We went to a lot of parties in January. And then again in November. Parties were, we guessed, what you’d call them. The parties always started and then grew, sadder, bigger, red-wine drunk, the drunk made sadder by the long strings of Christmas lights strung for ambiance in the badly decorated apartments. By the entries was always a line of all-white Adidas shoes, the ones everyone was wearing at the time. As more people arrived, the line of shoes would grow like all-white rabbits multiplying. No one we knew had ever seen rabbits multiply but we’d all seen videos of the shootings. Actual humans doing the opposite of multiplication. At the parties, the videos of the shootings would play on the televisions, muted, while George Brassens music played from the speakers. Everyone at those parties told stories about how close they’d been. How they got shut in just down the road, behind flimsy metal screens. How they’d heard the noises. The shots. Everyone we knew was so close to the shots. And everyone we knew loved to say so. Everyone we knew made sure we knew it. At one of those parties was the girl who’d been there. The one with a hole in her shoulder. The one with the best friend. We all knew her. She didn’t have to say where she’d been because we knew already. That party had started and gone immediately silent. That party was a bad party, really. No one was talking. Because that girl was there. And her best friend was dead. And so she had the better story.

…

The eight of them sat around a circle table, themselves taking on a circular shape, an imperfect ring hugging an unchanging guide—their table, in their bar—the geometry not far off from the old roundabout circling around outside the dirty plate glass windows. Inside the roundabout grew a dry beech tree three stories high. Inside the bar sat Rachel, Matthew, Jude and Léa, Marie, Eli, Pierre and Sarah. And outside the roundabout, Rue des Cascades and Rue Levert, Rue de la Mare and Rue des Envierges, Rue des Couronnes and last, la Mare’s other arm. Six concrete paths converging to form a traffic circle high up on the hills east of Paris.

It was late but still light thanks to the long Parisian summer with its blued-out evening silvers. Inside the bar it was dark, with the bar lights cutting on and off intermittently, a kind of twinkling to replace the night sky’s missing stars, a side effect of being connected by old extension cords that crisscrossed coat hooks bored into the ceiling. Their bar was a bric-a-brac bar, like so many bars in Paris used to be, with useless, hoarded trinkets lining the walls, a unique patron, and a broken toilet. At this particular bar, the hoarding of choice concerned giraffe statues, of which there must have been hundreds, but a collection about which the bar’s owner, Karim, would never speak nor seem to play any part in growing. Giraffes appeared, more every day, and Karim looked the other way. Instead, Karim was more often concerned with boasting about his bar’s storied history as a place for hiding, having apparently hidden Communards, Resistance moles, and other lesser-known revolutionaries. Now it hid these eight, who’d seen Karim open no fewer than three doors in the bar’s floor and walls that they had not been aware of before Karim first stepped through them.     

Jude and Pierre had been the first to find the bar, years ago, when they’d briefly lived together after university in the converted garage at the top of Belleville Park. The apartment was cold, sickeningly so, with a concrete floor laid over by unaffixed linoleum. They laughed at the shoddy front door made of corrugated iron giving onto a side alley clearly better attuned to the selling of drugs than to the living of life. But cold as it was, the toilet window hung over the bluff of the park like a sagging earlobe and the park overhung the flat expanse of the city like the most gorgeous dislocated shoulder, giving the toilet a clear view from left to right of the Pantheon, Notre Dame, Montparnasse, Pompidou, Tour Saint-Jacques, and, of course, the Eiffel. So Pierre and Jude took the apartment. And when the city was at its coldest, with a winter film of crystallized pollution hanging fuzzy over the capital as its fog, Jude and Pierre would stand together in the toilet, in agreement that their view was the most beautiful in the whole of Paris.  

