Just One Day

Twelve
Maybe Jacques was right, and time really is fluid. Because as we eat, my watch sits there on the table and seems to bend and distort like a Salvador Dalí painting. And then at one point, somewhere between the beef bourguignon and crème br?lée, Willem reaches for it and looks at me for a long moment before slipping it back on his wrist. I feel this profound sense of relief. Not just that I’m not being sent back to London tonight, but that he is taking charge of time again. My surrender is now complete.
It is late when we spill out onto the streets, and Paris has turned into a sepia-toned photograph. It’s too late to get a hotel or youth hostel, and there’s no money left, anyhow. I gave the rest of my cash, my forty pounds, to Willem to help pay for dinner. The waiter protested when we paid, not because we gave him a grab-bag of euros and pounds, but because we gave him the equivalent of a twenty-five-dollar tip. “Too much,” he protested.” Wholly insufficient, I thought.
But now here I am: No money. No place to stay. It should be my worst nightmare. But I don’t care. It’s funny the things you think you’re scared of until they’re upon you, and then you’re not.
And so we walk. The streets are quiet. It seems to be just us and street sweepers in their bright-green jumpsuits, their twig-like neon-green brooms looking like they were plucked from a magical forest. There’s the flash of headlights as cars and taxis pass by, splashing through the puddles left by the earlier downpour, which has now softened to a misty drizzle.
We walk along the quiet canals and then along the park with the lake where we hitched a ride earlier in the day. We walk under the elevated railroad tracks.
Eventually, we wind up in a small Chinatown. It’s closed up for the night, but the signs are all lit up.
“Look,” I say to Willem, pointing to one. “It’s double happiness.”
Willem stops and looks at the sign. His face is beautiful, even reflected in the bright neon glow.
“Double happiness.” He smiles. Then he takes my hand.
My heart somersaults. “Where are we going?”
“You never got to see any art.”
“It’s one in the morning.”
“It’s Paris!”
We wend deeper into Chinatown, cutting up and down the streets until Willem finds what he’s looking for: a series of tall, dilapidated buildings with barred windows. They all look the same except for the building on the far right; it is covered in red scaffolding from which hangs a series of very modern, very distorted portraits. The front door is completely covered in colorful graffiti and flyers.
“What is this place?”
“An art squat.”
“What’s that?”
Willem tells me about squats, abandoned buildings that artists or musicians or punks or activists take over. “Usually, they’ll put you up for the night. I haven’t slept here, but I’ve been inside once, and they were pretty nice.”
But when Willem tries the heavy steel front door, it’s locked and chained from the outside. He steps back to look at the windows, but the whole place, like the surrounding neighborhood, is tucked in for the night.
Willem looks at me apologetically. “I thought someone would be here tonight.” He sighs. “We can stay with Céline.” But even he looks less than thrilled at that prospect.
I shake my head. I would rather walk all night in the pouring rain. And, anyway, the rain has stopped. A thin sliver of moon is dodging in and out of the clouds. It looks so fundamentally Parisian hanging over the slanting rooftops that it’s hard to believe this is the same moon that will shine in my bedroom window back home tonight. Willem follows my gaze up to the sky. Then his eyes lock on something.
He walks back toward the building, and I follow him. Along one corner, a piece of scaffolding runs up to a ledge that leads to an open window. A curtain billows in the breeze.
Willem looks at the window. Then at me. “Can you climb?”
Yesterday I would’ve said no. Too high. Too dangerous. But today I say, “I can try.”
I sling my bag over my shoulder and step onto the ladder Willem has made with the loop of his hands. He heaves me halfway up, and I get a foothold in a groove in the plaster and use the scaffolding to get myself to the ledge. I sort of belly-slide across it and grab at the spiral railings by the window, heaving myself through headfirst.
“I’m okay!” I call. “I’m fine.”
I poke my head out the window. Willem is standing just below. He has that private little half smile again. And then as effortlessly as a squirrel, he shimmies up, steps upright onto the ledge, crosses it with his arms out like a tightrope walker, bends his knees, and slips into the window.
It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but once they do, I see white everywhere: white walls, white shelves, white desk, white clay sculptures.
“Someone left us a key,” Willem says.
We are both quiet. I like to think it’s a moment of thanksgiving for the providence of accidents.
Willem pulls out a small flashlight. “Shall we explore?”
