?”
Their driver sighs, mutters something like l'Américain under his breath.
“Dream,” Wilbur says, in explanation.
He and Niki are dropped off at the dock, where more than a few curious people have crowded around Dream and Nick. The man himself, greeting everyone jovially and welcoming them aboard, spots the two of them and waves them over with a grin.
“A little extravagant, don’t you think?” Wilbur says as they come within walking distance. Dream wheezes charmingly.
“You won’t believe the trouble I went through to get ‘er through Gibraltar, only to be told that I’m not to set sail today at all!” Dream claps Wilbur on the shoulder. “Come on now, you two. I see now why you settled here now, you know? I love it in France,” he declares.
“Many people do,” Niki says, as Dream helps her step off of the walkway and onto the ship deck.
“Oh, I do not doubt it. Most things are beautiful here, aren’t they? The scenery, the buildings, the music,” and here Dream glances behind them for a second, beckons somebody over, “the people.”
Somebody steps around Wilbur and Niki to come stand next to Dream. Wilbur’s heart drops. “This is Georges.”
George looks surprised for a split second, before the veil of bored amusement falls over his face again as Dream speaks to him in clumsy French. All Wilbur can think about is how George is suddenly Georges, how Dream has his arm draped over his shoulders in such a way.
“It’s nice to meet you,” George says in French, kissing Niki’s hand. He holds his own out for Wilbur, who feels ice-cold under the Mediterranean sun.
“Likewise,” Wilbur says eventually. They shake. To Dream, he asks, “How do you...know each other?”
“He’s been teaching me French,” Dream says. “Not very successfully, seeing as how he doesn’t know much English, but I think we get along.”
Wilbur knows the look in George’s eye. It promises everything and explains nothing. Just trust me.
He finds it difficult to even try.
“You poor thing,” Niki says, gently taking Wilbur’s champagne flute away from him. “Was that your boy?”
“Don’t call him my boy,” Wilbur mutters. He hits the croquet ball with a little too much force and it ricochets away.
Niki fans herself under her big sunhat and asks, “Is he not from England as well?”
“London,” Wilbur says. He is momentarily distracted as he catches sight of George at the bow of the yacht, laughing in between Dream and Nick.
“Wilbur,” Niki says sharply. She bumps him lightly on the ankle with her mallet, right where it hurts the most. “Pay attention. If he’s from England, then why on earth would he act like he can’t speak English?”
“How should I know?” Wilbur says bitterly.
“You are so tiresome when you’re heartbroken,” Niki says affectionately. “Look, I’ll fix things for you. Take my mallet.”
“Niki--” Gripping two croquet mallets, Wilbur watches Niki joins the group on the ship’s bow, smiling along to one of Dream’s jokes. He can’t watch for long, feeling foolish (what else is new) and slightly sick. He sets the mallets down and ducks under the mainsail, back over to the walkway down to the dock. Nobody pays him any mind as he makes his way back onto land.
Then, rapid footsteps follow.
“Wilbur!” George calls. He catches up on the dock when, against his better judgement, Wilbur pauses to wait for him.
“You never mentioned this when you wrote to me,” Wilbur accuses.
“Neither did you,” George says.
“I was going to tell you!”
“Would you believe me if I said the same?” The sun makes him squint, brings out the fine smile lines in the corners of his eyes. Wilbur tears his own eyes away from the sight and walks further in-land. He knows, for better or for worse, that George will follow.
“Wil--” They end up on a cracked, empty street, surrounded on either side by yellow houses, glowing gold in the sunlight.
“I’ve realized that I don’t understand you,” Wilbur says. “Each time we run into each other, I think I might, but I know now that I’ve never come close.”
“It’s your fault!” George yells. He steps closer, presses the point of his finger into Wilbur’s chest. “I know your type, Wilbur Soot. You want to live your life like it’s a memoir in the process of being written--half of Paris is just like you, and you’re trying to write me into a role that doesn’t exist. Do you know why I pretend not to speak English with Dream?”
Wilbur shakes his head, tries to keep himself from being too taken in by the fervor with which George is speaking in. George says, “For the fun of it. As simple as that. Dream is charming, and I find it amusing when he tries to speak French with me. I bore myself half to death sometimes, Wilbur. Did you know?”
“I suspected,” Wilbur says.
“You suspected. Then you should have suspected that there’s a reason why you’ve held my attention for years now, crétin,” George says, face fully pink by now. He averts his gaze and rests back onto his heels again. Wilbur feels his heart in the back of his throat. He wants so many things. “Just don’t—overcomplicate it.”
“I’m sorry,” Wilbur says, perhaps rather unintelligently. “If that’s what I’ve done, then I’m sorry.”
George rolls his eyes. “That’s alright. You’re lucky I like you.”
“I’m always lucky with you.”
George laughs. A breeze, fragrant from the sea, rushes by and sweeps through his hair, makes his half-open shirt flutter a little. “Say that about forty more times and maybe then I’ll forgive you.”
“I’m always lucky with you. I’m always lucky with you.” They set off back in the direction of the sea again. “So, Dream Holland, huh?”
