Just One Day (4 page)

“Who’s Boris?”

“The thuggish Ukrainian who’s going to do the dirty work. You were just the bait.”

Now he laughs, tilting his long neck back. When he comes up for air, he says, “I usually
work with Bulgarians.”

“You tease all you want, but there was a thing on TV about it. And it’s not like I
know
you.”

He pauses, looks straight at me, then says: “Twenty. One point nine meters. Seventy-five
kilos, last time I checked. This,” he points to a zigzag scar on his foot. Then he
looks me dead in the eye. “And no.”

It takes me a minute to realize that he’s answering the same four questions he asked
me. When I do, I feel a flush start to creep up my neck.

“Also, we had breakfast together. Usually the people I have breakfast with, I know
very well.”

Now the flush tidal-waves into a full-on blush. I try to think of something quippy
to say back. But it’s hard to be witty when someone is looking at you like that.

“Did you really believe I would leave you on the train?” he asks.

The question is oddly jarring after all that hilarity about black-market sex slavery.
I think about it. Did I
really
think he’d do that?

“I don’t know,” I answer. “Maybe I was just having a minor panic because doing something
impulsive like this, it’s not me.”

“Are you sure about that?” he asks. “You’re here, after all.”

“I’m here,” I repeat. And I am. Here. On my way to Paris. With him. I look at him.
He’s got that half smile, as if there’s something about me that’s endlessly amusing.
And maybe it’s that, or the rocking of the train, or the fact that I’ll never see
him again after the one day, or maybe once you open the trapdoor of honesty, there’s
no going back. Or maybe it’s just because I want to. But I let the robe drop to the
floor. “I thought you got off the train because I was having a hard time believing
you’d be on the train in the first place. With me. Without some ulterior motive.”

And
this
is the truth. Because I may be only eighteen, but it already seems pretty obvious
that the world is divided into two groups: the doers and the watchers. The people
things happen to and the rest of us, who just sort of plod on with things. The Lulus
and the Allysons.

It never occurred to me that by
pretending
to be Lulu, I might slip into that other column, even for just a day.

I turn to Willem, to see what he’ll say to this, but before he responds, the train
plunges into darkness as we enter the Channel Tunnel. According to the factoids I
read, in less than twenty minutes, we will be in Calais and then, an hour later, Paris.
But right now, I have a feeling that this train is not just delivering me to Paris,
but to someplace entirely new.

Four

Paris

I
mmediately, there are problems. The luggage storage place in the basement of the train
station is shuttered; the workers who run the X-ray machines the bags have to pass
through before they go into storage are on strike. As a result, all the automated
lockers large enough for my bag are full. Willem says there’s another station that’s
not so far from here we might try, but if the baggage handlers are on strike, we might
have the same problem there too.

“I can just drag it behind me. Or toss it into the Seine.” I’m joking, though there
is
something appealing about abandoning all vestiges of Allyson.

“I have a friend who works in a nightclub not so far from here. . . .” He reaches
into his backpack and pulls out a battered leather notebook. I’m about to make a joke
about it being his little black book, but then I see all the names and numbers and
email addresses scrawled in there, and he adds, “She does the books, so she’s usually
there in the afternoons,” and I realize that it actually
is
a little black book.

After finding the number he’s after, he pulls out an ancient cell phone, presses the
power key a few times. “No battery. Does yours work?”

I shake my head. “It’s useless in Europe. Except as a camera.”

“We can walk. It’s close to here.”

We head back up the escalators. Before we get to the automatic doors, Willem turns
to me and asks, “Are you ready for Paris?”

In all the stress of dealing with my luggage, I’d sort of forgotten that the point
of all this was Paris. Suddenly, I’m a little nervous. “I hope so,” I say weakly.

