Concorde
(a novella excerpt)

Knew I was pregnant the morning after the Frenchman fucked me. Science says I’m delusional, but I knew, sixty thousand feet in the air. Screaming through the black. Around the fringe of planetary gravity, where the earth’s grip is weak and from the windows the horizon curves away from you in the arch of a wrist. The fetus spoke to me, a whisper from the dark, and it said Hello, world.

The Frenchman could afford my ticket but not the scandal our affair would cause. Concorde seats cost thirteen thousand dollars round trip that year. They served fresh baked pains au chocolat, springy dewy cinnamon rolls, ham and cheese croissants, espressos, chicory drip coffee, poached eggs benedict and florentine. There was sliced tropical fruit, a color palette of modern geometry, pineapple arcs, dragonfruit discs, papaya splayed like a deck of cards with lime sour cream, a mango coulis feather spooned on the plate, raw pink coconut water in a shot glass. An hour later they served lobster and caviar canapes. They poured Dom Perignon. Nobody knew my man because he was in business and his business was not to be known to other people in the same business. There were celebrities on the flight, some film stars and royalty, who I didn’t know, but the Frenchman pointed them out, from behind his whisky or his cigarette. You could always smoke on the Concorde. Cough cough. Better keep me away from that shit.

I couldn’t ask the Frenchman to stop smoking.  I knew women are trained, all our lives, to doubt, all of us doubting, from things we know so deeply our blood rings with them to things easily proven like bus schedules and ticket dates, but I also knew I was crazy and hysterical and nobody would believe me. If I said this, that I knew I was pregnant, nobody in this scientific marvel tearing a rip in the sky heralding the new age would believe me. I didn’t believe me. But the fetus said, Your belly is warm.

I asked for two pains au chocolat and after I took a bite of the first one I asked for some cream, then dipped them in the cream and licked cream off my fingers, and the Frenchman looked at me with this thing on his face taking over his eyes and the furrows at the corner of his lips, and when I got up he followed me to the bathroom to tell me he wanted to piss in my mouth.

The Frenchman isn’t important. I was twelve when he fucked me and made you.

I sat down again in the leather aisle seat and he talked and smoked and I picked at my wool sweater. I pulled wisps of wool and pilled it between my fingertips. When I looked down the Frenchman would sometimes tell me to look up again at the big black and yellow digital readouts around the cabin telling us how fast we were going and how high we were. In my bag was a book I was reading for school, Stuart Little. In my bag was another book the Frenchman bought me, Le Rouge et Le Noir. My dad thought I was on a fashion shoot in Denver and I had just seen Paris, for real, Paris, where the Frenchman bought me a diamond tennis bracelet, paid cash in a shop on the Champs Élysées, and fucked me from behind at the cemetery in Montmartre, scraping my elbows on a gravestone with soupy, faded letters. It was gray and cold, raining a little, and his thighs were hot and rough with hair against the smooth chill of my ass. I smoked two of his Gauloises leaning against Stendhal’s tomb. We drank the thick hot chocolate Paris is famous for, with the texture of bisque. I ordered bittersweet. He ordered milk. He took me to a parfumier and tried to pick out a young, floral scent for me but it was too sugary, too sour. I wanted one with dark, rich, old ingredients: cardamom, sandalwood, dried roses, oakmoss, oud.

I wore the diamond tennis bracelet all through Paris and on the Concorde but before I got home hid it inside the zippered pouch with my passport and the pads my dad never acknowledged except to buy me more pads every three months. I got my period at ten years old and none of the kids in my class or my teachers knew. He wouldn’t find the Stendhal either. He was fundamentally incurious about who I was and what I liked. My growing personhood made him feel older, so he distanced himself from it. Now he would be a grandfather. All because you couldn’t say no, slut.

I liked caviar even though at home I still ate Kid Kuisines two nights a week. But on the Concorde I ate four or five lobster and Almas Beluga canapes. I had complicated tastes because the Frenchman had dressed me up and tied me up and hit me and burned me with the ends of cigarettes and mixed his semen with champagne and got me drunk on it. Grief matures the brain. Over the Frenchman’s shoulder the horizon of the world glowed robin’s egg blue under the black velvet of the void. Later I would sometimes ask boyfriends to choke me as I came. Even later I’d ask them to call me little girl. I’d cut the backs of my hands and lick the blood off. 

The Frenchman was talking about German expressionist movies I should see. He offered me a cigarette then took it back before I could accept. He was worried about people seeing his offer.

I had already seen Metropolis because of my father. We sat in the converted attic with the wood stove burning and watched movies my father liked. He would leave if I chose the movies, so he chose them.

The Frenchman’s smile was softest when I forgot everything and wound myself up in whatever I was saying, and he would treat me delicately so the bubble of my excitement wouldn’t pop. It was something he did, but which nobody who fucked me since has done. So when I lost myself talking about Metropolis, one of the few movies my dad chose which I also liked, when the stewardess came past us and the Frenchman interrupted me gently to order more whisky, I stopped talking. It left embarrassment behind, a bad smell. I want sparkling water and lemon. No calories. You don’t need the extra calories. I’ll grow you plenty. I ordered and drank it for you but the carbonation was harsh like sponge pads on my tongue. I didn’t keep talking about Metropolis.

