Amanda's Guide to Love (25 page)

“So you keep telling me.”

“He’s in the spider book—I’ve marked
the page.”

She gave him a sidelong look. “What
about your second reason?”

“I want you to practice on a more . . .”—he
sucked his teeth—“challenging life-form than an orchid before you graduate to
me. Something that isn’t naturally and easily lovable. I considered sending you
a toad, but then I remembered you had Christophe.”

“Let me get this straight.” Amanda
stopped walking, released Kes’s hand, and folded her arms across her chest.
“Your plan is to get me to love you—the
right
way—by having me water an orchid
and talk to a spider. Right?”

“More or less.”

“Kes, that’s the dumbest plan I’ve
ever heard of.”

“Not so fast.” He tut-tutted. “It’s
designed to work in conjunction with the brain-torching properties of my left
shoulder.”

She giggled. “Oh no.”

“Oh yes.” He glanced at his watch.
“We really need to hurry.”

Ten minutes later they were seated
in the second row of a small, dimly lit room. They had entered the theater too
quickly for Amanda to take in the different posters adorning the façade and
figure out which show they were about to watch. She looked around. The audience
was a hodgepodge of well-dressed couples, unkempt tourists, and
extravagant-looking families. In short, they were too heterogeneous to
determine if the piece was going to be a Greek tragedy or a rock concert.

Kes gave her hand a light squeeze.
“You’re about to find out. Patience, ma belle.”

At that precise moment, three stout
men in black shirts climbed onto the stage and settled in the right-hand
corner. Two of them sat down and placed their acoustic guitars across their
laps. The third one remained standing.

The room went quiet, and the
guitarists began to strum a soulful ballad. Their music rose and fell, the
tempo escalating from gentle to feverish and back to gentle again. The third
man nodded at the musicians and began to sing in Spanish.

Amanda marveled at the haunted
beauty of his voice.

A few minutes later, a circle of
light illuminated the middle of the stage. A slender young woman stood there in
a long, form-hugging dress that flared out at the hem. Head high and eyes
closed, she absorbed the beat.

“Flamenco?” Amanda mouthed, turning
to Kes.

He smiled and whispered. “The best Gitan
flamenco company in Andalusia.”

She nodded and turned back to the
stage.

The woman was now clapping her
hands in perfect harmony with the music. She had no castanets or fans that you
saw on postcards. A few moments later, her foot began to tap and her hips and
arms to move with a restrained passion that was more sensual than the most
shameless carnival samba.

And then she launched into a
full-fledged dance.

Amanda watched, mesmerized as she
took in the dancer’s olive skin and shiny black hair pulled into an elegant
knot at her nape. She admired the woman’s supple body
and the
frenzied stamping of her feet, marveling at the arresting grace with which she
arched her back. At some point during the dance, the woman stopped tapping. She
straightened her back and spread her arms, pushing them up and back, elbows
high—like a seagull’s wings.

“
Olé
, Pilar,” the musicians
cheered.

She rewarded them with a dazzling
smile and resumed her dance.

Amanda glanced at Kes and felt a pang
of absurd jealousy pierce her heart. This Gitan woman—Pilar—was so much like
him, full of color and life. Next to this woman, Amanda felt too gray, too
lethargic.

Pilar and Kes.

She silently rolled the two names
on her tongue. Two stunning, permanently tanned Gitans. They’d make such a
perfect couple. They’d set the world on fire.

Stop it.

She shouldn’t allow ridiculous,
self-destructive thoughts to invade her mind. Pilar probably didn’t know Kes
from a bar of soap. Kes admired her only as an artist. Despite the dancer’s
colorfulness and passion, he wasn’t enamored of her.

He was enamored of Amanda.

And I’m
not
in love with him.

Amanda’s heartbeat slowed, and the
lump in her throat began to dissolve. By the end of the show, she had managed
to convince herself that even if Kes became crazy about Pilar, it would be
totally OK.

Because he wasn’t Amanda’s
boyfriend.

He was her
sex friend
and
pastime companion.

And above all, he was
a footloose Traveler leaving town before the end of the month.

* * *

In the Maze

~ ~ ~

A Woman’s Guide to Perfection

Guideline # 12

The Perfect Woman knows how to
manage her mother.

Rationale
: Unless your mother is a Perfect
Woman herself, she’s likely to be one (or more) of the following: interfering,
indifferent, domineering, uncaring, caring too much, too present, too absent,
too extravagant, too boring, _____ (please fill in with your own grievances).

A
word of caution
:
While mothers come in handy, especially in times of financial trouble and
newborn babies, they have a knack for driving us mad like no one else. In
extreme cases, the only solution short of complete and irrevocable breakup of
diplomatic relations is to move to New Zealand.

But
then you’ll never be a Perfect Woman (see Guideline #5, The Perfect Woman lives
in Paris).

Permissible
exception
: Do ask
your mother for advice if you are 100 percent sure she won’t tell her entourage
(hence, the whole world) about your little pickle.

Damage
control
: Vary the
frequency of your calls and visits to reward your mother for good behavior and
punish for misdeeds.

~ ~ ~

An
afternoon in Disneyland Paris had seemed like such a good idea.

With Manon’s permission, Amanda
left work early. Kes met her at the RER station, and they boarded the train to
Marne-la-Vallée—a Parisian suburb that hosted the theme park.

The trip took two hours because
some moron had left a suspicious-looking backpack at one of the stations.

