The Last Time I Saw Paris (18 page)

“Don't worry, no bug could survive the calvados.”

“Dan?”

“Yeah.”

“I've locked my key in my suitcase.”

He groaned as he pulled a sweater over his head. “I'll ruin it if I have to force it open.”

Lara looked doubtfully at her nice new case.

“Tell you what, we'll get a locksmith when we get to Tours.” He pushed his duffel across the bed. “Meanwhile, feel free.”

She picked through his clothes, pulling on a T-shirt, and his gray sweats, and a pair of his white athletic socks, thanking heaven for sneakers as she laced hers up. She rubbed her long dark hair dry and pushed it up beneath a Lakers baseball cap. She looked like the Michelin Man. “Ready for dinner, Mr. Holland?”

His guilty eyes met hers. “It's like this. Madame Defarge doesn't do meals.”

“Probably just as well, if her cooking's anything like her calvados.” Lara added a touch of Bobbi Brown “Bare” lip stain, studying the effect in the tiny mirror. “We'll find a cafe in the village.”

“As a matter of fact, there is no cafe in the village.”

She swung around.

“Though there is a bar. Madame said we could get a meal there.”

Lara beamed at him, relieved. “Let's go for it, Mr. Holland. I just hope it's not too dressy, though, or maybe they won't let us in.”

“I wouldn't worry about it,” he said gloomily.

They stood in the entrance to the Bar Jurassic, taking in the purple and turquoise Formica decor. The tiled floor around the bar was ankle-deep in peanut shells. French pop music blared from the jukebox, and the local population of spiky-haired, black-leather-jacketed young layabouts swung around on their purple plastic bar seats, staring at them. They should have known from the motorcycles outside, Lara thought, staring back through the pungent blue Gitane fog.

“Bonsoir, messieurs,”
Dan said politely.

“B'soir.”
The owner was a gruff, graying man with sharp eyes who looked as though he had his hands full with his rowdy clientele.
“Qu'est-ce que vouz voulez, m'sieur, ‘dame?”
His eyebrows were raised in a question.

Lara had to think of the French.
“Vouz servez le dîner, m'sieur?”

He shrugged, pointing to the blackboard in back of him.
“Seulement les sandwiches.”

The entire bar was riveted by this halting exchange.

“Okay, a sandwich,” Dan agreed. “What have you got?”

The
patron
ordered the leather-jacketed customers back so they could view the glass display counter.
“Du jambon. Ou du fromage.”

“Jambon
et
fromage, s'il vous plaît, monsieur.”
Lara was starving.
“Et vous avez du vin?”

He plonked a bottle on the plastic counter along with a pair of thick tumblers.

Clutching the wine and the tumblers, they shuffled back through the debris and took a seat at the Formica table farthest from the bar. The bottle had no label and the wine tasted as though it had been made yesterday. They drank it anyway.

The
patron
arrived with the
sandwich
—a whole
baguette sliced lengthways. Inside were one thin slice of ham and one thin slice of cheese. There was no butter on the bread. Lara's eyes met Dan's. “I guess it's a French sandwich,” she said doubtfully.

She asked the
patron
for butter. He looked at her as though she were a mad foreigner.
“Pas du beurre, madame.”

She took a bite of the dry bread. Her eyes met Dan's. “It's really not that bad,” she said, swallowing hard.

Dan pushed back his chair. He walked across to the bar and spoke to the
patron.
He came back holding a squeezy bottle of Savora mustard and plonked it down in front of her.

“How about napkins?”

“You can't have everything, Ms. Lewis.”

“I don't want everything,” she whispered, reaching for his hand. Their eyes locked in that deep gaze and they failed to notice they had company.

“Where you come from in America?”

They glanced up at the four cocky young men standing too close, Lara thought nervously, to their table. They wore identical leather jackets studded with steel nail heads, had identical haircuts cropped to the scalp, identical tattoos, and blue-black stubble. And they emanated attitude.

“Uh-oh,” Dan whispered to Lara, “the local chapter of the Hell's Angels.” Then, “We're from San Francisco, my friends,” he said, and their pallid faces lit up.

“California?”

For a minute Dan thought he saw dreams in their drink-reddened eyes. “You ever been there?” He took a sip of wine, looking benignly at them.

They shrugged in unison.
“Mais non, non.…
Someday, I hope,” the tallest one ventured in English. He snatched off Lara's baseball cap, and her eyes popped in alarm.

“Lakers,” he said admiringly.

Dan took off his own baseball cap and handed it to the tall guy, who he could tell was the boss. “Forty-Niners,” he explained, “the San Francisco football team. It's yours, my friend.” He turned to the patron.
“Cognac, s'il vous plaît,
for
mes amis.
And now we'll say good night.”

Still hungry, Lara grabbed the rest of the sandwich and stuffed it in her pocket. Dan was already easing her out of there as he laid money on the counter for the brandy.

“Merci, monsieur.”
Their thanks floated after them into the rainy night.
“Et bon voyage.”

“You've just gotta know how to handle these things,” Dan said smugly as they climbed into the Renault. Then he laughed. “I thought we were about to get blasted by the natives, when all they wanted was our baseball caps. Poor kids,” he added, thinking of the dreams that, for them, would never come true.

“You're a nice man, you know that?” Lara leaned her head on his shoulder as he drove.

He glanced affectionately at her. “You didn't think that earlier in the day.”

“Well, of course not.
Then,
I hated you.”

He laughed. She was a very contradictory woman and he knew it.