We walk out the front of the train station and step into the shimmering heat. I squint,
as if preparing for blinding disappointment. Because the truth of it is, so far on
this tour, I’ve been let down by pretty much everywhere we went. Maybe I watch too
many movies. In Rome, I really wanted an Audrey Hepburn
Roman Holiday
experience, but the Trevi Fountain was crowded, there was a McDonald’s at the base
of the Spanish Steps, and the ruins smelled like cat pee because of all the strays.
The same thing happened in Prague, where I’d been yearning for some of the bohemianism
of
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
. But no, there were no fabulous artists, no guys who looked remotely like a young
Daniel Day-Lewis. I saw one mysterious-looking guy reading Sartre in a café, but then
his cell phone rang and he started talking in a loud Texas twang.

And London. Melanie and I got ourselves completely lost on the Tube just so we could
visit Notting Hill, but all we found was a fancy, expensive area full of upscale shops.
No quaint bookstores, no groups of lovable friends I’d want to have dinner parties
with. It seemed like there was a direct link between number of movies I’d seen about
a city and the degree of my disappointment. And I’ve seen a lot of movies about Paris.

The Paris that greets me outside Gare du Nord is not the Paris of the movies. There’s
no Eiffel Tower or fancy couture stores here. It’s just a regular street, with a bunch
of hotels and exchange bureaus, clogged with taxis and buses.

I look around. There are rows and rows of old grayish-brown buildings. They are uniform,
seeming to ripple into one another, their windows and French doors thrown open, flowers
spilling out. Right across from the station are two cafés, catty-corner. Neither one
is fancy, but both are packed—people clustered at round glass tables, under the awnings
and umbrellas. It’s both so normal and so completely foreign.

Willem and I start walking. We cross the street and pass one of cafés. There’s a woman
sitting alone at one of the tables, drinking pink wine and smoking a cigarette, a
small bulldog panting by her legs. As we walk by, the dog jumps up and starts sniffing
under my skirt, tangling me and him in his leash.

The woman must be around my mom’s age, but is wearing a short skirt and high-heeled
espadrilles that lace up her shapely legs. She scolds the dog and untangles the leash.
I bend over to scratch behind its ears, and the woman says something in French that
makes Willem laugh.

“What did she say?” I ask as we walk away.

“She said her dog is like a truffle hog when it comes to beautiful girls.”

“Really?” I feel flush with pleasure. Which is a little silly, because it was a dog,
and also I’m not entirely sure what a truffle hog is.

Willem and I walk down a block full of sex shops and travel agencies and turn a corner
onto some unpronounceable boulevard, and for the first time, I understand that
boulevard
is actually a French word, that all the big streets called boulevards at home are
actually just busy roads. Because
here
is a boulevard: a river of life, grand, broad, and flowing, a plaza running down
the middle and graceful trees arcing out toward one another overhead.

At a redlight, a cute guy in a skinny suit riding a moped in the bike lane stops to
check me out, looking me up and down until the moped behind him beeps its horn for
him to move on.

Okay, this is, like, twice in five minutes. Granted, the first one was a dog, but
it feels significant. For the past three weeks, it’s been Melanie getting the catcalls—a
result of her blond hair and
LOOK AT ME
wardrobe, I cattily assumed. Once or twice, I huffed about the objectification of
women, but Melanie rolled her eyes and said I was missing the point.

As this lightness buoys me, I wonder if maybe she was right. Maybe it’s not about
looking hot for guys, but about feeling like a place acknowledged you, winked at you,
accepted you. It’s strange because, of all the people in all the cities, I’d have
thought that to Parisians I’d be invisible, but apparently I’m not. Apparently, in
Paris, not only can I skate, but I practically qualify for the Olympics!

“It’s official,” I declare. “I love Paris!”

“That was fast.”

“When you know, you know. It’s just become my favorite city in the whole world.”

“It tends to have that effect.”

“I should add that there wasn’t much competition, seeing as I didn’t actually enjoy
most of the places on the tour.”

