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1.) Elliot dropped a fig into my palm– my second one– offer trailing off and a million miles away already. There were three to begin with; I asked if he wanted to save it for his mother.
“I don’t think she likes them,” he confessed, not looking up from his hands. Always, always preoccupied.
“Why not?”
He shrugged, eyes wide as always. “Too sweet, I think. Too sticky.”
I bit into it. His mother was right; they were beautiful, as ripe as little planets. The juice ran down my chin, too sweet, too sticky, just right. I’d always had a habit, as a kid, of refusing my fruits and vegetables. I’d kick and scream, like most children do, refusing until my parents gave up. My mother hardly ever dealt with it, always slinking off, cigarette in hand, the same brand I grew to like when older. (I’ve always wondered if preference for tobacco products is genetic. I hope the cancer is, at least.)
I wiped my face with the back of my wrist, feeling Elliot’s eyes track the movement but refusing to meet his gaze. Too intimate. The sun was still shining. Not enough time. You know how it is.
As we brought furniture out– set the old chests of drawers and wooden side tables against the front face of the house– I could still feel his eyes on me even when he wasn’t looking. I felt like I was going crazy. The patina on everything was as good as hypnosis. I could smell the age in each piece, dusty, endless. Elliot’s mother, Beatrice, felt like a haunting. I’d never believed in ghosts until I met them both. Guess it runs in the family. Just like taste in cigarettes.
We were both sitting on things not meant to be sat on, feeling the breeze of midday. Beatrice standing far away, like she was worried she’d interrupt us by simply existing. I stared at her. Elliot stared at me. There were very few words spoken. I think he said he liked the Beatles. I think I told him to pick a better band.
When I did finally look to him, his eyes were unfocused, expression distinctly pleasant; he really did have the bluest eyes I’d ever seen. Doll lashes, undereye bags, misshapen brows. He smiled timidly, like he always did. There was something gross inside of me, something right below the cavity of my ribcage. It manifested in the urge to break his nose. I was itching for a smoke. He told me not with his mother around.
2.) I should’ve known he didn’t smoke by the way he grabbed the package. Forcefully, like there was any universe in which I’d assume he had experience. It took him four tries to light the cigarette, the thing hanging loosely from his lips. I allowed myself the indulgence of watching each of his unsure movements. He couldn’t keep any of what he inhaled in, which made me laugh, which made him laugh, which made him only cough harder. I didn’t know what I was doing until I tapped him on the shoulder– anything to get his attention when I knew I didn’t really have to try.
“Comme ça.” My demonstration was clean, automatic. Unnecessary. I just wanted to show off, because I always wanted to show off. Maybe there was a part of me that reveled in the flash of respect that crossed Elliot’s features; the sun shone from under his skin, I swear it, swear to God.
His second attempt gave me a headrush; there was an air of impertinence about him that was so out of place it electrified me. I wanted to dig my canines into it, into the very idea of him being cross with me, though I’d never admit it aloud. Of course, this was short-lived; he devolved into phlegmatic hacks, drowning above water. He very nearly fell out of the old, beaten-down truck we were sitting in, lungs collapsing in on themselves as he crouched and spit up.
“Soldat?” I was worried, very briefly, that he may run out of air and die in front of me. I quickly jumped out, reaching to pat him on the back and ease his uncontrollable wheezing. Somehow, he ended up being the one slapping away my hand extended in comfort. Perhaps I’d let my touches become too casual. (However, if anyone knew about craving something so badly you could only push it away in disgust, it was me.)
3.) We were both smoking again, sitting next to each other but facing opposite directions. In front of the café; always in front of the café. I think I indoctrinated him. He said something about how the burning in his lungs felt good and holy.
I was lighting up my second, third, fourth cigarette— does it really matter?— when I felt compelled to say what I’d been thinking for hours. Days, even.
“Tu es un peu tante.” As soon as I’d said it, I had to avert my gaze. I knew Elliot was turning to look at me with those glassy eyes of his, and I just couldn’t bear it.
“What?” (I think, now, he knew exactly what I meant.)
“C’est l’argot, laisse choir.”
And he obliged, because he’d do anything I told him to.
