Among the Ruins Chapter1, Part 2

“I saw you talking to that French girl again,” Evelyn said, with a malicious smile. She glanced at Luke and raised her eyebrows, but Luke refused to meet her eyes and stared pointedly at his wine glass. Whatever message she was trying to communicate to Luke about me was either missed entirely or already known and didn’t need a look to get across. She sat up on the bed and leaned towards me, staring intensely and with a slight edge of scorn which I came to understand was jealousy. That was how she let her jealousy show, she denigrated and humiliated you when she felt jealous, picking apart what she couldn’t be a part of, finding the weak point that stuck out, the flaw, the secret humiliation that you wanted to hide. Then she exposed it, broke it, laughed about it, before finally dismissing it completely, as if it never mattered to her, and, what is more, since the laughter and scorn worked, it always worked, it no longer mattered to you.

           “What French girl?” Luke said to Evelyn. “You know a French girl?” He quickly turned to me. I knew that he knew who we were talking about, and he knew that I knew. He knew her name, and probably more things about her than I did.

            “Yeah, they were standing in the book shop talking about sex and love and other meaningless things.”

            “There’s a French girl?”

            “There is a French girl.”

            “Who is this French girl? And where did he meet her?”

            “She met him somewhere secret, this girl from France.”

            “And where were you, when I was talking about meaningless things with this girl?” I demanded of Evelyn.

            “Somewhere.”

            “Somewhere?”

            “Yeah, just somewhere.” She laid back down on the bed and took a deep drink of the wine. “Nowhere really, just close enough to hear you talking to the French girl. I wasn’t spying.” She smiled a cheeky, almost innocent smile. “Well, not at first.” She sat up on the bed again and leant closer to Luke. She turned to him as if she were confiding in him a secret, despite the fact that I was between them and could hear and see everything. “I think he’s in love with her.”

            Luke gasped in shock. “Love? Who ever heard of such a revolting thing. Who is this woman who has so tartly stolen our dear friend’s heart? Evelyn, tell me about her. Paint me a word picture.” He waved his glass of wine with a melodramatic flourish and half closed his eyes, seemingly to better imagine the image of this mysterious French girl in his head.

            “She isn’t even French; you know that, you know her. She’s Belgian.” I tried to object, but it had already gone too far for me to stop it now. And a little part of me didn’t want them to stop. I felt as if it was only a harmless thing, something we all did to each other. It was a price that I paid to have them as my friends. I guess I felt like I deserved their laughter and teasing after a fashion. I had crossed some strange unbroken line that separated us from other people. By talking to, and becoming friendly with someone else who wasn’t connected as we were, I had betrayed them as surely as if I had gone running to the police. Luke had eschewed other people in favour of us and only spoke to others when he wanted something from them, and Evelyn didn’t talk to anyone without an underlying hint of derision in her voice. They had both done the right thing and cut other people out, and I was supposed to follow suit. But I resisted; I kept talking to Ludivine, Cullen, Paige and even sometimes Lee, and all without a hint of condescension, with friendship, with kindness, with familiarity even! It was something they couldn’t stand, or understand, and I should have known better.

            Evelyn was talking. “She’s Belgian,” she almost yelled at us. “Did you hear that Luke, she’s Belgian?” They both began a chorus of saying the word, Belgian, over and over in increasingly high pitched voices and varying inflection. She’s Belgian. She’s Belgian. Did you know that she was Belgian? Is she from Belgium? The word began to lose whatever loose meaning it had held before.

            I laughed good naturedly, trying to hide how annoyed and humiliated I was. I drained my glass of wine and poured myself and Evelyn another one. Luke’s glass was always full. He never seemed to sip his wine, only drinking the entire glass in one go, a habit I seemed to have acquired from him. I laid down on the bed next to Evelyn.

Luke suddenly jumped up in shock. “The shop closes soon and we are dangerously out of wine.” He waved the empty bottle at us and then expertly examined the remaining unopened bottle. He began putting on his clothes and coat and then threw ours at us.

We stared at him, sheepishly and with an exaggerated air of tiredness and drunkenness. We waved him away and rolled over on the bed, intertwining our bodies, trying in a jokey, mock-comical way to shield ourselves from him and his enthusiasm.

