Paris for One and Other Stories

  She pulls out her notebook and grabs the hotel pen from the bedside table. She writes:

  REASONS I AM RIGHT TO STAY IN TONIGHT

  1. He might be an ax murderer.

  2. He will probably want sex.

  3. Perhaps both 1 and 2.

  4. I may end up in a part of Paris I don't know.

  5. I may have to talk to taxi drivers.

  6. I may have problems getting back into the hotel late at night.

  7. My outfit is silly.

  8. I will have to pretend to be impulsive.

  9. I will have to speak French and eat French food in front of French people.

  10. If I go to bed early, I will be up nice and early for the train home.

  She sits there, staring at her neat list for some time. Then on the other side of the page she writes:

  1. I am in Paris.

  She stares at it a bit longer. Then, as the clock strikes eight, she shoves the notebook back into her bag, grabs her coat, and runs down the narrow staircase toward Reception.

  He is there, leaning on the desk and talking to the receptionist, and at the sight of him she feels the color flood her cheeks. As she walks toward them, her heart beating fast, she is trying to work out how to explain herself. Whatever she says will sound stupid. It will be clear that she was afraid of going out with him.

  "Ah, mademoiselle. I was just telling your friend here that I thought you might take a few minutes," Marianne says.

  "You are ready to go?" Fabien is smiling. She cannot remember the last time someone looked so pleased to see her--except perhaps her cousin's dog when he tried to do something quite rude to her leg.

  "If you return after midnight, mademoiselle, you will need to use this code at the main door." The receptionist hands her a small card. As Nell takes it, Marianne adds quietly, "I am so glad your stomach-ache is better."

  "You're not well?" Fabien says as he hands her a spare helmet.

  The Paris evening is crisp and cold. She has never been on a bike before. She remembers reading about how many people die while riding bikes. But the helmet is already on her head, and he is shifting forward on his seat, motioning for her to get on behind.

  "I'm fine now," she says.

  Please don't let me die, she thinks.

  "Good! First we will drink, and then maybe we eat, but first we show you some of Paris, yes?" As she wraps her arms around his waist, the little moped leaps forward into the night. And with a squeal they are off.

  Chapter Nine

  Fabien whizzes down the rue de Rivoli, dipping in and out of the traffic, feeling the girl's hands tighten around his waist whenever he speeds up. At the traffic lights, he stops and asks, "You okay?" His voice is muffled through his helmet.

  She is smiling, her nose tipped red. "Yes!" she says, and he finds he is grinning, too. Sandrine always looked blankly at him on the moped, as if she were barely able to hide her thoughts about the way he drove. The English girl squeals and laughs, and her hair flies up, and sometimes, when he swerves to avoid a car that pulls out of a side street, she yells, "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!"

  He takes her down crowded avenues, through back streets, whizzing over Pont de la Tournelle, then over the Ile Saint-Louis, so that she can see the river glittering beneath them. They ride around the back of Pont de l'Archeveche, so she can see the cathedral of Notre-Dame lit up in the darkness, its gargoyles gazing down with shadowed faces from its Gothic towers.

  Then, before she can breathe, they are on the road again, riding along the Champs-Elysees, weaving through the cars, beeping at pedestrians who step out into the road. At one point he slows and points upward, so that she can see the Arc de Triomphe. He feels her lean back a little as they drive past. He puts his thumb up, and she puts her own up in response.

  He speeds over a bridge and turns along the river. He dodges the buses and taxis and ignores the horns of drivers, until he sees the spot he wants. He slows and cuts the engine by the main path. Tourist boats float along the river with their bright lights, and there are stalls selling Eiffel Tower key rings and cotton candy. Then there it is. The tower soars above them, a million pieces of iron pointing into the infinite sky.

  She releases her grip on his jacket and gets off the bike carefully, as if during the journey her legs have become shaky. She pulls off her helmet. He notices that she does not bother to fix her hair, as Sandrine would have done. She is too busy gazing upward, her mouth an O of surprise.

  He pulls off his own helmet, leans forward over the handlebars.

  "There! Now you can say you have seen all of Paris's finest sights--and in . . . uh . . . twenty-two minutes."

