Nico

Friday 19 August 2011
Avignon, FRANCE

He had the same eyes, Nico. I would have recognized them anywhere. But his hair was blacker than I had remembered, and his Marseillais accent was thicker than I had realized when I knew him years ago. The nuances of language come only with fluency. I met him when I was nineteen and naïve, a virgin in every possible sense of the word. It was my first time in France. I wanted so desperately to fall in love.

We first met at Red Sky, or maybe O’Neill’s, peu importe. It doesn’t much matter. I was tipsy and happy and I wasn’t afraid of men yet, no, not then. I met Nico before the terror started, before I learned how to distrust, how to hate, how to fear. I was innocent when I met Nico. I trusted him. I trust him still.

We decided to meet up at Place Pie. It was only natural. He was in jeans, the back sneakers he always wore, a grey shirt that unbuttoned in a V at the neck, the white fedora that I used to playfully steal.

« Comme c’est bizarre de te revoir, » he said to me as he kissed my cheeks. Left right left.

He asked me right away about my novel, the hypothetical one that I promised him that I would write one day. He was sure that I had started it. I laughed and shook my head as we found a table on the terrace at Red Sky.

« Mais tu écris toujours j’espère . . . »

« Oui, t’inquiète pas. Et je te donnerai un exemplaire dès que mon boucan sort. Si jamais ça sort . . . si jamais j’en écris un qui vaut être publié . . . »

We ordered drinks in the afternoon heat and picked up where we had brutally left off, somewhere in the middle of the folly of the spring of 2009.

I have been doing aller-retours between France and the United States for so long now it seems that Avignon has become the France of my youth. A golden Virgin stands at the highest point of the lonely town, her hands clasped in prayer and her head ringed in a crown of stars. She looks out over Avignon—over its lavender, its cobblestones, its palace with its statues of headless saints, its cicadas, its olives, its wine, its river, its ramparts. It was Mother Mary that watched the madness of my youth. She watched as I broke into le Rocher des Doms with Thom; as I stumbled through Place Pie, weeping; as I lit cigarettes in the rain while walking home to Monclar; as I sat alone by the river, writing and inviting my fate. Avignon is a city where no one knows me deeply, where no one expects my voice on the telephone, where no one worries if I don’t call. When I wander at night, the beat of my boots echoes off of rampart walls. There is no sound more lonely than that of solitude. No one here asks me what I want to be when I grow up. Except Nico.

« Tu te souviens de cette soirée-là ? . . . celle où nous sommes rentrés chez toi—ou bref, chez Isabelle—et on n’a fait que causer pendant toute la nuit. Et le lendemain il m’a fallu m’enfouir dans le jardin pour que personne ne me voie . . . et il y’avait tous les gamins et Isabelle dans la cuisine cette matinée quand nous sommes descendues, tout doucement, en cachette. Et toit t’étais en train de me chuchoter et tout et j’avais trop peur moi qu’on ne nous découvre . . . »

One night two years ago he stayed the night at Isabelle’s house, secretly, in my bed, wrapped in my sheets that smelled like lavender. I will remember his eyes, always. He had taken off his thick, black-rimmed glasses and placed them on my nightstand, next to my morning cup of tea. We shouldn’t have risked it, no, not there. Shawna had refused to bring Levy home; instead they took a cab to Adrien’s apartment in Agroparc, near Montfavet. Levy had complained that the bed would be too small for the two of them, but it was Shawna that knew better. Our host mother was strict, temperamental, bipolar. I never should have suggested that Nico stay over. But I did. And we did nothing that night but lay in bed and stay up all night talking, I swear.

Two years ago, Nico was a police officer that wanted nothing better than to act, and I was a bilingual aspiring author who had always dreamed of painting. He said that he hadn’t wanted to let his father down. He had done for his son, sacrificed so much to get Nico where he was. Nico had entered the police academy to appease family tradition.

« Mais là où je suis aujourd’hui n’est pas là où je veux être demain. »

“Where I am today,” he said, “is not where I want to be tomorrow.”

« Et moi je veux écrire. Je vais écrire, à n’importe quel prix. »

“And I want to write. I will write, at whatever cost.”

Where I am today is never where I want to be tomorrow.

At twenty-one years, I suddenly feel old, fatigued. I have become nostalgic. I haunt the stumbling ground of my dangerous youth. I remember its caresses, its insults, its kisses, its violence. I remember running into the frigid waves at the beach at La Ciotat with Shawna, I remember the route to Apt in Alex’s car that always smelled like kif, I remember Adrien’s apartment in Agroparc where we drank vodka and picon, I remember sitting on a bench on Nico’s lap outside of La Cadillac and kissing him for the first time, I remember calling Levy from the airport in Marseille and crying while waiting to board a flight to London, I remember buying a long-stemmed zinnia, with red petals and a red ribbon to match, and leaving it in a vase on my desk at Isabelle’s as a final gesture, a gift, a goodbye.