Face Value (26 page)

“Kate . . . I ’ope you don’t mind, but we leaf your bags at my flat, and ’ead straight out, okay? There is something I want to show you.”

"Thanks, Jean-Paul. And by the way, they say ‘apartment’ over here, I believe.”

She didn’t know how to speak to him beyond the trivial. If this was a date, then how was she supposed to behave, and why was she on it in the first place? She felt awkward around Jean-Paul. She felt like she was using him. He’d irritated her before she’d left for L.A., with his chauvinism, lack of loyalty to Alexis, and inept Frenchness. But somehow, she’d always known that a pack of Marlboro Lights wasn’t going to be enough of a reward when she’d finished writing the Patty feature. And she certainly needed some cheering up, some de-Rio-ing after her hideous experiences there.

She wondered what Alexis would think of the Patty story. In the end, it hadn’t been too difficult a story to write, even though she’d had to do it with Rio looming in the morning. She would have liked to have written more—to encourage women to seek their empowerment elsewhere, away from how they were physically perceived by others or by how they perceived their beauty themselves—but she’d drawn the line. It would have been hypocritical, seeing as she had enjoyed her five minutes of feeling beautiful courtesy of JK’s “imperfect perfect” nonsense. Besides, feeling beautiful, that was okay, wasn’t it? A good thing. Most of all, she’d wanted to really nail JK. She wondered, now that her article had been sent merrily to Alexis: had she been vitriolic enough? After Rio and the parrot ’n’ pig island, she felt she couldn’t be vitriolic enough. She would have to get it all double-checked with
Darling’
s legal department, of course. She didn’t want a lawsuit on her hands. But she’d seen Patty’s letters, the documentation; she had a witness. Aurelie had promised her more should it ever come to court. She was pretty sure of where she stood on that front.

The comfortable grid system disappeared, and their cab moved into a rough network of awkward crossings. The streets were lined with trees springing up at regular intervals through the pavement. Sidewalks. Small boutiques, tiny cafés, and tall old redbrick apartments that looked almost English.

“Where are we now?” she asked Jean-Paul.

“Greenwich Village,” he said. “You ’aven’t bin ’ere before?”

“You know what? I haven’t been anywhere.”

She hadn’t really. Meatpacking District. Her office in Central Park South. The airport. The Russian baths and the charity shop. She wouldn’t be writing any guidebooks just yet.

“Ah . . . zat’s what I thought,” said Jean-Paul. “Don’ worry, we change all that. What have I to show you tonight?”

“I don’t know . . . what?” She dreaded to think what.

“New York!” he said triumphantly.

And he did.

They started with Jean-Paul’s all-time favorite record shop. Or so he said, until further questioning revealed it was his friend’s favorite record shop, but that he knew Kate liked records and so he’d pretended for her sake. She was touched.

Fat Beats was situated on the second floor somewhere along Sixth Avenue not far from his apartment.

“Okay, so we take twenty dollars each. I buy you something. You buy me something. That way . . . we get to know each other better.” He peeled off a gray-green note from a wad in his back jeans pocket and handed it over to her.

Hadn’t they tried getting to know each other already? She seemed to remember it had ended with her storming out of a bar in the early hours of the morning. Tom Waits and his marmalade thighs.

She knew of only one French rapper. MC Solaar was indisputably cool, but even Jean-Paul would know about him. The only French rapper who was ever any good, he’d have his entire back catalog ready to whip out to refute any accusations about how crap French rap music is. She looked over her shoulder to the racks of records near the window. He was fingering through them, his head nodding seriously to the beat of the Beastie Boys track that the three sales assistants were playing from a record player on the counter. Each of their faces resembled the finals in some facial hairdressing contest, their beards and mustaches etched into numbers and symbols as if a graffiti artist had been let loose on a bear with a pair of clippers.

“Excuse me.” She played on her English accent. “Do you have any Plastic Bertrand?”

"The Belgian guy?” one asked. “ ‘Ça Plane pour Moi’? Circa 1970 . . .’78?” He disappeared into the back room and emerged beaming. “Hey, guys!” he shouted in the direction of his hirsute companions. “I thought we were never gonna get rid of this!” Much laughter.

