“Okay.” I pull out my Paris phone, and we exchange numbers. “You never told me your name, by the way?”
He laughs at that. “No, I didn’t. I am Modou Mjodi. And I never learned your name. I looked on the suitcase but there was nothing.”
“I know. My name is Allyson, but Céline will know me as Lulu.”
He looks perplexed. “Which is correct?”
“I’m beginning to think they both are.”
He shrugs a little, takes my hand, kisses my cheeks twice, and then he bids me adieu.
It’s only lunchtime when I leave Modou, and with no idea when I will see Céline, I feel oddly relieved, like I’ve been given a reprieve. I hadn’t really planned on being a tourist in Paris, but I decide to do it. I brave the Metro and get off in the Marais quarter and go to one of the cafés along the beautiful Place des Vosges, where I order a salad and a citron pressé, adding plenty of sugar this time. I sit there for hours, waiting for the waiter to kick me out, but he leaves me alone until I ask for my check. At a patisserie, I get a ridiculously expensive macaron—this one a pale tangerine, like the last whispers of a sunset. I eat it and walk, in and out of the narrow streets, through a lively Jewish section, full of Orthodox men with black hats and stylish skinny suits. I snap a few pictures for my mom and text them to her and tell her to forward them to Grandma, who’ll get a kick out of it. Then I wander around looking at the boutiques, gazing at clothing I can barely afford to touch. When the salesladies ask me in French if I need help, I answer in French that I am just browsing.
I buy some postcards and go back to Place des Vosges and sit down in the park inside the square. Amid the mothers playing with their babies and the old men reading their newspapers, puffing away on cigarettes, I write them out. I have a lot to send. One to my parents, one to my grandmother, one to Dee, one to Kali, one to Jenn, one to Café Finlay, one to Carol. And then, at the last minute, I decide to write one to Melanie too.
It’s kind of a perfect day. I feel totally relaxed, and though I’m undoubtedly a tourist, I also feel like a Parisian. I’m almost relieved that I haven’t heard from Modou. Kelly sends me a text about meeting up for dinner, and I’m getting ready to make my way back to the hostel when my phone chirps. It’s from Modou. Céline will be at the club after ten o’clock.
I feel like the mellow relaxing vibe of the afternoon disappears behind a storm cloud. It’s only seven. I have several hours to kill, and I could go meet the Oz gang for dinner, but I’m too nervous. So, I walk the city in my nervousness. I get to the club at nine thirty and stand outside, the heavy bass thump of live music making my heart pound. She’s probably already there, but it feels like being early is some kind of faux pas. So I linger outside, watching the stylishly edgy Parisians with razored haircuts and angular clothes filter into the club. I look down at myself: khaki skirt, black T-shirt, leather flip-flops. Why didn’t I dress for battle?
At ten fifteen, I pay my (ten-euro) entry and go in. The club is packed, and there’s a band on the stage, all heavy guitars and a violin screeching feedback, and the tiniest Asian girl singing in this high, squeaky voice. All alone, surrounded by these hipsters, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so out of place, and every part of me is telling me to leave before I make a fool of myself. But I don’t. I haven’t come this far to chicken out. I fight my way to the bar, and when I see Modou, I greet him like a long-lost brother. He smiles at me and pours me a glass of wine. When I try to pay, he waves the bill away, and immediately, I feel better.
“Ahh, Céline is there,” he says, pointing to a table up front. She sits, alone, watching the band with a strange intensity, the smoke from her cigarette curling witchily around her.
I walk over to her table. She doesn’t acknowledge me, though I can’t tell if it’s because she’s snubbing me or concentrating on the band. I stand next to the open chair waiting for her to invite me to sit down, but then I just give up. I pull the chair out and sit. She gives me the slightest of nods, takes a puff of the cigarette, and blows smoke all over me, which I suppose counts as a greeting. Then she turns back to the band.
We sit there, listening. We are sitting right up close to the speakers, so the sound is extra deafening; my ears are already beginning to ring. It’s hard to tell if she’s enjoying the music. She doesn’t tap her toes or sway or anything. She just stares and smokes.
Finally, when the band takes a break, she looks at me. “Your name is Allyson.” She pronounces it Aleeseesyoohn, which makes it sound ridiculous somehow, an SUV of an American name with too many syllables.
I nod.
“So, not French at all?”
I shake my head. I never claimed it was.
We stare at each other, and I realize she won’t give me a thing. I have to take it. “I’m looking for Willem. Do you know where I can find him?” I’d meant to come in guns blazing, French spouting, but my nerves have sent me scurrying back to the comforts of my mother tongue.
She lights a new cigarette and blows more smoke on me. “No.”
“But, but he said you were good friends.”
“He said that? No. I am just like you.”
I cannot imagine in what way she would think she is even remotely like me, aside from us both possessing two X chromosomes. “How, how are we anything alike?”
“I am just one of the girls. There are many of us.”
It’s not like I didn’t know this about him. Not like he hid it. But hearing it out loud, from her, I feel exhausted, jet lag dropping me like a plummeting elevator.
“So you don’t know where he is?”
She shakes her head.
“And you don’t know where I can find him?”
“No.”
“And would you even tell me if you did?”
Her eyebrow goes up into that perfect arch as smoke curls out of her mouth.
“Can you even tell me his last name? Can you tell me that much?”
And here she smiles. Because in this little game we are playing, have been playing since last summer, I just showed my hand. And what a rotten hand it is. She takes a pen and a scrap of paper and writes something down. She slides the paper over to me. His name is on there. His full name! But I won’t give her the satisfaction of my eagerness, so I casually tuck it in my pocket without even glancing at it.
“Do you need anything else?” Her tone, haughty and gloating, manages to carry over the sounds of the band, who have started playing again. I can already hear her laughing about me with all her hipster pals.
“No, you’ve done quite enough.”
She eyes me for a long second. Her eyes aren’t so much blue as violet. “What will you do now?”
I force a bitchy smile, which I expect doesn’t look bitchy so much as constipated. “Oh, you know, see the sights.”
She blows more smoke on me. “Yes, you can be a touriste,” she says, as though tourist were an epithet. Then she begins ticking off all the places lowly people like us go. The Eiffel Tower. Sacré-Coeur. The Louvre.
