Milena — Jacqueline Feldman

The bar I liked in Paris was a large, neighborly place that had already, if you asked the regulars, gone downhill. That neighborhood in the Twentieth Arrondissement was being developed, though it wasn’t always striking what was happening. Then the bar started serving food. This gave regulars something to tell each other, that it had gone downhill at the moment it had started serving food. They told themselves over plates of steak hâché and yellow fries in wire baskets, over fish folded in on itself to be stuck with a toothpick and softened in cream sauce, that the bar had gone downhill. Outside the city, gleaming in a drizzle, was prepared to demonstrate a contrast.

You called it the bar without a name if you wanted to meet your friend there, and you identified it further by giving its location on the Place de La Réunion where there was just one other bar, a PMU. So you could say, even to somebody completely unfamiliar, let’s meet at the bar without a name that’s not the PMU on the Place de La Réunion. Such circumlocution is not, in French, unusual. In addition to a tolerance and even, locally, a melancholy preference for knowledge that is relative the language is highly abstract. Apartments are not numbered but are designated on envelopes in terms of a position in the building—“Staircase A, First Floor, On the Left.” Universities are named by strings of words that give a sense for their historic function. Philosophy is taught in high schools, and the language is conducive to philosophy, with few words; you use two or even three words to identify concepts, situations, and actions covered with a single word in English, and there is a corresponding pressure, often but not always salutary, to think clearly.

To identify the bar with that description was, then, culturally consistent—“natural.” The bar, in entering the period of its pandering, made a big deal out of it. “The Bar Without a Name” became its name—the opposite of what it had been. Menus were printed, with that phrase, a brand, up top. A Yelp page was populated…

A big place, it had at the center a counter, very traditional, of burnished zinc, where neighborhood men who would have been unfamiliar with the term “gentrification” came to drink a kir at around eleven in the morning, often staying on. In the traditional way, prices were lower if you drank at the bar than if you drank at a table. The serving area formed an L around the counter, a crescent, with the missing piece of the L being the kitchen. One leg of the L opened onto a terrace, a wall folding up to allow this, and it was inviting, with banquettes of red vinyl that had, at their backs, an alternating set of smudged mirrors and cubbies stuffed with books, with travel guides to Indonesia, Argentina, Cappadocia… The big part of the room at the back was undesirable, as it filled whenever the bathroom door was opened with a characteristic smell. Ideally you, I, would take one of a couple of two tops opposite the counter, where the room was narrow.

I had a date at one of those tables. It was impromptu. The man did not approach but looked up from the table as I was standing at the counter waiting to pay and, offering he’d seen me there a lot, asked if I wasn’t doing anything. The Bar Without a Name was where I went not only to do nothing but to avoid answering for my idleness. I did, however, join him, this man with an open and in retrospect empty face, and ordered at his invitation anything I wanted, another short coffee. I accompanied him to an exhibition, this exhausting, boring man—a young professor working on economic theory, he found of young adults, his students, that they wanted to make money and not learn about its fallacy—and by my choice did not again see him. Though I might have run into him later at the Bar Without a Name, I did not. It is possible he stopped going out of shame. It is also possible though does not seem a strong explanation that the man, Clément, stopped going because the bar, as I’ve established, went downhill. I, for my part, changed my preference out of respect for Clément so that, following our encounter, I sat in the front even when there was a table at the side available.

I was, and am, a foreigner in France, and it was as a foreigner that I got to know this bar, as a person on the lookout for signs of meaning, assimilable details. I lived in Paris, frequenting the bar, for three years, moved away, and after leaving made perverse use of this establishment in the throes of a transformation to remind myself, as if the backdrop were unchanging, who I’d been. The scenery had made for pleasant living, and it came to seem characteristic of my younger self, indicating some strong thing, an attribute or predisposition, that I was able so far from where I’d grown up in Connecticut, United States, to make a life of ease. My salary from a university where I taught English twice a week sufficed to rent a room in an apartment shared with Rémi, a Frenchman from the region around Lyon and fashion worker; he worked in retail. It was through Rémi, my roommate when I was twenty-two, twenty-three, and twenty-four and living in Paris, that I eventually met Milena.

