Icy Pretty Love (15 page)

I am personally very gratified when Geoff does, in fact, take us to the movie theater.

I'd hoped going to see it early in the day would cut down on the crowds, but the approximate population of Paris, and possibly London and Berlin as well, is packed into the theater. Cohen and I have to wedge our way through about a hundred making-out couples to secure seats in the very back.

"Get out of the way," he snaps at two people who have their knees kicked out in the aisle. They understand enough English to look offended.

I reach over and pinch his cheek. He swats me away. The girl half of the couple giggles nervously. "Wrong. Try again."

He scowls so intensely I think a lightbulb overhead just popped. "Please excuse us."

We slip by and settle into our seats, between a three-hundred-pound dude—you don't see many of those in France—making sweet love to a bucket of popcorn and a chic college-aged couple about two inches away from making sweet actual love.

"Stop looking like you're about to murder somebody," I whisper to Cohen. "This is romantic!"

"This is hell," he corrects. I sigh and ignore him.

The movie starts. It's actually a pretty good one. It's a summer romance, a modernized Romeo & Juliet with a Prince and the Pauper twist, with a girl staying on an expensive summer resort falling for the guy who cleans up at the local restaurant. From the beginning, you know it's never going to last. The girl's going to go back to fancy prep school and fall for a trust fund frat boy, and he's going to stay where he is forever, lifting different bags of trash from the same bin every day.

It's rather difficult to enjoy, since Cohen is sitting beside me in a cloud of malcontent, pointing out each and every plot hole and actor mistake.

"That idiot is awful at hiding his English accent. Do you notice how he randomly turns British every few minutes? And the subplot with the little sister is absolutely absurd, everyone knows she can really talk and is just waiting for the most poignant moment."

The couple beside us detach with a sound like a leech being ripped off, and one of them shushes us.

"Maybe you should shush somebody at a time when you haven't been exchanging bodily fluids at a deafening volume for the past hour," Cohen shoots back.

I grab the front of his shirt and turn him back around toward me. "If you get us thrown out of a chick flick movie on Valentines Day, I will actually kill you."

Just then, when the heroine is staring moodily at the sea and trying to convince herself via clumsy internal dialogue—oh God, Cohen is rubbing off on me—that she actually doesn't like the hero all that much, and that she's probably better off without him, the adorable little sister pipes in, saying the boy's name as her first word.

Cohen gives me a look to say I told you so. I roll my eyes as far back in my head as they'll go. That idiot.

The ending is unexpectedly sad, though. The girl goes back to her school without so much as giving the guy her phone number, and the guy ends up tossing a drawing of her that he made into the ocean. The last shot is of the drawing sinking into the water. Then the lights go up and the people who weren't too busy macking on each other to follow the plot start grumbling. I join in.

"That was ridiculous!" I complain on the way out of the theater. "The whole movie, they make you think something really romantic is going to happen at the end so they'll stay together. And then it turns out it really was just a fling after all. What a stupid Valentines Day movie."

"It would have been even stupider if they'd stayed together," Cohen points out, texting someone as he speaks—presumably Geoff. "That's the way life works. People take whatever pleasure they can get out of each other while it's convenient, and as soon as it ceases to be, it's over. People like to prattle on about unselfish love, when in fact selfish love is the only kind that exists. Love is just people sucking things out of each other like vampires."

I can't help it. "That's not the only kind of sucking involved."

There's a moment of silence. I expected him to toss me an expression of utter disgust...not look vaguely interested. And now my mind's stuck on sucking and it won't move on. I clear my throat. "Anyway. It's Valentines Day and you're not allowed to be that disgustingly pessimistic."

"Are there rules for Valentines Day?" he asks sardonically.

"Yes. Make out with people. And...every girl gets a rose, apparently." I look around to confirm. I've seen a couple girls with roses, but now that I bring it up, it seems that almost every girl is clutching a bright red flower trimmed free of thorns. "Did everyone go to the same party or something?"

"It's a Paris thing," Cohen explains as we leave the theater and remount our loyal steed—er, climb into the car waiting for us at the curb. "You'll see plenty of opportunists selling them at every corner."

