Just One Day

Five
We arrive at the club where Willem’s friend works; it seems completely dead, but when Willem pounds on the door, a tall man with blue-black skin opens up. Willem speaks to him in French, and after a minute, we’re allowed into a huge dank room with a small stage, a narrow bar, and a bunch of tables with chairs stacked on them. Willem and the Giant confer a bit more in French and then Willem turns to me.
“Céline doesn’t like surprises. Maybe it’s better if I go down first.”
“Sure.” In the hushed dim, my voice seems to clang, and I realize I’m nervous again.
Willem heads to a staircase at the back of the club. The Giant resumes his work polishing bottles behind the bar. Obviously, he didn’t get the message that Paris loves me. I take a seat on the barstool. They twirl all the way around, like the barstools at Whipple’s, the ice-cream place I used to go to with my grandparents. The Giant is ignoring me, so I just sort of spin myself this way and that. And then I guess I do it a little fast, because I go spinning and the barstool comes clear off its base.
“Oh, shit! Ow!”
The Giant comes out to where I am sprawled on the floor. His face is a picture of blasé. He picks up the stool and screws it back in, then goes back behind the bar. I stay on the floor for a second, wondering which is more humiliating, remaining down here or getting back on the stool.
“You are American?”
What gives it away? Because I’m clumsy? Aren’t French people ever clumsy? I’m actually pretty graceful. I took ballet for eight years. I should tell him to fix the stool before someone sues. No, if I say that, I’ll definitely sound American.
“How can you tell?” I don’t know why I bother to ask. Since the moment our plane touched down in London, it’s like there’s been a neon sign above my head, blinking: TOURIST, AMERICAN, OUTSIDER. I should be used to it. Except since arriving in Paris, it felt like it had maybe dimmed. Clearly not.
“Your friend tells me,” he says. “My brother lives in Roché Estair.”
“Oh?” Am I supposed to know where this is? “Is that near Paris?”
He laughs, a big loud belly laugh. “No. It is in New York. Near the big lake.”
Roché Estair? “Oh! Rochester.”
“Yes. Roché Estair,” he repeats. “It is very cold up there. Very much snow. My brother’s name is Aliou Mjodi. Maybe you know him?”
I shake my head. “I live in Pennsylvania, next to New York.”
“Is there much snow in Penisvania?”
I suppress a laugh. “There’s a fair amount in Penn-syl-vania,” I say, emphasizing the pronunciation. “But not as much as Rochester.”
He shivers. “Too cold. Especially for us. We have Senegalese blood in our veins, though we both are born in Paris. But now my brother he goes to study computers in Roché Estair, at university.” The Giant looks very proud. “He does not like the snow. And he says, in summer, the mosquitoes are as big as those in Senegal.”
I laugh.
The Giant’s face breaks open into a jack-o’-lantern’s smile. “How long in Paris?”
I look at my watch. “I’ve been here one hour, and I’ll be here for one day.”
“One day? Why are you here?” He gestures to the bar.
I point to my bag. “We need a place to store this.”
“Take it downstairs. You must not waste your one day here. When the sun shines, you let it shine on you. Snow is always waiting.”
“Willem told me to wait, that Céline—”
“Pff,” he interrupts, waving his hand. He comes out from behind the bar and easily hoists my bag over his shoulder. “Come, I take it downstairs for you.”
At the bottom of the stairs is a dark hallway crowded with speakers, amplifiers, cables, and lights. Upstairs, there’s rapping on the door, and the Giant bounds back up, telling me to leave the bag in the office.
There are a couple of doors, so I go to the first one and knock on it. It opens to a small room with a metal desk, an old computer, a pile of papers. Willem’s backpack is there, but he’s not. I go back in the hall and hear the sound of a woman’s rapid-fire French, and then Willem’s voice, languid in response.
“Willem?” I call out. “Hello?”
He says something back, but I don’t understand.
“What?”
He says something else, but I can’t hear him so I crack open the door to find a small supply closet full of boxes and in it, Willem standing right up close to a girl—Céline—who even in the half darkness, I can see is beautiful in a way I can never even pretend to be. She is talking to Willem in a throaty voice while tugging his shirt over his head. He, of course, is laughing.
I slam the door shut and retreat back toward the stairs, tipping over my suitcase in my haste.
I hear something rattle. “Lulu, open the door. It’s stuck.”
I turn around. My suitcase is lodged underneath the handle. I scurry back to kick it out of the way and turn back toward the stairs as the door flies open.
“What are you doing?” Willem asks.
“Leaving.” It’s not like Willem and I are anything to each other, but still, he left me upstairs to come downstairs for a quickie?
“Come back.”
I’ve heard about the French. I’ve seen plenty of French films. A lot of them are sexy; some of them are kinky. I want to be Lulu, but not that much.
“Lulu!” Willem’s voice is firm. “Céline refuses to hold your bags unless I change my clothes,” he explains. “She says I look like a dirty old man coming out of a sex shop.” He points to his crotch.
It takes me a minute to understand what she means, and when I do, I flush.
Céline says something to Willem in French, and he laughs. And fine, maybe it’s not what I thought it was. But it’s still pretty clear that I’ve intruded upon something.
Willem turns back to me. “I said I will change my jeans, but all my other shirts are just as dirty, so she is finding me one.”
Céline continues yapping away at Willem in French, and it’s like I don’t even exist.
Finally, she finds what she’s looking for, a heather-gray T-shirt with a giant red SOS emblazoned on it. Willem takes it and yanks off his own T-shirt. Céline says something else and reaches out to undo his belt buckle. He holds his hands up in surrender and then undoes the buttons himself. The jeans fall to the floor and Willem just stands there, all miles and miles of him, in nothing but a pair of fitted boxer shorts.