  She turns and looks at him, her eyes glittering. "That," she says, "was the most bloody terrifying and absolutely best thing I have ever done in my entire life."

  He laughs.

  "It's the Eiffel Tower!"

  "You want to go up? We will probably have to queue."

  She thinks for a moment. "I think we've done enough queuing for today. What I would really like is a stiff drink."

  "A what drink?"

  "Wine!" she says, and climbs back onto the moped. "A glass of wine!"

  He feels her hands slide around his waist as he starts the engine up again and drives back into the night.

  The Lanes of Brighton are heaving, thick with catcalling hen parties, groups of highly groomed young men who eye them speculatively, having not yet toppled over into drunken incoherence. Magda, Trish, and Sue are walking together in a row, even though it forces people off the pavement, trying to work out the location of the bar that Magda heard does happy hour if you are girls visiting alone.

  "Oh, heck," says Magda, reaching into her purse. "I've forgotten my phone."

  "It's probably safer at the hotel," says Trish. "You'll only get drunk and lose it again."

  "But what if I meet someone? How will I get his number?"

  "You can get him to write it on your--Pete?"

  "My what?"

  "Pete? Pete Welsh?"

  The three women stop and stare at the disheveled figure hanging out of the Mermaid's Arms bar. He blinks at them.

  Magda marches up to him, confused. "What are you . . . ? Aren't you meant to be in Paris?"

  Pete rubs at the top of his head. The amount of alcohol he has consumed may be slowing his Rolodex of excuses.

  "Oh. That. Yeah. Well. It was kind of tricky getting away from work."

  The women stare at one another as they register the surroundings.

  "And where's Nell?" says Sue. "Oh my God. Where's Nell?"

  Nell is squashed into the end booth at the Bar Noir, in some unspecified part of central Paris; she has long since stopped trying to guess where. There was a mention of food sometime ago, but it seems to have been forgotten. She has relaxed in here, with Emile and Rene and that friend of Emile's with the red hair whose name Fabien never can remember. She has taken off her hat and her coat, and her hair swings around her face as she laughs. Everyone speaks in English for her, but Emile is trying to teach her to swear in French. There are many bottles on the table, and the music is so loud that they all have to shout.

  "Merde!" Emile is saying. "But you have to pull the face, too. Merde!"

  "Merde!" She throws up her hands like Emile, then bursts out laughing again. "I can't do the accent."

  "Sheet."

  "Sheet," she says, copying his deep voice. "I can do that one."

  "But you don't swear like you mean it. I thought all English girls cursed like sailors, no?"

  "Bouf!" she says, and swings around to look at Fabien.

  "Bouf?" says Emile.

  "Bouf," says Rene.

  "More drinks!" says Emile.

  Fabien finds he keeps watching her. Not beautiful, not in the way Sandrine was beautiful. But there is something about her face that keeps you looking: The way she screws up her nose when she laughs. The way she looks a little guilty when she does it, as if she is doing something she shouldn't. Her smile
, wide, with tiny white child's teeth.

  They lock eyes for a moment, and he sees a question and an answer between them. Emile is fun, the look says, but we both know that this is about us. When he looks away, he feels a little knot of something in his belly. He goes up to the bar, orders another round of drinks.

  "You finally moved on, eh?" says Fred, behind the bar.

  "She's just a friend. Visiting from England."

  "If you say so," Fred says, lining up the drinks. He doesn't need to ask what they want. It's Saturday night. "I saw her, by the way."

  "Sandrine?"

  "Yes. She said she has a new job. Something to do with a design studio."

  He feels a brief pang that something so major has happened in her life without him knowing.

  "It's good," Fred says, not meeting his eye, "that you are moving on."

  And in that one sentence, Fabien realizes that Sandrine has someone else. It's good that you are moving on.

  As he carries the drinks toward the table, it hits him. It's a pang of discomfort but not of pain. It doesn't matter. It's time to let her go.

  "I thought you were getting wine," Nell says, her eyes widening as he arrives with the drinks.

  "It's time for tequila," he says. "Just one. Just . . . because."

