"A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty, with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow's wing and cut sharp and diagonally across her cheek. I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere, but she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone. So I went on writing.
The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.
I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil."
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
There were many good, perfect things about the apartment. The first was the location. Paris (Paris!), which in itself was the chief recommendation. It didn't matter that it was on the outskirts in the 16th, the refuge of grand Parisienne dames with their manicured poodles and perfect children, it didn't matter that it was on the fourth floor of an historic walk-up, without a lift and with winding, wide staircases perfect for making an entrance but not so perfect when carting suitcases up and down, up and down. It was in Paris. That was all that mattered. When you opened the windows you saw Paris, when you walked out of the wooden double-doors you smelled Paris, when you stood on the tiny (tiny!) balcony, cold-reddened hands gripping the iron balustrade, it was Paris that you felt all around you. It also had a working heater and wooden floors and a washing machine and all of those necessary things that make up good, perfect holiday apartments.
But the best good, perfect thing wasn't the high ceilings, or the chandelier, or the wide, free-standing wardrobe that smelt like lavender and sage. It was the vintage couch which sat, proud and resplendent against the far wall of the living room, facing that tiny (tiny!) balcony that looked out onto those good, perfect Paris streets. It was a washed out, worn out, lived-in red, with two tattered pillows that smelt like that good, perfect Paris melange of cigarettes and chanel number 5. It was big, so big that even my friend, long as a basketball player, could stretch out completely along its length, feet only just drooping over the curved edge. For me, long as an Olsen twin, it couldn't have been more perfect. There were days - good, perfect days - when we came home from Rose Bakery lunches or Cafe Charlot dinners and I would collapse, full of carrot cake or red wine, ebullient and exhausted and content, onto that couch and look at the high ceilings for hours until wandering into bed. There were afternoons when I would curl up along one side, my head on those two pillows, reading a book and drinking apricot-scented tea from muslin tea bags (Passion de Fleurs by Damman Freres!) and nibbling on whatever it was we had bought from the market square that morning (bread and butter, bread and cheese, bread and jam, all bread everything) feeling so happy that it was almost alarming. There were mornings when my friend had left and gone back to her travel and I was by myself in the apartment when I would arrive back from a morning espresso and lie belly-down, map of Paris spread out along the floor, planning everything that I would do that week, marking out future favourites with black biro and red stickers.
It's hard to quite come to terms with the fact that in just over a month I'll be back in that exact same apartment, lying on that exact same couch, drinking that exact same tea and eating that exact same bread from that exact same boulangerie. I've come to see that corner apartment in the heart of the 16th as my apartment, my bit of Paris, even though it belongs to someone else and it's only mine for a few brief weeks at a time. But, I don't know how, but it really does feel like it's mine. It has all the marks of my existence. That scuffed corner of the skirting board that I kept accidentally kicking with my boot, the table where we dripped candle wax during an impromptu dinner party of pate that we hosted with people we met at the art gallery, the glasses we bought from monoprix to replace the ones we smashed one hazy morning. And that couch, the one that seemed to mold to the shape of my body, with all of the curves and contours of relaxation and repose that most definitely, most certainly, most irrefutably belongs to me. I'm not the first person to feel like this. Ernest Hemingway got there before me. It's not bad company to be in, really.
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