Icy Pretty Love (23 page)

About half an hour later, I whisper, "Hey Cohen? Do you think maybe we could stay in touch? After this week is over?"

He doesn't respond. He's asleep.

And eventually I fall asleep too.

The next day, we go to the Louvre.

Geoff drops us off outside. The curb is high, and Cohen takes my hand to keep me from tripping as I step out of the car.

"Such a gentleman," I joke. The door shuts and the car drives up. "Racking up those niceness points, I see."

"Ah. Yes. That's what it is," he says. "Definitely."

The entrance to the Louvre, as it turns out, is underground. We walk through a gate set in the middle of tall fantastical buildings, embedded with sculptures of bearded men looking very serious, into a kind of courtyard. A long flat fountain bubbles in the middle of about a bajillion tourists. Beside the fountain is an odd glass triangle, rising high above the ground. A long line toward the triangle snakes around and around the fountain. As I watch, the group of people inside the triangle sink lower until they disappear. An elevator.

"Sweet!" I say. "It's underground. Like Batman's house."

Cohen raises an eyebrow as we join the line. "Batman's house was underground?"

"Of course it was. Where else would it be? The Batcave, duh. Didn't you ever watch Saturday morning cartoons?"

"Not really. My father thought most forms of entertainment were a waste of time. Other than opera."

I clap a hand to my face. "Your dad made you listen to opera."

"Fairly often, actually—"

"Oh, you poor poor thing." I pat his arm. "No wonder you're so grumpy all the time."

"Were," he says.

"Were?"

"I'm not feeling so grumpy anymore," he says. A kid running by bangs into his leg, and all Cohen does is smile at him. "I feel...free."

"Freee as the wiiiind blooows," I start singing.

Cohen winces. "I just told you I'm not in a bad mood for once. Don't ruin it."

"Hey, there's a reason I didn't go into opera singing."

The line snakes forward until we're finally inside the triangle. It descends into an enormous lobby with high ceilings and staircases going up every which way. I realize that the ornate buildings surrounding the courtyard must be part of the Louvre as well.

First we go to the sculpture section to check out all the fancy Greek and Roman statues, many of which are naked or only have fig leaves to preserve their modesty. I observe critically that their junk must be pretty small for a fig leaf to cover everything, and Cohen conceals his laughter with a coughing fit as a few older patrons frown at us.

"Look at that," I say, thumping his back in case he's actually choking on something and not laughing like I thought. "We've officially become the people who used to annoy you so much."

"It's more fun being those people, it turns out," he gasps.

I grin. "It's always more fun being the annoying person than the annoyed person."

We proceed to the Ancient Egyptians, where I get totally creeped out by all the dead people wrapped in toilet paper.

"Mummies," Cohen corrects.

"I don't care what they're called, they're gross! I thought I got to see all the preserved corpse bits in Paris when we went to the catacombs. I signed up for fancy-ass paintings and marble fig leaves, not more dead bodies. This place is probably haunted as hell."

Cohen wisely leads me away to look at some paintings.

I don't know much about art. I don't know anything about art, really. The most art education I ever got was Foundation of Arts freshman year of high school, where we twisted pipe cleaners into pretzel shapes and Sam Miller smeared glue all over his arms, waited until it dried, then peeled it off and ate it. This is real art. This is...

"Boring," I announce.

Cohen turns to look at me. "What?"

"This section of paintings. It's boring as hell. It's all just pictures of the same dude."

"Jesus Christ," he says.

"No need to get snippy. You're practicing being nice, remember?"

"No, that's the 'dude'. Jesus Christ."

"Oh. Right. Duh. I knew that. Anyway, my point is, why do we need all these damn pictures of him? One would have been enough."

"Well, during the Renaissance—"

"Oh God, don't start with all that historical stuff. It makes my brain melt. What I'm saying is, none of this stuff is original. It's all the same dude with the weird yellow cheese behind his head—"

"Halo."

"Halo, yeah. And the plot twist is that sometimes he's a baby with a littler yellow cheese-halo and his mom is goggling at him with her weird curvy neck. I don't like it."

