B0092XNA2Q EBOK (18 page)

I’d been running a long time. Something I was good at, comfortable with, and could keep doing for a lot longer. But the moment I’d stepped onto this plane, that’d changed. Clarity set in. In buckling my seatbelt, I’d given up control. Hand off the throttle. If I stayed with her, I became the puppet and Steady controlled the strings. What would happen when Steady the surgeon methodically picked his way around the wound, passing through the scars I used to protect me, and the scalpel cut into the stuff that was still living? With the wound laid bare, I’d have to deal with what it hid.

And, what I’d buried.

W
e landed, taxied, and before I had time to get nervous, customs agents boarded the plane and asked for our passports—in English. That’s when an amazing thing happened. Isabella Desouches opened her mouth and spoke the most beautiful language I’d ever heard. And while I’m no linguist, she spoke it like she’d done it before. The French language rolled off her tongue like it’d been born there. In seconds, they were feeding out of her palms. Jibbering and jabbering, using their hands almost as much as their mouths. They barely glanced at my papers, more intent on the little dark Cindy Crawford mole on the corner of her mouth and the moist spray of perspiration just above her blouse’s neckline. They stamped our passports, and wished us well on our way. The younger of the two slipped Katie a piece of paper with a phone number on it. She read it and shook her head. “French men. Predictable.”

We walked through the private wing of the airport. Getting here had been a nonevent. My blood pressure returned to a normal level. I spoke without looking behind me. “Is it always that easy?”

“Yep.”

Using her personal trainer–toned legs, and ridiculously high heels, she hailed a cab, said something to the driver, then sat back, patted me on the thigh, and said, “You can breathe now.” The cabdriver was adjusting his rearview mirror to see down her blouse but she didn’t give him the pleasure.

The drive into Paris took about twenty minutes, as traffic was thin. The Eiffel Tower was the first landmark to come into view. Then the Arc de Triomphe. We routed around the arc and down the Champs-Élysées. Katie stared out the window, melting into the city. Or, maybe letting it melt into her. Just beyond a Nespresso store, the driver turned left, drove two blocks, circled right, zigzagged through an area of restaurants and hotels, and dropped us in front of a bakery on a street marked mostly by storefronts covered with rolling garage doors. She paid the driver, walked into the bakery, ordered, paid, and was biting into a croissant by the time I walked in. The croissant, nearly the size of a football, was steaming, as it had just come out of the oven, and flakes were dripping off the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were closed and she was mumbling something about how she loved Paris. I sat and the lady delivered two really small coffees. Katie slid a croissant in front of me.

“Try it.”

I did.

It might have been the best thing I’d ever put in my mouth. The inside was filled with some sort of chocolate. My surprise showed. She sipped, took another bite, and lifted her eyebrows. “Welcome to Paris.”

The window to my left gave us a view of city life in Paris. People walking to and from work, shopping, or home. Dogs on leashes. Hundreds of motorbikes. The smallest cars I’d ever seen stuffed to the brims with groceries and sofas and steaming baguettes. Women smoking. Men watching women smoke. Pigeons everywhere. Buses with Katie’s picture plastered along one side. Kids wearing all black
and drinking beer on the sidewalk. Old men dressed in sport coats and vests with Windsor-knotted ties and tweed hats, newspapers tucked under their arms.

A couple of things struck me. Paris was dirty. The buildings, streets, everything looked like it had been blown with exhaust or a brown spray. The street was littered with trash, most everybody had a small, fashionable dog, and dog feces dotted the sidewalk. Also, a lot of people smoked. Much more than in the States. While I was observing this, a man with a small Jack Russell walked in, ordered a coffee, and then sat with the dog on his lap, feeding him small pieces of a baguette.

She said, “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking I miss my boat.”

She dropped a tip on the table. “Come on.” We walked out, she checked her watch, tilted her head side to side, and said, “You in a hurry?”

“Lady, I’m with you. I have no idea where we’re going, why we’re here, or when we’re returning. So, no, I’m not really in a hurry.”

