The Ingredients of Love (23 page)

Robert Miller sat down again and began the signing, while I pulled Adam aside. “Mayday, Mayday,” I whispered anxiously.

He looked at me in astonishment. “But it's all gone very well.”

“Adam, that's not what I mean: She's here,” I said softly, and noticed how my voice was threatening to crack.
“She!”

Adam got it at once. “Good heavens!” he cried. “Not the one and only?”

“Exactly: her!” I said, and grabbed his arm. “It's the woman in the red silk dress, standing at the end of the line, there—do you see her? And she's going to get her book signed any moment now. Adam, she is not—under any circumstances—to get any chance to talk to your brother, do you hear? We've got to prevent that!”

“Okay,” said Adam. “Then let us move to our posts.”

When Aurélie Bredin finally stepped forward—the last in the line—and put her book down on the table, behind which Robert Miller, flanked by me and Adam, was sitting, my heart began to race.

She turned her head to one side for a moment and looked at me coolly with raised eyebrows. I murmured a
“Bonsoir”
but she didn't deign to speak a word to me. Without any doubt she was angry with me, and her little pearl drop earrings shook aggressively on her earlobes as she turned away again. Then she bent over to Robert Miller and her expression brightened.

“I'm Aurélie Bredin,” she said, and I groaned softly.

The dentist gave her a friendly smile, obviously not understanding.

“Have you any particular wishes?” he asked, as if he was an old hand at this.

“No.” She shook her head and smiled. And then she gave him a meaningful look.

Robert Miller, a.k.a. Sam Goldberg, smiled too. It was obvious that he was enjoying the attention being paid him by the pretty woman with the bouffant hair. He pulled the open book over and thought for a moment.

“Well, then, let's write, ‘To Aurélie Bredin with very best wishes from Robert Miller'—that okay?” He leaned forward and concentrated totally on his signature. “There you are,” he said, and looked up.

Aurélie Bredin smiled again and clapped the book shut without looking inside.

Sam's gaze lingered on her mouth for a moment, and then he said: “May I give you a compliment, mademoiselle? You have really
wonderful
teeth.” He nodded appreciatively.

She blushed and laughed. “I've never had a compliment like that before,” she said in surprise. And then she said something that had my heart sinking into my boots.

“Such a pity you weren't at La Coupole, because I was there too, you know.”

Now it was Sam Goldberg's turn to be surprised. You could see his brain rattling. I'm not sure if our dentist didn't think at first that La Coupole was the kind of establishment where long-legged dancers with bunches of feathers on their behinds strutted their stuff, but either way he stared at Aurélie Bredin with a glazed look as if he were trying to remember something, and then said carefully:

“Oh, yes. La Coupole! I really must go there. Lovely place, very lovely!”

You could see that Aurélie Bredin was irritated: The rosy red of her cheeks went a shade darker, but she made another attempt.

“I got your letter last week, Mr. Miller,” she said softly, and bit her lower lip. “I was so glad that you wrote back to me.” She looked at him expectantly.

That wasn't in our script. A red flush broke out on Sam Goldberg's forehead and I began to sweat. I was incapable of uttering a single word, and listened helplessly as the dentist stuttered with embarrassment, “Well … I … I was really glad to do that … really glad … you know … I … I…” He was searching for words that he had no way of finding.

I shot Adam an imploring glance. He looked at his watch, and leaned down to his brother. “Sorry, Mr. Miller, but we really have to go now,” he said. “We have the dinner to go to.”

“Yes,” I interrupted, and my petrifaction yielded to the panicked desire to prize the dentist away from Aurélie Bredin. “We're
already
late for that.”

I grabbed Sam Goldberg by the arm and literally dragged him from his seat. “I'm very sorry, but we must go.” I nodded apologetically to Aurélie Bredin. “Everyone's waiting for us.”

“Oh, Monsieur Chabanais.” As if she was seeing me for the very first time that moment. “Thanks very much for the invitation to the reading.” Her green eyes flashed as she took a step back to let us pass.

