We Won't Feel a Thing (10 page)

Riley whistled soft and low. Rachel expelled a grim sigh.

“It’s perfect,” she said.

“Of course it is.” Peter (Pierre) pulled a chair out for Rachel. “Would you like to hear the couplet I wrote about the two of you, just now in my head?”

“Not really,” she said.

“She the raven, he the fish/O reckless love, untamed by wish.
Yes? I don’t know what it means, exactly. It can’t decide what it wants to be yet.” He dropped two menus on the table. “I shall return
avec
breadsticks!”

The waiter dashed off, leaving a whiff of spicy aftershave in the air. Rachel and Riley shrugged at each other, as they did at home when they encountered the ridiculous. Rachel grabbed the duffel bag and unzipped it.

“Let’s not start yet,” said Riley.

“Why?” said Rachel.

“It’s just…so nice.” He smiled at the starry night painted beside them. “I kind of like Fake Paris.”

“That’s the saddest thing you’ve ever said.”

“Look! They even painted teeny French people.” Riley squinted at the mural. “I see Madeline. And the Phantom of the Opera.”

“I would totally read a book about those two.”

“Right?”

“The Phantom moves in next door.”

“And woos Miss Clavel.”

“Madeline suspects his motives are less than pure.”

“Then one night there’s a terrible storm—”

“Ri.” Rachel held up a hand. They could make a story out of anything, and it had to stop. “Come on. Let’s put the tubes in.”

He eyed them up, then passed them over. “I…think you should go first.”

“Quelle surprise.”

Rachel hooked the tubes over her ears and slipped the two clear prongs in her nose. Riley hesitated, then followed suit. The thin tubing drew ear-to-ear plastic smiles under their noses. A real smile tugged at Riley’s lips.

“Don’t
laugh
,” said Rachel.

“You look so tragic.”

“So do you.”

“Où est l’hôpital?”
Riley said, in a husky French accent that would horrify his mother.
“Je suis malade.”

“Oh my god.” Rachel giggled.

“Êtes-vous malade, mademoiselle?”

Rachel rolled her eyes and tapped her heart. “
J’ai très mal ici.”

“Avec quoi?”

“Amor…itis,”
said Rachel.
“Amoritis toxicosis.”

“Zut! Quel dommage!”

Peter (Pierre) parted the curtain, holding a black tray. A white towel was draped over his arm.

“Les essentiels,”
he announced. “Bread
et
water!”

He plunked down a basket of breadsticks and two glasses of water. Then he noticed the tubes and did a double-take. His eyes traced the thin plastic channels from Riley’s nose down to the console, and then up to Rachel’s nose.

“What…what is
this
?” His eyes went googly and tender.

“It’s a rare condition,” said Rachel. “We’d rather not discuss it.”

“Not serious, I hope!”

“It’s amoritis toxicosis.” Riley gave a solemn nod. “Not much can be done.”

Rachel kicked him under the table.

“This changes everything. Everything!” Peter (Pierre)’s face wilted in grief. He hugged his tray, thought for a long and complicated moment, and then raised a finger with his eyes closed.
“The lovers brave, though doomed to die, embraced the fading light/By waltzing in the sunset ‘til the ruthless fall of night.”

Rachel put her face in her hands. Riley crunched a breadstick.

“You must,
must
let me take care of you tonight.” Peter (Pierre) snatched their menus. “Your dinner will be a sonnet, composed by me, transcribed by the gorgeous and peerless Chef Antoinette.” He kissed his fingers with a flourish.

“That’s okay,” said Rachel. “We can—”

“I INSIST.” He lit the five wicks of their candelabra and straightened their breadstick basket. “I shall return! With your food poem!”

He swept out of the nook. Seconds later, they heard his faraway voice, the accent dropped:
Toni! ORDER UP!
They dissolved in giggles, until a draft from the dining room wafted through the curtain and stirred up the ocean-breeze smell of their candles.

The scent of sea salt shaded the air, found its way past the prongs in their noses. They were back on the balcony of Suite 7B, the mermaid clock ticking on the railing and their hands joined in a solemn knot. Their aloneness pressed into them. They eyed the kissing couples framed on the wall.

“We should start,” said Rachel.

“Press the button,” said Riley.

On the console, Rachel found the black button stamped with a white 2 and pressed it five times, as David had instructed. The unit quaked, then commenced a low mechanical hum. A flat red line scrolled across the gray screen, and then it blipped to life, perking steadily like a hospital monitor. Riley’s arm hair prickled.