I search her face for hidden meaning. Did he tell her about our day? I can just picture them laughing about me throwing the book at the skinheads, telling Willem I’d take care of him.
Céline is still talking about all the things I can do in Paris. “You can go shopping,” she is saying. Buy a new handbag. Some jewelry. Another watch. Some shoes. I can’t quite fathom how someone spouting off Ms. Foley–like advice can be so condescending.
“Thank you for your time,” I say. In French. Annoyance has made me bilingual.
Thirty-one
Willem de Ruiter.
His name is Willem de Ruiter. I rush to an Internet café and start Googling him. But Willem de Ruiter turns out to be a popular name in Holland. There’s a Dutch cinematographer with that name. There’s some famous diplomat with that name. And hundreds of other nonfamous people who nevertheless have some reason to be on the Internet. I go through hundreds of pages, in English, in Dutch, and I find not one link to him, not one piece of evidence that he actually he exists. I Google his parents’ names Bram de Ruiter. Yael de Ruiter. Naturopath. Actor. Anything I can think of. All these combinations. I get vaguely excited when some weird theater thing comes up, but when I click through, the website is down.
How can it be this hard to find someone? It occurs to me that maybe Céline intentionally gave me the wrong name.
But then I Google myself, “Allyson Healey,” and I don’t come up, either. You have to add the name of my college before you get my Facebook page.
I realize then it’s not enough to know what someone is called.
You have to know who they are.
Thirty-two
The next morning, Kelly and her friends ask me if I want to join them for a trip to the Rodin Museum, followed by some shopping. And I almost say yes. Because that’s what I would like. But there is still one more stop. It’s not even that I think I’ll find anything; it’s just that, if I’m facing down demons, I have go to there too.
I’m not sure where it is, exactly, but I do know the intersection where Ms. Foley had me picked up. It is seared into my brain. Avenue Simon Bolivar and Rue de l’Equerre, the cross streets of Humiliation and Defeat.
When I get out of the Metro, nothing seems familiar. Maybe because the last time I was here, I was flipping out in such a panic. But I know I didn’t run that far before finding the pay phone, so I know it can’t be that far to the art squat. I methodically go up one block. Down the next. Up and back. But nothing seems familiar. I attempt to ask directions, but how do you say “art squat” in French? Old building with artists? That doesn’t work. I remember the Chinese restaurants in the vicinity and ask for them. One young guy gets really excited and, I think, offers a recommendation to one supposedly good place across on Rue de Belleville. I find it. And from there, I find a sign for double happiness. It could be one of many, but I have a feeling it’s the one.
I wander around for fifteen more minutes and, on a quiet triangle of streets, find the squat. It has the same scaffolding, same distorted portraits, maybe a little more weather-beaten. I knock on the steel door. No one answers, but there are obviously people inside. Music wafts out from the open windows. I give the door a push. It creaks open. I push it farther. I walk inside. No one pays me any notice. I go up the creaking staircase, to the place where it all happened.
I see the clay first, bright white, yet at the same time, golden and warm. Inside, a man is working. He is petite, Asian, a study in contrasts: His hair white with black roots, his clothes all black and strangely antiquated, like he stepped out of a Charles Dickens novel, and all covered in the same white dust that covered me that night.
He is carving at a piece of clay with a scalpel, his attention so focused I’m afraid he’ll startle with the merest sound. I clear my throat and knock quietly on the door.
He looks up and rubs his eyes, which are bleary with concentration. “Oui.”
“Bonjour,” I begin. And then I sputter. My limited French is no match for what I need to explain to him. I crashed your squat, with a guy. I had the most intimate night of my life, and I woke up utterly alone. “Umm, I’m looking for a friend who I think you might know. Oh, I’m sorry—parlez-vous anglais?”
He lifts his head and nods, slightly, with the delicacy and control of a ballet dancer. “Yes,” he says.
“I’m looking for a friend of mine, and I wonder if you might know him. His name is Willem de Ruiter. He’s Dutch?” I watch his face for a flicker of recognition, but it remains impassive, as smooth as the clay sculptures that surround us.
“No? Well, he and I stayed here one night. Not exactly stayed here . . .” I trail off, looking around the studio, and it all comes back to me: the smell of the rain against the thirsty pavement, the swirl of dust, the smooth wood of his worktable pressing into my back. Willem towering over me.
Just One Day - English romantic Novel
Re: Just One Day - English romantic Novel
“What did you say your name was?”
“Allyson,” I hear myself say as if from a distance away.
“Van,” he says, introducing himself while fingering an old pocket watch on a chain.
I’m staring at the table, remembering the intense sharpness of it against my back, the ease with which Willem hoisted me onto it. The table is, as it was then, meticulously clean, the neat pile of papers, the half-finished pieces in the corner, the mesh cup of charcoals, and pens. Wait, what? I grab for the pens.
“That’s my pen!”
“I’m sorry?” Van asks.
I reach over to grab the pen out of the cup. The Rollerball, inscribed BREATHE EASY WITH PULMOCLEAR. “This is my pen! From my dad’s practice.”
Van is looking at me, perplexed. But he doesn’t understand. The pen was in my bag. I never took it out. It just went missing. I had it on the barge. I wrote double happiness with it. And then the next day, when I was on the phone with Ms. Foley, it was gone.
“Last summer, my friend Willem and I, well, we came here hoping someone might put us up for the night. He said that squats will do that.” I pause. Van nods slightly. “But no one was here. Except a window was open. So we slept here, in your studio, and when I woke up the next morning, my friend, Willem, he was gone.”
I wait for Van to get upset about our trespassing, but he is looking at me, still trying to understand why I’m gripping the Pulmoclear pen in my hand like it’s a sword. “This pen was in my purse and then it was gone and now it’s here, and I’m wondering, maybe there was a note or something. . . .”
Van’s face remains blank, and I’m about to apologize, for trespassing before, and now again, but then I see something, like the faint glimmers of light before a sunrise, as some sort of recognition illuminates his face. He taps his index finger to the bridge of his nose.
“I did find something; I thought it was a shopping list.”
“A shopping list?”
“It said something about, about . . . I don’t recall, perhaps chocolate and bread?”
“Chocolate and bread?” Those were Willem’s staple foods. My heart starts to pound.
“I don’t remember. I thought it came in from the garbage. I had been away for holiday, and when I came back, everything was disarrayed. I disposed of it. I’m so sorry.” He looks stricken.
