The Expats (11 page)

“NOUS SOMMES DES amis de Pierre,”
Bill said to the doorman.

They were standing on the wide sidewalk of the broad, quiet boulevard, just the other side of the Pont d’Alma.

“Est-il chez lui ce soir?”

The man behind the velvet rope was big and black and bald.
“Votre nom?”

“Bill Maclean.
Je suis americain
.”

The man grinned at this piece of obviousness, and inclined his head at a willowy girl in a silver sheath dress who was standing a few yards away, smoking; she herself looked a bit like a cigarette. The girl flicked aside her butt and sauntered inside.

Kate and Dexter and Julia and Bill waited, amid a dozen people who were perhaps waiting for the same type of thing. Maybe the same exact thing, from the same person. Other supposed friends of Pierre.

This was not something Dexter and Kate had ever done in D.C. Or anywhere else. He took her hand, fingertips cold in the brisk autumn
air, and tickled her palm with the tip of his forefinger. Kate stifled a giggle at the tingle, at her husband’s secret signal for sex.

The cigarette-girl reappeared, nodded at the bouncer, then lit a new smoke, and resumed looking bored.

“Bienvenue, Beel,”
the bouncer said.

A different big and black man, this one with a short afro and beside the rope, not behind it, opened the brass hinge and held aside the thick, braided strand.

Bill ushered his wife forward, through the gap in the rope. Then he repeated the gesture for Kate, his fingers lightly pressing the fabric of her jacket, his fingertips barely but unmistakably felt through the silk and wool. Kate knew with a jolt that this touch was wrong. Bill hadn’t touched Julia this way.

“Merci beaucoup.”
Bill shook the bouncer’s hand.

The hallway was dim and red, low light reflected off walls that were both glossy and matte. Kate reached out her hand, and let her fingers trail across the fleur-de-lis flocked in plush velvet against a satin background. The hall widened, and opened, and they were beside a short bar, ordering a bottle of Champagne, Bill laying a credit card on the gleaming wood, swept up by the bartender and stowed next to the register, an open tab.

Beyond the bar, low tables and couches surrounded a diminutive dance floor. Two women were dancing playfully around one man, who was standing still, letting his head bounce from side to side. Minimalist dancing.

Bill leaned in to Kate’s ear. “It’s early,” he explained. “There will be more people.”

“Early? It’s midnight.”

“This place doesn’t open until eleven. And nobody would show up at eleven.”

They arrived at the table of a slender olive-skinned man, reeking of cigarettes, his ears littered with rings, his arms with tattoos, his shirt unbuttoned halfway down to his crotch. He and Bill exchanged cheek kisses. Bill introduced him as Pierre, first to Kate, then to Dexter, and finally to
“ma femme, Julia.”
Pierre seemed surprised that Bill had a wife.

The Americans took a table beside Pierre’s, populated by a similar-looking man and a pair of modely-looking young women in jeans and slinky blouses and not a single extra ounce of body fat.

Kate took another sip of wine.

IT WAS DARK, and loud, and the dance floor and lights and music tugged at everyone’s concentration, pulling toward this light and that body, this beat and that voice, and all these distractions, this sensory overload, created a sort of privacy, an energy shield behind which Kate felt like she could finally take a moment and study Bill, this husband of a woman who had quickly become her best friend on the continent.

Bill’s arm was thrown over the back of the banquette, and his jacket was off, and his shirt was undone two buttons. His wavy dark hair had gone a bit wild, and he was sporting the easy smile of someone who’d been drinking for six hours. He looked completely in his element here, at this Right Bank
club privé
. He leaned his head back to listen to Pierre, then let out a full and loose laugh. He could be a fashion designer, or a filmmaker. But what he didn’t look like was a currency trader.

The humor of Pierre’s joke receded, taking with it the better part of Bill’s smile. He turned back to his American companions, his table, and his eyes found Kate’s, and rested there a few beats, saying nothing and asking nothing, just looking. She wondered what he was looking for, and who the hell he was.

Bill’s being, his presence, dominated his surroundings. Making his wife seem small and quiet, even when she was standing tall, loudly. They were a strange match; Bill was kind of out of Julia’s league.

“Hey guys,” Kate said to her husband, and to Bill, pulling her phone out of her pocket. “How about a picture?” They both looked reticent, but not enough to argue.

Kate had come across a lot of Bills: alpha males, trying to out-alpha one another. It had been her job to deal with them. In private life, it had been her habit to avoid them.

“And Julia?” she asked. “Could you lean in also? ”

The trio smiled, and Kate snapped the picture.

She looked at these men across the low littered table, her own man and this new one. One whose entire being was suffused with confidence, flowing up from some deep well that originated Lord knows where—maybe he’d been spectacularly good at some sport, or he had a photographic memory, or was impressively well-endowed—and oozing out into a sleekness, a fluidity, as if all his gears were well-oiled, perpetually lubricated and running efficiently, manifested in smooth physical movements and playful smiles and an undeniably animal sexuality.
This man didn’t run his hand through his hair, or adjust his shirt collar, or dart his eyes around the room, or run his mouth meaninglessly; he didn’t fidget in any way.

