Shay tries to be buoyed by that philosophy but now she wonders if it isn’t better to starve in a place with bad food, where the warm gusts of air and laughter escaping through restaurant doors on cold winter nights are scented with less delicious flavours and don’t remind her how long it has been since she’s been able to afford even a medium-rare bavette in Béarnaise sauce with frites and a glass of beer, under ten euros in most joints in her neighbourhood. And besides, those who found inspiration and the seeds of prosperity in hard times were usually iconoclastic geniuses. She isn’t sure any more she has even the spark to genius, that she can justify coming here. It had all been done, hadn’t it? Every inch of this city, every quirk of the culture, had been covered long before she arrived, right down to the joys of the classic French pissoir which Henry Miller spoke about with such eloquence and affection. Most of them were gone now, the ornately decorated circular tin urinals, little green kiosks, open at the top and bottom so you could see the legs and heads of those using them, exchange a friendly wave or have a neighbourly chat. It would be hard to update that – the new version was an oblong booth made of corrugated fibreglass in dull beige or brown. It cost 40 cents to use it, and you had a limited amount of time in the closed, modular bathroom before it flushed itself with water and cleaning chemicals. She’d heard about someone who lingered too long in one and drowned.
During this time, she develops a terror that this is how she’ll die, not in a public toilet per se, but in some ironic, comic or embarrassing way, which will stick in people’s minds so everything she has done before will be blotted out by it. Instead of ‘award-winning graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and performance artist Shay Rutherford dies’ or even, ‘artist of some renown in certain circles dies during performance’, she’ll be remembered as the woman killed by the cork of the bottle of champagne she was opening to celebrate some long-awaited good news, or run over by a truck full of monkeys bound for the zoo, the driver later revealed to be a long-lost cousin, or by a car full of clowns in civilian clothes on their way to a wedding, or simply remembered as the woman killed while walking down the street by the last Titanic survivor who falls out of a window while watering her peacock tulips and, miraculously, survives yet again thanks to Shay’s broken body cushioning her fall.
Aware of her awesome ability to make her fears come true, she gets the idea that she should control her own death by killing herself. At this point, she is without hope, and this plan gives her a certain discipline and purpose. A project. She used to be much better at making her dreams come true – for example, her dream of living one day in Paris brought her to Paris. Now the fears rule, hard as she tries to keep them at bay. All the mistakes, the triumphs, have taught her nothing useful. She has experience now, and is hidebound by it, unable to move in any direction, lacking the same energy and daring she once had to challenge the maze, too prone to analysis – ‘what worked, what didn’t work, how did I do it before’, at the cost of all spontaneity. If experience was wisdom, it was greatly overrated.
The suicide note is the first thing that grabs her in ages, and she writes the initial draft in a frenzy, feeling unshackled from her fears, temporarily. But unfortunately, the fears kick in again as she edits and she can’t stop rewriting the note. Is she being too honest or too obtuse, too easy on herself or too hard? On others? Will people understand why she’d rather die than admit failure and go home? Will they lament the waste of a young talent, or her wasting their time and that of other people by trying to be an artist all these years? After all, what did she have to show for all these years in school and in Paris except a couple of lit mag publications and one article on French words that look like English words but mean completely different things that was printed on page seventeen of a free newspaper for Anglos? She imagines her death notices will read like her rejection slips: ‘over-dramatic’, ‘not much there to interest us’, ‘belaboured ending’.
Soon, she begins fictionalising here and there to make it a better read, and before long, the note isn’t about her any more, but about a man named Harry Waller, who sits down one day and loads a gun with bullets, placing it carefully by the side of a typewriter where he proceeds to write his farewell – the story of a life gone wrong, the love and opportunities lost, the heartbreak that he feels physically, a genuine pain in his heart whenever he thinks of his sad, bad and mad moments, as if these regrets reside in his heart like shards of glass. As he approaches the end of his ten-page suicide note, he suffers a sudden coronary, and instinctively picks up the phone and calls 911. Alas, by the time paramedics arrive, he is dead.
Afterwards, she reads it and decides it is good, not just good but redemptively good. Faith is restored. She spends precious euros at an internet café emailing it to magazines who take electronic submissions and on postage sending it to those that do not. Then she waits, living on street crêpes and water and the certainty that she has turned a corner and the future is wide open. Not only is it a great short story, she thinks, but it would make a great independent film, the note framing Harry Waller’s wild woolly life as an international oil rig salesman, which was much funnier and more interesting than her life.
But it turns out the editors don’t agree it is great, or even agree with each other about why it is not. ‘Too long’, says one. ‘Too short and undeveloped’, says another. ‘Very funny but not right for us’. ’Failed to see the humour’, and so on.
That day she receives the last rejection slip for ’A Short Story about Hope’. She hasn’t eaten in two and a half days and is more than two months behind on the rent, phone and EDF. The man who runs the Manhattan School for Business English in Paris, where she was working black, refuses to pay her the 1,500 euros he owes her. He knows that she can’t do anything about it without revealing her sans papiers status and getting kicked out of France. She wasn’t angry when he fired her – she hated the job and the students, who seemed to think she could do all the work in getting them to understand English, pumping them full of useful English words and phrases while they did nothing, sitting by slack-jawed and dull-eyed like force-fed geese. But she is angry that he won’t pay her what she is owed.
Having been through the gamut of ‘black’ jobs, off the books, which are few, badly paid and usually menial, there remains prostitution and begging – never! – and thievery, which she considers. Back in college, she used to pick pockets as a party trick. There’d be some meaty and easy pickings in some of the tourist areas, like place du Tertre where the crowds jostle with sidewalk artists, who advertise their skills with portraits of celebrities that are at the same time more flattering and less interesting than the originals. But she could only do it if she knew her victim was a greedy despoiler of planet Earth and its people, and that would require an unrealistic amount of research. Otherwise, she was liable to pick someone who looked the part, some big-spending German with a big belly, and worry later he was just an innocent tourist, maybe here for a last vacation before he begins the cancer surgery to remove the watermelon-sized tumour in his stomach. So thievery is out. There are no options other than starve in Paris or find her way back to her home town in Wisconsin to work in the cheese-flavoured foods factory or the Walmart, like her sister Tiff who has sacrificed everything to stay home to look after her mother, who is suffering from some mysterious undiagnosed ailment that keeps her in bed most of the day watching game shows and screaming at CNN.