As always, Raef knew somebody, worked a deal somehow. There was no end to Raef’s handiness.
The rooms were not much; they had not been updated in ages, but each room possessed a tiny balcony, large enough for a chair if you sat sideways. Raef and Constance had a room on the second floor, slightly below and to the right of our room. From our balcony we could see the rooftops, the red-tiled gutters and aluminum vents, and Jack promised me that Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, might swing into our bedchamber at any time, day or night.
He sat on the bed and watched me unpack. I put some things in the small bathroom, trying to be orderly. The double bed made the room difficult to navigate. I banged my shins twice on the bedframe, the second time so hard that I had to stand for a second and close my eyes. Jack seemed to have the better idea. He looked ready for the nap we had promised each other—Raef and Constance had the same idea—before meeting to go exploring.
“You okay?” Jack asked when he saw me standing and grimacing against the pain.
“This damn bed.”
“Why don’t you get on the bed with me? Then it wouldn’t trip you up.”
I nodded and crawled over to him, my shin still stinging like a crazy torch. With our heads on the pillow, we could look out on midday Paris. I smiled, thinking how good it felt to be in Paris. The sun did not appear to be strong; a few lazy clouds worked against the gray sky and seemed to gather the day’s color into their billowy centers.
“I have a bit of a headache,” Jack said.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine.”
He shrugged.
“Can I get you anything? Do anything?”
“Sex,” he said. “Kinky sex.”
I pushed up and looked at him. He smiled. It was a weak smile. He didn’t feel great, I could see, and his color was lousy.
“I mean it, Jack. Are you okay?”
He shrugged again. He tried to put a brave face on it, but he clearly didn’t feel well.
“Let me close my eyes,” he said. “I’ll be okay in an hour.”
“Okay. If I’m not here when you wake up, it means the Hunchback has taken me.”
“Good to know.”
I kissed him gently on the cheek. I felt his lips curl in a smile, but he didn’t move.
We slept a long time. I woke in midafternoon, and Jack still slept soundly beside me. He had turned away so I couldn’t see his face. I didn’t want to shake the bed or risk waking him, so I slipped carefully into the bathroom, rinsed my face, brushed my teeth, brushed my hair quickly, then wrote a note and stuck it to the mirror.
“Sleepyhead, call me as soon as you wake up,” I wrote. “I hope you feel better.”
I slipped out the door and went to explore Paris on my own.
*
I bought a crêpe du fromage and a café au lait from a food truck outside the Jardin du Luxembourg and carried it to a table beside a statue of Pan not far beyond the entranceway. I was hungry, but I also wanted the sensation of having a small meal by myself in the park that Hemingway made famous. I sat beneath a large chestnut tree, already in its final fruiting, the heavy nuts scattered around its base, some of them exploded from footfalls. I ate slowly, picking at the crêpe, which was delicious. It tasted of grass and meadows, and the cheese was warm and sweet. The coffee had a dark, heavy viscosity that I had never tasted in coffee before. The two flavors and textures—the soft, yielding flesh of the crêpe balanced against the oily richness of the coffee—made me happy in a peculiar, pleased way. Here I was again on the Left Bank of Paris, late summer, and I sat in the Jardin du Luxembourg, the massive trees and green lawns surrounding me, the exact spot where Hemingway and Hadley and Bumpy sat decades before between the wars.
It was slightly silly and overly romantic, but I didn’t care. I pulled out my iPad and read Hemingway. I read from A Moveable Feast, which I had read during my first trip to Paris. I scanned through the pages, stopping to reread sections I had noted or underlined. Hemingway still got to me. He wrote: We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.
I read that several times. I thought of Jack and of what I wanted.
I took the last, tiny sip of my coffee and turned the plate over so that the crumbs from the crêpe could be taken by the multitudes of pigeons that roamed near the table, never far away, always burbling, like water or birds made of glass.
I was still sitting, empty but pleased, when the phone beeped.
Where is Quasimodo holding you? the text read.
The Jardin du Luxembourg, I wrote back. Come sit with me.
*
“We need to go on a secret mission,” Jack said as he kissed me quickly and slid in beside me. “We’re not meeting Raef and Constance until late. We have the evening to ourselves.”
“First tell me how you’re feeling.”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you really? Or are you just being brave?”
“No, I feel fine, honestly. I swear.”
“You slept really hard. You didn’t wake at all when I left.”
He smiled and reached over and tucked my hair behind my ear.
“Did you eat?” he asked.
“A crêpe and a cup of coffee.”
He nodded. He looked serious for a second and turned to me.
“This is Hemingway’s park, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“When he was young, he walked his baby here, didn’t he?”
I nodded.
“He used to kill pigeons and stuff them under the baby blanket,” I said. “They were so broke they needed the pigeons for food.”
Jack smiled softly.
He reached across the table for my hand.
I loved the weight of his hand. I loved its size wrapping around my own.
My phone buzzed before we had a chance to move. The Mom-a-saurus was on the line, but I didn’t pick up the call.
We sat for a while and watched the park grow darker. It was a beautiful evening. Later, a tall man walking a Jack Russell came by, and we watched them continue down the path. They looked funny together; the dog’s short little legs seemed to go a thousand times faster than the man’s. The dog was well behaved. It moved like a balloon tied to the end of a stick.