by Kirsten Koza
I decided to change the subject. “So...how was Barcelona?”
Languidly, the giant rabbit sat up, uncorked the wine, poured herself a glass, and took a drag of her Dunhill as a bad-kitty expression crossed her face.
“Well...?” I prodded, because I could tell she was dying to get out the story.
“Well.” Her naughty smile expanded. “Yesterday, our last night in the city, we went to a frightfully trendy new club. There was a small stage with a girl covered in whipped cream for the men, and a man in whipped cream for the women, and for a few euros you could go up and lick the stuff off their bodies. You can imagine. There was a queue around the corner for the girl. I mean, she had nothing on except whipped cream and men love that sort of thing. But no one was queuing up for the man. Bea didn’t want to do it, and Sophie didn’t want to do it, and somehow they decided that I ought to do it.” She chewed a pinkie finger on one hand and lifted up her glass with the other, her eyes glinting merrily.
“Eep!” I screeched in horrified, fascinated delight, bouncing up and down on the sofa in anticipation of what was coming next. “So did you?”
“You must be joking!” She wrinkled up her nose in disgust. “I wasn’t that drunk—plus you know how I loathe whipped cream.” She gave me a mischievous grin. “Then that obnoxious song starts up, you know the one—da da dum deedle deedle da da—and everyone goes simply mad and starts dancing and nobody cares anymore. It was like watching a mindless swarm of bees returning to the hive.” She took a condescending drag of her cigarette.
“That’s it?”
The giant rabbit stubbed out her cigarette in a hideous bowl picked up from a souk, paused, gave me a mock-appraising look, and lit a fresh cigarette, all the while looking very thoughtful, as if she were about to lecture on “The Meaning of Socratic Sacrifice in Ancient Greece.” She shifted her weight and then resumed: “Everybody is dancing, Bea and Sophie had simply vanished, and the poor boy looked bored out of his mind. I didn’t want him to feel too bad, so I went up and started talking to him.”
“You what?”
“I didn’t think he spoke any English!”
“What did you say?”
“Something like, hullo, you are a very pretty man, and I hope you don’t take it personally.”
“And…?”
“He said—in English English—‘I think you are the most gorgeous creature I’ve ever seen!’ I was so startled that I almost fell off the platform right there.”
“He wasn’t Spanish?”
“No, he’s a Brit! Turns out that he was just there on holiday and had done it on a bet. His mates promised him 300 quid if he’d stay up there for an hour. The club manager fancied his looks, so she agreed to give the regular fellow a break and let James strip for the ladies.”
“How on Earth do you have a conversation with a strange man wearing nothing but whipped cream?”
She took another long drag. “It was amazing. Turns out he not only went to Oxford, same as me, but now he’s a broker here in London. Believe it or not, we actually know some of the same people.”
“You bonded with this man? Onstage, in an S&M club in Barcelona?
“We started snogging right there!”
My mouth fell open.
Airily, she waved her cigarette to dismiss the notion that impulsively kissing a naked stranger might possibly be anything but proper. “In no time at all, you get used to being up on stage,” she said primly. “You forget that everyone in the entire room can see you.” Suddenly the impish smile returned to her face. “Then out of nowhere, his mates ran up and dumped beer on his head, and, well, no more whipped cream!”
“What!”
She sighed, a starry look in her eyes. “He insisted we meet here!”
“Here?” I blinked in surprise. “As in ‘London’ here, or ‘at your flat’ here? When?”
“Tomorrow!” she squealed. “He wants to use the money he won to take me someplace nice!”