She turned laughing, reached in her purse, and slid on her glasses. “Follow me.” We walked a block, turned a corner up a tight alley, and she stopped at the third garage door we came to. She fingered the combination lock, slid the lock sideways then kicked the door up revealing a garage of sorts. A car, several scooters, and a plethora of helmets closest to us, and then a rack of hanging clothes, stacks of faded jeans, piles of shoes, and two comfortable chairs. A sink, toilet, and shower filled one corner. She grabbed two keys out of a box on the wall, tossed one at me, and said, “Pick a helmet.” While I found one that fit, she changed into some jeans, running shoes, and black leather jacket. She pointed at one of the scooters. “That’s yours.” It was something I’d never seen. The bike had two front wheels and one rear. She said, “You’ve ridden this kind before?”

I shook my head. “I’ve never really ridden any kind before.”

She pulled on a helmet, then punched a button, and the black,
tinted eye-shield popped up, revealing her eyes. “Don’t worry. Thing almost drives itself.” Her laughter told me she was lying. She pushed a button on the handlebars, it started, and she began pushing it out of the garage. I could still hear her laughing inside her helmet. We idled into the alley. I locked the garage door and then eased to the stop sign of the one-way street. I pulled up alongside her. Traffic moved in front of us, left to right.

“Keep up”—she flipped her shield down and her voice took on a garbled Darth Vader tone—“if you can.” She kicked it into gear. She did not wait for an opening in the traffic. She just flicked her right wrist, launching her forward. The Apollo rocket was slower out of the gate. I followed, turned right, gunned it, and saw her three cars ahead. Steady’s voice echoed: “Don’t let her get you on a scooter…” We turned onto the Champs-Élysées, drove two blocks and then into the circle surrounding the arc. I saw her briefly on the far side where she looked back, blew me a kiss, and then she was gone.

I tried desperately to get out of the circle but people in Paris don’t drive like me so I made three trips around cussing the absence of streetlights. Growing dizzy on the fourth lap, I gunned it, darted right, and popped up on the curb in front of a café after nearly getting crushed by a bus with a loud horn. A group of kids cussed me and gave me the finger. I’d interrupted their smoke. I parked the bike, dropped my helmet on the ground, and sat at a table. When the server spoke to me in words I didn’t understand, I said the only European-sounding thing I could think of that might result in something to drink. “Cappuccino?”

Halfway through a great cup of coffee, she appeared, screen up. “What happened?”

I pointed at the spaghetti-intersection of cars circling the arc. “That.”

Darth Vader again. “Come on, rookie.”

We spent the day zooming in and out of traffic and the only reason I kept up with her was because she held back. She could have
left me at will. At one point she said, “There’s no better way to see the city.” I’m not sure about that but we did see a good bit of it.

She drove me through what turned out to be the Paris Flea Market—largest of its kind in the world. Hundreds, even thousands, of vendors, the market is not measured in square feet, but square blocks, and it is larger than some towns I’ve seen. She pulled to the side. “Gypsies started this. A share shop of sorts. Grew out of the idea that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Since then, it’s grown. Some of the world’s best antiques are right here. I’ve been coming here for ten years or so. Whenever I bought a new house, I’d walk through, buy everything I wanted, fill a shipping container or two, and then ship it to the new house where it’d be waiting on me when I arrived. Expensive, but”—she smiled—“fun. Used to drive my designers nuts, but”—a shrug—“I figured I was paying them so it was their job to figure out how it all fit together.”

A shipping container filled to the brim with disconnected pieces. Somebody’s discards. All traveling to a new home to be handled by a stranger.

It was a good image and I made a note of it.

Following brunch, then lunch, then another coffee, we stopped outside the Hermès store in the late afternoon. She pulled up next to the curb, eyeing the window displays. “One of my favorite places.” She raised a hand. “And before you butcher the name, it’s not ‘her-meez.’ It’s pronounced, ‘air-may.’ ”

“Glad you clarified that.”

She surveyed the window displays.

I said, “Go ahead.”

“They used to open at night. Just for me. No one else. I have, or had, about two hundred and fifty of their scarves.” She shook her head. “Beautiful.”

