by Tim Sandlin
Odette's lip pouted. "What would Will James do?"
I stood and waited for the wave of whirlies to settle. It was touch and go as to whether I would fall on my face or walk upright.
Odette didn't offer to steady me. "You said when you don't know what to do, you think about Will James, you consider what he would do."
"But those are stories."
I walked over to the sink to wash down the codeine. To hell with the high risk of Paris water, I drank from the tap. The water tasted like tinfoil.
"You do not believe the stories?" Odette asked. "You were an imposteur all along?"
"Imposteur?"
"Fake."
"I'm not a fake."
"What are you?"
Her keys were on the countertop, beside her glasses and the beaded purse. I picked up the Disney World key chain and bounced it in my palm. What was I? I'd spent an awful lot of my life climbing onto bulls, even if I wasn't good enough to stay put. I couldn't see how it was possible to be a fake and a bull rider at the same time.
So, what would Will James do, in Paris? "Did your American husband give you this key chain?"
She looked at the key chain there in my hand, as if trying to recall what it was. When you carry something every day, you tend to forget what it looks like. "We visited both there and Epcot Center on our honeymoon. It is the only time I have been in the States, before my trip to Boulder."
"Why Disney World? Why not Yellowstone Park?"
"His mother lived nearby."
Something inside me clicked. "I don't know what Will James would do, but what he wouldn't do is sell the ranch."
Odette came over to the kitchen counter, looking at me, as if expecting more.
"Your friend Giselle is fixing to kill people."
"Giselle is angry, but she would not kill anyone. I know her."
"Why was she in Boulder?"
Odette gave me a look, but not an answer.
"Your philosophy department never heard of Giselle. Why did she go to Colorado?"
Odette gave the French shrug. "She said it was to view the Rocky Mountains. I suspect she came on the trip in hope of seducing me. Giselle likes women the same as men."
"Did you and Giselle ever drive up into the mountains? A place called Gold Hill?"
"I did not have sufficient time for drives. She may have, the day I presented my paper."
I crossed back to my saddlebag and pulled out my second best cowboy shirt. Best after tonight. It was white cotton with a blue flannel yoke and artificial pearl buttons. The gun nut T-shirt was beginning to feel like it belonged on someone else.
"Our three-way started with you in front and my dick in Giselle. Do you remember her pulling out a tampon?"
"What kind of question is that?"
"A girl about to get nailed in her period has to stop and pull the plug. Unless she did it in the can earlier, but then it wouldn't wind up on my floor. You weren't having your period, were you?"
"I do not enjoy relations during the time of bleeding. It is difficult to achieve climax."
Now I was on to something. Will James would like this. "You know much about French literature?"
Odette nodded, suspicious of where this was going. "I studied it in lycée, before Santayana and James."
"Help me." I bent over with my arms outstretched and she pulled the T-shirt off over my head. I couldn't do it the normal way. "Would a person write a paper on 'Gide as Proto-Heroic Parisian Male'?"
Odette laughed.
I said, "What?"
"André Gide was a renowned homosexual. He was to France what" — she paused to come up with an example — "Liberace is in America."
I opened my billfold and flipped through various receipts, credit cards, and photos of Tyson until I found the card I was looking for.
"Telephone this number and tell whoever answers that we need a taxi."
Odette's face lit up. I'd made her day. "You will stay in Paris now and fight for the buckle?"
I pulled on my cowboy shirt, leading with the right arm. "The buckle's gone. I'm going to save McDonald's."
She held the card between the fingers of both hands, somewhat dubious. "You can do that?"
"While I'm at it, I'll make the world safe for Starbucks."
33.
Forty minutes later, Odette and I emerged from her building, arm in arm. To the casual observer, the arm-in-arm stuff would have appeared as pure affection, which was mostly but not all the way truth. There was an element of holding me upright. We came out soon after daybreak to a rainy street that was empty except for the Chinese guy unlocking the retractable fence that covered his shop across the street, and Pinto, sitting in his taxi, in a bad mood. He leaned over and rolled down the passenger-side window and stared at me from behind his sunglasses, without talk. His silver hair hung down, loose. He looked like he hadn't had much sleep. Monty'd stayed home.
Odette picked up on the less-than-friendly vibration. "We should take the metro. It goes wherever you wish and it is cheaper."
"We'll do it my way this time." I leaned low for a better angle on Pinto. "The fare you told I was Starbucks by way of CIA, you happen to catch a name?"
"He was your pal from Crepes a Go Go, the blond American you spilled your guts to before I could get there."
"The kid from Orlando, right there next door to Disney World."
I held the back door open for Odette. As she ducked in, I said, "It's time we paid a visit to your husband."
She didn't speak until she'd settled on her side of the backseat and I'd gotten in behind her. Then she said, "Surely you are not jealous."
"Michael, right?"
Odette's cheeks paled a shade. "I do not think he would approve if I were to reveal his address."
"We already know it." I looked forward to Pinto. "Don't we?"
"I can take you to the apartment on rue Cler where I dropped him yesterday."
Back to Odette. "Is it on rue Cler?"
She nodded.