The bar was a short walk from the apartment, down Rue des Envierges, and when Jude and Pierre passed it the first time, Jude peered through the windows and said it looked terrible. They went in. They called Eli, who found the bar an easy walk from his mother’s, up Rue des Couronnes. Quickly they were joined by Rachel and Marie, who came down Rue de la Mare from the Métro and said it hadn’t taken any time to get there, coming up the line eleven. No time at all, they said. And when they got the bill that first night they looked down at it, then up at Karim like he was either an angel or an imbecile, both maybe, but they didn’t argue. They all came back the next night, found the bar pleasantly empty and the price of the beers uncorrected. A month later, after meeting Léa in a lecture, Rachel brought her to the bar. Léa came from down the stairs on Rue Levert, her apartment conveniently just up in Télégraph. Her coming caught Jude off guard. Two months later, when Matthew moved to Paris, he took an apartment on Rue des Cascades to be close to Jude, the only person he knew in the city. The second he’d soon know would be Marie. And when Pierre brought Sarah to the bar on their first date, a day after he’d brought another girl to the bar on a different first date, Karim told Sarah it was nice to see her again, which confused Sarah and caused Karim, who quickly realized what he’d done, to always treat her very nicely. The bar on the roundabout was theirs for no better reasons than it was cheap and they each flowed easily toward it, turned easily in it. There were usually few other customers competing for space, except on the rare occasions when something shifted slightly in the Paris atmosphere and the bar became terribly crowded. In such cases, Karim made sure these eight were the first to be taken care of.

But on normal nights it was only these eight, give or take a lonely old drinker, and there was room in the bar to stand and turn and laugh and cry and argue and dance and throw oneself, for whatever reason, into the arms of any number of best friends to one’s right or left and thus begin turning together, or better yet, turning all at once.

On this particular evening Rachel sat, red and shifting, uncomfortable in a sunburn that was failing to turn. She was responsible, at least partially, for her pain. She was both sad and furious while the circle went on talking, turning. Always talking and turning. Always going on. Peugeots and Renaults and Citroëns went turning through the roundabout outside, their headlights beaming through the bar windows, stage-lighting their faces at haunting, unflattering angles.

But what did he say this time, Rachel, specifically?

Il est con.

Non, c’est un connard. 

Who cares what he actually said. He’s a piece of shit.

Mais, let her speak.

Rachel, what did he say?

The Paris night was full of the dull heat that came annually with a return to responsibility. Rachel could remember this weekend jammed up inside every year of her life. Twenty-five iterations of the same pre-rentrée weekend, the two days buffering good summer from hectic autumn. Rachel hated this weekend for the confusing energy it gave her friends, friends who changed or had been replaced throughout her life, but whose energy, on this particular weekend, was reliably consistent: expectant energy, solution energy, energy for arguing. Three days before, Rachel had been calm and alone, perched on a rocky outcropping in the Calanques outside Marseille, frustratingly pale but excited to go home, excited to see Maxime after their long week apart. Excited for Maxime to see her body perfectly browned. In the sun, she had felt herself getting hotter and hotter. Now, Rachel ran clammy fingers across her tender clavicle.

He said it was because of the job offer.

Comment ça?

What about the job offer?

The job in general.

Il est con.

Connard.

Bâtard.

Salopard. 

What the fuck does that even mean?

Male prostitute.

Male slut.

No, what does he mean, the job in general?

Matt had been thinking for weeks that the job would be a bad fit for Rachel. But he wasn’t about to say that out loud. The long hours, the pressure. Matt looked down, continuing across Rachel’s chest, still small, still perfectly shaped, but bubbling under the shame of the burn. He could imagine the sides of the bathing suit she’d been wearing pressing into her ribs, making divots. He could imagine the straps of the bathing suit having been pushed down, hanging lazy by her side. Then Matt thought of her suit bottoms and he grimaced. Matthew actually liked Maxime, though he’d never respected him. Now Matt respected Maxime even less for what he was giving up. Rachel was like Matt’s sister. With years of training, he’d convinced himself he saw her that way. Matt knew he should feel angry, protective. He told himself not to feel happy. He told himself not to stare at her chest the way he was starting to, again. Like he had when he’d first moved to Paris and Rachel had taken him places that she, a real Parisian, had thought important for him to see, empty places at the edges of the city, where they would sit and Rachel would talk to Matt about men not dissimilar to Maxime. Instead, Matt looked up, saw Marie watching him, and tried to move past it, out the windows, out to the roundabout with its single tree, the tree’s leaves crunchy and starting to fall. Two boys leaned against the tree, smoking and ashing dangerously into the leaves.

It’s because he’s jealous. It’s always the same with Maxime.

C’est pas ça.

No, that is it. That has always been it.

No it isn’t. It’s because I’ve been so…

I swear to God, if you finish that sentence I will murder. You first, and then him.

