The Ingredients of Love (15 page)

I paused for a moment and scanned my e-mail. It all sounded very plausible and confident, I thought. And above all there was not a single trace of unfriendliness. And then I baited my first hook:

Dear Mademoiselle Bredin, I hope that this has answered your questions. I would really like to help you more, but you will understand that I cannot simply trample over the wishes (and rights) of our authors. Nevertheless (and if you promise me not to shout it from the rooftops), something a bit more informal might possibly be arranged.

As chance would have it, I'm meeting Robert Miller this coming Friday to discuss his new book. It was a completely spontaneous idea: He has things to do in Paris that day, and not much time, but we are going to meet for dinner. If you would like it, and if the time is possible, you could perhaps turn up as if by chance and have a drink with us—and in that way you'd have an opportunity to personally shake the hand of your favorite author at least once.

That is the best I can offer you at the moment, and I am only making it so that you don't send me any more aggrieved e-mails.

Now—what do you say?

It was the best
immoral
proposition that I could make to her at that moment, and I was actually quite sure that Aurélie Bredin would bite. It was immoral above all because the person who was its main subject would ultimately fail to turn up for the meal. But of course Mademoiselle Bredin could not know that.

I sent the e-mail off, signing it “with very best wishes” and then walked decisively over to my desk to get a sheaf of paper and my ballpoint.

She
would
come—especially when she read Robert Miller's letter—the one I was now going to write. I sat down at the table, poured myself a glass of wine, and took a good swallow.

“Dear Miss Bredin,” I wrote in a bold hand.

And then I wrote nothing for a long time. I sat in front of the blank sheet and suddenly had no idea how I should begin. All my skill at creating phrases seemed to have vanished. I drummed on the tabletop with my fingers and tried to think of England.

What would someone like Miller, sitting alone and abandoned in his cottage, write? And how would he react to the questions Mademoiselle Bredin was asking him? Was it pure chance that the heroine of his novel looked like the writer of the letter? Was it a mystery? Was he unable to explain it even to himself? Was it a long story that he would like to tell her sometime at leisure?

I took Aurélie Bredin's photo out of my wallet, let her smile at me, and lost myself in happy fantasies.

After a quarter of an hour I stood up. This was just a waste of time. “Mr. Miller, you're not very self-disciplined,” I scolded.

It was just after ten, the cigarette packet was empty, and I urgently needed something to eat. I put on my coat and waved at the table.

“I'll be right back. And in the meanwhile, put your thinking cap on,” I said. “Produce some ideas, you writer, you!”

*   *   *

It was still raining as I opened the very wet glass door of La Palette, which was quite full at this time of night. I was immediately surrounded by an animated hum of conversation, and at the back of the bistro, which was half in darkness, all the tables were occupied.

La Palette, with its simple scrubbed wooden tables and paintings on the wall, was very popular with artists, gallery owners, students, and even publishers. You came here for a meal or just for a coffee or a glass of wine. This old bar was only a stone's throw from my apartment. I came here often and nearly always met a couple of people I knew.

“Salut, André! Ça va?”
Nicolas, one of the waiters, waved to me. “Lousy weather, isn't it?”

I shook off a few raindrops and nodded. “You can say that again!” I called back. I pushed through the crowd, sat at the bar, and ordered a
croque-monsieur
and a red wine.

The lively activity around me was, in a strange way, soothing. I drank my wine, took a bite of my toast, ordered more wine, and gazed around me. I could feel the chaos of this exciting day gradually falling away from me and began to relax. Sometimes you only need to take a step or two back from your problems and everything becomes simple. Writing the Robert Miller letter would be child's play. After all, it was only in the end a matter of keeping Aurélie Bredin's idée fixe burning until I'd succeeded in inserting myself between her and the author.

It might not always be an advantage to work in a profession that lives exclusively on words, stories, and ideas, and there were moments in my life when I would gladly have had something more tangible, more real, more solid, something you made with your hands—like building bookshelves or a bridge—just something that was more material and less intellectual.

