"Chartreuse" by Thaddeus Rutkowski

After I’d moved to New York, I spent a lot of time visiting my downstairs neighbors, Stephane and Michele. The young French couple lived in a space next to the service landing in our Seaport building. The building had been a warehouse for a department store.

Both neighbors were unusually slender. Stephane had long brown hair, while Michele had short blonde hair. Their features resembled those of children.

The three of us would sit at their table, listen to pop music, smoke, and drink. Once loaded, Stephane would make fun of English words that were vulgarities in French. “You know Pine Street?” he would ask. “Pine means penis. And Con Edison? Con means a couple of terrible things.”

I would giggle, and Stephane and Michele would smile.

“Your mother is Chinese,” Stephane once said to me. “Do you know any Chinese?”

“I know wode shu,” I said.

“It sounds like water shoe,” Michele said. “Does it mean ‘boot’?”

“It means ‘my art.’”

Stephane showed me photos of his artworks. The constructions, made of wide rolls of green paper with white stripes down the middle, were attached to a white wall. The paper rolls hung down until they met the floor. There, Astroturf replaced the paper, and at the ends of the turf were tiny flags and holes the size of golf balls. A few small dimpled balls lay on the “grass.”

“I have a show coming up,” Stephane said.

He gave me directions to the gallery, located in SoHo. The gallery had a catchy name: OK Harris. The place sounded all right, just fine—the work in it would meet with everyone’s approval.

*

Sometime before the show opened, my father came to visit. He’d driven from central Pennsylvania and parked his car near the fish market, a couple of blocks from our building.

“I found a bar,” he said to me. “It’s called the Sketch Pad. It’s right for me.”

In the evening, Stephane and Michele came to my loft. We sat around my table—a slab of particleboard set on legs and painted with black Rust-Oleum. The table stood next to a plywood cabinet that held a sink. Around us, the walls were pure white.

The couple had brought a bottle of chartreuse.

“It’s popular in France,” Michele said as she poured the liqueur.

“If it doesn’t agree with you, there is the sink,” Stephane said.

I sipped the Chartreuse and felt it sting my throat. The taste was sweet, reminiscent of mysterious roots and berries. I wasn’t a big drinker, but I finished my glass and asked for another.

My father worked on the bottle. Soon, the liqueur was gone.

“I’d like to show my artwork in New York,” my father said, “but nobody wants to see it. I’m not trendy. I just comment on people.

“I’m going to the Sketch Pad,” he added as he stood up.

In the morning, I walked my father to his car. The air near the fish market smelled like seafood going bad. The air, mixed with the memory of the Chartreuse, made me queasy.

My father pointed at a plant growing in the street median and asked, “What is that?”

It looked like cannabis to me, growing from a discarded seed, but I said, “I don’t know.”

“It looks like marijuana,” my father said.

At home, I found that the few bottles of liquor I owned were empty.

*

At Stephane’s art opening, I pushed my way into the OK Harris gallery. Through the people, I saw golf putting greens divided into vertical and horizontal planes. At their lower ends, the greens had holes marked with flags on sticks. Several leather bags, holding golf clubs and painted black, were hanging on the walls.

Stephane and Michele were sitting together in the back of the room, surrounded by admirers. I wanted to talk to my neighbors, but I had to wait to get to the front of the crowd. After a time, I reached Stephane.

“Do you like the show?” he asked.

I wanted to say, “It’s OK,” but knew I shouldn’t. I said, “It’s great.”

*

When I next saw Stephane and Michele, they were in their living space, which had probably been a storage area. They were listening to an album by Patti Smith.

            “Patti Smiss is great,” Stephane said.

            I hadn’t paid much attention to the rock singer, but from that moment on I was a fan.

            “We’re going back to Paris soon,” Michele said. “You should come to visit, stay for a month.”

In my head, I pictured asking for a month off from my job. I didn’t have that much vacation time. If I took a month off, I would basically be quitting my job. I decided to go to Paris anyway. I would freelance when I returned—I had editing skills. The problem with that plan, though, would be finding clients. I might have a lot of down time. Plus, I wouldn’t have Stephane and Michele to hang out with. But Paris was worth the risk—I might even stay.

            “There is plenty to do in Paris,” Stephane said. “We have lots of chartreuse. We even have absinthe.”

“You’d like the wormwood,” Michele said

            I didn’t know what wormwood would do to me, but I was willing to give it a try.

*

Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of eight books, most recently Safe Colors, a novel in short fictions. He teaches at Medgar Evers College, Columbia University, and a YMCA and received a fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.