Paris Red: A Novel (4 page)

He rubs his fingers over the pads on my palm, then over my fingers again.

“I can tell you both do the same job. You have calluses in the same places,” he says, and gives us back our hands.

At the end
of the meal, when he goes to pay the check, he pulls a handful of coins from his pocket, but that is not the thing I notice. What I notice is how, after he counts out the ones he wants, he lets them fall to the table. He does not lay out the coins, he does not present them. He opens his fingers and—how can I say it? Both drops and tosses them to the table. One small flip, hardly a motion at all, and the coins lay where they fall.

Then the money-holding hand brings everything that is left back to his pocket.

I have never had a coin that I did not finger carefully or part with reluctantly. Never dropped money or tossed it with a small flick of the fingers. Never brought a jingling handful of coins back to my pocket or a purse.

Of course he knows how to do all those things. He does not know he knows, but he does all the same.

A
fter dinner we go out
walking on the boulevard. We walk three abreast again, Nise and me on either side of him.

“We’re some kind of slow-moving animal,” I say, swaying into him.

“One with three heads,” Nise says, and I feel her sway into him.

He can feel her breast against one arm and mine against the other.

“We’re our own kind of animal,” he tells us.

Yet it is not awkward to walk that way. Sometimes people have to make room for us, but they do. It is not just the space we take up, I think, that makes people notice us—it is our slow pace. It gives them time to look and understand. To make up the story of the three of us as they pass us by.

Walking, I remember what his arm felt like from the last time, but he still is not familiar. He still feels like a stranger against my side. A stranger I can touch, who holds me close. It is that part I like best, being so close to someone and not knowing him, still coming to know him. But while we walk I keep feeling there is something familiar about him, something I recognize, and in a little while I realize what it is.

His scent.

Not just the cigarette smell or the smell of the cloth of his jacket, but something else I cannot yet name. And once I get that in my mind, it occupies me so much I cannot say anything at all, not even the occasional comments I try to make just to show I am listening, that I am not just a mute body, a breast pressed up against his arm. A silent wife. When he turns to me, I am sure that is what he will say.

“Don’t go away from us,” he says instead. Shakes my arm a little in his.

“I’m just thinking,” I say.

“What of?”

“Of my mother.”

“Like a baby,” Nise says, and laughs a little.

He smiles but does not laugh. Holds my arm a little tighter to his side.

I do not say that it has just come to me that his smell makes me think of the clove-studded orange I helped my mother make one Christmas. When we first stuck the pointed ends of the cloves into the orange, the smell was so sharp it seemed to burn my nose, and the whole orange smelled raw. But over the days, that burning went away and the orange scent got fainter and the cloves got warmer, and soon all you could really smell was cloves.

He smells of smoke and cloves. But I do not say that, I only say, “It doesn’t make any sense, I know.”

We go on walking, past cafés that shed so much light into the street you can see everything as clearly as day, past a column with posters that advertise:

A little further on, we pass a kiosk in the square that sells jumping ropes, hoops, puppets, tops, balls, tiny baskets—all manner of cheap toys. Closed now, but when I passed it the last time, it was run by a heavyset woman in a black bonnet trimmed with white lace. And I think the thing I always think when I pass by: did I ever have toys like that? Cheap things meant to last a short time, bought on impulse? If I did, I don’t remember.

And there above the shuttered windows of the kiosk I see the sign. In white letters on black.

DEMANDEZ DU PLAISIR.

And I am thinking of those words and how we all want pleasure, how we are born wanting something to hug and something to play with and something to finger and something to suck. How it is one thing when you’re young and something different when you get older, but the wanting does not change. I am thinking of all of that, and maybe he and Nise are, too. Maybe they saw the sign and believe it was meant for them just the way I believe it was meant for me.

I am thinking all that when we come around the corner and see the girl standing outside the market. The place is closed for the day, but she is selling paper cones of cherries, the first of the season, to the couples and fancy people walking by. She has two cones left so he buys them, and Denise takes one cone and I take the other, and we find a place to sit.

We eat the sweet cherries, which are the same color, I think, as the stone in his tie pin. Denise offers her cone to him and then I do, and the three of us eat. We slip the pits into our fingers and then toss them onto the ground.

There is not that much fruit in the cones, and when I get to the last cherries, I take the stem of one with my first two fingers and my thumb. I hold the cherry by its stem so the fruit rests against the soft part of my thumb, and then I move my hand close to his mouth so he can eat it.

And he does. He leans forward a little and bites the cherry from its stem.

I feel the softness of his lips and mustache on my thumb, and then I feel him kiss around the fruit and through the fruit to my skin.

Nise watches at first. She could do it too if she wanted—he made it clear that he wants to treat us equally. But she does not offer him a cherry to eat from her hand. Instead she looks away and just goes on eating, finishing the fruit in her cone.

I have two cherries left, and I hold each one up for him. Each time he bites, he kisses. Makes my palm a mouth. That is all I can think of, there on the bench. I stop thinking about Nise being beside him. I do not think about anything except his mouth on my skin.

I could lean toward him, I could get him to kiss my mouth instead of my thumb—I know I could. But I do not let myself because of Nise. Whatever it is that has started includes her, and even though she is not feeding him, she is there. She is there beside him, too. So as much as I would like to kiss him, I do not. I let my hand be a mouth.

It seems as if he eats cherries from my hand for a long time.

When we stand up to walk again, I feel bound to him, and I also feel something taut in the skin of my wrist and hand. And even though I did not kiss him, I still feel a little guilty. Because I wanted to be there with him alone, because I wanted him for myself. To myself. And if we had gone on sitting there much longer I would have kissed him. I would have kissed him and would not have cared if Nise was beside us or not.

As we walk, I look at Nise to see if she knows how I feel. But I do not see any sign that she is upset or that she has hurt feelings. Maybe she is hiding it, but she talks to him as easily as before. Teasing and sweet. And then I understand I got it wrong.

She turned away from him and me to give us our privacy, the way she and I turn away from each other in our room. That is all.

So the three of us still walk arm in arm in arm, a three-headed, three-hearted animal, and when we get back to Maître-Albert, Nise is the one who says, “You can come home with us. You don’t have to go all the way to Gennevilliers. Or wherever it is that you live.”

He stops and looks at her.

“From what you tell me, there’s hardly room for the two of you,” he says. “Where would you put me?”

This time I am the one who speaks. “In our bed,” I tell him.

Now I am the one he looks at, and I can see from his face that I have pleased him. Nise pleased him with her offer and I have pleased him with the quickness of my reply. I see the pleasure in his eyes as he steps close to me.

“Brava,” he says.

It is not a real kiss he gives me then, but it is still slower than the brush the night before, and there is a little moisture on his lips. I feel his lips and the soft mustache I felt on my hand, but there is a pressure in the kiss as well, a kind of intent. An insistence.

When he pulls back from me, he turns to Denise. Because he needs to keep it fair, because we have all been walking arm in arm, because her breast has been mashed against his arm just as mine has. So he kisses her, too, and I watch. The brown wing of her hair and her closed eyes. The way the back of her jaw curves upward. The careful way he leans in.

And the thing I have been understanding about him all night becomes clear just then. He likes to be teased. He likes for us to play with him. It is part of what he wants from us.

We make plans to meet the day after tomorrow, and that is how we leave him, that is how we part on the street. With the feeling of his mouth on both of our mouths.

Maybe that is why Nise and I do not talk for the last half a block, from the corner of La Maube to the elbow of Maître-Albert. We want to keep the feeling of his mouth on our mouths. There is nothing to say just then, anyway.