Louise hadn’t been home when I’d returned to her apartment in London at 1:00 A.M. the next morning following my own confusing evening with a date that wasn’t a date. Ten hours later, she was still gone when I rolled out of bed and headed for Waterloo Station to hop a train to France, but any number of reasonable scenarios could explain her absence. Most likely: after dinner, she’d stayed out dancing ’til dawn with the stranger she’d met in Spain. Less likely: she’d dumped him, or he’d dumped her and she’d gone to Bea or Lily’s flat to be consoled. A call was definitely in order, but as soon as I arrived at my shabby studio rental in the 3rd arrondissement, I quickly discovered that it had no phone, and I couldn’t bring myself to subscribe to a mobile service. Hoping to catch her at home, I called her late at night from the Last Phone Booth in Paris—a pristine, transparent, squared-off test tube where not even a stroke of graffiti was allowed—where I stuck my Télécarte into the port and started pushing buttons.
“Louise?” I hollered into the phone. “Where are you? I can barely hear you.”
“I’m at The Cow getting a bite to eat!” she hollered back. “Sorry, the group’s a bit noisy.”
“What happened Saturday?”
“Such a story!” Pause. She was either taking a drag or a drink, depending on where she was in her meal. “Wait, you’ll be in Paris this weekend?”
“Planning on it. Wanna come over?”
“Hang on,” she ordered. In the background I could hear her asking “Ulrich” to ring the reservations line on his mobile and find out the Eurostar schedule. More shuffling noises, a muffled male voice burbling with her high-pitched tones, and then she came back on the line. “How’s this: there’s a late afternoon train leaving on Friday, gets in the Gare du Nord at 20:50, just in time for dinner. Does that work?”
“Sure.”
“Come meet me at the station?”
“Of course. Can’t wait!”
“Got to run! Kisses!” The phone clicked off.
The good thing, and the bad thing, about not having a phone is that you’ve got to actually see the other person if you want to find out what’s going on. The main thing was that Louise had survived her evening and sounded none the worse for wear. Given the way she’d met this fellow in the first place, however, it was possible that none of the plausible scenarios I’d imagined had occurred and something completely different happened. I’d just have to wait five days to find out.
So I made reservations at the weirdest restaurant in my neighborhood: the Auberge Nicolas Flamel. Established in 1407, the alchemist’s house was the oldest in Paris. Flamel claimed to have found the secret for turning lead into gold, and usually I would doubt such tales except he clearly passed on the secret to J.K. Rowling, who made billions by popping Flamel into Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Angels danced up the doorjambs of Flamel’s house, and deeply carved Gothic lettering announced in old French: “Icy on loge (Lodging here)” above the near left portal, and “Icy l’on boit et l’on mange (Drinking and eating here).” A lengthy inscription ran across the entire façade, which ended: “…forgive the poor deceased sinners, Amen.”
“What do you think?” I asked Louise, who’d arrived on schedule on the Eurostar, thrown her bags in my apartment, and rushed me out the door to get to the restaurant as quickly as possible.
“I can’t understand any of it,” she finally answered, scrunching up her face in bemused puzzlement, “but it certainly is old!”
Cautiously, we pushed through the door and immediately smacked into a single, off-center pier, roughly hewn out of wormwood. “Ow,” we both grumbled, rubbing our injured prides, and took stock of the room.
I hadn’t hit my head that hard and neither had Louise, but every line in the room was askew. The interior volume was an irregular trapezoid, and the ceiling beams had the haphazard appearance of a box of no. 2 pencils upchucked by giant beavers. It quickly became apparent why my old friend Henri had urged me to make reservations: the din
ing room held no more than fifteen tables, the majority of which were already occupied by experts in the fine art of speaking without sound.
Our table gave Louise an excellent view of the entire room and me a good view of a terrible contemporary painting. Off to one side, the daily menu was written neatly in cursive on a small chalkboard.
A waiter whisked forward. “Would you care to consult the wine list?” he murmured in almost inaudible tones. Handing over a thick folder, he took our orders without wincing at our French and evaporated with a polite nod. As I flipped through the pages of vintages and labels, the little detail that popped out at me was a tidbit about the building’s history. Flamel had set up his auberge as a refuge for travelers and wayward girls.