Whenever I saw the Eiffel Tower thrusting so bold and indestructible into the Paris sky, I would think proudly of my great-grandfather, an engineer and prolific inventor who had been involved in the construction of that impressive monument of iron and steel.

I often thought what a glorious feeling it must have been to create something like that. But at this moment I would not have wanted to change places with my great-grandfather. Admittedly, I couldn't build an Eiffel Tower (and, to be totally honest, not even a bookshelf) but I could handle words. I could write letters and think up the right story to tell. Something that would lure a romantic woman who didn't believe in coincidences.

I ordered another glass of red wine and pictured my dinner with Aurélie Bredin, which, I was quite certain, would be followed by a much more intimate meal in Le Temps des Cerises. I just needed to set it craftily in motion. And one day, when Robert Miller was long forgotten, I might even tell her the whole truth. And we would laugh about it together.

That was my plan. But of course everything turned out differently.

I don't know why it is, but somehow people can't act any differently. They make plan after plan. And then they're surprised when the plans don't work.

And so there I was, sitting at the bar wallowing in my visions of the future, when someone tapped me on the shoulder. A laughing face swam into view, and I returned to the present.

There stood Silvestro, my old Italian teacher, from whom I'd taken lessons in the past few years to freshen up my rusty Italian.

“
Ciao,
André, good to see you,” he said. “Do you want to come and join us at the table?” He pointed at a table behind us where two men and three women were sitting. One of them, a stunning redhead with freckles and a wide, soft mouth, looked over to us and smiled. Silvestro always had exceptionally pretty girls in tow.

“That's Giulia,” said Silvestro, and winked at me. “A new pupil. Great-looking—and still available.” He waved back to the redhead. “How about it? Are you coming?”

“That's very tempting,” I replied with a smile, “but no thanks. I've still got things to do.”

“Oh, forget about work for a while. You really do work far too hard.” Silvestro gave a downward wave of his hand.

“No, no. This time it's something personal,” I said dreamily.

“Aaaah, you mean you've got something on the go, eh?” Silvestro looked at me mischievously and grinned broadly.

“Yes, you could say that.” I grinned back and thought of the white sheet of paper on my living room table, which was suddenly beginning to fill up with words and sentences. All at once I was in a hurry.

“
Pazzo,
why didn't you say so right away? Well, I won't get in the way of your good fortune!” Silvestro patted me benevolently on the shoulder a couple of times before going back to his table.

“My friends, he's got something on the go!” I heard him call—and the others waved and laughed.

As I headed for the exit, making my way through the customers who were chatting and drinking at the bar, I thought for a fraction of a second that I saw a slim figure with long dark blond hair sitting farther toward the back of the room with her back to the door, gesticulating energetically.

I shook my head. You're imagining things! At that moment Aurélie Bredin was in her own little restaurant in the Rue Princesse. And I was a little drunk.

Then the door flew open, a gust of cold wind blew in accompanied by a lanky guy with curly blond hair and a dark-haired girl in a crimson coat snuggled tight against him.

They looked very happy, and I stood aside to let them in. Then I went out myself, my hands deep in my pockets.

It was cold in Paris and it was raining, but if you were in love the weather didn't matter.

 

Seven

“When push comes to shove, you find the whole thing crazy, don't you? Admit it!”

I'd been sitting with Bernadette in La Palette for quite a while. It was full to bursting, but we'd managed to grab a table right against the back wall and our conversation had moved on from
Vicky Cristina Barcelona,
the film we'd seen that evening, to how realistic or unrealistic the expectations of a certain Aurélie Bredin actually were.

Bernadette sighed. “It's just that I think it might be better in the long run to invest your energy in more realistic projects—otherwise you'll end up disappointed again.”

“Aha,” I retorted. “But when that Cristina goes off with a totally unknown Spaniard who tells her that he wants to go to bed not only with her but also with her friends, you find that
realistic
?”

