Authors: Christine Sneed
“Ça va. Tu ne me dérange pas,” she said, even though he was bothering her. “It’s okay.”
“Alors, il y a quelqu’un en haut … for a long time someone is in the bathroom upstairs,” he said haltingly. “I hit at the door, but no one will answer. Will you let me use yours and M. Moller’s? I am sorry. It would take so long to walk to the music school.”
She didn’t know if she should let him, but Laurent had never told her to be wary of Philippe. But would he have? “All right,” she finally said. “Entrez. It’s around the corner, first door on the right, première porte à la droite.”
“Merci,” he said, his face still red.
She could hear him even after he shut the bathroom door, peeing exuberantly, her own face turning warm now. She had long wondered, without ever being able to answer the question to her satisfaction, why people were so embarrassed by their bodies when their basic functions were all the same. She had known an artist who took on the topic in college, her paintings of urinals and of women and men peeing alongside each other in open stalls impressing Jayne as both funny and smart, but their instructor, a man with veins in his neck that bulged during his frequent aggrieved outbursts, had not been that impressed. Some of her classmates speculated later that he was jealous.
When Philippe reappeared a minute later, wiping his hands on his pants and thanking Jayne several times, she surprised them both by saying, “Why don’t you keep the packages your parents send you?”
He blinked, and for a second she wasn’t sure if he had understood her. He looked down at his hands and said, “They send too much. I used to be fat. That is the word for very big, yes?”
“Yes, it is,” she said, surprised. “But you’re so thin now. I can’t imagine you being fat.”
“I was,” he said. “It was very … c’était très difficile pour moi.”
“I’m sure it was difficult,” she said. “I’m sorry to hear that.” She paused, her eyes moving involuntarily to his stomach, which was as flat as the wall behind him. “But you give away the other gifts they send too, don’t you?” How nosy she was being! But she found it impossible to stop herself.
“Not always,” he said. His eyes were on his scuffed black oxfords, the toes worn down to grayness. “They send so much. I don’t like to have too many pieces—how do you say it?—in my room.”
“Too many possessions or things. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be such a busybody.”
He looked at her thoughtfully before turning toward the door. She was conscious again of her nakedness beneath the robe but no longer felt as shy about it. “Thank you,” he finally said. His hand was on the doorknob when he glanced back at her. “How do you know I give away the packets from my parents?”
“Laurent told me,” she said. “I guess he must have noticed, or else maybe one of your neighbors told him. I’m really not sure.”
“Are you his wife?”
She shook her head.
Philippe nodded. “He is not a bad person.”
She stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“I have had worse …” He paused. “The word for the person I pay each month?”
“Landlord?”
“Yes, landlord. In French it is
propriétaire.
Mais vous parlez francais, oui? Un peu?”
“Oui, mais pas très bien. I studied in Strasbourg for a semester in college, but I hung around with other Americans mostly. Not the best way to learn a new language, I know.”
“You will get better if you practice. Like me with the cello. I am better than I was two years ago, even two months ago.”
“I wish you practiced here in the building. I never hear you.”
He had put his hands into his pockets and was leaning backward on his heels. He shook his head. “My neighbors would not like it. They would complain. I must practice at the school. They have rooms for this. Je vous laisse maintenant. Merci beaucoup—thank you for letting me—”
“You’re welcome, Philippe,” she said. “No problem at all.”
She had almost shut the door when he turned again. “You can go back to sleep now,” he said, nodding at her robe.
“I wasn’t sleeping, though I’m sure it looks that way,” she said, pausing before she blurted, “Wait, Philippe. One more thing. Have other people lived here with Laurent before me?”
He considered the question, his expression both serious and preoccupied. “I have not lived here very long. Only a year and a half,” he said. “There was maybe one woman before Monsieur Moller went to New York. But I am not sure. She might have been his daughter. I do not remember.”
He turned to face her more fully, his eyes moving to her chest. She looked down and saw that her robe had sagged open, her breasts half exposed. She almost scratched the thin skin over her clavicles in her haste to pull it closed. If she hadn’t listened to Laurent and sat around naked all morning like a dimwit, she wouldn’t be in this embarrassing situation!
