Oh well, I thought, the one consolation about being in the merde is that the only way is out.
Although, come to think of it, there was a second way to go—deeper in.
4
Mike, Alexa, and I had some Boston creme pie—not a pie at all, but a skyscraper of a custard-filled layer cake—and a soothing quantity of Sam Adams beer. And as the beer soaked in, I began to get philosophical.
There are times, I reflected, when it's best to accept humiliation and play for sympathy. Mike and the people in woolly underwear weren't really malicious—they just thought my arrival in Boston was a big joke. Which, of course, it was.
So I milked the story of the Bronx iguana and the Mini with the wrong flag, and got them laughing with rather than at me. The fancy-dress group were official Boston guides, it turned out, and they started to brainstorm on places in town where I could hold a party at short notice.
"The trouble is," the giant with the ponytail said, "so many places have anti-British historical resonances. I mean, there was the Boston Massacre here in 1770.1 bet you don't know about that, do you?"
"No," I confessed. "When I was at school we didn't tend to spend much time on British massacres."
"Your troops panicked and fired into a crowd of innocent civilians, killing five," the giant said.
"Huh, call that a massacre?" Mike pitched in. "They killed twenty Irishmen on Bloody Sunday."
"And the whole French nobility at Agincourt in 1415," Alexa added. "Many of them after they had surrendered."
"That's not all, though," the giant went on. "We have the Old State House, where the Declaration of Independence was read out. And the battleground at Bunker Hill, where our men were told, Don't fire until—"
"You see the whites of their eyes," I chorused with the other guides. We clinked glasses and drank a toast to the whiteness of English eyes.
"You see," Mike said, "this whole city is a tourist trail of anti-English revolt. It'll be like setting up a tea party in a minefield."
It might be simpler to do just that, I thought. At least I wouldn't have to do any washing up.
Alexa and I took a taxi to our B&B, which turned out to be a funky little place in a cool-looking part of town. It was in a street of brownstone houses, the ground floors and basements of which were taken up by tattoo parlors, bars, and punkish clothing shops. There was even a store selling nothing but condoms.
The B&B had thick carpets, efficient heating, and a young Korean receptionist with fluorescent pink streaks in her black hair and dangerously low-cut jeans.
"I'm me," she said. A very Asian thing to say, I thought. We're all me in our own way.
"Hello, you," I said.
She giggled and pulled at a lock of pink hair. "No, it's my name. M-I, Mi. If you need anything, just ask for Mi."
I laughed until I caught Alexa eyeing me with a "Why do you always have to act the idiot with attractive girls?" expression on her face.
Mi showed us up to our room, which had refurbished gothic furniture and a view of a tiny service alleyway of parked cars and huge garbage cans, the kind where bodies get dumped in American films.
"OK, the view sucks, but it's quieter than in front," Mi said. "It gets, like, crazy out there at night."
Which suited me a lot better than having the craziness inside, as we'd had in the Bronx.
"You don't have any idea where I could organize a tea party, do you?" I asked her on an impulse.
"A what?"
I explained the problem and gave her my phone number in case.
"If you have any brainwaves, just call me, Mi," I said, and we shared another laugh.
"You gave her your number," Alexa said when Mi had gone downstairs with a generous tip nestling in her tiny jeans pocket.
"Yes."
"Do you give your number to any girl who smiles at you?" Her eyes were shooting icicles at me.
"No. I'm in a crisis here, Alexa. In a strange city, with a tea party to organize and absolutely no support from the people—including your friend Mike—who were meant to be helping me. So yes, I gave her my number."
"There's no need to be so aggressive."
"I'm sorry, you're right. It's not your fault."
We both stood silently for a few moments, letting the bad vibes dissipate.
"I'm sure if you asked Mike again, he would help you," Alexa said.
"If you asked him, you mean. He'd set up a leprechaun cull if you fluttered your eyelashes at him."