The sight of him burning his cigarette to the filter— too inexperienced to pace himself— lit my nerves up like circuits. Such an odd view: him in profile, a boy of creekwater and tinsel, stealing a Sirene from my stash, puffing away like he paid for it. It was so novel that it made my head spin. I’d always imagined sharing my cigarettes with a pretty girl, maybe one from Spain or Corsica; not a Brit who was pale as milk. I was not so sure how I felt about this substitution.
“You wank too much?”
The look he gave me in return was more of an answer than the words that followed were. “C’est normal.”
Ha. Funny. “Avec aun carrot dans ton cul.”
He didn’t say anything about this, which I was thankful for. My mind was saying enough, silent as it was. I shouldn’t have said it. I shouldn’t have even thought of it. The image burned behind my retinas, me having to live with the impression. Once again: the gross, untamable thing in my stomach with gnashing teeth was threatening to spill out from my mouth. Maybe, if I had puked all over myself, I’d have been saved from certain doom. I could have left, never hearing him ask:
“What happened to your hand?”
I almost laughed again. I almost broke his nose. Again. “Ne rien.”
4.) “The Vélibs, you know— the bicycles you can hire— are everywhere, which is cool. But, how do you say… people piss everywhere.”
“No…!”
“Si.” I was talking to Beatrice, for once. Such a sad woman; the kind they would have made sculptures of, the kind they would have painted beheading Holofernes. “They make signs to stop people.”
I’d noticed her affinity for mugs. Fine china, cheap ones, didn’t matter. The one she held bore the repeated image of a bowl of oranges ‘round the side. (Maybe she liked them more than figs— citrus over honey.) Her smile was just as captivating as Elliot’s, if only for the rarity of it. Like snow with no clouds. Like getting hit by a car and walking away bruiseless. She sputtered a bit, finally landing on, “Even on the Champs-Élysées?”
“No, no, les Champs-Elysées sont trop classe.”
There were footsteps behind me, and suddenly Elliot in a pale green sweater that didn’t fit him quite right. His expression was brilliant and radiating when he saw me, and the opposite as he recognized his mother. Such is the case, a lot of the time. I wanted to bottle up both sights separately: the grace and the bitterness. Both were equally intriguing to me. All gums; either a smile or a tooth pulling. Beatrice’s voice like wildflowers in may: “Clément’s come back to help.”
(It almost seemed like she was happier to see me than her own son.)
“I can see.” Elliot’s voice was very polite, as it all too often was, though he balanced unsurely on one leg like a marsh bird as he tied his right shoe.
“He was just telling me about Paris,” Beatrice added, somewhat hopefully. Elliot refused to even look up.
“Chocolat chaud?”
I looked back down to my empty plate, crumbs speckling the surface. “Eh, no, I prefer coffee.”
“Moi aussi,” Elliot said plainly. “I’ll make it.”
I must admit: it was very entertaining to watch two supposedly composed people contantly passively belittling each other. Beatrice thought Elliot a crybaby. Elliot though Beatrice a bitch. Both were right, both were wrong, and I couldn’t sympathize less. They were both incapable of living how they wanted, and it was both of their faults. I wanted to spit on them; maybe piss on their graves. (I watched the flash of Elliot’s pale skin in the morning light which filtered through the kitchen window. I had to take a hearty swig of my coffee to wet my suddenly dry throat. It had not occurred to me, until that point, that he had a mole on the nape of his neck. Putting my mouth to it would have felt like grasping fire.)
“Okay…?” Beatrice blinked wildly as I turned to look at her again, already holding two mugs. She would later tell me that Elliot had always hated coffee. He’d spit it out, no matter how much milk or sugar you put in it; said he hated the idea of it, whatever that meant. And though he did make himself a cup that morning, he hardly drank it.
Beatrice passed by him like she wasn’t even there and he wasn’t either, out in the garden with the door shut before I could think of anything to say.
“Ça va bien?” I could practically hear the color hesitantly returning to his face.
“Oui, cool, et toi?”
“Uh, oui.” (He didn’t sound so sure. I saw him spilling coffee grounds all over the counter, but I bit my tongue.) “Oui, oui.”
