nobody knows which street to take
Remember way back in the day when the Decemberists spontaneously caused me to commit fic?
Now Metric's done the same thing.
(It took me days to write the ending and I still want to stab things over it, but other than that I am pleased. Some of you may recognise our hero and heroine, but they are so far removed from their original context that their names don't really mean anything much.)
Here is the song in question; the fic in question is below.
She comes to Paris in autumn because she's read that July and August will mark her as a tourist. She pins up her hair with a hundred little pins and a beret and insulates herself with a trenchcoat and knows that she looks every inch the desperate faker she is, which suits her: art should tell the truth.
She is here to write. She can't afford even a typewriter after the plane fare and the reality of food, and the moleskine she brought is beginning to fall to tatters, but she is starting over, a blank slate no matter how tattered, and for the first time in her life she is free.
She finds a dingy little flat in a street that is little more than an alley, but it's in Montmartre and if she walks down the grilled stairs and out of the alley the Paris skyline takes her breath away: that is beauty.
Her fellow lodger is a man around her own age, with dark hair and faded eyes and an endless supply of slightly unraveling turtlenecks and long pale fingers. He looks every inch as desperate as he is too, but he has been here longer and he's beyond pretending and has reached something truer freer more beautiful. What she feels then is understanding, but she calls it something else.
They're a hundred years too late for Bohemia, but what the hell.
"Juilliard Vichy," he says.
"Liar," she says. "Melanne Moncrief."
Equitably: "Liar."
"Melanie Taylor," she says.
"Thomas Moore," he returns.
She calls him Juilliard. He calls her Mêlée.
Juilliard has a day job that is a night job, the literal gravedigger's shift. He comes home with dirt under the fingernails of his elegant hands and every night Melanne washes the mud from his clothes and his hands, feeling small and feeling Biblical. Her attentions keep calluses from his fingertips; impractical, but he never protests it. She has a day job as a waitress at a dingy café down the street; it carries her home exhausted, the color washed from the world. In the spaces they have together-- days off, the darkest pause of night, the dim cold moments before dawn-- she tries to recount stories of customers, draw up quick little lives to take down on the typewriter she will get any day now; retells their features so that Juilliard might lay them down with his brush using her memory as the inspiration for his canvas. He doesn't often laugh, although there is a cynical gleam in his eye that bespeaks of laughter.
Often Melanne steals one of the cheaper bottles of wine on her way home from the café and she does not write and he does not paint and they both drink straight from the bottle. Juilliard drinks too much and Melanne always thinks that she doesn't drink enough, but once in another lifetime she lived with her mother who had money and so she had some taste and the wine is too cheap for her to enjoy it.
The first time they make love-- whether or not love is involved is hardly the point; this is Paris and not sleeping and not sex so it is making love-- neither of them are drunk but half-starved and fatigued. She presses little bruising fingerprints up his spine like Braille or typewriter keys, and he brushes hair back from her face as though painting. They cling together against some invisible nameless storm and Melanne does not wonder who else Juilliard sees.
She loves the color of half-dried blood, like wine or her favorite lipstick. She has never told anyone this before, and when she tells Juilliard he laughs and asks her how she knows. She shrugs and takes a drag on her cigarette and has finally been smoking long enough to pull it off elegantly, without a cough. He mixes a few of his paints and takes a daub at the canvas. "Like that?" he asks, and he might not be very talented but he can take her words and turn them into so precise a color that she almost suspects him of rummaging through her thoughts while she sleeps.
In the dying of the year the ground turns hard and Juilliard wears green fingerless gloves, that last scrap of pretending. He tells her his paintings come out rough and shaky because of the cold; the frostbite will set in any day now. She kisses his fingertips as though they live in a world where kisses beget life, and they make love (sleep together fuck) just for the warmth of it, the contact, the poetry that is their clouds of mingling breath in the still air.
"We should go away," Melanne says. "Just get away. Go on a holiday."
