I’ve been trying to figure out what I thought of France while I was there for a while now.  Sometimes I get really angry at my behavior over there. Sometimes I just want to go back.  It’s one of those cliches that is a cliche because it’s SO true.  That town is the most beautiful and most perfect place to disappear in.

But anyway, here’s a draft of a story I wrote about being there.  Comments are welcome.

The stairs are made of metal.  They are that cold, gray-black mesh that you can see through, diamond-shaped holes make every one of the 1365 steps that have already been conquered plainly visible when looking down.  He looks past the dirty white laces of his black, low-top tennis shoes at all of the heads bobbling up towards him.  1365 feet down.  He picks his head up and the same metal grating surrounds him on all four sides.  It is, essentially, a cage with paths going in only two directions: up and down.

“We’ve come this far.  Just keep walking,” he says.  The amount of air he audibly sucks in order to spit the sentence out belies the confidence he’s tried to inject.

She doesn’t remember complaining.  Thus far, she’d only slowed her pace a bit, caught her breath before the final three-hundred step stretch to the top of the Eiffel Tower.  She’d settled with the fact that he might have been right in advising against her cowboy boots for the day.  But they’d worked so well with her skirt and she just couldn’t ruin this outfit she’d somehow managed to assemble with just a half-length mirror and one suitcase for an entire two weeks.  No, she knew better than to complain about foot pain at this point.  She’d slowed, but had kept moving.  “James, I didn’t complain.  Just wait a minute and I’ll be right with you.”

“I could see you were about to say something.”  He lies.  He hadn’t turned to look at her in at least ten minutes.  After three years of spending every waking moment thinking about Mary, he’d begun to suspect he could predict her every move.  That’s how it worked, he’d thought.  When two people are in love, they can read each other’s minds.  She’d proven him drastically wrong more than a few times recently, but still.  He knew that he knew her inside and out and he could have sworn he’d glimpsed her oblong, but fitting, nose wrinkle into the words, “This is ludicrous.”

She shook her feet, wiggled her ankles inside of the confining boots, and picked her pace up.  Only three hundred more.  And she hadn’t even broken a sweat.  There he was, head practically between his knees, lumbering his tiny frame up in front of her.

“You know, you wouldn’t be in such a foul mood if you wouldn’t have had so much to drink last night.  Maybe had some water this morning with all that coffee?” she reached out and playfully nudged him in the ribs as he refused to break pace.

James pushed her hand away and accidentally connected with a woman in athletic shorts holding a small handycam pointed in front of her.  He made a compulsory apology that seemed not to register as she moved past like nothing had happened.

“Settle down.”  She paused, then asked, “Why’d you come here anyway?”  She’d picked up her pace enough that the two were next to each other again, their feet slapping at the metal and their calves aching at the same moments.  They’d walked in unison as a joke many times, both noticing that people gave them strange looks when they did so.  As if they were a pair of Siamese twins, circus freaks.  The conjunction of two beings completely, outwardly, physically, matching with each other, a jab at normalcy.  It made them both laugh when they’d get home and lie down in bed with the Chinese food they’d picked up from around the corner.

He muttered, “You know why I came here.”

“No.  No, I don’t.  Maybe if you’d tell me I could start to figure out what we’re going to do about all of this.”

“Why am I here?  Why are you here?”  He’d come to a full stop and turned to face her.  Faces wandered by staring past her and straight at him and his outburst.  He returned the favor by looking straight past her for a moment at the Parisian cityscape splayed beneath them.  He continued, “You left me.  Not the other way around.”  He took a sip of water from the bottle in his hand and wiped the sweat from his forehead, a futile task under the summer sun.  “And then you just show up here.  Unannounced.  You have no money.  What do you think you’re doing following me here?  Was me getting on a plane and crossing an ocean not a signal enough that I wanted to not be near you?”

