Because She Is Beautiful

by Cameron Dougan

"A bit."

  "May I ask what you do?"

  He shrugged. There was a notebook on the table in front of him.

  "Are you a writer?"

  He looked down. "This?" he said. "No, this is just . . . there's a lot of garbage in here." He patted the notebook.

  "Are you on vacation?"

  "I'm trying to be a painter."

  "So you are a painter. I'm always jealous of anyone who can draw. I should think you either are one or you aren't, though. A painter, I mean. Why trying?"

  His coffee arrived and he glanced at the bill and reached into his pocket for some coins. He picked up his book and began to read again. How rude, she thought, to start a conversation and stop like that. She ordered a second glass of wine. It tasted more mellow, like a pear without the skin.

  The young man finished his coffee.

  "Can I buy you another?" she said.

  "No, thanks."

  He stuck his book in his jacket pocket and began to collect his things. He pointed to her umbrella. "I see you're staying at the Ritz." He stood and stretched his long arms, gazing up at the sky.

  "I keep getting caught in the rain," she said.

  He peered up the boulevard, turned as though he were about to walk away, and paused.

  "You look lost," she said.

  "There's a story about Einstein. He's walking across campus and stops a student. 'What direction am I heading?' 'Why, Mr. Einstein,' the kid says, 'I believe you're heading north.' 'Good,' he says. 'Then I've had lunch.' "

  She hadn't expected to laugh and the young man seemed relieved that she had. His eyes didn't run from hers.

  "Did he really say that?" she said.

  He shrugged. "At least it's how I feel today," he said. "By the way, that is a beautiful ring. Is it an emerald?"

  "Yes."

  "Enjoy your wine," he said.

  She watched him go, his jacket slanting across the backs of his thighs. A bit of the lining had come unstitched in one of the tails and showed, a lick of silk smiling at her. At the corner, he stopped the small Gypsy boy and bought a carnation. The young man walked on with his hands at his sides, his pocketed book swinging, bumping his thigh until he took it out and tucked it under his arm with the flower.

  Kim paid for the wine and thanked the waiter.

  "It was good?" said the man.

  "Oui, oui."

  He stared at her.

  "Very," she said, more seriously.

  She wandered along the boulevard, pausing in front of a movie theater to inspect the posters. There were those same stricken eyes again staring back at her, the pouting red lips. They were everywhere. She considered going in, losing herself in the dark, but pressed on. She turned up a hilly street lined with galleries and rare bookshops. A wooden half-open book dangled on chains from a copper arm above a door. In the window were rows of stern red leather volumes. One was two feet tall with latticed gilt running up the spine and no title. Browning paperbacks lay about it like fallen leaves, nothing but text on their jackets.

  She came to another busy avenue. There were more bookstores with shady outdoor tables and hundreds of art books and whirlybird maple seeds raining down on the stands and sticking in her hair. Signs with arrows pointed to a garden across the street. Two grim-faced gendarmes stood to the side of an iron gate.

  Who had the young man at the café bought the flower for? she wondered. Maybe just to buy it from the boy.

  In the center of a sprawling sandy square was a boat pond and fountain. Flower beds wrapped the perimeter: swaths of red and pink zinnias and snapdragons against a green backdrop, a sharp rise of grass that led to the surrounding tier of park, potted palms and allées of chestnut trees. Boys and girls huddled at the pond's edge with sticks, leaning against the molded rim, stretching, beckoning to several miniature sailboats that dotted the pond. Wind pushed the boats to the edge, toward the anxious sticks, then shifted mischievously, turning the boats on themselves, sails dipping into the water, then springing up, filling, turning. It was a race to see whose boat would reach the edge first. When one did, it would be poked out with a stick after a mere moment's glee. Then a wild dash to the other side of the pond, pebbles kicking up as the children ran.

  There was a girl with crooked bangs and a black cotton sweater with lace at the neck. Her cheeks were pale and she stared but not at anything in particular, her little stick at her side. Kim smiled but the girl did not smile back, and then Kim realized she was blind. The stick was not for the boats. Her mother guided her to the pond, a hand, inches from her shoulder, ready in case she should stray. She reached down into the water and spritzed the daughter's face, swept the panorama of the park with her arm, drawing it in the air with gestures that her daughter could not see.

