Eddie Signwriter (30 page)

He watched it but didn’t say anything.

Still she hadn’t responded.

The truth was she never thought she’d see him again. She was used to people coming and going. She was used to not relying on other people. Certainly not men.

So what had there been to feel so cheated by? What had he promised? Nothing. Nor had she wanted any promises out of him.

She stood aside to let him walk past her into the room. As she started to move he grabbed the spoon by the handle just above her hand.

The sauce flowed over his knuckles.

He winced but didn’t say anything.

She saw what had happened. She let go of the spoon and he put it down.

“That must hurt,” she said calmly.

“It does,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said with a little less disinterest—now she was trying to wipe the hot sauce from his hand with the cloth she’d held in her other.

He let her dab away and then tried to take her hand.

She felt anger flaring again. She was thinking about the scene down in the lobby from his departure, the humiliation it had caused her. How could she have done that? She still couldn’t look some of the tenants in the eye. It was his fault. To have made her do that? That wasn’t her.

She pulled away.

But this wasn’t her either. She didn’t want to feel angry and proud.

She said over her shoulder, “It had better be a very good story.”

She opened the window, and tried to wave the steam out of the room with her hands. He laughed from behind her, and she laughed too.

Then she turned around and leaned back on the counter on her hands.

“Are you all right, Kwasi? Are you hurt? Nobody’s seen you at all. Where have you been living?”

“Under a roof,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, the sides of her mouth turning downward in noncommittal interest.

She asked if he’d been alone.

He told her that he had.

She nodded.

Then he leaned down and picked up the bag he’d brought with him, which was at his feet. She thought it was clothes inside, but it wasn’t. He opened the bag and it was flowers he’d picked up from Madame la Fleuriste.

“I brought these,” he said.

What does this man think?
she thought. But still she let herself smile and came over to him and took the flowers, smelled them, even as she hated the stupidity of being flattered by flowers.

But so what? She was.

“So is this sorry?” she asked.

“Yes,” he told her.

“Idiot,” she said, and she put down the flowers and let him hold her.

Then she asked him if he was hungry.

He was. So she added some more tomatoes to her sauce and made a double portion of rice. He got out the knives and forks and the water and salt and they ate the meal together.

He did the washing up and then they sat down together on her sofa that opened up into her bed, and for twenty minutes, speaking softly, not looking at her, he told her where he’d been in the last four weeks, of some of the things that had happened, and what he had done and what he had felt, and something of what he made of it, to the extent that he could make anything of it at all.

When he’d finished speaking they sat in silence.

Then he looked at her and asked her if she thought he was crazy.

She wanted to tell him that she didn’t care if he was, but she didn’t. She didn’t say anything.

He said that maybe he should ask her rather if she could live with it.

“I can,” she said, “until I can’t.”

But then she corrected herself because it wasn’t quite what she wanted to say.

“Yes,” she said.

He put his hand on her hand.

He said, “Thank you.”

She said, “At least for tonight.”

“Oh,” he said, “so now you want me to stay the night.”

She said, “You don’t?”

“I wouldn’t want you to think I’m easy,” he said.

She smiled back. “OK,” she said, letting go of him and getting up, “then I’ll try not to,” and she went over to the basin and pushed the pots aside and got out her soaps and her toothbrush and the creams for her face to get ready for bed.

It was the end of February. The month had but a few days to run. Over three trips he moved his clothes and his few possessions from Pigalle to Bernadette’s rooms. On the last of the trips he stopped by his old apartment in Strasbourg to see if perhaps Denis had come back, or in any event learn news of the others.

Denis was gone. They were all gone. Nobody knew where he was. Six people from Vietnam were now living in his old rooms. They let him poke around for a few moments. There were still some of the pieces of furniture he and Denis had purchased, or found, or fixed—a large chest of drawers they’d once seen on a pavement in Barbès, and somehow managed to wedge in the back of Fawad the Algerian’s station wagon. An old record player that Mamadou had given him. There was a framed painting he’d picked up in his first month in Paris from a
bouquiniste
on Île de la Cité—a van Gogh–inspired scene of Saint Michel, all garishly yellow and blue—still hanging, though on a different wall, and behind which he and Denis would keep the monthly rent.