“How much are they?”

“The inexpensive ones are about three hundred euros.”

I did the math. “Four hundred and fifty dollars?”

She nodded.

“And it’s just a scarf.”

“It’s not just ‘a’ scarf. It’s ‘the’ scarf.”

I glanced through the window. “Does it come with a TV or something?”

She chuckled. “You should come in off the water some time. There’s a whole world out here just waiting to be seen.” With that, she flicked her wrist. Within seconds, she’d become a speck in the distance.

A
t sundown we found a café beneath the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. She returned from the bathroom with a scarf covering her ears and forehead and large sunglasses covering the top half of her face. She topped it off with a second scarf around her neck. She blended in seamlessly—Patricia the Parisian painter. She ordered dinner, conversing with the server. Between the wig, scarves, and sunglasses he had no idea. I listened, watching her mouth. The way she formed the words. Unlike English, her heart was connected to these words. Hearing it reminded me of melting ice cream. Her mouth made the words but the transformation was in her body. Her facial expressions. She was in midsentence. She was excited, happy, and smiling. She waved her hand across the scenery. “You know how Tim McGraw sings that song about how you should live like you were dying?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he should write one that talks about how to live like you were dead. It’s much better.” She was chatty. The excitement of the
city had settled in her. “I like it here. People sit at cafés, drink beer, smoke cigarettes, eat desserts and taste them, like really taste them. They watch the afternoon go by.” She shook her head. “Americans never watch the afternoon go by. It’s silly to us. We think, ‘Why would we do that?’ We are always in a hurry, always on to the next minute and never enjoying the one we are in, and no one is a worse offender than me. I am, or was, always on to the next thing, never on this thing, never this right now. I used to send somewhere between a hundred and two hundred texts a day—and most were me telling somebody to do something. Giving orders. Success here is a bottle of wine, fresh flowers, or a loaf of bread just out of the oven. Sweet cream butter and a plate of olives. They get six weeks’ vacation and work thirty-five-hour workweeks. They don’t need three closets of clothes and four cars. They need right now. They live right now. Not tomorrow.” She stood, walked to a corner vendor, bought a package of cigarettes, returned, packed them on her leg, and lit one, inhaling deeply. When she’d filled her lungs, she laid her head back and blew the smoke up and out.

“You smoke?” I said.

Another inhale followed by a smile. The smoke trailed up and out the corner of her mouth. “Only in Paris.”

I whispered, “In your—” I looked over my shoulder. “Did you play many French roles?”

She stamped the cigarette and shook her head. “None.”

“Why?”

She stared up at the tower, now lit with a million lights. The memory rising to the surface. “My father used to bring me here.” The full moon above the Eiffel Tower had her attention. “We rode the train.”

The pieces fell together. “You’re French?”

A sip of wine. “
Oui
.”

“That means ‘yes,’ right?”

The red wine colored the tip of her lips. She let the taste linger. “
Oui
.”

I paused. “Who else knows this?”

“Just you.”

“What about that Richard Thomas guy?”

“I told him a few of my secrets, but not this one.”

“Steady?”

She shook her head. “English was one of my favorite subjects in school, and I was able to speak it with very little accent by the time I met him.” She spoke without giving it much thought. “About forty percent of English is actually of French origin.”

“Get out of town.”

“You don’t believe me?”

She shrugged. The phrases rattled off her tongue like letters of the alphabet. “
Déjà vu, à la mode, pièce de résistance, bon appétit, à la carte, en masse, art deco, nouveau riche, au contraire, au naturel, au pair, au revoir, je ne sais quoi, fait accompli…”
She counted on her fingers as she made her point. Each finger popping up in unison with the words as she spoke them. “
Avant garde, bon voyage, RSVP, chaise longue, crème de la crème, café au lait, potpourri, carte blanche, laissez-faire, grand prix, cordon bleu, coup d’état, esprit de corps, crème brûlée, cul-de-sac, faux pas, double entendre, en route, art nouveau, film noir, Mardi Gras, nom de plume, papier-mâché, c’est la vie, raison d’être, tour de force, vis-à-vis…”