by Robyn Sisman
She sidled down the broad deck, trailing her hand along the rail. The frustrating thing about arriving here at night was that she couldn’t see anything properly. Where, for example, was the Eiffel Tower, whose ubiquity in photographs suggested it was visible from every square inch of Paris? She followed the deck as it curved round to the front of the boat, stopping every few paces to crane her neck left and right, not even knowing where to look.
A faint movement in the semi-darkness made her stiffen. She registered a fruity tobacco smell. Then a voice said, “Vous cherchez quelque-chose?” You are searching for something?
She knew he was smiling even before she looked round, just as a prickle of goosebumps between her shoulder blades told her that something extraordinary was about to happen. He was leaning back against the rail a few feet away from her, smoking: thin, twentysomething, heart-stoppingly handsome, with dark hair carelessly swept back and hot, pinched eyes that rested on hers as he waited for an answer to his question.
“No. Well, yes,” she replied, so flustered that she momentarily forgot how to speak French. “I was looking for the Eiffel Tower.”
“Mais alors, one can’t see it from here.” His voice was wonderfully scornful. “It’s over there, behind the mountain of Sainte Geneviève.” As he indicated the correct direction, Molly saw his profile briefly illuminated by the lighthouse turret: sloping forehead, straight nose, yesterday’s stubble shadowing the angled plane that ran from ear to chin, a boyish smudge of eyelashes.
“I didn’t know,” she said, stepping closer. “I only arrived in Paris this evening.”
He picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue. “Tourist?”
Molly’s chin rose in protest against this label. “I am here,” she said in careful French, “to—to regard the beautiful things of history and of culture.”
“Ah, oui?” He took a drag of his cigarette and narrowed his eyes against the trickling smoke. “And the beautiful men?” he inquired.
Her skin tingled. This man had insouciance in spades.
“Perhaps. If I find any.” Molly thrilled to her own audacity. But she was a beautiful woman: she’d had it in writing.
He cocked an eyebrow. “You are English?”
“No, I am from Turkey.”
For a moment he seemed to half believe her. Then he caught the mischief in her face and they both burst out laughing. He had white, even teeth. When he smiled his eyelids stretched into sensuous upward curves.
“The Turkish girls, quand même, don’t have the beautiful blonde hairs like you.” He examined her in silence for a moment, then took his cigarette out of his mouth, held it between thumb and index finger, and flicked it into the river. Uncrossing his legs, he eased himself off the rail. “On danse?”
There it was again, that insidious impersonal pronoun. He didn’t exactly ask her to dance; she didn’t exactly agree. It was simply going to happen.
Instead of leading her back down into the hold, he grasped her hands and started to dance with her right here on the deck. Out in the open air the music was muted, and so was his dancing, a kind of slow jive she’d seen other people do but had never dared attempt.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she apologized.
“It’s easy.” He drew her forward, pushed her away, turned her round, dropped her hands, reached for them again. It was like playing a game—a slow, silent, sexy game. Molly watched the way his body moved under his jeans and shirt, and felt she was being hypnotized. Her body began to respond to the rhythm. Soon she was snaking past him, sliding back to back, twirling in and out of his lazy embrace.
While they danced, they talked. So: she had come to Paris for the weekend. Alone? Yes—though, of course, she had friends here. She worked in London. Her job was very interesting. Quite a lot of responsibility and international travel and—and so forth. What about him?
He was born in Paris and had lived here all his life, though naturally his family had a country place too—nothing special, just a gentilhommière in the Loire. Until last summer he’d been studying art at the university, but he’d had to drop out. Money problems.
“Quel dommage,” Molly murmured, and remembered to slip in the fact that she, too, had been to university. She didn’t want him to think she was a birdbrain who just went clubbing. All the time, as his eyes glanced down into hers and she watched the mobility of his mouth and dark eyebrows, she felt the pressure of excitement building in her chest, in her throat.
