13 Little Blue Envelopes

by Maureen Johnson

  Her roommates were still there, gathering their things for the day. They nodded hello to Ginny and exchanged a few words of greeting, then they went back to their conversation. She quickly concluded that they were from the same high school, which was in Minnesota. She knew this because they all knew one another’s names and were talking about what classes they were going to take together. They also kept saying things like, “Oh my God, can you imagine this in Minnesota?” and, “I want to take one of these home to Minnesota.”

  Ginny put her bag o’ sheets on one of the empty cots on the other side of the room. She lingered for a minute, adjusting the sack over the little plastic pad that served as a mattress. She wasn’t great with strangers, but today she felt like she could be. If the girls had seemed interested, she could have gotten into a conversation with them. Maybe she could join them, and they could all go somewhere together.

  That was it. That was what she wanted. She and the girls from Minnesota could go through Paris together. They’d go to stores and stop at a café. They’d probably want to go to a club or something. Ginny had never been to a club but knew from her French textbook that that’s what you did in Europe. So if the Minnesota girls wanted to go, she would go too. They’d all become good friends really quickly.

  But the Minnesota girls had different plans and slipped out the door without her. A screeching voice came over the loudspeaker and told everyone in French and English that they had better get out or there would be some kind of hell to pay. Ginny picked up her bag and left, alone.

  Once she was out on the street, she soon passed a metro station with one of the famous, curling green metal entrances and, lacking a better plan, descended. The Paris metro map was a bigger, more troubled cousin of the London map. However, the Louvre was easy to find. The stop was called Louvre. That was a good hint.

  Her French textbook had assured her that the Louvre was big, but nothing prepared her for just how big. She waited in line for two hours to get in through the massive glass pyramid entrance. Inside the Louvre, there was a certain safety. It was okay to be a tourist. Everywhere she looked, people were poring over the floor plan, reading guidebooks, digging into backpacks. For once, she fit in completely.

  There were three named wings to choose from—Denon, Sully, and Richelieu. She checked her pack into the baggage claim, chose Sully at random, and headed into its depths, immediately finding herself in a re-creation of a stone vault, which led around to the section on ancient Egypt. She wandered through room after room of mummies, tomb decorations, hieroglyphics.

  She had always liked Egyptian things, especially as a kid, mostly because she’d seen them at the Metropolitan Museum with Aunt Peg and they played “If you could pick what things you wanted to take with you when you died, what would you take?”

  Ginny’s list always started off with an inflatable raft. She didn’t even own an inflatable raft, but she could imagine it perfectly—it was blue with a yellow stripe and handles. She was convinced that she’d need it in whatever heaven she was imagining.

  The Egyptians had also taken some seriously weird crap with them to Deadland. Tables shaped like dogs. Little blue thumb-sized dolls that were supposed to be servants. Big masks of their own heads.

  She turned the corner and walked down the hall toward the Roman sculpture.

  And she was right back where she started, in the stone vault. It seemed impossible, but it had happened. She tried again, following the signs and the maps. This time, she ended up in the sarcophagus room. On a third try, it looked like she had made it into Roman statues, and then bam, she was right back in with the canopic jars and tomb decorations.

  It was like she was walking through some kind of fun house.

  She finally had to follow a tour to get out of the land of the dead. She followed them through the Roman statues. Little French children sat below the nudes, gazing up. Not one of them was pointing and laughing. She kept walking through the endless succession of connected chambers until she caught sight of a sign that featured a little picture of the Mona Lisa and an arrow. She followed this through at least a dozen more galleries.

  One thing Aunt Peg had instilled in her was a comfort around paintings. Ginny never claimed to know much (if anything) about painting. She didn’t know a lot about art history, or techniques, or why everyone suddenly fainted in ecstasy if some artist suddenly decided to use only blue…. Aunt Peg had explained that while these things were important to some people, the main thing to remember was—they’re just pictures. There was no right or wrong way of looking at them, and there was no reason to feel intimidated by them.