We snuck into his studio, made a mess of it, and he looks guilty.
“No, don’t be sorry. This is so helpful. Would there have been any reason for a shopping list to be in here? I mean, might you have written it?”
“No. And if I did, it would not have contained bread and chocolate.”
I smile at that. “Could the list have been, maybe, a note?”
“It is possible.”
“We were supposed to have bread and chocolate for breakfast. And my pen is here.”
“Please, take your pen.”
“No, you can have the pen,” I say, and out escapes a whoop of laughter. A note. Could he have left me a note?
I throw my arms around Van, who stiffens for a moment in surprise but then relaxes into my embrace and reaches around to hug me back. It feels good, and he smells nice, like oil paint and turpentine and dust and old wood—smells that, like everything from that day, are stitched into the fabric of me now. For the first time in a long time, this doesn’t seem like a curse.
When I leave Van, it’s mid-afternoon. The Oz crew is probably still at the Rodin Museum; I could meet up with them. But instead, I decide to try something else. I go to the nearest Metro station and close my eyes and spin around and then I pick a stop. I land on Jules Joffrin and then I figure out the series of trains that will take me there.
I wind up in a very Parisian-seeming neighborhood, lots of narrow, uphill streets and everyday shops: shoe stores, barbershops, little neighborhood bars. I meander a ways, no idea where I am, but surprisingly enjoying the feeling of being lost. Eventually, I come across a broad staircase, carved into the steep hillside, forming a little canyon between the apartment buildings and green foliage hanging down on either side. I have no idea where the stairs lead. I can practically hear Willem’s voice: All the more reason to take them.
So I do. And take them, and take them. No sooner do I reach one landing than I find another set of stairs. At the top of the stairs, I cross a small cobblestoned medieval street and then, boom, it’s like I’m back in the world of the tour. There are idling coaches and sardine-packed cafés, and an accordion player doing Edith Piaf covers.
I follow the crowds around the corner, and at the end of a street full of cafés advertising menus in English, Spanish, French, and German is a huge white-domed cathedral.
“Excusez-moi, qu’est-ce que c’est?” I ask a man standing outside of one of the cafés.
He rolls his eyes. “C’est Sacré-Coeur!”
Oh, Sacré-Coeur. Of course. I walk closer and see three domes, two smaller ones flanking the big one the middle, reigning regal over the rooftops of Paris. In front of the cathedral, which is glowing golden in the afternoon sun, is a grassy hillside esplanade, bisected by marble staircases leading down the other side of the hill. There are people everywhere: the tourists with their video cameras rolling, backpackers lolling in the sun, artists with easels out, young couples leaning into each other, whispering secrets. Paris! Life!
At the end of the tour, I’d sworn off setting foot in another moldering old church. But for some reason, I follow the crowds inside. Even with the golden mosaics, looming statues and swelling crowds, it somehow still manages to feel like a neighborhood church, with people quietly praying, fingering rosaries, or just lost in thought.
There’s a stand of candles, and you can pay a few euros and light one yourself. I’m not Catholic, and I’m not entirely clear on this ritual, but I feel the need to commemorate this somehow. I hand over some change and am given a candle, and when I light it, it occurs to me that I should say a prayer. Should I pray for someone who’s died, like my grandfather? Or should I pray for Dee? For my mom? Should I pray to find Willem?
But none of that feels right. What feels right is just this. Being here. Again. By myself, this time. I’m not sure what the word for this is, but I say a prayer for it anyway.
I’m getting hungry, and the long twilight is starting. I decide to go down the back steps into that typical neighborhood and try to find an inexpensive bistro for dinner. But first, I need to get a macaron before all the patisseries close for the day.
At the base of the steps, I wander for a few blocks before I find a patisserie. At first I think it’s closed because a shade is drawn down the door, but I hear voices, lots and lots of voices, inside, so hesitantly, I push the door open.
It seems like a party is going on. The air is humid with so many people crammed together, and there are bottles of booze and bouquets of flowers. I begin to edge back out, but there is a huge booming protest from inside, so I open it up again, and they wave me in. Inside, there are maybe ten people, some of them still in bakers’ aprons, others in street clothes. They all have cups in hands, faces flushed with excitement.
In halting French, I ask if it might be possible to buy a macaron. There is much shuffling, and a macaron is produced. When I reach for my wallet, my money is refused. I start to head for the door, but before I get to it, I’m handed some Champagne in a paper cup. I raise the cup and everyone clinks with me and drinks. Then a burly guy with a handlebar mustache starts to cry and everyone pats him on the back.
I have no idea what’s going on. I look around questioningly, and one of the women starts talking very fast, in a very strong accent, so I don’t catch much, but I do catch bébé.
“Baby?” I exclaim in English.
The guy with the handlebar mustache hands me his telephone. On it is a photo of a puckered, red-faced thing in a blue cap. “Rémy!” he declares.
“Your son?” I ask. “Votre fils?”
Handlebar Mustache nods, then his eyes fill with tears.
“Félicitations!” I say. And then Handlebar Mustache embraces me in a huge hug, and the crowd claps and cheers.
A bottle of amber booze is passed around. When all our paper cups have been filled, people hold them up and offer different toasts or just say some version of cheers. Everyone takes a turn, and when it gets to me, I shout out what Jewish people say at times like this: “L’chaim!”
“It means ‘to life,’” I explain. And as I say it, I think that maybe this is what I was saying a prayer for back in the cathedral. To life.
“L’chaim,” the rowdy bakers repeat back to me. And then we drink.
Thirty-three
The next day, I accept Kelly’s invitation to join the Oz crew. Today they’re going to brave the Louvre. Tomorrow they’re going to Versailles. The day after that, they’re taking the train to Nice. I’m invited to come with them for all of it. I have ten days left on my ticket, and it feels like I’ve found as much as I’m going to find. I found out that he left me a note. Which is almost more than I could’ve hoped for. I am considering going with them to Nice. And, after my wonderful day yesterday, I’m also considering going off on my own somewhere.
After breakfast, we all get onto the Metro toward the Louvre. Nico and Shazzer are showing off some of their new clothes, which they got from a street market, and Kelly is making fun of them for coming to Paris to buy clothes made in China. “At least I got something local.” She thrusts out her wrist to show off her new high-tech digital French- manufactured watch. “There’s this huge store near VendÔme, all they sell is watches.”
