Country of Cold Read Online Free PDF Page B

just sort of assume that there is a secret menu for the locals, one that more closely approximates the Piggly Wiggly experience. But there isn’t, Paris is obscene, that’s all. And the French acknowledge this, once they’ve established that there are no social points to be made in impressing you. But, for them, Paris is also the only real city in the world, the only city that, in the end, isn’t provincial, and so the four-dollar cups of coffee are conceded as sort of a poll tax on sophistication—they go with the territory, but just look at the territory, will you? And they have a point.
    To American art students who didn’t quite finish and now find themselves reading baby formula preparation instructions with a dictionary in hand, the poll tax seems a little more outrageous, and if the baby’s father wants her to live in this city, then she’s going to need a little more than five thousand lousy francs a month. Which, it seems, his family understands and so despite him, they reply with remarkable generosity and a matter-of-factness that shuts her up completely. Good Lord, must be some plumbing business.
    Which brings her to the point of sitting in an old church by herself, listening to a harpsichord concert and wondering if people can tell just by looking at her howignorant she is. Even her daughter had heard of this guy and had seemed to understand what the big deal is.
    And when I made a face at the pompous introductions she saw me and laughed. At the intermission she sidled up beside me, drink in hand, hat firmly in place, and said, in English, “Nice tapestries, huh?”
    I said, “Is it that obvious?” And she nodded.
    “The clothes,” she said. I looked down at them, unaware that the Gap had been betraying me.
    “Is there no hope at all?”
    “Wear primary colours only as a last resort and even then as a gesture of self-parody.”
    “Maybe I should just go back home now.”
    “Had you been planning on being around for a while?” she asked.
    “My name is Robert.”
    Her child flirted with me outrageously on our first meeting. Her eyes between her fingers, beside me on the couch, she laughed like a bebop jazz trumpeter, all uninhibited flights of exuberance. “This will last until she decides that you are a threat to her father,” her mother said. She waited for a response. I played some more with the child. “Which I am very careful about,” she added.
    A month later: rising at four in the morning to sneak out before Giselle awoke, walking down rue St. André des Arts, the street cleaners soaking down the sidewalks,which glisten like sweaty skin, our skin perhaps, a half hour previously. In midsummer in Paris the streets are the most comfortable place to spend the close, thick nights, and I did not hurry home. In Place St. Michel you can always get a croissant and
café crème
and so I stopped there to sit among drunken Scandinavians and derelicts and wait for the morning newspapers to be dropped off.
    As I sat there, nursing my four-dollar cup of coffee, I thought of Leonard. He and I had not met but no day passed without a dozen references to him, by Giselle and her mother. It had been Leonard who had broken things off initially, before they had learned of the pregnancy. But he had adjusted more quickly to the prospect of being a father than he had to that of being a husband and before she knew it he had found her an apartment on rue de l’Éperon, two bedrooms, maybe five minutes from Place St. Michel, and he was there for the child’s birth and for another couple of months following, fixing meals, washing diapers, buying groceries. And she appreciated this help, she said, but after a while she was wondering how long he intended to stay—the apartment was in his name, incidentally—and eventually she had to ask him to leave.
    Which he had done. But he still saw his daughter every few days and most weekends, and when Giselle spoke of her grandparents it was only his mother and father she