Foreign Tongue Read Online Free PDF Page B

pirate, as befitted the fashion editor for a men’s magazine. I kissed his cheek and rubbed his shiny, shaved head.
    We sat at a corner table. Pascal waved to the other diners, texted and talked to his office on his cell phone, and threw me apologetic glances. I ordered an overpriced salade Californienne, with avocados and shrimp, because that’s precisely the kind of food I flew six thousand miles for, and watched a group of well-dressed Middle Eastern women with perfect eyebrows stroll by, laden with Chanel and Ungaro shopping bags.
    “Alors. Raconte-moi tout,” Pascal demanded, hanging up the phone.
    “There’s nothing to tell. I missed Paris, so I found a way to come back.” I attempted a Gallic shrug. He looked at me, narrowing his eyes.
    “Je ne te crois pas,” he said. “Did you win the lottery? Did someone die?”
    Heartbreak in French is chagrin d’amour. It means a disappointment in love, and it’s like food poisoning: everyone knows what it is and sympathizes. It’s probably covered under the state’s socialized medicine umbrella. Arrêt de travail pour cause de chagrin d’amour . I told him about Timothy.
    “C’est très people!” he exclaimed. The word “people,” pronounced “pipeul” à la française, had become the term for celebrity or worldly gossip. Trendy places were described as hyper-people , celebrity sightings photographed in the paper came under the rubric “le monde des people,” chic nightclubs were where the “ nice people ” hung out. Pascal flipped open his phone and scrolled through the display.
    “What is his name? Timothy comment ?” he asked. “I have to tell Florian. Il adore les potins!” he said, pressing the speed dial.
    “It’s not gossip and that’s not funny!” I said, snatching the phone out of his hand. “I’m telling you in confidence. Besides, I’m still getting over it.”
    “I am sorry, chérie, ” he said, clucking sympathetically. “Can I tell him when you’re over it?” he asked.
    “No!” I glared at him. He picked at his smoked salmon and blinis.
    “ De toute façon, you shouldn’t date well-known people,” he remarked, watching a plate of fried calamari go by. “I should’ve ordered that.” Turning back to me, he added, “It’s always a disaster.” He frowned and picked at the knife pleat in his trousers.
    “He wasn’t well-known when I met him,” I said.
    “Still. It’s a rule. In any case, you shouldn’t fall in love with them.”
    “How are you supposed to stop yourself from falling in love with someone?”
    “You can’t. But it doesn’t matter; now you’re in Paris. Eventuellement , you will get over it,” he said, waving to someone at the other end of the restaurant.
    It wasn’t comforting. Eventuellement, the mother of faux amis, means possibly.
    We ordered dessert, but he got another call and had to rush back to the office. I took the manuscript out of my bag and ate my mousse au chocolat alone.
    My education at the hands of women had been thorough. I felt confident in my appeal, I had never wanted for partners. My current girlfriend, Daphne, was a striking, thin blonde with pouty—
    I made a note to look up pulpeuse —does it mean voluptuous or fleshy?
    —lips and heavy eyelids. A former model, she was now studying for an advanced degree in political philosophy. She’d begged off coming to dinner that evening, claiming her essay on Machiavelli and Han Fei was too pressing.
    I went to Robert’s birthday celebration alone, so it was with an unhampered and luxurious curiosity that I observed Eve, seated next to me.
    “Would you prefer white or red?” I asked, offering to pour her a glass of wine. She mistook my stilted gesture for withering irony, considering the casual tavern we sat in. It was Robert’s favorite dive. He was a writer who hobnobbed with the police investigators he wrote fat thrillers about.
    “White. I prefer a headache to indigestion,” she said in a snooty, languid