Our views of the heroines of the film were somewhat divided.

“That's not what I said. I just said that I can
understand
how it might happen. Anyway, the guy is at least totally honest. I like that.” She poured more wine into my glass. “Good grief, Aurélie, it's only a film, why are you getting so worked up? You find the plot implausible, I find it plausible. You preferred Vicky, I preferred Cristina. Do we have to quarrel about it?”

“No. It's just that it annoys me a bit when you apply a double standard. It may well be that it's not very likely that the guy will answer my letter, but it's
not
unrealistic,” I said.

“Oh, Aurélie, that isn't the case at all. After all, I did actually help you to look for information about the author on the Internet today. I find the whole thing amusing and exciting. I just don't want you to go running down a blind alley again.” She took my hand and sighed. “You seem to have a penchant for relationships that have no chance of success. First of all you're with that weird designer who just vanishes every couple of weeks and has several screws loose. And now all you talk about is this mysterious author who—whatever you read into his novel—definitely seems to be one thing at least: difficult.”

“That's what that peculiar Cerberus at the publishing house says. Do you know if it's true?” I stopped talking and pettishly painted patterns on my napkin with my fork.

“No, I don't know that. Listen, I just want you to be happy. And I sometimes just get the feeling that you set your heart on things that will never work.”

“But a pediatrician, that'd work, would it?” I replied. “That's something realistic as well?”

“You'd do better to take a nice pediatrician instead of getting hung up on such unrealistic things” was what Bernadette had said when, after the cinema, I'd wondered out loud how long a letter would take to get from England to France.

“Okay, I shouldn't have said that about the pediatrician,” she now said. “Although Olivier is really nice.”

“Yes. Nice—and boring.” Bernadette had already introduced me to Dr. Olivier Christophle at her birthday party in the summer, when I was still with Claude, and since then had never given up the hope that we'd get together.

“Yes, yes, you're right.” Bernadette waved dismissively. “He just isn't exciting enough.” An almost imperceptible smile played on her lips. “Good. At the moment we are all agog to see how long the post office takes to carry a letter from England to Paris. And I want you to keep me in the loop about this affair, is that clear? And if the moment ever comes when a nice, boring doctor is called for, you can just let me know.”

I crumpled my napkin and dropped it on my plate, which still showed the traces of a ham omelette.

“
D'accord!
That's what we'll do,” I said, and reached for my purse. “It's my treat.”

I noticed a slight draft in my back and shrugged my shoulders with a shiver.

“Do people always have to leave the door open so long?” I said, and reached for the saucer with the check.

Bernadette stared at me in surprise, and then her eyes narrowed.

“What is it? Have I said something wrong again?” I asked.

“No, no.” She hastily lowered her gaze and at that moment I realized that it wasn't me she'd been staring at. “Let's have an espresso,” she said, and I raised my eyebrows in astonishment.

“Since when do you drink coffee so late at night? You always say it stops you sleeping.”

“But now I want to.” She looked at me as if she was trying to hypnotize me, and smiled. “Here, look at this,” she said, and took a leather folder out of her purse. “Have you seen these pictures of Marie? They were taken at home in Orange at my parents' place.”

“No … Bernadette … what … what's all this about?” I noticed that her eyes were looking anxiously past me. “What do you keep looking at over there?”

Bernadette had the seat with a view of the bistro, while I was facing the oil painting on the wall. “Nothing. I'm just keeping an eye out for the waiter.” She seemed tense, and I started to turn around.

“Don't look around!” hissed Bernadette, and grabbed my arm, but by then it was already too late.

In the middle of La Palette, right by the passage through to the back of the bistro where we were sitting, stood Claude, waiting for a table by the window where they were just paying the waiter. He had his arm lovingly around a young woman who, with her chin-length black hair and rosy cheeks, looked like a Mongolian princess. She was wearing a waisted coat of red felt with fringes around the sleeves and the hem. And she was unmistakably pregnant.