The Gum Thief (25 page)

VIA FEDEX

Roger, Why aren't you writing me? I'm drunk and overwhelmed and I'm in a bistro not far from the Seine-Left Bank-and I have to tell you what happened to me this afternoon. I was leaving my hotel, feeling spaced out and depressed by the Christmas decorations here-not only because they're Christmas decorations and hence automatically depressing, but because they're so much more beautiful and delicate and, I don't know ...
devoted
than the cardboard schlock we put up in Staples windows. And I felt stupid and young and not worthy of all the beauty these Frenchies soak in every day. It's killing me, all this beauty. I have this feeling the French have X-ray vision and look at me and know that I live with my mother in a Kleenex box on the other side of the planet, that I can't cook, that I watch too much TV and, when I do, it's never the History Channel.

So there I was, walking along, lost inside this downward loser spiral, when I passed this hotel and a man emerged, dressed like a doctor in
All Things Great and Small-sage
greens and browns and that jacket English people wear when
Hello!
magazine visits their country house-and he was walking with two kids and a woman, and then the blood froze in my veins. It was Johnny Depp, right in front of me. And he was this normal guy with normal kids, and I think Vanessa Paradis was in a crabby mood, but he looked my way, our eyes met, he smiled and winked, and then they all got into a Range Rover and left.

Roger, I was standing on the sidewalk for maybe five minutes, trying to digest what had happened. I put my hand to my cheek and felt all this white makeup I've been wearing forever, and I felt so #$%&ing naive and childish. I ran back to my hotel and went to my room, but then, I'd forgotten my key-#$%&ing Europe-and had to go back downstairs to get it. My face was like a mud pie from tears, and I used the shower-this idiotic brassy thing that's totally hopeless for showering in-and washed away all of the pancake and eyeliner and polonium and all this other crap I've been buried under for five years. And beneath it all is my face, my face that I've never been able to look at for very long. My relationship with the mirror is usually like locking eyes with a stranger on a bus and then looking away. But this time I didn't look away, and there was foolish, naive, pink, blubbery, boring, nothing little me.
If
I saw me on a bus I'd snicker and say, "Well. At least I'm not her." But I am.

Roger; I feel so stupid, and I'm trying to drink myself into feeling numb, and I've never done that before. I think there's much to be said for feeling numb. Time passes more quickly. You eat less, and because numbness encourages laziness, you do fewer things, good or bad, and the world's probably a better place. Being numb makes you a crime fighter! Is that what happened with you? Selfish me-I write you a letter and talk about nothing but me. How is
Zoe?
How's Staples? How's the weather? I scour the
International Herald Tribune
every day, and you have no idea how good it makes me feel to know that, back home, the daily high is two degrees Celsius and it's partly cloudy. I can see the parking lot at work: abandoned shopping carts, a thin crust of road salt, SUVs coming and going - how depressing that visions of a parking lot can make me homesick.

For dinner I ordered
mussels-moules marinere.
Have you ever tasted those things? They taste like catshit scraped off a dock. I ate exactly one, then tried to wash the taste away with pastis (that licorice liqueur), but now I can feel the mussel in my stomach breeding, multiplying, expanding, having babies ... I'm hoping it's not a rough night tonight.

I just looked up at all the tiny yellowy-white lights they've lit for Christmas. They go all the way down the street, some brighter than others, some a different shade of white. Of all things, I'm remembering that astronomy book my mother left in the bathroom to try and lure me into the world of science and nursing.
It
described the asteroid belt. Most people don't know what the asteroid belt is. It's this gap between Mars and Jupiter where a planet used to be. To be more precise, scientists think there used to be a planet there with a big moon, but they got too closely entangled in each other's orbits and they collided and shattered. How romantic, in a Japanese manga kind of way.

It's so fucking
old
here, Roger, so fucking
old.
The concierge told me they don't allow anything to be built that might prevent them from making Paris look like the seventeenth century if a movie were to be filmed.

I have to stop writing this now.
Garcon!

Bethany

PS: Don't forget, you can always email me at [email protected].

Bethany

VIA FEDEX

Roger, I ran out of money staying at the swankypants hotel, pretending I was Mademoiselle Fifi. I don't know what I was thinking-I sat there in the hotel, and I could feel the money leaving my body, but I didn't move, and now I'm broke. I went to the airline office here and it turned out I couldn't use my ticket to fly home early because it was some special fare deal, but I
was
able to switch it so I don't have to go back to London to catch the flight. I'm stuck in a hostel again, except this one is in eastern Paris and it makes the hostel in Hampstead look like the Four Seasons. It's full of Russian skinhead hash dealers who listen
to
nothing but reggae music. I'm convinced they spend their free time, when they're not selling hash, stealing purses from French housewives. I'm afraid to leave my stuff here, so when I go out to get something to eat I take anything remotely valuable with me. I catch a train to Frankfurt tomorrow to fly home on a direct flight.
If
I don't screw up, I'll get back with one euro in my pocket.