He turned the painting round. There it was, three months later.
The franc notes folded up like a cigar, pinned behind a nail that held the plywood in its frame, which he took. It was all the cash he had.

Down on the street he recognized a few faces. He recognized the
clochard
, a knitted cap pulled tightly over his head like a tea cozy, as he slept under a stair. He recognized the tall Liberian waiter at Café Deux Garçons, who had a cut down the side of his cheek, scarred up like sofa upholstery; and two of the waiters in the Indian restaurant. He recognized in the small bar filled with mirrors, birdcages, and orchids, the woman tending the bar who was really a man.

But he knew better than to linger as the people of the
quartier
came in for the early evening, and instead went round the corner to where the Refuge de l’Ouest had been. It was still closed. What had he really expected? There were posters over the windows now. The glass at the top of the doorframe was marbled over with dust. At the bottom there was still the crack where the boot of a gendarme had kicked it, patched with heavy masking tape.

He stopped at the North African restaurant two shops down, where sometimes in the old days they would get something to eat after Monsieur Richard got tired of them and closed up the Refuge for the night.

The Arab restaurant was a long thin room stretching back from the street, where they had a few tables with plastic covers, and plastic chairs, and a television over a counter playing Arabic music, and a small Moroccan woman underneath playing patience, and a half-lit hovel of a kitchen behind, from which her husband, who lived in a haze of smoke and walked with a limp, would bring food to the four or five customers who’d been coming there every night for twenty-five years, and appeared to be the only justification there was for continuing to keep the place open.

The old man gave him a grunt of acknowledgement when he came in.
“Quelle jolie surprise,”
he croaked in a broken, smoke-scored voice,
“quelle jolie surprise,”
and had him sit down and brought him some mint tea unasked.

“Amis sont partis,”
the old man said, standing in front of the table with a bowl of sugar cubes,
“partis. Tant pis. Humph …”
and he shrugged.

He drank his tea slowly. The old woman, playing cards at the other end of the room at her counter, raised her eyebrows in friendship, then began cursing the hand of cards spread out before her.

The old man came back with another cup of tea and a piece of paper with a telephone number on it.

“Fawad,”
he said.
“C’est Fawad.”

Fawad’s telephone number.

After his tea he shook the old man’s hand. He waved at the woman playing cards. She raised her eyebrows, shrugged, sucked a lungful of tar from the cigarette hanging off her lip, and began dealing cards.

He put his bag on his shoulder, went round the corner, avoiding Rue Oberkampf, and descended into the metro.

The tunnels were full of the sounds of somebody playing drums. Some hawkers were selling sunglasses and scarves. It smelled of nuts down beneath the ground.

It took thirty-five minutes to get to the 16th arrondissement. When he resurfaced above ground it was getting to be evening. There was a fine mist of drizzle in the air. Behind him, over the river, the lights of the city were coming on. The gold dome of the Invalides shone like a child’s painted sun.

He made his way towards Avenue Victor Hugo. Across the road from Bernadette’s, the lights of the flower shop shone out into the early evening, intensified by the mirrors and the marble and the glass of the chandeliers. The door was half-opened. It was strange to see the place open at this hour. He stopped and poked his head in. There were large plastic sacks of dirt in a stack just inside the doorway.

“Salut
, Madame, it’s Edward,” he shouted in.

There was no response.

He put his bag down and walked into the interior of the shop. The buckets in which the flowers for passing trade were kept on the pavement were lined up against the back walls. The floor around them was wet, where Madame must have dragged them in and spilled the water. On the long counter where she usually cut and wrapped the special orders, rows of pots were spread out, with seedlings recently planted.

