Apparently she had been sitting there in a reverie for several minutes.
“Lala? Honey? Shoot, I think the screen froze . . .”
“No, no, I’m sorry, David. I was just having sex with you in my mind. In Ventura, specifically.”
“Could you please write up an extensive list of colorful, emphatic, and intellectually-admirable French swear words and phrases for me?”
“Just use ‘merde.’ Trust me, it’s the easiest way.”
Lala and Kenny were on their way to meet with a French veterinarian who had studied at Tufts Veterinary School with one of David’s fellow visiting professors at UC Davis. The French veterinarian had recently added a small animal rescue foundation to her medical practice.
“It’s like she’s the French me. I mean, the French me if she’s also short and slightly out of her mind, and minus the ability to actually understand science and math,” Lala had said when David had Skyped with her that morning to give her Dr. Veronique Dermond’s contact information. It was the first time since she had arrived in Paris that they had seen and spoken to each other more than once in a 24-hour period. It had broken Lala’s heart to be reminded twice in such a relatively short time how much she loved David and how constantly terrified she was that he would die and leave her as her first husband had died and left her.
Dr. Dermond’s clinic was in the Eighth Arrondissement. Lala and Kenny were walking along the Champs-Élysées toward the Arc de Triomphe. Lala saw that Ladurée, the classic, world-famous emporium, was coming up on their left.
“Is it me,” she said, “or are macarons . . .”
Being the self-proclaimed worshipper and guardian of words that she was, Lala pronounced the name of the dessert as a French person would . . . if that French person had a French accent that was for shit.
“. . . just as boring as a treat can be? I do not get the fascination. They’re dry. And kind of tasteless. Or is it just me? I have never craved mah-cah-roh—”
“Lala,” Kenny said, “please just call them ‘macaroons,’ okay? Please. Your accent is driving me nuts. And I do agree that they are highly overrated.”
Lala whacked Kenny on the back of his head with great affection and giggled. They turned left just before getting to the overwhelming flow of merging streets and traffic leading into and around the Arc de Triomphe.
“Man,” Lala said, “every sentient being in Paris should be grateful that I have not gotten behind the wheel of a car here. Look at that. How do they manage not to smack into each other?”
Just as Lala noticed it, Kenny also saw a little girl walking up ahead leading an Irish Wolfhound by the leash who dwarfed her. The two of them skipped through an archway just a few buildings ahead of where Lala and Kenny were marching.
“Ohhhh,” they both said in joyous appreciation.
“I have a good feeling that we’re in the right place,” Lala said.
“Yup,” Kenny said.
They followed where the little girl had gone through the archway and checked the first door they saw. A small plaque outside read: “Dr. Veronique Dermond, Clinique Vétérinaire.” Kenny grabbed the door and they rushed in together. The waiting room was beautifully jammed.
“Ohhhh,” they both said. Lala sought out and found and smiled at the little girl and the Irish Wolfhound, who were sitting together in a corner. The little girl was perched on a chair and had her feet sticking straight out, resting on her dog’s head. The large beast was stretched out on the floor next to his girl. A long-haired Chihuahua was valiantly humping the big dog’s leg, a gesture which no one, including the Wolfhound, noticed or commented on. Lala, smiling like someone who might be dangerously happy, approached the little girl.
“Votre chien est absolument adorable!”
Everyone in the room, including, Lala thought for a moment, the animals, chuckled.
“You’re from the United States!” the little girl said.
Oh, for god’s sake, Lala thought. My accent is really that bad? I swear, I don’t hear it . . .
“Yeah,” Lala said.
“I love New York!” the little girl continued. “And Washington, DC and Seattle and San Francisco!”
“Wow, you’re English is really good,” Lala said. “And I shouldn’t have used the formal form of ‘you’ with a young person like you, should I?”
“No!” the little girl said with surpassing sweetness and enthusiasm. “You should use ‘tu’ with someone my age! That’s why we were all laughing!”
“Okey-doke,” Lala said. “Anyway, your dog is adorable. And I really like that English has only one form of ‘you’.”
