“She said it was your fault the package wasn’t delivered correctly,” Lala told Kenny.
“And of course I knew nothing about the package. Rien. I have no idea what she’s talking about.”
“And of course that’s what I assumed. I swear, it drives me nuts when people don’t take responsibility for their actions. Nuts. I see red. I contemplate assault and battery. You need to pee?”
“Nope. I’m good.”
By the time Lala returned from the bathroom in her apartment, there had been activity. Kenny was silently jumping up and down with delight. He raised three fingers.
Three? Lala silently mouthed, and Kenny nodded like a bobble-head.
“In two traps,” he whispered. “Let’s go.”
He had already covered the front of the traps that had been tripped with the flap of the large towel that had a slit cut in it so that the handle of the trap was easily accessible. Kenny grabbed the trap that had two cats in it, and Lala picked up the other one. They made their way up the stairs and into Lala’s apartment. Because they were in a covered space inside the traps, the cats were silent, their fear eased by the darkness. They would stay in their traps until the next morning, when Lala and Kenny took them to Veronique and Camille’s clinic to be spayed or neutered, vaccinated, and treated for fleas, and to have one of the tips of their ears docked so that fellow rescuers could identify them as already having been trapped and fixed.
Lala and Kenny placed the traps in a corner of the living room where the hardwood floor was covered with newspapers. They sat on the couch at the other end of the room and each had a big glass of milk.
“There’s no chance I’m going to fall asleep,” Lala said. “This milk won’t help me sleep,” Lala said.
“I think it’s making me feel more awake,” Kenny said.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“You’re wondering if our tame cat is in the trap?”
“Bingo,” Lala said. “We can’t look. The light will upset them. We could shut off all the lamps and then look so they don’t get upset. But then we couldn’t see if she’s in there.”
They were both silent for a few minutes.
“Thoughts like these are going to keep me awake all night,” Lala said. “All night of which there’s maybe, what? Four hours left? Tops?”
They did not in fact sleep for anything more than a random moment here and there when they nodded off while watching Les Feux de l’Amour, which Kenny had never seen in English or French and which he dubbed “over-the-top to an almost delicious degree, ‘almost’ being the operative word.” Kenny’s grandfather drove them to the veterinary clinic the next morning before he opened the restaurant because, as he said in French and Kenny translated for Lala without her asking him to do so, “You both look like shit.” To which Lala responded, “Kenny, I caught the merde part and I presumed the rest. Give me some credit.”
While the cats were sedated, Lala and Kenny slept on the couches in Veronique and Camille’s office.
The little tame cat had not been among the three they caught.
“If I had even slept half an hour last night, I wouldn’t be able to sleep now because I’d be so upset about her not being safe. The only reason I can sleep now is because I’m crazed with exhaustion,” Lala said just before she shut her eyes and lost consciousness.
“We’ll get her tonight,” Kenny said before he did the same.
Veronique woke them up when the cats were safely out of surgery. Camille drove Lala and Kenny home with the cats still asleep in their three separate carriers, which Veronique and Camille had lent to Lala and Kenny. The cats would rest, covered with towels to keep them peacefully in the dark, in Lala’s apartment until nighttime. Then Lala and Kenny would release them back to the garden by the building. They were all deemed by the vets to be at least five years old. They would stay feral and would be best served by being in the garden they were already calling home.
The garden had high walls and was relatively safe for them, Lala silently reflected as Camille drove them back.
“We need to build a shelter for them in the garden,” Lala said aloud, though she had intended it to be just for herself.
She was sitting in the front passenger seat. Kenny was in the backseat wedged next to one of the carriers. The other two carriers were in the trunk of the hatchback. He leaned forward and put his chin on Lala’s shoulder.
“Cruella de Vil won’t let us do that,” Kenny said.
“You’re right,” Lala said. “And we have to do something about that.”
After they settled the cats in Lala’s apartment, Kenny went to the restaurant to take over managing so his grandfather could catch an afternoon nap.
“He won’t actually nap,” Kenny told Lala. “He’ll be in our apartment on my laptop, posting quotations from his favorite films on the Facebook group page he created, Les Enfants du Paradis, et les Autres.”
“God, your granddad is adorable,” Lala said. “Give him a big hug from me, ’kay?”
After Kenny left, Lala started to feel antsy almost immediately. She tried to do some writing, but determined that everything she was going to come up with that day was probably going to be, as she described it to the still slumbering kitties, “what I can only dub hyper-crappity crap, and I think I’m being charitable.”
Lala went out and began a brisk walk by the Seine. After just a few energetic strides along the banks of the river, she missed a step and fell flat on her face.
Several people rushed over. There was much concern and many gracious offers of help, to which Lala responded that she was fine, if a bit entirely embarrassed.
Lala carefully shuffled herself over to a bench and sat down. She fished her phone out of her purse and called Clive.
“I need some distraction,” she told him. “I’m suffering from weltschmerz and ennui. Plus, I just did an utterly ungainly pedestrian wipeout right by Notre Dame. Are you on set today?”