He called out Madame’s name again.

There was no response.

The cash register, he noticed, was turned off.

The statues of the naked white goddesses watched him serenely as he walked around.

The profusion of plants, which screened off whole sections, the clutter of noble furniture, and the sound of dripping water from two fountains made the room seem much bigger than it was. But it took little time for him to realize that he was alone.

He made his way around the displays, poking his head into the side rooms and vestibules, round the divisions made by shelves full of trays of seedlings.

At last he went to the back of the shop, where it curled round the inner courtyard and lengthened into a thin corridor without any windows. There was a kettle and sink. The temperature seemed to drop. The walls, he noticed, were thick and rough, and ended in a series of shelves stacked with packets and implements and rolls of wire and string. And he noticed, where before he’d assumed there to be only shelves, that one whole wall was in fact the back of a door, that was slightly ajar. As he approached he could see a dim light rising from beneath, up a series of steep steps that wound immediately downwards in a tight spiral.

He opened the door further and shouted down, “Hello?”

“Hello,” came back the voice of Madame.

He waited, and then walked down the stairs.

Beneath the floor, where he descended, there opened up a large cellar, at least two or three feet under the ground. It was illuminated along the ceiling by rows of fluorescent lights, joined by metal pipes that housed the electric cables. The cellar must have stretched the whole length of the shop underneath. The walls were made of arched bricks. The floor was set with paving stones. The whole space was washed white and was completely empty but for a large stack of plastic bags—the same as upstairs—stacked five high against the back wall, which Madame was heroically trying to move to the stairs.

“Welcome to my cavern,” Madame said, leaving the plastic bags and standing up and brushing her hands down her skirts.

“Do you need some help?” he asked.

“In effect, yes,” Madame said.

As he helped her haul a couple of bags of compost she explained that she’d never use the cellar at all if she weren’t so cramped upstairs, but what was she to do?

He told her he had no idea this space existed.

Few people did, she said, and that now he knew her
grand secret
.

The room, in fact, was the original cellar, she told him, and had been reinforced as an air-raid shelter during the war. She had once found a few old coins and some spoons and what looked like the wheel from a model car in various nooks and crannies. It was, he had no doubt noticed, completely impractical, and why the workmen who delivered the sacks of compost had decided to stack them right at the back was a complete mystery to her, but here she was, a little old lady (she was hardly that, he protested), with nobody to help her, and how glad she was that he’d happened to come along, and perhaps, in fact, he could come more often, she suggested after they’d been talking a while—to help her out, perhaps three times a week, paid of course, unless possibly he was working somewhere else—how presumptuous it was for her to assume … ?

But no, he told her, it was not presumptuous at all. He told her that he had been going through a difficult time, but that now he was optimistic that things would turn for the better, and from the way he smiled—sheepishly—she felt comfortable asking if his optimism had anything to do with the flowers he had bought from her the week before. He confessed that it did, that in fact he was living nearby with the recipient of those flowers—Bernadette, he told her (“Ah, what a lovely name, for a lovely lady no doubt,” she said)—and that he would be glad not to have to travel into the city to work. She realized, he assumed, that he had no papers (“Papers, what are papers? Paf!” she said). How much less likely to be picked up if he stayed in the
quartier
, where the police were so few. She couldn’t agree more, she said. The state was a brute. She apologized for the madness of her countrymen. Were we not all human beings under the same sun—or moon, as the case now happened to be?

And so he had good news when he got back to Bernadette’s a little later, after she herself had returned from the cheese shop in Saint Germain: flowers, every night after work, of which the bunch of azaleas bursting from the water jug on top of the television would be the first of many.

“This is going to be very nice,” she said, and went over to rearrange the stems.

So she was pleased?

She was.

And he said that he too was pleased—to have a job already, without even having to look, and so close by. Best of all he wouldn’t need to travel at all.