by Michael Ryan
“Who cares? You have some secret little theory about me? My trauma yadda yadda blah blah bullshit? Maybe I like what I’m doing.”
“You’re the one who said you can’t be happy.”
“Okay, Bucko. You want to do something about it?” The bar-fight challenge again.
“Damn straight I do. I want to fucking marry you.”
That stopped her. She started to cry without crying. No tears came out of her eyes but every other facial movement was the same. She didn’t make a sound. Instead she stood up.
“I’ll be right back,” she said. “I’m going to the Femmes, then to call us a cab.”
She walked away, just like that, without the slightest indication what she was feeling. She did walk toward the ladies room and the telephones at the back of the café, not out the door to the street, so unless she was planning to escape through the kitchen she had to at least walk past me on the way to never speaking to me again. How badly did I fuck up? 1) Royally 2) Disastrously 3) Catastrophically 4) Apocalyptically 5) All of the above. Well, if I did, I did. I had to tell her sooner or later anyway. Admittedly I kind of bulldozed right past all the pleasant preliminaries. It might have been nice to tell her I loved her first. And I suppose I could have proposed in a more tender manner than “I want to fucking marry you.” And perhaps chosen a more tender and propitious moment. But oh well, too late now.
She was gone a long time, long enough for me to start thinking she did slip out through the kitchen—especially since I noticed there was a whole line of cabs parked outside and she must have known she didn’t need to call one. The waiter came by to see if I wanted some food and I ordered another round of absinthes with no intention of drinking them, just to pay table rent. As the Japanese girls were leaving the café, they stopped at my table and one of them said to me in English, “Excuse me, are you Patrick Swayze?” I said, “No, but thank you,” and they went off giggling on their Paris adventure. Probably one dared the other to say it. Maybe if Angela didn’t come back, I could start robbing banks and the police would arrest Patrick Swayze instead of me.
Then she did come back, acting as if she had never left and I hadn’t just asked her to marry me, although I could see there was something else going on under her acting.
“More drinks?” she said.
“No, but thank you,” I said.
“Were those Japanese girls hitting on you?”
“Unbelievable. I’m going to report it to the CIA feminist collective. Then organize a multicultural gender studies conference about it.”
“I remember all too well,” Angela said. “Go Bruins.”
“Hook ’em Horns,” I replied.
“Shall we go to dinner?” Angela asked.
“Are we getting married?” I said.
“I’ll tell you at dinner,” she said.
21.
Angela didn’t call a cab, she called a car—a Plaza Athénée car, “at the disposal of hotel guests during their stay in Paris.” L’Excuse was nestled on a narrow twisty cobblestone cul de sac in the Marais district. She said it might be hard to get a cab back to the hotel but the hotel car would wait for us while we dined. The car was a Town Car like the one that drove us from the airport through Paris at dawn on Sunday, but this ride wasn’t much like that one. Angela stared out her window the whole way as the streets darkened. If she sat any farther away from me, she’d have been riding outside. She did not hold my hand, and hardly seemed to be with me at all, much less with the person she wanted to marry. Paris looked about as enchanting as a clogged urinal. If I had any doubt about how badly I had fucked up by telling her I wanted to fucking marry her (Royally Disastrously Catastrophically Apocalyptically), I got my answer: 5) All of the above. Then as we pulled up to the restaurant, she pulled me to her and kissed me on the mouth. Good-bye? Hello? Confusing? Bewildering?
I was about to find out, despite L’Excuse being an unlikely venue for the experience. The owners, Fabrice and Maurice, twin brothers in pompadours and beltless slacks who together weighed less than one Bill Clinton, met us at the door and outdid even the Plaza Athénée staff in gushing over Angela. Whoever she is they seem to like her, I thought. They treated her like the Queen of Cuisine. They showed us to one of ten tables in a tiny room decorated in plywood paneling, hanging plants, and ancient velvet drapes sporting a film of congealed cooking vapor. All the tables were filled at ten on a Wednesday night and the clientele wasn’t there for the decor. The brothers put their resources entirely into the food, to spectacular effect. It was straight-ahead bistro cooking as delicious as the Plaza Athénée at one-tenth the price, so Angela was right (as usual)—although I didn’t actually taste anything after the amuse-bouche; a soft-boiled egg sweetened with cream that sounds horrific but was sublime.