Kate looked him squarely in the eyes. “Do you do gift wrap?” she asked, tersely.

Next on their sightseeing trip was a narrow house, still in Greenwich Village. "I know you like writing ... it’s your job ... ,” began Jean-Paul, looking up at the building, which was indistinct apart from its thinness. “But did you know that ’ere originated the expression”—he paused, as if concentrating on each word, like a joker anxious he was going to forget the punch line—“ ‘burning ze candle at both ends’?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” he said triumphantly, “there was a lady ’oo lived ’ere. A poet, I believe. Edna St. Vincent Millay. She said it first. ‘Burn-ing ze can-dle at both ends.’ ”

“Gosh, your English is good. I could never say that in French!” There hadn’t been much call for languages at
Maidstone Bazaar
. She was touched he seemed to have put so much thought into trying to please and titillate her. “But did she say it here?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, she was a poet, and she lived here. But did she say it while she lived here? Or did she say it while she lived somewhere else?”

“I don’t bloody know, as you say in England!” He looked grumpy.

She laughed.

“You said ‘bloody.’ You’re more English than the English!”

He laughed back.

They only just made it to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, fortunate that the museum was open late tonight. The glass entrance, imposing yet friendly, sat comfortably within the older frame of the nineteenth-century building.

“I prefer this museum to the Metropolitan,” explained Jean-Paul. “It’s smaller, more, you know, personal.” He squeezed her hand gently. It would have been rude not to squeeze it back.

“I don’t know much about art,” she said. “I really don’t.”

“I guessed . . . that night I met you. Don’t worry. It doesn’t matter. It’s better, in fact. You come to it with no preconceived ideas. Only a knowledge of—”

“What I like and don’t like? I don’t know much about art but I know what I like?” She laughed. The joke got lost somewhere in translation, but he laughed anyway.

“Come!” He grasped her hand again and led her into a vast room filled with bright white stone sculptures. Naked forms sat passionately entwined with one another, gracefully waiting for more strangers to file around them, never tiring of their admiring glances.

“Rodin.” He sighed. “Look at zis one . . . so beautiful, zis figure. You see, stone is such a perfect material for the human form. It gives shape, sensuality, it’s not flat like a picture, you want to touch it, the porosity of the stone it is crafted from makes it seem some’ow receptive, you want to reach out. . . .” He leaned closer, stretching his fingers toward the statue.

“She is pretty fit, yes,” said Kate, looking round her anxiously as two security guards eased themselves up from their chairs by the door and slowly made their way toward Jean-Paul, observing him closely.

"I don’t think you should touch her, though. That might be seen as sculptural harassment,
non
?”

“What do you find attractive in a man?” asked Jean-Paul. Only a Frenchman could ask such a direct, loaded question, she figured. They were sitting in a Brooklyn café by the waterfront, somewhere underneath the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. They’d opted for brunch, even though it was dark now, and were wolfing down eggs Benedict in a little café along the East River, with views across the water toward Manhattan. Kate stirred two sugars into her caffe latte, while Jean-Paul looked on, his surprise at her sweet tooth conveyed with the merest raising of an eyebrow.

“A brain is always useful,” she said. “I don’t know . . . what do you find attractive in a man?”

“Oh . . . you’re not serious.” He pouted playfully. It was impressive the way he managed to drop his lower lip in a sulky manner and yet still look resolutely heterosexual. “I was just trying to talk, you know, about Rodin, about his ability to present both men and women, and make them appealing to both sexes. I find it interesting,
non
?”

“Oh, I see.”

“But since you ask, I like men who are . . .” He paused, sucking his froth-covered spoon noisily before laying it down by his coffee cup. Its bottom was submerged in a shallow pool of milky coffee that had spilled in the saucer. “Older. Who have character in their faces. Broad shoulders. Long feet with a second toe that’s longer than the first. A little gray ’air at the temples. Bags under the eyes like, like Serge Gainsbourg’s! Maybe a slight hook in the nose.”

“You haven’t thought about this much then, have you?” Kate laughed.

“It’s ’ow I’d like to be when I’m old,” he explained.

