In London it had been sticky early summer, but in Paris, somehow, it was spring. On his first day off from work at the archives, Neil sat in a café and watched the reflections of glass windows slide across the old stones of a church. Cigarette ash blew onto him from the next table and he had to stop himself from sticking out his tongue to catch the flakes and let them melt like snow. He watched the little bits of ash floating in the foam of his beer and he thought that it was wonderful. Music was playing. Neil read a book by a French historian in French, looking up every word he didn’t know, and a pigeon hopped around his foot with a bit of string looped around one of its toes, as if it had something important to remember.
That summer Neil almost never got phone calls. He didn’t know anyone in Paris, except for Loren, Jean-Claude, and Beth, who were all in grad school and barely even spoke to him, and when his mom called with the weekly update on what mail he’d gotten and who from his high school was getting married, she did it on Skype. Not that many people had called Neil in London either, except Veejay sometimes to tell him to hurry home, zebras were having sex on the BBC. So when his phone rang during one of Professor Piot’s seminars, he didn’t even realize it was his.
It was Neil’s third week in Paris. He was supposed to be auditing the seminar as a way to ameliorate his French in between trips to the archives, but so far it had only messed up his English. His thoughts had taken on an incredibly stilted tone—ameliorate, for instance—and Professor Piot’s lecture that day wasn’t much more than a collection of separate words. Taken all together, they had something to do with the Vichy regime’s co-opting of the Joan of Arc mythology, which was one of Professor Piot’s favorite topics, although it was possible that Neil was mishearing and Jeanne d’Arc was really gendarmes and they were talking about Pétain’s special police. Possibly both.
So as Professor Piot paused while Neil’s phone rang and rang, Neil kept scribbling in his notes—a lot of unconnected phrases that trailed off into nothing when they got to the verb—while the rest of the class wondered what moron had “Frère Jacques” for his ringtone. When he finally realized that it was his phone that was ringing and started fumbling around with it to try to turn it off—in an excess of optimism he’d switched the settings to French—he silently cursed Veejay, whose idea of a going-away present had been to secretly download some boys’ choir trilling “sonnez les matines” to Neil’s phone.
At the break, while the class smoked and drank their little coffees out of plastic cups, Neil tried to check his voicemail, only he couldn’t remember the new code. He tried to look cool, like he was just texting somebody a really long message, and finally he got the number right. “One . . . new . . . message . . .” a voice sang out. Neil had accidentally put the phone on speaker. He pushed a bunch of buttons and missed hearing the person say her name, but right away he figured out that it was the girl he’d met in Swindon. “So, I am coming to London for taking the bus to Vilnius and I am wanting to ask you do you want to meet for a coffee, because I am going to be there for some hours? So, okay, that’s all. Maybe you can call me when you have some moment. Okay, good-bye.”
Neil only rarely had the opportunity to return girls’ phone calls, and when he did, he liked to spend some time rehearsing a casual tone and working up a joke or two. But he had a sudden desire to speak his own language in front of all the Sorbonne kids milling around outside the classroom, flopping their hair in their eyes and discussing existentialism in Fascist literature without saying the second halves of their words, that French university dialect designed to exclude American research assistants.
Neil pushed the buttons on his phone until he figured out how to call the number back.
“Hello?” she said.
“Hey, it’s Neil,” Neil said.
“Oh, yes.”
“I got your message and, gosh, I mean I’d love to meet up, but actually I’m not in London right now.” He liked the sound of his own voice, casually speaking a language the Sorbonne kids had to learn from books.
“Well, it’s okay,” she said. “It’s no problem, really, you are busy.”
“No, it’s not that, it’s just that I’m in Paris for the summer.”
“Oh you are in Paris?” she said.
“Yep, till August,” Neil said. “I’m doing some work for my professor.” There was a pause. “Shoot, I mean I’m really sorry. It would have been fun to get a coffee and all.”
“Actually this is perfect,” she said. “I am changing my bus in Paris.”
“Wow, really?” Neil said.
“Yes, for this I have gotten the most cheap ticket.” There was another pause. “I will come tomorrow in the morning at six o’clock into the station Gare du Nord. This is Paris?”
“Yeah,” Neil said. The class was filing back into the classroom and Professor Piot was already writing a list of dates on the board. “Wow, that’s great.”
“Yes, so we can meet there tomorrow,” she said.
“Cool,” Neil said. Six o’clock seemed awfully early. “We can have some croissants.”
It was frankly a surprise to hear from her again. Neil had called her up the day after he got back from Swindon to tell her about the camera in the medicine cabinet, and instead of being grateful to him for telling her and pissed at Barry for being such a creep, she had sounded almost amused, leaving Neil wondering, as usual, what he’d done wrong.