  As she wandered through the galleries, she felt herself relaxing. There was something about the orderliness of it all—something familiar in this strange place. Just being there made her feel that although she was so far from home, she wasn’t alone. It seemed like everyone else was trying to capture something about the place. Art students perched everywhere with their massive drawing pads, gazing intently at a work of art or a decoration on the ceiling, trying to duplicate what they were seeing. So many people were taking pictures of the pictures—or weirder still, videotaping them.

  Aunt Peg would love that, she thought.

  She was so busy watching them that she didn’t even realize that she had walked right past the Mona Lisa. It had been buried somewhere in one of the crowds. In any case, it seemed as good a time as any to stop. She sat down on a bench in the middle of an Italian gallery with deep red walls and pulled out the next letter.

  * * *

  #8

  Dear Gin,

  So there I was, Gin, on my way from the passions of Rome to the cool romance of Paris.

  I thought I was broke before, but I’d always had a little money. But I’d blown most of what I had in Rome.

  There was a café I passed almost every day. An amazing smell of fresh bread always came from it, but the place was just falling to pieces—the paint was chipping, the tables were plain and ugly. It was cheap, though. So I went in and had one of the best meals of my life. No one was in there, so the owner sat down and talked to me. He told me that he was closing down the café for a month because everyone in France goes on vacation for a month in the summer. (Another thing that makes France cool.)

  I had an idea.

  In exchange for a little money for food and letting me sleep in the café, I would redecorate for him. The whole place, top to bottom. For the cost of a couple croque monsieurs, a few hundred cups of coffee, and a little paint, he would have his entire café decorated with original work by a woman who would stay there twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It was too good an offer to pass up. So he accepted it.

  For the rest of the month, I lived in the café. I managed to get some blankets and pillows and I made myself a little sleeping nest behind the bar. I went to the market for food and cooked my meals in the little kitchen. It didn’t really matter if it was day or night—I painted all the time, whenever I felt like it. I slept with the paint fumes. I dreamed about the designs. I permanently stained the skin under my left thumbnail blue. I made curtains from aprons I found in a secondhand shop. I bought up old plates, smashed them in the courtyard out back, and made them into a mosaic.

  My Paris was just this tiny room, and a few junk shops, and occasionally walks down the street either at night or when it was raining. This, I thought, is what Paris is all about. Remember, this city is where the peasants seized control and took over and beheaded all of the royals and the rich. It takes pride in the poor artists who have lived here in the past—all the painters, writers, poets, singers who made the bars and cafés famous. Think Les Misérables! Think Moulin Rouge! (But without the TB.) Mari lived on the streets of Paris for three years! She danced in clubs, and painted on the sidewalk, and slept wherever she could.

  So this is the CHERCHE LE CAFÉ PROJECT. (I know you take French, but just in case…it means FIND THE CAFÉ.) I want you to find my café based on what I’ve told you and what you know about me. />
  And, of course, when you get there—have something delicious for me because I am your loving…

  Starving Artist Aunt

  * * *

  Ginny looked over at the watch of the man sitting next to her and saw that it was almost six, so she decided to leave. The word sortie, which was on signs all over the place, meant “exit.” So she followed the signs.

  Sortie, sortie, sortie…

  And then suddenly she was standing in front of the Virgin Megastore, in front of a display for Star Wars: La Menace Fantôme.

  Did sortie mean “This way to Jar Jar”? And why was there a Virgin Megastore in the Louvre?

  After ten more minutes of trying unsuccessfully to escape, Ginny finally found the exit. Since the Seine River was right there and there were dozens of bridges over it, she decided to cross. Things were smaller and tighter on the other side. This was the Left Bank, she knew. The student quarter. She glanced around and turned back to walk over the bridge.