“Anybody?” he asked, indicating the walk down to the shop to buy some more wine before it closed. He didn’t indicate this with any real gesture, but with a heightened and much too earnest look of expectation on his face, matching our pantomime of inebriation with one of innocence and excitement. “No one? Does no one care about the lack of wine in the house? The lack of food? What will become of us?” He struggled to the door and threw it open, then paused in the doorway. “You and your lack of life make me physically ill.” Then he disappeared down the corridor, pretending to retch as he left.

“You and your French girl,” Evelyn said gently. We were laid out on my bed, touching the entire length of our bodies, our legs slightly intertwined, our hands almost touching. I had one arm behind my head, but it was already feeling numb. I could feel her warmth and power emanating from her perfect body.

“What play would you write about me?” she asked me, anticipating my decision later in life to aspire to become a writer. She always knew that I would want to write about her; perhaps she engineered it so she could be immortalized in some way. Or perhaps I only wanted to be a writer because of her urgings and persistence. She would always ask such questions of me when we were alone or too drunk and too close. They stayed with me. What would my biography be called? Read out the poem you have written about me. What do you mean you haven’t written a poem about me? I command you to write me one. You are the only I trust to turn my life into a book. I think it was in moments such as this that my idea to one day write first made itself known to me. I notice she never made these demands of Luke. “The play would be called The Mysterious Woman,” she added in an afterthought that felt far too considered.

I turned over in bed to face her; my arm was almost numb with shooting pains and I held it in the air to get the feeling back. “It would be a one act play. Second acts are boring and nothing ever happens in them. The third act is always too preachy and too far removed from the first. Keep it simple, keep it short. None of this convoluted egotistical bullshit. None of that pseudo-poetry masquerading as prose.” She was gesturing emphatically with her hands and my hand was resting on her stomach. I manoeuvred it under her shirt so I was touching her bare skin and began caressing her; feeling around her belly button and as far down as the top of her low slung jeans, not daring to go any higher or lower. She didn’t resist, or push me away; she gently touched my elbow and almost, practically imperceptibly, guided my arm as I ran my fingers over her skin.

“There’s this story of this girl, a French girl. It was in the Victorian era, or whatever they called it in France, like eighteen eighty or something. Anyway, she was about sixteen and drowned herself in the Seine. No one knows who she was, where she came from, or why she chose to kill herself. No one knows anything about her at all. Except for the fact that she was dead and she was smiling; just this vague, gentle smile, a hint of a smile. The mortician hadn’t seen anything like it. She was just beautiful, perfect even, except for being so cold and grey. The mortician took her small, perfect body and made a plaster cast of it, so that the world would always know how perfect she was. He took a death mask of her face and everyone who saw the mask fell in love with her. They all wanted to know who she was and why she was smiling so serenely in death. And so the mortician made copies, and copies of copies were made, then copies of copies of copies, until only copies existed. The mortician cried and cried and then, eventually, in a fit of despair at having only known true beauty in its death, he too threw himself into the Seine. People came from all over Europe to see this beautiful death mask, this perfect, mysterious smile, and soon it got to be that the girl was forgotten, ignored behind this beautiful death mask that had so captivated the mortician and all of old Europe. No one cared about who she truly was, or why she was smiling so. No one cared about the mortician who had preferred to drown in dirty water than live in a world without her. Men wrote poems about the mask and then plays and books, and turned it into art. And then, in a final act of irony, a Norwegian man gave the likeness to the doll he was making to train people in CPR. And she was at peace, kissed by countless nameless princes, who had no idea they were practising saving lives with the death mask of the face of a suicide.”

She laid down flat on the bed, straightened her legs and let her arms fall to her side, accidently, or perhaps not so accidently, touching my penis as they fell.

“Do I look like the girl?” she asked with a completely unmoving face and blank expression, imitating a corpse. Even so empty and devoid of life she was beautiful and I felt empathy for the mortician who had tried to preserve beauty and had been driven to suicide over it.

“I don’t know what the girl looked like. But you’re breathing too much.”

She took a deep breath, pushing out her breasts, and held it. Her mouth twitched into a smile and she half opened one eye.

