Bubble in the Bathtub (7 page)

“Congolese tse-tse elephant.” Lisa finished Nilly's sentence, sighed, and looked out the window, resigned.

“Exactly,” Nilly said. “The elephant fell asleep right in the middle of his first performance, and then they had to dig three generations of Russian trapeze artists out of the sawdust.”

“Oh, enough already. Elephants like that don't exist!”

“They do too! My grandfather told me he saw a couple of them at the zoo in Tokyo. They had just flown the elephants straight there from the jungle in the Congo and because of the time-zone difference, they obviously still had jet lag. One time they fell asleep …”

Nilly's mouth kept moving like that until the cab stopped and the driver said, “
Madame
and
Mussyer, l'Hôtel Frainche-Fraille.
”

And sure enough, they had pulled up in front of a tall, thin building that was so crooked you might suspect that the stonemasons had enjoyed a little too much red wine when they were building it. But the hotel had small, charming balconies and a glowing sign that said
HÔTEL FRAINCHE-FRAILLE
. Well, actually it said
HÔT L FRA NC E-F ILLE
” since a fair number of the letters seemed to have burned out.

Lisa paid the driver, and they clambered out onto the sidewalk. In the distance they heard accordion music and the sound of champagne corks popping out of bottles.

“Ah,” Nilly said, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, “Paris!”

Then they stepped in the front door of the hotel. Standing behind the reception desk there was a
smiling, red-cheeked woman and a pleasant, plump man who made Lisa think of her mother and father back home on Cannon Avenue.

“Bohnswaar,”
the woman said. And even though Lisa didn't know what that meant, she could tell it was something nice, so she responded by saying “Good evening” and curtsying a little. Then she elbowed Nilly, who immediately bowed deeply. She knew a little curtsying and bowing never hurt. This was obviously true in Paris, too, because now the two standing behind the counter were smiling even more warmly.

“Doctor Proctor?” Lisa asked hesitantly, preparing for another round of linguistic confusion. But to her delight, the red-cheeked woman lit up,
“Ah, le professeur!”

“Yes,” Lisa and Nilly said in unison, nodding eagerly. “We're here to see him.”

“Vooh zet famee?”
the woman asked, but Lisa and Nilly just stood there staring at her blankly.

“Paarlay-vooh fraansay?”
the man asked cautiously.

“Why are you shaking your head?” Nilly whispered to Lisa.

“Because I'm pretty sure he's asking if we speak French,” Lisa whispered back.

The two behind the counter discussed something between themselves for a while, and Nilly and Lisa realized that French must be a very difficult language even for French people. Because to make themselves understood they had to use their faces, both arms, all their fingers—well, actually, their whole bodies.

Finally, the woman grabbed a key that was hanging on a board behind them, came out in front of the counter and motioned that Nilly and Lisa should follow her as she hurried over to a wooden staircase.

Twenty-six steps and half a hallway later, she unlocked a door and showed them into a room.

It was very plain, with two twin beds, a small sofa, a wardrobe and a desk that was strewn with notes. Plus a door that led into a bathroom that was clearly in
the process of being renovated. Or at least on the shelf under the mirror—next to two glasses—there was a hammer, a screwdriver, and a tube of glue. There was a bathtub by one wall and a rusty pipe that was dripping. As Nilly unpacked his toiletries and put them on the shelf under the mirror, Lisa set her knapsack down next to the desk in the bedroom. And there—in the middle of the papers on top of the desk—she spotted a drawing. She picked it up. It depicted a bathtub, just like the one in the bathroom. Under the drawing there were a lot of numbers. They looked like equations, rather complicated equations, actually. They seemed to involve borrowing, carrying, multiplying, and dividing, Lisa thought.

“What is that?” asked Nilly, who had just come back in from the bathroom.

“I don't know,” Lisa said. “But it sure looks like Doctor Proctor's handwriting.”

“And this looks like Proctor's motorcycle helmet,”
said Nilly, who had opened the door to the wardrobe and picked up a brown leather helmet. “So then these must be his white long underwear.”

The red-cheeked and very French woman started speaking French. She gestured dramatically with her arms, repeated the word
“evaporay!”
several times and made her fingers into a bird that flew away.

“He disappeared,” Lisa said.

“I got that,” Nilly said.

The red-cheeked woman pointed first questioningly at Nilly and Lisa and then at her own mouth with all five fingers.

“And what do you think she's asking us now?” Lisa asked.

“How many fingers we can fit in our mouths,” Nilly said.

“You idiot, she's wondering if we want something to eat.”

Lisa curtsied deeply and nodded and then firmly
elbowed Nilly, who immediately bowed and nodded as well.

The pleasant woman brought them down to the kitchen and seated them at a table. Then she served them chicken thighs or wings or something, which Nilly thought were really good, whatever they were, before he got so full he couldn't help but burp. All of a sudden he leaped up, bowed politely, something he seemed to have gotten the hang of, and launched into a long, rhyming apology that made the man and woman laugh out loud, even though they didn't understand a word of it. Then Nilly yawned so loudly that it seemed as if his head would rip in half.

The woman left and came back with two sets of clean sheets that she handed them along with the key to Doctor Proctor's room.

As Nilly and Lisa each made their bed, Nilly commented that those chicken thighs had been so small you might almost think they were frog legs. They both
laughed pretty hard at that—because who in the world would ever dream of eating frog legs?

“Hm,” Nilly said after a while. “Why does your bed look so much neater than mine?”

“Because it makes more sense to put the comforter in the comforter cover than in the pillowcase,” Lisa sighed, walking over to Nilly's bed to help him.

Then they went into the bathroom to brush their teeth.

“How are we going to find the professor?” Lisa asked.