Rémi and his friends were a little older than I was, and Milena was old for them, already thirty. The women of that group, her included, were to my eyes dazzling, beautiful in the way Mother is beautiful with her devices, an arcana, of jewelry and makeup, with the way that she can change herself according to a custom she may one day deign to teach. They were like birds, like foreigners although I was the foreigner. I say “Mother,” but I don't mean my mom, whose relationship to all this was that, asked what her grown daughter was up to, she could say “living in Paris” and in that way avoid naming a professional occupation. Rémi’s friends, colleagues of his, obtained with their discounts clothing that amazed me.

There was a single room that with a third roommate (a graduate student, rarely around) we leased in common. There was a couch from Ikea with storage room inside it where we kept our pots and pans. I sat there, writing. Rémi came home at 7 or 8 wearing a tweed jacket or, that December, a jewel-toned puffer and, handing me my mail pointedly, would ask if I had had the chance to go outside that day. 

It is possible that he was trying, in setting up Milena and me, to get me to share in a responsibility he felt for her wellbeing. I did not think so at the time, when useful was the last thing I found myself to be. 

Rémi was careful of Milena. He would meet her for drinks just the two of them and come home saying she was doing well. Evidently she had periods of doing poorly. One night he’d given her my number, and he gave me hers, which obediently but without any plan I saved. It was easier than not to do. I assumed Milena had told Rémi about her interest, if she had spoken of such interest, in order to be nice to him, that he was exaggerating. I had, perhaps, left him embarrassed; he had needed reassurance.

I had friends from college visiting Paris on the weekend of her birthday party and with Rémi’s permission brought them and, a condition of his permission, an extra bottle of wine, as well as, making sure, a pineapple. This Rémi and the others did not like, or seem to want to understand. But Milena laughed, throwing back her head. She was wearing a black blouse with puffy sleeves and a square neckline, yellow earrings.

She was elegant, with dark hair and an unusual, broad nose; her father had been Serbian, her mother Algerian. She was an orphan—a recent development, as Rémi had informed me. Milena had in the depths of her grieving turned to English-language poetry, to one Sylvia Plath, to help her through. Meanwhile I was the genuine article, an American girl who demonstrably, in Rémi’s eyes certainly, was bookish.

“You always do this,” Hugo said, three years later. “You always try and find the most meaning in the people you know least. You think meaning is hidden.”

“It’s possible,” I said. I was doing something at my laptop.

“So who are you seeing tomorrow?” He sat heavily in one of the other chairs and poured wine for us both.

“I’m going to see Juliette in the afternoon,” I said, “for coffee. And I think I might try and see Simon as well.”

“You can have Juliette come over here for dinner if it’s easier,” he said.

“What about Simon?”

“What about him?”

“Forget it,” I said. “It’s just that he has such a nice name, I’ve always thought. It’s just such a great name to give a child, if you’re going to have to name a child. Because it sounds like sinon. Like, I’m the parent. For me, basically decades of my life have gone by without my getting any of the results that I wanted, I haven’t been able to manifest anything, it’s quite obviously too late for me mais Simon lui…”

“Very funny,” Hugo said. He stood and refilled my glass. “Remind me,” he said, moving into the kitchen, a galley kitchen where I still could see him, “which one is Milena, again? I get all Rémi’s friends mixed up.”

“Milena is the one you like.” Hugo was making saag paneer, and there was a sudden aroma of spinach as a bunch he had put in defrosted. “You find her not as difficult to access as you find Rémi,” I elaborated.

“The pretty one.”

“She’s beautiful,” I said.

“But a little sad.”

“That’s the one.”

Hugo, my friend of seven years, had lived in his apartment in the Eighteenth Arrondissement for two years, and I was used to staying there when I came back for a visit. I knew him from college, an international experience for Hugo that lay at the foundation of his understanding of the world and that I feared he over-valued. We had, in any case, coevolved, as he had made many trips to the US. The apartment, shared with two roommates who, like Hugo, a doctor, worked a lot, wasn’t far in terms of distances I was used to, American distances, from the Place de La Réunion. I did not, as a visitor to Paris, find the journey burdensome.

There was some commotion on the sidewalk, a fight, and it was burdened by the effort obscurely to see less than I was seeing that I made my way to Barbès, where I would catch the Métro. It was November, late November, a slow time in the US; I had judged I would be able to get away. That year I also worked a lot. The metallic surfaces of the boulevard, a line of storefronts, were glossy where the light from streetlamps landed. I would take the train to Nation and backtrack walking. That line runs aboveground for the segment that subtends La Villette and, later, the Place du Colonel Fabien. For years I had appreciated that periodization of the city, blue and brief in windows of a car that, rattling and shaking, with the others makes its way.