At the end of the song they stopped and faced each other.
“I am called Fabrice,” he said.
“And I’m Molly.”
“Bonsoir, Molly.” He reached out and shook her hand with a teasing formality that made her smile.
But he didn’t mean good-bye, did he? Not now. Not yet.
“Tell me about Paris,” she said quickly. “Where should I go? What should I see?”
“You mean ‘the beautiful things of history and of culture’?”
“Yes! Don’t laugh at me. I can go to a club and still be an intelligent person, you know.” Unconsciously she placed one hand flat across her chest, hiding her cleavage. “I’ve never been here before. I want—I want—” She stopped, unable to articulate even to herself the magnitude and urgency of what she wanted.
“Never?” Fabrice looked amazed. “Is that true?”
Molly nodded.
“Alors, viens.” He grabbed her free hand, suddenly full of energy, and started tugging her toward the gangplank.
“What are you doing?”
“We are leaving.” He turned, eyes teasing, and bopped backward down the deck, pulling her with him.
“Wait!” laughed Molly, though a wild exhilaration swept through her. “Where are we going?”
“To see Paris!”
“Now?”
“Why not?”
“But it’s dark. Everything will be shut.”
Fabrice stopped. “Enfin, Molly, one cannot shut a city. It lives, it breathes, like you and me.” His own breath was warm on her cheek. “It’s at night that Paris reveals her secrets. Just like a woman.”
Molly’s head spun.
He was jingling some keys. He must have a car. It would be utterly crazy to go off in a car with a strange man in a strange city.
His eyes were like melted chocolate. His fingers against her palm delivered shocks of pleasure to hidden places.
And he was an art student.
“I’ll grab my jacket,” she said.
5
Wind rushed in her ears and swept up her skirt. There was hair in her mouth, folds of leather jacket clutched in her hands, a fairground flutter in the pit of her stomach.
It wasn’t a car, it was a motorbike—one of those scooter things with wide running-boards curving up to the handlebars and a coffer under the seat from which Fabrice had extracted a spare helmet. His own helmet, Molly thought, made him look as heroic as a gladiator.
“Hold tight!” he called over his shoulder, as he accelerated up the esplanade.
Tentatively Molly moved her hands to fit more firmly on his waist. It felt very intimate sitting so close, with her skirt rucked up and her knees nudging his thighs. Fabrice reached round and drew her hands closer still, until they met under his rib cage and her breasts pressed against his back. He opened the throttle wide.
Instead of taking the sliproad down which she’d come, he headed toward the river. They sped along the edge of the stone bank, perilously close to the dark gleam of water. Powerful currents rippled its surface, like muscles under skin. The danger was intoxicating.
There was a bridge ahead—and beneath it a tunnel. Fabrice beeped his horn as they raced into it. The engine was suddenly as loud as thunder. A yellow beam from the scooter’s headlamp flashed across massive stone supports banded with a green tide-line. “Eeeeeh! ” Molly shrieked, and heard her voice echo around the mossy vault.
A few meters out of the tunnel Fabrice stopped showily, with a squeal of rubber. “You are frighten
ed?”
“No,” she gasped. “I love it.”
“Gentille petite Anglaise,” he murmured, and slid one warm palm up and down the outside of her thigh, as if soothing a horse.
He revved the bike to a roar and took off along a path that meandered up and down between mown grass. Jagged metallic sculptures, looking as if they had been ripped from sheet metal by a giant’s hand, lined the way. Was this a park? An outdoor museum? There was no time to decide before Fabrice turned the bike onto the grass, bounced hair-raisingly downhill toward the river and careered into another tunnel. On the far side he slowed the engine to a sputter and stopped, keeping the bike balanced with his feet. He pointed forward. “Et violà, . . . Mademoiselle la Touriste.”
Molly brushed the wind-tears out of her eyes and leant past his shoulder. “Oh . . .” she breathed.
