Trust Me (Rough Love 3)
When we finished, I helped her up and into the bathroom to put herself back to rights. It wasn’t even dinner time yet. “There’s more I want to show you,” I said. “Let’s get out of this tomb.”
* * * * *
I took her from the stark stillness of my parents’ pied-a-terre to the touristy squalor of the 18th Arrondissement. We skirted around the Moulin Rouge even though I thought Chere might enjoy it. Too many people, too campy, and honestly, Chere was a hundred times sexier than the topless burlesque dancers inside.
Instead we walked the gritty streets and browsed the North African marketplace. I was blond and white enough to raise some eyebrows, but Chere fit in with her bronze skin and old New Orleans features. When I was a teenager, I came here to get away from my parents’ glittering world. I learned to scowl and be tough, and posture, and throw attitude. I wanted so badly to belong here, where life seemed real, where money changed hands in small, sweaty, wrinkled bills, where my parents would never dare go. Stay out of the Goutte d’Or, my mother would scold, but I knew Goutte d’Or meant Drop of Gold, and even before I used the name for my first bridge, I thought that was the most beautiful name for anything ever. I felt like a man in the Goutte d’Or, even if the ageless women behind the stalls would smile at me like I was a boy.
They smiled at me now just as they had then, with curiosity and a quiet patience. We walked from the Maghreb areas into the Chinese district and then to a row of Indian shops with windows full of gold and silk.
“There’s so much to see,” said Chere, gripping my hand as we moved through the crowds. “My eyes…”
She wasn’t complaining. She was delighted. People crowded around us, working class men and women ready to celebrate the weekend. We ducked into a small, pungent cafe with a view of the Sacré Coeur, and shared a table with an elderly Indian couple who spoke over us in rat-a-tat Tamil. I looked around in sudden realization, watching time turn in on itself. I used to come to this cafe. I was sure of it. It was a different place then, with different decor and different food on the menu, but the view was the same.
Chere caught my gaze and put a hand over mine. “Don’t you like the food?”
“I like the food. I’m not that hungry.” I fed her banana and rice from my plate, and thought that I probably shouldn’t have fucked her on my parents’ living room floor. I suffered this sociopathic desire to possess her, to use her, to mark her as mine. The Indian woman at our table looked between us with a knowing smile.
“You’re not from here,” she said in French. “You and your lady.” She gestured toward Chere.
People were so bold in the 18th Arrondissement. “We’re not from here,” I admitted. “I’m showing her around. I used to stay nearby when I was young.”
Chere didn’t understand a word of our conversation, for all her French name and her Creole heritage. She gave the woman a crooked smile and the woman gazed back with a curve to her thin lips. She had dozens of rings on her fingers, stacked all the way to her knuckles in a jumble of silver and gold. Chere stared at them, entranced.
“She’d love to see your rings,” I told the woman, and she offered her hands for Chere’s perusal. While Chere bent over the bands and gemstones, I studied the woman’s bindi, the bright third eye within the wrinkles of her brow.
“You seek clarity,” she murmured under the raucous noise of the cafe.
“What?”
“Clarté,” she repeated in French. “You’re drawn to my bindi because you have many questions. You seek a balance of your higher and lower selves.”
“I’m perfectly in balance,” I lied. “I’m drawn to your bindi because I’ve visited India and Asia many times.”
“You travel so much?” She nodded. “Of course. You seek. You search. But all answers come here.”
She reached out, but she didn’t touch me. Instead she touched Chere’s brow, letting her fingertip linger atop some invisible bindi. Higher and lower selves. My low self was all over Chere all the time. We had no balance, as this complete stranger had so bluntly pointed out.
“Tell her that her rings are beautiful,” said Chere.
“Tell her I said merci,” the Indian woman replied with a smile. “You both have questions, non? Many questions. But at least you are together.”
I didn’t know whether to take that as a compliment or an insult. Her companion demanded her attention and they left soon after, allowing a group of teenagers to crowd closer to our table. Chere asked about my conversation with the woman. Instead, I told her about bindis and my travels to New Delhi and Mumbai.