Milena’s apartment I had visited twice, and it occurred to me too late that I had sent her, too, out of her way; she lived in the Eighteenth Arrondissement, not far from Hugo’s. The apartment, however, I remembered well. It had become one of the memorable settings of my life, for whatever reason; as I had found reading novels, it was in a roster of places my imagination supplied in which to picture the events of the plot. My mind would do this for me, making the decision. It had been a one-bedroom with a plugged-up fireplace and, at the room’s center, a coffee table made out of half a surfboard.

I had gone over there after her birthday party in order to learn more about my friend. That was her sell. She had invited me during the party, over her shoulder plating a cake as I approached the stretch of counter to see if I could help, and I had followed up by text, letting her know I, too, would be glad for us to get to know each other. Later, from a remark Rémi made, I realized that that had been unnecessary. She had mentioned my message, signaling by this that it had been remarkable, a bad thing, and around my memory of the visit hung a sense, the ambiguous sense taken from Rémi of having done wrong, exaggerated. The evening seemed ill gotten, the memory sitting uneasily in my possession ever since.

She had grown up around there, in the Eighteenth Arrondissement. Her parents, with the enthusiasm of converts, had held ideas about France that Milena considered frankly unspeakable—the kind of ignorant kitsch, her words, against which that winter’s protests had been, quite rightly she felt, assembled. Glory, patriotism… She sang that last word, making a circle like a conductor’s with the hand that didn’t hold the wineglass. The armchair, an eccentric choice with sides like wings, fit her entirely. There had been that year in Paris a sense of things coming to a head, and finally it had been the killing of an environmental activist by police in some godforsaken valley of the southwest that had set off those protests, which had not slowed.

She got up, went to the fridge stepping over something—her cat, Minouche—and brought out a bowl over which she’d drawn a piece of cellophane. 

“I’m sorry I was a little late,” I said in French.

She hadn’t heard. The bowl went on a brass tray on which Milena was arranging salt, red spices, a pitcher of water—a clay pitcher, of a kind you saw in bistros. I wondered where she’d gotten the blouse with its unusual pattern—of suns, I thought before realizing foxes—and was overcome by the thought it would be possible for us to spend the rest of the evening in asking each other, Milena, me, where we’d acquired certain items. I adjusted my skirt, forest-green and pleated, from a woman on the quai de Jemmapes who made skirts and sold them rarely, a passion she supported by doing alterations.

“Well!” Milena was practicing her English on me. She lifted the tray and turned to make a presentation of tray and crazy smile. “So,” she said, lowering the tray using her body so that as it came to a rest on the coffee table she was squatting, “what you do is take the chili, it’s in this big bowl, and put it over the rice, and then there is also an American cheese you can sprinkle. Eh?”

It was perfect; I said so.

“So,” Milena went on, “you’ll tell me all about where you come from.”

“Sort of like here,” I said. My mouth was full.

“Really?”

“No,” I said. “Sorry, I don't know why I said that. If you take the two cities, New York and Boston, and draw a line between them—”

She dreamed of visiting New York, she said, cutting in. For Milena, who, she went on, understood herself to be impressionable, une sensible, it had been particularly marking to grow up the daughter of immigrants, even immigrants besotted with the country of their adulthood. Her life had never been without the sense of hurry, that of precipice, and her parents, although they had pretended to be happy, were always lonely.

“You mean always alone,” I said.

“No,” she said, and laughed as though I’d said something really funny. “Lonely. Come here,” she said then. She had in the next room some clothes she wanted to get rid of, and I followed her using a paper napkin clumsily to clean my hands. 

I was never sure what size I wore, but the dress Milena had set aside for me was a fit. When I saw myself—she had a standing mirror just like one of Rémi’s I borrowed customarily—I couldn’t think of anything polite, modest, to say. “You need,” Milena said, “different friends.” She was sitting on her bed. “You need friends who are also writers, at least one.” She started laughing, apparently at the look on my face. “There’s nothing wrong with it! But you accept for Rémi to treat you as a child. Is it because you want to be a child?”