Alexa didn't answer.
We went across the street to a bookshop-wi-fi cafe so that I could check out a list of function rooms, tea shops, and restaurants in the city—anywhere that could hold a party. I also wanted to read up on Boston's history in the hope of avoiding any more Anglo-American conflicts. I now had only twenty-six hours to put things right. I wasn't going to get a second chance.
The shop was the kind of place where you could find ten different books on Taoist pet care and no thrillers. Its cafe smelled of cinnamon and pesto, and had waitresses with more earrings than eyebrow hairs. It was full of studenty types working together, flirting together, or both.
I hooked up to die wi-fi and did a search on Boston, while Alexa read through the guidebook. I soon found a website that gave a leaf-by-leaf account of the Tea Party. Apparently it had involved a group of Americans who wore disguises to fool the English into thinking tliat their tea crop had been destroyed by black slaves and Indians. But their getup was so amateurish that one of die English sailors wrote that "about eighty men came, some of diem dressed and whooping like Indians." So much for revolution—it was a belated Halloween party.
The website said that die Brits could have saved their tea if diey'd been a bit sharper at business. The English government had tried to force the American colonies to buy their tea exclusively from the motherland, and pay tax on all imports, even though the Bostonians usually got it cheap from France and Holland. Knowing this, die English offered to undercut the black-market imports, but stupidly they let it be known that even the new lower price included a nominal tax, so the Americans still went ahead and emptied the cargo into the harbor. If the Brits had just shut up about die tax, the Tea Party—maybe the whole revolution—would never have happened. Perhaps that was the real reason they kicked us out, I thought—we were such bad capitalists.
I was about to share this irony with Alexa when my phone rang. A waitress glared down at me for disturbing the karma, so I hurried out into the cold to answer. It was Suraya.
"I think I have found something for you." She sounded excited.
"Found what?"
"A place for your party. Indoors, of course. And heated." She was positively buoyant. "I have a male colleague, you see, and he lives in the same street as me, and we both come on scooters to work, so we often ride together ..."
"Yes?" I tried to scoot her along. My fingers were already starting to turn blue.
"I told him about our problem, and his father's best friend has a restaurant in Boston."
"An Indian restaurant?"
"Yes. They often hold wedding parties there. And I just called the owner and he is definitely willing to hold a tea party for us."
I mulled this over for a second or two. An English tea party in an Indian restaurant?
"Suraya, you're a genius," I told her.
5
Alexa and I went downtown on the subway, which Boston calls the T, probably just to provoke British tourists. It was basically an underground trolley, and like a trolley it seemed to make a designated stop about every hundred yards, so that our three-station ride took a matter of seconds.
The restaurant was down at Quincy Market, the building I'd noticed earlier that looked like a white Greek temple. In fact, it was a temple to American food. Inside the city's old market hall, there were stalls selling everything from hot dogs and ribs to health food and chocolate-dipped strawberries.
Around the building was a big cobbled square—a pedestrian zone, too—that was ringed
by cafes, restaurants, and boutiques. The Indian restaurant was here, on the south-facing side of the square that was catching die pale afternoon sun. Even now, on a cold workday afternoon, there were plenty of people milling about. The square was a magnet for passing trade, the ideal place for my party.
The restaurant was called the Yogi Mahal, and a blazing electronic sign across its facade advertised "world-class Indian, Bengali, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Vegetarian, and Halal cuisine." The owner clearly didn't want to alienate anyone who might once have enjoyed a curry somewhere. This was the spirit of enterprise that had been missing from my campaign so far.
Inside, the restaurant was the usual mix of maharajah's palace and velvet-wallpaper factory, with incense and faint Bombay disco completing the sensory overload.
A white-shirted Indian waiter greeted us, and I asked to see the owner, Mr. Randhawa.