“Thank you, Philippe,” she said, avoiding his eyes. “Bon après-midi.”
“Merci. Je vous en prie, madame.”
She shut the door, waiting until she heard his step on the stairs before she went into the bedroom to get dressed. She had spent enough time that day unclothed, and now she wanted to get out of the humid apartment for a while. Who was the woman Philippe had mentioned? Not Jeanne-Lucie, surely, but someone young, maybe Sofia? Laurent had never mentioned having a live-in lover before her, but this didn’t mean that he hadn’t had one; she had never pressed him for information, knowing that he would have told her not to worry about it—what, really, was the point? She reached for the skirt and blouse she had worn the previous day to the gallery, not caring that both pieces would have benefited from a washing. In France, she had seen people wear the same clothes several days in a row, and no one seemed to bat an eye.
It was after twelve now; she would go for a walk and find some lunch while she was out. On her way through the building’s crepuscular entryway, she encountered Laurent’s cleaning woman, Pauline, her hair in a topknot, a red bucket in one hand, pink latex gloves and a gallon of eau de Javel visible inside. She was going up to the apartment, she told Jayne by way of greeting. Jayne had forgotten that she was coming, and Laurent had not reminded her, something he usually did because Pauline, he was sure, preferred to clean the apartment when no one was occupying it.
Pauline was Czech, middle-aged, a graying blond with green eyes and prominent dark eyebrows. She had been friendly but not overly talkative in the few exchanges Jayne had had with her. Laurent had told her that Pauline spoke five languages and had lived in several countries. Why she was cleaning houses for a living, Jayne wasn’t sure, but Laurent seemed to think it was because she liked the work—strenuous, maybe, but with tangible results. She could also be her own boss, more or less, and after she’d finished the work, her time was her own. Jayne suspected a deadbeat husband, but Laurent had scoffed at this.
“I don’t think it’s too messy up there,” said Jayne. “But it is a little warm.”
“I am used to that, Madame.”
“Please call me Jayne,” she said, something she had asked Pauline to do twice before now.
Pauline glanced toward the front door before meeting Jayne’s eyes again. “Did Monsieur Moller leave a check for me upstairs?”
“I didn’t see one,” said Jayne. “But it could be that I just didn’t notice it.”
Pauline sighed. “It should be on the dining room table.”
“I could call Laurent right now at the gallery and ask him. It wouldn’t be a problem.”
The older woman shook her head. “No, no, don’t bother him. I will call him if it is not there. He owes me for the last visit and for today’s.”
“I’ll make sure he gets a check to you tomorrow if you don’t find one,” said Jayne, surprised by Laurent’s forgetfulness. It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford to pay Pauline. “Or I could go to the bank and get cash for you now.” She wondered again how Laurent could have forgotten. Something must have been on his mind.
Pauline faltered. “No, no, that’s okay. But if you would ask him to send the check to my house today or tomorrow, that would be good.”
“I will, Pauline. It’s no problem.” She couldn’t tell if the other woman was embarrassed about having to ask for her pay. Maybe forgetful employers were something she was used to, but what a drag to have to ask for money you were owed. Jayne had never been good at it. Even as a girl, she had not liked asking her parents for her allowance if they forgot to give it to her on Fridays after school, but her sister had not had any qualms, a trait Jayne had both admired and teased Stephanie about, to which her sister retorted, “I’m not being greedy by asking for something I’m owed!”
“Au revoir, Madame,” said Pauline, her eyes showing an emotion that Jayne couldn’t decipher: anger, resignation? She wondered what Pauline thought of her and Laurent, if anything at all. Did she feel contempt for her wealthy employers? On some days, if she was especially tired, Jayne wondered if Pauline was disgusted by the evidence of sloth and excess she doubtless found in some of the homes she cleaned. Laurent’s apartment glowed for a day or two after she’d plied her mop and dust cloths to it. She was the best cleaning woman he had ever had, he’d said. “They are not so easy to find,” he’d added. A couple of years before meeting Laurent, Jayne had briefly considered taking on extra work as a house cleaner in Manhattan, but she had managed to find the job at the shoe boutique instead. A woman Jayne had worked with for a year at the accounting firm had a second job with a maid service and earned more than the shoe boutique paid Jayne, but Jayne still did not want to clean houses. It was snooty of her, she knew, and maybe Pauline also had a college degree. Maybe she too had worked in an office for a while but had determined that she could set her own schedule and earn more by cleaning apartments. These circumstances trumped almost any white-collar job, in Jayne’s view.