Up to Pinto. "Let's go."
The street where Michael lived and, I guessed, where Odette used to live, was considerably more trendsetting than any other part of Paris I'd seen so far. It was clean. The pavement was old bricks and the buildings were glaringly white with curved-arc edges and balconies crammed full of potted bushes. A gun barrel—gray Rolls-Royce slid by, going the other way. A couple girls pushed babies in carriages along the sidewalk. I got the idea the babies in the carriages did not belong to the girls pushing them. It was the Hollywood view of Paris you see in movies, which made me think the neighborhood was full of Americans.
"This is a pretty hot-stuff block for a graduate student," I said.
"Michael's family owns the company that invented puffed cheese. You have heard of them, no?"
"Not me."
"Michael blames his parents and their group for the cultural genocide of France. His dream is to rekindle the French tradition of pride in eating."
I watched a woman I took as a hired hand struggle with seven yippee dogs on leashes. She got them across the street all right, but then they split ranks around the stoplight pole. "He could donate a couple million to a museum. I don't see any call for forcing people to eat decent food if they don't want it."
"Armand says Michael suffers from class guilt."
I thought about the blond stallion who'd offered me a girl to have sex with. That kid had reeked of entitlement. "It's hard to picture the Michael I met feeling guilt over anything."
"You would be surprised. Michael Gunner is more complex than he appears."
"Assholes usually are, but that doesn't change the smell."
Pinto pulled up in front of an apartment house with the entrance set at an angle to the street corner. The double doors were flanked by these seven-foot-high vases looked like they'd come from the pyramids.
Pinto pulled off his sunglasses. His eyes looked worn out. "That's forty-three euros."
I dug for my replenished billfold as Odette got out
on her side and moved over by the building. I said, "How'd you know telling this Michael character would get back to Armand?"
"I went fishing." Pinto took my three twenties and didn't offer me change. "I knew he was connected to Armand through her." He nodded toward Odette. "I wanted to see how connected."
"So you knew the girl I was looking for and the guy I was talking to were married to each other."
Pinto pocketed my money. "Have you chosen to behave like a patriotic American now?"
I got out, shut the door, and leaned into the open front window. "Somebody has to do your job."
Odette punched a code and walked in like she owned the place, which, I suppose, at one time was more or less true. The lobby was plush carpeted with more vases. A couple even held flowers. The walls were tile and the chairs modernly uncomfortable. A little nervous man rubbing his palms together came from a closet-sized room to greet us. He had a napkin tucked into the top of his shirt.
He said, "Madame Gunner."
Odette said, "Bonjour, Paul. Monsieur Gunner est à La maison?"
The man took on an extra level of nervousness. He rubbed his palms like a Comanche starting a fire. "Oui, mais — "
"Ce n'est pas la peine de l'appeler, allons-y."
Odette led me across the lobby rug to an elevator with stone pink-pearl framing, the shade of your higher-priced grave marker.
When the elevator came I was surprised to see it was full-sized, like a regular American elevator. Odette stepped in. I stepped in. Grim-faced, she punched the four button, which meant five. Her fingertips brushed against mine. She said, "The taxi driver was with you yesterday, at the university."
"He's my interpreter."
"You lied when you said you are working for no one but yourself."
What could I say? It hadn't been a lie when I said it, but she had no call to believe that. We left the elevator and walked down a hallway you'd have to describe as swank. Odette dug into her purse and I discovered what door one of the other keys on her Disney World key chain went to.
"How long since you and your husband split up?"
"Thirty-nine days." She slid her key into the lock. "But I prefer not to count."
Showing up at your ex's soon after the crack of dawn is a fine way to look for heartache, even finer if your ex is a known chow hound. I only did it the once with Mica, coming off an all-night blizzard drive from Scottsbluff. I wound up wishing I'd slept in the truck, snow or no snow. I have no idea who was in the house. She blocked the door with her body so I couldn't look around her and told me I'd lost my dropping-by privileges. She was wearing the Trashy Lingerie teddy I'd bought her for Christmas. I didn't see Tyson.
I can't blame Odette for being tense, and, for a moment, I regretted bringing her along. I could have left her behind, I guess, although it would have been complicated getting from the street into the apartment.
The thing about Michael Gunner's apartment was in my wildest imagination I couldn't picture Odette living there, not after seeing where she lived now. It wasn't so much that every surface was clean, which it was, but pretty much every surface was reflective. Furniture came in white, silver, and black. There were more vases without flowers and little foot-and-a-half-high statues of naked women on pedestals. Cowboys put women on pedestals, metaphorically speaking, but we don't make them stand there naked. He had art all over but no books to speak of, which seemed odd for a student. Maybe they were tucked off in a library or conservatory or some other room with a pretentious name.
He had a crystal chandelier, a tabletop made from a slab of black marble, and a mirror with a frame big as a hayloft door. Fish of exotic colors and shapes swam around a big tank.
"Did you buy this furniture?" I asked Odette.
She dropped her beaded purse on the marble table. "Michael hired an interior decorator. I chose none of it."
"That's a relief."