  "She is very beautiful," said Kim, moving closer.

  The woman stooped to button the girl's sweater. A large moth hole near the neck showed her undershirt beneath. The lace collar had browned and was stitched sloppily in a spot where it had frayed.

  "Qu'est-ce qu'elle a dit?" said the girl.

  "Tu es très mignon," said the woman. "You are nice," she said to Kim, finishing the last button and running her hand across the girl's cheek. There was a scar on the back of the woman's hand, pink and round, the size of a dime. They started to go.

  Kim opened her purse and took the first few bills she could find and held them out to the woman.

  "Please," she said.

  The woman hugged her daughter to her leg. The girl stumbled, then caught her balance and held on to her mother. "Maman?" she said, and the mother shushed her.

  "I want you to have it," said Kim, holding the money out, taking a step toward her.

  The woman rattled off a string of sentences, snatched the money, and threw it down, bills scattering in the breeze. She took her daughter by the shoulders and steered her.

  "Maman!" the girl cried, reaching out with her stick, money fluttering about her feet. A bill blew against her leg and stuck for a second, then fell away.

  "Wait," said Kim.

  They hurried off, leaving Kim frozen with her hand outstretched like an unsuccessful pickpocket. The woman's voice had drawn attention. People stared, their faces full of alarm. Kim abandoned the swirling bills, marched straight to a park bench, and sat, cradling her purse in her lap, looking ahead.

  "Madame," said a man. He handed Kim a fifty-franc note and walked away.

  Kim woke before the sun, dressed, and went down to the lobby. Robert was calling at ridiculous hours, leaving messages with numbers she didn't recognize.

  "Madame does not wish to be bothered?" said the man at the desk. "You will let me hold your calls?"

  The sun had not climbed above the buildings yet, and the street lay in shadow. Taxis lined up, their headlights still glowing. The bakery at the corner was crowded with people. Armloads of fresh baguettes were heaped into baskets, emptied and refilled, selling faster than they could be baked. The smell of oven-hot dough wafted out whenever the door opened, the rich warm scent lingering.

  Up ahead an iron sailing ship swung from a door sign. She reached the store and pressed herself to the darkened window, cupping her hands at either side of her head like elephant ears, peering in. There were rolled-up maps bundled into barrels and small wooden models of ships, tiny squares of sail like tissues and thread for rope. Her breath fogged the glass. Her hands left prints; she stared at the smudges. A gust of wind rattled the sign above her, which settled into a slow, rocking rasp.

  She passed brass doorknobs the size of pineapples, and two wooden knobs carved like sunflowers. She walked by a store window full of umbrellas: cat-faced carved handles and duck bills, a crystal ball gripped in silver talons, and an intricately engraved sword handle. She was so engrossed that she nearly tripped over a woman sprawled on a piece of cardboard, gnawing on a hunk of bread. She stuck out a swathed hand and grumbled. Her eyes were black-rimmed and hollowed and her four front teeth were missing. Crumbs had collected in the layers of cloth bunched
between her knees. When Kim looked back, the woman was tossing the crumbs to pigeons, cooing to them like pets. The gloomy birds waddled toward the bits of bread but left them, and the woman cursed, her shrill words lost in a burst of ungracious beating wings.

  Kim wandered aimlessly, beginning to trust that around each corner lay a secret waiting patiently to be revealed. Bit by bit the sun lit one side of the street, etching the jagged shadows of garrets, gutters and pipes, ducts, and slanting roofs on the listing walls of opposing buildings. New sights, new details: the carved stone around a doorway, grapevines clinging to an arborlike crossbeam, a building's perfect facade, cream-walled with black shutters and iron rails—but through the windows, clouds, sky, and the steel frame of a ten-story crane, rising out of the center of the gutted building like a ravenous dinosaur attacking the city, the exterior walls preserved like a movie set, a shell of the past. Everything competed for her attention. She quickly forgot the signs she read, remembering only that she'd wanted to remember them. But all interesting things were replaced by an endless supply of new interesting things, the remembrance of remembrance and a longing to hold on to experiences.