“It was nice to see you, Mr. Miller”—she shook the surprised Sam by the hand—“I hope you won't forget our rendezvous.”

She smiled again and smoothed back a strand of dark blond hair that had escaped from her hair clip. Sam looked at her, speechless. Then he said,
“Au revoir, mademoiselle,”
and before he could say anything else we shoved him through the crowd of onlookers who were putting on their coats and chatting.

“Who … who
is
that woman?” he asked softly, and kept turning his head back to look at Aurélie Bredin, who was standing at the table with the book, and following him with her gaze until we had left the bookstore.

 

Eleven

It was long past midnight when I asked Bernadette to call me a taxi. After that remarkable reading in the Librairie Capricorne we had gone back to her place for a glass of wine—which I really needed.

I must admit that I was in a state of great confusion as I followed Robert Miller with my eyes. He too continually looked back over his shoulder before stumbling out of the bookstore in the company of André Chabanais and another man in a light brown suit.

“Do you know what I don't understand?” Bernadette said to me when we'd taken off our shoes and were sitting opposite each other on her big sofa. “You wrote a letter, he wrote a letter, and then he stares at you as if you were an apparition, doesn't react, and behaves as if he'd never heard your name. I find that rather strange.”

I nodded. “I can't explain that either,” I responded, and tried to call to mind all the details of my short conversation with Robert Miller. “You know, he seemed so … so baffled. Almost spaced out. As if he couldn't understand anything. Perhaps he hadn't expected me to come to his reading.”

Bernadette sipped her wine and took a handful of macadamia nuts from the dish.

“Hm,” she said, chewing thoughtfully. “But he wasn't drunk, was he? And why should he be baffled? Let's be honest: He is an author, after all, and so he can't possibly be totally floored when a woman who thinks his book so great that she's even invited him to dinner actually turns up at his reading.”

I said nothing, and silently added: someone who had even sent him a photo of herself. But Bernadette knew nothing about that, and I had no intention of telling her.

“When I mentioned our rendezvous, he also just stared very strangely.” I suddenly had a thought. “Or do you think he was embarrassed because the other people from the publishers were there as well?”

“I don't think that's very likely … he wasn't exactly shy before that. Just consider how he dealt with the questions!”

Bernadette pulled the clip out of her hair and shook it loose. The light blond strands shone in the light of the standard lamp beside the sofa. I watched her running her hands through her hair.

“Do you think I look very different when I have my hair up?” I asked.

Bernadette looked at me. “Well, I'd always recognize you.” She laughed. “Why do you ask? Because the woman in the book who looks like you wears her hair down?” She shrugged and leaned back. “Did he mention the reading in his letter, then?” she asked.

I shook my head. “No, but it could have overlapped. He probably didn't know anything definite about the reading when he wrote me the letter, that's possible.” I also fished a handful of nuts from the dish. “What I really find too much, however, is that that Chabanais never said a word about it.” I crunched a nut. “And he looked quite guilty when I suddenly turned up.”

“Perhaps he just forgot.”

“Oh, forgot!” I retorted. “After that totally crazy evening we spent together in La Coupole? When he invited me there
specially
because of Miller? I mean, he
knew
it was important to me.”

I leaned back against the armrest of the sofa. If it hadn't been for Bernadette I wouldn't have heard about Robert Miller being in Paris. But since my friend lived on the Île Saint-Louis, she often bought books from that nice Monsieur Chagall, who in reality was called Pascal Fermier, and so she had seen the poster by chance one morning in his store window.

We'd arranged to go for a walk in the Tuileries that cold, sunny Monday morning, and the first thing Bernadette asked me was if I was going to Robert Miller's reading that evening and if she could come along as well.

“I do want to see the wonder author after all that's happened,” she had said, linking arms with me.

And I had shouted, “I don't believe it. Why didn't that dumbbell from the publishers tell me about it?”

And then I'd gone to the Librairie Capricorne that afternoon to buy two tickets for the reading. Just lucky that the restaurant's closed today, I thought, as I climbed the steps in the subway station.

A few minutes later I pushed open the door of the little bookstore I had entered for the first time a few weeks earlier, fleeing from a concerned policeman.