I start laughing.

"What?" he asks as the car pulls off.

"Nothing. I was just wondering why all these girls were carrying roses around with them, and now I know. It's like a badge of honor. Girls with roses today are the lucky ones. They all look so smug about it. Seems pretty dumb."

"We agree on something for once," Cohen says, turning to face the window.

We stop to get lunch at a cafe. It's February and chilly, but cafes in Paris have heat lamps protruding from the overhang so that people can sit outside even when it's rainy and cold. Cohen and I order two tiny espressos that come equipped with two little foam hearts on each one. Cohen sips his immediately and destroys it. I like the cuteness of the heart so much that, not wanting to ruin it, I wait too long to drink.

"It's cold!" I yelp.

"What did you expect when you wait fifteen minutes to start drinking?" he says.

I punch his shoulder lightly, then run inside and buy two éclairs. They're running a Valentines Day two-éclairs-for-the-price-of-one special. I bring the box back to the table and squeal when I open it. Each éclair has half a heart.

"I refuse to eat something so sentimental," Cohen says.

"You drank the heart espresso," I point out.

"Fair enough."

I study the éclairs. "We'll have to time this just right and eat them at the same time. I don't want one half of the heart to be left alone. That's depressing."

"Spare me," says Cohen, reaching for one of the éclairs and taking a big bite. I cry out and grab the other one, stuffing it into my mouth to keep pace with Cohen, who eats a lot faster than me. By the end, he looks perfectly normal and I have chipmunk cheeks.

"Don't choke," he advises.

"Ffffnnkkoo!"

"What was that?"

"Fuck you," I manage, spraying crumbs across the table.

He laughs. And then, just like it always does when that happens, the sun comes out and shines a little brighter.

What an idiot.

We spent the rest of the day wandering around. Or rather, I spend the rest of the day wandering around and dragging Cohen behind me. Paris on Valentines Day is a pretty cool thing. Most of the stores have special window displays, and I have to stop to gape at each one.

"You know, if you want something in there, all you have to do is ask," Cohen points out. He's standing behind me with his arms folded as I marvel at a white tulle skirt with a lace waistband.

"No!" I shoot back. "I don't need your charity."

"I already technically bought you plenty of clothes from when you went shopping with Renard."

"That's different. I needed those for the job you hired me to do. To be Georgette. I don't want you to buy things for me just because I want them. You're my client, after all."

"Client," he repeats, as if he'd momentarily forgotten what the word meant. "Right."

Client. Client client client client client. It’s an important word for me to remember.

One month
. Just three weeks left now. More very important words.

After a solid amount of wandering around, in which Cohen complains vocally about the romance coming in from all sides and I note that every girl except me continues to have a rose—a fact that I most certainly do not care about even at all—my stomach grumbles. I look down. “Crap. Where are we gonna go for dinner? Every restaurant in Paris is probably a mob scene.”

“Not McDonalds,” Cohen says.

I gape at him. There’s something fundamentally wrong about going to McDonalds for dinner on Valentines Day, even if it’s not a real date. “I’m amazed you’d deign to eat at McDonalds.”

“It was a joke.” He smirks at me. “I made reservations.”

“You did?” My gaping level goes up.

“Of course I did. While you were in the bathroom a few hours ago. What kind of idiot doesn’t make reservations on Valentines Day?”

“The kind of idiot who hates Valentines Day and everything it stands for.”

“Wrong,” he says.

“You…don’t hate Valentines Day?”

“No. I’m saying you’re wrong about hating Valentines Day and making dinner reservations for Valentines Day being mutually exclusive. I guarantee that’s the case with most husbands in the city. Anyway. As luck would have it, the restaurant is just around the corner.”

We’re in one of the swankier areas of the city. A jazz band so classy is playing next to the entrance to the subway station, and they’re so good that it’s hard to tell if they’re busking or if they were hired by the city. The sun is setting, smearing molten light across the lower clouds as twilight gathers and sinks itself in a purple haze from the tip of the sky downward. Paris isn’t really the City of Lights until it gets dark. Then the ancient-looking streetlamps come on, and each café glows with its own special golden light, and the warmth lamps puddle onto the sidewalk, and it’s like being back in time. Or another world.