“So you like to talk endlessly about everything and I don’t,” Angela said for openers after we were seated.
“We make a great team,” I said. “I’m all talk and no action and you’re all action and no talk. You don’t say anything and I don’t do anything.”
“What about my tics?” she asked.
“Your ticks? You collect insects?”
“T-I-C-S.”
“Tourette’s? I didn’t notice.”
“I’m talking about my habits you can’t stand.”
“I love your habits,” I said. “Especially the way you recite Dr. Seuss during sex.”
“You have no idea what they are. What about money?”
“Easy. I don’t have any.”
“What if you hate wasting money and I waste it?”
“I waste it too.”
“Well, I don’t. I hate wasting anything. I hate wasting food.”
“You only ate half your fish on the plane. Nor did you finish your meat pie. I bet you never ate a leftover in your life.”
“So I just lied. I’ve studied how to lie. I lie all the time. You said so yourself. I hardly know what truth is.”
“Neither do I.”
“I don’t care what truth is.”
“Me neither.”
“What do you care about?”
“Sex,” I said.
“Seriously,” she said.
“I am serious,” I said. “With you, it all goes into sex and radiates out from it. That’s the truth. It’s never happened to me before.”
“What happens when I weigh 400 pounds?”
“You’d have to eat a very big dinner, even for Paris.”
“So you want to get married, do you? Never have fun together? Have shitty sex, then none? Bitch and nag, little zingers, pointed ‘jokes’? Lots of monitoring, opinions, ‘helpful criticism’? Sure, let’s get married. When’s the date?”
“As soon as you want it,” I said.
“Come on, Robert. You know the drill as well as I do. Couples drive each other nuts, it’s not even their fault, horrible things happen, kids get into the mix, somebody gets sick or fired or depressed or injured, meanwhile frustration and resentment and fantasy eat them alive, not to mention that everyone’s so screwed up to begin with. Look what happened to you and Doris.”
“I didn’t love Doris,” I said. “I love you. I think I forgot to mention that.”
She started to respond, but the waiter appeared and showed me the wine.
“Please, just pour it,” I said, and he did, after taking about seven weeks to open the bottle, sniff the cork, and taste it himself from his shiny silver sommelier’s tasting cup, Angela all the while smiling at my impatience at this French national ritual.
“So?” I asked, after he finally left us to ourselves.
“Okay,” she said.
I couldn’t believe my ears.
“Okay?” I asked. “As in, okay let’s get married?”
“Believe me, I never expected this. This is not what I’ve been waiting for, because I haven’t been waiting for anything. I don’t understand how you make me feel the way you do. A crush, yes, but I’m afraid this is the real deal. You do it for me, Robert.
You’re the one. Not Jalalzada. Not anybody else. You. I want to be with you forever.”
The waiter had delivered the first course and I hadn’t even noticed. We were required upon pain of excommunication to eat it with the first growth Chablis the sommelier had selected for us and poured so religiously.
“Your scallops are getting cold,” she said.
“What do you want me to do now?” I asked. “I’ll do anything.”
“Good,” Angela said. “We’re almost there. What do you know about Islam?”
“Oh God, that again,” I said. “What is this Islam thing? Haven’t we been through this already?”
“Do you see how sexy Islam is?”
“Yeah, my thobe made me feel like a real stud muffin. And that Prince Abdullah, my God, the man just exudes pheromones. I could hardly breathe in the elevator.”
“Do you know where I bought the underwear I’m wearing?”
“Toys Я Us.”
“Riyadh. And the red Brazilian bikini you seem to favor? Not actually Brazilian.”