“Excusez-moi,” he says as he brushes past me so close his bare torso slides up against my arm. It’s dark in here, but I’m fairly certain Céline can tell I’m blushing and has marked this as a point against me. A few seconds later, Willem returns with his backpack. He digs in it for a rumpled-but-stain-free pair of jeans. I try not to stare as he slips them on and threads his worn brown leather belt through the loops. Then he puts on the T-shirt. Céline glances at me looking at him, and I look away as though she’s caught me at something. Which she has. Watching him get dressed feels more illicit than seeing him strip.
“D’accord?” he asks Céline. She appraises him, her hands on her hips.
“Mieux,” she says back, sounding like a cat. Mew.
“Lulu?” Willem asks.
“Nice.”
Finally, Céline acknowledges me. She says something, gesticulating wildly, then stops.
When I fail to answer, one of Céline’s eyebrows shoots up into a perfect arch, while the other one stays in neutral. I’ve seen women from Florence to Prague do this same thing. It must be some skill they teach in European schools.
“She is asking you if you have ever heard of Sous ou Sur,” Willem says, pointing to the SOS on the shirt. “They are a famous punk-rap band with strong lyrics about justice.”
I shake my head, feeling like a double loser for not having heard of the cool French anarchist whatever justice band. “I’m sorry, I don’t speak French.”
Céline looks disdainful. Another stupid American who can’t be bothered to learn any other languages.
“I speak a little Mandarin,” I offer hopefully, but this fails to impress.
Céline deigns to switch to English: “But your name. Lulu, it is French, non?”
There’s a small pause. Like at a concert in between songs. A perfect time to say, ever so casually, “Actually, my name is Allyson.”
But then Willem answers for me. “It’s short for Louise.” And he winks at me.
Céline points at my suitcase with a manicured purple fingernail. “That is the bag?”
“Yes. This is it.”
“It is so big.”
“It’s not that big.” I think about some of the bags other girls brought on the tour, the hair dryers and adapters and three changes of clothes per day. I look at her in her black mesh tunic that stops at her thighs, a tiny black skirt that Melanie would pay too much for, and suspect this knowledge would fail to impress her.
“It can live in the storage room, not in my office.”
“That’s fine. Just so long as I can get it tomorrow.”
“The cleaner will be here at ten o’clock. And here, we have so many extra, you can have one too,” she says, handing me the same T-shirt she gave Willem, only mine is at least a size larger than his.
I’m about to open my suitcase and stuff it in, but then I visualize the contents: the sensible A-line skirts and T-shirts that Mom picked out for me. My travel journal, the entries I hoped would be breathless accounts of adventure but wound up reading like a series of telegrams: Today we went to the Prague Castle. Stop. Then we saw The Magic Flute at the State Opera House. Stop. Had chicken cutlets for dinner. Stop. The postcards from Famous European Cities, blank because after I’d mailed the obligatory few to my parents and grandmother, I’d had no one left to send them to. And then there’s the Ziploc bag with one lone piece of paper inside. Before the trip, my mom made me a master inventory of all the things to bring and then she made copies, one for every stop, so each time I packed, I could check off each item, to ensure I didn’t leave anything behind. There is one sheet left for my supposed last stop in London.
I stuff the T-shirt into my shoulder bag. “I’ll just hang on to this. To sleep in tonight.”
Céline’s eyebrow shoots up again. She probably never sleeps in a T-shirt. She probably sleeps in the silky nude, even on the coldest of winter nights. I get a flash of her sleeping naked next to Willem.
“Thanks. For the shirt. For storing my bag,” I say.
“Merci,” Céline says back, and I wonder why it is that she’s thanking me, but then I realize she wants me to say thank you in French, so I do, only it comes out sounding like mercy.
We go upstairs. Céline is nattering away to Willem. I’m beginning to understand how his French got so fluent. As if this didn’t make it clear enough that she was a dog and Willem her hydrant, when we get upstairs, she links arms with him and walks him slowly to the front of the bar. I feel like waving my arms and saying “Hello! Remember me?”
When they do that cheek-cheek-kiss-kiss thing, I feel so much of the excitement from earlier dwindle. Next to Céline, with her mile-high stilettos, her black hair, the underneath dyed blond, her perfectly symmetrical face, which is both marred and enhanced by so many piercings, I feel short as a midget and plain as a mop. And once again, I wonder, Why did he bring me here? Then I think of Shane Michaels.
All through tenth grade, I’d had a huge crush on Shane, a senior. We’d hang out, and he’d flirt with me and invite me lots of places and pay for me even, and he’d confide all kinds of personal things, including, yes, about the girls he was dating. But those relationships never lasted more than a few weeks, and I’d told myself that all the while, he and I were growing closer and that he’d eventually fall for me. When months went by and nothing happened between us, Melanie said it was never going to happen. “You have Sidekick Syndrome,” she said. At the time, I thought she was jealous, but of course, she was right. It hits me that, Evan notwithstanding, it might be a lifetime affliction.
I can feel myself shriveling, feel the welcome Paris bestowed on me earlier fading away, if it even really happened. How stupid to think a dog sniffing my crotch and a quick look from some random guy meant anything. Paris adores girls like Céline. Genuine Lulus, not counterfeits.
But then, just as we’re at the door, the Giant comes out from behind the bar and takes my hand and, with a jaunty “à bient?t,” kisses both my cheeks.
A warm feeling tickles my chest. This is the first time on the trip a local has been unabashedly nice to me—because he wanted to, not because I was paying him to. And it doesn’t escape my notice that Willem is no longer looking at Céline but is watching me, a curious expression lighting up his face. I’m not sure if it’s these things or something else, but it makes that kiss, which I get was just platonic—a friendly, cheek-handshake thing—feel momentous. A kiss from all of Paris.