Michael came from what I assumed was the kitchen, wearing a maroon silk robe that said MG on the breast in fancy script, carrying a black enamel tray with two steaming mugs of coffee, two pastries, and a glass bowl full of assorted berries.
He said, "Slick."
"What'd I say I would do if you called me that word again?"
"You walk into my home uninvited, I'm allowed to call you any name I want."
He and Odette studied each other. There's always this competition when two people break up where each one wants to go to pieces less than the other. For most couples it comes down to the together one gets re-involved the soonest. I have no doubt that was most, if not all, of Bernard's appeal. It's hard to see anything else he had going. For people who split up frequently and for whom re-involvement is not a challenge, it's who moves up or down the social pecking order. So, right off, Odette sees the two mugs of coffee and knows whoever comes out of the bedroom will be measured against me.
Michael gave Odette a thick-lipped smile. I don't know diddly when it comes to elective surgery, but those lips looked professionally poofed.
"Come see who has dropped in for a visit," he said.
Giselle slouched from the bedroom in a white terry-cloth robe more than likely stolen from a hotel.
Odette flew off the handle. You never heard such a French tirade. She charged Giselle and, for an instant, I thought she might batter the bitch. So did Giselle. Soon as Giselle realized the attack was vocal as opposed to physical, she attacked back.
Michael and I stood amazed. Men are mystified by fights between women. Pride goes out the window. Carefully constructed walls of personality crash down. It's the exact opposite of fights between two men or a man and a woman. There's no bullshit.
"You want her coffee?" Michael offered the tray. "It's American."
I could have kissed him.
Thank God he didn't know that. "I mean, it's Tanzanian peaberry," he said. "But it's dripped through a filter, the American way."
I held the mug with two hands and closed my eyes for the first sip of real coffee since Starbucks in the Denver airport. I tried counting back the days to see how long ago that was, but the flight across the Atlantic had thrown off my inner calendar. The rodeo was Sunday, I hit Paris Tuesday, I'd slept twice, which left today at Thursday and I had a plane to catch tonight. That meant three days without decent coffee, which was the longest I'd gone since eighth grade. I figure I don't chew and only drink after sunset, so I have coffee coming. Man with no addictions at all strikes me as suspect.
Michael was idly watching the girls yell at each other. Far as I could see, he didn't have a care in the world.
"When we were in Philosophy, looking for these two, why didn't you tell me you already knew them?"
I'm not absolutely certain what sardonic means, but I can come close, and, in my mind, Michael was sardonic. "You didn't ask."
"That's the sort of answer gets people punched out."
Michael bit the tip off a strawberry. I imagine Giselle had told him what happened with Armand and the gang, so he knew I was capable of violence, but he still came off as casual. You have to give him that. "I knew you could find the twats without my help. What I wanted was to see how long you would take."
"And that bull malarkey about Gide as proto-male?"
"I was pulling your leg," which is the Southern way to put it. We don't pull legs in Wyoming. "Graduate school humor, like out in your country when you tell tourists about jackalopes. Having an outsider believe your lies makes you feel intellectually superior."
I drank more coffee, considering how everyone who knows something thinks they're better than those who don't. "Do you have my buckle?"
Michael looked over at me in surprise. "God, no."
"Do you know who does?"
"Giselle said you have it. Don't tell me you lost your precious belt buckle again?"
By then the noisy part of Odette and Giselle's argument had wound down and they'd gone into the silent staredown section. Giselle was so much taller than Odette that she had an advantage. I knew how Odette felt, which is
why I generally skip over the stare-down as quick as I can and go straight to hitting.
I held out my mug. "Got a refill?"
Michael hesitated, then took my mug and went to the kitchen. I walked over to Odette.
"Why're you upset?"
She blinked a couple times, not wanting to shift her focus off hating Giselle. "Because this one is supposed to be my friend."
"But you and Michael broke up."
"He is despicable. I hate the air he exhales."
"Then what difference does it make if Giselle humps the bum?"
Odette's hand went to my upper arm. "Sisters of the battle do not betray one another."
Giselle spit on the carpet — a wet noogie next to my boot.
I gave Odette an unpleasant truth, which isn't quite the same as self-evident. "Friends always sleep with each other's exes. The best you can hope for is they wait till you're actually split up."
"Just now Giselle boasted that she did not wait."
"That's different, then."
Michael came back and handed me a fresh cup. "You've porked them both. Which is better, in your mind?"
Odette s grip tightened on my arm to the point of feeling more claw than hand — the signal that I'd better answer the question to her satisfaction.
"I have trouble relaxing with a woman who might slit my throat in the afterglow," I said.
Giselle said, "I would not be too confident as to which of us that is," which is something I'd already thought about. Odette and I might be in love, but that still didn't mean I knew her well enough to turn my back.
Michael went off to the bedroom, leaving the three of us in an awkward silence. He kept the door open in case we wanted to watch him throw off the robe and dress. No one did.
"So give up the truth for once," he called back. "Who are you?"
I'd been considering that question all morning and the answer didn't seem the same as yesterday. But then Michael probably wasn't looking for navel gazing. "Name's Rowdy, same as it was the first time you asked."