And again, it just slips out. Apparently when you only have one day, you can say anything
and live to tell.
The trip has been a bust
. How good it feels to finally admit this to someone. Because I couldn’t tell my parents,
who had paid for what they believed was the Trip of a Lifetime. And I couldn’t tell
Melanie, who really was on the Trip of a Lifetime. And not Ms. Foley, whose job it
was to ensure I had the Trip of a Lifetime. But it’s true. I’ve spent the last three
weeks trying to have fun—and failing.

“I think maybe traveling is a talent, like whistling or dancing,” I continue. “And
some people have it—you seem to. I mean, how long have you been traveling?”

“Two years,” he says.

“Two years with breaks?”

He shakes his head. “Two years since I’ve been back to Holland.”

“Really? And you were supposed to go back today? After two years?”

He throws his arms up into the air. “What’s one more day after two years?”

I suppose to him, not a lot. But to me, maybe something else. “That just proves my
point. You have the talent for traveling. I’m not sure that I do. I keep hearing everyone
go on about how travel broadens your horizons. I’m not even sure what that means,
but it hasn’t broadened anything for me, because I’m no good at it.”

He’s mostly silent as we walk over a long bridge spanning dozens of railroad tracks,
graffiti everywhere. Then he says, “Traveling’s not something you’re good at. It’s
something you do. Like breathing.”

“I don’t think so. I breathe just fine.”

“Are you sure? Have you ever thought about it?”

“Probably more than most people. My father’s a pulmonologist. A lung doctor.”

“What I mean is, have you ever thought about
how
it is that you do it? Day and night? While you sleep. While you eat. While you talk.”

“Not so much.”

“Think about it now.”

“How do you think about breathing?” But then all of sudden I do. I get tangled up
in thoughts about breathing, the mechanics of it, how is it that my body knows to
do it even when I’m sleeping, or crying, or hiccupping. What would happen if my body
somehow forgot? And sure enough, my breath grows a little labored, as if I’m walking
uphill, even though I’m walking down the slope of the bridge.

“Okay, that was weird.”

“See?” Willem asks. “You thought too hard. Same with travel. You can’t work too much
at it, or it feels like work. You have to surrender yourself to the chaos. To the
accidents.”

“I’m supposed to walk in front of a bus and then I’ll have a good time?”

Willem chuckles. “Not those accidents. The little things that happen. Sometimes they’re
insignificant; other times, they change everything.”

“This all sounds very Jedi. Can you be more specific?”

“A guy picks up a girl hitchhiking in a faraway country. A year later, she runs out
of money and winds up on his doorstep. Six months after that, they get married. Accidents.”

“Did you marry a hitchhiker or something?”

His smile unfurls like a sail. “I’m giving examples.”

“Tell me a
real
one.”

“How do you know that’s not real?” he teases. “Okay, this happened to me. Last year
when I was in Berlin, I missed my train to Bucharest and caught a ride to Slovakia
instead. The people I rode with were in a theater troupe, and one of the guys had
just broken his ankle and they needed a replacement. On the six-hour ride to Bratislava,
I learned his part. I stayed with the troupe until his ankle got better, and then
a while after that, I met some people from Guerrilla Will, and they were in desperate
need of someone who could do Shakespeare in French.”

“And
you
could?”

He nods.

“Are you some kind of language savant?”

“I’m just Dutch. So I joined Guerrilla Will.” He snaps his fingers. “Now I’m an actor.”

This surprises me. “You seemed like you’d been doing it a lot longer.”

“No. It’s just accidental, just temporary. Until the next accident sends me somewhere
new. That’s how life works.”

Something quickens in my chest. “Do you really think that’s how it works? That life
can change
justlikethat
?”

“I think everything is happening all the time, but if you don’t put yourself in the
path of it, you miss it. When you travel, you put yourself out there. It’s not always
great. Sometimes it’s terrible. But other times . . .” He lifts his shoulders and
gestures out to Paris, then sneaks me a sidelong glance. “It’s not so bad.”

“So long as you don’t get hit by a bus,” I say.

He laughs. Then gives me the point. “So long as you don’t get hit by a bus,” he says
back.

