Doors

Her gesture is an answer to a question I never asked. It means back there, which I knew since they haven’t started putting the toilets in the windows of Parisian cafés. But I nod my thanks, push open the only door in the back of the dark room, seeming darker than it really is because I have come in out of the sunlight and, as always, I’m wearing my sunglasses, and find myself in a vestibule. To my right, behind the door I’m holding open, is a narrow unwelcoming door, to my left a wall, and straight ahead of me—the obvious direction—is another door with a sign on it in English. “Free Sex” it announces. Which door would you take?

I have nothing more in mind than peeing, but you never know, at least I never do, and I push the door open. There’s nothing to lose and besides if there’s no free sex, there will still be a urinal, and if there is free sex, you can’t beat the price, and I can add into the bargain that the woman who has been sitting outside at a table with me is a brand-new acquaintance who is proving to be anything but free, sexual, or even interesting, the three beers she has already swallowed having added nothing to her fluency or charm. I can’t be sure where she comes from, but her French can fairly be described as grotesque and her English could probably make the dogs bark in the street if she raised her voice.

As it turns out, there’s no sex, free or otherwise, or even a urinal on this side of the door. I’ve come to a dead end of sorts, with an iron grill to my left, a solid-looking locked door to my right, and a window mounted low in the wall ahead of me. Not promising, I turn around to open the door I’ve just come through. It is locked and so is the grill that leads, as far as I can see, into an ordinary looking Parisian courtyard, more decorated with the scruffy bicycles you see everywhere in Paris than with the pots of geraniums that seem to be reserved—or served up—for photographers taking pictures for the more tempting guidebooks. I knock on the door—nothing. I pound on the door—still nothing. I am two doors away, after all, from the back end of a dark café on a lovely day when the help as well as the customers want to be outside.

It is no consolation that I am not by any overwrought imagining the first man to be suckered by an offer of free sex or the first man who walked through a strange door without checking to see if it would lock itself behind him. The courtyard is silent. I stick my hand through the grill and wave it, thinking maybe someone is there, and call out, even trying au secours, the standard cry for help in extremis, that I think has never passed my lips before. I might as well be in the house of the deaf who hear no evil or distress signals either.

That leaves the window which swings out and leads into what looks like a dark corridor. I haul myself up head first, manage to turn slightly with my left hand on the sill and use my right hand to pull one leg and then the other through the window, and with silent gratitude for my remaining agility drop down more or less straight onto an old metal garbage can lying on its side, and hit the deck, landing on all fours, then roll over. The floor here is lower than the floor behind the window, something I decide not to remember since I doubt it will ever be handy again. Nothing torn, nothing broken, no blood, I get up and start down the corridor which is lighted by two very small and stupefyingly dirty windows. At the end of the corridor, past a few more retired poubelles, cast-off twig brooms, and other junk waiting patiently for time to turn them into artifacts, there is another door, which I do not take as a good sign. The doorknob turns in my hand, but the door does not open, no matter how hard I pull it. It just gives a couple of centimetres, and I think I know what that means and what it means is awful, I’m pretty sure.

It is. At least I learn it is after I kick out the bottom window pane of the door, reach around toward the jamb, and feel a closed padlock in a hasp. Bending to look through the missing glass, I see two things: another empty courtyard and the remains of the window I’ve just assaulted buckling outward—the other three panes and their mullions looking originally skimpy and contemporaneously rotten. Another kick and they are gone. Checking for any remaining shards so I don’t engrave this memory on my body—my brain will have to go it alone—I see everything looks good and manage to half step, half vault through the window and into the courtyard and the sunlight. The right side of my black shirt and black pants are now gray from the dust in the corridor when I fell, and I’m not sure I smell very good, but otherwise I’m out in the open and looking at more doors.

Three obviously lead to apartments, and I’m not about to break into one of them, hope no one is home, and sprint out the front door, not with today’s diseased rabbit’s foot in my pocket. But there is a fourth with modern plastic garbage cans lined up beside it. Technically, you would say it is locked, but if a window in this door happens by chance to be broken and someone can without any trouble and barely making a sound reach through the broken window and turn the button on the inside handle, you would also say technically it is unlocked, and so it is. I am where I thought I would be, at the bottom of the back stairs leading all the way up to the top of the house where les bonnes sleep at night or, these days, where people rent what used to be the maids’ rooms for several hundred euros a month, toilet down the hall, shower down one half flight on the landing, line up and take your turn. These stairs will go all the way up, but the main staircase, for the residents, probably does not. I have no choice. Up I go.

I am hoping that one of the apartments will be under construction, residents gone, workman coming and going, and indifferent to a newcomer. An open back door, I go in, and when someone asks if I’m the electrician, I say yes, Is this the Dupont job? And when they say No, it’s the Larivière job, I slap my head, and walk out the front door, so sorry, can’t remember anything these days. But no doors are open. At the top of the house, six long flights up—high ceilings are lovely until you have to walk up them—there is another corridor and, all the way down at the end of it, the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end: a hatch in the floor with a folded rope-ladder fastened to the wall just above it. Sometimes, even French fire marshals get it right. This is for emergencies, in case the back stairs catch fire. I pop the hatch, drop the rope ladder down, and just to be on the safe side, given my luck today, give it a good tug. It stays put, and I climb down the ladder to the top floor of the residents’ staircase and take the elevator down to street level, where I open the door, grin at the ease of it, and hold it for a woman with groceries in her arms who says merci and bonne journée.

Without thinking—my mind’s cheerfully on the reaction of the copropriétaires to the broken windows and the dangling rope ladder—I turn right as I come out onto the street, and right again at the corner, and there’s the café straight ahead in the middle of the block. The woman is gone, not surprising and not dismaying as far as I’m concerned, and after all I think I’ve been gone about half an hour, twenty minutes anyway. I wonder what she thought. I go inside. “Ah monsieur,” the lady at the cash register says when she sees me, “Madame vient de partir.” Just left? “Oui, trois minutes.” Really, only three minutes ago? I have no idea what she may have said when she left in her palsied French or spasming English, maybe something about my gastritis, poor dear, but la patronne has only café English and would not have got it anyway. She didn’t seem to miss me much and she did not pick up the check, which shows me she had two more beers and a sandwich.

You see, I explain to la patronne, I went through the door with the sign that said Free Sex—she giggles—and, and, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to tell her what happened. Anyway, I still really have to pee. I head for the back once again, and she gestures.

Merci, madame.

© Joseph Lestrange

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