Russian Spring (14 page)

But that would be cheating. That would be violating the whole purpose of this little excursion into the maze of little back streets between the river and the Boulevard St.-Germain.

André Deutcher had dropped him back at the hotel after the meeting two days ago and then left him to his own devices until dinner to ponder the
ESA
offer.

André had brought Ian Bannister along with him when he showed up at about eight, and the three of them had dinner at what Bannister declared to be a perfect simulacrum of an authentic English restaurant: leek and potato soup, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, Stilton cheese, fruit trifle, port served with roasted walnuts and huge Havana cigars, polished dark wood and brass, crotchety old waiters in ill-fitting tuxedos, the whole thing somehow reminding Jerry of something on La Cienega’s Restaurant Row in Los Angeles.

All during the long leisurely dinner, Bannister assured Jerry that living in Paris wouldn’t really be that much of a problem for an English-speaker; he himself didn’t speak much French, English was the main working language of
ESA
, most of the “frogs like friend André here” had the good sense to learn how to speak it, and if one got lonely for hearing the Mother Tongue spoken properly on the street, why Victoria Station was a mere three hours from the Gare du Nord by Eurotube!

The next day, André took him to lunch with Nicola Brandusi at a quite acceptable sushi bar off the Champs-Élysées, though hardly up to
LA
standards, after which Brandusi took him around to a series of apartments that
ESA
had already lined up for his perusal.

That night André took him to dinner again, this time to a Chinese restaurant up in the northeast somewhere in a place called Belleville. Jerry was given to understand that another prostitute could be his for the asking, but in some weird way, this seemed like a betrayal of something special he had shared with Nicole, as well as a subtle insult to his manhood, so he settled for a few after-dinner drinks with André at a café overlooking the Place de la Bastille, and then called it a night.

And today, when André Deutcher called him after breakfast, and started discussing where they would go for lunch, and singing the praises of someone called Marie-Christine who would be his companion at dinner and accompany him to an
ESA
reception tonight, Jerry had finally cut him short and asserted his own independence for the first time since the 747 had dropped him in Paris.

“Hey, André, thanks, but no thanks,” he said. “I want to go out and see if I can manage lunch on my own today. You can pick me up at the hotel for dinner, but no more hookers, okay? If we’re going to go to a party tonight, I want to see how I can make out on my own for a change, if you get what I mean. . . .”

“Bien sûr,” André said suavely over the telephone, “pas problem, je comprends. . . .” And then, in a much more real, more honest tone of voice, “Yes, that’s a real good idea, Jerry.”

And so Jerry had gotten dressed, and walked across the Place
Vendôme and down through the Tuileries, along the right bank of the Seine toward St.-Germain.

He had already been in this area in the company of André and Nicole, it was jam-packed with tourists, there seemed to be hundreds of little restaurants, many of them with menus posted in Russian and Japanese and German and English as well as French, so Jerry had figured that this was as good a place as possible for his first solo excursion into the mysteries of Paris.

He wandered east along the river bank, crossed to Nôtre-Dame, stuck his nose inside for a few minutes just to say he had done it, walked clear around the cathedral, looking up at the gargoyles, then crossed the Pont St.-Michel into the Left Bank and onto the Boulevard St.-Michel, by which time he had worked up enough of an appetite to consider the adventure of ordering his first meal at a real French restaurant.

The Boulevard St.-Michel was a wide street lined on both sides with clothing stores, fast-food joints, bookstores, disc shops, and school-supply shops catering to the hordes of students and college-age tourists swarming along it, reminiscent of a combination of the Venice boardwalk, Hollywood Boulevard, and Westwood on a hot Saturday afternoon.

There was, however, what looked to Jerry to be a real French brasserie on the corner of St.-Michel and St.-Germain, a big place with lots of little tables right in the middle of the street scene, so he screwed up his courage and sat down at one of the few empty tables, next to a pair of neat-looking young girls in jeans and halter tops, who sat there sipping long drinks and babbling away to each other in a language that didn’t seem like French.