“And the point is?”
“Our sex together will be completely private. Just like the last four days only more. No one else knows or ever will know. Only you and me. Total devotion,” Angela said. “To each other.”
“I’m in,” I said.
“Total devotion. Restrict your sexual energy to me. You don’t get four wives and I get a quarter of a husband. It’s got to work both ways. I get all of you. You get all of me. Then it gets better. It gets more intense. Within our marriage, no limits. But we don’t go outside it. No past girlfriends, no ‘friendships,’ no flirtations, no deceptions, no horseshit. Zero Nada Never. You understand? I will love you until my ears fall off. I will devote myself to you and you will devote yourself to me. Could you do that? There aren’t many men who could do that.”
“With you I could,” I said. “I will.”
“All right,” she said. “You just said your marriage vows. And so did I. You’ve got me. Forever. If you ever die, I’ll fucking kill you.”
With that she stood up abruptly, just as she had at Café Les Deux Magots, just as the entrees arrived.
“Eat your dinner, Robert. I’ve got to make a phone call.”
“But the car’s outside waiting for us,” I said. Now that she said what she said I didn’t want to let her out of my sight. She might bump into somebody who would talk sense into her: you could have any man in the world, why do you want this bumblepuppet? I realized she had thought the whole thing through before we got to the restaurant—the whole conversation. That’s what she was doing in the car. I guess the kiss in front of the restaurant was a hello kiss after all.
Again she was gone a long time. I didn’t touch my entrée—roast partridge on a bed of cabbage and bacon with a vol au vent filled with avocado mousse. The vol au vent was a cup of puff pastry with tiny pastry sculptures of reclining nudes around its rim. It deflated and collapsed as the avocado mousse began to turn brown. After ten minutes, Fabrice and Maurice came to the table with identical pained expressions on their faces.
“There is a problem with the food?” one of them asked.
“Not at all. It’s absolutely wonderful, better than Alain Ducasse.”
“But you do not eat it,” the other said.
“I’m waiting for Angela,” I said. “She’s in the ladies room having an emergency.” As soon as I said this, I realized it implied she was incontinent or something. But Fabrice and Maurice were thinking only of the food.
“We will make you another!” one declared emphatically and the other nodded emphatically and swept my plate away.
When Angela finally returned, her face was white, as if she really had been sick in the pissoir. I knew it had all been too good to be true. Our marriage had lasted fifteen minutes, fourteen of which she had spent in the women’s bathroom.
“It’s off,” I said. “Correct?”
“Postponed,” she said.
“The shortest marriage in history.”
“Please, don’t be angry,” she said sadly. “I couldn’t take it.”
“Well,” I said, “I know you don’t like to talk about your decisions before you announce them to me, as if I might actually influence them in some minor way. But don’t you think I might be informed about this little matter that merely determines the entire rest of my life?”
“See, we’re bitching at each other already.”
“Pardon moi? You just called off our marriage.”
“Jalalzada’s dead,” she said.
I wasn’t expecting that.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“He’s dead. And I killed him.”
“Oh, Angela, that’s preposterous,” I said.
“Preposterous? What do you know about it? Nothing. The closer anyone is to me the more I hurt them.”
“I love you, Angela,” I said quietly.
“Don’t say that!” she screamed. “Don’t ever say that to me again!” She stood up and bolted out of the restaurant. Yet again. But this time she was gone.
I was so stunned, I didn’t move. It certainly got everyone’s attention. As I said, this was a tiny room—maybe twenty people dining, most of them couples. Fabrice and Maurice and the sous-chefs came out of the kitchen to see what was happening. Everyone stared at me. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t have said it in French anyway.
Then a beautiful elegant old woman seated with her husband across the room said to me in English, “Go after her.”
To my astonishment she was smiling at me, and so was her husband.
“Yes, yes, go after her,” the woman repeated. “She loves you.”
“Thank you,” I said.
I threw a wad of francs onto the table and started for the door. The woman’s husband raised his wine glass.