Jude loved when Léa got angry, but it worried him. Léa wasn’t drinking, so Jude wasn’t drinking either, and that meant the anger coming off Léa was total. He thought the anger probably wasn’t healthy for either of them. Or worth it. But still, the anger made the angles of Léa face that much stronger and the passion added a certain raspy treble to her voice. Maxime was such a weak catalyst for conversation, like so many new boys had been for certain members of the table. Fodder for gossip, animus through which the group could release its aggression, dolls they could rip limb from limb. Ultimately, Maxime was hot and he could make people laugh. Maybe the hottest and most funny boy Rachel had yet presented them. But he wasn’t anything more interesting than that. He was worthwhile for Jude, however, in the knock-on way Rachel’s romantic happiness had a direct influence on Léa’s happiness generally. Jude knew that Léa wanted to see herself mirrored in Rachel. That Léa not so secretly hoped Rachel would settle quickly, then come along with her. Jude thought back to his first days in the city, getting to know the both of them. Trying to decide who was smarter. Léa. And who was better looking. Léa. And then Jude thought about how, two weeks earlier, on a night when Léa had stayed home, a drunk Rachel had rested her head on Jude’s shoulder and asked if Jude could help get Léa off her back.

Léa put her hand on Jude’s back and let the violence of her frustration massage him instead. Maxime was a person who deformed the circle, by way of Rachel, changing its symmetry with the selfishness of his whims. With the susceptibility of his idiotic resolutions. Once, Maxime had explained to Léa how he was working on lucid dreaming in order to better research his thesis on Jung. Léa knew this ultimately amounted to Maxime demanding that Rachel sleep on the floor—of her own apartment—for weeks at a time. A demand Rachel agreed to, seemingly without protest. It didn’t satisfy Léa to learn through Rachel what Maxime was compensating for. Léa had told Jude and Jude had said he knew that the moment he met Maxime. But nonetheless, Maxime had the power to make Rachel a weak person Léa hated and Léa hated Maxime for that most of all. For the fragility he injected into her life. For the ugliness he’d brought upon the gorgeous summer they’d all just passed through: Léa’s last real summer. And Léa wanted a drink. A fuh-king drink. Léa turned to watch the bar, with Karim behind it, like always, washing glasses by hand, squat and palmy hands, with his thick, Mediterranean fingers, setting the glasses to drip-dry on the bar, the glasses and Karim’s hands slowly dripping beads of water down their sides like the beads of sweat running down Léa’s aching back.

He said he’s been thinking about it for a long time.

It’s only been three months since the last time.

That was different.

No it wasn’t different. Pas du tout, Rachel.

Marie thought back to three months ago, how beautiful Rachel had looked while she cried, how nice she’d felt to hold on to. Marie remembered the odd sort of sympathy she felt, tired sympathy, at seeing her oldest friend break apart again, and how Rachel’s emotion didn’t fit the season, the June. The heat of the night was more fitted to jealousy and Marie had been proud of herself not to have felt any. Rachel was one of the lucky few who got to experience the pains of surplus. She was allowed to sit in rooms, teary-eyed in balmy springs, thinking that, for everyone, failures made for greater opportunities. That breakups only predated gettings back together. Or better, gettings with better-looking replacements. Rachel was the sort of person who could take off her jeans with others watching, put on sweatpants, and find true relief. Marie hadn’t felt frustrated then because, at the time, at the start to the summer, she was herself finally content. She had been able to coo and stroke and say, Everything will be alright, and believe she was speaking the truth. But now that Marie’s summer was being bookended by someone else’s pain, a summer that had been filled by and dedicated secretly to overcoming her own, to bolstering her own defenses, Marie was now silently fuming. Rachel’s pain was nothing more than a kink in the predestined crises of life. Marie breathed sickly air into her hot lungs and thought about how no one at her office was good-looking; not any of them, the men or the women, the managers or the interns, and how even as ugly as they were, none of them ever seemed to pay her any extracurricular attention anyway.

He’s allowed to feel how he feels, but he’s not allowed to be cruel about it.

C’est ça le problème. La cruauté.

I’m sick of people not being able to make up their mind.

People need to stop fucking around, pretending they don’t know what they want.

At least he won’t be in Paris to figure it out.

Tu sais où il va aller?

Non.

Do you know how long he will be away for?

I don’t know.