After a good long while, a waiter finally appeared and dropped a plastic folding menu on his table. It was in French, but with translations in smaller type in Russian, Japanese, German, and broken English, and there were full-color pictures of featured dishes that reminded him of the bill of fare at any Denny’s.

So, alas, did what was featured—burgers, pizzas, sausages, sandwiches, sundaes—but there was a little card attached, hand-lettered in French, obviously the specials of the day.

Jerry didn’t know what any of it meant, but he was damned if he was going to order any of the fast-food junk with English subtitles, so when the waiter reappeared, he pointed to the first item, and essayed a pronunciation. “Uh . . . the cassoulet, si voo play . . . ”

When the waiter nodded and wrote it down on his pad, Jerry was encouraged. “And . . . uh . . . wine . . . uh . . . vin, vin rouge . . . ”

The waiter cocked a lofty and inquisitive eyebrow. “Uh . . .
Côtes-du-Rhône . . . ” Jerry said, which was the only French wine name he could think of.

“Pichet? Demi?”

“Huh?”

The waiter smiled perhaps somewhat condescendingly. “Grand?” he said, holding his hands apart. “Ou petit?” And he brought them closer together.

“Uh . . . petit . . . ”

“Bon,” the waiter said, writing it down, and then he departed, leaving Jerry proud enough of himself to smile at the girls at the next table, who had been stealing glances at him and giggling.

While he waited for whatever it was he had ordered to arrive, Jerry surveyed the street scene. There was just nothing like this in all of his previous experience, all these thousands of people crammed together on the street, this compression of possible random human contact that just didn’t exist in car-bound Los Angeles, where there was hardly any street scene at all. Jerry realized that this too would be his if he took the
ESA
job, this feeling of the infinite possibilities of human and sexual adventure cramming the streets, this entirely different level of existence. . . .

If only the French had had the good sense to adopt English as their national language, the decision would already be made for him!

The food, when it arrived was, well, a little weird, though not entirely inedible when washed down with red wine from a brown-glazed ceramic pitcher—a crock of some kind of white beans baked in a savory sauce with pieces of two or three kinds of sausage, some kind of greasy dark-meat poultry on the bone, and a disgusting slab of what looked like the world’s fattiest bacon.

Jerry kept stealing glances at the girls at the next table as he picked his way carefully through the edible bits of this stuff, and was rewarded with an occasional glance back. Finally, when he was sitting back sipping the last of his wine, one of them ventured to say something to him in a babble of incomprehensible guttural syllables.

Jerry could only smile, shrug, and throw up his hands.

More babble.

“Uh . . . no parlay-voo français . . . ”

For some reason, the two of them thought this was quite funny.

“Uh . . . do you speak English?”

Now it was
their
turn to goggle at
him
in incomprehension.

“Sprichst du Deutsch . . . ?” one of them ventured.

Jerry shook his head in frustration.

One of them, the prettier one at that, gave him a look of eager anticipation. “Russki?” she said hopefully.

“Shit no!” Jerry snapped indignantly.

“Amerikanski?” the other said, with the strangest little wrinkle of her nose.

And when Jerry nodded, that ended that, as, for some unknown reason, the two of them frowned, pointedly turned their backs on him, and went back to their gibberish conversation.

“Well, screw you too, and the horse you rode in on!” Jerry shot back in futile indignation. And he hailed the waiter on his next pass, handed him a 500
ECU
note, counted the change, calculated what the check had been, left a 15 percent tip, pocketed the rest, and departed.

The crap he had gotten from the two girls had soured his sense of accomplishment somewhat, but the sun was bright and warm, his belly was full, he had a slight buzz on from the wine, and he was not about to let two snotty little teenagers ruin his game plan for the day, which was to order and eat a real French meal at a real French restaurant all by himself, and then stroll around without paying much attention to where he was going until he was pleasantly lost and then see if he could find his way back to the Ritz without having to take a taxi.

