“What I mean is, have you ever thought about how it is that you do it? Day and night? While you sleep. While you eat. While you talk.”
“Not so much.”
“Think about it now.”
“How do you think about breathing?” But then all of sudden I do. I get tangled up in thoughts about breathing, the mechanics of it, how is it that my body knows to do it even when I’m sleeping, or crying, or hiccupping. What would happen if my body somehow forgot? And sure enough, my breath grows a little labored, as if I’m walking uphill, even though I’m walking down the slope of the bridge.
“Okay, that was weird.”
“See?” Willem asks. “You thought too hard. Same with travel. You can’t work too much at it, or it feels like work. You have to surrender yourself to the chaos. To the accidents.”
“I’m supposed to walk in front of a bus and then I’ll have a good time?”
Willem chuckles. “Not those accidents. The little things that happen. Sometimes they’re insignificant; other times, they change everything.”
“This all sounds very Jedi. Can you be more specific?”
“A guy picks up a girl hitchhiking in a faraway country. A year later, she runs out of money and winds up on his doorstep. Six months after that, they get married. Accidents.”
“Did you marry a hitchhiker or something?”
His smile unfurls like a sail. “I’m giving examples.”
“Tell me a real one.”
“How do you know that’s not real?” he teases. “Okay, this happened to me. Last year when I was in Berlin, I missed my train to Bucharest and caught a ride to Slovakia instead. The people I rode with were in a theater troupe, and one of the guys had just broken his ankle and they needed a replacement. On the six-hour ride to Bratislava, I learned his part. I stayed with the troupe until his ankle got better, and then a while after that, I met some people from Guerrilla Will, and they were in desperate need of someone who could do Shakespeare in French.”
“And you could?”
He nods.
“Are you some kind of language savant?”
“I’m just Dutch. So I joined Guerrilla Will.” He snaps his fingers. “Now I’m an actor.”
This surprises me. “You seemed like you’d been doing it a lot longer.”
“No. It’s just accidental, just temporary. Until the next accident sends me somewhere new. That’s how life works.”
Something quickens in my chest. “Do you really think that’s how it works? That life can change justlikethat?”
“I think everything is happening all the time, but if you don’t put yourself in the path of it, you miss it. When you travel, you put yourself out there. It’s not always great. Sometimes it’s terrible. But other times . . .” He lifts his shoulders and gestures out to Paris, then sneaks me a sidelong glance. “It’s not so bad.”
“So long as you don’t get hit by a bus,” I say.
He laughs. Then gives me the point. “So long as you don’t get hit by a bus,” he says back.
Five
We arrive at the club where Willem’s friend works; it seems completely dead, but when Willem pounds on the door, a tall man with blue-black skin opens up. Willem speaks to him in French, and after a minute, we’re allowed into a huge dank room with a small stage, a narrow bar, and a bunch of tables with chairs stacked on them. Willem and the Giant confer a bit more in French and then Willem turns to me.
“Céline doesn’t like surprises. Maybe it’s better if I go down first.”
“Sure.” In the hushed dim, my voice seems to clang, and I realize I’m nervous again.
Willem heads to a staircase at the back of the club. The Giant resumes his work polishing bottles behind the bar. Obviously, he didn’t get the message that Paris loves me. I take a seat on the barstool. They twirl all the way around, like the barstools at Whipple’s, the ice-cream place I used to go to with my grandparents. The Giant is ignoring me, so I just sort of spin myself this way and that. And then I guess I do it a little fast, because I go spinning and the barstool comes clear off its base.
“Oh, shit! Ow!”
The Giant comes out to where I am sprawled on the floor. His face is a picture of blasé. He picks up the stool and screws it back in, then goes back behind the bar. I stay on the floor for a second, wondering which is more humiliating, remaining down here or getting back on the stool.
“You are American?”
What gives it away? Because I’m clumsy? Aren’t French people ever clumsy? I’m actually pretty graceful. I took ballet for eight years. I should tell him to fix the stool before someone sues. No, if I say that, I’ll definitely sound American.
“How can you tell?” I don’t know why I bother to ask. Since the moment our plane touched down in London, it’s like there’s been a neon sign above my head, blinking: TOURIST, AMERICAN, OUTSIDER. I should be used to it. Except since arriving in Paris, it felt like it had maybe dimmed. Clearly not.
“Your friend tells me,” he says. “My brother lives in Roché Estair.”
“Oh?” Am I supposed to know where this is? “Is that near Paris?”
He laughs, a big loud belly laugh. “No. It is in New York. Near the big lake.”
Roché Estair? “Oh! Rochester.”
“Yes. Roché Estair,” he repeats. “It is very cold up there. Very much snow. My brother’s name is Aliou Mjodi. Maybe you know him?”
I shake my head. “I live in Pennsylvania, next to New York.”
