Katia (V-The End)

(cont. from posts below)

That was pretty much the end.

“Did you talk to Pascal?” Katia asked.

“Yeah.”

“How is he?”

“Not good.”

“Oh.”

She didn’t ask me about the rent money. She probably knew. The next two weeks were awkward between us. She knew I needed the rent money and she didn’t have it. I called Philippe and he told me he’d talk to Marie about it.

I came home from school one day and she told me she’d be moving out. I felt really bad about it. But that’s because I thought she was leaving because Pascal wasn’t going to pay the rent. It was something else. Some complex story that I barely understood. She was going back to Hungary. But only for a while. She told me the reason, but I didn’t understand it. Some family problem? Some visa question that she could only take care in Budapest? In any case, she couldn’t ask me to keep the room for her. It was getting to be late November. Great, I said to myself; not only did I not get November’s rent money, I won’t get any for December, either; it’ll take me at least a few weeks to find a new flatmate.

Katia and I kissed goodbye one afternoon and that was the last I saw of her. Philippe got the November rent from Maria and I swung by his office in Saint-Michel to pick it up one afternoon. A couple of weeks later, he had a get-together at his apartment in Versailles and invited me out. I brought him a Tom Verlaine record and he served snacks and wine and there was a lot of talk among a crowd of English teachers there about American politics. Ronald Reagan had just been elected president. Sometime during the party, Philippe asked me:

“Hey, did you hear about Pascal?”

“No.”

“He died.”

“He died?” It took a second to register. “When?”

“Oh, a few weeks ago.”

“You mean, right after I talked to him?”

“I don’t know. When did you talk to him?”

“About the rent. Early November. Before I called you.”

“A little after that.”

“Did he ever get out of the hospital?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they sent him home. Maybe not.”

So that meant: Maybe I had called him while he was on his deathbed to hound him about a hundred bucks in rent for Katia.

“What about Katia?” I asked. “Does she know?”

“Oh, she knows. She’s living at his parents’ house.”

“She’s back from Hungary?”

“Did she got to Hungary?”

“That’s what she told me.”

“Maybe. I guess. I don’t know. Marie told me, but I didn’t quite understand. In any case, her visa was temporary. So now that he’s dead, she’s no longer allowed to stay. She’ll have to go back.”

Katia did go back to Hungary. But the next year, at another party, Philippe told me that she found another Frenchman in Budapest and married him and they moved back to Paris. So Katia finally got what she wanted.

Pascal and Katia were in my life for just a few weeks that fall in Paris. We had a few conversations; really, Pascal and I just exchanged just a few sentence and Katia and I a few dozen. But I’ll always remember them both. Why is that? There are people I’ve known who’ve played bigger roles in my life, but they fade into the fog of my memory, emerging only upon some prompt, when I find some trace of them somewhere, somehow. Not Katia. She’s always there. I wonder if she still has that picture of me. Maybe it’s true, what the Native American mystics believe about images captured by a camera. Maybe it's true that they steal your soul.

Katia's Rent (IV)

(continued from posts below)

Before Katia moved in, I’d been dating Brigitte. She came over to see my apartment one night. My bedroom walls were covered with black fabric. The other bedroom had wallpaper with garish purple flowers, floor-to-ceiling. I told Brigitte I’d have to paint it white. She said, no, it would have to be blue. I said I didn’t know about that, being that the ceiling was purple. She said if I painted it blue, she would help. Promise? I asked. Promise, she said.

Once Katia had moved in, Brigitte came over for coffee one afternoon and met Katia and Jules. I had already explained to Katia that I had promised Brigitte she could help paint the walls blue. Katia said she wanted them to be white. I said fine, she could paint them white after Brigitte and I painted them blue. Katia said that was absurd. I explained to Katia that I had made a promise to Brigitte and I always kept my word. Katia wasn’t happy.

The next night she came into my room.

“You know, I was talking to Jules about painting the room,” Katia said. “And we think –”

“Yeah, I know, you want it to be white. I think white’s better, too. But –”

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“Oh? What were you going to say, then?”