Later, Beatrice and I were sat at the table, sorting through old instruction books for appliances and pamphlets for far away churches. I knew that Elliot was sulking in the other room— in fact, from my seat, I could even see him pacing in the kitchen wearing his mother’s ugly fucking apron— but I was finding things to do with my hands besides smoking, finding ways to be useful. I quite liked my place at Beatrice’s side. It made me feel needed. And I had always thought that being needed was akin to being stuck, but now I wasn’t so sure. I wanted to lay my head in her lap. I didn’t, of course. Even my own mother couldn’t get me to do that. Even if I wanted to.
I wondered, actually, if Beatrice had ever smoked. Perhaps that was why she had such an aversion to it— or, maybe, her own mother had gotten lung cancer and wound up dead. I wanted to share a cigarette with her, whilst Elliot watched. I wanted to make him suffer.
I sort of wanted to stub a cigarette out on his neck, right where the mole was.
5.) The stick in my hand was stripping, pieces curling downward to expose the pale inner bark. The driver’s seat of the broken down truck was my throne, for a change. Lighter in hand and cigarettes out of sight, for a change.
“My mother is in… it’s like an ‘ospital, but different.”
What I was referring to was un centre de soins palliatifs; hospice. I was only marginally younger the last time I’d seen her, so I remembered the environment well: all white, all blank, all empty. They’d hung pictures of Madonna on the walls— either the saint or the singer, depending on whose room you were in— and my mother was in the bed, dead and still breathing. Elliot did not know these things.
“Like an asylum?” His tone was very naïve, like he was only joking if I found it funny. Nose blush-red as always, lips the same color; he gesticulated loosely to imply something odd, intangible. My lack of response communicated to him only that I didn’t know what an asylum was, though I did. “Is she crazy?”
“No. She has cancer.”
I wanted to savor his guilt on my tongue. If I’d had kicked his ass right then, I could have convinced myself (and him as well, probably) that it was totally warranted. But I didn’t want to be violent. Deep down, I never do— I just am. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
“Oh… how…?” Envisioning the shame plastered on his face was easy even without looking at him. He was so obvious. “… I mean…”
I continued: “Smoking. First was just—” rapping on my knuckles against my sternum— “but now her…” I tapped my temple. Another small, insignificant oh from my right. “Yeah, and everywhere.”
I wanted to be assimilated into the seat. Why was I saying this? Why was I being vulnerable to the one person on earth who couldn’t help me? Elliot was pitiful, and weak, and clumsy, and ignorant. Nevertheless, I wanted to tell him everything. I wanted the sky to hear it all. “My father says she… she’s like a different person, because of… of the cancer. Not my mother anymore.”
Exactly as I’d anticipated, Elliot sat silently, without a single idea of what to say. Or, maybe, there were a million things he wanted to say, and none he could. A room full of air versus a room full of nothing; same difference. As I thought a bit more about the whole situation— how fucking ridiculous all of it was— I couldn’t help but chuckle. A nervous tic, maybe, but it was a knee-jerk reaction.
“At first she was funny. She made really strange comments, you know? Really. She made us laugh.” It was weird how giddy I was, at times, hearing the weird things she said. I knew that she was decaying from the inside out. I still laughed. That makes me a bad person, I think. Or so I’m told.
6.) He is in the bath, the next time I see him. (I’d arrived at the house only to be greeted by Beatrice, whose aloofness immediately told me that she didn’t know where Elliot was, and couldn’t be bothered to check.) I try his room to no avail, and then the garden; I eventually find the door to the bath locked and knock a bit too harshly. I’m in a rush to see him.
“I’m nearly finished,” he calls out, accent so palpable I want to cry. Stupid Suffolker.
“C’est moi.” There’s a mild pause in which I am sure he’ll tell me to wait, but who am I kidding? The door opens gently instead. I shut it behind me. Such a small space. “Salut, sirène.”
The body in the tub undressed. The hand I reach out to shake wet. I retract it, bathwater dribbling from my digits limply. I want to kiss my open palm, hold that part of him to my features and die that way; I wipe my hand on my trousers. He apologizes for it, because he apologizes for everything. Another part of me wants to strip down to my skin and join him; submerge myself in the water until the lines between the two us blur beneath the pooling surface. There is a fatal silence that settles. I’m sitting on the lid of the toilet, which feels rather stupid simply because of its domesticity. This isn’t my home. I don’t belong here. I want to carve out a space for myself anyway. The bathroom is lit very poorly, as if by candlelight and nothing else. (They never replace the bulbs in these old houses, you know. They only get yellower and yellower until you can’t see anything. They dim until you die.)
