I met him on a rainy summer night in Paris, the kind of night that’s made for kissing. Chris was English, with thick wavy black hair, warm eyes, and an accent that could melt butter in a freezer. By the end of our first evening together, he put his arms around me while we were waiting for a taxi and I turned around and kissed him. By the next day, we were officially “dating,” and we spent much of our time that summer staring into each other’s eyes and kissing on every street corner. It was the kind of passionate summer love where you go to the pub and ask for a dark booth in the back so you can wrap around each other and kiss until you are seeing stars. We gallivanted around Paris together nearly every day, when he wasn’t working of course.
Chris had an unusual job with unusual hours. He was an artist at a museum, but not the quiet-reverential-priceless-art kind of museum. He worked at the Museum of Horror and Torture. He was the artist who worked on the wax dummies, painting their eyes and lips sewn shut, or sculpting their faces into expressions of pain and terror as their wax fingernails were pulled out by some executioner. Aaarrrggghhh. The Museum of Horror and Torture was a pop-up museum debuting in 1990, and as I knew nothing about torture, I never asked him what exactly he was painting. But then there came the day when he invited me and my friends into see the exhibits, and let’s just say I’m still haunted. It was like passing a car crash: you don’t want to look but you can’t help it. Now you might think that Chris was a strange bird with a job like that, but he wasn’t. He was just a kind artist who happened to be working on that particular museum for a few months.
Chris liked to have a few pints every night after work, and honestly, if I spent my days creating torture scenes, I would probably need a hundred pints every evening. Back in 1990, I was a practicing Mormon, so I didn’t drink, but I still loved going to taverns for the people-watching. Throw in some steamy kissing and I’m a happy barfly. I loved hearing the stories of the other patrons, reading the poetry on the wall, the charm of the fat cat sitting on its own barstool at the bar like it was just about to order a whisky.
One night, I took Chris to my favorite haunt, La Caveau de la Huchette, in St. Michel. Ironically, the Caveau de la Huchette was once a medieval torture chamber back in the 1400’s, but in a recent century, it had been turned into a swing-dancing club. I shivered when I saw the metal hooks on the walls, and imagined how many screams those stone walls had heard over the centuries… that damn Museum of Torture had put images in my mind I couldn’t erase. But if anything can wash away pain and suffering, it’s music and dancing. The stone walls seemed to thump with the energy of the crowded room, with dancers rising up and down in one sweaty mass, occasionally separating when one couple started throwing each other into the air, and the entire crowd cheered and danced harder, bigger, brighter, like shooting stars that didn’t want their light to end.
But as we all know, all wonderful things must come to an end. After a few weeks of our passionate Parisian romance, Chris’s job ended and he went back to England. I kissed him goodbye but I wasn’t too sad, because I happened to be deeply involved with a new kind of torture, the kind of sweet torture that happens when you fall in love with a city. When I walked across the bridges in Paris at night, and stopped to watch the lights glimmer on the Seine, my heart ached with the beauty. I felt the same divine ache when I bit into a warm banana nutella crepe bought from the street vendor while watching children play with the sailboats in Luxembourg Park; or when I listened to poetry read aloud by raspy voices at midnight by candlelight in a bookshop across from Notre Dame, or when I ended up splashing in a fountain on a warm rainy night; the sweet torture of summertime in Paris.
