Текст книги "Just One Day"

Автор книги: Gayle Forman

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

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The final section of the canal is underground. The walls are arched, and so low that I can reach up and touch the slick, wet bricks. It’s eerie, hushed but echoey down here. Even the boisterous Danes have shushed. Willem and I sit with our legs dangling over the edge of the boat, kicking the side of the tunnel wall when we can.

He nudges my ankle with his toe. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For arranging this.” He gestures to the boat.

“My pleasure. Thank you for arranging this.” I point above us, to where Paris is no doubt going about its business.

“Any time.” He looks around. “It’s nice, this. The canal.” He looks at me. “You.”

“I’ll bet you say that to all the canals.” But I flush in the musty, rich darkness.

We stay like that for the rest of the ride, swinging our legs against the side of the boat, listening as the odd bit of laughter or music from Paris seeps underground. It feels like the city is telling secrets down here, privy only to those who think to listen.

Eight

Arsenal Marina is like a parking lot for boats, tightly packed into cement piers on both sides of the water. Willem helps Captain Jack guide the barge into its narrow mooring, hopping out to tie the lines in complicated knots. We bid farewell to the Danes, who are now truly soused, and I take down Agnethe’s cell phone number, promising to text her the pictures as soon as I can.

As we get off, Captain Jack shakes our hands. “I feel a little bad to take your money,” he says.

“No. Don’t feel bad.” I think of the look on Willem’s face, of being in the tunnel. That alone was worth a hundred bucks.

“And we’ll take it off you soon enough,” Gustav calls.

Jacques shrugs. He kisses my hand before he helps me off the boat, and he practically hugs Willem.

As we walk away, Willem taps my shoulder. “Did you see what the boat is named?”

I didn’t. It’s right on the back, etched in blue lettering, next to the vertical red, white, and blue stripes of the French flag. Viola. Deauville.

“Viola? After Shakespeare’s Viola?”

“No. Jacques meant for it be called Voilà, but his cousin painted it wrong, and he liked the name, so he registered her as Viola.”

“Okaaay—that’s still a little weird,” I say.

As always, Willem smiles.

“Accidents?” Immediately, a strange little tremor goes up my spine.

Willem nods, almost solemnly. “Accidents,” he confirms.

“But what does it mean? Does it mean we were meant to take thatboat? Does it mean something better or worse would’ve happened to us if we hadn’ttaken that boat? Did taking that boat alterthe course of our lives? Is life really that random?”

Willem just shrugs.

“Or does it mean that Jacques’s cousin can’t spell?” I say.

Willem laughs again. The sound is clear and strong as a bell, and it fills me with joy, and it’s like, for the first time in my life, I understand that thisis the point of laughter, to spread happiness.

“Sometimes you can’t know until you know,” he says.

“That’s very helpful.”

He laughs and looks at me for a long moment. “You know, I think you might be good at traveling after all.”

“Seriously? I’m not. Today is a total anomaly. I was miserable on the tour. Trust me, I didn’t flag down a single boat. Not even a taxi. Not even a bicycle.”

“What about before the tour?”

“I haven’t traveled much, and the kind I’ve done . . . not a lot of room for accidents.”

Willem raises a questioning eyebrow.

“I’ve been places. Florida. Skiing. And to Mexico, but even that sounds more exotic than it is. Every year, we go to this time-share resort south of Cancún. It’s meant to look like a giant Mayan temple, but I swear the only clue that you’re not in America is the piped-in mariachi Christmas carols along the fake river waterslide thing. We stay in the same unit. We go to the same beach. We eat at the same restaurants. We barely even leave the gates, and when we do, it’s to visit the ruins, but we go to the same ones every single year. It’s like the calendar flips but nothing else changes.”

“Same, same, but different,” Willem says.

“More like same, same, but same.”

“Next time when you go to Cancún, you can sneak out into the real Mexico,” he suggests. “Tempt fate. See what happens.”

“Maybe,” I allow, just imagining my mom’s response if I suggested a little freelance traveling.

“Maybe I’ll go to Mexico one day,” Willem says. “I’ll bump into you, and we’ll escape into the wilds.”

“You think that would happen? We’d just randomly bump into each other?”

Willem lifts his hands up in the air. “There would have to be another accident. A big one.”

“Oh, so you’re saying that I’man accident?”

His smile stretches like caramel. “Absolutely.”

