It felt like his retreat from Russia, even before she’d hit the avenues de Wagram or d’Iéna.
What she needed to do was go on the offensive.
Attack. March. March on him.
Show herself to him, smile, joke around, act like an old friend just passing through, or a little sister from the country dumped in Sept-Cinq, or Little Bo Peep who’d lost her sheep, or just some skank (who’d disappear depending on who she met up with).
And she needed to get up early.
Because you could never get anything out of the dining room. Maître d’s, café waiters, guys who were tired before they’d even put their vests on, headwaiters who thought they were hot stuff with their blowouts, all those people who changed completely depending on whether they were on duty or not. Who were friendly once they’d put on their uniform and were fishing for tips, but would give you the finger when they were still in street clothes, vacuuming.
What she needed to do was get up early and find the back door. The artists’ entrance, the delivery entrance. The badly-lit one that didn’t look like anything, that was wedged open with a crate or an empty jar or an oilcan; the one that was half-open now, with Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, Congolese, Filipinos, Ivorians, and other citizens of the United Colors of A Shitty Life coming out and spraying soapy water, and where, from time to time, you could also see zombies with rounder cheeks and lighter skin.
The zombies were rubbing their faces and had enough money to buy pre-rolled cigarettes, and they smoked alone or in groups, one foot braced against the wall, growing more and more silent as the day went on.
Fresh as daisies at the eight o’clock break, calmer at ten, fried at three, and—paradoxically—completely refreshed at closing time, when they got all chatty again.
Instead of finally going home they talked and laughed, and went over the service, making wisecracks to open the valves and give the stress of the evening time to dissipate in the night air.
In just a few days of this . . . quest, it was, rather than a conquest, so far (she didn’t even try to be noticed anymore), Mathilde had learned all of that.
A whole world.
She’d also realized that only having a first name to go on wasn’t going to get her very far; that most of these guys only went by their last names, and every time she asked for a Jean-Baptiste she was looked at regretfully, as if she were trying to get her security blanket back from the strict man who’d just closed the school gates. Jean-Ba, at a pinch, but Jean-Baptiste, no. It was too long.
When she ran into a dishwasher and sensed that her English, or Bengali, or Senegalese, or Tamil, or she didn’t even know what, wouldn’t be up to the level of his, she gestured at the kitchens and then showed her left hand, folding under the first two joints of a randomly-chosen finger (she couldn’t remember exactly which one he was missing); mimed having a big belly with her other hand, and sometimes even a cowlick on top of her head, too.
They—the rare ones who didn’t assume she was completely insane—shook their heads and spread their hands.
Then she would hear them whispering among themselves as she walked away:
“Avaluku ina thevai pattudhu?” (What did she want?)
“Nan . . . seriya kandupikikalai aval Spiderman parkirala aladhu Elvis Presley parkirala endru . . .” (Uh, I couldn’t quite tell whether she was looking for Spiderman or Elvis Presley . . . )
“Aanal ninga ina pesuringal? Ina solringa, ungaluku ounum puriyaliya! Ungal Amma Alliance Française Pondicherryla velai saidargal enru ninaithen!” (What are you talking about? You didn’t understand any of it, did you! I thought your mother used to work at the Alliance Française in Pondicherry!)
“Nan apojudhu . . . orou china kujandai . . . ” (Well, yeah, but I was really little at the time . . . )
Once or twice someone had pointed out a Jean-Baptiste to her who turned out not to be her Jean-Baptiste, and on another morning someone showed her a hand missing some fingers—but that wasn’t his, either.
News traveled fast on Radio Casserole, and after a week and a half or so it wasn’t uncommon for her to be greeted with:
“Don’t say anything. You’re the one looking for an armless cook, right? Heh heh! Nope, he isn’t here.”
She had become a kind of attraction. The morning’s KitKat break. The crazy girl on the bike who crossed things out in her notebook and either bummed a cigarette off you or offered you one.
At the end of the day, she was having fun. She really liked these young people who were always hurrying and not really chatty, but gallant. Always gallant. The youngest ones fascinated her the most. Were they aware of the enormous gulf that stood between them and their civilian friends at this particular time in their lives?
* * *
She set her alarm clock for five A.M., showered at the lowest water pressure so she wouldn’t wake up the girls, stuffed her maps into her bag, and went out into Paris at dawn, in the full glory of midsummer.
The rosy, drowsy Paris of deliverymen, market porters, and artisan bakers. She rediscovered views, boulevards, and avenues that she had frequented before, at the same time of the morning, but then she had been exhausted and on automatic pilot, weaving and limping, leaning on—or barely managing to grab—the handlebars of her bike, which served at those times as a balancing weight.
She admired the misty stretches, the rough languor, the half-closed yet already seductive indolence of a city that her poor little eyes, clouded by fatigue, alcohol, and the myxomatosis common to all nameless depressives, hadn’t truly seen in a long time, and that remained, whatever was said, whatever was done, beautiful.
