Simon Van Booy - The Secret Lives of People in Love

This morning I woke up and was fifteen years old. Each year is like putting a new coat over all the old ones. Sometimes I reach into the pockets of my childhood and pull things out.

When Michel gets home from his shop he said we are going out to celebratemaybe to a movie or the McDonalds on boulevard Voltaire. Michel is not my real father. He grew up in Paris and did a spell in prison. I think he was used to being alone, but weve lived together so long now, Im not sure he could survive without me.

We live in Paris, and I think I was born here, but I may never know for sure. Everyone thinks Im Chinese, and I look Chinese, but Michel says Im more French than bread.

It is the afternoon of my birthday, but still the morning of my life. I am walking on the Pont des Arts. It is a small wooden bridge, and Americans sit in colorful knots drinking wine. Even though Im only fifteen and have not had a girlfriend as such, I can tell who is in love with who when I look at people.

A woman in a wheelchair is being pushed across the bridge by her husband. They are in love. Only the back wheels move across each plank. He tilts the chair toward him as though his body is drinking from hers. I wish he could see her face. She clings to a small cloud of tissue. They look Eastern European. I can tell this because they are well dressed but their clothes are years out of style. Id like to think this is their first time in Paris. I can imagine him later on, straining to lift her from the chair in their gray hotel room with its withering curtains swollen by wind. I can picture her in his arms. He will set her in the bed as though it were a slow river.

A filthy homeless man is squatting with the American tourists and telling jokes in broken English. He is not looking at the girls shaved legs but at the unfinished bottle of wine and sullen wedge of cheese. The Americans seem good-natured and pretend to laugh; I suppose the key to a good life is to gently overlook the truth and hope that at any moment we can all be reborn.

The Pont des Arts is wooden, and if you look through the slats, you can see boats passing beneath. Sometimes small bolts of lightning shoot from the boats as tourists take pictures of one another, and sometimes they just aim the cameras at nothing in particular and shootI like these kinds of photographs best, not that I have a camerabut if I did, I would randomly take pictures of nothing in particular. How else could you record life as it happens.

Michel works in a shop on the place Pigalle. Outside the shop is a flashing arrow with the word Sexy in red neon. Michel has had the shop since I can remember. I am forbidden to visit him there, though sometimes I watch him at his desk from the street corner. He likes to read a poet called Giorgio Caproni, who is dead, but Michel says that his words are like little birds that follow him around and sing in his ear.

If you saw Michel, you might cross the street because he has a deep scar that runs from his mouth all the way across his cheek. He told me he got it wrestling crocodiles in Mississippi, but Im fifteen now and just humor him.

He has a friend called Lon, who sometimes stays the night with us because if he drinks too much, his wife wont let him into the apartmentthough he always makes an effort to explain how his wife has beautiful dreams and that he doesnt want to wake her with his clumsiness. One night, while Michel was in the bathroom, Lon told me how Michels face came to be scarred.

Before you lived with Michel, he said breathlessly, there was a terrible fight outside his shop. Naturally Michel rushed outside and tried to break it up. He paused and slid a small bottle of brandy from his shirt pocket. We each took a sip, then he pulled my ear through the brandy fumes to his mouth. He was trying to save a young prostitute from being beaten, but the police arrived too late and then the idiots arrested Michelshe choked to her death on her own But then we heard Michels footsteps in the hallway and the words disappeared forever, lost in the wilderness of a drunk.

Michel would throttle Lon if he knew that hed told me this much, because he tries to pretend that I dont know anything and that when I get into the Sorbonne, which is the oldest university in Paris, Ill leave this life behind and visit him only at Christmas with gifts purchased at the finest stores on avenue Montaigne and Champs-lyses. You dont even have to wrap them, Michel once marveled. The girls are happy to do it right there in the shop.

I like to stroll around Notre-Dame, which is on its own private island. I like to see tourists marvel at the curling beauty of the stone frame. It reminds me of a wedding cake that is too beautiful to eatthough perpetually hungry pigeons know the truth, because hundreds of them drip from the dirty white ledges, pecking at the marble with their brittle beaks.

Sometimes tourists go in and pray for things. When I was very young, Michel used to kneel at my bedside when he thought I was asleep. I would hear him praying to God on my behalf. He referred to me as peanut, so Im not sure if God knew who he was talking aboutbut if there is a God, then he probably knows everything and that my real name is not peanut.

After smoking on the steps of Notre-Dame and making eyes at an Italian girl posing for her boyfriend, I am now in the Jardin des Plantes. Michel and I have been coming here on Sunday since I can remember. Once I fell asleep on the grass and Michel filled my pockets with flowers. Today I am fifteen and Im taking stock of my life. Even though I want to go to university and eventually buy Michel a red convertible, when I think of those Sundays in the Jardin des Plantes, I want to do things for people they will never forget. Maybe thats the best I can do in life. It is cloudy, but flowers have burst open.

Its amazing how they contain all that color within those thin, withering segments.

Michels shop sells videos and now DVDs of mostly naked women having sex with all and sundry. Michel said that sex is sometimes different from love, and he never brings anything home; he said that what happens on the Pigalle, stays on the Pigalle. Sometimes when I watch him from the street, prostitutes walk by and ask me if Im okay. I tell them I have a friend in the industry, and they laugh and offer me cigarettes. Im friends with one prostitute in particular, her name is Sandrine and she says she is old enough to be my grandmother. She wears a shiny plastic skirt and very little on top. I cant stand in the doorway with her because its bad for business. The skin on her legs is like leather, but she is very down-to-earth. She knows Michel and told me that he was once in love with one of the girls, but that nothing ever came of it. I tried to get the name of the girl when I was twelve, hoping that I could bring them together, but Sandrine took my head in her hands and very quietly told me that the girl was dead and thats the end.

I would like to know more about this girl because Michel has never had a girlfriend, so she must have been something special. Sandrine sometimes buys me a book and leaves it with one of the other girls if shes working. The last one she gave me was called The Man Who Planted Hope and Grew Happiness .

On this cloudy afternoon of my fifteenth birthday, I can see Michel sitting at the counter reading. If he knew I was here, he would be angry and express it by not talking to me for a day or so. It would put him in no mood to go out tonight, birthday or no birthday. I watch from within a crowd of shadows. Michel is reading. In Michels books of Capronis poetry, he has written his own little poems in the margins. Once, in a foolish moment, I opened one of his books and began to read one; he snatched the book from me and it ripped. We were both very upset.

He told me that his poems were not meant for methat they were little flocks of birds intended to keep the other birds company. When I asked him who the poems were for, his eye pushed out a solitary tear that was rerouted by his scar.