“Why do you need a watch when you’re traveling?” Nick asks.
“How many bloody trains have we missed because someone’s phone alarm failed to go off?”
Nick gives her that one.
“You should see this place. It’s bloody enormous. They sell watches from all over; some of them cost a hundred thousand euros. Imagine spending that on a watch,” Kelly goes on, but I’ve stopped listening because I’m suddenly thinking of Céline. About what she said. About how I could get another watch. Another. Like she knew I lost my last one.
The Metro is pulling into a station, “I’m sorry,” I tell Kelly and the gang. “I’ve gotta go.”
“Where’s my watch? And where’s Willem?”
I find Céline in the club’s office, surrounded by stacks of paperwork, wearing a thick pair of eyeglasses that somehow makes her both more and less intimidating.
She looks up from her papers, all sleepy-eyed and, maddeningly, unsurprised.
“You said I could get another watch, which means you knew Willem had my watch,” I continue.
I expect her to deny it, to shoot me down. Instead, she gives me a dismissive little shrug. “Why would you do that? Give him such an expensive watch after one day? It is a little desperate, no?”
“As desperate as lying to me?”
She shrugs again, lazily taps on her computer. “I did not lie. You asked if I knew where to find him. I do not.”
“But you didn’t tell me everything, either. You saw him, after . . . after he, he left me.”
She does this thing, neither a nod nor a shake of the head, somewhere in between. A perfect expression of ambiguity. A diamond-encrusted stonewall.
And at just that moment, another one of Nathaniel’s French lessons comes back to me: “T’es toujours aussi salope?” I ask her.
One eyebrow goes up, but her cigarette goes into the ashtray. “You speak French now?” she asks, in French.
“Un petit peu.” A little bit.
She shuffles the paperwork, stubs out the smoldering cigarette. “Il faut mieux être salope que lâche,” she says.
“Allyson,” I hear myself say as if from a distance away.
“Van,” he says, introducing himself while fingering an old pocket watch on a chain.
I’m staring at the table, remembering the intense sharpness of it against my back, the ease with which Willem hoisted me onto it. The table is, as it was then, meticulously clean, the neat pile of papers, the half-finished pieces in the corner, the mesh cup of charcoals, and pens. Wait, what? I grab for the pens.
“That’s my pen!”
“I’m sorry?” Van asks.
I reach over to grab the pen out of the cup. The Rollerball, inscribed BREATHE EASY WITH PULMOCLEAR. “This is my pen! From my dad’s practice.”
Van is looking at me, perplexed. But he doesn’t understand. The pen was in my bag. I never took it out. It just went missing. I had it on the barge. I wrote double happiness with it. And then the next day, when I was on the phone with Ms. Foley, it was gone.
“Last summer, my friend Willem and I, well, we came here hoping someone might put us up for the night. He said that squats will do that.” I pause. Van nods slightly. “But no one was here. Except a window was open. So we slept here, in your studio, and when I woke up the next morning, my friend, Willem, he was gone.”
I wait for Van to get upset about our trespassing, but he is looking at me, still trying to understand why I’m gripping the Pulmoclear pen in my hand like it’s a sword. “This pen was in my purse and then it was gone and now it’s here, and I’m wondering, maybe there was a note or something. . . .”
Van’s face remains blank, and I’m about to apologize, for trespassing before, and now again, but then I see something, like the faint glimmers of light before a sunrise, as some sort of recognition illuminates his face. He taps his index finger to the bridge of his nose.
“I did find something; I thought it was a shopping list.”
“A shopping list?”
“It said something about, about . . . I don’t recall, perhaps chocolate and bread?”
“Chocolate and bread?” Those were Willem’s staple foods. My heart starts to pound.
“I don’t remember. I thought it came in from the garbage. I had been away for holiday, and when I came back, everything was disarrayed. I disposed of it. I’m so sorry.” He looks stricken.
We snuck into his studio, made a mess of it, and he looks guilty.
“No, don’t be sorry. This is so helpful. Would there have been any reason for a shopping list to be in here? I mean, might you have written it?”
“No. And if I did, it would not have contained bread and chocolate.”
I smile at that. “Could the list have been, maybe, a note?”
“It is possible.”
“We were supposed to have bread and chocolate for breakfast. And my pen is here.”
“Please, take your pen.”
“No, you can have the pen,” I say, and out escapes a whoop of laughter. A note. Could he have left me a note?
I throw my arms around Van, who stiffens for a moment in surprise but then relaxes into my embrace and reaches around to hug me back. It feels good, and he smells nice, like oil paint and turpentine and dust and old wood—smells that, like everything from that day, are stitched into the fabric of me now. For the first time in a long time, this doesn’t seem like a curse.
When I leave Van, it’s mid-afternoon. The Oz crew is probably still at the Rodin Museum; I could meet up with them. But instead, I decide to try something else. I go to the nearest Metro station and close my eyes and spin around and then I pick a stop. I land on Jules Joffrin and then I figure out the series of trains that will take me there.
I wind up in a very Parisian-seeming neighborhood, lots of narrow, uphill streets and everyday shops: shoe stores, barbershops, little neighborhood bars. I meander a ways, no idea where I am, but surprisingly enjoying the feeling of being lost. Eventually, I come across a broad staircase, carved into the steep hillside, forming a little canyon between the apartment buildings and green foliage hanging down on either side. I have no idea where the stairs lead. I can practically hear Willem’s voice: All the more reason to take them.
So I do. And take them, and take them. No sooner do I reach one landing than I find another set of stairs. At the top of the stairs, I cross a small cobblestoned medieval street and then, boom, it’s like I’m back in the world of the tour. There are idling coaches and sardine-packed cafés, and an accordion player doing Edith Piaf covers.
I follow the crowds around the corner, and at the end of a street full of cafés advertising menus in English, Spanish, French, and German is a huge white-domed cathedral.
“Excusez-moi, qu’est-ce que c’est?” I ask a man standing outside of one of the cafés.
He rolls his eyes. “C’est Sacré-Coeur!”