  "Because you are in Paris and it's Saturday night," says Emile. "And who needs an excuse for tequila?"

  He sees a flash of doubt on her face. But then she lifts her chin. "Let's do it," she says. She sucks the lime, then downs the contents of the little glass, screwing her eyes shut with a shudder. "Oh, my God."

  "Now we know it's Saturday night," says Emile. "Let's party! Are we going on later?"

  Fabien wants to. He feels alive and reckless. He wants to see Nell laughing until the small hours. He wants to go to a club and dance with her, one hand on her sweaty back, her eyes locked on his. He wants to be awake in the early hours for the right reasons, alive with the drink and the fun and the streets of Paris. He wants to bathe in the sense of hope that comes with someone new, someone who sees in you only the best of everything, not the worst. "Sure. If Nell wants to."

  "Nell," says Rene. "What kind of name is this? It's a normal English name?"

  "It's the worst name ever," she says. "My mother named me after someone in one of Charles Dickens's books."

  "It could have been worse. You could have been--what is her name?--Miss Havisham."

  "Mercy Pecksniff."

  "Fanny Dorrit." They are all laughing.

  She claps a hand over her mouth, giggling. "How do you all know so much about Dickens?"

  "We studied together. English literature. Fabien reads all the time. It's terrible. We have to fight to get him to come out." Emile lifts a glass. "He is like a . . . a . . . how do you say it? A hermit. He is a hermit. I have no idea how you got him out tonight, but I am very happy. Salut!"

  "Salut!" she says, and then she reaches into her pocket for her phone and stares at it. She looks shocked and peers closer, as if checking she has read correctly.

  Are you OK?????

  It is from Trish.

  "Everything is okay?" Fabien says when she says nothing.

  "Fine," she says. "Just my friends being weird. So . . . where are we going?"

  It is two thirty in the morning. Fabien has drunk more than he has drunk in weeks. His sides hurt from laughing. The Zedel is packed. One of Fabien's favorite tracks comes on, which he always played in the restaurant during cleanup time until the boss banned it. Emile, who is in crazy party mode, leaps onto the bar and starts dancing, pointing at his chest and grinning at the people below him. A cheer goes up.

  Fabien feels Nell's fingers resting on his arm and takes her hand. She is laughing, her hair sweaty, with strands stuck to her face. She took off her coat sometime ago, and he suspects they may not find it again. They have been dancing for hours.

  The redheaded girl gets up on the bar beside Emile, helped by a sea of hands, and starts dancing. They shimmy together, swigging from bottles of beer. The barmen stand back, watching and occasionally moving a glass out of the way of a stray foot. It is not the first time the bar of the Zedel has become a dance floor, and it will not be the last.

  Nell is trying to say something to him.

  He stoops lower to hear her, catching a faint trace of her scent.

  "I've never danced on a bar," she says.

  "No? Do it!" he says.

  She laughs, shakes her head, and he holds her gaze. And it is as if she remembers something. She reaches a hand to his shoulder, and he helps her up, and there she is, above him, righting herself and then, suddenly, dancing. Emile lifts a bottle in salute, and she is off, locked into the rhythm, her eyes closed, hair swinging. She wipes sweat from her face and swigs from a bottle. Two, then three more people join them up there.

  Fabien is not tempted. He just wants to stand here, feeling the music vibrate through him, part of the crowd, watching her, enjoying her pleasure, knowing he is part of it.

  She opens her eyes then, searching him out among the sea of faces. She spots him and smiles, and Fabien realizes he is feeling something he thought he had forgotten how to feel.

  He is happy.

  It is 4:00 a.m. Or maybe 5:00 a.m. She has long since stopped caring. She and Fabien are walking side by side down a silent street, her feet uneven on the cobbles, her calves aching from the dancing. She gives a small shiver, and Fabien slows, removing his jacket and placing it over her shoulders.

  "I will call the Zedel tomorrow," Fabien says, "and ask if anyone found your coat."

  "Oh, don't worry," says Nell, enjoying the weight of his jacket, the faint male scent it gives off as she moves. "It was an old coat. Oh--damn. It had the code in it."

  "Code?"