His lips quirk into that faint smile that does something terrible to her chest: a true friend stabs you in the front. (Someone wrote it on Wilde's grave in pencil not yet faded. Melanne and Juilliard made a pilgrimage to that graveyard when the leaves were still falling from the trees, both smeared their mouths with lipstick the color of half-dried blood and kissed the cold pale stone.) Melanne has never been in love before but she imagines this moment-to-moment terrified painful twisting she feels is the best approximation she will ever find.
"There is no holiday," he tells her.
At the dying of the year Melanne dreams of babies: they cling ethereal to her when she does the washing and hangs it out to fade to grey in the feeble winter sun. Whenever she dreams of them they are always half see-through, half imagined, and they say maman as though they recognize her. When she still doesn't have the money for a typewriter, she buys one, beat-up and clanking. The first thing she types on a crisp hungry sheet is Amelie Gabrielle Henriette Sophia Elisabet and like an afterthought Remy Thomás.
Which is the easy way, she wonders: rhetorical, just to hear her own thoughts. They are behind on the rent but they are always behind on the rent, always just managing; she kisses the landlord and the landlord laughs and she thinks of all the villains Victor Hugo ever wrote and wonders if the burgeoning under her shirt belongs to him. (To the landlord, to Hugo, to the Eiffel Tower, it's all the same.) The cheap wine is so familiar now that she can drink it without even tasting it, and in the morning when she's violently ill she tells herself it's the hangover or alcohol poisoning because it's all so fucking cheap. Juilliard finds her there and cradles her in his arms, still covered in frozen mud, and whispers je t'aime je t'aime words so familiar she can hear them without even listening. He offers her a cigarette and she takes it in trembling fingers; counts in one blow brain damage and addiction in the unborn and her own nicotine-stained death in twenty years.
On Christmas Eve she goes to the nearest hospital. Twins, they tell her. Female.
At midnight on the frozen new year Juilliard and Melanne sit out on their cramped little balcony with a bottle of champagne (not cheap; his one indulgence, Juilliard explains) and stare up at the glittering stars.
"What do you wish?" Melanne asks, and does not elaborate, just tipsy enough to be certain her question is sound.
Juilliard hums a snatch of song. "For nothing at all but this," he says, and laughs; he is learning laughter, and this laugh encompasses his half-done paintings and Melanne's unfinished stories and their petty jobs and his fingerless gloves and the unborn little girls he doesn't know exist and all the things they will never finish and everything around them, all of Paris. Melanne kisses him and he adds, with the seriousness of one who will remember little of it in the morning, "I should like to start a family."
She doesn't ask him if he means it; new year's resolutions are made to be broken.
In the cool of the evening when Juilliard is busy digging graves, Melanne lays on her back on the small bed and thinks of woods and journeys and poetry and roads not taken. She cups a flat silvery euro coin in the palms of her hands, pressed against her chest, and half-imagines two phantom heartbeats beneath, even though they are real.
I shall take them to the Seine, she thinks, and teach them to skip stones and to roller-skate in the plaza at Notre Dame. I shall go back to the hospital, she thinks, and tell them, please, I can't do this, take them away. I shall do a hundred years' worth of slowly fading washing, she thinks, and cling to Juilliard's arm while the girls cling to my leg and I shall never be any more than I am now, frail, futile, addicted to everything and amounting to nothing. I shall be free, she thinks, if freedom means some terrible hollowness of belly and bones, if freedom means sitting at the typewriter never writing a word, sobbing sick over the washing, never telling Juilliard where it went wrong.
She sits up. A casual flick of her hollow pale wrist and the euro comes down, an arbitrary choice, a fifty-fifty chance and she thinks, somewhat ironically, heads. Caught within un- sub- or supernatural forces, now and forever, amen. She goes to the window, arms wrapped close, cradling herself, her body the baby the same. They're a hundred years too late for Bohemia. She smiles a little, the coin digging into her palm. So this is being grown up. It's not so bad.