  She tried to go on. In Paris the roads angled so that one could never see far ahead. Now the bakery windows were emptied. Baskets that at dawn had contained scores of baguettes now held only a few. One had to rise early.

  Clouds streaked the sky. The sun disappeared. She came to a park. She could hear cries, see small colored forms scrambling between tree trunks. A boy with a book bag charged with his head down, clumsily, as though this were a rare opportunity.

  "Arrête," a woman called, and he stopped. His eyes were still wide, chasing after the pigeon or the leaf or whatever it was that his heart had attached to momentarily.

  A raindrop hit Kim's hand. A group of waiters stood outside a bistro at the corner, shoulder to shoulder just under the edge of an overhang, smoking. They gazed up at the churning sky, the park lanterns swinging from their curly posts, cigarettes glowing in turns. Behind them, a man in white trousers waved to get their attention. "Excuse me," he was saying. They smoked on, talking quietly without emotion. Finally, one flicked his butt away. It arched through the air, trailing smoke like a launched firework. She imagined shimmering colors, a thunderous boom. It landed without a sound. The waiters still looked up, as if there were something there, something promising in the colorless wash.

  Kim walked under her umbrella. She stopped to admire an octagonal crocodile handbag. It had a keyhole latch and a tiny key on a chain that hung from a gold-scaled handle. The store was a puzzle. There were other old handbags, a white fitted short-sleeve top and knee-length black skirt, yards of puddling material, green satin and silk, Schiaparelli pink, and scarves the color of blood-soaked tourniquets draped across the back of the window display. Kim entered to find a maze of racks on wheels and more racks hanging from the ceiling.

  A man in a turquoise angora cardigan with no shirt underneath was talking on the phone. He looked up at the sound of the door and then went back to picking lint from his sweater. His fingers were covered with silver serpent rings and a horned skull that clicked against the glass countertop.

  She found an eighteenth-century gown that smelled of mothballs and smoke. Its hooped skirt was turned up on end and mashed, looking as if it wanted to explode. A white-powdered Madame Pompadour wig sat atop a plaster bust, rows of tight curls pyramiding toward a butler's coat that hung above. The Comédie Française, she knew, was nearby. Many of the outfits were probably discarded costumes from past productions.

  She pointed to a pair of patent-leather military boots beneath a row of clothes.

  "Are these from a performance?" she asked.

  "Un moment," he said into the phone. "Quoi?" he said to her, his voice deep. "Ah, oui. D'accord. Those are real," he said, putting down the phone. "There is a uniform that goes with this."

  He pushed a rack aside to reveal a panel where all the ropes from the ceiling racks converged. He rubbed his hands on his hips and stared at the ceiling.

  "Oui," he said, and untangled a knot like a clenched fist. The veins on his neck rose as he let the rope out slowly, the pulley squawking.

  Once he'd lowered the rack and secured it, he wedged both hands between the hangers to get at the jacket. He laid it across the rack and beat dust from the deep navy shoulders with the flat of his hand. It was single-breasted with a belt at the waist and a high collar that hooked. She slipped her fingers under a button and pulled it taut, staring at dulled gold that was like a coin that had sat at the bottom of the sea for many years.

  He lifted a flap of the jacket. There were trousers, too, with red piping along the seams.

  "A man's name on the label," he said. "Tiens."

  He unhooked the collar and folded the lapel back. In faded black ink it read roth.

  "It is an officer's," he said.

  She would never forget the image of her father in his formal uniform on Sundays. Even after retirement he still wore it, he told her. Possibly he went to it out of habit. There were the annual parades, the march down Main Street with kids waving flags. Did he have his name inscribed in his as well? She squirmed at the thought of his uniform ending up in a boutique, strangers fondling it, buying it for parties, wondering if it was worth the price. She remembered the day a stranger came to dinner. He'd known her father from years back and was passing through. "Is your father home?" he'd said, clutching a baseball cap in both hands, turning it. She remembered the sweat stain in the brim, the salt line at the edge of the wet. He was bigger than her dad and ducked to get through the front door. He took up most of the sofa when he sat, springs jostling as he sank in, popping when he struggled to stand to salute her father. After dinner the two of them rehashed the years, the deaths, the devastated lives. They were still in the kitchen when it was time for bed. She went to kiss her father good night. The visitor was crying—three hundred pounds shaking in a tiny metal chair. She remembered great swatches of raw tear-soaked cheek and the adoration in his eyes to be in her father's presence, hearing his assurances: "There's nothing you could do, Lou."