Seconds later, a short, hyperactive guy in a gray suit came bustling in from the kitchen. He held out a large hand with two hefty gold rings weighing it down, and flashed a smile that looked as if it had been molded in finest porcelain. Business was pretty good, I guessed.
"Paul? Ma'am? Siddown, please. Have some tea with spices, our best chai. We can also make normal English tea, of course. Vijay, chais here!" His accent was mid-Pacific— Indian with sudden incrustations of American.
Over an excellent milky spiced tea, we quickly got down to business. The tea party could take up the whole restaurant, Mr. Randhawa said. At five in the afternoon, they didn't have many other customers, anyway. He could provide so much tea at such-and-such a price, source so many English-style cakes and sandwiches, and lay on six staff— his sons and nephews, who helped out when they weren't studying for their science degrees. He even promised to get in touch with the mayor and a few key people, and make sure that the event got enough notable visitors to ensure a write-up in the press.
"I will call a friend at WBFM to get the party announced on the radio. I will print some posters for the window. I will call the mayor now, and I am playing racquetball with him at eight tomorrow morning, so he will not forget." Mr. Randhawa was a guy who'd come to America to make as many decisions as he could in as short a time as possible, it seemed. He chortled happily and spun his gold elasticized watchstrap around on his wrist.
I watched him and fell in love with his optimism.
"So shall we say five hundred dollars now and the balance after the party?" he said, still chortling. You don't get big watches and a smile like that just by being optimistic, I realized, and reached for my Visitor Resources credit card.
The only problem we hit—apart from a short and terrifying delay getting permission for such a big debit on the card—was what to call the party. For historical reasons we obviously couldn't bill it as a British or English tea party.
"How about Friendship tea party?" I suggested, but that sounded too much like a religious sect.
"Peace party?" Alexa said.
"Americans hate pacifists." Mr. Randhawa was dismissive. "No, I know. We must call it a 'We Love America' tea party. They will come to that." At first I wanted to laugh, but he was serious, and carried on brainstorming to himself. "A big poster saying, 'We heart America, come to a free tea party offered by the government of our British allies.' How about that?"
It was stunningly cynical, but brilliant.
6
While Alexa went off to do some filming, Mi very kindly let me make some local calls from the reception desk at the B&B, and even helped me look up the numbers on the Internet.
She seemed to be really excited about the project. She said she'd love to come and work at the party and wear a GB heart USA T-shirt, as long as it wasn't too loose. She preferred her T-shirts short and tight, she told me, like the low-cut black one she was wearing now. She pulled open her jacket to show me, and I was able to confirm that her T-shirt was indeed very tight, and yes—when she stood up—quite short, too. Though it would have needed to be abnormally long to reach down to the top of those waistband-less jeans.
"I'll take my jeans off," she said. I gulped. "I've done some waitressing, and they usually prefer me to wear a skirt." A very short one, it seemed, that came down to an imaginary line which she traced with a forefinger across her thighs and around her bum.
"You OK, Paul?" she asked.
"Yes, it's just the air in here. My eyeballs seem to have dried out."
"Yeah, it's really dry with this heating on. I have to use lip balm the whole time."
She pulled a small honey-scented tube from her jacket pocket and began kissing it passionately.
I ground the heel of my left shoe into the toes of my right foot. Intense pain was the only way to get my mind and body back on the job I had to do. If I hadn't known better, I'd have said that Mi had been hired by the French to seduce me away from the goals of my American tour.
* * *
To be fair, though, at least one French person seemed to be backing my bid for victory.
Elodie rang, concerned that she hadn't heard anything and wondering whether I'd driven the Mini into Long Island Sound. I updated her about our enforced TGV ride, and described the excellent venue for my tea party.
"An Indian restaurant?" Elodie scoffed, clearly not appreciating the closeness of Britain's ties with its ex-colonies.
"Yes, it's perfect." It struck me now that the restaurant was far better than anywhere Mike would have found. He'd have set things up in a corner of an Irish pub. "I can't see any signs that there's a French event planned here, though," I said. "You don't know if your fellow countrymen are doing anything, do you?"