The restaurant he takes me to has probably never had anyone like me step foot in before.

If I’d ever bothered to imagine what a fancy French restaurant looked like while eating instant ramen in my bug-infested LA bed, this is what it would have looked like. A waiter in a black-and-white suit greets us at the door and exchanges some rapid-fire French with Cohen, at the end of which I catch the name
Ashworth.
At that, the waiter actually bows. Bows. Like he’s a servant in some medieval drama and Cohen is the king. He’s got the expression for it, anyway.

We’re seated at a small glass table next to a chandelier, near a window strewn with lights. A band led by a devastatingly handsome man with a gleaming upright base plays something slow and romantic. All around us, tables are populated by two. Women look into the adoring eyes of their husbands, who, no matter what Cohen says, are definitely not hating Valentines Day. Beautiful French women with elegant red dresses and soft, tumbled hair. I suddenly feel like a spotlight has swung onto me.

“I’m not dressed for this,” I say.

“Who cares?”

“People are looking at me—”

“So? You’re not planning on making your home in Paris, are you? In three weeks, you’ll never see any of these people again.”

Including you,
I say to myself.

Cohen pulled a waiter aside and apparently orders wine in French, because a few minutes later, he returns with two crystal glasses full of ruby-red liquid and a bottle.

“Drink,” Cohen orders as the waiter sets one in front of me.

I lift it to my lips.

“No, not like that. Smell it first. Swish it and watch the way it comes down on the sides. Take a small sip and let it fill your mouth before you swallow.”

I do what he says. It smells like blackberries and currant, and when I take my small sip, the flavors grow in my mouth and expand like a flowering bouquet. I close my eyes.

“Good, isn’t it?”

I open my eyes. Cohen is watching me intently, a small unconscious smile on his lips, like he’s enjoying the sight of my pleasure and doesn’t even realize it.

“It’s delicious.”

“I’m glad. It’s a hundred euros a bottle.”

I nearly spit my second sip of wine all over the table. It’s a good thing I don’t, since that mouthful is apparently worth a pretty penny. “Why would anyone ever pay that much for a beverage? How can anyone
charge
that much for a beverage?”

“There’s no point in having stupidly large amounts of money unless you have equally stupid things to spend it on.” He sips his wine, though the enjoyment on his face seems to say he doesn’t think it’s all that stupid. “There are worlds that cater only to preposterously rich people. Entire businesses. It amuses people like my father to throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at each other for a splash of paint on a canvas, or an uncommon stone, or a bottle of wine.”

I put my glass down. “Can I ask you something?”

“Ask away,” he says. “I’d love to be distracted from the nauseating atmosphere in here.”

“Putting the fact that you’re the Valentines-Day-Grinch aside…okay. You seem to be pretty sick of your dad and pretty critical of the whole people-with-more-money-than-they-know-what-to-do-with thing. Yet making tons of money seems to be your main life goal. Why is that? You could ditch this. Forget about that company of LeCrue’s. Go be an artist or a poet or something. Write poems about how much you hate people.”

He rolls his eyes.

“Fine. Or paintings about how much you hate people. Those weird modern ones where you have to interpret everything and a blue blob symbolizes something about the artist’s childhood or whatever. You won’t even have to be good at painting.”

“That’s not the way that women I know usually talk about modern art.”

I give a crooked smile. “There’s a lot of things about me that are different from the other women you know, I’d imagine.”

“Believe me, I’ve noticed.”

The way he says that ought to be derogatory, but somehow it isn’t. He says it with a kind of unintentional interest, like he’s fascinated by me and has only barely managed to hide it this long.

"To answer your question," he says, "I don't care about the money."

"I thought everyone cared about the money."

"Seems like a pretty boring thing to care about, in my opinion."

"Then what do you care about?"

I meant it only in the context of his work, but it comes out as if I'm asking something broader. I qualify it hastily. "You work so much, I mean. All those papers. What's it supposed to be for? And if you say something obnoxious and cliché like power or control, I'm throwing this wine in your face."