Five

W
e arrive at the club where Willem’s friend works; it seems completely dead, but when
Willem pounds on the door, a tall man with blue-black skin opens up. Willem speaks
to him in French, and after a minute, we’re allowed into a huge dank room with a small
stage, a narrow bar, and a bunch of tables with chairs stacked on them. Willem and
the Giant confer a bit more in French and then Willem turns to me.

“Céline doesn’t like surprises. Maybe it’s better if I go down first.”

“Sure.” In the hushed dim, my voice seems to clang, and I realize I’m nervous again.

Willem heads to a staircase at the back of the club. The Giant resumes his work polishing
bottles behind the bar. Obviously, he didn’t get the message that Paris loves me.
I take a seat on the barstool. They twirl all the way around, like the barstools at
Whipple’s, the ice-cream place I used to go to with my grandparents. The Giant is
ignoring me, so I just sort of spin myself this way and that. And then I guess I do
it a little fast, because I go spinning and the barstool comes clear off its base.

“Oh, shit! Ow!”

The Giant comes out to where I am sprawled on the floor. His face is a picture of
blasé. He picks up the stool and screws it back in, then goes back behind the bar.
I stay on the floor for a second, wondering which is more humiliating, remaining down
here or getting back on the stool.

“You are American?”

What gives it away? Because I’m clumsy? Aren’t French people ever clumsy? I’m actually
pretty graceful. I took ballet for eight years. I should tell him to fix the stool
before someone sues. No, if I say that, I’ll definitely sound American.

“How can you tell?” I don’t know why I bother to ask. Since the moment our plane touched
down in London, it’s like there’s been a neon sign above my head, blinking:
TOURIST, AMERICAN, OUTSIDER
. I should be used to it. Except since arriving in Paris, it felt like it had maybe
dimmed. Clearly not.

“Your friend tells me,” he says. “My brother lives in Roché Estair.”

“Oh?” Am I supposed to know where this is? “Is that near Paris?”

He laughs, a big loud belly laugh. “No. It is in New York. Near the big lake.”

Roché Estair?
“Oh! Rochester.”

“Yes. Roché Estair,” he repeats. “It is very cold up there. Very much snow. My brother’s
name is Aliou Mjodi. Maybe you know him?”

I shake my head. “I live in Pennsylvania, next to New York.”

“Is there much snow in Penisvania?”

I suppress a laugh. “There’s a fair amount in Penn-syl-vania,” I say, emphasizing
the pronunciation. “But not as much as Rochester.”

He shivers. “Too cold. Especially for us. We have Senegalese blood in our veins, though
we both are born in Paris. But now my brother he goes to study computers in Roché
Estair, at university.” The Giant looks very proud. “He does not like the snow. And
he says, in summer, the mosquitoes are as big as those in Senegal.”

I laugh.

The Giant’s face breaks open into a jack-o’-lantern’s smile. “How long in Paris?”

I look at my watch. “I’ve been here one hour, and I’ll be here for one day.”

“One day? Why are you here?” He gestures to the bar.

I point to my bag. “We need a place to store this.”

“Take it downstairs. You must not waste your one day here. When the sun shines, you
let it shine on you. Snow is always waiting.”

“Willem told me to wait, that Céline—”

“Pff,”
he interrupts, waving his hand. He comes out from behind the bar and easily hoists
my bag over his shoulder. “Come, I take it downstairs for you.”

At the bottom of the stairs is a dark hallway crowded with speakers, amplifiers, cables,
and lights. Upstairs, there’s rapping on the door, and the Giant bounds back up, telling
me to leave the bag in the office.

There are a couple of doors, so I go to the first one and knock on it. It opens to
a small room with a metal desk, an old computer, a pile of papers. Willem’s backpack
is there, but he’s not. I go back in the hall and hear the sound of a woman’s rapid-fire
French, and then Willem’s voice, languid in response.

“Willem?” I call out. “Hello?”

He says something back, but I don’t understand.

“What?”