“Oh, stop it.”
Wilbur chews on his bottom lip and flutters his shirt slightly against the heat. “Would you ever? If he asks? Because I think he might ask you.”
“Heavens. No.”
“No?”
“What is it that you think Dream wants? And don’t overcomplicate it.”
Wilbur thinks back to the generous way that Dream spends, the luxury yacht, his easy charm. “To have fun?”
“More or less. What I’m getting at is that he doesn’t really want me. He—and Nick, for that matter—wants the experience of it, you know? I think he wants to wear me on his arm for a little while, just until he goes back to Hollywood. It’s very novel for both of them! Except, I’m the novelty.” George squints into the sun and Wilbur wishes, not for the first time, that he could read him a little better.
“It sounds awfully demeaning,” Wilbur says.
“Hm,” George thinks. “Maybe a little. But they’re interesting, and they have good wine, so they may stay for now,” he says imperiously.
Wilbur chuckles. “King George.”
“King George is right,” George says, then the smile drops from his face as they turn again and find themselves nowhere near the docks. “King George is...lost.”
“Why does this always happen to us?”
“Bet you I could find it again.”
“No more bets, please--”
One of them, Wilbur isn’t sure which one, breaks into a run, pulling the other any which way. George has a vice grip on Wilbur’s hand. It’s exhilarating, being deafened by the wind and laughing like a mad person, sandals slapping against the concrete as the two of them tear through street after street. They run and they run and they run until George—it must be George, because Wilbur has no idea where they’ve been going—leads them through a sharp left turn and they burst onto a market road, hugging a fishing pier that opens to the sea.
“See?” George says breathlessly, standing out of the way, in the gap between two buildings. “Easy. Found it.”
“I wish I still had my camera,” Wilbur says as he catches his breath, resting his hands on his knees. George leans back, head reclined to rest against the wall behind them. He wants to do something reckless, like pressing his lips to the bump of George’s Adam’s apple.
Through his panting, Wilbur says, “Saint-Tropez was made for you.”
He says it because it’s the truth, because he can think of nobody else who belongs out here any better than George does, in a shirt that is a little too large for him, flushed from exertion. The only person in the world to grow more beautiful under the sweltering heat, and he’s spent the day and the first few moments of the decade with Wilbur, and he’s seen Wilbur perform Huis Clos three times.
George lifts his head. For a moment, they do nothing but look at each other. Cataloguing the changes. Then, Wilbur is being dragged further into the gap, into the cool darkness, breath knocked back out of his body as George pushes him against the wall and kisses him hard.
Many things go wrong in the first few seconds. George’s hands, fisted into the delicate linen of Wilbur’s only good summer shirt, punch into his chest. The wall behind them is damp and mildewed. The angle is wrong, their teeth click and their noses knock.
But sweet mercy, so much else goes perfectly right. Wilbur’s arms curve perfectly around George’s body, reaching around to cup the back of his neck. Past the initial awkwardness, their mouths slot together perfectly and Wilbur hunches forward as George traces the roof of his mouth with his tongue.
George kisses--well, he kisses like he’s curious. Like he’s passionately interested. Like he’s proving a point, not to Wilbur, but to the world. Wilbur is all for it.
When they pull apart, George’s lips are slick and pink and Wilbur is devastated. He kisses him again, swallowing his breath, reveling in the way his hands slip under the collar of Wilbur’s shirt.
They break apart a second time, gasping for air. This close, Wilbur counts the freckles on his cheeks, a newly-discovered relic. Living proof that George is not as immutable as he might have earlier seemed.
George’s eyes flutter a little. He licks his lips--Wilbur follows the movement with a religious fervor. “I--I’m colorblind, you know?”
Wilbur shakes his head. “I didn’t.”
“I’ll never be able to drive, that’s how severe it is,” George says.
“Nobody really needs to drive, do they?” Wilbur says, nonsensical. George laughs.
“It’s why I love the sea. It’s why I ran.” George turns to look out over the coastline, glittering in the sun. “The sea is one of the only things I can see in full color.”
He tries to imagine what that would be like, to be limited in such way, then puts it out of his mind when George takes him by the chin and turns his face gently, presses another languid kiss there. When they part, Wilbur says, “Thank you for telling me.”
They take their time making their way back to the yacht (George’s jugular tastes like salt and the bitterness of expensive cologne), but they make their way back just as the sun reaches its zenith. If Dream notices their absence, he doesn’t remark upon it, only welcomes them as easily as they left.
“I’m glad you guys are getting along,” he says to Wilbur. George smiles blankly and accepts the champagne flute that Dream hands him. His eyes shine when he looks at Wilbur.
Later on, as the partygoers file off the yacht, George tugs on his sleeve and mouths wait for me. Wilbur nods and lingers on the deck. He watches as George rushes up to where Dream and Nick are talking amongst each other, taking both of them by the hand. He says something to them, and Wilbur watches, holding back his amusement, as their faces pass through shock, then confusion, then anger, and finally, laughter. George smiles too, stunning against the sunset, then quickly kisses both of them on the cheek before ducking away and joining Wilbur on the gangplank.