“It doesn’t cost me anything,” I said in French.

“It doesn’t cost me anything,” she said merrily in what even I could tell was an imitation of my accent, and she actually took me by the hand to bring me, wearing her dress, back to the main room. Basta, she said. “I have something to tell you. It’s a story that I tell my friends.” On the mantel—I hadn’t noticed—sat a crown of paper from a King’s Day cake. For a moment I was afraid that she would put it on my head.

From earliest childhood she had been assigned tasks, special jobs that were all hers, and she had loved doing them. Looking back, it was crazy for her to have loved them, but she did. She took pride in doing her little jobs correctly. She had no siblings. She was the only one. And in the mornings, she would go and get the bread. There was a bakery across the street from their apartment building, very traditional, and that was where she went. So by this time, the time of the story, she was twelve years old, she was not tiny, she was not any longer swept away by excitement over the opportunity to go and get the bread, but she still felt every day stepping outside and into the morning at least an echo, an afterimage—and prompted by her I nodded yes, that was the term; she said it in French, image rémanente—of the excited feeling she’d had as a younger child first allowed to do this. It was her favorite thing to do. Coins were left out nights for her to find and carry in her pocket. She was allowed to eat one end of the hot bread on her way back. They lived in a corner building, and she would let herself out a side door closing it behind her gently though it was unlikely in closing to wake up her parents. So they would be sleeping, although for the entirety of the first year in which Milena did this, the year she was nine, her mother accompanied her to the threshold of the building’s door each day and, in slippers, watched her for the five minutes that it took. There was never any wait.

So one morning like this, quite a-lone as she was used to being, she sensed and then saw a man she didn’t know, a stranger. He was a horrible-looking man, old and ugly, un français with a red, red face from drinking who looked as if he had not slept but spent all the night in the city trying to find her. She shuddered, setting down the wineglass. The bakery was not exactly across the street but at a diagonal, a couple of doors down, and he somehow came up as she was leaving the bakery and beginning to make the crossing that was as familiar to her as the faces of her parents. It couldn’t have been scarier if he had been shouting; he was speaking in a whisper at the level of his exhale that was nonetheless quite audible from the distance Milena was able, at least at first, to keep. He was standing, by the end of this maneuver, which was almost like a dance, almost perfectly still. In fact, because of the position in which he was standing, he was blocking the door to her building, and that seemed significant. Milena got up and went to her own window to smoke. It was as if he had by watching her on some other day figured out which one was hers. Probably it was random, but that was how it had seemed to her. What he was saying was of course disgusting and of course had to do with her appearance, her ethnicity, and the Muslim religion, although she, brought up quite as secular, as laïcard, as much anything as you like, barely knew what he was talking about. Stuff to do with her being a girl of a certain complexion. He was asking to meet her father, who of course was a Serb, and something about the headscarf, which naturally Milena did not wear. The way he spoke was repetitive. It took all her courage and cunning to find a way to step around the man, and it was only after this had been accomplished, inside the building where she lived, that Milena realized the baker she had seen every day for many years would have been able to see, through the broad and windowed storefront, all that had happened—and made what seemed to Milena the adult a choice not to intervene.

Her parents had not seen the event as Milena, even then at twelve years old, could see it, though she lacked the term—as harassment. I sensed that she would not start crying, but Milena’s eyes were bright with something, with anger. She would have to be careful not to invite such situations. That was all she heard from them. At twelve years old, she hadn’t known enough to know how wrong that was. But the experience was representative. Milena had moved from that point on unconfidently through life, unprepared by her parents for the most basic of dangers, dangers she’d had to encounter as mysteries that she had been, these long years, alone in solving—a state of affairs regarding which her deceased parents were permanently unavailable to grant relief. It seemed that up until the end she had hoped to have some kind of a reckoning with them.

The narrative, three years later, was more accomplished. I felt in my bones the fright of the child as the strange man came up at her back. And the telling benefited, was helped to be contemporary, from the addition of the vocabulary that had in the interim become a popular currency in France, borrowed from American social movements, an importation of terms that in fact had mattered, as many thought a change in attitudes was coming. Despite these variations I felt myself becoming impatient with the story that I could not again hear for the first time, and it was a bad surprise, as they say in French, that Milena had forgotten the details of our dinner that had stayed in my mind all those years. It had been Rémi who had said to reach out, explaining he would be away, that a job supervising arrangements of window displays had sent him traveling, and it was, I realized, to substitute for his own company that he had said Milena would love to see me. He had sent her in his stead, saying a little maliciously, his idea of fun, how étonnant it was that I had come all the way from New York to go to that old bar.

