Read Online Swimming by Nicola Keegan - Free Book Online Page B

myself and sleep until bells sound from some distant church, dawn lifts the gray out of the black, and the edges of the Eiffel Tower turn into bronze iron flint.
    It is not a good trip, although technically I love it. There is no real reason for this love other than the freedom of not existing, the brief suspension of real time, and being able to tug at my underwear right inside my jeans in the metro at high noon without having to worry about a dry maxi pad popping out and exposing me for the liar I am.
    Parisian girls are growing up faster than us; they wear their hair in ratty chignons, blow thin streams of gray smoke out their trim nostrils. They turn their bored llama eyes on us, giving Bron’s scarf, our flat shoes, our ringless fingers, our naked faces the once-over. A look that dismisses in one rapid glance. I don’t care about them, my eyes screening crowds for mustache, absently say: What bitches , but Bron’s face hardens into her hard face and Mother and Leonard make like they don’t see. They hold out their maps with wide-open arms while people stare at Leonard’s gigantic height and funny pants. Bron’s French-club French doesn’t sound French even though she’s gotten straight A’s since the beginning of time. A red rash appears on her neck when she has to say something twice, victim of her own perfection. She quits. I’m too tired to talk anymore—-you talk . I don’t care, speak in whole paragraphs, point with my finger or my chin, pulling people where I want them without asking their permission first. I can tell by the look on their faces that they are amazed.
    We spend two days in the Louvre. A short Japanese guy moves in right in front of me as I’m staring at the Mona Lisa , breaking the spell I’m supposed to be under. I find the Mona Lisa small, oblong, slightly yellowish, relatively humdrum. The Japanese man has zero manners, a long torso, two short legs tucked into a pair of baggy American pants. I laser two holes into the back of his head with my opaque glare: The Japanese Have Zero Manners .
    Just look at the detail on this ceiling , shouts Leonard, and up our eyes flip to gilded naked angels riddled in fat and God pointing One Finger down below.
    That’s my next trip , Bron says, laughing so hard she has to sit down on a wooden bench, and we have to stand around waiting until she recovers.
    Flashy synthetic clothes covering people who don’t matter to me move in front of the backdrop of the glues and the inks, the plasters, marbles, precious metals, and woods, while God up in His World looks down upon ours—newer, faster, hotter, keener, with a furrow in the middle of his gold face. Still no mustache anywhere. My eyes cut through crowds of people roaming, feverish with hunt. Dalí is luck. Luck bring me Dalí.
    At the Rodin museum, I stand on the second floor looking down on Bron and Leonard, who sit under a tree drinking water from a small bottle. Bron leans her head back, exposing her throat to the sky. Mother has a quick nervous breakdown next to the bust of a child’s perfect head— she says oh oh oh oh while the museum guard pretends her flashlight is interesting and I slip out as quiet as a Shawnee, calling: Come to me, mustache, come to me now .
    It starts to rain. We order crêpes and eat them standing up.
    Bron made a list of things she wanted to taste before we left: a real crêpe suzette, a real café crème, a real croissant, a real baguette, a real glass of wine, cassis sorbet. But now that we’re here, nothing appeals to her. We wait as she stares silently at miles of pastry in pastry cases and the pastry woman’s daughter twists her eyebrows into question marks and Parisians start to shuffle and sniff, their way of signaling dissent, until finally she says Rien and the pastry woman’s daughter says Pardon? and her neck flushes red and she says Rien again.
    She sits in restaurants in front of plates of delicately seasoned fish with open gills like angels caught