Toby Barlow - Babayaga

“Will Van Wyck.”

“‘Van Wyck,’ yes, like that new expressway back in New York. I hear it’s marvelous. Say, what kind of cigarettes do you have on you?”

“Chesterfields. Want one?”

“Ah, yes please. God bless you. I can’t stand to smoke any more of that nag hay they sell over here.” Oliver managed to take the cigarette and light it without pausing in his speech. He was a talkative fellow. “You know, I saw you walk in and knew in a snap you were a Yank. You’re too broad-shouldered to be French. And such American teeth. So what brings you to this corner tonight?”

“A friend gave me a ticket.”

“A friend ? What sort of friend sends you to a party like this?”

“Well, actually, it was a colleague; he got stuck with a ticket. Brandon must have thought it was going to be a different kind of party.”

“Well, you never know with book parties. The better ones can be outrageously good.” Oliver gave him a curious look. “Actually, when I first saw you I thought you might have been escorting those two grandes dames over there.”

Will laughed. “No, no. I came alone.”

Oliver sipped his drink again and looked around the room. “Brandon, you say? Wouldn’t be Bob Brandon, would it?”

“Yes. I sort of know him through work. You know him?”

“Only slightly. It’s a small town for Americans, you know. Seems like a good man. You work at the agency?”

“Yes, I do. I was transferred over from the States two years ago.”

“Really?” Oliver said. “So what do you do there?”

“Not a lot these days,” said Will. “I used to manage a lot of different things, but it’s gotten kind of quiet.”

“Yes, well.” Oliver sipped his drink. “Can’t say I know much about how the agency works. No reason to, I suppose. Golly, nothing’s more boring than shoptalk, is it?” Oliver gave him a quick, curious look. “Though I am curious why on God’s green earth Brandon ever thought this would be fun for you.”

“Like I said, must have been some sort of mix-up.”

“Either that or your friend has a bit of a cruel streak, throwing you out like fresh carrion for all these dusty dowagers to descend upon.”

Will smiled. “How come you’re here?”

“I know the publisher, we play belote now and again. I’d hoped to find some real writers here, but they are such an elusive bunch.” Oliver looked at his watch. “Actually, I’m supposed to be meeting up with a couple of girls right around the corner in a bit. At Taillevent, ever been?”

Will shook his head no.

“There are two girls and only one of me. So perhaps you should join? The restaurant’s a touch stuffy but the food’s fabulous, and their crab remoulade is beyond words. Please, come. It’s always nice to have a fourth.”

Will felt a little uncertain if he should say yes. Oliver looked him in the eye and smiled.

Five hours later, Will lay stone drunk on a bench below the Pont Neuf, blearily gazing at the lights playing across the dancing surface of the night-blackened river. A few feet away, Oliver was humming a waltz tune as he slow-danced with the young brunette named Juliette. She was wearing a short white dress with matching pearls. The other girl, more beautiful than Juliette, and far too lovely for Will, had found a taxi home hours before. The yellow moon was verging on full and the stars up in the sky looked blurred and undefined, as if someone had splashed water across them before their ink could dry. Will tried to recall what day it was and prayed it was Saturday or Sunday. The sun would be up soon and he was in no condition for work.

The dinner had been enjoyable. Oliver had introduced Will as an old friend from America and the two French girls had quickly complimented him on his fluency. He explained how his mother’s family had emigrated down from French Canada to Detroit (“Ah, Detroit!” exclaimed Oliver, “the Paris of the Midwest!”) and so he had grown up with a rough-hewn colonial version of French bouncing around the house. It had grown more refined in his time in Paris, though it was far from perfect ( “Absolument!” the girls laughed. “ C’est pas du tout parfait !”). He was going to tell them more, but Oliver interrupted with one long anecdote that spilled into another, and as the evening progressed, that turned out to be just about all Will had a chance to say. Instead, he and the girls listened on while the seemingly ever-present sommelier popped bottle after bottle of ’47 Clos Saint Jean’s and Oliver bubbled over with gossip, rumors, anecdotes, and broad, flirtatious innuendos that made the girls blush and giggle into their napkins. Will did not mind, Oliver seemed to be both fascinating and humorously silly as, over the course of the evening, he described swamping his mother’s vintage Jordan roadster in the Connecticut River, sang them a smattering of old Phillips Exeter fight songs, butchered some Keats verse in a slightly slurred attempt at oration, and then drunkenly reenacted the march he had made entering Rome with the American army.

“You were in the infantry?” asked Will, now a bit tipsy too.

“Yes, nothing very brave, mostly clerical work. Supply-line stuff. My father, of course, harbored much greater ambitions for me, firstborn son and all that, but it turns out the dreamy, poetic types make for rather poor officer material.”

“Well, he must have been proud of you, you did your part.”

“Oh, in the end he was proud enough. I sent him a photo of me with Patton. That positively thrilled the old man,” Oliver said, refilling his own glass. “What about you? You look too young to have served then, did you do Korea?”

“No…” Will hesitated, feeling a little self-conscious. Coming out of a working-class family, he knew he had been fortunate not to have been drafted, and an academic scholarship had kept him from having to sign up to cover the costs of school. But he never felt lucky about it, especially when he was talking to a veteran like Oliver. It was one of the reasons he liked living abroad in France, he felt less surrounded by those pressures. The subject rarely came up; people in Paris tended to be quiet about what they did during the war.

“Well, maybe you didn’t serve then, but you certainly serve now, don’t you?” Oliver said, leaning over with a knowing smile. “We all serve.”

The line puzzled Will and he was about to ask what Oliver meant, but instead his friend plucked up two spoons and made them dance the cancan, which again got their dates giggling and the moment passed, dissolving into various chocolate and meringue desserts served with fruit brandies and followed by more servings of Oliver’s effervescent chatter, this time about a conspiracy he was obsessed with, a cover-up involving a silver flying saucer that had been found somewhere in the deserts of New Mexico. Everyone laughed at his imitation of a little green man from Mars.

The two girls began asking Oliver’s opinion on various topics, and Will realized he should know a bit more about the range of subjects they touched upon, the fashionable filmmakers like Chabrol and Truffaut and the new authors he had never heard of—Robbe-Grillet, Butor, and Duras. He knew a little about current events, the situation in Algiers and the return of de Gaulle, but only what the headlines told him, not enough to have anything resembling an informed opinion. Listening on as the subjects went by, one by one, like train cars clattering along through the night, Will was aware again of how, despite the time spent here and all the things he had done, Paris remained vast and impermeably foreign to him. For the first time since that heady season when he was literally fresh off the boat, the city once again felt exotic.