I rub my toe against the curb. I think of my Ziploc bags. I think of the color-coded schedule of all my activities that we’ve kept tacked to the fridge since I was, like, eight. I think of my neat files with all my college application materials. Everything ordered. Everything planned. I look at Willem, so the opposite of that, of me, today, also the opposite of that.

“I think that might possibly be one of the most flattering things anyone has ever said to me.” I pause. “I’m not sure what that says about me, though.”

“It says that you haven’t been flattered enough.”

I bow and give a sweeping be-my-guest gesture.

He stops and looks at me, and it’s like his eyes are scanners. I have that same sensation I did on the train earlier, that he’s appraising me, only this time not for looks and black-market value, but for something else.

“I won’t say that you’re pretty, because that dog already did. And I won’t say you’re funny, because you have had me laughing since I met you.”

Evan used to tell me that he and I were “so compatible,” as if being like him was the highest form of praise. Pretty and funny—Willem could stop right there, and it would be enough.

But he doesn’t stop there. “I think you’re the sort of person who finds money on the ground and waves it in the air and asks if anyone has lost it. I think you cry in movies that aren’t even sad because you have a soft heart, though you don’t let it show. I think you do things that scare you, and that makes you braver than those adrenaline junkies who bungee-jump off bridges.”

He stops then. I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes out and there’s a lump in my throat and for one small second, I’m scared I’m going to cry.

Because I’d hoped for baubles, trinkets, fizzy things: You have a nice smile. You have pretty legs. You’re sexy.

But what he said . . . I did once turn in forty dollars I found at the food court to mall security. I have cried in every single Jason Bourne movie. As for the last thing he said, I don’t know if it’s true. But I hope more than anything that it is.

“We should get going,” I say, clearing my throat. “If we want to get to the Louvre. How far is it from here?”

“Maybe a few kilometers. But it’s fast by bike.”

“You want me to wave one down?” I joke.

“No, we’ll just get a Vélib’.” Willem looks around and walks toward a stand of gray bicycles. “Have you ever heard of the White Bicycle?” he asks.

I shake my head, and Willem starts explaining how for a brief time in Amsterdam in the 1960s, there used to be white bicycles, and they were free and everywhere. When you wanted a bike, you grabbed one, and when you were done, you left it. But it didn’t work because there weren’t enough bikes, and people stole them. “In Paris, you can borrow a bike for free for a half hour, but you have to lock it back up, or you get charged.”

“Oh, I think I just read they started something like this back home. So, it’s free?”

“All you need is a credit card for the deposit.”

I don’t have a credit card—well, not one that doesn’t link back to my parents’ account, but Willem has his bank card, though he says he isn’t sure if there’s enough. When he runs it through the little keypad, one of the bikes unlocks, but when he tries it again for a second bike, the card is declined. I’m not entirely disappointed. Cycling around Paris, sans helmet, seems vaguely suicidal.

But Willem’s not replacing the bike. He’s wheeling it over to where I’m standing and raising the seat. He looks at me. Then pats the saddle.

“Wait, you want meto ride the bike?”

He nods.

“And you’ll what? Run alongside me?”

“No. I’ll ride you.” His eyebrows shoot up, and I feel myself blush. “On the bike,” he clarifies.

I climb onto the wide seat. Willem steps in front of me. “Where exactly are you going to go?” I ask

“Don’t worry about that. You just get comfortable,” he says, as if it’s possible in the current situation, with his back inches from my face, so close I can feel the heat radiating off of him, so close I can smell the new-clothes aroma of his T-shirt mingling with the light musk of his sweat. He puts one foot on one of the pedals. Then he turns around, an impish grin on his face. “Warn me if you see police. This isn’t quite legal.”

“Wait, what’s not legal?”

But he’s already pushed off. I shut my eyes. This is insane. We’re going to die. And then my parents really will kill me.

A block later, we’re still alive. I squint an eye open. Willem is leaning all the way forward over handlebars, effortlessly standing on the pedals, while I lean back, my legs dangling alongside the rear wheel. I open my other eye, release my clammy grip on the hem of his T-shirt. The marina is well behind us, and we are on a regular street, in a bike lane, cruising along with all the other gray bicycles.