“Wayward” was such a nice euphemism for willful women who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, follow the rules. I wondered if Henri had suggested this place because he knew I’d pick up on his little joke. Women who get lost easily are bound to be traveling a lot, and he was quite aware of my lousy sense of direction.
“What happened in London with Alex?” Louise resumed in English, her face eager and hopeful for good news.
“Ugh,” I made a sour face. “Let’s just say that the whole situation was bizarre.”
Her face fell in shocked surprise, melting directly into an appropriately sympathetic configuration.
“He showed up with another woman,” I added dryly, “a bitchy blonde.”
The shocked look took over again.
“And,” I added neutrally, as I casually sipped my water, “she went home with him.”
“He did what!” Louise exclaimed, setting her glass down abruptly. “Your ex-boyfriend insists you come to dinner, shows up with another woman, and then throws you over for her?” She flung up a corresponding arm to make her point, accidentally thwacking the painting behind her head. Now the thing was not only ugly, it was crooked.
“More or less,” I sighed. By now, all the emotional force had drained from the story. I just wanted to give Louise the basics and move on.
“That’s terrible!” When she was indignant, her hair had a way of bristling straight up that reminded me of an angry cockatiel.
“To make a long story short,” I concluded archly, “I’ve thrown away his phone numbers again. Goodbye. The End.”
Right on cue, the wine and main dishes arrived at our table, as if to signal the end of the prologue and the beginning of the main narrative. Both dishes were simply presented, but my main interest was getting to Louise’s story.
“All right, Louise,” I commanded. “Enough procrastinating. You have to tell me what happened!”
She stuck an investigative fork into her scallops. “He took me to the Oak Room. Have you heard of it?” she inquired doubtfully, not really expecting an answer. “Anyhow, after the reception at the Tate, he called and asked me to meet him there. Thank god I was wearing a halfway decent dress. I popped off in a cab and got there in about 25 minutes.”
“Huh,” I said noncommittally, munching on a buttered slice of white potato. “Was he already there?”
Instead of replying, she tipped her head over slightly. I wondered if she was unconsciously adjusting her view to match the slope in the ceiling. “I was a bit worried,” she nattered in a non-sequitur sort of way, going on about fears and hopes and the problems with Spanish cabs, eventually coming back around to the subject at hand. “You meet people in clubs, and you’ve had a bit much, and it’s different seeing them in normal light.” She righted her head momentarily. Then, cautiously, she tipped it back over again. With a sigh, she said: “He had on a smart suit, and turns out he’s just as good looking with his clothes on.”
“That’s a reversal of the usual order of things, isn’t it?”
Making a face, she ignored my little jibe. “IN THE MEANTIME,” she plowed on loudly, having resolved to get out her story as quickly as possible lest she get sidetracked again, “I’d rung mutual friends to see if he really was who he said he was, that sort of thing.”
“Was he?”
“Most definitely yes. Turns out he’d been living in Singapore, doing work for a Japanese firm, and had only returned back to London recently. That’s why we hadn’t met before.”
“Any dirt?”
She shook her head. “Not married, not seeing anyone as far as Lily, Ulrich, or anyone else knew. Has the usual skeletons in the closet—the balmy uncle with a sheep fetish in Shropshire, that sort of thing, but,” she beamed, “—who doesn’t?”
Oh dear. Being willing to wave away pervy relatives is a good sign that she’s besotted. “All right,” I nudged. “You’re at the restaurant. Then what?”
“We get seated right away. Everything is lovely—he’s lovely, the setting’s lovely, and the food’s lovely. I’m positively floating through the meal.”
“What did you order?”
Her expression suddenly went blank. She leaned forward as if about to speak and then abruptly sat back again. “I can’t remember.”
“You go to one of the best restaurants in London and you don’t remember what you ate?”
She hunched over, focusing. “There were truffles in there somewhere, the mushroom kind.” Her expression focused again, and then she broke out into a laugh of happy embarrassment. “That’s the best I can do!” Relaxing her posture, she slid down and flopped her arms over the sides of her chair, mocking her rag-doll self, then promptly sat back up, her spine schoolgirl straight again.