And the other man, bereft of this confidence. His supply compromised, a plugged well or a broken pipe, just a trickle flowing up, not enough to even out the rough edges of nervousness and insecurity, of herky-jerky body language with creaks and squeaks and uncomfortable angles. This was her man, the one who didn’t just want her but needed her, and not just passingly but desperately. This was the legacy of her upbringing, the result of her own finite supply of self-confidence, her own valuation of herself in the world: Kate needed, badly, to be needed. She’d gravitated toward men who tended to need her more than want her. She’d married the one who’d needed her the most.

The new man was again staring at her, staring at him, challenging her, knowing that she was considering him, wanting her to know that he was considering her.

She couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to be with a man who absolutely didn’t need her, but merely wanted her.

KATE DIDN’T NOTICE anyone order or deliver or pick up the third bottle of Champagne, but there was no way this was still the second. She was hot, and thirsty, and she took a long sip, and then another, before Julia tugged her back into the throbbing crowd on the dance floor, everyone in the same motion and to the same beat, everyone sweaty, the strobe sweeping slowly across the room, the mirror-ball twinkling.

Dexter was engrossed in conversation with a staggeringly beautiful woman who read headlines for a news station. She wanted to move to Washington, this French newscaster, to cover politics; she was pumping Dexter for information he didn’t really have. Kate didn’t begrudge him his obvious thrill, basking in the glow of attention from an unattainably gorgeous woman.

They were all plastered.

Julia had undone yet another button on her blouse, crossing the neckline between sexy and exhibitionist. But half the women in the club were the same degree of naked.

Kate looked away from Julia, through the obstacles of lights and forms, her eye drawn toward the far wall, where Bill was slouched next to an attractive woman, who turned her head into the side of his, and may or may not have licked his ear.

Kate glanced at Julia, her eyelids resting heavy against her cheeks, oblivious.

Kate again scanned the roiling sea of flesh. Now it was Bill who was turning into the young woman’s neck. She smiled, and nodded. Bill took her by the wrist and led her away.

Julia’s eyes were now open, but she was looking nowhere near her husband.

Kate watched Bill recede with the girl down one of those halls in clubs and bars that lead to privacy, to restrooms and broom closets and storage rooms, to back doors that empty into alleyways. To places where people go, late at night, groping and squeezing, unzipping trousers and pushing aside panties, breathless and urgent.

Kate blinked, long and slow, letting her eyes stay closed for a few loud techno beats. Julia glided away, was dancing with a tall, dangerously thin young man, her lips moist and partway open, teeth glinting, tongue sliding slowly across her lip. One of Julia’s hands was resting against the flat of her stomach, then this hand rose to her breast, cupping herself, then fell again, past stomach and down to hip, thigh. Her head was thrown back, extending her glistening neck; her eyes were hooded, open but barely, looking not at the man she was dancing with, but across the room, and not in the direction of her own disappeared husband, but in the direction, Kate knew without turning, of Dexter.

It was three thirty in the morning.

THE BOULEVARD DESERTED of muscular bouncers and nubile girls, not a taxi nor a person in sight, but suddenly out of nowhere there were two of them, hoodies and baggy jeans and piercings and scraggly beards. One shoving Dexter hard against the wall. The other with the quick, unmistakable movement of a flustered young man raising a gun.

Kate could replay the next couple of seconds frame by frame, stop-motion, in her mind. There was Dexter’s panicked face, and Julia’s frozen horror, and Bill’s impressive, impassive calm.
“Je vous en prie,”
he said.
“Un moment.”

Kate was off to the side of the main confrontation, ignored. It would be easy for her. The path she could take to end this scene was clear: the swift kick to the side of the head, the rabbit punch to the kidney, then wresting away the weapon. But if Kate did this, then everyone would wonder how the hell she had the nerve, and the technique, and she wouldn’t be able to explain.

So Kate turned her thoughts to whether she’d miss anything she was about to hand over to these thugs. Muggers don’t shoot tourists on central-Paris streets, do they? No.

But then the odd thing happened. Bill took hold of Julia’s handbag, and extended it toward the gun-wielder. This was clearly not how these boys wanted the transaction to proceed, both shaking their heads.

“Tenez,”
Bill said. Kate could see that he knew what he was doing, and why, pushing the bag toward the weapon, getting too close, forcing the other man to step between Bill and the bullets to grasp the booty, which was when Bill lunged into the unarmed man, using him as a shield while he reached out and yanked the barrel of the gun, effortlessly, brazenly.

Everyone froze for a beat, cutting their eyes from the weapon to one another, heavy breathing, mouths agape, calculating their next possible actions …

The young men ran away, and Bill tossed the gun into the gutter.