And I had been changing, still young enough for aging to have improved me; I was thinner—Milena had made a comment—and, I felt, more directed. I was less irresolute, choosier; this kind of thing shows on the face. We had taken one of the booths, below a broad, Art-Deco poster of a coiled woman smoking. Track lighting cast a glow unflattering to Milena, filling hollows that I thought had formed around her eyes since our last meeting.

I was flooded with the memory, an atmospheric memory, of years in which I had been satisfied with little, acting as if passivity were a virtue; increasingly it seemed to me I had been all that time waiting for somebody to tell me to cut it out, and in fact, I reflected, Milena had, that night. But she had lacked authority. Her mouth, red in the light, was pursing. I let my hands come to an awkward rest on the red-and-white checked oilcloth, very traditional, one set of fingers tracing the base of my glass.

When it was empty, I started getting up. I’d thought the next round would be my treat, and I wanted to make sure of that by ordering at the bar. I reached for her glass to feel—having pushed up my sleeves in the heat of the café, which was crowded, dazzling bright—Milena’s hand, very warm. Her fingers, the nails painted red, closed automatically like a baby grasping on the hard, bony part, separating out perceptibly the part of the arm that was fat. “Wait,” Milena said. “I wasn’t finished.” I moved the arm to shake off the hand. J’avais pas fini, Milena said again in French, very drily. I had of course made the gesture without thinking.

We might have taken the Métro home together, Hugo’s was on the way to her place, but Milena waved me off. She would stop for cigarettes, and I was under no circumstance to wait. At the perimeter of the Place de La Réunion the horse-chestnut trees were leafless where I could see them near the streetlamps, their leavings everywhere, and I stepped on the fruits to crush them as a way of getting warm as I watched Milena go, a long-haired figure in a coat that reached her knees.

I wrapped the jacket I was wearing, a velvet jacket, more tightly around my body and thought about the way it had seemed to me as a child that warm clothing was for children, for babies like me. It was the achievement of grown women not to require accouterments of winter like the ones I had—hats, puffy jackets, mittens on a string. Very young I had wondered when I would reach an age of generating my own warmth, of having lost a taste for warmth.

At least I had an interesting reflection to prepare, on the Métro, for Hugo. That was what I thought as I took in the sight of vending machines with splintered glass on the platform opposite. Say what you wanted about the interaction I’d had, it had not been without its lesson. Say what you wanted about my friendship, you could not say that it had been, as it reached its end, without meaning. The beliefs Milena had come ever more strongly to hold about her parents were of a kind that ultimately had, I planned to venture, to be banished. The therapeutic insight was of no validity without the person who’d occasioned it; it was, without that person, a piece of information that was incomplete to the point of being untrue. Milena could not check the insight she had been developing against her parents. I thought, and wanted to know if Hugo agreed, that this was a bad and common situation, to be locked in argument with a ghost.

I was so ready to share my thinking that I was astonished to see he’d fallen asleep. His bedroom door, anyway, was closed. “I cannot help this person,” I had planned to say. “This person cannot be helped by me.”

A smell was in the air of a cleaning product that he liked to use on counters. The lights were off. I ran a hand along the frame of a large window, thinking. My face, in that dark, cast no reflection; I saw straight down to where a puddle was unraveling, sending out a tendril of itself. The street was slanted, with a drift of lamplight on the sidewalk, a raft of light so bright the lip of sidewalk cast a shadow, a pure boundary. In those days I was always in need of figures of speech, geometries, that would survive the transposition between languages. It is, for whatever reason, an arrangement of objects I think of even today when, able to reflect, I take stock which of the people from that period I keep up with and which—a sign of having managed my own life, unless it is a sign of nothing—I have left behind completely. Hugo had made up an air mattress and left, on a folded towel, the note: “Coffee in the fridge. If you don’t know how to use the Chemex call me.” I did what I could to get ready, feeling that I wanted to sleep well.

***

Jacqueline Feldman is a Delaney Fellow in the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her work has appeared most recently at StatORec.