 

That night they huddled in the old narrow bed like animals seeking warmth from each other's bodies. Lara's eyes were closed and Dan wondered if she was sleeping. He smiled thinking about the disastrous day,
and how somehow it had turned out all right in the end. The way it always seemed to on this trip. Because of Lara, he thought. Lara, who with one look from those smudgy topaz eyes could make him weak at the knees. Was topaz the right color? Wasn't it more citrine, especially when the sun caught them in its glitter? And amber, perhaps, in the softness of twilight, copper by candlelight.

He laughed at himself, the working guy, the builder, acting like a poet about his love's eyes.

His
love.
Not just his lover. Because Lara was no mere conquest. She had sneaked into his head, into his dreams, and, somehow, into his heart. What was love, anyway? he asked himself. Then he smiled, remembering the red bathing suit, her shyness, their fights, the laughter.

How do I love thee, let me count the ways
…

His fifth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Purley, would be proud of him, quoting Browning's
Sonnets from the Portuguese. …
Now he knew it had to be love.

He counted the ways he loved her: the sweetness of her expression and the slow smile that exposed the tiniest dimple at the left corner of her mouth. The way she held herself, slightly self-conscious, like a girl still coming to terms with a woman's body. Her breasts, the deep upward curve, satin under his touch. The spicy taste of her; her damp skin with its faint pearly sheen of sweat after they had made love. And, oh, God, how he loved making love to her. Then it was all passion and fire and nothing else mattered except the way she felt under his hands, and what she did to him, what he did to her. And afterward, the exhausted, tender silence while the hearts that had thundered together gradually slowed, and with it the awareness of
having just encountered another's soul, in some far-off place we search so hard to find.

That was it. Lara fitted his soul. She had fallen into his life, invited him into her world, and now he never wanted to leave. Whatever that inexplicable thing that love was, he welcomed it.

 

It was almost dawn and Lara lay sleepless next to Dan. He snored lightly and she smiled; it was such a comfortable sound. A man in her bed, holding her, snoring, content.

Gray light slipped past the orange poly curtains, still unable to lend the cold room even a vestige of sun color. Shivering, she slid her leg over Dan's, hugged closer to him, letting his warmth permeate her chilled limbs.

Dear God, she thought, watching his face, so close to hers, as he slept, please take care of him. Don't let him leave me. . . not now that I've found him. You know what, God, I'd forgotten how to feel like this. I've found how to laugh, how to be silly, foolish, sexy; how to be
young
with him in a way I never was with Bill, even when I really
was
young. Let me love him, please, even if I can only have him for a little while.…

I
t was ten o'clock the following night and they were comfortably ensconced in the charming little Hotel de Groison in Tours. They had explored the city, had an early supper, and now Dan was sleeping like a dead man in their pretty room overlooking the beautiful garden.

Lara was using the public telephone downstairs to call Delia, partly because she didn't want to disturb Dan, but also because she knew that Delia would want her to tell all and she couldn't exactly do that with Dan around.

She dialed and heard the phone ringing, imagining Delia rushing to answer. Delia always rushed everywhere, she was in perpetual motion, or at least she had been until the bout with chemotherapy had slowed her down a bit.

“Ohhh, it's you at last.” Delia was breathless with excitement. “We're gasping to know what's going on. Vannie says we're like a Greek chorus, moaning and worrying and predicting disaster in the background. So? How's it going?”

“It's going good.”

“Good?
What kind of adjective is that? I had expected at least a superlative.
Great,
maybe. Or even better,
stupendous.”

They were both laughing now. “You know what I mean,” Lara said, suddenly shy with her best friend.

“No, I don't know what you mean. Do
you
know what you mean?”

Lara sighed. “We fight all the time,” she admitted. “Or, at least, yesterday we did. And once in Paris. Big fights.”

“That's good; at least he's not perfect.
Then
I would have been suspicious.”

“But sometimes—most times—it's wonderful.”

She heard Delia's sigh of relief. “Well, thank the Lord for that. At least it's taken your mind off Bill the Bastard.”

“Delia,” Lara hesitated to admit it, but this
was
her best friend, “it hasn't—you know—taken my mind off Bill. At least not completely. I keep remembering stuff—things we did together.”

“Of course you do. Aren't you retracing your footsteps? Visiting the same places, staying in the same hotels? What did you expect?”

“But the odd thing is, now I'm remembering it the way it really was. Not this sort of glowing, golden version I must have polished up over the years. And you know what else, Delia? It's uncanny the way this trip with Dan is sometimes so like what happened when I was with Bill, I might be with the same man.”

“Except you are not. And just remember one thing, honey: men are all alike. They're a different breed from us women, who, naturally, think for ourselves. They have the same archetypical reaction to certain circumstances.”

“It's like, press their buttons and watch what happens,” Lara said, amazed. “I mean, why won't they stop and ask directions? Why won't they read a map? Why do they get pissed off when we make simple mistakes?”

Delia was laughing. “Oh, my, trouble on the road, huh? So tell me about Paris.”

“Paris was wonderful. Mostly,” Lara added, remembering Lucas Carton. “Delia, I'm having fun with Dan, just walking the streets. We hold hands all the time. He makes me . . . he makes me feel beautiful.
Paris
makes me feel beautiful. Delia, it's not hormone replacements I need, it's
femininity
replacements. Give me the same flirt pills these French women have and age doesn't seem to matter. I'd forgotten how to feel that way. Sometimes I can't believe it's me, acting so sort of. . . shameless.”

“So it's just sex between you, right?”

“Yes . . . no . . . I mean, how do I know? Right now it's all I can think of. When I think of leaving, of him not being there anymore, it's not only my heart that sinks, it's all of me—heart, sex, everything. I mean, Delia, how are you supposed to
know?
Do you think he loves me? Just a little bit?”