Fly-Fishing the 41st Read Online Free PDF Page A

but not met, Pierre Affre. Whether I would spend the winter alone or with friends depended on my success in cultivating relationships with these two.
    I arrived at the Gare de Lyon and settled into a hotel on rue de Caumartin not far from l’Opera. Then I phoned Yannid at her apartment in Rouen.
    â€œ Allo? ” she greeted in her soft voice.
    â€œYannid, it’s James.” I hoped she would remember her promise, our planned meeting. “I didn’t expect to get you,” I said. “How are you? I’m in Paris.”
    â€œI’m fine. You’re already here?”
    â€œYou’re not going to Belgium with your mom?”
    â€œI was too busy to go,” she explained. “I’m not going to Paris for the New Year either, I’ve got to stay here and study. I’m sorry if you planned on my joining you.”
    â€œNo, it’s no big deal.” I felt my words were awkward. “I’m in a hotel. I’d like to see you.”
    â€œI agree that New Year’s is no big deal.”
    â€œBut maybe I can see you later this week.”
    â€œI was thinking we could go to an art show at the Grand Palais. I’ve been wanting to see it, of Chinese art. I could come in tomorrow and you could meet me there.”
    â€œWhy don’t you meet me at my hotel,” I suggested. “I’m on rue Caumartin, near the Opera.”
    â€œOkay, that’s fine. I suppose I need a break from work.”
    Â 
    Yannid arrived by train at Gare Saint-Lazare from Rouen at noon the next day. I was waiting for her in the hotel lobby when she walked in from the cold and damp day.
    She held herself with an air of propriety and carried a backpack that looked to be heavy with books. She insisted on taking it with us as we walked to the Grand Palais.
    â€œI come from one of those old Norman families you read about in Flaubert,” she told me as we sauntered along the quai. “My mother lives in a big apartment with a view of the cathedral; it’s beautiful.” She looked at me and seemed to acknowledge an attraction between us. “You have to come see it.” We were getting along, just walking through Paris together, getting lost and somehow always ending up by the river again, which looked high and powerful. She liked to talk about art and books.
    Â 
    It was a cool Saturday morning when, several days later, I made the trip by train to Rouen to see her. The medieval city was also on the river Seine but downstream of Paris and closer to the sea. Yannid picked me up at the station in her mother’s Citroën. I was shocked by the paleness and luminosity of her face; she looked as if she hadn’t slept for days, but I found her slight and sickly appearance strangely beautiful.
    â€œI feel,” she told me, “that Normandy is like Connecticut. You’ll see the resemblance when we get out into the countryside.”
    Yannid had told her mother that I would be staying with her in her small apartment. “This is a big deal,” she did not fail to tell me, “my mother is very…Catholic. She seemed okay with it, though, which kind of scares me. She’s given me freedom to do what I want. I guess I’m an adult now, but I find that a bit fearful.”
    We drove to the little street where Yannid lived, rue Eau de Robec. In medieval times Eau de Robec was a drapery and linen manufacturing center and the little stream that ran through it, the eau, or water, of Robec, was said to change color with the dyes that were discarded in it (this is described in the opening of Madame Bovary ). The water, fed by a spring, now ran clear over pavement and pebbles, and the street was no longer lined with linen manufacturers but with sex shops and cafés.
    Yannid stopped in the narrow stone street and opened a nondescript metal door. We walked into a dark corridor and up five flights of narrow spiral stairs. Her apartment was in an eighteenth-century