“So…how do we do this?” he said.

“Like David did with Tilly. In the hypothetical example.” Rachel brushed breadcrumbs off the table. “We pretend we’re on a real date. The machine does the rest.”

“Okay.” Riley folded his hands, then refolded them. “…What do people do on real dates?”

What did you do on your date with Chad Armstrong?
he thought
.
Rachel’s Valentine date haunted their conversation, like it had for the past five months. They never talked about the night of the dance, not ever.

“I don’t know what people do.” Rachel sipped her ice water. “I suspect we’re not people. In the traditional sense.”

“Me too. I suspect that too.”

“So really it’s—what would we
like
to do? In our…” She shut her eyes and clasped her cold glass. “In our wildest fantasies.”

Riley fiddled with his napkin. “You first.”

“No way.”

“Why not?”

“You’re the romantic.”

“So?”

“So this is easy for you. You’ve got whole secret diaries of this stuff.”

“I do not keep a diary,” said Riley. “Anymore.”

“Just say
something
, okay?”

Riley rubbed at the band of his silver watch.

“Anything I want?” he said.

“That’s the idea,” she said.

“I would like,” he said, “to hold your hand.”

The console whirred.

“That’s it?” Rachel said softly. She toyed with the gold R on her necklace. “That’s your fantasy?”

Riley looked up at her. “That’s just where it starts,” he said.

The console whirred louder.

“You’ve held my hand before.” Rachel curled and uncurled her fingers. “On the hotel balcony. At Solomon’s Pond, at Skateland. You’ve held my hand lots of times.”

“Not like this.”

Riley reached halfway across the table. Her hand moved to meet his.

Then he pulled back.

“What?” said Rachel.

“I just…
ugh
.” Riley knocked his forehead with the heel of his hand. “I have like, one chance to be actually romantic with you, and I waste it being cheesy.”

“I thought you were fine!”

“
‘That’s just where it starts’
?” He screwed up his face. “I sound like that movie you hate. The one where the guy has amnesia and the girl kisses his memory back?”

“Ri,” she said. “You could never sound like a movie I hate.”

Rachel reached over and, with two efficient motions, flipped Riley’s warm hand over and caged it in her long cool fingers. She stroked his palm lightly with her middle finger, the way the waiting-room magazine had instructed in the “7 Simple Ways to Drive Him Wild” article she had studied and rehearsed long ago, in case she ever had cause to drive anyone wild. Riley’s hand felt different now, strong and mature, pulsing with secrets and trapped urges and new possibilities.

The machine hissed and sputtered, rattled and wheezed. The red line jittered. Rachel and Riley squeezed their eyes shut.

“It’s coming,” said Riley.

“I know,” said Rachel.

The console let out a triumphant hiccough, and a maximum-dosage blast of The Smell.

Rachel and Riley broke apart, gasping. The Smell was worse than advertised. It was worse than the time Mrs. Woodlawn dragged them to a sewage plant while researching her fifth unpublished novel,
The Evacuations
. It was worse than the time Mr. Woodlawn lost half a tuna sandwich in his office for a month. Their noses burned. Tears filled their eyes and bile rose in their throats. All their sweet feelings skittered away.

“Uccch.” Riley coughed, cupping his nose. “That’s…”

“Magnificent,” said Rachel.

“I might throw up,” said Riley.

“This is
great
,” said Rachel, wiping her eyes. “I already feel less attracted to you.”

“You do?”

“Maybe four percent. Like, I can look directly at your hair and not want to touch it.”

“That’s something.”

“What about you?”

“I—”

Their waiter entered, brandishing a covered silver platter.

“Ohh!” he said. “No no. No tears, not tonight!”

Rachel dabbed her eyes again. “What
is
that?”

“Your first course. Of many.”

“That was fast.” Riley coughed.

“Chef Antoinette works her fastest and finest magic when the joy of doomed lovers is at stake.”

Peter (Pierre) uncovered the platter and set it on the table between them, right beside the console. Two small china plates proffered fancy asparagus hollandaise appetizers, breaded spears cut and stacked like Lincoln Logs and topped with red flakes that looked like tinted sea salt. Rachel and Riley went weak at the smell. It was a specific Puckatoe summer-smell—strong and unfiltered, as if it had been concentrated and bottled. It made them think of bike rides and bottle rockets, of feeding horses over fences and telling chain stories in Solomon’s Woods.

