Day 179: Le Hang Over

Paris, Day 8. In France, everything is tiny. Little apartments. Little restaurant tables. Little cars. And teeny tiny wine glasses. As a woman of low alcohol tolerance, I have a system for my wine drinking in North America. It goes: One, Two, DONE. But that doesn't work here. Because the little wine glasses only fit about three sips to begin with and I can't count higher than ten.

So it's quite possible I had a hundred glasses of wine last night at Maud's open house.

"How many people are coming tonight?" I asked Maud when I arrived.

"Maybe ten, maybe fifteen," she said. "I put it out like a bottle in the sea."

Maud has a delicious way of speaking. Her accent is very thick and most of what she says is in metaphor.

She also sells secrets. Elegantly writing something she's never told anyone on a piece of paper, tying it with gold thread and selling it to a stranger. She says she might write a novel, just of secrets. "It's perfume from my life," she says.

I pull out my notebook and write down what she says. "You are a spy," she tells me. I don't contradict her.

When the others start arriving, the English stops completely. For an hour, I sit in silence letting the language and the cigarette smoke wash over me. I drink. And watch the people in the room.

Across from me sits Mélanie, an actress I met last time I was in Paris. Then, she had just broken up with a boyfriend and said she'd like to try a woman next. Now it appears she got her wish. She shares a seat with her lover, a stunning, older woman with a dragon tattoo winding down her arm. Mélanie is dressed like she just walked off the set of Flashdance.

Beside me is Esmeralda, the woman who spoke only John Wayne lines to me last time.

"Esmeralda is a bit of a dandy," a girl named Michelle would tell me later. "She has a persona...it's quite powerful. You should dance with her. Then you'll see."

Esmeralda is seldom seen without Gilles, a brooding straight man, who works for a poker magazine and travels to casinos all over the world. He sits in the corner, saying little for most of the night. He is the first to leave.

After he goes, the lights go off and the music gets louder. Mélanie and her girlfriend begin kissing passionately and then get up to leave. Someone bring out a riding crop and an S&M paddle and suddenly everyone is getting spanked.

I'm already drunk off the bad champagne and red wine when Michelle pours me a glass of thick, sweet white. The too-sweet wine mixes suddenly with five hours swimming through the blue haze of ten chain-smoking Parisians in a 200-square-foot apartment and sends me careening me over the edge. I say my goodbyes and stagger out into the piss-scented air of the street.