“And now?” she murmured.

I slowly dragged my hand up her body to her neck. “You’re breathing too much.” I closed my hands around her neck and held them there, too gently to actually cause harm or stop her breathing. In truth I was too elated that I was able to touch her so intimately to wonder what I was doing or if she would let me. I wondered what Luke would think if he caught us.

She moved her hand up to join mine and forced me to squeeze her neck harder. I could feel her pulse quicken in her neck as I increased the pressure, stopping her breathing, trying, almost, to stop her life, turn her into just another mysterious dead woman, another beautiful corpse among ruins.

I held that pose for half a minute, or perhaps more, until she let out an instinctive gasp for air.

She struggled to croak out the word “harder” and I shifted my body so I was almost lying on top of her, momentarily letting go of her neck. She involuntarily took in another ragged breath and gripped my arm with both hands.

A door slammed shut. Footsteps negotiated the hall way and the stairs. Someone tripped on the top step. They uttered a quiet expletive. Evelyn opened her eyes wide in shock and pushed my hands away. I sat up on the bed, guilty, ashamed, scared, and then jumped and sat on the desk before the door opened fully. Evelyn sat up on the bed as well, smoothed out her hair, wiped her mouth and did up her trouser buttons which I had apparently undone at some point. Luke threw a bottle of wine at me as he stumbled into the room, falling heavily onto the chair and gave us searching, puzzled looks.

“Wotcha.”

I tried to surreptitiously rearrange my boxer shorts and my penis. The insides of my trousers were damp and sticky from becoming far too excited far too quickly and I hoped Luke couldn’t see or smell it. He gave us an odd look while he opened another bottle of wine but was soon too immersed in it that he couldn’t see mine and Evelyn sharing furtive glances.

“There are revolutions in the East,” I said again to no one in particular. “I think I heard from someone, maybe Cullen, that communism is finishing. He said it’ll just become another myth, or a story we tell our grandchildren.”

“Meh,” Luke said. “I prefer my stories to have more blood and iron. None of this holding hands to bring down a wall nonsense. Where’s the hero? Where’s the prince hiding? Are there no dragons anymore?”

“People are saying this is a completely unexpected amazing thing. No one could have predicted that any of these revolutions could have happened.”

“Ha!” Luke laughed. “If you listen to the stars you can tell exactly what’s going to happen. Celebrities always know more about the way the world works than politicians. We’ve been hearing stories about these revolutions for years; you just have to look at the right movies, songs and books. The revolts are nothing new. They’ve already been written before.”

“Oh god,” Evelyn said loudly, interrupting him. Her head was arched back in an overly theatrical gesture to show how infuriated she was.  “They’re just idiots demanding pointless things,” she said as she dismissed his thoughts with another wild gesture of her hands. “All they want is more air time and more newspaper inches and more attention taken away from more important things. I’m not oppressing anyone. I’m not oppressing shit. They want to stand up, and moan, and die, then let them. Why do I need to be bored by them? Really? Rainbow revolutions? Fuck that. Jews and gays and other fags who want what we have.”

We lapsed into silence at her stern wisdom. Luke nodded solemnly; at the things Evelyn said or his own imagined retort, I couldn’t guess.

            We stopped talking about war and death and started talking about meaningless things. We all keenly felt midnight approaching and knew that Evelyn would have to leave us. I didn’t want to talk about it, I didn’t want the subject of where she was going, or with who, or why, raised at all. I wanted us to just ignore it. Maybe then it wouldn’t really happen. Maybe then she wouldn’t really go. Maybe then she wouldn’t need to leave at midnight ever again. But then, right on time, she stood up. Me and Luke fell into our roles and said our lines perfectly as she got ready to leave.

            “Do you really need to go?”

            “It’s still so early.”

            “Yeah, stay for an hour or two.”

            “Where will you go?”

            “Why are you leaving now?”

            She sighed like a theatre grand dame in her final role and stared with exaggerated longing out the window.

            “Sorry boys,” she said as she delicately pulled on her gloves and fixed her hair. “You’ll just have to shut your eyes and think of England and I’ll be back soon.”

            And then she exited, stage left, leaving Luke and I as the adoring audience without a star.