Straight ahead, rising out of the river in a golden haze of spotlights, was the cathedral of Notre Dame; she recognized it at once, though she’d had no idea it was on an island. Despite its stupendous size it had an airy fragility, almost as if it floated on the water. With tapered buttresses like billowing sails and a mastlike spire soaring into the sky, it might have been a dream ship conjured by Coleridge in an opium trance.
“Not bad, hein?” Fabrice grinned. Suddenly he looked much younger than the mysterious stranger on the boat.
He’s actually nice, Molly told herself, as well as gorgeous. “It’s fabulous,” she told him.
He gunned the engine and they were off again, up a juddering ramp, then back into the glitter and swish of late-night traffic on the riverside highway. Where now? Molly wondered. Somewhere a clock was chiming: half past something. Half past Friday? Half past Paris? Half past her life? Could this really be the same night she had arrived at the Gare du Nord?
And was this really her, an unemployed office-worker who’d never even been abroad before, zooming through Paris with her cheek laid against the warm back of a tantalizing Frenchman? Yes! She was not a nobody from the provinces. She was not a stupid secretary. She was a wild woman loose in Paris. Une femme sauvage. Grrrrrr.
They had left the highway now and were climbing steeply, away from the river, past shuttered shops, tall houses slumbering shoulder to shoulder, the dark bulk of a church, a mysterious high wall that made Molly think of the secret garden where Cosette and Marius had pledged their love in Les Misérables. (She’d spent one interminably rainy holiday sobbing over that book.) The narrow streets wound upward, dark and deserted. Molly would not have been surprised to see the furtive shadow of a monk whisking down an alleyway.
Instead they were suddenly bathed in an unearthly light as if an alien spaceship had landed, though it wasn’t a spaceship but a great golden building, domed like St. Paul’s, standing spotlit at the center of a vast square. A palisade of black railings emphasized its austere magnificence. There was no sound except the putter of Fabrice’s engine as they circled it and came to a stop at the entrance. Molly craned her neck to look at the columned façade. There was some writing high above the entrance; it seemed to be a kind of monument to the “grands hommes” of France. She frowned. “What about the great women?”
“Are there any?” he teased.
“Of course,” she said, racking her brains. “Simone de Beauvoir . . . Marie Curie, er . . .”
“In any case, that’s not why I brought you here. Look the other way.”
Molly turned her head. From here a road sloped downward, wide and straight as a die, to some distant gates. Sticking up above the horizon, as familiar and heart-lifting as a friend, was a soaring shape outlined in a filigree of tiny golden lights. “It’s the Eiffel Tower!” she cried. “Isn’t it beautiful? Oh, thank you, Fabrice.” Impulsively she tightened her arms around his waist to hug him clumsily from behind.
He swiveled round and gave her a slanting smile that practically made her fall off the bike. Their faces were very close. For an electric moment she thought he was going to kiss her. “Are you tired?” he asked.
“No!”
“Okay. Let’s go.”
He sailed the bike gently down the hill. Molly watched the Eiffel Tower shrink smaller and smaller, then slip beneath the horizon. He probably wanted to take her to some special place. Well, that was fine. She was beginning to understand Frenchmen. They might do that looking thing, but that didn’t mean they had to grab. Being French, they recognized that there was a pace to love, a concept she was sophisticated enough to appreciate. They would kiss when the time was right.
Anyway, their helmets might have clashed.
Wherever they were going, it was a long way. They returned to the river by a different route, crossed over to the Right Bank on a bridge she didn’t recognize and entered an area of triumphalist avenues and one place after another as grand as Trafalgar Square. The buildings here were puffed up with self-importance to monumental size, splendiferous with pediments and flags. They reminded Molly of Victorian grandees in top hats and tail-coats eyeing each other superciliously through pince-nez. Yet there was an exuberance about the gilded domes and scrolled pillars, the frivolity of metalwork and profligacy of trees, even the outsize statues of noble men (and their noble horses) that filled her with delight. Liberté, égalité, fraternité! (Especially fraternité .) Street by beautiful street Paris was opening its heart to her. Molly could do no less than fling her own wide.
