Page 42 of French Kiss

17

Silver Lining

July11

Paris

We founda pair of seats at Café du Marché and were greeted immediately by a tall waiter dressed similarly to the one who’d helped me earlier at Café de Paris—black pants, white shirt, black vest, white apron. He held a notepad. “Bonjour. Vous avez decidé?”

I had a feeling he was asking if we were ready to order, although we’d only been there a few minutes and hadn’t seen a menu. But maybe he had no way of knowing that.

“Bonjour,” Josh said, holding up a finger. “Non. Un moment, s’il vous plaît.”

The waiter handed us each a menu and turned to take care of another table. I wasn’t particularly hungry, but I took some time to look over the list of wines, asking Josh for help deciphering the differences between them. “You want a Pouilly-Fumé or a Sancerre if you’re looking for something light. You drink sauvignon blanc, right? These are like that.”

It was funny that he thought I had a taste for a particular strain of grape, as though I was a person who had vast wine knowledge and real preferences. The reality was that one night we’d all been having dinner at Heidi and Karim’s apartment, and coincidentally, each of us had brought a different type of white wine. So we decided to conduct a little wine tasting and see which we thought was best. Heidi put all the bottles into brown paper bags and made a note to herself which one was which. Then we tasted them blindly and made comments on Post-its and ordered them from best to worst. My favorite that night turned out to be a sauvignon blanc that no one else liked, and I’d been roundly mocked because it was the cheapest wine, a two-buck variety from Trader Joe’s.

“What can I tell you?” I’d said. “I like what I’m used to, and I drink the cheap stuff.”

On Josh’s advice, I ordered a glass of Sancerre, and Josh chose a French beer, which was delivered in a footed glass with a squat, round middle. He held his glass up for a toast. “À santé.”

I clinked my glass against his and mumbled, “Same to you.”

Then he added, “We need a plan.” He borrowed a pen from the waiter, who seemed reluctant to part with it until Josh said something else to him in French that made him smile and hand it over. This was the Josh I knew well, the one who could charm anyone with his good nature, even a grouchy French waiter. Josh set to work on the paper place mat on our table, drawing a basic map of the city, highlighted by the Seine running through the middle. “Okay, we’re about here.” He pointed to a dot on his map, near a spot where the river curved. “What kinds of things are on your to-do list?”

I’d let my mental schedule go blank after the point when I was supposed to meet up with Maddox, figuring that whatever we did would be spontaneous and passionate because we hadn’t ever talked about a plan. That was the first fallacy in my reasoning, I realized. “I honestly don’t have a list. I guess I need to make one, and quick.”

He drew a few spirals on the place mat and took a sip of his beer. “Well, if you’ve never been here, there are some things you have to do.”

“I know I need to see the museums and eat mussels and stuff like that, and actually, I did a tiny bit of research.” I took out my phone and scrolled down my Paris list, which I’d jotted on the plane after reading an article about museum exhibits that had just opened and restaurant suggestions. I showed him my list.

“Yeah, those are all good things to do in the next few days when you get an earlier start, but the museums are all closed by now. Now’s the time to stroll in all the parks and gardens and look for views and take perfect photographs.”

I’d thought about doing some of those things, but they’d all been tinged with the romantic light of being with Maddox. I was still stinging with the rejection of him having left me standing under the Eiffel Tower, and I wasn’t sure if I could muster the enthusiasm to be a fun companion to Josh. “Okay, maybe I should leave it to you to come up with an itinerary. Do you have a train ticket to go back in the morning?” I was used to a pragmatic approach, and I needed to know all my parameters—how long we had and what our choices were in that amount of time. Then I could prioritize. “Speaking of which, I should figure out when I’m headed out and where to meet up with Shelby…”

Josh held up a hand. “Stop. You’re in Paris. Be in Paris. It’s an amazing city, and you haven’t seen anything yet. Don’t be in such a rush to leave.”

“I’m not in a rush, but I don’t think spontaneity works very well for me. It took me here, only for me to get my ass handed to me under the Eiffel Tower. I need a plan and a road map.”

“You really don’t know how to be on vacation, do you?” He looked at me, amused. “I mean, I do have the benefit of having been in Europe for a couple weeks already, but I am way more relaxed than you.”

“That may be the normal state of affairs. I’m not sure I know how to relax.”

“Drink your wine, my dear. You’ll get there,” he said.

My heart skipped a beat when I heard those words. My dear. In the years we’d been friends, he’d never called me that. But maybe this was the carefree European Josh. Regardless, I liked the way it sounded.

I obediently took another sip. “This is really good, actually. I could easily drink this all day, and then we’d really be in trouble.”

“I’m stopping you after two glasses. And look, they’re small, so two is less than it sounds. We have many hours ahead of us.”

I held up my glass, which, sure enough, was about half the size of the average wineglass in the US. It was consistent with what I’d observed of France so far—subtle, well designed, and never more than it needed to be. I scooted back a little bit in my chair and leaned against the backrest. Josh was right. I wasn’t a relaxed person by nature, but if ever there was a time to let everything go, a day in Paris when I had nothing to do was it.

On the street in front of us, a woman in a dark-green coat that looked too heavy for summer walked by with two small dogs on leashes who wove in and out of each other’s paths. She bent every couple of feet to untangle them. Finally, she picked one up and let the other one wander on the leash.

I took a deep breath and another sip of wine. “Why am I such a fucking idiot?” I said finally.

Josh looked up from the doodle he was drawing on the place mat of a man swinging from the branch of a tree. For as long as I’d known him, he’d been a doodler, and the things he drew rarely had anything to do with what we were discussing or the scene around us, like a window into something he was thinking but not saying. I liked seeing what he came up with.

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