I nod. We set off, examining a sculpture that looks like it’s made of marshmallows, a series of black-and-white photos of naked fat girls, a series of oil paintings of naked skinny girls. He shines the flashlight around a giant sculpture, very futuristic, metal and tubes, all twisted and turning, like an artist’s rendition of a space station.
We pad down the creaking stairs to a room with black walls and enormous photographs of people floating in deep blue water. I stand there and can almost feel the soft water, the way the waves caress when I sometimes go swimming in Mexico at night to escape the crowds.
“What do you think?” Willem asks.
“Better than the Louvre.”
We go back upstairs. Willem clicks off the flashlight.
“You know? One day one of these might be in the Louvre,” he says. He touches an elliptical white sculpture that seems to glow in the darkness. “You think Shakespeare ever guessed Guerrilla Will would be doing his plays four hundred years later?” He laughs a little, but there’s something in his voice that sounds almost reverent. “You never know what will last.”
He said that earlier, about accidents, about never knowing which one is just a kink in the road and which one is a fork, about never knowing your life is changing until it’s already happened.
“I think sometimes you do know,” I say, my voice filling with emotion.
Willem turns to me, fingers the strap on my shoulder bag. For a second, I can’t move. I can’t breathe. He lifts my bag and drops it to the floor. An eddy of dust flies up and tickles my nose. I sneeze.
“Gezondheid,” Willem says.
“Hagelslag,” I say back.
“You remember that?”
“I remember everything from today.” There’s a lump in my throat as I understand just how true this is.
“What will you remember?” He drops his backpack next to my messenger bag. They slump into each other like old war buddies.
I lean back against the worktable. The day flashes before me: From Willem’s playful voice over my breakfast on the first train to the exhilaration of making my strange admission to him on the next train to the Giant’s amiable kiss in the club to the cooling stickiness of Willem’s saliva on my wrist at the café to the sound of secrets underneath Paris to the release I experienced when my watch came off to the electricity I felt when Willem’s hand found me to the shattering fear of that girl’s scream to Willem’s brave and immediate reaction to it to our flight through Paris, which felt just like that, like flight, to his eyes: the way they watch me, tease me, test me, and, yet, somehow understand me.
That’s what I see before my eyes when I think of this day.
It has to do with Paris, but more than that, it has to do with the person who brought me here. And with the person he allowed me to become here. I’m too overcome to explain it all, so instead I say the one word that encapsulates it: “You.”
“And what about this?” He touches the bandage on my neck. I feel a jolt that has nothing to do with the wound.
“I don’t care about that,” I whisper.
“I care,” he whispers back.
What Willem doesn’t know—what he can’t know, because he didn’t know me before today—is that none of that matters. “I wasn’t in danger today,” I tell him in a choked voice. “I escaped danger today.” And I did. Not just getting away from the skinheads, but I feel like the whole day has been an electrical shock, paddles straight to my heart, bringing me out of a lifelong torpor I hadn’t even known I was in. “I escaped,” I repeat.
“You escaped.” He comes closer so he towers over me. My back is pressed into the worktable, and my heart starts to pound because there’s no escaping this. I don’t want to escape this.
As if disconnected from the rest of my body, my hand raises in the air and goes to touch his cheek. But before it arrives, Willem’s hand whips around and grabs my wrist. For one confused second, I think I’ve misread the situation again, am about to be refused.
Willem holds my wrist for a long moment, looking at that birthmark. Then he lifts it to his mouth. And though his lips are soft and his kiss is gentle, it feels like a knife jamming into the electrical socket. It feels like the moment when I go live.
Willem kisses my wrist, then moves upward, along the inside of my arm to the tickly crook of my elbow, to my armpit, to places that never seemed deserving of kisses. My breath grows ragged as his lips graze my shoulder blade now, stopping to drink at the pool of my clavicle before turning their attention to the cords of my neck, to the area around the bandage, then gently to the top of the bandage. Parts of my body I never even realized existed come alive as the circuits click on.
When he finally kisses my mouth, everything goes oddly quiet, like the moment of silence between lightning and thunder. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Four Mississippi. Five Mississippi.
Bang.
We kiss again. This next kiss is the kind that breaks open the sky. It steals my breath and gives it back. It shows me that every other kiss I’ve had in my life has been wrong.
I tangle my hands into that hair of his and pull him toward me. Willem cups the back of my neck, runs his fingers along the little outcroppings of my vertebrae. Ping. Ping. Ping, go the electric shocks.