He says something else, but I can’t hear him so I crack open the door to find a small
supply closet full of boxes and in it, Willem standing right up close to a girl—Céline—who
even in the half darkness, I can see is beautiful in a way I can never even pretend
to be. She is talking to Willem in a throaty voice while tugging his shirt over his
head. He, of course, is laughing.

I slam the door shut and retreat back toward the stairs, tipping over my suitcase
in my haste.

I hear something rattle. “Lulu, open the door. It’s stuck.”

I turn around. My suitcase is lodged underneath the handle. I scurry back to kick
it out of the way and turn back toward the stairs as the door flies open.

“What are you doing?” Willem asks.

“Leaving.” It’s not like Willem and I are anything to each other, but still, he left
me upstairs to come downstairs for a quickie?

“Come back.”

I’ve heard about the French. I’ve seen plenty of French films. A lot of them are sexy;
some of them are kinky. I want to be Lulu, but not
that
much.

“Lulu!” Willem’s voice is firm. “Céline refuses to hold your bags unless I change
my clothes,” he explains. “She says I look like a dirty old man coming out of a sex
shop.” He points to his crotch.

It takes me a minute to understand what she means, and when I do, I flush.

Céline says something to Willem in French, and he laughs. And fine, maybe it’s not
what I thought it was. But it’s still pretty clear that I’ve intruded upon
something
.

Willem turns back to me. “I said I will change my jeans, but all my other shirts are
just as dirty, so she is finding me one.”

Céline continues yapping away at Willem in French, and it’s like I don’t even exist.

Finally, she finds what she’s looking for, a heather-gray T-shirt with a giant red
SOS
emblazoned on it. Willem takes it and yanks off his own T-shirt. Céline says something
else and reaches out to undo his belt buckle. He holds his hands up in surrender and
then undoes the buttons himself. The jeans fall to the floor and Willem just stands
there, all miles and miles of him, in nothing but a pair of fitted boxer shorts.

“Excusez-moi,”
he says as he brushes past me so close his bare torso slides up against my arm. It’s
dark in here, but I’m fairly certain Céline can tell I’m blushing and has marked this
as a point against me. A few seconds later, Willem returns with his backpack. He digs
in it for a rumpled-but-stain-free pair of jeans. I try not to stare as he slips them
on and threads his worn brown leather belt through the loops. Then he puts on the
T-shirt. Céline glances at me looking at him, and I look away as though she’s caught
me at something. Which she has. Watching him get dressed feels more illicit than seeing
him strip.

“D’accord?”
he asks Céline. She appraises him, her hands on her hips.

“Mieux,”
she says back, sounding like a cat.
Mew
.

“Lulu?” Willem asks.

“Nice.”

Finally, Céline acknowledges me. She says something, gesticulating wildly, then stops.

When I fail to answer, one of Céline’s eyebrows shoots up into a perfect arch, while
the other one stays in neutral. I’ve seen women from Florence to Prague do this same
thing. It must be some skill they teach in European schools.

“She is asking you if you have ever heard of S
ous ou Sur
,” Willem says, pointing to the SOS on the shirt. “They are a famous punk-rap band
with strong lyrics about justice.”

I shake my head, feeling like a double loser for not having heard of the cool French
anarchist whatever justice band. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak French.”

Céline looks disdainful. Another stupid American who can’t be bothered to learn any
other languages.

“I speak a little Mandarin,” I offer hopefully, but this fails to impress.

Céline deigns to switch to English: “But your name. Lulu, it is French,
non
?”

There’s a small pause. Like at a concert in between songs. A perfect time to say,
ever so casually, “Actually, my name is Allyson.”

But then Willem answers for me. “It’s short for Louise.” And he winks at me.

Céline points at my suitcase with a manicured purple fingernail. “That is the bag?”

“Yes. This is it.”

“It is so big.”