Oh, Sacré-Coeur. Of course. I walk closer and see three domes, two smaller ones flanking the big one the middle, reigning regal over the rooftops of Paris. In front of the cathedral, which is glowing golden in the afternoon sun, is a grassy hillside esplanade, bisected by marble staircases leading down the other side of the hill. There are people everywhere: the tourists with their video cameras rolling, backpackers lolling in the sun, artists with easels out, young couples leaning into each other, whispering secrets. Paris! Life!
At the end of the tour, I’d sworn off setting foot in another moldering old church. But for some reason, I follow the crowds inside. Even with the golden mosaics, looming statues and swelling crowds, it somehow still manages to feel like a neighborhood church, with people quietly praying, fingering rosaries, or just lost in thought.
There’s a stand of candles, and you can pay a few euros and light one yourself. I’m not Catholic, and I’m not entirely clear on this ritual, but I feel the need to commemorate this somehow. I hand over some change and am given a candle, and when I light it, it occurs to me that I should say a prayer. Should I pray for someone who’s died, like my grandfather? Or should I pray for Dee? For my mom? Should I pray to find Willem?
But none of that feels right. What feels right is just this. Being here. Again. By myself, this time. I’m not sure what the word for this is, but I say a prayer for it anyway.
I’m getting hungry, and the long twilight is starting. I decide to go down the back steps into that typical neighborhood and try to find an inexpensive bistro for dinner. But first, I need to get a macaron before all the patisseries close for the day.
At the base of the steps, I wander for a few blocks before I find a patisserie. At first I think it’s closed because a shade is drawn down the door, but I hear voices, lots and lots of voices, inside, so hesitantly, I push the door open.
It seems like a party is going on. The air is humid with so many people crammed together, and there are bottles of booze and bouquets of flowers. I begin to edge back out, but there is a huge booming protest from inside, so I open it up again, and they wave me in. Inside, there are maybe ten people, some of them still in bakers’ aprons, others in street clothes. They all have cups in hands, faces flushed with excitement.
In halting French, I ask if it might be possible to buy a macaron. There is much shuffling, and a macaron is produced. When I reach for my wallet, my money is refused. I start to head for the door, but before I get to it, I’m handed some Champagne in a paper cup. I raise the cup and everyone clinks with me and drinks. Then a burly guy with a handlebar mustache starts to cry and everyone pats him on the back.
I have no idea what’s going on. I look around questioningly, and one of the women starts talking very fast, in a very strong accent, so I don’t catch much, but I do catch bébé.
“Baby?” I exclaim in English.
The guy with the handlebar mustache hands me his telephone. On it is a photo of a puckered, red-faced thing in a blue cap. “Rémy!” he declares.
“Your son?” I ask. “Votre fils?”
Handlebar Mustache nods, then his eyes fill with tears.
“Félicitations!” I say. And then Handlebar Mustache embraces me in a huge hug, and the crowd claps and cheers.
A bottle of amber booze is passed around. When all our paper cups have been filled, people hold them up and offer different toasts or just say some version of cheers. Everyone takes a turn, and when it gets to me, I shout out what Jewish people say at times like this: “L’chaim!”
“It means ‘to life,’” I explain. And as I say it, I think that maybe this is what I was saying a prayer for back in the cathedral. To life.
“L’chaim,” the rowdy bakers repeat back to me. And then we drink.
Thirty-three
The next day, I accept Kelly’s invitation to join the Oz crew. Today they’re going to brave the Louvre. Tomorrow they’re going to Versailles. The day after that, they’re taking the train to Nice. I’m invited to come with them for all of it. I have ten days left on my ticket, and it feels like I’ve found as much as I’m going to find. I found out that he left me a note. Which is almost more than I could’ve hoped for. I am considering going with them to Nice. And, after my wonderful day yesterday, I’m also considering going off on my own somewhere.
After breakfast, we all get onto the Metro toward the Louvre. Nico and Shazzer are showing off some of their new clothes, which they got from a street market, and Kelly is making fun of them for coming to Paris to buy clothes made in China. “At least I got something local.” She thrusts out her wrist to show off her new high-tech digital French- manufactured watch. “There’s this huge store near VendÔme, all they sell is watches.”
“Why do you need a watch when you’re traveling?” Nick asks.
“How many bloody trains have we missed because someone’s phone alarm failed to go off?”
Nick gives her that one.
“You should see this place. It’s bloody enormous. They sell watches from all over; some of them cost a hundred thousand euros. Imagine spending that on a watch,” Kelly goes on, but I’ve stopped listening because I’m suddenly thinking of Céline. About what she said. About how I could get another watch. Another. Like she knew I lost my last one.
The Metro is pulling into a station, “I’m sorry,” I tell Kelly and the gang. “I’ve gotta go.”
“Where’s my watch? And where’s Willem?”
I find Céline in the club’s office, surrounded by stacks of paperwork, wearing a thick pair of eyeglasses that somehow makes her both more and less intimidating.
She looks up from her papers, all sleepy-eyed and, maddeningly, unsurprised.
“You said I could get another watch, which means you knew Willem had my watch,” I continue.
I expect her to deny it, to shoot me down. Instead, she gives me a dismissive little shrug. “Why would you do that? Give him such an expensive watch after one day? It is a little desperate, no?”
“As desperate as lying to me?”
She shrugs again, lazily taps on her computer. “I did not lie. You asked if I knew where to find him. I do not.”
“But you didn’t tell me everything, either. You saw him, after . . . after he, he left me.”
She does this thing, neither a nod nor a shake of the head, somewhere in between. A perfect expression of ambiguity. A diamond-encrusted stonewall.
And at just that moment, another one of Nathaniel’s French lessons comes back to me: “T’es toujours aussi salope?” I ask her.
One eyebrow goes up, but her cigarette goes into the ashtray. “You speak French now?” she asks, in French.
“Un petit peu.” A little bit.
She shuffles the paperwork, stubs out the smoldering cigarette. “Il faut mieux être salope que lâche,” she says.
Re: Just One Day - English romantic Novel
I have no idea what she said. I do my best to keep a straight face as I try to find keywords to unlock the sentence like Madame taught us, salope, bitch; mieux, better. Lâche. Milk? No, that’s lait. But then I remember Madame’s refrain about venturing into the unknown being an act of bravery and her teaching us, as always, the opposite of courageux: lâche.
Did Céline just call me a coward? I feel the indignation travel from the back of my neck up to my ears to the top of my head. “You can’t call me that,” I sputter in English. “You don’t get to call me that. You don’t even know me!”