She turns and fades into the future.
Now Metric's done the same thing.
(It took me days to write the ending and I still want to stab things over it, but other than that I am pleased. Some of you may recognise our hero and heroine, but they are so far removed from their original context that their names don't really mean anything much.)
Here is the song in question; the fic in question is below.
She comes to Paris in autumn because she's read that July and August will mark her as a tourist. She pins up her hair with a hundred little pins and a beret and insulates herself with a trenchcoat and knows that she looks every inch the desperate faker she is, which suits her: art should tell the truth.
She is here to write. She can't afford even a typewriter after the plane fare and the reality of food, and the moleskine she brought is beginning to fall to tatters, but she is starting over, a blank slate no matter how tattered, and for the first time in her life she is free.
She finds a dingy little flat in a street that is little more than an alley, but it's in Montmartre and if she walks down the grilled stairs and out of the alley the Paris skyline takes her breath away: that is beauty.
Her fellow lodger is a man around her own age, with dark hair and faded eyes and an endless supply of slightly unraveling turtlenecks and long pale fingers. He looks every inch as desperate as he is too, but he has been here longer and he's beyond pretending and has reached something truer freer more beautiful. What she feels then is understanding, but she calls it something else.
They're a hundred years too late for Bohemia, but what the hell.
"Juilliard Vichy," he says.
"Liar," she says. "Melanne Moncrief."
Equitably: "Liar."
"Melanie Taylor," she says.
"Thomas Moore," he returns.
She calls him Juilliard. He calls her Mêlée.
Juilliard has a day job that is a night job, the literal gravedigger's shift. He comes home with dirt under the fingernails of his elegant hands and every night Melanne washes the mud from his clothes and his hands, feeling small and feeling Biblical. Her attentions keep calluses from his fingertips; impractical, but he never protests it. She has a day job as a waitress at a dingy café down the street; it carries her home exhausted, the color washed from the world. In the spaces they have together-- days off, the darkest pause of night, the dim cold moments before dawn-- she tries to recount stories of customers, draw up quick little lives to take down on the typewriter she will get any day now; retells their features so that Juilliard might lay them down with his brush using her memory as the inspiration for his canvas. He doesn't often laugh, although there is a cynical gleam in his eye that bespeaks of laughter.
Often Melanne steals one of the cheaper bottles of wine on her way home from the café and she does not write and he does not paint and they both drink straight from the bottle. Juilliard drinks too much and Melanne always thinks that she doesn't drink enough, but once in another lifetime she lived with her mother who had money and so she had some taste and the wine is too cheap for her to enjoy it.
The first time they make love-- whether or not love is involved is hardly the point; this is Paris and not sleeping and not sex so it is making love-- neither of them are drunk but half-starved and fatigued. She presses little bruising fingerprints up his spine like Braille or typewriter keys, and he brushes hair back from her face as though painting. They cling together against some invisible nameless storm and Melanne does not wonder who else Juilliard sees.
She loves the color of half-dried blood, like wine or her favorite lipstick. She has never told anyone this before, and when she tells Juilliard he laughs and asks her how she knows. She shrugs and takes a drag on her cigarette and has finally been smoking long enough to pull it off elegantly, without a cough. He mixes a few of his paints and takes a daub at the canvas. "Like that?" he asks, and he might not be very talented but he can take her words and turn them into so precise a color that she almost suspects him of rummaging through her thoughts while she sleeps.
In the dying of the year the ground turns hard and Juilliard wears green fingerless gloves, that last scrap of pretending. He tells her his paintings come out rough and shaky because of the cold; the frostbite will set in any day now. She kisses his fingertips as though they live in a world where kisses beget life, and they make love (sleep together fuck) just for the warmth of it, the contact, the poetry that is their clouds of mingling breath in the still air.
"We should go away," Melanne says. "Just get away. Go on a holiday."
