Chapter nine
The Centre Pompidou is the modern-art museum, a huge box of a building that looks as if it’s been turned inside out. Its inner structure is exposed and colour-coded: green pipes for plumbing; blue for heating and cooling; yellow for electricity; and red for safety. The bold primary colours clash with the noble grey elegance of the rest of the city. For some reason, that makes me like it even more.
I wouldn’t have minded the walk here – my sushi place is right around the corner, not to mention the Treehouse – but Josh took one look at my heels and led me straight to the nearest taxi stand. I am wearing my tallest pair. He’s still over half a foot taller than I am, but I know I can reach his lips if he tries. I hope he tries.
The museum’s lobby is silver metal and blinding neon. As we pass the information desk, Josh takes my hand again. Our palms are sweaty. It’s heaven. We ride the crowded escalators up, up, up beside a wall of steel and glass. The glittering streets of Paris stretch all the way to the horizon. We talk about the shiny little nothings we see – people and cars and cathedrals, even la Tour Eiffel – but it’s not that we don’t have anything meaningful to say. The feeling is that we have everything to say.
And where do you begin with everything?
We switch escalators from level four to five, and I ride backwards on the stair above him. Our eyes are level. We’re laughing, I’m not even sure why, and he’s holding both of my hands now, and – suddenly – he’s leaning in.
This is the moment.
Josh hesitates. He second-guesses himself and pulls back. I lean forward to say the timing is right, I’m ready, let’s do this thing, and his smile returns and our eyes are closing and his nose is bumping against mine and – blip!
We jump. His pocket blips again.
“Sorry,” he says, flustered. “Sorry.” Our hands unclasp, and he pulls out his phone to silence it. And then he bursts into an unexpected laugh.
Everything inside of me is throbbing. “What is it?”
“He got a job.” Josh shakes his head. “He really got one.” He holds up the screen, and a snapshot of a guy with mussed hair and a polyester vest grins back at me. He’s giving the V sign, the English finger. It’s his best friend, étienne St. Clair.
I smile, despite our thwarted kiss. “Where’s St. Clair going to school now?” For reasons unknown to me, Josh’s friend goes by his last name.
“California. Berkeley. He said he was getting a job at a movie theatre, but I didn’t believe him.” Josh shakes his head again as we grab the final escalator. “He’s never worked a day in his life.”
“Have you?” Because not many people who’ve been to our school have.
Josh frowns. He’s ashamed of his answer, and it comes out like a one-word confession. “No.”
“Me neither.” We both hold the guilt of privilege.
Josh glances at his phone again. I lean in and examine the picture closer. “Oof. That’s one seriously ugly uniform. Does anyone look good in maroon polyester?”
He cracks a smile.
The escalator ends. Josh types a quick reply, silences his phone, and returns it to his pocket. I wonder if he told St. Clair about our date. I wonder if I’m newsworthy.
We head towards the galleries, but the mob inside the top-floor restaurant gives us pause. The tables have been removed, and an army of svelte models in frizzy white wigs, white lipstick, and marionette circles of white blush are manoeuvring trays of champagne through the swarm of bodies. Josh turns to me and cocks his head. “Shall we?”
“Why, yes.” I respond with a matching twinkle. “I believe we shall.”
We slip inside, and he grabs two flutes as the first tray whizzes by. We’re the youngest people here, by far. It must be a private party. The clamour of excited voices and the outlandish, kaleidoscopic music make the room unusually loud for Paris. “It’s like New Year’s Eve in here,” I shout.
He bends down to shout back. “But not the real one. That glamorous, fake one you see in films. I always spend the real one watching television alone in my bedroom.”
“Yes! Exactly!”
Josh hands me a glass and nods towards one of the restaurant’s giant decorative-aluminium shells. We duck underneath it. The noise becomes somewhat muffled, and I raise my glass. “To the new year? Our new school year?”
He places a dramatic hand across his heart. “I’m sorry. But I can’t toast that place.”
I laugh. “Okay, how about…comics? Or Joann Sfar?”
“I propose a toast” – Josh raises his glass with mock gravitas – “to new beginnings.”
“To new beginnings.”
“And Joann Sfar.”
I laugh again. “And Joann Sfar.” Our glasses clink, and his eyes stay carefully fixed upon mine in the French tradition. My smile widens into a grin. “Ha! I knew it.”
“Knew what?”
“You held eye contact with me. I’ve seen you pretend like you don’t know how things go around here, but you do know. I knew you knew. You’re too good of an observer.” I take a triumphant sip of champagne. The pristine fizz tickles the tip of my tongue, and my smile grows so enormous that he breaks into laughter.
Thank you, France, for allowing alcohol to be legal for teenagers.
Well, eighteen year olds. And we’re close enough.
Josh is amused. “How do you know I wasn’t looking at you simply because I want to look at you?”
“I’ll bet you speak French better than you let on, too. You never use it at school, but I bet you’re fluent. People can play dumb all they want, but they always give themselves away in actions. In the small moments, like that.”
The bubbles seem to go down the wrong hole. He coughs and sputters. “Play dumb?”
“I’m right, right? You’re fluent.”
Josh shakes his head. “Not all of us grew up in a half-French household.”
“But I’ll bet you’re still good.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Thankfully, he’s amused again.
“So why do you pretend not to know things?” My fingers play with the stem of my glass. “Or not to care?”
“I don’t care. About most things,” he adds.
“But why play dumb?”
He takes another sizable gulp of champagne. “You know, you ask really tough questions for a first date.”
A painful blush erupts across my face and neck. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I like girls who challenge me.”
“I didn’t mean to be challen—”
“You aren’t.”
I raise an eyebrow, and he laughs.