It was all so picturesque . . . she felt like a tourist, a wanderer, on a sightseeing trip to her own life. She rode very fast, played with bus drivers, slalomed between ungainly rental bikes, followed in Baron Haussmann’s tracks, left the working-class atmosphere (what remained of it) of the Place de Clichy far behind her, passed more and more luxurious buildings, recognized the lovely rotunda in the Parc Monceau, asking herself each morning who lived in these over-the-top private mansions, and if these demigods knew how lucky they were; had her breakfast in different local watering holes, watching the prices skyrocket as the arrondissement numbers got lower; people-watched, flipped through Le Parisien, turned her back to the television screens, listened to discussions at the bar, got acquainted with boastful, vain, ringing and/or bellowing discussions of horse races and football leagues; got involved when she wanted to, and pedaled fast to make up for the lost time.
She got goose bumps on downslopes and surges of determination going up hills.
Believed.
Fervently.
She improvised a destiny for herself, played with her solitude, made herself into a movie, pretended she was the Mathilde from Un long dimanche de fiançailles, searched for a guy who wasn’t handsome at all but who wanted to fix her; he had murmured it in her ear one night in the past, and even if she didn’t find him, even if this whole thing was just one more rip-off from the Land of Nod, it didn’t matter much; it wouldn’t matter that much because he had already given her the magnificent gift of awareness that she was on her feet, resolute, an early riser, and alive, and that . . . that, in itself, was a lot.
For as long as this handful of cool early mornings lasted, the world . . . at least . . . the world belonged to her.
3.
Belonged?
To other people!
For almost three weeks now she had been searching, getting up at dawn while continuing to work, going to bed with the chickens, eating like a bird and falling asleep disappointed. It was wearing her down.
Mathilde sighed.
But what had she expected?
And the hell was goddamned Cupid up to now?
Well, fatso?
What was this crap?
All the places she had believed in and been inspired by,
all the advice and recommendations, all the smoke signals sent from one service door to the next, all the “Good luck!”s and “You say there were rings on the blade? That’s Japanese. If I were you I’d start with the Japanese restaurants . . . ”, all the good leads and false hopes, all the meager descriptions and huge questions (“Excuse me, sir, I’m looking for a chef, but . . . uh, I don’t know what he goes by, but he’s a bit . . . uh . . . pudgy . . . does that tell you anything?”), all the wide eyes and regretful headshakes, the spread hands, the polite sending of her back behind the ropes where they shooed the riffraff, this whole upside-down life, these early mornings and continual disappointments . . . all of it, all, all of it was in vain.
Mathilde was faltering.
Where the hell was he? Did he really work in this neighborhood? Maybe he was an amateur chef, or worked in a school cafeteria or a company restaurant? Or was he just a bullshitter with a bunch of knives? Or a gentle dreamer with no follow-through of his ideas?
And why hadn’t he ever called her back? Because he was disappointed? Annoyed? Bitter? Amnesiac?
Because he didn’t know how to read?
Because she wasn’t his type, or he thought she was still hung up on the shitty poet?
Mathilde wavered.
Did he even exist? Had he ever existed?
Maybe she had dreamed it all up. Maybe the letter had been out of its envelope for years. Maybe somebody else had read it way before this. Maybe . . .
Maybe she’d been fucked over by words . . . again.
Speaking of words . . . it was on this street, years ago—she’d forgotten, but it came back to her just then, that her budding writer had turned pale one winter evening.
Pale and deeply emotional because he had seen, in the distance, the silhouette of an old man rushing through the revolving door of the hotel across the street. He had gone white, clutched her arm, and been silent for a long moment before repeating, several times and in every possible ecstatic tone: “Bernard Frank? Was that Bernard Frank? Oh my God . . . Bernard Frank! Don’t you get it? It was Bernard Frank!”
No, she didn’t get it; she was cold and she wanted to get the metro, but to seem as moved as he was she had said:
“Do you want to go in there? Say hello to him?”
“I couldn’t. Besides, that’s a luxury hotel. I couldn’t even buy you an olive.”
And for the whole trip home he had gone on and on about how brilliant and cultured the man was, the amazing books he had written, his style, his coolness, his elegance, blah blah blah.
Excitement, mumbo jumbo, yip-yapping, and excessive verbiage of the noble savage, Act II, Scene 3.
She’d listened to him babble with one distracted ear, counting the number of stations left before they got home, and at some point he had added that the man in the white scarf had been best friends with Françoise Sagan, that they had been young, rich, and beautiful together; that they had read and written and danced and gambled and partied together . . . thinking about that had put him into a dreamy state, she remembered.
In a tunnel under the earth on an icy November evening, she had pressed her nose to the window so she wouldn’t have to look at his glassy-eyed reflection and had thought about what it must have been like to party with Sagan . . .
That had spoken to her, yes, and now she regretted not having been daring enough to follow him into his luxurious cocoon. Friend of the Gatsbys . . .