Going outside here is torture-I can barely look at my clothes or wear them. They're so shabby and passé and juvenile. Black clothes look good only when they're brand new or recently dry-cleaned. When I put on my old clothes, I feel so deranged, and I'm convinced people on the street are staring at me like I escaped from a group home. A few weeks ago that would have made me happy. Now I feel like a loser.

But that's not the biggest or weirdest news, which is this: I bumped into Mr. Rant yesterday! Wow, huh? He was in St-Germain-des-Pres looking into a florist's window. He turned around, looked at me and said, "Hey, I need a replacement toner cartridge for an
HP
LaserJet 1320. Where do I find one?" I was so homesick and lonely that I hugged him. Him being him, he said, "Oh. You look different without your face all whited out. What are you doing in this nightmare of a country?"

I explained my situation to him. His name is Greg. Isn't that old-fashioned? Imagine naming your kid Greg these days. I can see the woman typing the name on the hospital form pausing for a second and looking up at you to make sure you aren't joking.

So anyway, Greg took me for lunch, and if you'd told me two months ago that a lunch with Mr. Rant would be the best thing in my life, I'd have thought you were insane, but there you go. He's here to visit some stainless steel manufacturers. He works for a company in the shipyards back home, and he apparently has to come to Paris every other year for business.

So we went to a bistro where they served generic French food-steak frites, pate and salade verte. The menu probably hasn't changed in a century. It was so nice to see a familiar face that at first I didn't pay too much attention to his conversation, which was mostly kvetching about the service; the weather; the euro; the hotel mattress; the twenty bucks a day he had to spend to get onto the Internet; the flight over; the pigeons-he went on and on. Then it started to wear me down. I tried pointing out some of the good things here, like the food, and all he could say was, "Trans fat," so I pointed out how well everybody dressed, and he said, "Because they don't have houses to spend money on. They all live in rented apartments and don't own land." I have to tell you, Roger; I began to get
annoyed.
By the time our waiter took away our plates, I snapped. I started shouting at him, and it was awkward because I could tell everybody around us thought we were having a lovers
quarrel - eeyooof-and
we were, for lack of a better word, "onstage." This, of course, stoked my fires, and I screamed at him something along the lines of, "What the hell is wrong with you? Are you on drugs? Are you on medication or did you stop taking your medication? Why can't you look at the world for even five fucking minutes without trying
to
trash the place and wreck it for people who maybe might like being here, or who are maybe simply trying to put a good face on being here? Why do you have to wreck everything?"

The poor guy was, possibly for the first time in his life, without words. Then he said, "I didn't realize I was having that effect." He wasn't being snide or anything. I think he genuinely didn't know the effect he has on people.

I said, "Well you
do
have that effect, and I can't stand it. How many friends do you have?"

"What?"

"How many friends do you have?"

"I don't see why that's any of your-"

"It
is
my business. Because you've made me angry. And you don't
have
any friends,
do
you?" His face said it all. "I thought so. Doesn't that make you wonder about yourself? Everybody has friends, Greg. Everybody."

"I thought we were simply having lunch here."

"We were. Until you wrecked it with your endless complaining. You're like the psychic equivalent of a wood chipper. Whatever goes in the front comes out the other end in shreds." Then he delivered a tae kwon do body kick: "You don't have any friends either, do you?"

"I ... I ..." I threw some money down on the table twenty coins' worth of accumulated petty change-and it made a good and rousing noise on the tabletop. "I have lots of friends. And I'm out of
here-Greg.
And by the way, whenever you come into the store, we make fun of you because you're a disaster."

I stormed out before he could make a touché remark - God knows I deserved one-and out on the sidewalk I felt like a total creep. I mean, what if his personality stems from some medical condition and he can't stop himself? Where does your personality end and brain damage begin? And why can't I be normal? Why do I have to be the freak? I don't want to be the freak, but all my life, there I am, out on the edge, the people in my life dropping around me like flies. Broke, wearing pathetic rags in a rectum of a French hostel, eating Mars bars until I catch my plane home. I can't believe I'm coming home, Roger. I feel like such a failure. I was going to become Count Chocula's personal assistant. I was going to-

Well, a fat load any of that matters any more. I'll probably get home before this letter reaches you. I have no idea what I'm going to do once I get back, and I don't care. Thanks for being an ear, Roger. I hope your novel has come a long way. It's going to be the worst Christmas ever.

X

Bethany

DeeDee

Hi, Roger!
If
I sound cheerful, it's because I am-I got an email from Bethany saying she's returning from Europe. (Didn't say if she's alone or with lover boy, but my mother's intuition tells me she's on her own. Joy to the world!) She got some weird discount Internet ticket, and she flies out of Frankfurt in three days, so I'm preparing the place for her return: I'm renting a big stack of DVDs (the complete Depp oeuvre) and hanging all the Christmas lights (even though Christmas is three weeks away). I bought extra strands to make everything even more festive for her. I also stocked up on all her favourite junk foods. I bet you don't know what her favourite snack is, so I'll tell you: it's saltine crackers with peanut butter on them, BUT she applies room-temperature margarine on top of the peanut butter. Honestly, they look like the coronary tissue from an eighty-nine-year-old woman's heart. But she loves them, and my little girl is coming home, so she can have anything she wants.