Locale

Locale

When I still lived in Paris I would sometimes get off a stop or two earlier on the Metro than my intended one and spend the extra time walking. Where I liked walking most was the tunnel of the Metro itself. Underground it was desolate and eerily quiet, something I craved after all the time I spent in the crowded Parisian streets and the solitude of which I considered special and deep in the pretentious way only a teenager can. 

It was in these tunnels that I first got pickpocketed, nearly a year after I moved to Paris. Even before I moved I was warned about pickpockets, but it didn’t take long for my laziness to take over and for my guard to slip. I didn’t miss the wallet; at fifteen years old I had perhaps twenty dollars and a bus pass in there. But as anyone who has been pickpocketed will tell you, it’s the evasion of privacy that is so shocking, the thought that someone could get so close to you without you feeling a thing. At the moment I was as horrified as anyone else would be, but as I thought about it in the weeks after it gave me a strange thrill. It made me feel connected to the city in a way I had yet to feel after living there for eight months. 

I had spent my whole life in southern California, less than a mile from the ocean, so it was reasonable, then, to feel such a strong sense of deja vu the first time we visited the beach after moving. Because I had already experienced my situation, hadn’t I? The beach was nothing new to me. Yet it was so specific and real, unlike any other deja vu I had ever had before. I still think about it often, when I let my mind wander far enough.

My mother -- she’s the one who moved us there after the divorce from our dad, moved my sister and herself and I -- finally settled for a public sector job. She took her first vacation in July and we rented a house in Nice for the thirty days of vacation that are standard in France. It was a bungalow, basic and functional with two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a porch. Every day we would stay at the beach until it got dark, then play cards on the porch until bedtime, candles burning if the light from the moon wasn’t enough. I should have been thrilled to be there, after being away from the beach for so long. And I was; but any enjoyment I had was tinged with a stinging nostalgia that drove me to sit in the sand alone, away from my family, letting the sun burn my skin. This return to the beach and the deja vu it created didn’t help matters, either. 

I know how spoiled and unreasonable I seem, when I tell people who find out I used to live in Paris that my experience was anything other than romantic. And it really wasn’t that bad; I, like most people, have a tendency to put more emphasis on the negatives, to only associate my time there with dark, damp winters, with my walks home from school shielding myself from the wind, hurrying past homeless people sleeping with their heads covered. But I was doing fine. I fit in at school, despite my limited French. I had a group of friends I hung out with regularly, a guy and his girlfriend and then my girlfriend. All four of us hung out together at school and on the weekends at cafes, sitting there for hours, smoking and talking about the union workers on strike and the refugees and other matters we found pressing at the time. We were normal teenagers, sullen and impolite. We stayed out late, drank, did drugs. My girlfriend and I would have sex in her bedroom while her parents were right down the hall, not even bothering to hide it from them beyond turning up music on her stereo. In retrospect we were very normal, but at the time we felt rebellious, or at least I did, because at my wealthy, suburban California school this sort of behavior was not typical, it was rare to not take advanced classes and do sports and marching band and theater and committees. My perception of this at the age of fifteen was probably out of touch with reality, but at that age I felt that the only students not like this were the ones not destined for college, the bad ones. To be an overachiever was the rule, not the exception. 

But of course Paris was a lot different than that. 

By the halfway point of our vacation my unease over this deja vu had passed. I was enjoying the break from school and the change of scenary. As I sat next to a rock near the coast, up ahead I saw three teenagers standing in the water, splashing each other. They were probably the same age as myself, two guys and a girl. Not an unusual sight, but what struck me, so sudden and forcefully it felt like a physical jolt, was how similar they looked to my own friends, the ones from my home in California, so similar in not just their ages and their looks but in the way they hung around each other, the ways they spoke to each other, albeit in French rather than English but the similarities were there the same. 

    Since the beginning of the trip I had a thought, a small one just ruminating at the back of my mind, and it was only once I saw these teenagers that I was forced to confront it, despite how bizarre it was

What I felt, as I watched the three of them in the water, was that I was witnessing what I could be living if I had made a different choice. That I was getting a glimpse of myself in an alternate reality had I not done what I did. 

I found out about it first; I guess my father only thought to try to hide his affair from my mother rather than from all three of us. It must not have occurred to him that I would find any evidence, but I did, one morning before school. I had missed my ride and so he was going to take me instead. I sat in the back, my older sister needing a ride as well and calling dibs on the passenger seat, and so while I sat there by myself, waiting for them, I saw the underwear. Even though my parents each had their own cars it wasn’t outlandish that my mother had been in the backseat of my father’s car, at some point. But something told me -- the instinctual part of my brain that noticed my parents’ cold silences with each other, I guess, whatever you want to call it -- that these were not hers. 

It scared me how easily my anger gave way to cold logic. I pinched the underwear between two fingers as though they were dirty, although they weren’t, they looked perfectly clean. But even though I was fourteen I found nothing about them erotic, either, not in those circumstances, and not when I hid them for later and put them somewhere for my mother to inevitably find them. 

In the time after it happened, the divorce and the announcement that we were leaving the country without my father, I considered the move to be retribution. I think that’s why I was so willing to believe I was miserable over there; because I wanted to be miserable. 

And that’s another thing that made me exactly like everybody else. I thought everything revolved around me. Seeing those three on the beach was my punishment coming to a head, dangling itself right in front of my face.

But now when I think about them, those teenagers, when I think about how similar they were to my old friends, how seamlessly I would fit into their group, it occurs to me that I was pining after something that was not more than fifty feet away from me. And why should I miss something when it was right there in front of me? 

I know a lot of people have the thought of how different their lives would be if they had chose some other job or college, how if they had gone to that one coffee shop on a Tuesday morning instead of a Wednesday morning they wouldn’t have met their wife or best friend. They think about how significantly their life could change, if they had made some different decision along the way. But I think I would have turned out just the same. 

    One of the boys, stocky and dark-haired, asked me for a lighter. I had one, of course, because like everyone else there I smoked, and after a startled moment I gathered myself and dug in my pants pockets and handed it to him. He thanked me, lit his cigarette quickly, and gave it back. He looked as though he wanted to say something, and although there’s no way of telling what it was, I like to think he was going to ask me who I was, if I wanted to join him and the other two kids he was with. But before he was able to speak, one of them shouted something at him and he glanced back, repeating his thanks to me before he returned to his friends.