by Jeremy Bates
Bridgette emailed me a number of times. I think she was worried about me, my mental health, though she didn’t come out and say this. I always replied, though briefly. She wanted my phone number, wanted to talk. I told her I didn’t have a US number yet, which was true. I was in no rush to get one either.
Danièle emailed too, almost every day at first, then a few times a week, then, over the last two months, hardly at all. I missed speaking with her, but I also believed it was for the best. She was an ocean away. We both had to move on.
One person I had been happy to hear from was my old boss. He emailed me one day to inquire when I would be returning to work. I thought he was kidding. I had assumed the travel guide company would have wanted to distance itself from someone who’d made the type of headlines I’d made. But my boss was serious. He said I could return whenever I felt up to it. I guess I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I had been; he’d always been a friend as much as a boss. Moreover, since I’ve been back at the New York office, I’ve gotten the feeling he held himself partly responsible for what happened in Paris, given it was his idea to send me to France in the first place. That was nonsense, of course, but that was the type of guy he was.
I finished my coffee, dumped the paper cup and my half-eaten fries in a bin, and left the restaurant. It was late November and freezing cold outside. Snow fell in a kaleidoscope of flakes, leaving a white and bright layer over everything except for slushy brown tracks on the streets and sidewalks. Everybody had their heads down, their hoods up, against the chill. Several people carried umbrellas.
Manhattan’s Chinatown was great for being anonymous. I was a six-foot-four Caucasian, but none of the Asians here recognized me, or if they did, they didn’t say anything. This was not the case in other parts of the city, where I got “Hey, Moleman!” and “Yo, Walking Dead!” and other stuff of a similar nature on a regular basis.
I made my way to my apartment building. It was on a warehouse street that even in the pit of winter smelled of dead fish. I greeted Jimmy, who acted as both doorman and concierge, then took the stairs to the fifth floor of the walkup. I stopped as soon as I entered the hallway. Someone was sitting with their back against my door, their knees pulled to their chest.
Another “fan?” Aside from the idiots who called me Moleman, there were others, both men and women, who would come up to me and start a conversation. It didn’t matter where I was—a park, a bar, a restaurant—they simply strolled over and started yacking it up. Most of them, I suspect, thought it was neat to be talking to someone of infamy. A few, however, were urban explorers who invited me to join them in the abandoned subway tunnels beneath New York City. I was blunt with the lot, telling them I wanted to be left alone. Their responses varied from polite and apologetic to indignant and offended, as if I was the one being rude for wanting to mind my own business. Nevertheless, they all eventually let me be—and no one had yet shown up on my doorstep.
I considered turning around, coming back later, but that was stupid. This was my apartment. I wasn’t getting run away from my own home.
I walked down the hallway. The person stirred in response to my footsteps and lifted their face in my direction. It was a woman. For a moment—not longer than a heartbeat—I didn’t recognize her. Then I said, “Danièle?”
She shot to her feet. “Will!”
We embraced, and I breathed in an unfamiliar jasmine-scented perfume. I stepped apart and grinned and said, “Wow.”
She grinned back. Her hair was longer, but other than that she looked just as good as I remembered. “Are you surprised to see me?”
“Obviously. What are you doing here?”
“I was in New York…and I decided to drop by.”
“You were in New York?” I said skeptically.
“Do not worry, Will, I did not come all the way from Paris just to see you. I am not a psycho stalker. I am here for other reasons that I will tell you about if you decide to invite me inside.”
“Yeah, sure, right.” I unlocked and opened the door.
She stepped inside, and I followed behind her. The unit had high ceilings, an exposed brick wall, a renovated kitchen, and newly refinished cherry wood floors. The rent was a bit more than I wanted to pay, but it was a block from the F train, which was what I took to work, and it had large corner windows that let in a lot of sunlight, which sealed the deal.
“I like it,” Danièle said, moving to the brick wall, on which hung several oil-on-canvas paintings. “Hey!” she exclaimed. “That is my bicycle!”
I went to stand beside her. The painting depicted a woman riding a pink bicycle with white fenders and a wicker basket along a cobbled street. “Looks like it, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, and even she looks like me.”
The woman’s face was turned away from the viewer, but she was thin and had short-cropped black hair.
“Where did you get this—?” She glanced at me, her eyes widening in understanding. “You painted it?”
I nodded.
“I did not know you painted.”
“I took it up.”
Danièle walked down the wall, studying the other paintings: a section of the Jardin des Plants I had particularly enjoyed, the tire swing hanging from the old maple at my parents’ house, the view of neon and slummy anarchy outside my window.
“They are very good,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“And you painted me.” She smiled. “That means you missed me.”