The skirt she had on dropped well past her knees, but was whipping in the wind and collecting the sweat from passersby on its edges.  All of them moving through the caged tunnel towards the top.  “If we’re going to do this in public, can we at least keep walking?” she said.

“Fine,” he started climbing again, “I’m listening.”

“You’re not going to like this.”  He rolled his eyes, a gesture she could not see, but a guard on one of the landings seemed to notice, eyeballing him closely as he rounded the corner to the next flight up.  “I came here to fall in love,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Your parents told me you were here and that I should just let you be alone.  Especially after what I did.  How am I supposed to do that when I’m in love with you?”  She paused, then continued as if the next statement was more obvious than two and two making four: “And, come on, you ran away to Paris.  You’re just asking for people to follow you.  Especially people like me.”

“What do you mean by ‘people like you?’”

“I mean people you’re so obviously willing to change for.  People that you’ve completely fallen for.  People who transcend that whole, ‘give them an inch, they’ll take a mile’ mantra.  People who know that if we give you an inch of us, you’ll give us a mile of you.”

“You’re a goddamn liar.”

“Are you saying you wouldn’t?  Are you saying that if I claimed that I’d try to make it all right again, that I was sorry, are you trying to say that you wouldn’t come running right back?  Are you saying that you wouldn’t do everything in your power to make it work as well as I’d claim it could?”

“What about you?  You’ve already flown across the world with almost no money just to see me.  I didn’t even have to give you another inch and you took 6,000 miles.”

“What’s a few days and a couple hundred dollars when stacked against you rearranging your life?”

He walked on.

“See?”  she finally broke the silence twenty stairs from the top, “you can see it all from here already.  Let’s just go back down.  You’re tired.”  He was sweating uncontrollably, getting dizzy.  He’d chalked it up to his hypoglycemia or his anxiety disorder or the lack of clonazepan in his blood stream.

“No.  We go to the top.”

“No.  You’re going to fall over.  Let’s go.”  She held her arms out in front of her while other climbers passed by her, not noticing their behavior, like desperate loveless pleads were par for the course atop le tour Eiffel.

“We go to the top!”

“No.  We’re going down.  You’re delusional.  You’re sitting on the steps and you don’t even know it.”  Indeed, he was.  He’d slumped down after his last exclamation.

“You lied,” he sputtered.  He was choking on what tasted like either coffee or vomit.  “You lied.  You said the last time that we fought that you’d be willing to try a change.  That you’d try as hard as I did.”

“And you don’t think I did?”

“No.”  His expression was blank, eyes like two empty caves.

“What about the flying back and forth?  All the times I visited you in New York?” she was trying to attract attention, arms flailing, spilling water out of her thermos on passersby who continued with heads down, seemingly wishing to not get involved.

“What’s a few days and a couple hundred dollars?”

James pounded his way up the last twenty stairs, keeping pace with a group of runners that were scaling the tower as a fun-run.  He almost made a joke of it, swinging his arms back and forth further than he normally would, painting a clown-like smile on his pale face.

When he reached the top, he held his hands up over his head and looked back at Mary whose mouth was still agape at his last comment.  It was true, he was angry at her, and she at him.  But the past two weeks had been so lonely, it felt good to at least have something to rail against.

“Are you done with your Rocky impression?” she shouted up the final steps.  He ignored the sass, noting that you could really see the entire city from atop.  The strangest part about Paris, to him, was that there were hardly any buildings taller than four stories.  The city’s sprawl seemed remarkably organized, Tuillerie Gardens pointing perfectly out to the Louvre which spread its walls majestically and formed the center of each surrounding neighborhood, like one cohesive vision.  Like someone had planned each individual neighborhood, like someone had organized everything into perfectly European clichés.  He smiled at the thought of complete control.

She sidled up next to him and took his hand and sighed, “This is never going to be okay, is it?”

He then said the first honest thing all day, “No.  It’s not.  But goddammit, it’s good to have you here.”