It was forbidden to discuss work at the Piots’ Sunday afternoon teas. Something had given Professor Piot the idea to try to assimilate his research assistants into normal society by having them over to his house to speak French and eat unfamiliar foods off of china so thin it was nearly translucent and exposed each gap in conversation with a chorus of little clinks. Aside from Neil and Beth and Loren—Jean-Claude had made up some excuse about visiting a grandmother in Lyon—there were two rheumy-eyed Sorbonne kids who were doing the actual layout and text for the museum display on the Tour Saint-Jacques, and a German archaeology student who worked on the site. Madame Piot fluttered around them with an eagle eye for an empty plate or an emptyish glass, and everyone searched their brains for conversation topics that did not include the tower of the old church of Saint Jacques. “If it was written on calfskin or you found it under a rock, save it for Monday,” Professor Piot announced at the beginning of each Sunday afternoon, laughing as if it were the first time he’d said it. So they bit their lips and wracked their brains, trying to think of some normal everyday thing to talk about, while all anyone was really interested in were the pearls they’d pried out of that week’s research.
They ended up talking about whether the falafel was better in the fourth arrondissement or the fifth, and the relative merits of the Chatelet movie theater versus the one up by school, while Madame Piot quizzed them about cultural activities: Had they seen the light show at Saint-Paul? Wouldn’t they like to see the absurdist play about nothing that had been playing in the same little theater for thirty years? Oh, definitely, they all agreed, all of them anxious for Monday, when they would cram themselves into Professor Piot’s office and sift through their notes on the past week’s discoveries, tacking and flattening time like a butterfly under glass. Historians are grave robbers, opening coffins and looking for jewels, Professor Piot had told them more than once, looking jolly and clapping his hands a little with delight at the thought of it. It was endearing until you realized that he was not necessarily speaking metaphorically. During Neil’s first week in Paris Professor Piot had taken the team to the catacombs to see the bones that had originally been buried in the graveyard of the old church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie. He’d been right in the middle of telling them all about how it had taken so many hundreds of midnight processions of carts draped in black to collect the thousands of bones from all over Paris, and everyone had been feeling eerie, imagining the noise all those carts of skeletons would have made across deserted cobbled streets. Priests had led the way, chanting the mass of the dead and swinging incense to cover the smell. Neil had been trying very hard not to step in the little puddles of water that had collected between the stacks of thigh bones and skulls, when all of a sudden Professor Piot paused, dug a tibia right out of the pile, and turned to them saying “voilà!”—to make some obscure point about nutrition during the Hundred Years’ War.
But while Neil dreaded Sunday tea chez Piot as much as anyone else, it was a sign of how incurably uncool the whole group was that, for the first time in any social setting ever in his life, Neil found himself doing a lot of talking. This was his third Sunday at the Piots’, and he was still the only one who’d ever had anything to say when Professor Piot asked them what besides research they had been up to that week. Even when he hadn’t done something, Neil could think of an embarrassing personal experience to relate, if only to avoid one of Professor Piot’s lengthy dissections of French politics—which he usually gave while his mouth was filled with some kind of jellied meat. Neil thought about telling the story of spilling Magdalena’s friend’s ashes in the train station, but he didn’t feel up to it. He’d forgotten again what the word for ashes was, and it wasn’t even all that funny. So he kept quiet and ate another slab of foie gras, trying his best to pretend it was cheese.
In the days since Tuesday, when Neil had seen Magdalena off at the station, he’d been feeling particularly distracted. He’d even skipped work at the archives, ostensibly to organize his notes, and ended up spending most of Friday wandering around the city. He kept replaying the meeting with Magdalena in his mind and giving it different endings. As often happened when Neil let his imagination go, the scene that he’d originally created as the most impossible of all had become his favorite, and his imagining of it had become so real that he could hardly believe that reality had failed to let it happen. A few days of intense daydreaming had closed the gap between fact and fantasy, not to the point that he believed it had happened, but that he believed it might have just as easily.
In Neil’s reimagining the ashes still spilled, but in a way that was entirely not his fault—perhaps the feral offspring of the German tourists had done it. In this version Neil helped Magdalena sweep them up, delicately lifting bone fragments out from the cracks in the floor and comforting Magdalena with a tactful little joke about how her friend obviously wanted to spend some time in Paris.
Then, as they talked, and Magdalena looked at him with that intensity in her eyes, the really important part would happen. She would be looking at him, and then when she lifted her hand up to his temple she would leave it there a moment, maybe letting her fingers brush down along his jaw, and she would say, “Ni-yell, I am just really wanting to kiss you right now, okay?” It seemed so entirely possible it might have happened that way that Neil was having a hard time thinking of anything else. Her lips would be moist from all that crying and her mouth would taste like gum—as would his, thankfully—and they’d probably end it sort of laughing at themselves, not an awkward laugh at all, but a laugh that transcended all the obvious differences between them, like the fact that she was perfect and Neil had baby fat, that they thought thoughts in separate languages and had only moments before been strangers to one another.
Madame Piot interrupted Neil’s dream, and Gare du Nord dissolved into the Piots’ living room again.
“Neil, why so quiet?” Madame Piot said. “Have some Camembert.”
“Okay,” Neil said.
The problem was that he would never, ever see her again. She had gone back to Lithuania, and unless she actually sent him those sixty euros, which he was now feeling like a real jerk for not having just given to her outright, he would never hear from her again. He didn’t even know her last name. He could ask his father, but that would mean he’d have to call his father, which would mean explaining about the Christmas presents, and that was definitely out. Why hadn’t he asked for her e-mail? Her mother was opening a pizza shop, she’d said. How many pizza shops could there be in Lithuania? Neil let Madame Piot refill his glass. He saw how it would happen. The place would be filled—maybe it would be the grand opening. She’d be running around taking orders, her hair sort of messy around her face. He’d stand off to the side, having a drink at the bar until she had a spare moment. Then as she went by he would say, “Hi Magdalena.” He would smile shyly but in a charming way, and she’d know right away that he’d come all this way to see her, just to make sure she’d made it on the bus okay. She’d push her hair up out of her eyes, worrying that she was sweaty or that there was tomato sauce on her shirt, but of course Neil wouldn’t care at all. And she’d look at him just for an instant in that way she had. What would happen next wasn’t very clear, but it hardly seemed to matter, and Neil was already refining the scene that hadn’t happened at the train station to make it happen in the pizza restaurant, when he realized that all the others were carefully transferring the crumbs from their knees to the saucers of their teacups, Madame Piot was thanking them for saving the foie gras from being thrown away, and it was time to go.