If anyone gets up to sleep in the other room, someone has to go with them. No one sleeps alone, okay? Judy declares.
Okay, I say, touched.
Her screams during sex were so intense, like she was getting murdered, but then they opened up into a tornado of laughter at the end, her phenomenal mouth stretched to the ceiling, where a couple of American dollar bills are taped with, $1,000,000.000 written on them in Sharpie. Wendy must have seen The Secret.
We fall asleep, or rather the French people do, because all three of them start snoring. Or maybe it was just Judy, she snores loud as a bed full of recently fucked drunks on MDMA. When Antoine gets up and leaves the bed I take note, but can’t bring myself to chase after him. Partly I’m paralyzed by some melatonin I’d taken earlier, partly I feel shy, like maybe he doesn’t want me to follow him. Maybe he wants to be alone in his MDMA haze. Eventually Killer goes with him, and I fall asleep and dream that the four of us are getting mani-pedis in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, all laid out on the sidewalk on towels, like we’re at the beach. Then I dream I’m in a grand hotel introducing my mother to Killer and Antoine and she keeps calling them ‘she’ and I’m so frustrated with her because I just got out of an eight-year relationship with a trans guy so it’s not like she doesn’t know about trans guys. Why is she being so dense? In my half-awake state I ponder Killer and Antoine and the awful medical binders they wear to smooth their chests, how it hurt them to climb the seven stories to Wendy’s apartment. I hate that there is a three-year wait in Paris for trans guys to get their top surgery, and then they are sent to contemptuous doctors who butcher them. Judy tells me of a trans guy who just had his top done and was flashing his new pecs at everyone for approval. Amazing! everyone cheered. What could we say? He’ll have that body for the rest of his life! Judy said sadly. His chest was a mess. Killer is attempting to save the thousands of dollars required for a pilgrimage to San Francisco to have his surgery done by the legendary Dr, Brownstein, artisan of the near-perfect trans male torso. I wonder how long it will take Killer, who is essentially a social worker, working with developmentally disabled senior citizens, to save up enough to get rid of the binder that’s crushing his body. I hate that trans surgeries aren’t recognized as urgent and necessary, not covered by insurance in the United States and managed so ignorantly here in France, whose health care system I’d so admired in Sicko.
When I wake up Killer has gone and fetched us croissants and juice. He had to devise a whole system to get back into the building as he didn’t know the code and didn’t want to wake anyone. He’s very proud of himself. He gets me breakfast every morning, Judy says proudly. Not just for one-night-stands. Judy has been working very hard at getting the butches to practice ‘butch service’, a sort of chivalry that includes femmes getting their cigarettes lit and I’m not sure what else. This post-orgy breakfast surely scores Killer big Butch Service points.
I’m in a sleepless fog, still muffled from the melatonin, and from the sex and the constant overwhelmingness of being in another country. Thank you, I gush to Killer. Just make me some coffee, he says. All I want to do in the whole world is make espresso for Killer, I swear, but we used it all last night so I toss my long puffer coat over my lingerie and run out into the streets, deranged. I can’t find the bodega I got the coffee at before so I wind up careening through a three-story supermarket way down on Rue des Martyrs, looking at people and bleating, Cafe? I can’t remember S’il vous plait, or even Merci. I’ve been gone for so long, and still have to walk up seven flights of stairs! I’m worried that my menage is worried. I’m worried that they’ll leave because I’m taking too long and they need caffeine. Both these things almost happen, but I swoop in in the nick of time and make the coffee. We’d thought you’d been raped in Pigalle! Judy gasps. I was going to go look for you! Killer and Antoine smoke. Antoine reads the newspaper. Judy dunks her croissant in her orange juice. Tonight we go to the catacombs.