I was twenty pages into the English translation of Le Rouge et Le Noir and I liked reading it in front of the Frenchman because I could read it without skipping any words or putting it back down or asking him what a word meant. I don’t know if he expected me to read that way, pretending to be an adult, or if he liked it when I did, but he stopped looking at me and opened his briefcase and took out a plush leather folder with some papers and a yellow legal pad ruled in blue with a red margin, and a thick shiny pen. He folded the leather cover behind the yellow legal pad and wrote notes in English. I didn’t know what language the papers were in. They might have been in French which I couldn’t read then.

Behind us a minor princess was complaining. She was in her thirties, or forties, but I don’t remember which because I couldn’t tell the difference until I got older. She couldn’t find any men interested in dating her, only commoners were interested, and she couldn’t marry a commoner, they’re all gold diggers or power hungry, every one, only interested in her for her family, being a royal, you know, they all think they can become a king if they marry me. I looked between the seats and she was twisting her ring around her finger. She raised her hand out of sight, I think to run her fingers through her hair, and then dropped her hand back into her other hand, to resume twisting the ring. 

What does your dad do? He was a tenured Classics professor at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. He’d grown away from Classics by the time I was born, even though that was his expertise, and now at home the huge volumes he read and wrote to build his career were on the high shelves of his office bookcases and dust had settled on the top edge of their pages. When he was a child he played with rubber dinosaurs. When I was twelve my father was interested in Modernism. He seemed to progress slowly through history as he aged.

My father was cursed to never be able to think of a clever cartoon caption for The New Yorker, despite reading it every week for decades. He uncapped his pen and for twenty minutes a week hovered the tip over the caption contest line. It never fell. This was his life’s biggest disappointment. Surely he was intellectual enough to overcome this, he thought. 

I met the Frenchman in New York. He was at my catwalk debut, in the second row, when I first walked for a fashion house. I wasn’t the star of the show. That was Frances, a few months older, taller, with colt legs and a sweet pout to the lip. I dated her for a few weeks after we did a spread in Vogue together for a different fashion house, before I quit to finish highschool and she went on to catalog modeling. By then we were too old for both the designer and the Frenchman. 

The designer made clothes for adults, but only showed the clothes on children. He never sold the clothes in children’s sizes, and never advertised the clothes on adults. He was the first to do it that way, which was very exciting in the fashion world, and the Frenchman was so impressed he promised financial backing for the designer’s next venture, into shoes and haberdashery, and so the designer invited him to all the shoots after that. One time I ran a few steps from the craft services cart to the tables set up near it, and ate apple slices with sugar and fat free lite fruit dip, quickly, in makeup, waiting for a call to set from the photographer. My lips were already done so I skinned them away from my teeth so they wouldn’t touch the apple and smudge. I drank my Diet Coke through a straw. The Frenchman was in a chair nearby. That’s when he invited me to Paris. Maybe it was the way I bared my baby teeth. My adult set was dormant, bone bulbs still rooting in my jaw, not ready to sprout. A few days later the designer urged me to go to Paris, with a sentence that started with by the way. By the way, he said, Paris is lovely this time of year and you should go.

I wasn’t reading the Stendhal anymore. I turned a page of it, but the electric blue outside, not air anymore, the liminal band between something and nothing, or something drawn out thin, right there outside, it was nothing I could breathe, lungs designed for the rich gel the planet holds jealously close. I turned the next page and through the paper saw a crack form in the window of the Concorde, spiraling through the glass, plucking the window out of the plane, the outside sucking me through the empty frame like being pulled through a straw, and would I for a short time feel what this blue outside is like on the skin, taste it as I suffocate? Maybe it tastes like wild berry punch. It tastes like blood. Your lungs swell and burst. Like a deepwater fish brought up to shore. And how do you know? You’ve never even lived. You’re two cells dividing furiously. 

Pressure, said the fetus. Too little pressure. You are compact and heavy. Your body burns with the effort of movement. What sort of billowing, expansive life could live up here? Sieving oxygen molecules from the void like a baleen whale. 

What do you know? 

I know what it’s like to float. So did you, for a time.

I looked up. The window was intact. The princess was sniffling into her hands. I had, in turning them, missed ten pages of the Stendhal. The Frenchman was sleeping on his jacket, a well muscled shoulder, a strong jaw, a chiseled ear, his face obscured by sharp trimmed salt and pepper hair. His beauty worked its way into the patterns of my later life. He didn’t have much time to sleep until the plane began its descent. He paid ten times the price for a shorter flight, only to resent it for not being longer, gruff on the jetway, yawning at baggage check.

I don’t think the less said about the Frenchman the better. But what I needed to say about him, I’ve said.