by Julia Holden
“So do I,” Celestine said.
“Don’t you think I should hate him?”
“Of course you should.”
“Good,” I said. “I do.”
“Then to hell with him.” We clinked bottles and drank. I’m not sure drinking good sake out of the bottle is exactly the classy thing to do, but we were both past worrying about classy.
“To hell with him,” I said. When I heard those words come out of my mouth, they sounded like somebody else was saying them. But I attribute that entirely to the sake.
“And to hell with Gerard,” Celestine said.
“Yeah,” I said. Then I said, “Who is Gerard?”
“My father.”
“You call him Gerard?”
“What should I call him?” she asked. “Father? Papa? Dad?” she asked, in her best imitation of a nasal Midwesterner. “He does not act like a father. He acts like a Gerard. Like a badly behaved boy. To hell with him.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m so sorry he did what he did to you,” she said.
“It’s not your fault,” I said.
“Of course not,” said Celestine. “But I am still terribly sorry. To hell with him.”
Sometime around midnight, Celestine reminded me that we both had to go to work in the morning. She tried to convince me to take the sleeping loft, but I said no way. I was perfectly happy to sack out on the couch. Which I was, actually. It is soft cozy old red leather, as comfortable as any bed.
As soon as she turned out the lights, I found myself thinking about Josh. And promises. Lost causes. The Astros. His movie. My Grandma’s dress.
If I kept thinking about those things, I would never get to sleep. So I made a conscious decision to think about something else. Like for example my amazing new job. Just four days ago I was working at Independence Savings and Loan in Kirland, Indiana, feeling like I had about as much of a future as the dull little yellow brick on my desk. Today, Mister Giorgio Armani himself had hired me to sell his fabulous clothes at his glamorous Paris boutique.
I couldn’t wait to tell my mom. My dad, too, but especially my mom. She and I always watch the Oscars and the Emmys and the Golden Globes together, especially the red carpet preshows, and we love to be catty about who is wearing what awful dress. But neither one of us has ever had anything bad to say about any Armani dress, so she would be particularly impressed with my new job.
Of course, if I called my mom, I would have to admit that I lost Grandma’s dress. And I was not sure how I could possibly bring myself to tell her that, since Grandma was my mom’s mother. So even though I had this amazing new job to brag about, maybe I would not call home after all.
Ever.
30
Celestine and I got up very early the next morning. Which was complicated somewhat by all that sake. But headaches did not stop us. We were on a mission.
Before I describe our mission, you need to know that Paris is a very, very clean city. Big cities are typically not very clean. And Paris is certainly a big city. But the streets are clean. The sidewalks are clean. The little public trash receptacles always seem to be empty. All this cleanliness is so remarkable, you would think that the average Parisian would know who is responsible for it. But you would be wrong.
Our mission was to find my suitcase. Since we did not get a name or a license off that evil little pickup truck, we figured our only hope was to find where trash goes in Paris. I asked Celestine who picks up the trash.
“I don’t know.”
“But you have lived here your whole life.”
“And the trash has always gone away without my help. I don’t know.”
Celestine tried to figure it out online. But the French government web sites seem to have been created by videogame designers. The kind of games where you are lost in a maze with only a magic sponge and a hiccuping eunuch to help you find the treasure. We did not have six years to figure out the maze, so she logged off and started calling people. She knows a lot of people in Paris. Including some very important ones. Although most of them are not the type of people who are awake, much less in the mood to answer questions about trash, at seven A.M. In any event, none of them knew anything about who picks up the trash.
Then she remembered Didier. Who is apparently a minor pop music star in France. And who she seemed to recall was the son of some kind of deputy minister. She did not remember him right away because she said he was a very bad kisser—Didier, not the deputy minister. But Didier must have thought Celestine was a fine kisser, because he did not mind at all that she woke him up. He immediately put us in touch with his father.
So at eight fifteen in the morning, there we were, Celestine and I, in our matching Armani salesgirl outfits, in a very regal government building that Celestine said was built in 1763. A very good-looking soldier with a very big gun walked us down about two miles of corridors, then finally showed us into a bland little office that looked like it was built in 1963. Behind the desk sat a very small man with a very big mustache who introduced himself, first in French and then in English, as Monsieur Lebecq, deputy under-secretary of the Department of Facilities and Utilities. It rhymed in French, too.
Briefly, I told him what happened.
“I see.” He shook his head sympathetically. Then he thought for a while. Finally Monsieur Lebecq asked, “Is it a sewer matter?”
“I don’t think so. It’s a suitcase. It wouldn’t fit down a sewer drain. A little truck picked it up.”
“If it was a sewer matter, I might be able to help you. Public inquiry into sewer matters is permitted. For nonsewer matters, public inquiry is not permitted.”
“It’s not a sewer matter.”
“That is a pity.”
“Where does nonsewer trash go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you saying you don’t know because you don’t know, or because it’s a nonsewer matter, and public inquiry is not permitted?”
“Both.”