  Paris seemed to make good on the promise it made in every photograph of it she’d ever seen. People carried long baguettes. Couples walked hand in hand through asparagus-thin streets. And before long, a round moon hung overhead in an electric blue sky and the Eiffel Tower began to twinkle with a thousand little lights. The air was warm, and as Ginny leaned against the side of the Pont Neuf and watched a dinner boat slide along the Seine under her, she thought that this was a perfect Paris night. But she didn’t feel perfect. She felt alone, and the only thing she could think of to do was go back to the hostel.

  Les Petits Chiens

  That night, Ginny sat in the wide, empty lobby, at the long table with the mismatched wooden chairs that held the hostel’s computers. Every seat was taken. People from all over hunched intently, reading their e-mails from home, composing epic Web logs, totally unaware of each other’s presence.

  There was a smell of old smoke from the woman at the front desk’s constant sequence of cigarettes. On the wall above Ginny’s head were old maps of the world dotted with white star-shaped scars and little holes on the points where they’d been folded time and time again. White stars all over the world, in the oceans. Holes in China, Brazil, Bulgaria. There was even a tiny hole in New Jersey, though much closer to the ocean than where she lived.

  For the first time since she’d been away, she had access to the outside. She could write to anyone she wanted—that is, if she didn’t follow the rules. The only thing stopping her from talking to Miriam right now was a razor-thin strip of willpower. No electronic communication with America. There was no ambiguity on this point.

  But there was nothing in the rules about England. And while she didn’t actually have Keith’s e-mail address, she guessed it wouldn’t be impossible to find. She was good at finding things. She was an Internet bloodhound.

  Finding Keith proved to be absurdly easy. She tracked him down through the Goldsmiths site. But it took her a full hour to come up with what she wanted to say to him in her e-mail. It took one hour and about twenty-six versions, in fact, which finally resulted in:

  Hey, just wanted to say hi. I’m in Paris right now.

  She read it over as soon as she sent it and immediately regretted the “Hey.” Why “Hey, just wanted to say hi.” Why not just “hi”? Why didn’t she tell him she missed him? Why couldn’t she say anything cute and clever and alluring? No one would reply to a note like this, because this note was inane.

  Except that he did. A reply popped up in her in box. It read simply:

  Paris, eh? Whereabouts?

  She grabbed her fingers and stroked them to steady them. So, the simple approach had worked. Fine. She would keep it simple:

  The UFC Hostel in Montparnasse.

  And should she ask him if he was still mad…or was she the one who was mad? Maybe better to drop the mad part entirely. Keep it informational.

  She waited for half an hour. No reply this time. The night’s excitement was over.

  She went back upstairs to the dorm, where her roommates were clustered together once again on their side of the room. They smiled at her when she came in, and though she could tell that they had nothing against her, she also sensed that they had been hoping she wasn’t coming back. Which was fair enough. They were all friends. They wanted some privacy. She tried to get her things together as quickly and quietly as she could, then climbed into the loudly creaking bunk and tried to sleep.

  Ginny bolted straight upright at the loudspeaker announcement at 7:30 a.m., which alerted everyone that breakfast was only until eight thirty and that everyone was expected to be out by nine on the dot.

  The Minnesota Contingency was just waking up. They were pulling things out of their bags (much cooler, better-designed bags than her purple-and-green monstrosity). She had nothing, she realized. Nothing except shampoo and toothpaste. That meant no soap and no towel. She had never even thought of it. She dug around in her bag for something she could use as a towel, finally coming up with her fleece.

  The bathroom was small, with three shower stalls and four sinks. Though it was fairly clean, there was a raw, rotting smell coming from somewhere deep in the building. She waited in line with the others, slumped against the wall. She noticed that everyone seemed to be staring at her in the mirror. Their eyes flicked back and forth between her towel-fleece and the drawing on her shoulder. For the first time in her life, Ginny felt a little more dangerous than the people around her. It was an interesting feeling, but she figured she would probably have enjoyed it more if it were true.