His lips quirk into that faint smile that does something terrible to her chest: a true friend stabs you in the front. (Someone wrote it on Wilde's grave in pencil not yet faded. Melanne and Juilliard made a pilgrimage to that graveyard when the leaves were still falling from the trees, both smeared their mouths with lipstick the color of half-dried blood and kissed the cold pale stone.) Melanne has never been in love before but she imagines this moment-to-moment terrified painful twisting she feels is the best approximation she will ever find.
"There is no holiday," he tells her.
At the dying of the year Melanne dreams of babies: they cling ethereal to her when she does the washing and hangs it out to fade to grey in the feeble winter sun. Whenever she dreams of them they are always half see-through, half imagined, and they say maman as though they recognize her. When she still doesn't have the money for a typewriter, she buys one, beat-up and clanking. The first thing she types on a crisp hungry sheet is Amelie Gabrielle Henriette Sophia Elisabet and like an afterthought Remy Thomás.
Which is the easy way, she wonders: rhetorical, just to hear her own thoughts. They are behind on the rent but they are always behind on the rent, always just managing; she kisses the landlord and the landlord laughs and she thinks of all the villains Victor Hugo ever wrote and wonders if the burgeoning under her shirt belongs to him. (To the landlord, to Hugo, to the Eiffel Tower, it's all the same.) The cheap wine is so familiar now that she can drink it without even tasting it, and in the morning when she's violently ill she tells herself it's the hangover or alcohol poisoning because it's all so fucking cheap. Juilliard finds her there and cradles her in his arms, still covered in frozen mud, and whispers je t'aime je t'aime words so familiar she can hear them without even listening. He offers her a cigarette and she takes it in trembling fingers; counts in one blow brain damage and addiction in the unborn and her own nicotine-stained death in twenty years.
On Christmas Eve she goes to the nearest hospital. Twins, they tell her. Female.
At midnight on the frozen new year Juilliard and Melanne sit out on their cramped little balcony with a bottle of champagne (not cheap; his one indulgence, Juilliard explains) and stare up at the glittering stars.
"What do you wish?" Melanne asks, and does not elaborate, just tipsy enough to be certain her question is sound.
Juilliard hums a snatch of song. "For nothing at all but this," he says, and laughs; he is learning laughter, and this laugh encompasses his half-done paintings and Melanne's unfinished stories and their petty jobs and his fingerless gloves and the unborn little girls he doesn't know exist and all the things they will never finish and everything around them, all of Paris. Melanne kisses him and he adds, with the seriousness of one who will remember little of it in the morning, "I should like to start a family."
She doesn't ask him if he means it; new year's resolutions are made to be broken.
In the cool of the evening when Juilliard is busy digging graves, Melanne lays on her back on the small bed and thinks of woods and journeys and poetry and roads not taken. She cups a flat silvery euro coin in the palms of her hands, pressed against her chest, and half-imagines two phantom heartbeats beneath, even though they are real.
I shall take them to the Seine, she thinks, and teach them to skip stones and to roller-skate in the plaza at Notre Dame. I shall go back to the hospital, she thinks, and tell them, please, I can't do this, take them away. I shall do a hundred years' worth of slowly fading washing, she thinks, and cling to Juilliard's arm while the girls cling to my leg and I shall never be any more than I am now, frail, futile, addicted to everything and amounting to nothing. I shall be free, she thinks, if freedom means some terrible hollowness of belly and bones, if freedom means sitting at the typewriter never writing a word, sobbing sick over the washing, never telling Juilliard where it went wrong.
She sits up. A casual flick of her hollow pale wrist and the euro comes down, an arbitrary choice, a fifty-fifty chance and she thinks, somewhat ironically, heads. Caught within un- sub- or supernatural forces, now and forever, amen. She goes to the window, arms wrapped close, cradling herself, her body the baby the same. They're a hundred years too late for Bohemia. She smiles a little, the coin digging into her palm. So this is being grown up. It's not so bad.
She turns and fades into the future.