ils se marièrent et eurent beaucoup d’enfants

alternative titles: Endings are the most fun to write or I am too lazy to write the middle of anything or (the most truthful) I wrote this a couple of weeks ago and I’m trying to get excited enough to go back and fill in the big ole gap between once upon a time and happily ever after.

Our petite Parisienne drew a fat black marker line over the last remaining section of the city and let out a sigh into the fading afternoon. She flicked through the pages of the notebook she would give me three days later and waited for something. A sensation of completion or a sign that everything had fallen into place. Her eyes faded behind metallic painted lids and white teeth ground impatience into her pink lips. She held her breath and sat utterly still like this but there was only the muted bursts of a band tuning and conversations bubbling. This was eventually disturbed by a familiar twinkling that caused her stomach to flinch towards her heart. It was the phone but this fact took a few minutes to register in Marie-Jacques mind.

“Phone!” Camille called from across the square, waving frenetically at her roommate framed in the window. She could hear the phone ring anywhere and Marie-Jacques sometimes imagined wires connecting the two. Reluctantly lifting the receiver she fancied she saw Camille’s arm jerk. She raised the phone to her ear and the girl down on the street stretched up to the sky. The man calling her name stopped her game abruptly and Camille sank to the curb.

“It’s me.”

The me in question was one Louis Rousseau, our would-be hero of chapter three. What he was doing interrupting a narrative he’d been banished from was precisely what our heroine wanted to know.

“I miss you.”

She slumped in her chair and waited. It was a long silence for you see Louis was gathering up all his strength to tell a girl three rather weighty words. While she waited Marie-Jacques was watching three young men abandon their instruments to hang a string of lights between lampposts instead. The party was an annual thing arranged by tenants on all sides of the square. This year the south was in charge and Camille was the self-appointed chief. She surveyed from her position on the ground, barking new ideas inbetween kisses from her dozy boyfriend. Marie-Jacques watched this bustle of lazy activity and felt her limbs deaden. She plummeted through the cushioned seat of her chair and was in danger of crashing through the floors to the very foundations of the building had Louis not cleared his throat at that very moment.

“You were right.”

There was her sign. Her heart soared before her brain could question further. She still did not know what it was that had a right and a wrong side but that almost didn’t matter. She expressed the sheer exhilaration and release of so many weeks of exhaustive searching in the only word she could muster.

“What?”
“Marie, listen to me.”
“I am listening.”
“Come away with me.”

The sky bloomed a little bluer and a road stretched from her window along the rooftops. A man with dark hair and a warm smile reached out a hand and as he detailed the places they would go, her stockinged feet danced tightrope elegance along the tops of the city.

“Pack a bag and we can leave tonight.”

Reality tugged on the hem of her skirt and picked runs in her nylon legs. It was foolish to leave so suddenly. It would be foolish to leave at all in fact. Marie-Jacques struggled to clear her mind of romances. Had she explored every corner only to discover the answer lay in departure?

“We can see the country. Travel down the Med. I’ll take you to Nice and Barcelona and Milan. We’ll sail away to India and Japan. I’ll fly you to London and New York. I’ll take you anywhere, anywhere you want to go if you’ll come away with me tonight.”

Our Parisienne took a long look out of her bedroom window. Her eyes followed the skyline she had memorised so exactly in the months she had lived there. The thrill of virgin territory was gone and though the familiarity was inviting it lacked a certain something. Inactivity gnawed on her bones and she consented to her ex-lover’s absurdly romantic request as she began packing her life into suitcases.

Camille didn’t say a word about the bags by the door or the stripped bedroom. She merely clasped warm fingers around Marie-Jacques’ wrist and pulled her into the party. Their skin fused for a second as the sweat of too many bodies clogged their pores. The band flowed seamlessly from song to song and Camille gripped her hips invasively and manually swung Marie-Jacques’ bones into a dance. Camille’s curls were limp and frizzy against Marie-Jacques’ face as she dug her chin into the fiery mane and told her friend the plan.