Maxime owed Eli money. Eli thought of the money and tried to remember what Maxime had said it was for. Something related to Rachel. Something related to a gift. But Eli hadn’t heard of Rachel receiving anything. And Eli knew Maxime didn’t work enough to afford travel. So, if somehow Maxime had taken a trip out of town, like Rachel said he had, Eli understood how he’d most likely gotten there. Eli had always known Maxime would turn out to be the type of boy who teetered between being absolutely loved and totally reviled. Once, alone with Maxime in the asphyxiating smoking room of some dirty club, Eli had said to him, You’re not long for our world, to which Maxime winked and shrugged his lips, sort of like blowing Eli a kiss. Eli thought again about the money. He had always felt powerful in his generosity and tried not to worry over what it funded or what it damaged. He had unearned resources. He gave away his cigarettes and invested in intoxicants and then he doled out purposefully bad advice. Eli lavished others for a reason: to fund risk, to promote love and wilder stories. Rachel was a person—a smart and pretty, if fragile person—and she would have to feel the pain of her self-inflicted risk just like Eli and the rest of the circle had to, no matter how much better-looking or less equipped she was to handle it. But he did worry that maybe he had done something bad. Or at least contributed to it. And he especially didn’t like wondering if he had done something to make the group less good, and that he would not at least partially be paid back in some unquantifiable measurement of fun now that Maxime, who was constantly fun, would no longer be around. Then Eli thought of Rachel dancing, how she was always the one in their dance circle who made the group really go. Especially when it was hot and she would lose the limits of her corners, mouth corners and elbow corners going all over the place, making Eli feel looser and more forgetful. Eli thought back to how they had danced together in hot, high chambre de bonne apartments in high school, apartments of their friends’ hot older brothers, and how Rachel had showed Eli how to swing his arms in distraction, distractions in order to steal said brothers’ most prized little trinkets, no matter how worthless they might be. For the fun of it. For the rush. Eli was frustrated knowing they wouldn’t dance that evening, with Rachel feeling how she did. Or if they did dance, Rachel would probably go home before they went, like she did when she was sad, and going dancing wouldn’t be as worth it. Eli looked across the table at Rachel and tried to mime begging with his eyes. 

He’s going to be back in a couple months saying he was stupid and confused, or whatever he always says.

You can’t take him back again.

Just drop it. Really. Let her live.

Fine. How was Marseille? You got some color.

That’s an understatement.     

Mais meuf, tu as vachement brûlé.

My petite crème brûlée.

Shut up, Jude.

Have you been using cream? It looks awful.

Pierre and Sarah sat naked and sweating on their new back patio, looking at the photo of Rachel’s burn that Léa had sent to the group so Pierre and Sarah could see. They felt pity for Rachel. They alone understood why she had such a bad burn. And so it was their burden to help bear, both the shame in having designed a failed plan, and equally the skin cancer. They were only forty minutes away by train. They could go and console Rachel. But the thought of forty minutes felt like weeks in the heat. Sarah and Pierre looked at one another and knew without speaking that they would not be going. At almost the same moment, the couple thought of their own romance, namely the shame in its beginning. Pierre remembered how he’d purposefully reserved himself when he’d first met Sarah, when Sarah so clearly liked him. He remembered making himself feel apathetic in her presence, all while dreaming of candid romantic acts to win her, but to win with a guise of spontaneity. There were the nights Pierre went to visit Rachel, late, after his evenings spent with Sarah, to ask Rachel’s advice on molding the situation, making it bend before him. Rachel’s advice had been so savagely cunning. He remembered saying, Really? and Rachel saying, Trust me, and then Rachel looking out her window into the cour of her building like she could see in through all the rear windows of femininity. The image of Rachel on those nights lingered like a statue in his mind, and a statue on her bed, her bare legs tucked up and her body reclining, an odalisque in marble. And when Pierre asked Rachel a second time if she was sure, she responded, I’m only telling you this because I owe you, for I am like Cupid reviving Psyche, and you, Pierre, are the golden ass. And then she laughed. Pierre hated the memories, the thought of how his apathy, and Rachel’s advice, had almost convinced him his desires were childish, false, French; that he didn’t even like Sarah. The memories of Pierre’s youth scared him. But not nearly as much as how well Rachel’s advice had worked. Crispy, Pierre wrote in response to the photo. Well done, Sarah wrote. She set down her phone and put her hand on Pierre’s thigh, immediately feeling the thin layer of sweat between them. Sarah remembered how powerful her feelings for Pierre had been at first, how she would have burned anything up or down to be with him. And then she remembered the shame that intensity had made her feel. And then, how she’d purposefully reserved herself in response after asking Rachel out for a coffee in hopes of getting Rachel’s advice on Pierre, which Rachel had so freely given and Sarah had so attentively followed, even though at that time, the two hardly knew each other. Sarah remembered the torture she’d felt turning so cold toward Pierre, and the two weeks when she didn’t hear from him at all. How she’d asked Rachel out a second time, to a bar on the Canal, and Rachel had nearly laughed in her face until she saw how much Sarah was suffering, at which Rachel grabbed Sarah behind both her knees, spun her so they were face to face, leaned in close, Rachel’s lips wine-stained and quivering, and nearly shouted, Get a grip Sarah, it’s just a boy. And just like that, Sarah remembered the ridiculous acts of romance Pierre began performing. She felt shame for inciting them, but loved herself for having got the calculus right. They got there, Sarah and Pierre, though it took nearly two years together for their powers to balance, for their feelings to privately equalize, for them to trust one another. And so now they no longer asked Rachel for advice. Pierre and Sarah exhaled together. Then they looked to the blisters on Rachel’s body and felt pity, because they had one another, and they were sure.