“I know enough,” she replies in English. “I know that you forfeited.” Forfeit. I see myself waving a white flag.
“Forfeit? How did I forfeit?”
“You ran away.”
“What did the note say?” I am practically screaming now.
But the more excited I become, the more aloof she becomes. “I don’t know anything about it.”
“But you know something.”
She lights another cigarette and blows smoke on me. I wave it away. “Please, Céline, for a whole year, I’ve assumed the worst, and now I’m wondering if I assumed the wrong worst.”
More silence. Then “He had the, how do you say it, sue-tours.”
“Sue-tours?”
“Like with sewing on skin.” She points to her cheek.
“Sutures? Stitches? He had stitches?”
“Yes, and his face was very swollen, and his eye black.”
“What happened?”
“He would not tell me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this yesterday?”
“You did not ask me this yesterday.”
I want to be furious with her. Not just for this, but for being such a bitch that first day in Paris, for accusing me of cowardice. But I finally get that none of this is about Céline; it never was. I’m the one who told Willem I was in love with him. I’m the one who said that I’d take care of him. I’m the one who bailed.
I look up at Céline, who is watching me with the cagey expression of a cat eyeing a sleeping dog. “Je suis désolée,” I apologize. And then I pull the macaron out of my bag and give it to her. It’s raspberry, and I was saving it as a reward for confronting Céline. It is cheating Babs’s rule to give it to someone else, but somehow, I feel she’d approve.
She eyes it suspiciously, then takes it, pinching it between her fingers as though it were contagious. She gingerly lays it on a stack of CD cases.
“So, what happened?” I ask. “He came back here all banged up?”
She nods, barely.
“Why?”
She frowns. “He would not say.”
Silence. She looks down, then quickly glances at me. “He looked through your suitcase.”
What was in there? A packing list. Clothes. Souvenirs. Unwritten postcards. My luggage tag? No, that snapped off in the Tube station back in London. My diary? Which I now have. I grab it out of my bag, leaf through a few entries. There’s something about Rome and feral cats. Vienna and the Schönbrunn Palace. The opera in Prague. But there is nothing, nothing of me. Not my name. My address. My email address. Not the addresses of any of the people I met on the tour. We didn’t even bother with the pretense of keeping in touch. I shove the diary back in my bag. Céline is peering through narrowed eyes, watching while pretending not to.
“Did he take anything from my bag? Find anything?”
“No. He only smelled. . . .” She stops, as if in pain.
“He smelled what?”
“He smelled terrible,” she says solemnly. “He took your watch. I told him to leave it. My uncle is a jeweler, so I know it was expensive. But he refused.”
I sigh. “Where can I find him, Céline? Please. You can help me with that much.”
“That much? I help you with so much already,” she says, all huffy with her own indignation. “And I don’t know where to find him. I don’t lie.” She looks hard at me. “I tell you the truth, and that is that Willem is the kind of man who comes when he comes. And mostly, he doesn’t.”
I wish I could tell her that she’s wrong. That with us, it was different. But if he didn’t stay in love with Céline, what makes me think that after one day, even if he did like me, I haven’t been completely licked clean?
“So you did not have any luck? On the Internet?” she asks.
I start to gather my things. “No.”
“Willem de Ruiter is a common name, n’est-ce pas?” she says. Then she does something I wouldn’t have thought her capable of. She blushes. And that is how I know she’s looked for him too. And she didn’t find him, either. And all at once, I wonder if I haven’t gotten Céline, if not altogether wrong, then a little bit wrong.
I take one of my extra Paris postcards. I write my name, address, all my details on it, and hand it to her. “If you see Willem. Or if you’re ever in Boston and need a place to crash—or store your stuff.”
She takes the postcard and looks at it. Then she shoves it in a drawer. “Boss-tone. I think I prefer New York,” she sniffs. I’m almost relieved that she’s sounding like her haughty self again.
I think of Dee. He could handle Céline. “That can probably be arranged.”
When I get to the door, Céline calls out my name. I turn around. I see that she’s taken a bite of the macaron, the round cookie now a half moon.
“I am sorry I called you a coward,” she says.
“That’s okay,” I say. “I am sometimes. But I’m trying to be braver.”
“Bon.” She pauses, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think she maybe almost was considering a smile. “If you find Willem again, you will need to be brave.”
I go sit down on the edge of a fountain to consider what Céline said. I can’t quite make out if it was meant in support or warning, or maybe both. But it all seems academic, anyhow, because I’ve reached a dead end. She doesn’t know where he is. I can try some more Internet searching and send another letter to Guerrilla Will, but other than that, I’m tapped.
You will need to be brave.
Maybe it’s all for the best. Maybe I end here. Tomorrow I will go to Versailles with the Oz crew. And that feels okay. I pull out the map Dee and Sandra gave me to plot my route back to the hostel. It’s not too far. I can walk. I trace the route with my finger. When I do, my finger runs over not one but two big pink squares. The big pink squares on this map are hospitals. I pull the map closer to my face. There are pink squares all over the place. Paris is crazy with hospitals. I run my finger to the art squat. There are several hospitals within a thumb’s width of the squat too.
If Willem got hurt near the art squat, and he got stitches, there’s a good chance it happened at one of these hospitals. “Thank you, Dee!” I call out into the Paris afternoon. “And thank you, Céline,” I add a bit more quietly. And then I get up and go.
The next day, Kelly greets me coolly, which I can tell is hard work for her. I apologize for going MIA yesterday.
“S’okay,” she says, “but you’re coming with us today to Versailles?”
I grimace. “I can’t.”
Her face hardens into hurt. “If you don’t want to hang with us, it’s fine, but don’t make plans to spare our feelings.”
I’m not sure why I haven’t told her. It feels sort of silly, being over here, going to all this trouble, for a guy I knew for a day. But as I tell Kelly a short version of the long story, including today’s mad quest, her face grows serious. When I’m done, she just gives a little nod of her head. “I understand,” she says solemnly. “I’ll see you down at brekkie.”
When I get down to the breakfast room, Kelly and the group are huddled around one of the big wooden tables, maps spread out in front of them. I take my croissant and tea and yogurt and join them.
“We’re coming with you,” she declares. “All of us.”
