SINCE YOU’VE BEEN GONE
It was the French summer fling we all dream of – but when novelist Francesca Reece threw herself into a great amour, its eventual end taught her the value of honesty and respect
For one writer, what began as the Parisian summer fling of dreams turned into a lesson on the realities of love
WE WERE A HANDFUL OF DAYS INTO THE KIND OF HEAT WAVE that liquefies the tarmac and thickens the air into something viscid and resistant. I was on the terrace of the bar below my apartment, which was how I met a significant number of my conquests at that time in my life. I lived in Paris. I was 25 and enjoying a summer of wild abandon, having spent the earlier part of the decade ricocheting from one comically chaotic relationship to the next.
My first impression of B was that he was sweetly earnest, because he was wearing hiking clothes – this was before North Face and Patagonia became ubiquitous signifiers of urban hipness. My usual type was the arrogant hospitality-industry heartthrob with some kind of arty side gig. B looked more like a long-haired geography teacher. However, his devotion to reliable waterproofing and ‘guerrilla gardening’ belied his actual origins: he had grown up in Paris’ chic 3rd arrondissement and came from money. When he found out that I was from rural Wales and that my father was not only a manual labourer but a lumberjack, his eyes swam.
The electric charge between us was palpable, and hit me like a tsunami. On that first languorous evening, we polished off several pichets of Muscadet and cigarette after cigarette, the feather-light plumes of smoke dusky pink as the sun sank into the glittering black ribbon of the canal. He was attractive, emotionally articulate and intelligent. When the bar closed, he inevitably ended up back at my apartment. He told me he was falling in love with me one of the first times that we slept together.
We spent a handful of weeks cycling around Paris, limping from terrace to terrace, and between my apartment and his. He would meet me at the end of my shifts in the cafe and we’d spend endless balmy nights downing cloudy glasses of Ricard, chain-smoking and imagining a future together. I was cresting a wave of euphoria. One night – on a blanket by the Seine, under a limpid sky and a wedge of clean, silver moon – he invited me to his family’s house in the Dordogne.
It was just outside a medieval village that’s part of the old pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela. His grandparents had been artists, and the old stone farmhouse was full of books, records and his grandfather’s abstract paintings. The garden was fragrant with lavender and wild oregano. We spent our days bathing in the cool jade water of the river
basin, where the air was sweet with tree sap and the breeze broke the still heat of the long afternoons. We picnicked on leftover confit de canard, soft-boiled eggs, crusty bread and beer kept cold in the water. I was illuminated with love; it felt like each cell in my body was on fire. At night, we danced to Georges Brassens on the lawn. He sang the lyrics under his breath and I felt their impact tingle on my skin. It was all too perfect.
He’d told me early on that he was leaving Paris in the autumn. He spouted wild rhetoric about no longer being able to hack late capitalist urban life. In September, he was going to live on a non-hierarchical cooperative farm in the Ardèche. I sternly told myself to avoid any fantasies of longterm bliss, and told him that we could just enjoy an intense summer fling. He was the one who said he wanted something more, and insisted I could let myself invest in the relationship.
I believed him because, by that point, I was in love. For the first few weeks, my habitual cynicism remained intact. I’d had my fair share of starry-eyed Gallic suitors and prided myself on being too smart to have my head turned by that specific brand of ultra-romance. However, over the course of a few months, B managed to dismantle my scepticism entirely. His overblown intensity was so persistent it became difficult to question its authenticity. I started to believe that it came from a place of honesty. I let my guard down.
When summer ended, we said a tearful goodbye on the pavement outside my flat. The sun had barely risen, but he had a train to catch and I had to open the cafe. The night before, on the terrace where we first met, we’d performatively learnt each others’ numbers by heart. It all felt cringingly adolescent, but there was something so sincere about him that I knew that it wasn’t like that; this was compelling and real.
The first weeks apart were excruciating. Communication was patchy because B was going through an initiation of living totally off-grid. I waited for his messages like a clichéd lover of a married man in a gloomy 1950s pop song. Finally, after a month, he rang me to say he had a free weekend. He invited me back to the Dordogne. There, the leaves were on the turn and the air smelt crisper – wood smoke and pine. After three blissful days, I got the train back to Paris. He told me not to worry about our future and maintained that he loved me. He told me to call him when I got into Montparnasse.
The call went straight through to voicemail, as did all of the following ones. My texts were ignored and, after two months of silence, I sent a long letter that went unanswered. Reeling, I rebuilt my flippant façade and made jokes that he must be a fully paid-up member of the cult by now. Beneath the glib comments about orange robes and human sacrifices, I was secretly terrified that something awful might have happened. Finally, I bit the bullet and asked his brother for news. He replied, blithely, that B had moved to the Alps and was looking after goats. The humiliation stung like something physical.
I wasn’t just heartbroken, I was deeply ashamed to have fallen for his shtick. I began to question my own understanding of the relationship. I felt unhinged, the entire experience now undermined by self-doubt. I felt like I’d made the whole thing up.
I’d like to pretend that this put me off plunging head-first into another wild, cinematic entanglement so clearly jam-packed with red flags, such as B’s hastiness to declare undying love – eyes almost crossing in performative intensity. Even his middle name was an obvious warning sign. I’m loath to judge someone on the sins of their forebears, but it’s hard to shake the big dick energy of being named Loup, or ‘Wolf’– an animal with more pantomime machismo than a truckload of gun-toting Proud Boys…
In reality, I ended up lurching blindly into another relationship with a man about to leave the city. But what
I did learn from my experience with B was that being ‘chill’ and ‘undemanding’ could be tantamount to accidentally being a doormat. I had a right to hold people to promises they made; in fact, being able to do so was a sign that a relationship was nuanced and functioning in the first place.
When the next man left Paris for Berlin, we maintained a steady stream of reciprocal contact. When something felt wrong, I told him, instead of performing the role of the resilient, romantic dream girl. B had put me on his shoddy pedestal because I’d let myself behave according to his two-dimensional expectations of me. I’d enjoyed the glamour of becoming a symbol for him, without realising that it had made it easier for him to completely dehumanise me. I know now how much I should’ve held onto the wariness I’d had at the beginning. The ‘sensitive nice guy’ who makes extreme overtures on the first encounter is rarely worthy of trust.
About a year after we’d said our last goodbye, I was camping in the mountains in Corsica with the new love interest. It was another sultry, pine-scented evening and, after a day of hiking, we’d stopped in the town for an icecold beer and a plate of charcuterie on a terrace. As my phone picked up reception for the first time in hours, I noticed that I’d received an email. It was B, telling me in hilariously purple prose that he still loved me, and asking if he’d ruined things beyond repair. It was the kind of email I would have once fallen for. I remembered the total anguish of being ignored. I swallowed the dregs of my pint and felt a feeling of warm satisfaction flood my body. Now, it was my turn not to reply.
“He managed to dismantle my scepticism ENTIRELY... I let my guard DOWN”