“I'm too tired to think,” Nilly said yawning, his eyes half-closed, pushing the screwdriver on the shelf aside so he could grab his tube of toothpaste. “We'll figure it out tomorrow.”

“But how can we find him when no one understands what we're saying? And we can't understand what they're saying?”

“We'll learn French tomorrow,” Nilly said.

“Tomorrow? Impossible!”

“Even little kids here seem able to learn the language, so how hard could it really be?” Nilly asked and squeezed a white dollop onto his toothbrush, popped it into his mouth, and started brushing.

“It takes weeks and months,” Lisa said. “And I have a feeling that we don't have much time.”

“That's for sure,” Nilly gurgled. “We have band practice on Monday.”

“Quit joking around, Nilly! This is serious.”

She turned to face her friend, who smiled back with gleaming white teeth. Astonishingly white, actually. Yes, whiter than she had ever seen them before—Nilly was not a super-reliable toothbrusher.

“Nilly,” she said. “What's with your teeth, Nilly? Well?”

But Nilly just stood there with that grin, which was so stiff that it looked like his bottom teeth were glued to his top teeth. And when Lisa noticed the desperate
look in his eyes and the frantic gesticulations he was making with his toothbrush, she realized that that was exactly what had happened. She looked over at the shelf. Sure enough—his toothpaste tube lay there untouched, but the lid on the tube of glue next to it was off.

She picked up the tube and read the label out loud: “Doctor Proctor's Fast-Acting Superglue! You grabbed the wrong tube, Nilly!”

Nilly shrugged his shoulders apologetically and kept smiling that sheepish, idiotic grin.

Lisa sighed and rummaged around in her own toiletries bag until she found her nail file.

“Stand still!” she ordered. “And help me!”

Nilly used both his hands to pull his lips out of the way and Lisa managed to slide the nail file between his teeth on the far left side of his mouth and started filing toward the right. Nilly hummed the Marseillaise as she slowly filed his top teeth and his bottom teeth apart.

“Whoa,” he said when she was done and he looked at himself in the mirror. “Check out these pearly whites, would you? And they'll be totally impervious to cavities with this superglue on them, my dear Lisa. No more visits to the dentist for me!” He picked up the tube of glue and offered it to her. “You want to try?”

“No thanks. Why do you suppose Doctor Proctor's Fast-Acting Superglue was sitting right here? Along with these tools?”

“Elementary,” Nilly said. “He was obviously renovating the bathroom.”

“Maybe,” Lisa said with a yawn. “Well, that's enough thinking for one day.”

But after they got in bed, Lisa lay there awake, listening to the sound of water dripping in the bathroom, making a sorrowful seeping slurping sound. From outside came the distant rumble of traffic and some wailing accordion music. Plus a sound she couldn't quite identify, but which could have been the creak of a light
swinging in the wind. Or, for example, a roller skate on a wooden leg.

Such strange things go through your mind when it's dark out and you're alone in a big city. She glanced over at Nilly. Well, almost alone.

Surely everything would seem cheerier tomorrow.

And indeed, she would be right about that.

NILLY WOKE UP because Lisa was shaking him.

He squinted at the daylight streaming in through the window, and noticed that she was fully dressed.

“It's nine o'clock,” she said. “I'm going to try to find a library and borrow a French phrase book.”

“A what?”

“A little pocket-sized dictionary with French in it so people can understand a bit of what we're saying.”

Nilly sat up in bed. “And how are you going to find a library?”

“I'll ask people for directions. If I just pronounce it the French way I'm sure people will understand:
librairie
.”

“No doubt,” Nilly said. “What's for breakfast?”

“Nothing,” Lisa said. “They only serve air and café au lait for breakfast in this country. I'll buy a baguette on my way back.”

“Well, hurry up,” Nilly said, swinging his feet out of bed. They dangled just above the linoleum floor and looked as if they were wondering if it was going to be cold.

Once Lisa shut the door, he jumped down onto the floor—which was not just cold, but freezing cold—and sprinted to the bathroom. Shivering, he hopped up onto the chair in front of the sink and looked at himself in the mirror. And staring back at him he found—if
he did say so himself—an unusually handsome, redhaired young man of modest physical proportions but immense intelligence and charm. Indeed, Nilly was so pleased with the boy in the mirror that he immediately decided to give him a warm, relaxing bath on that chilly October morning.

So Nilly turned on the water in the bathtub and let it run while he looked for some bubble bath or something similar. When he didn't find any, he remembered that Lisa had brought some soap powder. He found her bag and, sure enough, inside it next to two nose clips he found a jar labeled
TIME SOAP
. Nilly grabbed one of the nose clips and the jar of soap, hurried back to the bathroom, and poured a little of the strawberry-red powder into the tub.

There's a time for this and a time for that, Nilly thought as he watched the bubbles instantly start forming, growing and rising like a white snowdrift that soon filled the whole tub. Nilly stripped off his clothes,
climbed up onto the edge of the bathtub, put on one of the nose clip and howled, “Bombs away!”

Then he jumped up, pulled his legs in, wrapped his arms around them and plunged into the bubbles. He hit the surface of the water just right and got the maximum effect. Soap bubbles and water sprayed all over the bathroom walls, all the way up to the ceiling. Satisfied, he let himself slowly sink down to the bottom, where he lay, holding his breath and gazing up at the surface of the water. It was covered with such a thick layer of bubbles that only some dim light made it all the way through. And in that light he saw an amazingly beautiful rainbow, like a line of multicolored, high-kicking cancan dancers at the Moulin Rouge in Paris in 1909. Oh, to have been there!

Just then Nilly felt the bathtub start to sway beneath him and saw the surface of the water above him start sloshing up and down. As if the whole floor were moving. Yikes, maybe the whole building was
collapsing? And wasn't that music he heard?