You know who gets to drink coffee at nonsense hours? I thought. The French.
An electronic sign flashed above Pierre’s head, advertising cell phone repairs. He sat in between rows of cheap luggage wrapped in plastic. I could tell he was smoking, even from a distance, by the clawlike way he turned the pages. More than just casually Parisian, Pierre detested and adored Paris in direct opposition to the way Americans detested and adored Paris. He also pretended never to have heard of major cities in Normandy. I’d quit smoking after Amos, but Pierre got me back at it the night we met.
Which was the same night I met Boots. It was Pierre’s surprise party.
Since then, Pierre had moved back to Paris and married a woman he’d just started seeing when we met. I spoke to her in passing at his party, while we were waiting for the bathroom. She was Ethiopian and French, raised in Belgium and London, and she now ran a theater company for at-risk teenagers in the Paris suburbs （it was a long wait for the bathroom）。 She wore a campaign-style button with a picture of baby Pierre pressed into it, a bowl of which was available at the door. For a while after the party, Pierre and his then-girlfriend had been one of my preferred social media pit stops. They spent a lot of time outdoors, kissing each other’s cheeks, angling their phones for optimal sun flare. If Willis’s online presence had made me feel alienated, Pierre’s had made me feel almost familial. I used to worry when she didn’t appear in photos for a prolonged period of time. Had she been written out of his life? Had she fallen out of love or into a canal? Maybe Pierre had cheated on her. After all, there’d been a moment when I felt I could’ve usurped her sun flare.
Halfway through the party, Boots had volunteered to go on an ice run, and I stepped onto the balcony to get some air. Pierre was already out there, looking as if he’d been born on the balcony and was fated to stay on it. But when I slid the door shut, trapping the noise of the festivities behind me, he looked up. He didn’t want a surprise party, he said. Like most people, he didn’t like surprises, and “like most men, I don’t love the attention.” He offered me a cigarette as he said this, so I took it instead of arguing. He lit it for me, cupping his hands close to my face. There were other people on the balcony with us, but they were low on wine and so they ducked back inside.
Pierre and I chatted about the obvious differences between New York and Paris, both of us pretending they were more revelatory than they were. He connected himself to the woman I’d met while waiting for the bathroom with a literal flick of the wrist, a hand gesture indicating that no, he had not come here alone but yes, he was still free to go.
He asked me if I was with Boots, and I explained that we’d only met a few hours prior. As I did, I looked over my shoulder to make sure he hadn’t come back yet. It was because of the cigarette. I didn’t want Boots to see me smoking.
“So we’re both taken,” Pierre reflected.
“I’m not taken,” I said, even though I was eagerly awaiting Boots’s return. “I don’t know him yet.”
“Ah, you see? But you’re already planning to know him. You can’t fool me, I saw you two. You are taken.”
He wagged his finger at me like I’d been caught, a romantic unmasked. But I was only hedging because I knew better than to jinx whatever might happen with Boots by agreeing with Pierre. I had fallen in lust with enough men over the years and, by my count, not one of them was standing on this balcony with me right now. Pierre thought he was sharing a joke with a fellow slave to seduction, but he was only engaged with someone who’d had a harder time making relationships stick than a scruffy Frenchman for whom people threw surprise parties.
“It’s a shame you’re so taken,” he said, “because you have my baby.”
He smirked and pointed at my lapel. I, too, had baby Pierre pinned to my chest.
“Why do I sense you’re trying to get me to kiss you?” I asked.
I wanted to make him uncomfortable right back, to bend the tenor of the conversation. Pierre raised an eyebrow, roused by my directness.
“How do you do that?”
“Kiss women on balconies?”
“No, the one eyebrow thing.”
“It’s muscle memory,” he said. “You must take control of your face.”
“You’re not going to kiss me on a balcony,” I decided. “It’s a cliché.”
“You’re pronouncing that wrong.”
“Oh, who cares?” I said, rolling my eyes.