Somehow, I gather the will to look at him again and not the tiled walls. He’s very pretty, I must admit, collarbones jutting out like the legs of a bug. I know that sounds vulgar, but what do you want me to say? That he looks picturesque? I can sit here and admit to you that he is far too candidly beautiful for the world, and it would not change the fact that he hates himself and we both know it. Sure, I could say something. I say this instead: “Tout à l’heure, j’ai dit que ton français était merdique. C’était une blague. Ce n'est plutôt trop mal.”
I am well aware of how often I point out Elliot’s smile. It’s inevitable, really, when it seems like most of what he does. Always simpering, lips curled tightly like it’s taking everything in him not to laugh. But this time, its different; proud. Embarrassedly proud. He thinks for a moment, before reaching for the little bar of soap on the shelf embedded in the wall. He knows what he’s doing; he has to. He washes himself as I can only watch, not daring to move, until I do.
I am on my knees beside the tub before I even know what is happening, bracing myself on the ledge, leaning over. Kissing him.
There is a small splash as he drops the soap and it sinks. He smells like mint and lemongrass. I pull away after only a moment, staring at him, seaglass irises large enough for me to see my reflection in. His hands are sudsy when they reach up wildly to grab either side of my face, tugging me in again. His mouth tastes of cigarettes, still. Both of ours do. Lord knows where he got more to smoke from. It doesn’t matter. Nothing else matters as I drink him in. It is not a good kiss, in all technicality. Both of our lips are chapped– his are scabbed over from how often he chews at them. I’ve never kissed anyone. I doubt he has, either. I hope not.
There is a third thing I have found to do with my hands: not smoking nor helping, but feeling. It’s so unbelievably simple, so human, and yet it’s taken me all my life to figure it out. My hands reach wherever they can, landing in places that make Elliot shudder. The water is lukewarm. We are both burning.
I had my first cigarette when I was twelve years old, you know. A half-smoked runt plucked from my mother’s ashtray; it still had her lipstick stained on the filter. I’d felt so scared about being caught that I couldn’t hear anything over my own pulse, hand shaking as I hid ‘neath a tree in our backyard. Just to see what it feels like. It was curiosity, that’s all. Just that once.
I ended up addicted, of course, never going more than a few hours without tobacco. That isn’t why I bring it up. I remember feeling so inexplicably guilty for what I’d done as a kid that I cried so hard I threw up. I was so terrified that my mother would hate me. She only smacked me lightly upside the head and called me a moron, telling me not to steal from her again, and especially not smoke. (Such a mild penalty for, what I felt at the time, was a crime deserving of capital punishment.)
Anyway, you get the point. There is another knock at the door.
Though we jump apart minutely, we stay zeroed in on one another, faces centimeters apart, the sleeves of my slate-grey button-up soaked. We are breathing far too heavily for how languid our kiss was. We are both scared.
“I’m… I’m nearly finished, mum.”
Beatrice audibly sighs outside. “Okay, well, hurry up. Clément was looking for you, earlier. Not sure where he’s run off to.”
“Yeah,” he replies, voice inhumanly level, “Alright.”
Receding steps in the hall. I lean back on my haunches, elbows resting on my knees, head hanging exhaustedly. There is a moth flapping its fat wings above us; I can see the little blot of a shadow upon the wall where it blocks out the light it crawls on. Minutes pass.
I feel like a Grotesque in the margins of an old atlas, which would make Elliot an angel I suppose, which makes the two of us a bad match. What it boils down to is this: one of us is ugly and one of us is only trying to love. I’m sure you can figure out which is which.
Elliot finally whispers, “Your shirt is ruined.”
This makes me chuckle a bit, and I hear him laugh, too— but I’m standing up uneasily and stumbling out of the room before he can open his mouth again. Entire house impossibly silent. Door ajar. Let the moth flutter out if it wants. Elliot still in the bath, not brave or stupid enough to call out after me. Beatrice standing somewhere just out of sight, listening, listening. C’est la vie.