“L’amour,” he said, toasting, and everyone else nodded and smiled and I heard their wine glasses clinking as I opened the door to the street.
The Town Car was gone and the street was deserted—the narrow cobblestone street of three-story buildings hardly wide enough for the Town Car. I sprinted down to the corner and looked in every direction: nothing anywhere. Desolate.
“Postponed,” Angela said. But why? Once again she just did what she did and left me completely out of it. This time I didn’t seem to even figure in the equation. If she loved me, how could she do this to me?
I had to find her and talk to her. Things were not going to go well for me if I didn’t. But what if she wasn’t at the hotel when I got there? She was right about the cabs, though: there were none. I began running—I didn’t know which way or to where. All my life I’ve had a nightmare about being lost in a foreign city and desperately needing to get to some place and waking up with my heart pounding. This was the nightmare. I was in it.
Eventually I stumbled onto Rue de Rivoli and flagged a cab that drove me to the hotel, but by then more than an hour had passed since I left the restaurant. I don’t usually pray, but on the elevator up to the room I kept saying aloud, “Angela be here Angela be here Angela be here.” Of course she wasn’t. Nor was her luggage. Baja all over again, only five bazillion times worse. There was the fucking Eiffel Tower again in the silver-framed window and a fresh vintage Cristal in the silver ice bucket and no Angela. In the middle of the table at the window was an envelope. A note from Angela? No, again. A plane ticket to LA, on the Concorde, leaving tomorrow. First class. But of course.
What could I do? I could throw the silver ice bucket through the window and take a swan dive after it onto the Rue Montaigne. I could do my famous Sex-Pistols-in-the-ultra-luxury-hotel imitation and yell obscenities into the phone at the desk clerk and break priceless antiques and set the mattress on fire. I could wander randomly around the city screaming Angela’s name at the top of my lungs like Marlon Brando in Streetcar. Or I could call Sheed. Angela must have called Sheed from the women’s bathroom at L’Excuse. How else could she have learned about Jalalzada? What time was it now? One A
.M.—Thursday. That made it four P.M. in LA— Wednesday. Sheed would still be at the office, no doubt arranging his next covert world-shaking multimillion dollar deal.
I dialed Sheed’s number and Tori answered and my life in LA instantly rushed back to me: the gym, the Z, my apartment in Santa Monica, my pathetic career. Maybe I would take the swan dive onto the Rue Montaigne after all.
“Tori, this is Robert Wilder,” I said.
“Robb-bert,” she breathed. “Where are you? You sound fuzzy.”
“I am fuzzy,” I said. “Is Sheed there?”
“Are you in Paris? He told me to put through any call from Paris.”
“That’s me,” I said, although I knew Sheed meant Angela.
“Paris. How romantic,” Tori said.
“So thick you can cut it with your nose.”
“Whatever that means,” she said. “Bye, Robert. I’ll put you through.”
Click. “Folsom Sheed,” Sheed said.
“Robert Wilder,” I said.
“Mr. Wilder, this is a surprise. It must be one A.M. there.”
“Do you know where Angela is? And don’t say that if you knew you couldn’t tell me.”
“Isn’t she with you? If I knew I could tell you. Because she doesn’t work for me anymore.”
“What?”
“She quit, Mr. Wilder. About two hours ago. She said she was getting married to you.”
“Two hours ago she was. Now she’s not. Did you tell her Jalalzada was dead?”
“I did. He is.”
“It upset her very much.”
“I expect it did.”
Silence. I could see this wasn’t getting me anywhere.
“Can you tell me anything that would help me find her?” I asked feebly.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Wilder. I can’t imagine what that would be. If Angela doesn’t want you to find her, I assure you that you won’t find her. She is very resourceful, as you know.”
“Yes, I know,” I said.
“Do you have a plane ticket home?”
“On the Concorde. First class. Tomorrow.”
“I suggest you use it,” Sheed said. “The arrangement was for you both to come home on that flight.”