By the time they got to Disneyland,
it was already four. The wait times for the best attractions and the heat
forced them to make pragmatic choices, such as foregoing Amanda’s favorite Rock
‘n’ Roller Coaster.

“What about the maze?” Kes asked,
pointing at Alice’s Curious Labyrinth. “The wait shouldn’t be more than twenty
minutes.”

“Sure.” Amanda perked up. “I have a
great sense of direction. Stay close behind me, and I’ll get us out in no
time.”

“I tried this one a long time ago,”
Kes said. “It’s trickier than you’d expect.”

She grinned. “The harder the
better. I enjoy a challenge.”

Forty-five minutes later, Amanda
began to suspect she might have underestimated the difficulty of this
particular maze. They kept bumping into the same card soldier that yelled “off
with their heads” no matter which way they turned.

They were going in circles.

Kes didn’t complain. He just
followed her between rows of neatly trimmed hedges, chuckling from time to time
at the popping card figures and nonsensical signs. Until suddenly, Amanda
couldn’t hear him anymore.

She turned around. Standing a
couple of meters behind her, he stared at something on the hedge wall and
beckoned to her. She backtracked, expecting to have a laugh at another stupid
sign. But it wasn’t a sign he was inspecting. It was a hole—and a rather big
one, at that.

He winked at her and nodded toward
the opening. Then he bent down and squeezed himself through it. She followed,
wriggling her body to avoid the protruding branches.

On the other side was an alley they
hadn’t explored before.

Five minutes later they saw the
exit.

Amanda sighed with relief. But as
they left the labyrinth behind and headed out of the park, irritation took
over.

“It’s just so like you,” she said
without looking at Kes. “It’s what you do—you find shortcuts and take the easy
way out.”

He frowned. “Sometimes, yes. But
not always. And anyway, what’s wrong with that, provided I don’t break any
laws?”

“I didn’t say you were breaking the
law. But you
are
breaking the rules. We weren’t supposed to get out of
the maze through a hole in the shrubbery. We were supposed to find the path
that leads to the exit.”

“I’m not familiar with that rule.”
He shrugged. “Did you see it written anywhere?”

“No, it’s an unspoken rule—a shared
understanding.”

“Well, it isn’t shared by me.” He
gave her a conciliatory smile. “Consider this: in the book, Alice uses a rabbit
hole as a portal to get into Wonderland. It’s only appropriate that we use a
hedge hole to get out of it.”

She considered it. The bastard did
have a point.

On the RER ride back home, Amanda
scanned the business pages of her paper and then checked her e-mail to see if
she’d received any Google Alerts about ENS or Julien Barre.

“Good news or bad news?” Kes asked,
pointing at her phone.

She closed her e-mail and dropped
the phone into her purse. “No news.”

He put his own phone into his jeans
pocket. “His head will roll, you’ll see.”

“You’re bloodthirsty today.” Amanda
smirked. “I guess that’s what happens when you spend time around the Queen of
Hearts.”

He chuckled.

“I had an e-mail from my mother,”
she said.

He waited for her to continue.

“Vivienne wants to take me to
dinner on Wednesday night.”

He looked her in the eye. “Don’t
turn your mom down on my account. I can be at your place on twenty minutes’
notice, as late as you want.”

“It’s not only that.” She stared
out the window. “I just don’t feel like seeing her these days.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “It’s complicated.”

He sat back. “I love complicated
stories.”

“She’ll pester me about waitressing
again, as if I didn’t know or wasn’t trying hard enough. Then she’ll bug me
about you.” Amanda wrinkled her nose. “And while she’s at it, she’ll keep
pressing right where it hurts. Like she always does.”

“I see.”

“No, you don’t.” She sighed. “You
can’t, unless you have a parent who’s like that.”

He thought about her words. “Maybe
you’re right.”

“Of course I’m right. It’s tough to
have a mother who claims she loves you but always says things that bring you
down.”

“Have you told her this?”

She shook her head.

“Have you ever told her how much
her opinion matters to you?”

She startled. “Why would I? It
doesn’t.”

“Of course it does.”

“What are you, my shrink?” Amanda
pushed her hair back. “Enough about Vivienne. Let’s talk about you. I’ve been
wondering what ‘Kes’ means for ages.”

He smiled. “No idea. But I’ll google
it right away.”

He pulled out his phone and tapped.
“OK. Let’s see. In the Punjabi language, Kes means
the uncut hair and beard
of Khalsa
.”

“Who’s Khalsa?”

He glanced at his phone. “Khalsa
refers to all Sikhs who’ve been initiated.”

“Right.” She narrowed her eyes.
“So, it could be a man or a woman—we don’t know.”

“No, we don’t.” He manipulated his
phone some more. “I have another lead. KES is the abbreviation for the Kenyan
shilling.”

She grinned. “So, which one did your
parents name you after—a bearded woman or a currency?”

“I think my parents just liked the sound
of it.”

“Fair enough.” She leaned in.
“There’s something else I’ve been wondering.”

“Shoot.”

“Why do Gypsies enjoy the Traveler
lifestyle so much? Doesn’t everyone need a place they can call a home?”

“What’s a home to you, Amanda?”

“My apartment.” She paused,
thinking. “And Paris.”

“OK. Well, to Gypsies, a home isn’t
a house with walls and a roof. It isn’t a city or even a country. It’s the
clan. Home is people, not a place.”

She sat back and stared out the
window until the train entered an underground tunnel.

“You’re too quiet,” he said.
“Should I be worried?”

She turned to him. “When exactly
are you leaving?”

“In a week’s time.”

She nodded.