The cool brunette at the next table shot her a reprimanding stare. Louise put her best upper-crust Brit face back on and stared snottily right back. The woman’s face registered surprise and irritation, and then turned away.
“Better behave in here, hadn’t I?” Louise whispered conspiratorially, leaning far across the table, her ears fairly wiggling with glee.
“That woman is going to go home tonight and tell every person she knows that Brits are a bunch of ill-mannered snobs,” I whispered back, leaning far forward so the brunette couldn’t hear me.
“Sod off, then, I say!” she giggled, doing her best imitation of a Cockney accent. It wasn’t very good, worse than me trying to fake a Texan drawl.
“So, he was lovely, dinner was lovely…the point is, where were you all night?” I stage-whispered across the table.
“Flying!” she squeaked, sitting back again in her chair.
“Flying?” Her answer perplexed me. “You mean, metaphorically?”
“He has a plane!”
“He has a plane?” I repeated, in a loud incredulous voice. It was too loud, apparently, for the neighbors: this time, the patronizing brunette decided to glare icicles at me. I gave her a big, toothy, American, “Hey there, how are ya?” smile. Her face scrunched up in disgust at my unseemly lack of repentance. She turned away again, having clearly decided to pretend that we were a pair of badly trained poodles. When, to my great disappointment, she didn’t attempt to bribe me with a treat, I turned my attention back to Louise.
“Well, not quite,” she corrected herself. “He has a sort of timeshare arrangement with another person. They split it every other week.”
“You went up in his plane?”
She nodded, and dug into her scallops.
“…after supper?” That was like swimming after eating: the sort of thing that was disastrous for the digestion. She knew it, I knew it; it wasn’t the kind of thing worth pretending didn’t happen. Because it did. All the time. In odd places. Including up in the air in a two-seater, which do not come with bathrooms.
Her head bobbed in confirmation. “It was brilliant!” she beamed, sweeping up her glass of wine and taking a big gulp for emphasis. “There’s a private airfield just outside of the city. He drove us out there, and then we went up.”
She looked euphoric. This man was incredibly well equipped. I wondered what he carried around in his pockets. He’d probably be able to fish out a first-aid kit, the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary, and a
box of cherry cordials, and somehow keep it all from ruining the line of his trousers.
“Then you flew around all night?”
She shook her head. “No.” Her eyes glinted merrily. “We circled around London, and then we went to Scotland. It took about three hours.”
“You went to Scotland?” I repeated. The echo function in my brain refused to turn off.
“We had a wonderful trip. It was just about dawn when we started to fly over the moors. The colors were simply breathtaking. I’d never seen anything like it.” She looked positively giddy.
“I can’t believe you did all that on the spur of the moment!” The thing was, I did believe it. I’d known her since we were teenagers, and this wasn’t even close to being her most unusual date.
She nodded, smiling blissfully like she’d just been given a basket of kittens.
“So did anything happen? You must have landed somewhere?”
“We landed in a small airfield just outside of Edinburgh. At least I think that’s where we were.” She didn’t look like she cared. “Then we stopped off at a pub to get a bite, got refueled, turned around and came back.”
“And…?”
“We did get in a bit of snogging when we got back.” She chewed her pinky finger, a look of fond reminiscence crossing her face. “But that’s all.” She still looked amazingly happy.
I gulped down several chunks of lamb. I’d been so startled by her narrative that I’d forgotten to eat. “Let me get this straight.” I took a cleansing sip of water. “He treats you to one of London’s best restaurants, flies you around in his plane, whooshes you over to Scotland, and behaves like a perfect gentleman the whole time.” Louise was still gnawing on her pinky. “What is this man going to do for an encore?” I stopped and thought a second. “I’m jumping the gun here. Is there going to be an encore?”