Hand in hand, silently, they had dwelt on their doubts and their dreams and their regrets in the bowels of line 9.
And Bernard Frank had died the next day.
Hello, heartache.
Mathilde hit the brakes.
The luxury hotels. She’d forgotten the luxury hotels.
She got off her bike, watching the ballet of concierges swarming around sublime luxury cars in fiscal paradises. Leaning on her handlebars, dumbfounded, she recognized once more the cleverness and all-powerfulness of life.
Because he was there.
Of course he was there.
Behind that grand cut-stone façade, in that exorbitantly-priced hotel on the Rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré, maker of miracles and patron saint of gourmands.
He was there, and words, she had to admit, had called the shots again. They had introduced her to him, and they had sown discord between them, and now they would reunite them.
It was true. Literature tore things apart, and she wasn’t always right.
She recognized her faults with relief, and the destructive love of her youth exonerated her at last: it didn’t matter if he had used them with more tenderness than he had loved her. He had kept his promise.
* * *
It was almost seven o’clock. A bad time for kitchen reunions.
She’d come back.
She moved away, comforted, and, leaning on old Jeannot, admired her smile in every window on the street, all the way to the corner of the Rue Royale.
Of course it was overpriced, and not always in the best taste, and sometimes hard to carry, but so what. She thought it was beautiful.
4.
Too beautiful, even.
Much too beautiful to be true.
Did you believe that? Are you kidding? What were you hoping for? That she would show up the next morning with a bounce in her step and ask someone to call him, and that he—ta-da!—would appear in a shimmering halo before running toward her in slow motion, with pigeons taking flight and the camera circling around them?
Come on, you bunch of sentimental fools. That only happens in the movies, or the kind of books her ex hated. This is real life, unfortunately, and our dreamer of a heroine got short-changed: entrance was prohibited, the doors were closed, and the only cameras were surveillance ones.
Okay. This story was beginning to be ridiculous. None of it was funny at all anymore, and Mathilde Salmon (spread the word) was sick and tired of running after a boy.
The character studies took two minutes.
She sat down on the hood of a car, changed her shoes, took out her makeup kit, tied back her hair, powdered her cheeks, lengthened her eyelashes, lined her lips, dabbed perfume on the back of her neck, and stuffed her jacket into her bike’s luggage rack before heading back up the street, swaying her hips.
Beautiful, sexy, in a hurry, and dripping with money as she was, she ignored concierges, bellboys, receptionists, luggage porters, maids, and clients.
Step aside.
Step aside, little people; you only get in the way.
Walking on a carpet as thick as her nerve, she went down hallways, ignored the questions and other remarks in Russian and English that people addressed to her along the way; arranged an invisible stole around her shoulders, searched for the dining room, dodged a vacuum cleaner, smiled in apology, spied the kitchens, pushed the door open, and collared the first person she saw:
“I need to see Jean-Baptiste immediately. Call him for me, please.”
5.
Who? Vincent?”
“No (disdainfully), Jean-Baptiste. I just told you. The one who uses Japanese knives.”
“Ohh, right, Jibé (scornfully). He doesn’t work here anymore.”
And all of a sudden Mathilde wasn’t beautiful anymore.
Or rich, or sexy, or proud. Or anything at all.
She closed her eyes and waited for someone to throw her out. A big, tough-looking guy was already coming toward her, wiping his hands.
“Miss? Are you lost?”
She said yes, and he showed her the exit.
But there must have been something in the sadness of her expression that told him she was truly crushed, and ugly, and miserable, because he added:
“Do you know him? Be careful . . . I thought I knew him too, and then . . . I got taken for a ride anyway. It was a while ago, though. I told him, by the way, I told him . . . but I don’t know wh
at’s gotten into him, because he’s not very accommodating, is he? Nope, not accommodating at all. He didn’t show up to work for weeks. He fed me line after line of bullshit, and then he left.”
“Do you know where I can find him?”
“No, I have no idea. And I don’t want to know, to tell you the truth. He really left us in the shit, too, in the middle of high season like that. Oh yeah, I remember . . . one morning he showed up and he just wasn’t the same anymore. Nothing interested him. He couldn’t tell the difference between a watermelon and a whelk anymore, the pigheaded fool. First he had to take some time off work because he burned himself, and then it happened again and we had to send him to the emergency room, and when he came back he wasn’t even the same person. He couldn’t concentrate. ‘I just don’t like it anymore,’ was all he could tell me. He emptied out his locker and settled his accounts and left, and you can go out the same door. And if you ever see him, tell him to give me back my Grimod. He’ll know what it means.”
Making her way back past the kitchen staff, Mathilde sensed that she was disturbing them, that she should hurry up. Access here, she remembered, was forbidden to salespeople and vendors and people looking for other people and all other intruders foreign to the world of the hash slingers.
Ousted.
She was walking toward her beautiful Aston Martin with the broken dynamo when the first guy she had spoken to touched her elbow.
“Is it you?”