“I do as well!” the little girl said.
Her Wolfhound had not moved during their conversation, and the Chihuahua was still madly humping away. A sturdy young woman wearing a lab coat opened the door that lead from the waiting room to the inner part of the clinic. She stood in the doorway and scanned the room. She waved to Lala.
“Madame Puh-tee-boh?”
“Oui,” Lala began, “je suis . . .”
Fuck it, Lala thought.
“Uh huh. That’s me.”
The young woman walked a few quick steps to Lala and held out her hand.
“Veronique Dermond. A pleasure. My American colleague told me all about you. I’m afraid I’ve gotten quite a bit busier than I expected today. Please accept my apologies.”
“No, no, pas du . . . not at all,” Lala said.
“Can I ask you to perhaps go next door to the bistro? Please tell Vincent that I sent you. My wife and I will join you as soon as we see the patients.”
“That sounds great! I love a nice bistro.”
“Excellent,” Veronique said. She pointed to Kenny. “You are Kenny? So nice to meet you. We will see you soon, yes?”
She smiled at them both and then motioned for an elderly woman, who was carrying an equally elderly looking cat wrapped up in a blanket like a baby, to follow her into the clinic.
“Ohhhh,” Lala and Kenny said.
“She is so nice!” Lala gushed.
“Nice!” Kenny echoed.
“Your name means ‘little good’!” the Irish Wolfhound’s young guardian said.
What? Lala thought.
“I . . . it . . . it does?”
It does, Lala thought. How have I not thought of that before? Little good. Always better than no good at all, I guess.
“Okay, Kenny, in my defense, it’s not like I spent my life walking around pronouncing my name as if I were a Parisian, okay? Peh-tee-bown doesn’t bring to mind the French words for little and good, okay? Though I have to confess, now that I’ve heard it, I can’t fathom how it never occurred to me before.”
They were sitting at a table for four at the window of Les Petits Fromages next to the veterinary clinic. Their host, Vincent, had spoken to them in the French of a sailor in Marseille who had decided to imitate Professor Henry Higgins’s lesson for Eliza Doolittle that involved talking with a mouthful of marbles. Lala couldn’t catch anything after Vincent said, “Bienvenue!” so Kenny had to simultaneously translate in their own mini-version of the United Nations.
“He went to high school with Veronique’s father in Provence. He says she’s like a daughter to him. He wants us to try a special bottle of Sancerre.”
And now they were loving that special bottle of white wine, which Vincent had just brought to the table and opened, and for which Lala thanked him profusely. In French.
“Merci mille fois, Monsieur. Vous êtes trop gentil!”
Vincent smiled and winked at her and had a blank look in his eyes that clearly indicated that everything she had just said had been Greek to him. Lala scrunched her face up as she watched Vincent toddle back to the kitchen.
“Kenny, I would just like to point out that my current boyfriend, who is fluent in French and a bun
ch of other languages, complimented my accent when he met me, and I sang Hier Encore with him at a karaoke night, and also when I spoke French with him after we—”
“Oh, well, okay, Lala, obviously he was trying to fuck you. And I say that with all due affection. Wait . . . He heard you sing and he still wanted to fuck you?”
Lala snorted a laugh and kicked Kenny under the table, just as Veronique and a very petite blonde woman, who was probably shorter than Lala, came in. Vincent rushed over to them and embraced them both. There was much kissing on both cheeks and many smiles. Lala beamed at the women as they approached the table. They were very quickly followed by Vincent, bearing another bottle of Sancerre.
“You all are so nice!” Lala crowed. “And I haven’t even officially met your wife yet, and I already like her! And I would say that all in French, but you’d probably all have to try to not laugh, and dear Vincent wouldn’t understand me! How do you say ‘exclamation points’ in French?”
Veronique introduced her wife, Camille, while Vincent ran off and came back in what seemed like no time with four plates covered with omelets and salad and round little pommes frites.