  Also, she had no clean clothes left. Everything was funky and damp and wrinkled. Why she hadn’t thought to wash them at Richard’s was anyone’s guess, but now she had to paw through, looking for the most passable items to put on her still-damp body.

  Once she was on the street, Ginny realized that she had no idea how she was supposed to do this. Even just a short walk around the area revealed that Paris was nothing but cafés. Cafés everywhere. Cafés and winding streets and broad boulevards. She spent an hour circling the neighborhood, peering into shop windows at displays of bread and pastries, stepping over little dogs, weaving around people intently talking on their phones, and basically accomplishing nothing. Paris was glorious and sunny, of course. But her pack was also heavy, and she had an impossible job to do.

  Ginny decided to take a gamble. She walked back to the hostel and tried the heavy black wrought-iron door. It was open. The sound of some heavy piece of cleaning equipment echoed from the hallways somewhere above, bouncing off the marble floors of the lobby. There was a strong smell of fresh smoke.

  She cautiously approached the front desk and found the woman still there (Ginny began to wonder if she ever slept), sipping away at a big blue bowl of something and watching Oprah dubbed into French. Upon seeing Ginny, she stubbed out her cigarette in anger.

  “Eet ees lockout!” she cried. “You are not to be heer.”

  “I just have a question,” Ginny began.

  “No. We have rules heer.”

  “I’m just looking for a café,” Ginny said.

  “I am not a guidebook!” The guide was particularly drawn out and indignant. Gaaaaaaide.

  “No,” Ginny said quickly. “My aunt was a painter. She decorated it.”

  This calmed the woman a little. She turned back to Oprah.

  “What ees eet called?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ginny said.

  “She did not tell you eets name?”

  Ginny decided to sidestep that one.

  “This place has a lot of decorations,” she said. “And she said it’s near here.”

  “There are a lot oof cafés neer here. I cannot tell you how to find somezing that you do not know ze name of.”

  “Okay,” Ginny said, shuffling to the door. “Thanks.”

  “Whaight, whaight…” The woman waved Ginny over. She took three phone calls and lit a cigarette before explaining why she had called her back.

  “Okay. So you go to see Michel Pienett
e. He sells vegetables at the market. He sells to chefs. He knows all cafés. Explain thees to heem.”

  She wrote the name down on the back of one of the hostel’s cards in big blocky letters: MICHEL PIENETTE.

  Though the woman hadn’t explained how to get to the market, it was easy enough to find. Ginny could see it in the distance as she got out on the street. Again, this was one of those moments that lived up to her French textbook. There were the heaping tables of fruits and vegetables, the massive breads, the terracotta bowls of fresh olives. It was almost too French-textbooky.

  After flashing the card around, Ginny managed to find Michel Pienette behind a pyramid of tomatoes. He was smoking a fat cigar and yelling at a customer. There was a short line of people waiting for the same abuse. Ginny took her place behind a man in chef ’s whites.

  “Excuse me,” she said to the chef. “Do you speak English?”

  “Some.”

  “Does…” She indicated the man with the cigar.

  “Michel? No. And he is mean,” he said to Ginny. “But his food is good. What do you want?”

  “I need to ask him about a café,” Ginny said. “But I don’t know the name.”

  “Michel will know. But I will ask for you. Describe it.”

  “Lots of colors,” Ginny said. “It’s probably a collage. Maybe made of…trash?”

  “Trash?”

  “Well, kind of…trash.”

  “I will ask him.”

  The chef waited patiently for his turn, then translated Ginny’s question for her. Michael Pienette nodded furiously and chewed on his cigar.

  “Les petits chiens,” he growled. “Les petits chiens.”

  That, Ginny knew, meant “the little dogs,” which made no sense. The chef seemed to feel this way as well and questioned Mr. Pienette again. This resulted in a minor explosion, and Mr. Pienette spun around and snatched a head of lettuce from another shopper’s hand and shouted something over his shoulder.