“As it happens, I just got back from an early morning shoot and I have the rest of the day off,” Clive said.
“Want to go to the Pantheon with me?” Lala asked.
“I do want to go to the Pantheon with you. But tell me one thing.”
“Of course.”
“Are you flirting with me, Madame Scribe?”
“No, I am definitely not, Sir Movie Star. Okay, yeah, maybe a little. But don’t get any ideas.”
“Dumas. What can I say? This man doesn’t know it . . . I mean, he does know it if there’s an afterlife, which I certainly hope there is because then maybe Alexandre and Terrence are enjoying a lovely sparkling bev-raj—if I may be so bold as to pronounce the word ‘beverage’ in my dreadful French accent with the only goal of amusing myself and without you making a face as though you’ve just caught a powerful whiff of old gym socks, thank you very much, Clive—together right now and are watching me effusing here . . . Anyway, he may or may not know that he saved my life during one utterly miserable summer in New York before I met Terrence. I lived in a fifth-floor walk-up with the bathtub in the kitchen and no air conditioning, and it was as humid as the tropics that August. I finally managed to get an unabridged version of The Count of Monte Cristo via interlibrary loan from a branch in Queens, and I walked from my apartment on 64th and First to the main branch of the New York City Public Library on 42nd and Fifth, and you know I was covered in schvitz by the time I got there.”
Clive, who had been signing autographs and posing for photos with an adorable foursome of elderly ladies from Philadelphia, did his best to indicate that he was staying engaged with Lala’s heaving monologue by nodding and glancing toward her on occasion while he was multi-tasking by simultaneously charming the Pennsylvania women.
“Betty, you’re lucky you’re married, because if you weren’t, well . . .”
“Ohhh, Clive,” Betty cooed. �
��We just love your work so much.”
“We just love you so much,” Abigail added.
“I had just been very unceremoniously dumped by my boyfriend of two years,” Lala continued. “I didn’t know what I was doing with my life, and I was just on the cusp of realizing that I had no business trying to be an actress. And all fifteen hundred pages of the Count’s travails immediately absorbed me and made me forget entirely about feeling sorry for myself. Man, did that guy survive a total merde storm, or what?”
“Yes, Lala, he sure did. Ladies, if you are ever in Los Angeles or London, I’ve listed my management company’s phone number on your maps of the Paris metro system, right underneath my autograph, so you be sure to contact me so I can take you all out to lunch.”
“Ohhh, Clive!” the women trilled as they scurried away, sounding rather charmingly like a female barbershop quartet at an assisted living facility.
Lala smiled at the women and waved to them.
“Bye, Ladies! Enjoy the crypts!”
She linked her arm in Clive’s and they stared at the three resting places that shared a hallowed space in the Pantheon. Clive was contemplative and absorbing. Lala was beside herself. Her entire body remained on a low but clearly discernible level of jubilant, highly-strung vibration. Lala shook her head in awe and whispered an homage to those she revered.
“Is this a triumvirate, or what? Dumas. And Victor Hugo. It’s Victor Hugo. I just . . . I . . . Victor Hugo. Right here. Dead. Victor Hugo. Wow. I mean . . . What can you say, except . . . Victor Hugo. Les Misérables. He wrote that. Wow. I . . . I . . . Wow.”
“Lala, do you need some water or something?”
“And like Dumas and Hugo aren’t enough? Zola? Émile Zola. He wrote J’accuse.”
“Yes, he did,” Clive said.
“His words helped get Alfred Dreyfus freed,” Lala said.
Clive did his best to look at her without turning his head, feeling somehow, instinctively, that any excessive movement could send her over the edge right now. And if the twitching she was engaging in was any indication, he was right.
“Lala, I’m thinking maybe we should find a bench and sit down for just a few—”
“After the poor man had been falsely convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island. ‘The truth is on the march, and nothing shall stop it,’ Zola wrote. This sepulcher is, like, mecca for devotion and words and justice, and I am profoundly moved and humbled, and I think I might be about to have an aneurysm. And if I do, this would not be the worst way to go.”
“Okay,” Clive said. “I’m giving you five more minutes here, and then I’m taking you outside to get some air.”
Clive held the door open for Lala as they exited the Pantheon. They blinked in the bright sunshine after having been in the darkened interior of the building for so long.
“Shall we go to Père Lachaise?” Clive asked.
“Oh, god, yes. Today has somehow become all about death and mourning and memory and devotion, and that is somehow a-okay with me. Terrence and I went to Père Lachaise when we were here on our honeymoon. It was very romantic. Abelard and Héloïse are buried there. Together. Talk about undying love. Sheesh.”
They walked to the nearest metro station and took the underground to the 20th Arrondissement. When they got out at the station for the cemetery, Clive grabbed Lala’s hand and led her on a run up the stairs to the outside. They found the nearest gate leading into Père Lachaise and then followed the signs for the Conservation Center, where they picked up two maps of the graves. Clive scanned his copy and made an announcement.
