Au bord de la Seine

The ex-girlfriend of your ex-girlfriend picks you up at the airport and drives like a maniac through the city, throwing sentences at you in rapid-fire French as she narrowly avoids several pedestrians. You’d thought yourself nearly fluent, but you’re only catching every other word. She does an appalling parking job on a side street and suddenly she’s pulling you by the hand through a gold-domed building packed with stores, escalator after escalator, until you reach the very top, gasping for air. “Avia will have what I’m having,” she tells the girl at the desk, who looks you up and down, measuring you with an expert eye. Thirty minutes later you’re back in the car, dressed like a doll in a store window. Your new Mary Janes pinch and chafe at your feet.

“Pia can be kind of … intense,” your ex told you when she’d given you her ex’s number. This had made you laugh. People call you intense, too, along with several other adjectives that you can’t wait to distance yourself from. (“Overconfident” is another.) Now, you see what she means. Pia shoves three more boxes from the store into your arms and tells you when to wear what. “You’ll like the sisters,” she says, examining your new outfit. “I think they’ll like you too.”

Do you even want to join her little circle? It’s flattering that they want you. That she wants you. Pia knows everybody who could make things happen. Look what she’s already done: the flight, the ride, the meetings, the clothes. You’re not even really sure what she sees in you, but you like that she thinks you have it. It’s a nice change from the last year and a half back home. Yes, you decide. Opportunities like these don’t come every day. Whatever she wants you to do, whoever she wants you to be, you’re in.

It’s late afternoon by the time you’re done getting settled. The ex-girlfriend of your ex-girlfriend takes you to see the golden sunlight slant across the open-air boats gliding through the river. Brown water laps at the edge where you sit, splashing little flecks onto your new dress. Apparently, there’s some sports event coming up and the mayor wants the Seine clean enough that people can swim in it. Pia says that all the locals decided to take a shit in the water that very day as an act of collective protest. You both study the waves with detached amusement. It does have the look of backed-up sewer waste.

“I wonder what it’s like in there,” Pia muses with an inscrutable look. Then, out of nowhere, she shoves you into the current.

She’s stronger than she looks. You catch her satisfied smile out the corner of your eye as you lose your balance. The rage you thought you’d mastered charges out from where it’s been lying in wait, taking control of your arm and making you grab her wrist. Both of you tumble all the way in, gasping and choking.

The water is revoltingly warm and smells even worse up close. You cough several times, kicking as hard as you can to stay afloat. Your arms and legs, already sore from carrying so many suitcases up five flights of stairs, aren’t moving nearly fast enough. Several feet away, Pia treads water gracefully, her gaze never leaving yours. In it is what almost appears to be … respect. She swims toward you, then past you, ignoring all the words you’re throwing in her direction. When she reaches the edge she lifts herself out of the water with ease — refusing the outstretched hands of several passers-by, who stare from her to you and back again — and walks away, leaving you in the water without a second glance.

There’s a box waiting for you at the door of your new apartment the following morning, gleaming brightly against the scuffed wooden floor and peeling paint. Inside is another dress, along with a gilt-edged card that requests your immediate presence at a building in the eighth arrondissement. You have at least two go-sees scheduled for the day, not to mention lunch with your agent. Skipping out will land you in trouble for sure. Yet you can’t help yourself. You’re in the dress and heading out of the door in minutes, your model’s book tucked under your arm as if you still plan on making those meetings.

Other words that people use to describe you: Calculating. Scheming. Opportunistic. Like you’re a storybook villain instead of a girl who simply knows what it’ll take to get her way. So what are you doing, ignoring your duties to crawl back to someone who pushed you into a river and abandoned you after dark on your first day in a new city? The Mary Janes, still wet from little your dip and bloody on the inside, squelch and dig into yesterday’s cuts with every step. You try to reason with yourself, to do the things you’re supposed to, the things that will continue to get you ahead. It’s no use. Your body seems to have its own agenda.

Throughout your life you’ve tried to make the right choices, the right decisions, because somewhere in the back of your mind you’ve always known that you would unravel someday. That you’d need to set up guardrails before that happened — the right friends, the right image, the right reputation. Things that would hide the fact that you’ve finally slipped over the deep end. You’d thought that Pia was the logical next alliance to forge. Now you see that she’ll be the one responsible for the unraveling.

It’s too late now to change a thing. You’re standing at the address, punching the code into the little keypad by the heavy wooden door. You’d made your decision, haven’t you? Whatever she wants you to do. Whoever she wants you to be. You’re all in.