Cohen opens his mouth, looks up and the paintings again, and closes it.

"You know what?" he says. "I don't either."

"You don't?"

"No. I don't care about their historical significance. These paintings all look the same."      

"Finally, you're making some sense." I slap his back. "Let's go see the Mona Lisa."

The Mona Lisa is mounted on a special wall in the middle of a big room. It's surprisingly small. I always pictured the Mona Lisa as giant, some huge twelve-foot monstrosity smiling creepily down from the wall, but the painting can't be more than three feet. We have to muscle our way to the front of the crowd to get a good view of her.

The Mona Lisa is definitely not boring. At first I almost feel bad for her, stuck in the middle of this big crowd with all these people gaping and snapping selfies of themselves with her in the background, but she doesn’t seem to care. Her little secret smile seems to say that she’s above it all, that she’s got her own thing going on and she likes the fact that none of us know what it is.

I shiver and pull back.

“What is it?” says Cohen.

“Nothing.” I shake my head. “It just feels like…she’s smiling at me.”

“Don’t tell me you’re getting creeped out by the Mona Lisa, because—”

“I’m not! It’s just…”

One woman smiling to another, as if to say, Hey, I know what your life is like. I’m a girl and I’ve been there. I wonder if all the men standing around even know what’s going on.

Her smile kind of reminds me of Annabelle’s, actually, even if she definitely doesn’t know what my life’s been like.

“Want to take a picture?” Cohen holds up his smartphone. “For you, I’m even willing to be one of those incredibly obnoxious people who takes pictures of themselves in front of a piece of art, as if they’re the interesting thing to look at.”

I hold up a hand. “One, that was a super annoying thing you just said. I don’t care how cool a piece of art is, a human being is always more important. Two…”

I glance at the Mona Lisa.

“Two, hell yeah I want to take a selfie with her.”

I grab Cohen’s phone and hold it up, angling so that it looks like I’m standing close to her. Mona and me, besties forever. I even flash a piece sign before I snap the shot.

Then I wrap an arm around Cohen’s waist and take a picture of the two of us, camera facing toward the hallway.

“You didn’t get the Mona Lisa in the picture,” he points out.

“I didn’t want her in that one. I just wanted a picture of the two of us. And you weren’t smiling, so we have to take it again.”

I poke him until he grins, and then I take the shot.

We wander around some more until we get lost and end up back with the sculptures. I'm admiring the boobs of a particularly alabaster specimen when someone ducks behind one of the statues in the distance. Someone familiar.

It looks like...no. Couldn't be.

I glance behind me. Cohen is absorbed in reading one of the placards on the wall. I take the opportunity to dart forward and around the statue. My hand closes on a sleeve. Annabelle's sleeve.

She whirls and some of the color drains from her face. "Oh, fancy seeing you here, Georgette—although I suppose I can't call you that anymore. What did he say your name was? Retta?"

"Rae," I say. "Annabelle, you can't expect me to believe we bumped into each other here by chance. Things like that don't happen in real life."

"I guess not." She sighs and looks at her feet. "I went to your apartment this morning, just in time to see you leaving. I...may have asked my driver to follow you. Although I never complain about the reasoning behind a trip to the Louvre."

I drop her sleeve. I was expecting her to be furious, indignant, righteous. "Er...okay. Why did you go to the apartment?"

"I wanted to speak with you, obviously!" She takes a step forward. I wait, steeling myself for the inevitable yelling, but what's flashing in her eyes isn't rage. It's...admiration?

"I can't believe you pulled that off," she says, shaking her head. "I'm terribly impressed. And terribly interested. All my friends are so very boring, you see. My whole life has been boring. You're the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me."

I start to talk, swallow my own saliva the wrong way, and cough for a minute. "I—am?"