“I know which one I want to see first.”
He grabbed Lala’s hand again and started them on a quick walk through the paths around the graves.
“Running would be disrespectful,” Clive said. “But I am hearing a running soundtrack in my mind.”
“I did suspect you were starting to think that we’re in an Audrey Hepburn movie,” Lala said. “That’s not a complaint.”
“Here it is,” Clive said.
Lala looked at a bust of a man on top of a tall white marble base. There was a short, ornate wrought iron fence around it.
“Honoré de Balzac,” Lala said. “The Red and the Black. My college colors. And one of the best novels ever written. In my forever-less-than humble opinion.”
“I giggle every time I hear his name.” Clive confessed, not sounding a bit guilty.
“Because it sounds like ‘ball sack,’ of course. You are such a boy.” Lala consulted the map. “Where’s Édith Piaf’s grave?”
They found the great chanteuse’s tombstone and stood close to each other in silence, both of them swaying a bit in an unsung rhythm of her signature song. Unsung until the humming started. And especially unsung when the singing began.
“Non!” Lala sang, “rien de rien, non, je ne regrette rien!”
“What in the hell!” Clive barked.
“I’ve been told I sing in perfect thirds, which doesn’t—”
“Let’s just be on our way, shall we?” Clive said. He took Lala’s hand and led her away. “No need to disturb poor Edith’s eternal repose.”
They stopped at Sarah Bernhardt’s grave and Marcel Proust’s, and then they looked at each other, nodded in an agreement that required no words, and raced over to Oscar Wilde’s mammoth tomb, where they stood in reverend awe of the great writer and whispered favorite quotations.
“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
“If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.”
“I can resist anything except temptation.”
“The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.”
“Fucking fabulous,” Lala concluded.
“Fabulous as fuck,” Clive agreed.
Lala opened her bag, pulled out her lipstick and ladled it heavily on her mouth. She leaned forward and planted a big kiss on an upper corner of Wilde’s tomb, next to the hundreds of other lip prints already there.
They lingered over the graves of other inspiring and interesting individuals, including Molière, where Lala informed Clive that Molière was his stage name and his actual name was Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, and Clive told her he knew that because he had, after all, gone to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
After leaving Père Lachaise, they took the metro back in the direction of Lala’s apartment and, en route, decided to get off at a stop near the Luxembourg Gardens. Clive took Lala to a tiny sandwich shop where the owner/chef, an adorable, grandmotherly old woman, came bounding from behind the counter to give “mon cher Clive,” a big hug and to then kiss Lala on both cheeks and bid her a warm welcome, and where they got, per Clive’s enthusiastic recommendation, scrambled egg and onion sandwiches on baguettes that Madame Pinson had baked there and just taken out of the oven a half hour earlier.
Their first stop inside the park was at seats near the entrance to the Luxembourg Palace to eat their lunch, where Lala bent Clive’s ear about Celestine and the cats.
“Right off the bat, I disliked her. She’s got very negative energy. You can tell she’s not kind. Something has to be done. Yeah, we could relocate the cats to someplace safe. But then other cats will show up. That’s how it works with ferals. I need to do something. We need a stable feral colony in that garden. I need to make it happen. I’m sorry, I think I might be boring you?”
“Actually, you’re not. And if I can do anything to help save the cats, let me know.”
“Seriously?” Lala said.
“Yup.”
“Okay, at some point you may be sorry you said that.” Lala grabbed their napkins and empty wrappers and tossed them in a garbage can. “Man, you are lucky I’m engaged-to-be-engaged, because I would be such a crazed fan of
yours if I weren’t. I’d be that nut job who thinks you’re her boyfriend when you’ve never actually met. You’d need a restraining order, trust me on this.” She seized Clive’s hand and yanked him up out of his chair. “Come on, I want to walk all fifty-plus acres of this fabulous garden right now.”
After they covered maybe ten of those acres, they left the garden and Clive dropped Lala off at the entrance to her courtyard.
“Oh, Clive, while I’m thinking of it, do you know if Matthew’s brother likes men or women?”
“Men,” Clive said.
“Cool! Is he single?”
“Dunno,” Clive said.
“Can you please find out for me? I have some notions of matchmaking ping-ponging around in my head.”
Lala raced up the stairs, newly hopeful because she might have found a blind date for Kenny and because of Clive’s offer to help her help the cats.
What time is it in California? Cool! They should be in the office.
Lala grabbed a bottle of sparkling water from the fridge and sat at her desk. She opened her laptop and sent an e-mail to Zoe and Eliza asking when they could Skype and could that when please be now.
Come on come on come on come on, Lala silently chanted. Her computer pinged and she happily clicked on to the call. The screen filled up with the smiling faces of Zoe and Eliza in the production offices in Los Angeles. They were both holding their morning coffee cups in one hand and waving cheerfully to Lala with the other hand.
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