"No. But I read in Le Monde about a group of French engineers on some kind of official visit to Boston."
It was my turn to scoff. French engineers? Engineericus Gallicus has to be the world's least sexy species, instantly recognizable because of its bad haircut, mismatched shirt and tie, and the body of a man whose only exercise is calculating concrete stress levels. No way were they going to attract hordes of excited Bostonians as they toured the city.
"Merci, Elodie," I said. "You just made my day."
Next morning, things were still looking good. I picked up the T-shirts I'd ordered (including one XXS for Mi) and went to check in with Mr. Randhawa, who now insisted that I call him Babar. His wife's nickname for him, he said. I didn't like to ask which bit of his squat anatomy resembled a cartoon elephant.
When I got to the restaurant at about eleven, he was talking to a large white guy who didn't look as though he was ordering a spicy chai. "Sorry, I know, you're right," Babar was saying, but the guy kept ranting on at him in a foreign accent. Italian, maybe. Not Sicilian, I hoped.
But no, Babar told me when the guy had gone that he was the manager of the wine bar opposite. And he wasn't too pleased about this sudden tea party clashing with his happy hour. Usually the bars and restaurants warned each other in advance of special events.
"It's OK," Babar said, waving his ringed fingers in the air. "I told him you had been let down by the Irish-American Association and that the whole city seemed to be against you."
"The whole city?" Had there been some new disaster?
"Oh, I was just dramatizing. You know that everything in America must be larger than life. Don't worry. Have a cup of tea."
He was right. When I sat down and warmed myself with his milky chai, my worries floated away like the steamy breath of the people walking past the restaurant window. Several of them, office-worker types, stopped to read the posters and look inside.
Babar dropped a stack of paper on my table.
"Labels," he said, peeling off a small rectangular section from the top sheet. "For the cakes."
"Pardon?"
"We must write labels for the cakes. I have ordered portions of hazelnut cake, and we will have to serve each one on a small paper plate, with a label saying, 'Warning, may contain nuts.'"
This, I declared, had to be a joke.
"No," he insisted. "We could get sued if someone with a nut aller
gy eats the cake, or if someone chokes on a piece of nut. It is best to write the labels."
"But of course hazelnut cake contains nuts. That's why it's called hazelnut cake," I argued. "Why not just write 'May contain cake'?"
"You have never done business in America, my friend," he said, placing a pen in my hand.
Writing my lines took me back to school punishments for passing love letters to girls in class. It also reminded me of Benoit, translating labels for the cakes and sausages back in Paris. Both of our tasks were absurd, but they might just save me from financial disaster. I knuckled down and got on with it, while Babar kept me amused by describing his rac-quetball game against the mayor, which, as usual, he had lost in a tiebreaker, thereby making the mayor feel good enough to promise that the voting committee for the World Tourism contest would come along to the tea party.
"I will call City Hall and ask if any of them have food or tea allergies," Babar said, completely earnest.
When I got back to the B&B, Mi was at reception and stood up to show me her thighs. Well, I'm not sure if that was her exact intention, but she told me she had already got her waitress's skirt on, and when she showed me the tiny black garment, I just happened to notice that it left a lot of thigh open to the elements.
"Tell her she should put some tights on or her panties will freeze. If she's wearing any," said a French voice behind me. Alexa had come in from the street and was scrutinizing Mi's legs even more attentively than I was.
I grabbed the room key and told Mi we'd see her later.
"All of her, probably," Alexa felt obliged to add.
"A bad morning's filming?" I asked as we climbed the stairs.
Just for a microsecond, Alexa blushed, a sign that she didn't want to talk about something.
"No, no, it was great," she said. "This is a really cool city.
There's an area of old houses around Boston Common that reminds me of the Marais. And the Old Souse Meeting House is fascinating."
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