"Yes! You have no idea what it's been like. I've been cooped up in this little bubble my entire life. It feels like I've only ever known one single stuffy person with a certain set of ideas, split into multitudes. I want to hear all about you, Rae. How you got into this line of work. What it's like. It must be so glamorous! Do you jet around the world, serving lies to the friends of rich businessmen? How much do you charge? I imagine it must be quite a bit. Oh, I'm so jealous, the adventures you must have had—"

I put a finger to her lips. That shuts her up. If nothing else, her voice was starting to echo in the large marble chamber, and I'd rather have this conversation without any participation from Cohen. "Annabelle, I haven't had a pretty life like you, okay? You're not...you're not imagining it right at all. It hasn't been an adventure. It's been horrible and I'm leaving it all behind. This is my last job."

"Your last...?" Her voice falls. "But what are you going to do after this?"

"I'm not sure yet!" I smile. "I've always sort of want to be a teacher. I like kids. I'm thinking I'll go back to school, get my certification." Of course, I'll have to get my high school diploma first. "We'll see."

"Oh," she says uncertainly. "Then you must be leaving Paris very soon?"

"A few days." I mean to say with ease, but it comes out like a shard of glass.

She scowls, and looks over my shoulder. Behind us, Cohen has finished reading and begun to glance around for me. I turn toward him, but Annabelle grabs my shoulder and hauls me behind an immense statue of a man riding a horse over what looks like a dead lion.

"But you're not leaving, surely," she hisses. "Not with Cohen being in love with you."

I shoot upright and bang my head on one of the horse's hoofs. Thank the gods of men in uniform that museum security wasn't around to see that. "He—what? He's not—that's crazy. What are you talking about?"

She tosses her hair. "Don't play dumb with me. I already know you're smart, at least smart enough to pull of that scheme of yours, so there's no point in pretending. I've never known a human being to change so much in a month. When I tried to drive you away from him, I could at least justify it to myself thinking that he really was a jerk. But he's not now, not at all. What he did at that party was ridiculously brave, and honorable. You've changed him."

"I—"

"People only change for people they love." She gives a sad laugh. "Believe me. I thought Claude would change for me, but he never did. I'm leaving him, by the way."

"You are?"

"Yes. Around him, I've turned into a person I don't like at all." She shudders. "But don't get distracted by that. My point is that you two care about each other, obviously, and you can't jet off now, not when you have such a fantastic how-I-met-your-father tale to tell your children someday."

"Children?" I squawk.

"Don't throw this away, you dratted fool. I'm so very excited to see where it goes." She beams at me. "Everyone in my circle's all in a tizzy. There's an uproar about something interesting for the first time in ages. It's wonderful."

"Annabelle," I manage. "You've got it all wrong. Cohen and I don't—don't love each other. He's my client. We're doing business together, that's all."

"Yes, business. And I'm sure that's why you've stuck around even though you were hired, as Cohen said, to prompt old LeCrue to sell the company and that's fallen through. And why you and Cohen are gallivanting off to the Louvre together for no apparent reason other than to have fun."

"No, that's—these niceness lessons we've been doing, where we go to all the crowded tourist places that would normally drive him crazy and he has to be polite to everyone he sees..."

But I trail off. I've hardly mentioned the niceness lessons today, and in truth, I wasn't thinking about them at all when I proposed going to the Louvre. What I really wanted was to spend some time with Cohen. And, though I almost didn't notice, he's been nice to everyone today. He thanked the ticket lady when he bought our tickets, helped a woman find her glasses case when she dropped her purse, and even pulled me to the side so a short old man could get a better view of one of the paintings we were looking at.

My job is done after all, I guess.

The only thing he needed was one person to tell him to be kind to others. To point out the obvious thing that his father, obsessed with greed and success, never did.

"I should make a dash for it," Annabelle says, straightening. "It would be a bit awkward for him to see me here, don't you think? Anyway, that was all I wanted to tell you. And I wanted to give you this."

It's a phone number on a piece of paper. She presses it into my hand. "It's my personal line. Call me at anytime, all right, darling? If you do decide to leave Paris, I'd love to stay in touch and hear all about your thrilling exploits."

The thrilling exploits of doing lots of homework and working a nine-to-five at Burger King, probably. But I don't say that. "All right. Thanks, Annabelle."

"Au revoir, darling," she says before backing into the nearest hallway, the one that leads to the Renaissance paintings.

I stuff the paper in my pocket and stand. Cohen spots me at once.