A sensory detail Jayne remembered well from her semester abroad: the bacterial smell of French butcher shops and cheese stores, especially in the open-air markets that sprang up in different neighborhoods every day of the week. In Paris, her favorite marketplace was not an itinerant one: the rue Montorgeuil, a cobblestone street with shops that sometimes overflowed into sidewalk stands where Laurent had taken her one afternoon during her second week in France. “It is a very old street,” he said. “Très, très vieux, en fait.”
He had first seen it as a small boy, he and his parents often traveling to Paris at the new year from their home outside Dijon. Vie Bohème was only a few blocks south on the rue du Louvre, and he walked to rue Montorgeuil often, sometimes buying his lunch from one of the street’s many
traiteurs
. “A trattoria,” he said, “You maybe are familiar with the Italian word but not the French one. We have traiteurs chinois, italiens, français, many different kinds.”
Montorgueil teemed with affable, tireless merchants, some of whom called out as Jayne slipped past, feeling shy:
Mademoiselle, j’ai de bons petits melons, deux balles! Tomates, pommes, épinards!
Of the determined commercial chorus of butchers and green grocers, Laurent said, “I think of this street as the soul of Paris.” He nodded to the vendors calling out to them and other passersby, some shoppers pushing two-wheeled carts which she had always assumed were designed for the old and arthritic, but she had spotted one in Laurent’s apartment. She had yet to see him take it out of the utility closet though, where it had probably been stashed (by some former female occupant?). “I say this is the soul of the city because we all must eat,” he said, pointing out his favorite pâtisserie. Its window display, artful as a museum exhibit, contained two rows of dollhouse-size chocolate and vanilla cakes and fruit tartlets, each on a diminutive porcelain plate. Jayne knew only a few shops like it in New York, also French pâtisseries, or American ones trying to look French.
On both sides of the street she noticed men on lunch break, many of them wearing maintenance jumpsuits, street sweepers in lime green, electricians in blue, their eyes following the pretty women who passed as the workmen chewed their falafel sandwiches and gyros. Her thought as she and Laurent walked slowly along rue Montorgueil, admiring the small, symmetrical pyramids or neat rows of green and white asparagus, oranges and lemons, whole fish glistening but lifeless on crushed ice (“You must not touch anything,” cautioned Laurent. “
Le marchand
is the only person who touches the food before you pay.”), the plentitude of cutlets and breads and cheeses, was that the teahouses with their elegant displays of cakes and puff pastries, along with the candy stores—the
confiseries
and
chocolatiers
—were probably a child’s dream of heaven on earth. But the only children present were in strollers, the others likely hidden away in their grammar schools and
lycées
, to be released after three or four o’clock to swarm the sidewalks in search of bonbons,
pains au chocolat
, and
sablés
.
Jayne had mentioned the multitude of Parisian candy stores and bakeries to Liesel during a Skype call not long after her arrival. “You’re so lucky,” said Liesel. “I’d get so fat if I were there. But I’m sure you’ll stay as skinny as a pole.”
“You wouldn’t get fat. You run more miles than anyone I know.”
“That’s so the Hostess cupcakes won’t catch up with me.”
“I can’t believe you eat those disgusting things,” said Jayne. “When you visit me here, we’ll eat ourselves sick. No more half-baked cupcakes filled with whipped lard.”
Liesel smirked. “You make them sound so appetizing. I’m going to go buy some right this second.” She got up and disappeared from the screen, Jayne laughing and calling after her.
When Liesel returned a few seconds later, she flashed her breasts at Jayne, who shrieked with scandalized laughter. “I’ve always wanted to do that,” her friend said before breaking into a violent burst of laughter too. “Wasn’t that what Skype was invented for, cybersex? If you ever need a new job in Paris, that might be the ticket.”
“You’re crazy,” said Jayne.
Liesel nodded. “Of course I am. You’re just figuring that out now?”