Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics

To imagine that Dad had deliberately chosen to spend five minutes with this man, let alone six days, was inconceivable. They were not friends. In fact, they appeared to loathe each other.

Meals with Baba au Rhum were not joyous affairs, but prolonged torture. He ended up so filthy after pulling apart his braised beef or leg of lamb, I found myself wishing he’d taken the gauche yet critical precaution of tucking his napkin around his neck. His hands behaved like fat, startled tabby cats; without warning, they’d pounce two to three feet across the table in order to seize the saltshaker or the bottle of wine. (He’d pour himself a glass first, then in a dull afterthought, one for Dad.)

My primary discomfort during these meals derived not from his table manners, but from the general repartee. Midway through the appetizers, sometimes even before, Dad and Servo became engaged in a strange, spoken locking-of-horns, a masculine battle of one-upmanship widespread among such species as the Rutting Bull Elk and the Sabre-toothed Ground Beetle.

From what I gathered, the competition sprang from Servo’s subtle insinuations that while it was all fine and dandy Dad had raised one genius (“When we go home, a little bird told me we’re going to find good news from Harvard,” Dad pompously unveiled during dessert at Lapérouse), he, Dr. Michael Servo Kouropoulos, hailed professor of littérature archaïque, had raised two (“Psyche was tapped by NASA for the Lunar Mission V in 2014. I’d tell you more, but these things are classified. I must remain, for her sake and the sake of the world’s declining superpower, mum …”).

After considerable word-to-word combat, Dad showed signs of strain — that is, until he located Servo’s Achilles’ heel, some disappointing younger son apparently mislabeled Atlas, who’d been unable not only to shoulder the world, but a single freshman course load at Río Grande Universidad in Cuervo, Mexico. Dad made him admit the poor kid was now adrift somewhere in South America.

I did my best to ignore these ridiculous skirmishes, spending my time eating as daintily as I could, raising White Mercy Flags in the form of long, apologetic stares at the various aggravated waiters and cranky close-at-hand clientele. Only when there appeared to be a stalemate did I placate Dad.

“‘Our love of what is beautiful does not lead to extravagance. Our love of things of the mind does not make us soft,’” I said as gravely as I could after Servo’s forty-five-minute oration on the famous son of a billionaire (Servo couldn’t name names) who in 1996 fell madly in love with tan twelve-year-old Elektra in Cannes, as she sat on the beach making sandcastles with all the modern design sense and keen eye for craftsmanship of Mies van der Rohe. So haunted was the World’s Most Eligible Bachelor, Servo was afraid he’d have to get a restraining order, so the man and his four-hundred-foot yacht (which he was threatening to rename Elektra, replete with Pilates gym and helicopter landing pad) couldn’t come within a thousand feet of the mesmeric girl.

Hands folded in my lap, I tilted my head and set loose a Powerful Gaze of Omniscience across the room, a gaze reminiscent of the doves Noah set loose from the deck of his Ark, doves that returned to him with twigs.

“So said Thucydides, Book Two,” I whispered.

Baba au Rhum’s eyes bulged.

After three days of such agonizing meals, I deduced from the defeated look in Dad’s eyes he’d come to the same conclusion I had, that it was best we find alternative accommodation, because, although it was all well and good they’d had bell-bottoms and sideburn length in common back at Harvard, this was the era of the ohs, epoch of serious hair and cigarette pants. Being Bon Amis at Harvard in the late 1970s with shirts fashioned out of cheesecloth and a widespread popularity of clogs and clip-on suspenders was certainly not greater than or equal to being Bon Amis now with minimalist fitted shirts in cotton blends and a widespread popularity of collagen and clip-on headsets so one could give orders hands free.

I was wrong, however. Dad had been severely brainwashed (see “Hearst, Patty,” Almanac of Rebels and Insurgents , Skye, 1987). He cheerfully announced he was going to spend the entire day with Servo at La Sorbonne. There was an opening for a government professor at the school, which would be an interesting fit for him while I was marooned at Harvard, and as I’d undoubtedly find an entire day of faculty hobnobbing tedious, I was instructed to go amuse myself. Dad handed me three hundred euros, his MasterCard, a key to the apartment, scribbled down Servo’s home and mobile phone numbers on a piece of graph paper. We’d reconvene at 7:30 P.M.. at Le Georges, the restaurant on the top of the Centre Pompidou.

“It’ll be an adventure,” said Dad with faux enthusiasm. “Didn’t Balzac write in Lost Illusions that the only way to see Paris is on your own?” (Balzac wrote nothing of the kind.)

Initially, I was relieved to be rid of the two of them. Dad and Baba au Rhum could have each other. But after six hours of wandering the streets, the Musée d’Orsay, stuffing myself with croissants and tartes, at times, pretending I was a young duchess in disguise (“The gifted traveler can’t help but affect a traveling persona,” notes Swithin in Possessions,1910 [1911]. “Whilst at home he may merely be a hoi polloi husband, one of a million dull suited financiers, in a foreign land, he can be as majestic as he desires.”), my feet were blistered, I had a sugar nadir; I felt drained and entirely irritated. I decided to make my way back to Servo’s apartment, resolving (with more than a little satisfaction) to take the opportunity of Me Time to peruse a few of Baba au Rhum’s personal belongings, namely, to locate some mislaid foe-toe drowning at the bottom of a sock drawer that revealed his girls not to be the chiseled Olympians their father led everyone to believe, but flabby, pimpled mortals, with dim eyes shoved deep into their heads, mouths long and bendy like pieces of licorice.

Somehow I’d managed to walk all the way to Pigalle, so I entered the first métro I could find, switched trains at Concorde and was walking out of the St. Paul station, when I passed a man and a woman moving quickly down the stairs. I stopped in my tracks, turning to watch them. She was one of those short, dark, severe-looking women who didn’t walk, but mowed, with jaw-length brown hair and a boxy green coat. He was considerably taller than she, in jeans, a suede bomber jacket, and as she talked to him — in French, it seemed — he laughed, a loud but supremely lethargic sound, the unmistakable laugh of a person reclining in a hammock soaked with sun. He was reaching into his back pocket for the ticket.

Andreo Verduga.

I must have whispered it, because an elderly French woman with a floral scarf wrapping her withered face tossed me a look of contempt as she pushed past me. Holding my breath, I hurried back down the stairs after them, jostled by a man trying to exit with an empty stroller. Andreo and the girl were already through the turnstiles, strolling down the platform, and I would have followed, but I’d only purchased a single ride and four people were waiting in line at the ticket counter. I could hear the shudders of an approaching train. They stopped walking, far to my right, Andreo with his back to me, Green Coat facing him, listening to what he said, probably something along the lines of, YES STOP I SEE WHAT YOU MEAN STOP (OUI ARRETTE JE COMPRENDS ARRETTE), and then the train rushed in, the doors groaned open and he turned, chivalrously letting Green Coat enter in front of him. As he stepped into the car, I could just make out a splinter of his profile.