By Linda Laino

During her first month in the “City of Light”, all Helene could do was pick at her fingers and notice her waist expand with the daily croissants she devoured like medicine. If she stopped eating Parisian pastries, she would cry. And never stop. Like if she allowed it once, it would happen forever.

She told friends she was going to Paris to paint, but mostly, she went there to hide. She and Oliver had always planned on a trip together to satisfy some latent longing for an artistic mecca, but in her current state, this most beautiful city may as well have been some godforsaken corner of the world. At least it wasn’t New York, where Oliver’s young perfect body had been splattered on 7th Avenue, his bike crushed like a beer can. 

“Oliver’s dead.”

Luke had dropped those two words like cinder blocks at Helene’s door, delivering the news trembling and shaken. The brothers had been cycling partners. Practically pros with all the right protection.

“He sailed through the red light like he was crossing a finish line.” 

Luke crumbled under the weight of Oliver’s carelessness. He haunted Helene with the bloody details. She recalled a terrifying moment last year with Oliver behind the wheel, not reading the stoplight as red. Soon after the funeral, she started to make monochromatic paintings to try and drain herself of the color.

Helene’s friend Suzanne had put her in touch with a painter who rented his 5th arrondissement flat and small studio when he traveled. Her artist friends told her this was a lucky windfall, a new start. They would all be sorely disappointed in her failure to rally. Instead, she wandered the city making idle lists of things she’d like to set on fire. 

Riding the metro one day, a gangly man wearing a buttery leather coat sat down next to her and opened a book with a French title. He had a stack of them under the one he was reading. There were tabs of color-coded paper in between the wrinkled pages, and their spines were splintered and frayed. After a few minutes of reading, he marked his page, dropped the book into his lap, and turned towards Helene.

“That green you’re wearing suits you,” he said, in his lightly accented English.

The comment startled her. Oliver could never distinguish red from green. Like the cashmere scarf she was currently wearing. It annoyed her when he couldn’t make sense of the color in her paintings.

While she thought the man was harmless, she simply wasn’t in the mood to engage. When she could only manage a polite smile, he turned back to his book.

“I apologize if I disturbed you.”

“Not at all.” 

Helene shifted in her seat, getting a whiff of bad breath. He was as disheveled as his book spines, and his fingers turning the pages were ink-stained and stubby. Oliver’s hands had been dark and smooth with long, musical fingers. She loved the way he lit a cigarette, cupping the blue flame with matinee idol flair.

“You have the most beautiful hands,” she’d told him, as he strummed the guitar on her couch soon after they’d met. He had a penchant for ballads, Neil Young and Bob Dylan.

“I want my hands as close to you as possible,” he whispered, sliding one under her skirt.

The train jerked and jostled Helene out of being aroused by a dead man, and she let out the air she was constantly holding these days. She glanced over at her seatmate’s stack of books and tried to sound friendlier than before.

“So, are you a writer or something?” 

He stopped reading and marked his page once again, but ignored her question.“You are American, oui?

“Yes.”

“This is your first time in Paris, oui?”

“Yes.”

“You are very sad, oui?

Helene slumped against her seat, hoping to be drunk soon. Her insides melted like lard at being seen so raw. Something caught her throat, and she was afraid she might start to sob right there on the train, but she was nothing if not a stoic mourner. The last thing she wanted was to bemoan Oliver’s death to a stranger, especially one who smelled like he’d been digging potatoes. 

As the train barreled into the station at Place Monge, apropos of nothing, the man said, “You should live in the forest,” as if this were her solution. He lowered his glasses toward her for a split second, then gathered his tattered books and was gone. Helene watched him get off the train with derision. Thanks for the cryptic message and bad breath. She slouched further into the world out the window, and thought about green. 

How could anyone go through life not being able to see its beauty? It was always the first color she chose for a new painting. She tried to imagine seeing Oliver’s mud-colored world. It certainly fit her current mood.  What if you couldn’t see colors at all? Like being trapped in a film noir, she imagined. Only she didn’t want to imagine. She would never survive in black and white. She would need at least green and red, the colors of life and death. What was the color of loss? Deeply blue like Oliver’s matchstick flame? 

She blew through the metro’s blur of gray underground cement, glimpsing her own film noir. Leaning back, she closed her eyes and daydreamed herself staking a claim through a tall stand of oaks in the Black Forest as the metro man had advised. Every few yards, smeared on a tree was a small greasy patch. Compliments bleeding into each other. Paint or blood, red or green, she was unsure.
Back in New York, Helene lined up the stack of red paintings, glowing like a pyre of grief against the studio wall. She imagined them licked by flames, then uncapped a large tube of Forest Green and, tipping a brush, put her faith once again in the color of life.