“I think they took that rather well,” George says. “They’re good people. I would’ve felt too guilty about taking it to my grave.”
“That was funny,” Wilbur says. He turns--they’re both watching George go. He feels absurdly proud that he should be the one who gets to leave with George, and not either of them. He says, “I think I could watch you gallivant around all day.”
George says something too quiet for Wilbur to hear. He clears his throat timidly, and repeats, “You’re welcome to join me. I think both of us might like that better, don’t you think?”
“How long are you staying in Saint-Tropez?”
“However long you want me to,” George says instantly. His face splits into a grin, like he can’t help himself.
“Great,” Wilbur says, like he isn’t smiling just as wide. “I can think of a few ways for us to get into trouble.”
Big man Wilbur,
Happy Christmas and happy New Year. Sorry it took me so long to write back to you. Only old people use letters now, and you and Mum and Dad are the only people I ever write to anymore. Take the opportunity to reflect on yourself and your choices.
I’m back at boarding school now and I attend all my classes with a heavy helping of hate in my heart (ha!). When we got back, Tubbo told me he learned how to vomit on command. I didn’t believe him until we had our first arithmetics exam of the year, at which point Tubbo promptly emptied the contents of his stomach all over the floor and one of my shoes. Very clever of him, because now none of us have to sit the exam.
Sorry to hear about Marie. Also, I would remind you that apparently you are having a grand time with the baguettes over in France. I think that you must be lying to me (or to yourself) when you say that there is nothing else there if Marie has left, because you have sent me far too many photographs for me to think that there is nothing there for you to do. You will be fine I’m sure. If not, you can cry on my big manly shoulders.
Just so you know, I would never have this problem. Not because I would never have a wife (women love me), but because I wouldn’t cry if one of them left (because there are too many women).
Also, if we were to duel, you would instantly die, because I am just too good. One day I’ll make my way over to Paris and I’ll prove it.
Love,
Tommy
29th of January, 1960
vi. des mots de tous les jours // et ça m' fait quelque chose
Paris, 1965
Wilbur hears George come in through the front door--the scrape of his shoes, the insistent slam when the door refuses to stay shut, as it often does. He says something that Wilbur doesn’t quite make out.
“In here,” he calls, carefully hanging a film spread up on the wire. The door to the darkroom opens and Wilbur blinks at the natural light, before George slips inside and shuts the door firmly behind him. “Bonjour.”
“Good evening, more like.”
“Is it really?” Wilbur looks up at the line of developed photographs he has up, then decides that maybe it’s time to clean up for the day. He carefully closes his bottle of stop bath liquid.
“Yes.” George kisses him on the cheek. “I was saying, they’re tearing down the A.B.C..”
The bottle nearly slips out of Wilbur’s grasp. “They’re what?”
“The A.B.C.--it’s a shame, I know. I saw on my way back, they’re taking it down as we speak.”
“I,” Wilbur says, looking down at his hands. “Will you wait for me? I’ll clean up, then we can go.”
The theatre is unrecognizable when they arrive. Everything is covered in a fine layer of gray dust, dim and half-destroyed. Wilbur makes to cross the road and step closer, but George pulls him back before he can be reprimanded by the construction workers. He hardly ever comes by to this side of town anymore--after all, he has no reason to, now that everybody has left the area.
All the same, some part of him feels guilty, watching the beginning of everything that he knows now be torn down before his very eyes. This is not the sort of thing that he could write to Tommy about. He doubts that the kid would understand, after all. He doubts that even George would understand, and it is rare that he ever doubts George anymore. So he watches, quietly, as the display, once bright and blinking, is taken down. Relents as George leans subtly against him in a silent show of support.
“You’ve been quiet,” George remarks on their walk back.
“I’m just---reminiscing, I suppose you could call it.”
“Regretting?”
Wilbur shakes his head. “No, not that. Just thinking. Did I ever tell you, I worked there for two whole years. The owners had so little money that in that time, I must have performed Huis Clos about a hundred times. And there was always that moment, near the end of the play, when the door to hell finally opens.”
“And Garcin chooses not to leave.”
“And he--” Wilbur turns to George, only to find him looking right back with a lively challenge in his eyes. There are still pale freckles on his cheekbones, the remnants of summers past. “Yes. Exactly. He chooses not to leave. That was always the moment that stayed with me the most. I know very little of philosophy--”
“--neither do I--”
“--but that he chooses not to leave--it feels so significant.”
“It does, doesn’t it? I wonder why.”
If life were a tale, its author would have many different drafts of George--one where his gray sleeves are rain-soaked, one where he has a cigarette balanced precariously between his lips, and yet another where the loose collar of his shirt flutters in the sea breeze.
Better still are the abilities of the film reel, where George exists half-submerged in the Loire river, where the delicate planes of his shoulder blades are discussed to no end.
Wilbur links their hands together furtively, shielded under the lengthening shadows of late evening.