  There were people out there who loved her dad.

  "You like?" said the salesman. "It is real."

  People respected her father for reasons she would never know, for deeds he kept secret. They loved him. The stories he told were for her imagining: the seeds of reasons to love. Distance made them grow. Twice he'd returned to her mother. Dedication, loyalty—they counted for something. Her mother had stuck by his side. Out of love? Had her mother ever said to him, I love you? All the time, she was sure.

  "Maybe I hold it?" said the man. "You come back?"

  Kim hesitated.

  "You don't think it is so fantastic?"

  "Okay," she heard herself say.

  "Oui?"

  "I'll take it. For Roth."

  "Roth? Ah, oui, Roth."

  "But I need it delivered."

  He pursed his lips.

  "I'll pay whatever it costs, of course."

  "To where?"

  "The Ritz."

  "Of course."

  "Today?"

  "When I close."

  He held the jacket up, admiring it.

  "Fabuleux, non?"

  She took a taxi to the café opposite the church. Even in the rain there were people waiting, clusters of umbrellas touching and bumping. The awning was rolled out all the way for cover. She spotted the young artist, alone at a table in the corner. He sat as she'd first seen him, in the same blazer, with wet hair, face tipped across a fist, book in the other hand, as if he'd never left. There was something sad in his sameness, his stillness.

  She remembered he'd been rude. Perhaps his time at the café was a routine, and perhaps she had interrupted that routine. She didn't care. She'd do it again. She squeezed through to his table and hovered. He looked up, then straightened, his cheek mottled with marks from his supporting knuckles.

  "Mind if I join you?" she said.

  He
looked at the open chair next to him, then stood. He cleared his notebook and book to one side of the table and pulled the chair out for her.

  "If you're in the middle of something . . . ?"

  He signaled for a waiter. She could see he'd already finished his coffee. She ordered wine and offered him a glass, but he declined.

  "I'm Kim Reilly."

  "Evelyn," he said. "Call me Scott, my middle name."

  "No surname?"

  "McKay."

  "Is that Irish?"

  "Scottish."

  "Isn't Evelyn a girl's name?"

  "If you're a girl."

  The waiter brought her glass. Scott reached for his book.

  "I'm right at the end of a chapter."

  She sipped and watched him read. Sometimes his lips moved. He looked up at one point and stared at her face, not directly so much as pondering, perhaps matching an image to the page, savoring it, and then continuing. When he finished, he opened his notebook and wrote something. He checked his watch.

  "So you came here to be a painter," she said.

  He nodded. "They let me into the Louvre. I've been copying some things there."

  "Yesterday I bought macaroons at Ladurée. I was wicked. Today I'm paying."

  "Are you here with friends?" He looked at his watch again.

  "Yes," she said. "Am I keeping you?"

  "The rain's let up."

  "Share a glass of wine with me."

  He buttoned his coat and reached under the table, pulling out a wooden box. He touched her shoulder as he stood.

  "I have to be disciplined," he said. "Have another for me."

  She didn't think she had said anything wrong, nor did he seem angry. She waited a moment, then stood. She left money under a glass so it wouldn't blow.

  He was already at the other side of the square. There was a saw musician: a woman on a bench with the tool wedged between her legs, bending the end and stroking the back of the blade with a violin bow. Scott had stopped and was listening, but before the light changed he was off and Kim still had to wait. There were no cars, but a gendarme was nearby and the do not walk sign was lit: the little red silhouette of a scolding man that amused her, as though he were wagging a finger. Now it wasn't amusing. She wanted to see the little green man, the cheery figure putting one foot happily in front of the other. She strained to see over people's heads and hurried across the street as soon as the light switched, past the woman with the groaning saw and down the side street after him.