“It’s not
that
big.” I think about some of the bags other girls brought on the tour, the hair dryers
and adapters and three changes of clothes per day. I look at her in her black mesh
tunic that stops at her thighs, a tiny black skirt that Melanie would pay too much
for, and suspect this knowledge would fail to impress her.

“It can live in the storage room, not in my office.”

“That’s fine. Just so long as I can get it tomorrow.”

“The cleaner will be here at ten o’clock. And here, we have so many extra, you can
have one too,” she says, handing me the same T-shirt she gave Willem, only mine is
at least a size larger than his.

I’m about to open my suitcase and stuff it in, but then I visualize the contents:
the sensible A-line skirts and T-shirts that Mom picked out for me. My travel journal,
the entries I hoped would be breathless accounts of adventure but wound up reading
like a series of telegrams:
Today we went to the Prague Castle. Stop. Then we saw
The Magic Flute
at the State Opera House. Stop. Had chicken cutlets for dinner. Stop.
The postcards from Famous European Cities, blank because after I’d mailed the obligatory
few to my parents and grandmother, I’d had no one left to send them to. And then there’s
the Ziploc bag with one lone piece of paper inside. Before the trip, my mom made me
a master inventory of all the things to bring and then she made copies, one for every
stop, so each time I packed, I could check off each item, to ensure I didn’t leave
anything behind. There is one sheet left for my supposed last stop in London.

I stuff the T-shirt into my shoulder bag. “I’ll just hang on to this. To sleep in
tonight.”

Céline’s eyebrow shoots up again. She probably never sleeps in a T-shirt. She probably
sleeps in the silky nude, even on the coldest of winter nights. I get a flash of her
sleeping naked next to Willem.

“Thanks. For the shirt. For storing my bag,” I say.

“Merci,” Céline says back, and I wonder why it is that she’s thanking me, but then
I realize she wants me to say thank you in French, so I do, only it comes out sounding
like
mercy
.

We go upstairs. Céline is nattering away to Willem. I’m beginning to understand how
his French got so fluent. As if this didn’t make it clear enough that she was a dog
and Willem her hydrant, when we get upstairs, she links arms with him and walks him
slowly to the front of the bar. I feel like waving my arms and saying “Hello! Remember
me?”

When they do that cheek-cheek-kiss-kiss thing, I feel so much of the excitement from
earlier dwindle. Next to Céline, with her mile-high stilettos, her black hair, the
underneath dyed blond, her perfectly symmetrical face, which is both marred and enhanced
by so many piercings, I feel short as a midget and plain as a mop. And once again,
I wonder, Why did he bring me here? Then I think of Shane Michaels.

All through tenth grade, I’d had a huge crush on Shane, a senior. We’d hang out, and
he’d flirt with me and invite me lots of places and pay for me even, and he’d confide
all kinds of personal things, including, yes, about the girls he was dating. But those
relationships never lasted more than a few weeks, and I’d told myself that all the
while, he and I were growing closer and that he’d eventually fall for me. When months
went by and nothing happened between us, Melanie said it was never going to happen.
“You have Sidekick Syndrome,” she said. At the time, I thought she was jealous, but
of course, she was right. It hits me that, Evan notwithstanding, it might be a lifetime
affliction.

I can feel myself shriveling, feel the welcome Paris bestowed on me earlier fading
away, if it even really happened. How stupid to think a dog sniffing my crotch and
a quick look from some random guy meant anything. Paris adores girls like Céline.
Genuine Lulus, not counterfeits.

But then, just as we’re at the door, the Giant comes out from behind the bar and takes
my hand and, with a jaunty “
à bientôt
,” kisses both my cheeks.

A warm feeling tickles my chest. This is the first time on the trip a local has been
unabashedly nice to me—because he wanted to, not because I was paying him to. And
it doesn’t escape my notice that Willem is no longer looking at Céline but is watching
me, a curious expression lighting up his face. I’m not sure if it’s these things or
something else, but it makes that kiss, which I get was just platonic—a friendly,
cheek-handshake thing—feel momentous. A kiss from all of Paris.