  "To the hotel. I won't be able to get in."

  Fabien doesn't look at her as he speaks. "Well . . . you could . . . stay . . . at my apartment." He says it casually, like it's no big deal.

  "Oh. No," says Nell quickly. "You're very sweet, but--"

  "But--"

  "I don't know you. Thank you, though."

  Fabien looks at his watch. "Well . . . the hotel doors will open in an hour and forty minutes. We can look for an all-night cafe. Or we can walk. Or . . ."

  Nell waits as he thinks. Fabien smiles suddenly, holds out his arm, and after the smallest hesitation she links hers through it and they set off down the street.

  There is a moment, just as Fabien starts heading down the slope that leads to the quayside, when Nell's courage briefly fails her. There is no way she cannot end up as a cautionary headline, surely, she thinks as she gazes at the inky black of the river, the shadows of the trees, and the utter emptiness of the quay below. And yet something--perhaps an English predisposition not to appear rude, not to make a fuss, even if it does end up in your untimely murder--propels her forward. Fabien walks ahead with the easy stride of someone who has been here a million times before. Not a serial killer's walk, she thinks as she picks her way down. Not that she has a clear idea of how a serial killer walks. Just not like that. He turns and motions to her to follow and then stops beside a small wooden boat lined with bench seats and tethered to a huge iron ring. Nell slows and stares at it.

  "Whose is this?"

  "My father's. He takes tourists along the river."

  He holds out his hand, and she takes it, climbing aboard. Fabien motions to the bench beside him, then reaches into a chest, from which he hauls a wool blanket. He hands it to Nell, waiting as she adjusts it over her lap, and then he starts the boat and they're off, chugging gently against the tide into the center.

  Nell looks up as they head into the dark waters, gazing out at the silent Parisian streets, the glitter of streetlamps on the water, and thinks she must now be in a dream. This cannot be her, drifting along in the Parisian waters with a stranger in the middle of the night. But she no longer feels afraid. She feels elated, giddy. Fabien looks back at her, perhaps seeing her smile, and motions to her to stand. He h
ands her the tiller, and she takes it, feeling the little boat break the waters beneath her.

  "Where are we going?" she says, and realizes she doesn't entirely care.

  "Just keep steering," says Fabien. "I have something to show you."

  They chug quietly upstream. Paris is illuminated around them, its sounds distant and beautiful, as if they are alone here in its epicenter, a dark, glittering bubble.

  "So," says Fabien. "We have two hours to find out everything. Ask me anything. Anything you like."

  "Oh, God. I'm hopeless at this. So . . . what did you love most as a child?"

  "A child? Football. I could recite all the players in Paris Saint-Germain: Casagrande, Algerino, Cisse, Anelka . . ."

  "Okay," says Nell, who feels suddenly that the Premier League may slightly kill her romantic Parisian vibe. "Then . . . who was the first girl you ever fell in love with?"

  "Easy," says Fabien firmly. "Nancy Delevigne."

  "Great name. What did she look like?"

  "Long dark hair, all ringlets. Comme ca." He twists his fingers near his face as if to suggest curls. "Big, dark eyes. A beautiful laugh. She went off with my friend Gerard. It was to be expected," he says, when he sees her face fall. "He had a better--"

  He mimes bouncing up and down. Nell's eyes widen briefly.

  "How you say . . . trampoline? We were seven. Here, steer this way a little. There is a strong current in this part."

  He places his hand over hers on the tiller as they pass under a bridge. She registers the warmth of it, tries not to reveal the flush of color that travels to her cheeks.

  "Nobody more recently?" says Nell.

  "Yes. I lived with Sandrine for two years. Until three months ago."

  "What happened?"

  Fabien shrugs. "What didn't happen? I didn't get a better job. I didn't finish my book and become the next Sartre. I didn't grow, change, fulfill my potential. . . ."

  "Yet!" says Nell before she can stop herself. As Fabien turns, she says: "Why does there have to be some kind of time frame on these things? I mean, you have a nice job, with people you like. You're writing a book. Hey, you're a man who goes to art exhibitions by himself! It's not like you're lying in bed in your boxers."