“Is there much snow in Penisvania?”
I suppress a laugh. “There’s a fair amount in Penn-syl-vania,” I say, emphasizing the pronunciation. “But not as much as Rochester.”
He shivers. “Too cold. Especially for us. We have Senegalese blood in our veins, though we both are born in Paris. But now my brother he goes to study computers in Roché Estair, at university.” The Giant looks very proud. “He does not like the snow. And he says, in summer, the mosquitoes are as big as those in Senegal.”
I laugh.
The Giant’s face breaks open into a jack-o’-lantern’s smile. “How long in Paris?”
I look at my watch. “I’ve been here one hour, and I’ll be here for one day.”
“One day? Why are you here?” He gestures to the bar.
I point to my bag. “We need a place to store this.”
“Take it downstairs. You must not waste your one day here. When the sun shines, you let it shine on you. Snow is always waiting.”
“Willem told me to wait, that Céline—”
“Pff,” he interrupts, waving his hand. He comes out from behind the bar and easily hoists my bag over his shoulder. “Come, I take it downstairs for you.”
At the bottom of the stairs is a dark hallway crowded with speakers, amplifiers, cables, and lights. Upstairs, there’s rapping on the door, and the Giant bounds back up, telling me to leave the bag in the office.
There are a couple of doors, so I go to the first one and knock on it. It opens to a small room with a metal desk, an old computer, a pile of papers. Willem’s backpack is there, but he’s not. I go back in the hall and hear the sound of a woman’s rapid-fire French, and then Willem’s voice, languid in response.
“Willem?” I call out. “Hello?”
He says something back, but I don’t understand.
“What?”
He says something else, but I can’t hear him so I crack open the door to find a small supply closet full of boxes and in it, Willem standing right up close to a girl—Céline—who even in the half darkness, I can see is beautiful in a way I can never even pretend to be. She is talking to Willem in a throaty voice while tugging his shirt over his head. He, of course, is laughing.
I slam the door shut and retreat back toward the stairs, tipping over my suitcase in my haste.
I hear something rattle. “Lulu, open the door. It’s stuck.”
I turn around. My suitcase is lodged underneath the handle. I scurry back to kick it out of the way and turn back toward the stairs as the door flies open.
“What are you doing?” Willem asks.
“Leaving.” It’s not like Willem and I are anything to each other, but still, he left me upstairs to come downstairs for a quickie?
“Come back.”
I’ve heard about the French. I’ve seen plenty of French films. A lot of them are sexy; some of them are kinky. I want to be Lulu, but not that much.
“Lulu!” Willem’s voice is firm. “Céline refuses to hold your bags unless I change my clothes,” he explains. “She says I look like a dirty old man coming out of a sex shop.” He points to his crotch.
It takes me a minute to understand what she means, and when I do, I flush.
Céline says something to Willem in French, and he laughs. And fine, maybe it’s not what I thought it was. But it’s still pretty clear that I’ve intruded upon something.
Willem turns back to me. “I said I will change my jeans, but all my other shirts are just as dirty, so she is finding me one.”
Céline continues yapping away at Willem in French, and it’s like I don’t even exist.
Finally, she finds what she’s looking for, a heather-gray T-shirt with a giant red SOS emblazoned on it. Willem takes it and yanks off his own T-shirt. Céline says something else and reaches out to undo his belt buckle. He holds his hands up in surrender and then undoes the buttons himself. The jeans fall to the floor and Willem just stands there, all miles and miles of him, in nothing but a pair of fitted boxer shorts.
“Excusez-moi,” he says as he brushes past me so close his bare torso slides up against my arm. It’s dark in here, but I’m fairly certain Céline can tell I’m blushing and has marked this as a point against me. A few seconds later, Willem returns with his backpack. He digs in it for a rumpled-but-stain-free pair of jeans. I try not to stare as he slips them on and threads his worn brown leather belt through the loops. Then he puts on the T-shirt. Céline glances at me looking at him, and I look away as though she’s caught me at something. Which she has. Watching him get dressed feels more illicit than seeing him strip.
“D’accord?” he asks Céline. She appraises him, her hands on her hips.
“Mieux,” she says back, sounding like a cat. Mew.
“Lulu?” Willem asks.
“Nice.”
Finally, Céline acknowledges me. She says something, gesticulating wildly, then stops.
When I fail to answer, one of Céline’s eyebrows shoots up into a perfect arch, while the other one stays in neutral. I’ve seen women from Florence to Prague do this same thing. It must be some skill they teach in European schools.
“She is asking you if you have ever heard of Sous ou Sur,” Willem says, pointing to the SOS on the shirt. “They are a famous punk-rap band with strong lyrics about justice.”
I shake my head, feeling like a double loser for not having heard of the cool French anarchist whatever justice band. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak French.”