“We think – well, we think Brigitte’s too young for you.”

“Oh, really?”

“And is Brigitte going to move in here?”

“No plans right now.”

“So why should she decide what color the room is? It’s my room.”

“Look. I told you before. I promised.”

I bought the blue paint. I peeled the wallpaper off the wall, which was a huge mistake. The plaster had never been spackled, so that was another huge job I hadn’t foreseen. I did a minimal amount of spackling, just enough to cover the worst slices and holes in the plaster, and got ready to paint.

Brigitte didn’t show up. I took out my anger by painting all night. I had bought her a rose and I left it on my mantelpiece to remind me of how she stood me up and that I shouldn’t ever make a date with her again. Over the next few weeks, Katia acknowledged that the blue paint turned out OK, although we agreed that white would’ve been better. The rose shriveled up and turned black, and I stopped seeing Brigitte.

Pascal didn’t pay Katia’s rent.

“He’s very sick. He’s in the hospital,” Katia told me.

“I still have to pay the rent, Katia. I need your share. You promised he’d pay.”

“Yes, but he’s in the hospital.”

“I can’t tell that to the real estate agent. They won’t care. They need the rent. When will you have it?”

“I don’t know. When he gets out of the hospital.”

“When is he getting out of the hospital?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will you ask him?”

“I don’t want to talk to him. You can call him. Here’s the number.”

So I walked down the street to the pay phone and called Pascal at the hospital that Saturday morning. The switchboard operator connected me to his room and he answered the phone.

“This is Steve, Pascal. You know, Katia’s living at my apartment.”

“Oh yes.”

“How are you?”

“Not good.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Are they taking good care of you?”

“Well, you know.”

“Are you going to be OK?”

“Doesn’t look good.”

“Wow, that’s terrible. When do you think they’ll let you go home?”

“I don’t know.”

“Look, I hate to bother you with this, you being sick and all, but I’m calling about the rent.”

“You’ll get the rent. Don’t worry.”

“Great. Thanks. It’s just that it’s due now, and I was wondering when I’d have it.”

He got angry and yelled at me:

“Look, I told you you’ll get your rent and you’re going to get the rent! You’ll just have to wait!”

“Oh, OK, sorry man, I didn’t mean to upset you. I was just trying to find out when I’d get.”

He was still angry.

“I told you YOU’LL GET YOUR RENT.”

“OK, OK, I said it was OK. I know your ill. I feel bad for you. I was just trying to explain why I was calling. It’s OK. Hope you get better, soon.”

“Thanks,” he said dryly.

We said goodbye and hung up.

Katia's Friends (III)

(Continued from posts below)

They left and Katia asked if she could put on some music. I said yes and she popped a cassette into the tape player in her room. It was “Phantasmagoria” by a group called Curved Air. I had loved the album when I was 15 – seven years before. It started with two bold strokes on the violin, then a descending pattern of eighth notes with an echo effect. It was dated, but it brought me back to my younger days and my life in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Katia took a picture of me. A few days later, I was passing her room and I noticed she had developed the film and put my picture in a plastic cube on her desk. I thought this was odd, being that I lived there. The other sides of the cube were decorated with pictures of other people – friends, I assumed.

One of my students had loaned me an antique Underwood typewriter so I could write the short stories I’d wanted to write when I came to Europe. The brackets that held the ribbon in place weren’t high enough to keep the ribbon from flying out of its place whenever I hit a capital letter, though, so I taped sticks of cardboard onto them. One afternoon when I got back from class, I was typing away at a story I’d been trying to write for a long time. The story was about the day before I moved from Los Angeles to the suburbs when I was 12. That morning, my friends Richard and Gary met me behind a restaurant and we went climbing on rooftops along a busy street. It was a farewell to my life in the city.

A friend of Katia’s came over. He was another student and he was also taking French classes. He was older and called himself Jules even though was German. Katia took him in her room and I could hear them getting it on as I typed. I stopped typing and put on some Billie Holiday music so I wouldn’t have to listen. I can’t say I liked the idea of her having sex in the next room on a weekday afternoon, but I couldn’t complain about it, either. After all, she had offered herself to me first. And her marriage, at that point, only existed officially, for visa purposes.