“What? Why?”
“Because you need an army for this.” The rest of the group sloppy salute me, and then they all start talking at once. Very loudly. People look over at us, but these guys are irrepressible. Only the pale petite girl at the edge of our table ignores us, keeping her nose in a book.
“Are you sure you guys want to miss Versailles?”
“Versailles is a relic,” Kelly insists. “It’s not going anywhere. But this is real life. Real romance. What could be more French than that?”
“We’re coming with you, like it or not. If we have to follow you to every French hospital between here and Nice,” Shazzer says.
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” I say “I’ve looked on the map. I’ve narrowed it down to three likely hospitals.”
The elfin girl looks up. Her eyes are so pale they seem to be made of water. “I’m sorry, but did you say you were going to a hospital?” she asks.
I look at the Australians, my ragtag army, all of them gung ho. “Apparently so.”
The elfin girl looks at me with a weird intensity. “I know hospitals,” she says in a quiet voice.
I look back at her. Really, I can’t think of anything more boring than this, except maybe a visit to a French unemployment office. I can’t imagine that she would want to come along. Except maybe she’s lonely. And that I understand.
“Do you, do you want to go with us?” I ask.
“Not particularly,” she says. “But I think I should.”
The first hospital on the map turns out to some sort of private hospital, where, after an hour of being sent from one office to the next, we find out that, while there is an emergency room, it does not take most cases off the street, but rather sends them to the public hospitals. They send us to Hôpital Lariboisière. We head straight for the urgences, the French version of the emergency room, and after being given a number and told to wait, we sit for ages in uncomfortable chairs, along with all the people with broken elbows and coughs that sound really ugly and contagious.
The initial enthusiasm of the group starts to flag when they realize that going to an emergency room is as boring in France as it is anywhere else. They are reduced to entertaining themselves with spitballs and card games of War, which does not endear the nurses to them. Wren, the strange, pale, pixie girl we’ve picked up, participates in none of the silliness. She just keeps reading her book.
By the time we are called to the front counter, the nurses are hating us, and the feeling is pretty much mutual. Shazzer, who apparently speaks the best French, is anointed ambassador, and I don’t know if it’s her French skills or her diplomatic ones that are lacking, but within five minutes, she is heatedly arguing with the nurse, and within ten, we are being escorted to the street.
It’s now three o’clock. The day is half gone, and I can see the group is antsy, tired, hungry, wishing that they’d gone to Versailles. And now that I think about it, I realize how ridiculous this is. The front desk at my father’s practice is manned by a nurse named Leona, who won’t let even me go back into the office unless my father is in there and waiting for me. Leona would never give out a record to me—her boss’s daughter, who speaks the same language as she does—let alone a foreign stranger.
“That was a bust,” I tell them when we come out onto the pavement. The cloud layer that has been sitting over Paris for the last few days has burned off while we were waiting inside, and the day has turned hot and clear. “At least you can salvage the rest of the afternoon. Get some food and have a picnic in the Luxembourg Gardens.”
I can see the idea is tempting. No one rebuffs it. “But we promised we’d be your wingmen,” Kelly says. “We can’t let you do this alone.”
Did Céline just call me a coward? I feel the indignation travel from the back of my neck up to my ears to the top of my head. “You can’t call me that,” I sputter in English. “You don’t get to call me that. You don’t even know me!”
“I know enough,” she replies in English. “I know that you forfeited.” Forfeit. I see myself waving a white flag.
“Forfeit? How did I forfeit?”
“You ran away.”
“What did the note say?” I am practically screaming now.
But the more excited I become, the more aloof she becomes. “I don’t know anything about it.”
“But you know something.”
She lights another cigarette and blows smoke on me. I wave it away. “Please, Céline, for a whole year, I’ve assumed the worst, and now I’m wondering if I assumed the wrong worst.”
More silence. Then “He had the, how do you say it, sue-tours.”
“Sue-tours?”
“Like with sewing on skin.” She points to her cheek.
“Sutures? Stitches? He had stitches?”
“Yes, and his face was very swollen, and his eye black.”
“What happened?”
“He would not tell me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this yesterday?”
“You did not ask me this yesterday.”
I want to be furious with her. Not just for this, but for being such a bitch that first day in Paris, for accusing me of cowardice. But I finally get that none of this is about Céline; it never was. I’m the one who told Willem I was in love with him. I’m the one who said that I’d take care of him. I’m the one who bailed.
I look up at Céline, who is watching me with the cagey expression of a cat eyeing a sleeping dog. “Je suis désolée,” I apologize. And then I pull the macaron out of my bag and give it to her. It’s raspberry, and I was saving it as a reward for confronting Céline. It is cheating Babs’s rule to give it to someone else, but somehow, I feel she’d approve.
She eyes it suspiciously, then takes it, pinching it between her fingers as though it were contagious. She gingerly lays it on a stack of CD cases.
“So, what happened?” I ask. “He came back here all banged up?”
She nods, barely.
“Why?”
She frowns. “He would not say.”
Silence. She looks down, then quickly glances at me. “He looked through your suitcase.”
What was in there? A packing list. Clothes. Souvenirs. Unwritten postcards. My luggage tag? No, that snapped off in the Tube station back in London. My diary? Which I now have. I grab it out of my bag, leaf through a few entries. There’s something about Rome and feral cats. Vienna and the Schönbrunn Palace. The opera in Prague. But there is nothing, nothing of me. Not my name. My address. My email address. Not the addresses of any of the people I met on the tour. We didn’t even bother with the pretense of keeping in touch. I shove the diary back in my bag. Céline is peering through narrowed eyes, watching while pretending not to.
“Did he take anything from my bag? Find anything?”
“No. He only smelled. . . .” She stops, as if in pain.
“He smelled what?”
“He smelled terrible,” she says solemnly. “He took your watch. I told him to leave it. My uncle is a jeweler, so I know it was expensive. But he refused.”
I sigh. “Where can I find him, Céline? Please. You can help me with that much.”
“That much? I help you with so much already,” she says, all huffy with her own indignation. “And I don’t know where to find him. I don’t lie.” She looks hard at me. “I tell you the truth, and that is that Willem is the kind of man who comes when he comes. And mostly, he doesn’t.”