“We meet again,” said Monsieur Chagall, when I went up to him at the cash desk. At least he had recognized me immediately.

“Yes,” I answered. “I really liked that novel.”

I'd regarded it as a good omen that Robert Miller's reading would take place in the very bookshop where I'd found his book.

“Are you better now?” the old bookseller asked. “You looked so lost the last time.”

“I was!” I answered. “But in the meantime a lot has happened. A lot of nice things,” I added. “And it all began with that book.”

I looked thoughtfully into the red wine as it washed around my glass. “Do you know, Bernadette, I think that Chabanais is just totally unpredictable and moody,” I said. “Sometimes he can be really charming, then he goes over the top—you should have seen him in La Coupole—and then he's unfriendly and grumpy again. Or he gets them to say he's not there.”

That afternoon I had rung the publishing house to complain to André Chabanais and to inform him that I'd already bought my own tickets, but unfortunately there was only a secretary at the other end of the line who fobbed me off and answered my question about when the chief editor would be coming back rather brusquely, saying that Monsieur Chabanais had no time at all that day.

“He does at least look quite pleasant,” remarked Bernadette.

“Yes, that's true,” I said, seeing in my mind's eye the Englishman's light blue eyes as they looked at me so helplessly when I mentioned the broken appointment at La Coupole. “Although he does have a beard now.”

Bernadette burst out laughing. “I actually meant Chabanais.” I threw a cushion at her and she ducked quickly. “But the Englishman also looks nice. And I found him very witty, I must admit.”

“Yes, wasn't he?” I sat up. “The reading was very funny. But he makes unusual compliments.” I snuggled down in the sofa cushions. “‘You have wonderful teeth,' he said. What do you think of that? If he'd said eyes, now, or ‘You have a beautiful mouth.'” I shook my head. “You just don't tell a woman she has wonderful
teeth.
”

“Perhaps Englishmen are different,” countered Bernadette. “But I do find his behavior toward you strange. Either the man has a memory like a sieve or—I don't know—his wife was around and he has something to hide.”

“He lives alone, you must have heard that,” I said. “And anyway, Chabanais told me his wife had left him.”

Bernadette looked at me with her big dark blue eyes and wrinkled her forehead. “There's something fishy about this business,” she said. “Perhaps there is a really simple explanation, though.”

I sighed.

“Think hard, Aurélie. What
exactly
did Miller say at the end?” asked Bernadette.

“Yes, well, at the end everything was in a rush because Chabanais and that other guy were pressing him to leave. They shielded him like a politician's bodyguards.” I paused for thought. “He sort of stuttered that he was glad he'd written the letter and then he said
Au revoir.
Good-bye.”

“That's at least something,” said Bernadette, and polished off her red wine.

*   *   *

As I sat in the taxi a little later, driving along the brightly lit Boulevard Saint-Germain, I opened the book where Miller had written his dedication for me:

 

To Aurélie Bredin with very best wishes from Robert Miller

I stroked the signature and stared a long while at the looping letters as if they were the key to Miller's secret.

And so they were. Except that I didn't at that moment realize how.

 

Twelve

I was always deeply impressed by a scene from the old black-and-white film
Les enfants du paradis.
It's the last shot, where the despairing Baptiste is running after his great love Garance and finally loses her in the commotion of a street carnival. He's overwhelmed, he can't get through, he's surrounded and shoved by the laughing, dancing crowd he's stumbling through. An unhappy, confused man among joyful people who are exuberantly celebrating—that's an image you don't easily forget, and which I remembered when I was sitting after the reading with Sam Goldberg and the others in an Alsatian restaurant near the bookstore.

The fat proprietor sat us at a big table against the back wall of the restaurant and cheerfully clattered cutlery and glasses down in front of us. Everyone seemed to be in the best of moods; there was drinking, jokes, celebration; the dentist played the role of Everybody's Darling, and finally all were happily united in the spirit of wine—apart from me, the unhappy Baptiste, sitting there in the middle like an alien because things had not gone so wonderfully for him.