Sincerely,
Miss Clare Ross
The chair across from me squeaked. “What’s this, Crépet?” Stefan Bauer leaned over the back of the chair, fingers laced. “A letter from a girlfriend?”
“No.” I folded the letter and stuffed it back in the envelope. “Just a girl. Who is also a friend.”
“A girl and a friend.” He reached across the table and helped himself to my wine. “Is that not how it is defined?”
“Your English is rusty, Bauer.”
He shrugged and drained the glass. “The whole language is rusty. Only German is strong as steel.”
I pulled my dish closer, hopefully out of his reach. “What are you doing here anyway? I thought you were going home to restring your racket.”
“I am following you. I am…I am stacking you like a deer.” He waggled his eyebrows.
“Stalking.” I retrieved the glass from him and gazed mournfully at the dregs. “And one generally doesn’t steal the food of one’s prey.”
“You forgot your satchel at the club.” He swung my battered canvas bag up onto the table, knocking my spoon onto the ground. “You will want your copybooks and texts, yes?”
I swore in French and opened up the satchel. Nothing was missing. “Thank you.”
Bauer shrugged again. “Now that you and the satchel are reunited, a cabaret?”
I never liked the cabarets like Bauer did. Too many loud-faced women and jingling coins. “I have a lot of reading to do tonight.” I buckled the satchel closed.
“Because of your girlfriend, eh?” He nudged me. “Tell me about her, Crépet.” He swiped my heel of bread and tossed it back and forth between his hands like a tennis ball.
“You’re imagining things. It’s a letter from my maman, that’s all.” I tucked the envelope into the satchel pocket. “When have you ever seen me talk to a girl? You’re delusional.”
“I do not know this English word. But I know that you are a liar.” He pointed. “Your ears, they are pink right there.”
“It’s the wine.” I brushed my hair over the offending ears. “Gaspard serves it strong.”
I couldn’t say why I was evading Bauer. What did it matter if he knew that Maman had a ward staying with us for a little while? Clare was at Mille Mots, and besides, she wasn’t his type.
“Does she have big…” He proved my point with an unmistakable mime.
“I’m not teaching you that word in English, you degenerate.” I retrieved my spoon from the floor and wiped it on my apron.
“But you knew what I was talking about, eh?” He nodded. “She does, does she not?”
“Of course not. She’s only fifteen.” I stuffed a heaping spoonful of lentils into my mouth above Bauer’s cries of “Aha!” I’d slipped.
“Why have I not met her? She does not come to the café with you or to the courts at Île de Puteaux. Young girls like to watch men at sport.”
I swallowed and wiped my mouth. “She’s not in Paris. But I wouldn’t introduce her to you anyway.”
“You are afraid she would see what a real man looks like?” He winked.
I was more afraid she’d see the questionable company I kept.
“Ah, then she is a country girl?” he persisted. “Ein Süßling from home?”
“She’s not a sweetheart.” I bent my head to my plate and ate faster. “She’s my maman’s ward. I hardly know her.”
He leaned his elbows on the table. “This is why you go so often on the weekends to your château. And also why you do not bring me.”
I never invited him to Mille Mots, but it wasn’t because of Clare Ross. The urbane Bauer with his tailored Berlin suits, with his straw hats and his Horsman rackets, with his casual change tossed down on baccarat tables or in the laps of showgirls, he didn’t belong at Mille Mots. Maman, in her aesthetic dresses and reform corsets, Papa in his knickerbockers and painting smocks. The château’s crumbling walls, leaking roof, moth-eaten curtains, halls lined with terrifying paintings and nude sculptures. The maids in their brightly colored uniforms that Maman had designed, “because happiness is more dignified than black.” Marthe in her crowded kitchen, birdcages hanging between the dented pots. Papa’s lunchtime potage, Maman’s English tea, both of them feeding the dogs under the dining table. Papa’s habit of cheerfully coming down to breakfast in absolutely nothing but a dressing gown. Among all of that, Bauer wouldn’t belong.
“You’re right.” I pushed back my chair and picked up my plate. “If I never invite you, I never have to share.”
He nodded approvingly. “You are a sly weasel, Crépet.”
“See you tomorrow?” I reached across the table for a handshake, but he yanked his hand away and offered an obscene gesture instead. He lit a Murad cigarette and disappeared in the after-supper crowd.
Tucked deep in my satchel, I had to forget about the little letter until after my shift in the café. I simpered and scraped, I balanced trays and poured wine, I washed each table a dozen times over. I did three sketches of a young trio visiting from England and they rattled down far too many francs for the souvenirs. I didn’t complain. After the café closed, Gaspard let me sit and study, sharing the light, while he finished hanging up the washed glasses, ready for tomorrow. After he hung the last, he pulled a squat bottle of cognac from a hollow spot behind the bar. He poured a finger out and toasted the thin air. Once I asked him what he celebrated. He tugged at his beard and said, “Another day, conquered. Isn’t that something to celebrate?”
I waited until I was back at Uncle Théophile’s apartment, shut in my narrow bedroom with the desk lamp on, to take out Mademoiselle Ross’s letter again.
I don’t believe you that it is as dreary as you say. You’re in Paris, after all. Paris it was, but not the city I’d fallen in love with years ago. Between classes, study, tennis, and the evening jobs that helped to pay for all of that, I had no spare time. I didn’t have time to sit in the Jardin du Luxembourg. I couldn’t roam the museums on rainy days—the Louvre, with its brass air registers and Rembrandts, the Petit Palais, the Musée de l’Armée, the exquisite little Musée d’Ennery. Sometimes on the weekends I stayed in the city I’d trek up to the nineteenth arrondissement, to Parc des Buttes Chaumont, green and rippling with waterfalls. But I usually didn’t see much of Paris outside of the gray stone and leaning buildings of the Latin Quarter.
I wrapped myself in a sweater—Uncle Théophile kept the apartment as cold as November—and smoothed a sheet of paper on the desk.
Dear Mademoiselle,
If I were you, I wouldn’t envy the life of the university student. Indeed I am in Paris, but I’m not dining at the Ritz. I can’t afford more than beans for supper, washed down with the vilest of wine. I don’t ride omnibuses when my feet work perfectly well. I don’t go to the opera when I have the collective complaining of the three who share my turne.
