An Accidental American: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

paper bag and surveyed the contents, then pulled out a pain au chocolat and offered it to me.
    I shook my head.
    “You were quite the couple once, as I understand it. Love of his life and all that,” Valsamis observed.
    “Well, things change, don’t they?” I turned off the heat under the milk and poured out two mugs, then topped them with espresso and handed one to Valsamis. “Okay,” I agreed. “Let’s say he would want to see me. What makes you so sure he’s even in Lisbon?”
    Valsamis sipped at his coffee, then tore off a piece of his croissant and smiled slightly, clearly pleased at my capitulation, at himself for having known I’d eventually agree. “We have reason to believe it’s in his best interest.”
    “I’ll bet you do.”
    Valsamis ignored the remark. He opened his briefcase and produced a thick stack of euros. “ Pour les frais, ” he said. For expenses. “You’ll leave this morning.”
    “I’m to drive?” I asked, momentarily thrown off by the language leap before finding my footing in French.
    Valsamis nodded.
    “And once I get to Lisbon?”
    “There’s a room in your name at the Pensão Rosa. Do you know the place?”
    I shook my head.
    “It’s in the Bairro Alto. On the rua da Rosa. You’ll find it easily. Someone will contact you when you get there.”
    His accent was immaculate, his French flawless, unquestionably better than my English, and this was a statement, I thought, as the eggs had been. A way of making me acknowledge the inherent inequality in our relationship.
    Valsamis shut his briefcase and stood up from the table, leaving his coffee and croissant nearly untouched.
    “And when I find him?” I asked.
    “We’ll worry about that.” He started to go, then turned back to me as if he’d forgotten some important piece of information. “Just think of it as giving back to your country, Nicole.”

    I once heard it said that there is no such thing as an accidental American. That we are, all of us, citizens by conscious choice. Of course, it was a Frenchman who posited this, some self-proclaimed modern philosopher on one of the political discussion shows on France 2, so I’ve always taken the theory with a grain of salt. After all, to be an American has never been my choice. I was raised in Lebanon and have lived most of the rest of my life in Europe. I’ve claimed France as my home and chosen the one profession in which these things can be changed. I’m my own universal consulate. I can whip out any decent passport in a matter of hours.
    If anything, I am a mongrel, the daughter of a father who was, himself, a drifter and a con man. My mother was a half-breed with French and Maronite parentage and an Arabic name. A woman whose own country had been stitched together by naive outsiders to form an optimistic whole.
    “Just this one thing,” she used to say, speaking of her last meeting with my father and what little she’d asked of him. She was proud of the fact, proud to have done for herself. Six months pregnant and on her own, her possessions only what she could carry in one small bag. Two loaves of bread and a spare change of clothes.
    And the one thing? Certainly not money. No, what my mother had wanted was merely a signature, an acknowledgment of paternity. The only thing of value she thought my father could give me.
    Not a name or even legitimacy but a life she imagined for her child, a certain freedom and power. The amphibious vehicles of the Sixth Fleet swarming in the Beirut harbor. An adolescent memory of the young marines with their GI haircuts and broad smiles. Rock and roll and Jackie Onassis. Places my mother and her sister had visited four years earlier on a trip to New York City. Greenwich Village jazz clubs. Hordes of overcoated diners at Schrafft’s. The crush of rush hour on the subway. Women in stockings and high heels. Women who worked.
    In the scrawled slope of my father’s name, she’d seen all of this. America, Americans, and what it