What drove me outdoors wasn’t the lack of diversions, but the lack of food. I couldn’t face the raspberry jam again. And while I couldn’t lay eyes on the source, all afternoon the smell of freshly baked bread had wafted up from the street to torment me. There must be a boulangerie on the corner, just out of sight. When the sky at last grew purple, I borrowed a raincoat and hat from the hall closet and let myself out. The coat stretched tight across my chest and hips; the woman was a sparrow.
The bakery was already locked tight for the night, but a corner shop on the next block had everything I desired. A wedge of cheese, the dry French sausage known as saucisson sec, half a dozen apples, cans of tomato soup, a liter of milk, a bottle of wine. In a dusty basket near the front I found baguettes. They had gone stale, but I tucked two under my arm, breaking off a heel to nibble as the clerk rang up my purchases.
Ten minutes later I was back in the apartment. I stashed the cheese and the milk in the fridge and chewed a slice of the saucisson as I contemplated the nonfood items I had acquired: a toothbrush, a bar of soap, and a box of L’Oréal Prodigy #10, Blond Très Très Clair.
Fifty-five
* * *
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2013
The L’Oréal #10 was a disaster.
It turns out you can’t go from naturally dark brown hair to Blond Très Très Clair, at least not without making an intermediate stop at ghastly orange. The woman who stared back at me from Madame Aubuchon’s bathroom mirror was crowned with what could only be described as a carroty mullet, complete with crooked layers in front and a ratty tail at the back, where I’d left the hair longer to hide my still-vivid scar.
I would have to seek professional help. Vanity aside, I was trying to keep a low profile, and this look would cause young children to run screaming.
On boulevard Saint-Michel was a salon I liked. But they might remember me, and it was unlikely to be open on a Sunday. Instead I borrowed the rain jacket and hat again, lowered my sunglasses, and caught the metro to the Chateau Rouge stop, in the eighteenth arrondissement.
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YOU COULD SMELL and hear the Marché Dejean before you saw it. The unofficial heart of Paris’s African community was hopping on a Sunday morning. The stink of meat assaulted you even as you climbed the steps from the metro, wafting over from Boucherie Amar Frères, a halal butcher. Around the corner, pretty housewives from Senegal haggled over the price of yams; street traders hawked fake Louis Vuitton bags; children begging for sticky, honeyed pastries spilled out the door of an Algerian bakery.
I stopped outside a Tunisian restaurant to get my bearings. Surely there was an Arab hairdresser around here. I was gambling that barbers in this neighborhood might be less likely to abide by the rhythms of a nominally Catholic country, where on a Sunday morning everyone was supposed to be either asleep or in church. Judging by the throngs of people squeezing past me, I had guessed right on that front. I was also gambling that someone used to styling women of color might have experience in rescuing brunettes from bad home dye jobs.
A beautiful black woman with platinum-blond hair swept past me on the sidewalk. I caught up with her, paid a compliment, asked directions. She said a name and pointed. It took several wrong turns and another request for directions before I arrived at a brightly tiled establishment fitted with two vinyl barber chairs. The proprietor looked surprised when I walked in. Even more surprised when I peeled off my hat and revealed the mess he had to work with. He held up a finger, signaling me to wait, and disappeared into the back. A minute later he returned with a woman in tow, a baby on her hip and a girl of four or five trailing behind. The two of them consulted in a language I couldn’t understand. Hindi, possibly, or Urdu. They were not African.
Then she stepped forward with a surprisingly sympathetic smile. “You did on your own?” She pointed at my scalp.
I nodded sheepishly.
“One hundred euros. I fix for you. Will take some hours.”
I handed over the money, plus a generous advance tip. When someone is about to attack your head with bleach and a pair of scissors, it’s in your interest for the person to feel warmly toward you.
I was led to one of the vinyl chairs. The girl shyly offered me tea, then sugar cubes, which she dropped into my cup with tiny silver tongs and a look of such endearing seriousness that I accepted three. She disappeared while her mother stood behind me, whipping bleach into a paste in a steel bowl.
“Where is your family from?” I asked the woman, by way of conversation.
“Pakistan. Lahore. And you?”
“Lyons.” France’s third-largest city. I knew it reasonably well, should she ask questions. But she merely nodded. The girl reappeared, carrying a stack of comic books. She held one up to me, smiling. I smiled back. She held up another one, pointed at the cover and giggled.
Her mother spoke sharply to her, asking a question in their language. Then the mother began to laugh as well. “She says you look like Tintin.”
I stared. The Belgian boy adventurer on the cover of her books styled his orange hair in a cowlicky cross between a pompadour and a Mohawk. I made to protest, but what was the use? The girl had nailed it. She crawled into my lap and demanded that I read aloud to her the adventures of Tintin and his dog, Snowy, while her mother rubbed a white paste that smelled of lemons into my hair.
? ? ?
I EMERGED INTO the strong sunlight of early afternoon looking less like Tintin and more like a youngish Mia Farrow. The Pakistani woman had done me right. My hair was dark, golden blond, shaped into a modern pixie cut, spiky on top, with a flirty flip in the back. The hair just covered my scar. She had deftly avoided touching it, had asked no questions.