At that point, Celestine jumped in. The two of them talked in French for about five minutes. I understood not one word. Finally Monsieur Lebecq opened a desk drawer and extracted several pieces of different-colored paper and handed them to me. I could tell they were forms. There were eleven of them, all in French. All different.
Celestine stood up. So I stood up. Then she started to swear. I don’t know what she said, but Monsieur Lebecq turned red, then redder, then almost purple.
“Let’s go,” Celestine said to me. So we left.
Outside, Celestine snatched the forms from me. “Do you want to fill out all these forms, or do you want to throw them away?”
“Why would I throw them away?”
“Because you will stand a better chance of finding your suitcase if you take the forms to the nearest trash bin, climb in, and wait to see where they take you.”
31
I did not climb into the trash. And we did fill out all those forms and file them. “But only because you want to,” Celestine said. “Your chances of getting help because you file forms are none and none.”
“You mean slim and none.”
“I mean none and none.”
“Why?”
“Because you are in Paris,” she said. “And because you are in France.”
If any French person is reading this, please do not be mad at me. I didn’t say it, Celestine did. And she is, after all, a French person.
Celestine made some more phone calls. But very quickly, we ran out of ideas about how to find the suitcase. It was just gone.
I did not care about the actual suitcase. Or about the lovely D&G outfit and Stephane Kélian shoes that Celestine had given me. Okay I cared about them just a little bit. But really, I only cared—I mean cared—about Grandma’s dress.
It was so many things to me. It was my inheritance from Grandma. It was my inspiration. It was the thing that made people think I was special, the thing that got me out of Kirland. It was the source of my power, to the extent that,
for about ten minutes, I had any power. And now it was gone. I felt lost.
Being with Celestine helped, of course. And, oddly enough, so did my new job. New jobs are scary things. When I started at Independence Savings, even though I had been there probably thousands of times in my life, and even though Uncle John was my uncle as opposed to just my boss, it was scary. So starting a new job in a foreign country surrounded by people speaking several languages I don’t understand should have been even scarier. Only it wasn’t.
The first day, things were a little awkward, because nobody at Armani Collezioni knew quite how to treat me. Except for Celestine, they weren’t exactly thrilled I was there. After all, the sales staff was complete before they were told to hire me. On the other hand, nobody got fired on my account. And given how I got my job, even if they didn’t like it, they didn’t say so. I guess they were afraid word might get back to Mister Armani.
By the second day, though, everybody figured out that I was actually good for business. We developed a tag-team system. In case you don’t know, that is a wrestling term. Except for Celestine, nobody at Armani Collezioni had ever heard of tag team.
Not that Celestine or I ever watched professional wrestling. Of course we agree that Dwayne Johnson is awfully good-looking. But we know that just from seeing him in movies. Not from watching The Rock kick Stone Cold Steve Austin’s ass.
Anyway when you’re a professional tag team wrestler, you wrestle with a teammate, and the person you’re wrestling against has a teammate. When you get tired, or you’ve already done all your big signature phony moves and it’s time for somebody else to show off, you tag your teammate. Then the new person jumps into the ring and you jump out. Hopefully before somebody hits you in the back of the head with a chair.
Tag team at Armani Collezioni was a lot safer, but the basic concept was the same. Somebody would walk into the store. The sales staff would size up whether they were a real shopper, or a just-looker. If they seemed like a shopper, one of the other salesboys or -girls would offer to help them. If the shopper spoke French, I stayed out of it. If the shopper spoke English, but there was even the littlest hint that they might speak French, I stayed out of it. But if the shopper spoke only English, and no French whatsoever—and let me tell you, it is pretty much a cinch to spot those people, 99.9 percent of the time—then it was my turn.
“Excusez-moi,” Celestine would say. Or Jacques. Or Yves. Or Madeline, or Severine, or Pauline, or Jacqueline. Then they would look toward the front of the store, toward the little room behind the checkout, which is where I would sit and wait. And they would call, “Jeanne?”
Tag.
That was me. Jeanne. Which is not pronounced Jean, like blue jeans. More like zhahn. It’s the closest French name to Jane. Anyway, they’d call “Jeanne,” and I’d come running. In my best French-English, I would say, “I can . . . asseest you?” I asseested a lot of English-only Americans, and not one of them ever had a clue.
I was really good at my new job.
That is not just me saying that. Or Celestine. All my coworkers said so. They were very impressed. They wanted to know where I worked back in the United States. Calvin Klein, maybe? They refused to believe I had an accounting job at a savings and loan in Indiana. Not that they knew what a savings and loan was, or where Indiana was, for that matter.
On the one hand, I don’t know why it was such a big deal. I can think of harder jobs than showing fabulous clothes to people who have a lot of disposable income. On the other hand, not everybody can do it. For example, take shirts and ties. Almost anybody can pick a suit—but for most people, picking the right shirt for the suit, then the right tie for the suit and the shirt, might as well be brain surgery. But it was easy for me. And it’s not a skill anybody else in my family had, so this wasn’t something I got from somebody. It was just something I had. It was all mine.