“Omigod, this food is delicious!” Lala said. “Kenny, can you translate for me so Vincent knows that I think he’s amazing? You’re both veterinarians? That is SO cool! WOW! I have to tell you, I made a very brief visit to the Island of Lesbos. In college. During a generously populated make-out session at an off-campus house that was the closest I’ve ever come to participating in an actual orgy. After making out with Willis Daniels, my then-boyfriend, I spent the rest of the party mashing on Diane Delehanty. She was a senior, and I was a sophomore, and she was the star of the theatre department. My lips were numb for the better part of the next day. No one had any tops on, but that’s about as far as it went, nudity-wise. I guess that makes me sound quite puritanical.”
“No, not really,” Veronique said.
“Not really even by French standards,” Camille agreed.
Vincent made a huge chocolate soufflé for the table, and a big pot of very strong tea. Veronique had explained to him that Lala and Kenny would be helping les chats, and it was going to be a long night.
“I’ve got seven traps in our car,” Camille told Lala and Kenny. “We’ll drive you home. You have a place to keep the cats until tomorrow morning?” Lala nodded.
“They’ll stay in my apartment.” And just as she spoke, Lala was surprised that she suddenly gasped and started crying. “At least one of the cats is tame. Or she could be.”
Camille took a tissue out of her purse and passed it to Lala. “You’ll know what to do with her, I feel certain.”
Lala dabbed at her eyes. “Thanks. She could be a boy. I swear, I can never tell with cats. I just don’t get where the penises are supposed to be.”
Veronique nodded and smiled. “I still have trouble with that.”
Lala had her nearly empty wine glass in one hand and a full cup of tea in the other. She slugged back the rest of the wine and followed it with a caffeinated chaser.
“This wine is really tasty. And this tea is very strong. Which is clearly a very good thing.”
“I am both hammered and wide-awake, which is an uneasy combination and one that, alas, I am not unfamiliar with,” Lala whispered to Kenny. They were sitting squished behind a corner door where they had a view of the three humane traps they had set up in the garden. “I remember being at Downey House drinking beer my senior year and suddenly remembering that I had forgotten I had a linguistics exam the next morning. So it was nothing but Diet Coke and cramming until I dragged myself to the test the next morning, bleary-eyed and functionally incoherent. P.S., I aced it. I really have to pee.”
“Go, go, go,” Kenny whispered. “I’ll keep watch.”
The evening which had started out so enthusiastically and supportively with the loaning of the humane traps and the delicious food and wine, had hit a major snag on the way to the actual rescuing of the feral cats when, at an hour that was entirely too late for anyone to be out and about on a Monday, regardless of how pinched and bloodless they might seem and regardless of how many comparisons to actual vampires they might inspire, Celestine Barrault, the building owner’s dreaded daughter, had appeared at the building in a lather which had been inspired by an Amazon France order that was intended as a toadying gift from Celestine for a wealthy tenant on the top floor being accidentally delivered to Celestine’s home . . . a mistake which was based entirely on her own flawed entry of the details of the desired transaction online, but one that she was determined to blame on Kenny, despite his total lack of any association whatsoever with the ordering or delivery.
Luckily, Lala and Kenny had gotten the traps secured in their hidden locations just before Celestine’s abnormally high boots came clacking across the cobblestones. The volume of her voice was not modified in any consideration of the late hour.
“Kenny!” she brayed. “Où es-tu?”
Lala gasped and pulled Kenny off to an opposite side of the building where Celestine couldn’t see them.
“You two tutoyer each other? You use the familiar form of ‘you’ with that harpy?”
“She calls me ‘tu.’ I, of course, have to call her ‘vous,’” Kenny explained.
“That bitch,” Lala hissed. “That aristocratic hypocritical bitch. Okay, no time for righteous indignation. I’m going to get her out of here. You man the barricades. Let’s pretend we’re in the French Revolution.”
Lala stomped out into the courtyard and, without consciously deciding to do so, affected what she imagined was the tone of a stern aunt, a way of speaking which she, as a demanding but also incredibly indulgent aunt to her actual and informally-adopted nieces and nephews, had never in fact used in real life.
