“A gentleman,” Freindametz sniffed, not believing Grace for a moment. But she took her mug and trundled off to her room, and Grace refilled the kettle.
They slept for a few hours, Freindametz in her room, Alls in Grace’s, and Grace on the couch as she had promised. Grace woke up at noon and made coffee. Freindametz stayed asleep and Grace and Alls sat at opposite ends of the couch, drinking coffee, an illustration of something more normal. She did not know what to say to him. Alls flipped through one of Grace’s books, looking up now and then to ask her about repoussé or bas-relief. Grace was pretending to read too, but she couldn’t. She felt as if she were in a play, and at any minute, a curtain would fall and she would run away, escape through a back door to the alley behind the theater, relieved and devastated with disappointment.
Alls snapped the book shut and asked her what she would usually do, what her day would be like if he were not here. He sounded friendly but cagey, a performance that made her cringe at how she wished for the real thing. Fine, she could do that too. She told him she would probably go to the grocery and then see the traveling exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. This month there was a show of trompe l’oeil and pastiches.
He marveled at how boring she was, how consistent in her habits.
“What if I really were just here visiting?”
“How?”
“If you’d gone off to Europe to find yourself, and liked it here and stayed, and left us at home to our own devices, and no one had ever set foot in the Wynne House again. And then I came to Paris to visit my old friend Grace.”
He unfolded his crisp tourist map and spread it on the coffee table.
“I can’t imagine that,” Grace said. “I can’t even begin to imagine that life.” She stood up. He was at the other end of the sofa, but he seemed to take up all the space in the room. “For either of us. How can you stand it?”
“Don’t ask me to comfort you, because I won’t.”
“I would never.”
“And how about if it had gone like it was supposed to?”
“You’d come to Prague with a rolled-up still life and we’d sold it for millions of dollars?”
“And now we lived in Paris together, in the shitty rented room upstairs, poor and hungry and run out of money, but we’d really done it.”
No one could have imagined such a life. There was no script for it. It wasn’t like being fifteen and imagining yourself in a wedding dress that looked like a wadded-up tissue. It wasn’t like attending an art auction and wishing you could transform into someone comfortable, in every sense of the word, like the people standing around you. They had planned a heist, and heist dreams always ended in a firework, the blaze of triumph, nothing of the mess but the smoke that hung over the ground. That was the point. You never dreamed of bickering, whining, trouble banking, stolen luggage, bleeding head wounds, the man you love in prison, and running out of money. You never had to deal with the wreck of yourself, whatever had gone so wrong in your wiring that this, this scheme with its fakes and maps and comps and fickle timetables and reliance on old Dorothea Franey’s ruined hearing, seemed like the best way out of the life you couldn’t live any longer. No. In the dream you only got as far as the sale, the hotel room, the suitcase full of cash, and then what? What? She had gotten that far alone, and then she’d learned, grotesquely, that Greg wasn’t the only idiot who’d confused real life with the movies.
“I can’t imagine that either,” she said to Alls.
“Well, let’s pretend,” he said. “I won’t be satisfied with your diamonds, and I’m not going home. So let’s just take a Saturday together and pretend we’re who we wanted to be.” He stood up and got close to her. “Can you do that?”
First they went to the grocery, where Grace nervously chose some plums and Alls marveled over the vast selection of yogurt. She showed him the things that had been unbelievable when she’d first arrived, the minor luxuries that made life here seem more precious, as though you could fill your grocery basket with enough to satiate your whole life’s hunger. Fatty yogurt in tiny blue ceramic pitchers, spotty cheese, duck confit in a can, butter wrapped in gingham foil, plums and apricots. On their way back she pointed up to the balconies in the buildings they passed and told him about the old woman who came out to water her hanging baskets in her red nightgown, the kid on the third floor who dropped sacks of something along a cord to waiting children on lower balconies, the set of sliding glass doors that had been painted over in mostly opaque purple streaks.
They walked through the mall at Gallieni and she watched him wonder at how dark and mundane it was, just as she once had, how crass and dumpy. She noticed his peculiar satisfaction in how disappointing Paris could be. They could have been in the Albe-mall, in Pitchfield. She pointed out the Boulevard Périphérique and the man who sold incense under it, the same smell in any country.
When Alls clasped his hands together on the bus, looking around almost shyly, she began to relax, just a little. She wondered if he wanted to prove something, to show her what they could have been, if she’d just stuck with the plan. He didn’t know that he already had.
Maybe this fake coziness was another way to shame her. But she would try to believe in it, or look like she did anyway, just for one day.
Lunch was surreal, a blind date in which they knew all the worst of the other person but little else. They ate buttery galettes and drank Coca-Cola. They laughed at a one-legged crow hopping around the sidewalk, tenacious and accusatory, cawing at the people eating at tables above him. The sight of Alls’s teeth when he laughed made her almost dizzy. She wanted to leap across the table and kiss them, to kiss his teeth and his lips and under his jaw. She wanted to hold his head in her hands and feel the weight of it resting on her lap. She wanted to pick the sleep from the corners of his eyes. She wanted to hit him on the chest to feel how real he was, how really there he was.
A man at the next table argued on his cell phone. He took off his sunglasses with his other hand and banged them against his table to punctuate his sentences. The man was telling the person on the phone that their offer was too low, that they should offer twice as much to even be in the running. He hung up abruptly and nearly smacked his phone on the table. He ran his hand down his face and then stood up to go inside, probably to the toilet. Alls took the man’s sunglasses from the table and tucked them into his pants pocket. No, Grace said softly, almost a whisper.
He raised a corner of his lips.
Because we’re being good today, she wanted to say. Because we’re being what we meant to be.
But good wasn’t what they had ever meant to be.
He shrugged, defying her to object further.
And this was what it would have been like, really. Poor and unspeaking, committing petty theft at sidewalk cafés, maybe pawning pricey sunglasses to cover the lunch they’d just bought. Fighting without speaking. Now she could see it.
? ? ?
“This is where you wanted to go?” he asked her as they passed the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.
She shook her head. “It would bore you.”
He insisted. Inside, she paid and they walked through the trompe l’oeil exhibit, where whole rooms were rendered in paint, flat on the wall, as though you could step into them. A violin hung from a ribbon on a heavy wooden door. You see a violin on a door, the placard read. There is no violin, and there is no door. She had read about the painting before. The wording of the placard struck her as particularly French.