After my second day at Armani, I decided to call home after all. I had been gone five days, and I didn’t want my parents to worry.
I got the answering machine again. I left a message saying my movie job was over, and now I was selling clothes for Armani. I said the new job was great, Paris was great, Celestine was great, everything was great. I said I still didn’t know when I was coming home, and asked my mom to tell Uncle John I’d be gone a little while longer. Then I hung up.
I guess I forgot to mention about losing Grandma’s dress.
Next, I called Bank of America to find out what was wrong with my Visa ATM card. They passed me around for a while, but eventually I reached a man who told me my account was frozen because of suspicious charges from Paris, France.
“That’s because I’m in Paris, France. I’m the one making the charges.”
“Well, how are we supposed to know that, ma’am?”
“Because I am,” I said. “Don’t you have security questions that prove I’m me?”
“Absolutely,” he said. He asked me my birthday, the mailing address on my account, and my social security number. All of which I knew. “Name of the first street you lived on.”
“Wespark,” I said. Which by the way is where I have lived my whole life. And where I still live. “W-E-S-P-A-R-K.”
There was a pause. Finally the man said, “I’m sorry, ma’am.”
“What do you mean, you’re sorry?”
“That’s not the answer I have here.” With that, he hung up.
Oh shit. He was right. Because my parents lived in another house till I was six months old. When I originally gave the bank all this security information, my mom made me change my answer to be completely accurate. What was the name of that street? I couldn’t remember.
I had no money. Which meant I was stuck in Paris.
32
Being stuck in Paris didn’t seem too bad, until I found out that Josh Thomas was stalking me.
“Josh Thomas is stalking me,” I told Celestine when I came back to the apartment the evening of my fifth day in Paris.
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I saw him.”
“Where?”
“At our patisserie.”
People in Paris do not grocery shop like you and I do. In Kirland, you drive to Sterk’s market every two weeks, roll a huge cart with one wobbly wheel through the aisles, and fill it until you can’t see over the top. In Paris, you only buy things the day you need them. Because you have to buy everything when it is totally fresh. From the way people act in Paris, I suspect there is a law that actually requires this. Also a law that says you cannot shop for different food groups in the same store. You buy meat at a charcuterie, bread at a boulangerie, and cheese at a fromagerie. If you need pastry—and trust me, if you are living in Paris, you need pastry—you go to a patisserie. Okay, maybe bread and pastry are technically in the same food group, but they have separate stores anyway.
So everybody in Paris makes like a dozen shopping stops every day on their way home, at the shops they think are the best ones in Paris. People go far out of their way to buy the best baguette, which is that long skinny French bread. Which French people really do eat, and really do walk down the street holding under their arms. Anyway, Parisians have very strong opinions about all these little stores, and I imagine that disagreements on who makes the best baguette are probably grounds for divorce.
Celestine believes that the best desserts in Paris come from a patisserie that is literally one block from her apartment. So she was shocked when I told her we would have to buy our mille feuilles someplace else from now on. The combination of perfect pastry and perfect convenience is not something one gives up lightly. “Why should we do that?” she demanded.
“Because I saw him at our patisserie.”
“Josh? You did not.”
“I did so. I was right behind him.”
“From behind, you could not see if it was him.”
“He was wearing his Astros cap.” I had told her all about the Astros, and promises, and lost causes.
“Well,” Celestine said,
“that could be a coincidence.” Although she did not sound very convinced. Because let’s face it, there are not a lot of Astros caps walking around Paris. “What was he doing?”
“He was buying pastry.”
“What kind of pastry?”
Do not ask me why Celestine thought that was relevant. “A Paris-Brest,” I said. Which is a pastry that, according to the French, is shaped like a bicycle wheel. To me it looks more like a bagel, only a bagel topped with almond slivers and sprinkled with powdered sugar, and instead of being spread with cream cheese, the inside is stuffed with yummy almond cream.
“I guess if you were close enough to see that he was buying a Paris-Brest,” Celestine said, “you were close enough to know if it was really him.” Oh. That’s why it was relevant.
In fact, before I had realized it was Josh, I was practically right behind him, with just one person between us. Then I saw him. Which immediately made me feel nauseous. Which is a very unusual way for me to feel, standing in the patisserie that Celestine says is the best in Paris. Fortunately I was able to run out of the pastry shop before he saw me.
For the past two days, I had done an excellent job of forgetting all about Josh. Okay maybe excellent is a little bit of an overstatement. Pretty good. Or at least fair. Under the circumstances, I mean. But in any event, seeing him brought everything rushing back. How I was starting to feel about him. Until he betrayed me, making them throw away my things like that. Grandma’s dress.
Then it occurred to me that maybe Grandma’s dress was paying me back for losing it. I have already told you how powerful Grandma’s dress was, and so far, that power had always worked in my favor—but maybe, like the Force in the Star Wars movies, Grandma’s dress had a dark side. Maybe now I was cursed.