“Really,” he says. “I like smart girls.”
My blush deepens. I wonder if he knows that I’m the top student in our class. I never talk about it, because I don’t want people to judge me. But it’s true that his ex-girlfriend was smart, too. Rashmi was last year’s salutatorian.
Josh says something else, but the noise level in the restaurant has been increasing, and it’s finally reached its maximum volume. I shake my head. He tries again, but I still can’t hear him so he takes my hand. We down the rest of our drinks as we squeeze through the revellery. He plunks the empty glasses on a passing tray, leads me past a final throng of partygoers, and we emerge gasping and laughing into the hall.
“Well,” Josh says. “Now that that’s done.”
I gesture towards the galleries. We stroll through them hand in hand. But the air here is cold, almost reminiscent of mortuaries, and the sparsely furnished rooms grow stranger and stranger. Miniature sculptures of mundane objects that you have to get on your knees to see. A short film of a fast-food joint being purposefully flooded with water. A collection of puppets with crayons shoved up their asses.
“That looks…”
“Uncomfortable?” Josh finishes.
“I was going to say like a very colourful suppository.”
He bursts into laughter, and an elderly woman with a dead fox around her shoulders glares at us. The fox has been dyed an alarming shade of purple. Josh whispers into my ear, “That’s how it became such a vibrant colour. Crayons. Up its butt.”
I cover my giggling, but it’s no use. She glares again, and we scurry into the next room. “Ohmygod. This whole thing is…not what I’d hoped.”
“Don’t say that.” But he’s still laughing.
I shake my head. “I wanted weird, but maybe it’s too weird?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m with you. I’m happy to be anywhere with you.”
My heart puddles. “Me too.”
Josh squeezes my hand. “Come on.” He pulls me closer as we walk, and our bodies bump against each other. It’s amazing how solid he is. How real. Muscle and skin and bone. “We still haven’t seen your Finnish artist. Maybe he’s over here?”
We find the exhibit hidden away in a back corner of the museum. The walls are collaged with hundreds, maybe thousands, of grainy, unframed photographs. We peer closer at one of a crumpled single-serving potato-chip bag. The artist had laid a scribbled note beside the object as some kind of label before snapping the picture. It’s written in Finnish, but it’s also been marked with a date.
“Huh.” We say it together.
Josh points to another photograph. It’s an empty bus seat, also labelled. “So he’s cataloguing his day-to-day life? I guess?”
I look around for a sign in French and find it beside the door. I walk over to read it. “These aren’t his things. They’re some woman’s.”
Josh gives a low whistle. “No wonder this looks like a stalker’s bedroom.” He bends over. “Oh, shit! Look at this one. Yeah, I think that’s actually shit.”
I race back to his side. “How did he get her shit?!”
“Maybe he went into a public restroom after her? He was probably gonna take a picture of the seat and got lucky. Maybe it wouldn’t flush.”
I snort loudly.
“I mean, I’ve been waiting for you to leave something behind for ages, but you keep picking all of these working toilets.”
I fake-gasp and shove him. He laughs and shoves me back, and I squeal as the purple-fox lady enters the room. She shoots us daggers. We straighten up, but our sniggering is barely contained as we attempt to focus our attention on a picture of a discarded Coke can. “This guy’s lady love is kind of a slob, don’t you think?” he whispers.
I cover my mouth with my hands again.
“A reaaaaaaaal litterbug.”
“Stop it,” I hiss. My eyes are watering. “Ohmygod, look at this one! How did he get her toenail clippings?”
“If you were my girl,” he whispers, “I’d take creepy pictures of your trash when I knew you weren’t looking.”
“If you were my girl,” I whisper back, “I’d put the creepy pictures in a foreign museum so you wouldn’t know that I take creepy pictures.”
A single belly laugh escapes from Josh, and the woman spins around and actually stomps her foot. Like a cartoon character. It’s the last straw. We lose control, cracking up hysterically, as we run from the room and towards the escalators.
“If you were my girl,” I say, barely able to catch my breath, “I’d remove your skin, dye it purple, and wear you like a scarf at fancy gatherings!”
He stops and bends at the waist, he’s laughing so hard. “Oh, fuck.” He wipes a tear from his eye. Two museum guards whip around the corner. “Go, go, go, go, go!”
We tear down the hall, and the guards take off after us. We hit the escalators, and – for some reason – they give up. After, like, ten whole yards. They cluck their tongues as we disappear from view. “So much for security.” Josh is cheerfully dismayed. “Maybe we should steal a painting?”
I laugh, and he watches me from the step below. Beaming. The current between us is so intense that it’s almost visible. He takes my hand and turns it over, examining it. It’s so much tinier than his. “If you were my girl?” he says. “I’d steal you away from the fancy gathering and take you somewhere less pretentious.”
I rest my thumb against an ink stain on his index finger. “And if you were mine, I’d tell you that I know a good place just up the street.”
He lifts his head. His eyebrows rise.
I smile.
“If you were my girl,” he says, but there’s an explosion outside in the courtyard, and I miss the punchline. Fireworks crackle in showers of pink, green, blue, white, green, pink, orange. The museum-goers on the escalators heading upwards erupt in a frenzy of applause as we continue heading down. “If you were my girl,” Josh says, pressing his nose against my ear. I turn my head, and the lights and the noise and the people disappear. The distance between us disappears.
Our kiss is anything but shy.
His lips press deeply against mine, and mine press deeply back. Our mouths open. Our tongues meet. We’re hungry, deliriously so. Even with my eyes closed, the shape of his body flashes before me, lit by the spectacle outside. Light, dark, light, dark. He tastes like champagne. He tastes like desire. He tastes like my deepest craving fulfilled.