Métro stations flashed past, with their pretty arched entrances and exotic names. There were intriguing shopping arcades, bandbox-neat theatres with posters outside, half-lit antiques emporia displaying opulent gilt chairs and lifesize statues of Nubian slaves. Gradually the smartness deteriorated into a zigzag of nondescript streets. Once they crossed a petrol-fumed avenue, still awake in a razzle-dazzle of neon, before entering a maze of ever-narrowing streets. All the time they were steadily climbing.
Finally the scooter stopped. Fabrice turned off the engine and removed the key. The silence was absolute. They were in a small, lopsided square of pretty houses painted white, with a tree in the middle. A scattering of leaves glinted yellow under an old-fashioned lamppost straight out of Narnia, and there was something about the stillness and small-scale charm of the place that gave Molly the same sense of entering a magical world.
“Where are we?” she asked, climbing stickily off the bike. She took off her helmet and shook her hair free.
“Montmartre.”
Fabrice stowed both their helmets and tethered his bike with a thick chain. He was even handsomer than she remembered. Just watching the deft movements of his hands—the play of knuckles and wristbones, those delicate, supple fingers—made her sigh. “But isn’t Montmartre very touristy?” she said quickly, to cover up.
“That’s why we come at night. Anyway, the tourists only want to see the Sacré Coeur.” He waved to somewhere in the distance. “This is the real Montmartre, where people live and work and have children and drink a coupe rouge with their friends. It’s like a village. Come. I’ll show you.”
He guided her toward a flight of steps while fishing in his jacket for a cigarette. Molly watched him wedge it loosely between parted lips, then angle his head to light it with a click of his lighter. The small flame glowed on his cheekbones and lowered lashes. He pouted slightly as he released a twist of sweet smoke. Molly dimly remembered that she disapproved of smoking, but for the moment couldn’t remember why.
They strolled slowly up twisting lanes, down precipitous stairways, from pools of light to the deep shade of trees, past ivied villas, terraced gardens and even a tiny vineyard, which Fabrice said produced wine like piss. A freshness in the air told her they were high above the city fumes. Sometimes she heard the gush of water from a small fountain or hidden rivulet. Otherwise, it was so quiet that they might have been the only two people in the world.
Fabrice told her why Montmartre was called the hill of the martyrs, and something about Napoleon, and showed her the house of a French film star she hadn’t heard of. He was very intelligent. Molly s
coured her brain for something impressive to say in response. All she really wanted to look at was him. All she wanted to know was whether he liked her.
“And, of course, this is where all the painters lived,” she managed at last, “like Picasso and—and all the, er . . .” Oh, God, was it Cubists? Or Surrealists? It would be terrible to make a mistake.
Fabrice rolled his eyes and gave a groan of laughter. “Molly, you and your culture. You are adorable.”
“Am I?” She smiled back tremulously, longing for it to be true.
He seized her by the shoulders, swung her round to face a row of cottagy houses and jabbed his cigarette toward one at random. His breath tickled her ear as he lowered his voice portentously. “It was in this very house that stupidisme was founded by Cliché and Maladroit. Note the intricately carved hors d’oeuvre above the door.”
“Stop it.” Molly giggled.
He swung her round to face the other way. “And here we find the studio of Champignon. He later combined with Huîtres in the shocking Flageolet Exhibition of 1925.”
Dizzy with laughter and his intoxicating touch, Molly leant into the warm circle of his arm as he strutted clownishly down the street. He stopped in front of a squat pink house with shuttered windows. “Et voilà! ” he announced, with a dramatic flourish. “The famous bar where the experimental poet Croque Monsieur used to come with his mistress, the chanteuse Muscadet, until she left him for Roquefort. All dead now—hélas!—and buried in the Cemetery of Bouillabaisse.”