“Is everything all right?” said Peter (Pierre).

Rachel shook her head. “This smells like…”

“The asparagus fries at Trail’s End?”

“Yes,”
said Rachel and Riley. Trail’s End was their favorite roadside produce stand.

“How did you know?” said Riley.

“Chef Antoinette knows all of Puckatoe’s special secrets,” said the waiter. “She’s been cataloging them since childhood.”

“She grew up here?” Riley loosened his tubes to sniff at the plate again.

“And then moved to Paris to pursue love and schooling, but thankfully returned to bless us with her gifts!” Peter (Pierre) indulged in a worshipful sigh. “Her cuisine is a unique love letter to her two favorite cities. She calls it Paris/Puckatoe fusion. The world’s first!”

“Do you remember,” said Rachel.

“That day in Solomon’s Woods,” finished Riley. “Percy.”

“YES.” Rachel turned to Peter (Pierre), who was listening with his hands crossed over his heart. “The Solomons have this three-legged black dog.”

“It’s pretty slow but also really mean,” said Riley. “Like, legendary meanness.”

“So three years ago—”

“Four.”

“We were walking to Trail’s End on his birthday for asparagus fries, and we took a shortcut through Solomon’s Woods, and Percy chased us—”

“Like, a low-speed chase.”

“—through the woods, and it was almost like a game until finally we got tired and climbed a tree to get rid of him.”

Riley walked his fingers on the plate. “It didn’t get rid of him.”

“It just made him madder, and he sat at the base of the tree snarling and snapping…”

“And we got hungrier and hungrier, and there was this warm breeze and we could smell the asparagus fries on the Trail’s End grill.”

Rachel dipped a breaded spear in hollandaise. “I told you it was lucky to get chased by a dog on your birthday, and you could have three extra wishes.”

“I wished for my own art gallery, and also a refurbished ice-blue 1967 Austin Healy convertible, which made me feel a little bit gross.”

“And what else?” said Rachel.

Riley propped his chin on his hand. “Guess.”

The nook felt smaller then, intimate as a honeymoon suite. Grinning, Peter (Pierre) slipped through the curtains and stole away.

On the console between Rachel and Riley, the red line stopped blipping in even peaks. It began to curlicue as they talked, up and up and up, like a plume of smoke on a birthday candle sending up a wish.

***

“…oh, oh, OH.” Rachel drummed her hands on the tablecloth. “And what about the time we were in the back booth and that clown came in and ordered fifteen pizzas, and he had on that giant rainbow wig and glitter suspenders, and—”

“Banana peel pants.”

Rachel gasped. “I forgot the banana peel pants.”

Riley made an
at-your-service
gesture.

“And then he played ‘American Pie’ on the jukebox like five times in a row, and then—what did Papa D say? Like, the
exact
quote.”

“Hey! Funny clown!” said Riley, in his best Papa D voice. “You play it again, I’ll Chevy your levy!”

Laughter burst from them both. The room swayed like a birdhouse in a rainstorm.

“…What made us talk about Papa D’s?” said Rachel.

Riley held up an empty plate scattered with crumbs. “Fancy little pizza tartlets.”

“Riiiiiight.” A goofy grin broke out on her face. “Tartlet. That’s an amazing word.
Tart-let.”

“It’s like, a very small strumpet.”

“A pocket jezebel, if you will.”

“Une petite floozy.”

Nearly two hours had passed. Chef Antoinette’s petite works of art had kept coming, all of them sprinkled with the same tinted salt. Rachel and Riley were trapped in a giddy haze, lost in the smells of Puckatoe places they’d discovered as a twosome on weekends and long summer days, when Mr. Woodlawn was working his second job at the supermarket and Mrs. Woodlawn was writing behind a locked door. The Twinema Popcorn Souffles brought up the buttery salty-sweet smell of the two-screen movie theater where they caught cheap matinees of second-run films. The Hayride Crepes summoned autumn at Solomon’s Farm: apple fritters and grilled sausage and the smoky tang of burning leaves. The Seventeen-Spices Mousse made them think of the spice factory on Old Mill Road, which perfumed the air for miles around with ginger and vanilla, nutmeg and thyme.

On the table between them, the console made periodic angry sounds—a rattle, a wheeze that burned their nostrils—but The Smell had stopped coming.
We should check the machine. See what’s wrong,
they would think now and then. But then Chef Antoinette would send out two lavender macarons that smelled like their front-yard lilacs, and they would forget.