And pity was exactly how Rachel imagined Pierre and Sarah would have felt had they been there. Had they not basically quit Paris two months prior. Had they not left her alone with the most difficult among them. Pierre’s, a more motherly pity, one of having been there and done that, in hindsight. Sarah’s, a nice fatherly pity, with an anger that didn’t proceed violence or embarrassing consequences. Rachel missed the two of them. She wanted their pity, their stand-in parenting. She wanted to curl up in their sureness and have them approve of her. Rachel remembered Pierre as a teenager, so precocious with emotions, so prodigious in emotional solutions. She could feel the power he gave her when, sitting inside her locked bedroom, years ago, he’d asked, Does this have anything to do with your parents? I know they act happy in public, but I’ve been wondering…and Rachel remembered crying and asking Pierre how he knew, because no one had ever noticed before. He didn’t answer the question, he just told her she deserved better, that she had the potential to become someone special, and that she should cut herself off from them as soon as possible. If she didn’t, she risked becoming them. She used to wonder what had happened to that Pierre, the Pierre who knew. Then, months later, she remembered Sarah saying to her, Pierre told me about all the stuff with your parents. He told me not to tell anyone, but I just want you to know I understand and I hate it. And if you need a place to stay, or to get away, I’ll help. I owe you. I have money. Rachel had told her then, so many years ago now, that everything would be alright. And it was. Rachel watched the window, out it and into its reflection, the circle’s traffic building up and relieving, changing and reordering, ordering more drinks and honking and always continuing to turn. She told herself to pay attention to her friends and not the window and definitely not to think of Maxime. A minute later, she told herself not to think about him again. A minute later she decided that thinking about Maxime was better than thinking about so many other things.

Outside, the spotlights of the Eiffel wove round through the low-hanging clouds while a wedding’s carcade of German autos entered the roundabout and began to spin through it. BMWs, Mercedes, and Audis, the husband Kabylian, the wife Kabylian, both hanging out windows, the cars honking leftward and the asphalt friction fighting the cars right, tires screeching, the drivers and the riders shouting into the air while a whole playlist of different songs played simultaneously. Some of the drinkers and smokers on bar terraces stood and began clapping and dancing, while those from the wedding party whose cars couldn’t fit in the roundabout parked, got out, and began dancing too, men and women pinching at the equal rations of pain in their foreheads, throwing the pain up into the sky, where the spotlights swept the pain away. Tongues in smiling mouths trilled joy like boiling water, the old beech tree breezing in the commotion and, caught up and bumping in between the dancers’ living hips, the ghosts of at least three Communards, awoken, confused but happy, dancing in a shimmering, heat-wave way. Then, as fast as the party started, it ended, the cars proceeding out down Rue des Cascades. To the north, in Belleville, some of the apartment lights turned on, glaring. And to the south, in Ménilmontant, some lights turned on and were then immediately turned off again.

---

Roundabout is available now from Relegation Books. You can order a copy here.

On Thursday 27th February Will be reading at minor impromptu, 15 Beautrellis, Paris.

Will Mountain Cox is the author of the books Roundabout and With Paris in Mind. His writing has been published in Lithub, Forever Magazine, Hobart, Spectra Poets, The Drunken Canal and Vol.1 Brooklyn. In 2013, he co-founded the Belleville Park Pages, which published more than 300 writers from 35 countries in three years and was described by Monocle as “the perfect, intelligent way to distribute new writing.” He holds degrees from Boston University and from Sciences Po in Paris, where he was named Graduate of Honor in 2017 for his research on the sociology of technology and urban life. Will was born in Portland, Oregon and lives in Paris, France. WEBSITE: https://www.willmountaincox.com/