“I know,” was the response. She twirled Marie-Jacques around and poured her towards the man waiting behind the crowd. “But tonight you’re mine.” Long brown arms encased our parisienne in a flood of homesickness. A deluge of longing as her feet dragged against the beat, digging into the stone to anchor the girl to the present.

Drinks sweating condensation down her arms were constantly refreshed and replaced until the music was a distant roar that her faraway limbs craved to follow and the words confided through her hair meant little. Somebody had commandeered the fountain and soon foamy bubbles covered every partygoer and the air was full of immature shrieks and splashes of movement. Past and future melted and fizzled into the blanket of bubbles and for the hundred or so bodies there was only that moment of tired joy. Louis’ hand sought Marie-Jacques’ and tore her from that collective, filling her skinny frame with resentment.

“Time to fly, princess.”

Her feet stumbled on a loose slab and her shoe was lost between dancing couples. He pulled her out of the square and may have dragged her clean out of the city if she hadn’t wrapped her fingers around the gate.

“No.” Marie-Jacques scrunched her toes over her remaining shoe and examined the iron shapes of the gate. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Louis fell against the metal. “You can’t tell me this now. It’s not”

“Fair?” She finished. “It might not be, I can’t really help that. I can’t leave. I don’t think I want to leave.” She sighed and squeezed his hand. “Goodbye.” She hopped back to a hundred pairs of arms that embraced and absorbed her. In a crowd there is no right or wrong but so long as your smile is genuine this needn’t concern even the most moral of souls.

At four sixteen am the sky flared cold gold and hangovers twinged in the backs of minds. Someone decides to ascend and many others refuse him but he argues so passionately that he garners fans. There are six of them perched like birds above all the beds, floors, couches and snoozing bodies to wait for the sun. The remains of the night twinkled in the tentative morning. Bottles and puddles and cups like plastic rain and on the edge of the dancefloor a solitary shoe lay on its side watched over by a sparrow who was in turn watched by a neighbour’s cat. Our Cinderella smiled at the sight and wriggled the dark nylon toes that had survived the party by a thread.

“Good morning, Paris!” The voice swelled over the city that lay before them and the chest that had pushed it out swelled with pride at its effect. The silence that followed was all the more noticeable for having been broken. The morning ruffled their hair and teased the flame of a lighter as a packet of cigarettes was located to celebrate the dawn.

“My brothers and beautiful sisters,” one of the drunker ones began. “Today we are alive and we must not forget it. This,” he stood shakily but his feet were certain on the tiles. His arms stretched along the river, fingers grazing the Eiffel Tower and the edge of our parisienne’s upturned smile. “all of this, is infinite. If only for today.” A girl tugged on his jeans but he brushed her away. “Once upon a time we were strangers and we’ll live happily ever after as strangers but for now we are one. I am all of you and all of the city.” He swayed as his voice gained decibels and the girl guided him back down safely, laughing over the remainder of his speech. Marie-Jacques did not mind that she couldn’t make out his words. He had been a prophet and a storyteller for a moment and her skin tingled from his touch and the wind and the smoke that stung her eyes. He burst out of the mediating girl’s clasp with one final conclusion.

“Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas!”

His foot lost the edge of the roof and ten hands pulled him from martyr back to prophet. He laughed and kissed every one of them until the chastising subsided. With a yawn Marie-Jacques rested her head on her knees and enjoyed the notion that they were the only people alive on the earth. Six remaining bodies and she could only firmly attach names to two of them. But it didn’t matter, none of it did because she was infinite for the morning.

Here I end her search for the missing shade of blue before the first stirrings of traffic taint the cloudless sky and too many eyes push the heavens back up high. I will end in the English way for the French equivalent would seem out of place, you would agree.

Therefore, Marie-Jacques the infinite Parisienne found what she was looking for on the 24th of August atop her apartment building in the eyes of a drunk and the sky above them. And she lived happily ever after.