His hands encircle my waist as he boosts me onto the table, so we are face-to-face, kissing hard now. My cardigan comes off. Then my T-shirt. Then his. His chest is smooth and cut, and I bury my head in it, kissing down the indentation at his centerline. I’m unbuckling his belt, tugging down his jeans with hunger I don’t recognize.
My legs loop around his waist. His hands are all over me, migrating down to the crease of my hip where they’d rested during our nap. I make a sound that doesn’t seem like it could come from me.
A condom materializes. My underwear is shimmied down over my sandaled feet and my skirt is bunched into a petticoat around my waist. Willem’s boxers fall away. Then he lifts me off the table. And then I realize that I was wrong before. Only now is my surrender complete.
After, we fall to the floor, Willem on his back, me resting next to him. His fingers graze my birthmark, which feels like it is flashing heat, and mine tickle his wrist, the hairs so soft against the heavy links of my watch.
“So this is how you’d take care of me?” he jokes, pointing to a red mark on his neck where I think I bit him.
Like with everything, he’s turned my promise into something funny, something to tease me with. But I don’t feel like laughing, not now, not about this, not after that.
“No,” I say. “That’s not how.” Part of me wants to disavow the whole thing. But I won’t. Because he asked me if I’d take care of him, and even if it was a joke, I made a promise that I would, and that wasn’t a joke. When I said I’d be his mountain girl, I knew I wasn’t going to see him again. That wasn’t the point. I wanted him to know that when felt alone out there in the world . . . I was there too.
But that was yesterday. With a clench of my chest that makes me truly understand why it’s called heartbreak, I wonder if it’s not him being alone that I’m worried about.
Willem fingers the fine film of white clay dust that covers my body. “You’re like a ghost,” he says. “Soon you disappear.” His voice is light, but when I try to catch his eye, he won’t meet my gaze.
“I know.” There’s a lump in my throat. If we keep talking about this, it’ll become a sob.
Willem wipes off a bit of the dust and my darker, tour-tanned skin reemerges. But other things, I now realize, won’t come off so readily. I take Willem’s chin in my hands and turn him to face me. In the wispy glow of the streetlamp, his planes and angles are both shadowed and illuminated. And then he looks at me, really looks at me, and the expression on his face is sad and wistful and tender and yearning, and it tells me everything I need to know.
My hand shakes as I raise it to my mouth. I lick my thumb and rub it against my wrist, against my birthmark. Then I rub again. I look up, look him right in his eyes, which are as dark as this night I don’t want to end.
Willem’s face falters for a moment, then he grows solemn, the way he did after we were chased. Then he reaches over and rubs my birthmark. It’s not coming off, is what he is telling me.
“But you leave tomorrow,” he says.
I can hear the drumbeat of my heart echo in my temples. “I don’t have to.”
For a second, he looks confused.
“I can stay for another day,” I explain.
Another day. That’s all I’m asking. Just one more day. I can’t think beyond that. Beyond that things get complicated. Flights get delayed. Parents go ballistic. But one more day. One more day I can swing with minimal hassle, without upsetting anyone but Melanie. Who will understand. Eventually.
Part of me knows one more day won’t do anything except postpone the heartbreak. But another part of me believes differently. We are born in one day. We die in one day. We can change in one day. And we can fall in love in one day. Anything can happen in just one day.
“What do you think?” I ask Willem. “One more day?”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he flips me under him. I sink into the cement floor, submitting to the weight of him. Until something sharp jabs into my rib cage.
“Ow!”
Willem reaches under me and pulls out a small metal chisel.
“We should find somewhere else to stay,” I say. “Not with Céline.”
“Shh.” Willem quiets me with his lips.
Later, after we have taken our time, exploring every hidden crease of each other’s bodies, after we have kissed and licked and whispered and laughed until our limbs are heavy and the sky outside has started to purple with predawn light, Willem pulls a tarp over us.
“Goeienacht, Lulu,” he says, his eyes fluttering with exhaustion.
I trace the creases of his face with my fingers. “Goeienacht, Willem,” I reply. I lean into his ear, push the messy bramble of his hair aside and whisper, “Allyson. My name is Allyson.” But by then, he is already asleep. I rest my head in the crook between his arm and shoulder, tracing the letters of my true name onto his forearm, where I imagine their outlines will remain until morning.