The Photograph had been taken mid way across the Point des Arts.
Steven had been in Paris for almost three months now and was getting absolutely nothing from the experience. He had met no-one and had immersed himself in none of the cultural activity that he intended to. What unnerved him most was the sense of being left behind, of having missed out. He struggled to reconcile the photos of Miller and Durrell, or of Artaud and Breton that had emblazoned his bedroom walls during his teenage years with the city he now saw built up around him. He had slipped into the dusty footprint of another era finding it to be oversized and outdated.
More importantly he had written nothing. He never had in fact. the closest he came to truly feeling like a 'writer' was when he stumbled upon a second hand copy of Saul Bellow's 'Dangling Man' in an English bookstore near the river. He had hurried there hoping for solidarity, hoping that it would be peopled with other disenfranchised 'would be' writers. Instead he had found himself amongst a handful of confident American students whose French was far more fluent than his. They had tossed books to one another loudly discussing their content in a way that made him feel that he had stumbled into a literary circus. He climbed the stairs to the top floor where he had been told writers, down on their luck can find a place to crash, to gather their thoughts. Here the show was more grotesque than downstairs. His heart beat at the back of his throat. Whether he was being led through the city by the ghost of failures past or future he couldn't tell.
On the Pont des Arts he paused to look out across the Seine. The light was just beginning to dim now, the tourist boats pulling away from Pont Neuf were now draped in fairy lights, so that they seemed as haloed shadows. Steven watched the boats turn and glide toward him. He realised that he would be able to look down between the gaps in the bridge's wooden planks, that the lights would flow beneath him.
Last week he had received a frenzied phone call from his Mother asking what he hoped to achieve in Paris, why he didn't have a job. He found that he focused on the the tone of her words more than the exact details of what was said. That afternoon, wanting to feel close to other people, he had walked along the river toward the Trocadero and two quite unexpected images had pierced him, bringing him to the edge of tears. As he moved between the groups of North African men selling miniature Eiffel tower statues, he saw a small girl, perhaps three years old, chasing a pigeon. At no point did she come close to catching it, but as she ran she screamed with delight. It was a silly thing to take notice of but it suddenly made everything seem so unreal. He looked at the people around him. He tried to imagine the girl at seventeen or eighteen years old, being asked to attend interviews, to justify her 'passions'. It terrified him. Later, a tourist bus passed him on the rue de New York and he saw the same look of delight on the faces of adults peering from the windows. He realized then that writing was his pigeon as much as Paris was theirs.
He could hear the muffled tones of the boat's tour guide as it approached his bridge. The kush of the engine as it splashed amongst the waves grew louder and drowned the guide's voice so that only odd words could be heard, bubbling to the surface here and there. He heard 'Ile de Saint Louis'. Along the length of the Ile, giant posters of eyes had been pasted. Eyes looking back to meet those of the tourist. Some of the eyes were peeling away but he couldn't say whether this was the result of bad weather or the hands of angry Parisians.
As the boat pulled beneath him he saw faces looking up excitedly. He made eye contact with a fat man in a red wind breaker and the man smiled. As he looked up and back out across the river he was aware of a camera flash exploding to his left. He turned and a middle aged women beamed at him, motioning with her hands that she spoke no French. She moved further along the bridge scouring the crowd with her finger poised and ready to shoot. With his pea coat, cigarette, and beret, Steven realised that he must have seemed to her the quintessential French man of letters - Gazing out into the night, awaiting a flood of inspiration to wash over him.
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