I’ll just pretend I’m Geraldine, and Celestine is me, and I’m really pissed off at her, Lala thought. Thankfully, there will be no actual acting involved in this scene.
“Mademoiselle Celestine! People are trying to sleep!”
Celestine wobbled on her heels and narrowed her eyes at Lala.
She’s drunk, too, Lala thought. Okay, good. Even playing field here.
“Pardon me, Madame,” Celestine said. “Would you possibly know where Kenny is?”
“I imagine he’s asleep, as is the rest of the civilized world. Come on, you’re buying me a drink.”
They ended up at the bar in a small hotel two streets over. The atmosphere was dark and romantic. Lala found herself wishing she could be there with David. Or Terrence. She quickly dismissed the thought and ordered them very dirty vodka martinis, all of the communication with the attractive young bartender being done wordlessly. Lala pointed dramatically at the nearest vodka bottle, and then mimed tossing large green olive after large green olive in the two martini glasses she had seized from behind the bar.
“Elle veut dire—,” Celestine began to say to the bemused bartender.
“Zip it, Celestine!” Lala snapped. “We’ve got a universal language goin’ on here! Back off!”
They drank a round of delicious martinis while Lala listened to Celestine blather on and on about how difficult it was to find the right kind of people to work for you. Lala did her best to keep her eyes open and to suppress a desperate impulse to smack the obnoxious young woman.
“Look, I’m going to have to jump in here and state, unequivocally, that Kenny and his grandfather are wonderful and heavenly, and if you don’t start appreciating how lucky you are to have them, I’m going to hire them away from you and bring them to Los Angeles with me.”
Celestine, who was at that point ever drunker than Lala, cackled. Her voice in amusement, Lala reflected, recalled to mind the overwhelming enthusiasm of feeding time at the zoo.
“We will be agreeing to disagree, shall we, Madame Pettt-eeeettttt-BOWWWNNN?”
“Oh, for god’s sake,” Lala snapped. She raised
two fingers to the bartender and nodded frantically. “Call me Lala. Unless you’re able to make my first name, which even I know is in fact a doubled-up actual musical note, sound clipped and curt and cutting.”
Lala was a bit chapped to see that Celestine was too drunk to appreciate how much Lala was hoping to convey her contempt by way of a small degree of subtlety. As in, Celestine would know that Lala couldn’t stand her, but quoting Lala’s actual words wouldn’t be sufficient evidence that Lala had actually said that she couldn’t stand her. Instead, the vodka seemed to be resulting in Celestine thinking she and Lala were new best friends. There was now some burping and some giggling coming from Celestine, all of which sounded even more blood-chilling than the recent loud cackling.
“Si tu veux,” Celestine cooed.
“Whoa!” Lala snapped. “Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. I’m the senior in the hierarchy here, young missy. I decide when we tutoyer. Which we do not. I do. You don’t. Tu comprends? I am vous to you, got it?”
Though Lala would have readily admitted she didn’t have an actual plan when she hauled Celestine away from the courtyard, the plan that had appeared worked quite well. Celestine seemed to have forgotten that she was even looking for Kenny when Lala escorted her into a cab to go home.
“Lala, à bientôt! C’était très sympa de boire un verre avec vous!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Lala grumbled. “Not if I see you first.”
When Lala got back to the courtyard, Kenny reported that there had been some suspicious sniffing of the traps by a few of the cats, but none of them had taken the smelly tuna bait. So they sat together and waited. And Lala complained. And drank from a large bottle of warm Diet Coke that she had found in the pantry of the restaurant when she interrupted Kenny’s grandfather’s cigarette-and-demitasse fueled late night reflection on the state of the world via his reading of Machiavelli’s The Prince at a table near the window of the restaurant, upon which Lala had tapped, startling the old man and causing him to spill his demitasse, and, once she had gotten his attention, where she did a dramatic mimed rendition of someone dying of thirst.
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