Jerry couldn’t exactly tell himself why, but he knew that this little game was somehow an essential part of his decision-making process.

If he had any politics at all, it was no more than his loathing for the Battlestar America projects he would have to work on for the rest of his life in order to stay in the Program, for what had destroyed both Rob Post’s career and the hope of any visionary American space program.

His true allegiance was to the dream of space itself, the dream that
ESA
, not
NASA
, was now passionately pursuing.

So he could certainly take the
ESA
offer with a clean conscience; his personal goals and his idealistic passion perfectly coincided, and they both told him he would be a total asshole not to kiss off Rockwell in favor of Project Icarus.

Face it, he had told himself as he wandered off the Boulevard St.-Germain into the unknown back streets of Paris, the only thing that kept you from taking them up on it right there on the spot was the fear of being alone in this city.

After all, he had no real friends in Paris, didn’t really know anyone in all of Europe, and he didn’t speak French.

Paris tantalized him and intimidated him. He longed to be a part of it, to be able to explore it like a native, to taste its infinite complexities.

But no two streets ever seemed to meet at a right angle, all the street signs bore French names he had difficulty even remembering, and now here he was, in this tangle of back streets filled with beautiful
women he couldn’t talk to, restaurants he couldn’t order a meal in, bars where he would have trouble even getting a beer, lost indeed, and in more ways than one.

Which, he reminded himself, had been his intention all along. If he couldn’t even find his way back to the hotel by himself, he certainly had no business thinking about becoming a Parisian!

Having gotten himself fairly good and lost, Jerry now set about trying to find his way back to the Seine, from which it would simply be a matter of following the river away from Nôtre-Dame and toward the Eiffel Tower until he saw the Louvre and then the Tuileries on the other side, after which it would be a simple enough matter to proceed north across the gardens to the Place Vendôme.

Okay, so the Seine is north of here. . . . So which way is north . . . ?

As Jerry wandered around growing more and more confused, a certain panic began to set in. Every little street began to seem like every other. He could swear he had been on the same street three or four times. The people strolling by seemed to be inhabiting another reality, and the babble of French and the incomprehensible street signs began to assume a certain sinister character.

He forced himself to stand still and think. Sooner or later, after all, a cab would come by, and all he had to do was say the magic words “Hotel Ritz” and he would be rescued.

His panic subsided. This was, after all, just a game he was playing with himself.

So let’s try and win it.

How do you solve a maze?

You go to a wall, and follow it by making every right turn that comes along until you get out.

Jerry began walking up the narrow street. He made a right on the next cross street, and the next, and the next, and the next. This stupid little maze was bounded on two sides by the Boulevard St.-Germain and the Boulevard St.-Michel and on a third by the Seine. Sooner or later he would have to intersect one of them and the maze would be solved.

And sure enough, he soon found himself standing on the Boulevard St.-Michel, indeed with the spires of Nôtre-Dame in full sight to the north, and the brasserie in which he had eaten lunch clearly visible not three blocks up the street.

All he had to do now was walk up St.-Michel to the river, hang a left on the bank of the Seine, follow it past the Louvre to the Tuileries, cross the bridge, cross the park, continue on up to the Place Vendôme, and he’d be back at the hotel.

So why didn’t it smell like victory?

Why did he feel as if he had somehow cheated?

Or been cheated.

Winning the game was supposed to make him feel more like a sophisticated prospective Parisian, but the way he had won it had somehow left him feeling even more like a stranger in a strange land.

The hell with it! he thought sourly.

There was a line of cabs sitting at a taxi stand just down the street on the other side. It was getting late, there was a party tonight, and there was nothing to be gained by pigheadedly trudging all the way back to the hotel on foot to prove a point he had already made to his own dissatisfaction.

“Hotel Ritz,” he said, getting into the taxi at the head of the line, and letting it carry him across the Seine and back onto the old magic red carpet ride.

But no more hookers, he promised himself. At least until I’ve really tried to get laid on my own.

That, at least, was a game a guy always knew whether he had won or lost!