A tug moved past them, horn blaring. The dark evening sky was deepening into black, and the lights were getting brighter by the second. The view was breathtakingly pretty, like a stage set just for them. He was French, she was British, two outsiders looking into Manhattan. L.A. didn’t have that kind of magic. As for Maidstone . . .

“Gosh, that view,” she said.

“I know. And you know, I ’ave bin ’ere a while now, and I never get tired of it. Never never never.”

They gazed in silence.

“So . . . ’ow you’d like to be when you’re old, Kate?”

She’d never really thought about it. She wasn’t sure how she’d like to be now, let alone years down the line. How old was old, anyway? If forty was the new thirty, and so on right up to eighty being the new seventy, who knew what lay in store for her?

“I’d like . . . well, physically, I’d like to be fit. I think I’m going to dye my hair once it starts going gray. And I hope that when I get to my midfifties, you know, menopausal or whatever, I’d like to be a bit plumper, with a big chest my grand-children can rest their heads on when we’re watching
Blue Peter
, or whatever’s on TV for kids then.”

“Ah . . .
Blue Peter
. . . I remember zat.”

"They had it in France?”

“Oh, you know . . . zey get everything zere. My parents were Anglophiles. All our ’olidays were in Britain in fact. Anyway . . . are you ’appy the way you look now?” For a second she thought this was a quick jibe at her marmalade thighs confession, then she decided to let the doubts go. The glimmer of suspicion vanished from her face. She relaxed.

“You know, I thought I was, and then . . .”

"Then what?”

“Well, I don’t know, here it’s so different. In England, you can do well at your job, it doesn’t matter so much how you look. Well, it does, but you know, not at my job, I suppose.”

“What was your job?”

“I was a reporter on a local magazine.”

“And now?”

“Well, now, I don’t know. One minute I’m struggling to fit in the requisite number of blow-dries per day, and the next minute I’m on national TV being hailed as some kind of role model by some idiot plastic surgeon for looking messy and unkempt!”

“He didn’t say messy, Kate, ’e said ‘imperfect perfect.’ ”

“You saw it?”

“Everyone saw it! But I think you’re pretty perfect-perfect myself.”

“You smooth talker!” She frowned a little, but the corners of her mouth turned upward. Now that she thought about it, there was something she would like to be different about the way she looked. She could only have realized it now, as she stared out over the river at the lights, aware once again of all the different opportunities that seemed to have landed at her feet in the last two months or so, like some blessed gift from heaven, from her dad perhaps. She often thought of him when confronted with stars, or lights, or a sense of things greater than herself.

“You know what, Jean-Paul?” she said, taking a sip from her Bloody Mary. “I’ve never told anyone this, I think because I’ve never known myself, but I’ve always been slightly embarrassed about the way I look.” She smiled nervously at him. “I mean, is it okay to like makeup, to dye your hair, to worry about putting on weight? Doesn’t all that stuff make you vacuous somehow, stupid even? And the other day in L.A., I realized, or maybe I didn’t realize it then, maybe I’m only realizing it now . . .”

“Go on.” He rested his chin on his hand, elbow on the table.

“Well, there was this model. And at first, I thought, wow, she looks amazing! Maybe I’m gay. Then I realized, no, of course I’m not, I fancy men, and then I knew—just now in fact, when you asked me about how I like to look. I knew what it was that was bothering me!”

“What?” He laughed and took her hand in his.

“I’d like to have bosoms like hers! Isn’t that weird? I mean, there I am writing an article about how not to get plastic surgery, and actually, I’d like to have bosoms like the model’s!”

“It’s not really something to worry about,
non
?” Jean-Paul took her other hand, clasped both of them in his, and smiled. “You know some surgeons now . . . you could get them if you wanted to.”

“Oh, no!”

“Why not? You dye your ’air, you go to a gym, what’s the big deal?”

Kate slurped on her Bloody Mary and frowned a “No way!” back at him.

“Okay, maybe not . . . surgery is not for you, but say, when you get old. Okay, you look like you told me, with dyed hair and big bosoms, but in your ’eart, ’ow do you want to be? I mean, emotionally?”

She thought for a second, looking out over the East River. “I don’t want to be alone. Do you?”