“A little bit.”
“Good. Because I do not know about you, Will. You stopped emailing…”
“You stopped.”
“Because I always wrote first. You simply replied. So I stopped to see if you would write first. You never did.”
“I’m sure I did.”
“I am sure you did not.”
“You were so far away…”
“Yes, I know, I know. You do not need to tell me one of your famous excuses.” She looked around the flat. “Do you have any other paintings?”
“A few.”
I led her to my bedroom and pointed to several canvases stacked against each other in the corner.
She flicked through them. “Oh, I like these too…” She studied one for longer than the others. “Is that…? It is.”
She pulled it out and showed it to me, though of course I knew which one she was referring to. Katja’s portrait stared back at me. Initially I had planned to paint only her eyes. I had wanted to capture them, their intensity and innocence, so I would never forget them. But then I found myself unable to stop there. I wanted to know what she might have looked like had she not been disfigured, and I ended up painting her entire face, unblemished, perfect.
I said, “I was thinking about her one day…”
“She is beautiful.”
I nodded, but I didn’t want to talk about Katja. “So where about are you staying?” I asked.
Danièle set the canvas back on the floor, stared at it for another couple seconds, then turned to me. “The Belvedere.”
“In Hell’s Kitchen.”
“What a stupid name for a neighborhood, yes? Why would tourists ever stay in a neighborhood called that?”
“You did.”
“Because it reminded me of you.”
“Me?”
“Remember in the catacombs, when I showed you that inscription of the street name in the wall, and explained how an entire neighborhood had collapsed into a tunnel…?”
“Hell Street,” I said.
“Yes. So when I saw a hotel located in Hell’s Kitchen, I thought of you, and I decided it would be a good story to tell you when I arrived here.”
I nodded. It made sense in a wacky Danièle-logic sort of way. “So what are you doing here?” I asked her.
“I am studying.”
“Studying?”
“I was accepted to MIT’s School of Engineering.”
“Shit! Congratulations, Danièle!”
She beamed. “
I told you I was not going to be a florist forever.”
I shook my head. “So you’re living, where, in Cambridge?”
“Yes, I have been there for about a month now. I wanted to come sooner to New York to visit you, but there was so much I had to do.”
“Yeah, no problem, whatever, I—I just can’t believe you’re so close now. It’s like, what, a three-hour drive?”
“The bus took me four hours.”
“How did you know where I lived?”
“I called your work. Someone named Scott Swiercz-something gave me your address.”
“He’s my boss. Bastard never told me anything.”
“I told him not to. I told him it was a surprise.”
“Well…fuck, Danièle! I’m blown away. Do you want a drink? We should celebrate.”
“How about dinner? I worked up an appetite sitting outside your door.”
“Did Jimmy just let you up?”
“The doorman? Yes—I told him not to say anything either.”
“Great security, huh? Let me get my jacket. There’s a good—”
“I thought we could eat in,” she said. “You promised to make me a French dinner. Remember—you, me, and your hot twenty-year-old neighbor.”
“Madame Gabin, right.” I shrugged. “Okay, French home cooking it is. Um—do you know any recipes?”
We inventoried my refrigerator and cupboards, Danièle decided I had the ingredients to attempt a beef bourguignon, and we spent the next two hours preparing and cooking it, polishing off two bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon in the process.
I didn’t have a dining table—I usually ate at my computer—so we spread out a picnic on the thick-pile rug in the middle of the living room. It was the most fun I’d had since…since I could remember.
At some point we ended up leaning against the sofa, folk music playing from the stereo system, Danièle’s head resting on my shoulder. Outside the windows dusk turned to night, and the room filled with shadows. When those shadows threatened to blend into a unified blackness, the nightlights switched themselves on.
“You have nightlights?” Danièle said, her voice startling me. I had been half asleep and had thought she’d been too.
“Yeah…a few…” I said.
“Me too.”
“Really?”
“I’m afraid of the dark.”
“Get a place with big windows.”
A chuckle. “Will?”
“Yeah?”
“I missed you.”
“I missed you too.”
“Did you really?”
“Yeah.”
“You do not have to fake it—”
“I’m not faking anything.”
“Will you visit me in Cambridge?”
“Of course.”
“Good…” She snuggled closer.
Just as I was drifting off once more, she said, “Will?”
“Yeah?”
“Hold me.”
I wrapped my arm around her shoulder and held her.
About The Author
Jeremy Bates is the author of the number #1 Amazon bestseller White Lies, which was shortlisted for the 2012 Foreword Book of the Year Award. He is a graduate of the University of Western Ontario with a degree in English literature and philosophy.