I wish I could tell her that she’s wrong. That with us, it was different. But if he didn’t stay in love with Céline, what makes me think that after one day, even if he did like me, I haven’t been completely licked clean?
“So you did not have any luck? On the Internet?” she asks.
I start to gather my things. “No.”
“Willem de Ruiter is a common name, n’est-ce pas?” she says. Then she does something I wouldn’t have thought her capable of. She blushes. And that is how I know she’s looked for him too. And she didn’t find him, either. And all at once, I wonder if I haven’t gotten Céline, if not altogether wrong, then a little bit wrong.
I take one of my extra Paris postcards. I write my name, address, all my details on it, and hand it to her. “If you see Willem. Or if you’re ever in Boston and need a place to crash—or store your stuff.”
She takes the postcard and looks at it. Then she shoves it in a drawer. “Boss-tone. I think I prefer New York,” she sniffs. I’m almost relieved that she’s sounding like her haughty self again.
I think of Dee. He could handle Céline. “That can probably be arranged.”
When I get to the door, Céline calls out my name. I turn around. I see that she’s taken a bite of the macaron, the round cookie now a half moon.
“I am sorry I called you a coward,” she says.
“That’s okay,” I say. “I am sometimes. But I’m trying to be braver.”
“Bon.” She pauses, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think she maybe almost was considering a smile. “If you find Willem again, you will need to be brave.”
I go sit down on the edge of a fountain to consider what Céline said. I can’t quite make out if it was meant in support or warning, or maybe both. But it all seems academic, anyhow, because I’ve reached a dead end. She doesn’t know where he is. I can try some more Internet searching and send another letter to Guerrilla Will, but other than that, I’m tapped.
You will need to be brave.
Maybe it’s all for the best. Maybe I end here. Tomorrow I will go to Versailles with the Oz crew. And that feels okay. I pull out the map Dee and Sandra gave me to plot my route back to the hostel. It’s not too far. I can walk. I trace the route with my finger. When I do, my finger runs over not one but two big pink squares. The big pink squares on this map are hospitals. I pull the map closer to my face. There are pink squares all over the place. Paris is crazy with hospitals. I run my finger to the art squat. There are several hospitals within a thumb’s width of the squat too.
If Willem got hurt near the art squat, and he got stitches, there’s a good chance it happened at one of these hospitals. “Thank you, Dee!” I call out into the Paris afternoon. “And thank you, Céline,” I add a bit more quietly. And then I get up and go.
The next day, Kelly greets me coolly, which I can tell is hard work for her. I apologize for going MIA yesterday.
“S’okay,” she says, “but you’re coming with us today to Versailles?”
I grimace. “I can’t.”
Her face hardens into hurt. “If you don’t want to hang with us, it’s fine, but don’t make plans to spare our feelings.”
I’m not sure why I haven’t told her. It feels sort of silly, being over here, going to all this trouble, for a guy I knew for a day. But as I tell Kelly a short version of the long story, including today’s mad quest, her face grows serious. When I’m done, she just gives a little nod of her head. “I understand,” she says solemnly. “I’ll see you down at brekkie.”
When I get down to the breakfast room, Kelly and the group are huddled around one of the big wooden tables, maps spread out in front of them. I take my croissant and tea and yogurt and join them.
“We’re coming with you,” she declares. “All of us.”
“What? Why?”
“Because you need an army for this.” The rest of the group sloppy salute me, and then they all start talking at once. Very loudly. People look over at us, but these guys are irrepressible. Only the pale petite girl at the edge of our table ignores us, keeping her nose in a book.
“Are you sure you guys want to miss Versailles?”
“Versailles is a relic,” Kelly insists. “It’s not going anywhere. But this is real life. Real romance. What could be more French than that?”
“We’re coming with you, like it or not. If we have to follow you to every French hospital between here and Nice,” Shazzer says.
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” I say “I’ve looked on the map. I’ve narrowed it down to three likely hospitals.”
The elfin girl looks up. Her eyes are so pale they seem to be made of water. “I’m sorry, but did you say you were going to a hospital?” she asks.
I look at the Australians, my ragtag army, all of them gung ho. “Apparently so.”
The elfin girl looks at me with a weird intensity. “I know hospitals,” she says in a quiet voice.
I look back at her. Really, I can’t think of anything more boring than this, except maybe a visit to a French unemployment office. I can’t imagine that she would want to come along. Except maybe she’s lonely. And that I understand.
“Do you, do you want to go with us?” I ask.
“Not particularly,” she says. “But I think I should.”
The first hospital on the map turns out to some sort of private hospital, where, after an hour of being sent from one office to the next, we find out that, while there is an emergency room, it does not take most cases off the street, but rather sends them to the public hospitals. They send us to Hôpital Lariboisière. We head straight for the urgences, the French version of the emergency room, and after being given a number and told to wait, we sit for ages in uncomfortable chairs, along with all the people with broken elbows and coughs that sound really ugly and contagious.
The initial enthusiasm of the group starts to flag when they realize that going to an emergency room is as boring in France as it is anywhere else. They are reduced to entertaining themselves with spitballs and card games of War, which does not endear the nurses to them. Wren, the strange, pale, pixie girl we’ve picked up, participates in none of the silliness. She just keeps reading her book.
By the time we are called to the front counter, the nurses are hating us, and the feeling is pretty much mutual. Shazzer, who apparently speaks the best French, is anointed ambassador, and I don’t know if it’s her French skills or her diplomatic ones that are lacking, but within five minutes, she is heatedly arguing with the nurse, and within ten, we are being escorted to the street.
It’s now three o’clock. The day is half gone, and I can see the group is antsy, tired, hungry, wishing that they’d gone to Versailles. And now that I think about it, I realize how ridiculous this is. The front desk at my father’s practice is manned by a nurse named Leona, who won’t let even me go back into the office unless my father is in there and waiting for me. Leona would never give out a record to me—her boss’s daughter, who speaks the same language as she does—let alone a foreign stranger.
“That was a bust,” I tell them when we come out onto the pavement. The cloud layer that has been sitting over Paris for the last few days has burned off while we were waiting inside, and the day has turned hot and clear. “At least you can salvage the rest of the afternoon. Get some food and have a picnic in the Luxembourg Gardens.”
I can see the idea is tempting. No one rebuffs it. “But we promised we’d be your wingmen,” Kelly says. “We can’t let you do this alone.”