Saturday morning I went grocery shopping. When I came back, Katia called me from the shower.

“I’m stuck in here. I forgot a towel. Could you get one from my room and hand it to me?”

So I did. She reached her arm out from behind the shower curtain and said thank you. She stepped out of the shower with her towel wrapped around her and walked past me to her room.

So there I was with a beautiful, naked young woman, fresh out of the shower, in my apartment. I was a healthy young man with a normal sex drive. But I followed my rule: no relationships with the roommate. She was married and I needed the rent money. I put the groceries away and made us some lunch.

That afternoon, her friend Jules came over with Gyorgy, who was a friend of Katia’s from Budapest. He had wild frizzy hair and he was a filmmaker. He saw one of my books – “Blood Letters and Bad Men: An Encyclopedia of American Crime” and went nuts.

“Can I read this?” he asked, wide-eyed with excitement. Sure, I told him. I explained that I used it to teach English, photocopying the entries on Jesse James and John Dillinger so that my students could read and discuss them. I stayed away from the gory stuff in class, though. But I urged him to read the entry on the cannibal killer Albert Fish, which he did – and loved. We bonded.

“What are you doing in France?” I asked him. “Are you making movies?”

“No, I’m a political refugee.”

“Oh really? For a film you made?”

“Well, one I was making. It’s that there were some people I was working with. They were in trouble. The government wasn’t happy with them.”

Katia walked into my room and joined us. She spoke a sentence or two of Hungarian with him. The mood changed.

“I was telling him that he didn’t understand what it was like there,” she said to Gyorgy. Then she turned to me and said: “We had a good friend who disappeared.”

“Disappeared? How?” I was hoping for some elaboration.

“Gone. One day he was just gone,” Katia said.

“The police got him? The government? Did anyone see him get arrested?”

“No,” she said. “No one ever does.”

Maybe it was their rudimentary French, or maybe I didn’t know how to ask the right questions, but I still wasn’t getting the full picture.

“Did he do anything wrong?” I asked. “Was he a criminal? A drug dealer? Leading a revolutionary cell?”

They both shrugged.

“We were students,” Katia said.

Maybe it was our rudimentary French. Maybe it was tough to communicate. They were trying to tell me that it could’ve happened to anyone. I think that’s what they were trying to tell me.

Katia went into the kitchen to make us coffee. Jules, Gyorgy and I went into the living room. Gyorgy grabbed a small platform that the previous tenants had left behind. It was a wooden box made from pieces of particle board with carpeting wrapped around it. I was using it sometimes as a coffee table, sometimes as low seat. He stood it on its side and sat on it.

“Hey, if you want to sit on that, fine, but not on its side,” I said. “It’ll break. Look at the way it’s put together.”

Gyorgy laid it flat. But Jules decided to give me some shit.

“It’s funny how people are in Europe,” he said. “When I was in the United States, I stayed with some friends and they let me drive their car. I was amazed at how open and generous they were.”

He was implying that I was being stingy and controlling with my carpeted box.

“If you came to visit me in the states, I’d let you drive my car, too,” I told him. “The car’s insured. That’s my only piece of furniture, man. I don’t have insurance for it. So if it breaks, I have to throw it out. Then I won’t even have this pathetic little thing I can use as a coffee table. I’ll have nothing in my living room. I’d be upset.”

Katia brought us a coffee pot and cups and served the coffee.

“And I’m looking around at the four of us and I don’t see us going to get me a coffee table if this thing breaks.”

“You’ve got a point,” Jules acknowledged. “But you will acknowledge, that the mentality is different in America.”

“I will acknowledge that,” I said. It was an easy enough point to concede. Mentalities are different country to country. I’d met enough people in my travels to have learned that. United States, Germany, Hungary, England, France – things are really different, everywhere and when things are different, people think differently.

We drank the coffee quickly. It was winter and the days were short. The light in the sky was already fading and the apartment was getting darker every minute. I went back into my room and tried to work on my story. Katia and her friends left.