We turn onto a choked street full of construction, half the avenue blocked by scaffolding and blockades, and I’m looking at all the graffiti; the SOS, just like on the T-shirt for that band Sous ou Suris scrawled there. I’m about to point it out to Willem, but then I turn in the other direction and there’s the Seine. And there’s Paris. Postcard Paris! Paris from French Kissand from Midnight in Parisand from Charadeand every other Paris film I’ve ever seen. I gape at the Seine, which is rippling in the breeze and glimmering in the early-evening sun. Down the expanse of it, I can see a series of arched bridges, draped like expensive bracelets over an elegant wrist. Willem points out Notre Dame Cathedral, just towering there, in the middle of an island in the middle of a river, like it’s nothing. Like it’s any other day, and it’s not the freaking Notre Dame! We pass by another building, a wedding-cake confection that looks like it might house royalty. But, no, it’s just City Hall.

It’s funny how on the tour, we often saw sights like this as we whizzed by on a bus. Ms. Foley would stand at the front of the coach, microphone in hand, and tell us facts about this cathedral or that opera house. Sometimes, we’d stop and go in, but with one or two days per city, most of the time, we drove on by.

I’m driving by them now too. But somehow, it feels different. Like, being here, outside, on the back of this bike, with the wind in my hair and the sounds singing in my ears and the centuries-old cobblestones rattling beneath my butt, I’m not missing anything. On the contrary, I’m inhaling it, consuming it, becoming it.

I’m not sure how to account for the change, for all the changes today. Is it Paris? Is it Lulu? Or is it Willem? Is it his nearness that makes the city so intoxicating or the city that makes his nearness so irresistible?

A loud whistle cuts through my reverie, and the bike comes to an abrupt halt.

“Ride’s over,” Willem says. I hop off, and Willem starts wheeling the bicycle down the street.

A policeman with a thin mustache and a constipated expression comes chasing after us. He starts yelling at Willem, gesticulating, wagging a finger at me. His face is turning a bright red, and when he pulls out his little book and starts pointing to me and Willem, I get nervous. I thought Willem had been joking about the illegal thing.

Then Willem says something to the cop that stops the tirade cold.

The cop starts nattering on, and I don’t understand a word, except I’m pretty sure he says “Shakespeare!” while holding a finger up in an ahamotion. Willem nods, and the cop’s tone softens. He still wagging his finger at us, but the little book goes back into his satchel. With a tip of his funny little hat, he walks away.

“Did you just quote Shakespeare to a cop?” I ask.

Willem nods.

I’m not sure what’s crazier: That Willem did that. Or that the cops here know Shakespeare.

“What did you say?”

“La beauté est une enchanteresse, et la bonne foi qui s’expose à ses charmes se dissout en sang,”he says. “It’s from Much Ado About Nothing.”

“What does it mean?”

Willem gives me that look of his, licks his lips, smiles. “You’ll have to look it up.”

We walk along the river and onto a main road full of restaurants, art galleries, and high-end boutiques. Willem parks the bike in a stand, and we take off on foot under a long portico and then make a few more turns into what, at first, seems like it should be a presidential residence or a royal palace, Versailles or something, the buildings are so huge and grand. Then I spot the glass pyramid in the middle of the courtyard, so I know we have arrived at the Louvre.

It’s mobbed. Thousands of people are flooding out of the buildings, like they’re evacuating it, clutching poster tubes and large black-and-white shopping bags. Some are energized, chatty, but many more look shell-shocked, weary, glazed after a day spent ingesting epic portions of Culture! I know that look. The Teen Tours! brochure bragged that it offered “young people the full-on European immersion experience! We’ll expose your teen to a maximum number of cultures in a short period of time, broadening their view of history, language, art, heritage, cuisine.” It was supposed to be enlightening, but it mostly felt exhausting.

So when we discover that the Louvre just closed, I’m actually relieved.

“I’m sorry,” Willem says.

“Oh, I’m not.” I’m not sure if this qualifies as an accident or not, but I’m happy either way.

We do an about-face and cross over a bridge and turn up the other bank of the river. Alongside the embankment there are all kinds of vendors selling books and old magazines, pristine issues of Paris Matchwith Jackie Kennedy on the cover and old pulp paperbacks with lurid covers, titled in both English and French. There’s one vendor with a bunch of bric-a-brac, old vases, costume jewelry, and in a box on the side, a collection of dusty vintage alarm clocks. I paw through and find a vintage SMI in Bakelite. “Twenty euro,” the kerchiefed saleslady says to me. I try to keep a poker face. Twenty euro is about thirty bucks. The clock is easily worth two hundred dollars.

“Do you want it?” Willem asks.

My mom would go nuts if I brought this home, and she’d never have to know where it was from. The woman winds the clock, to show me that it works, but hearing it tick, I’m reminded of what Jacques said, about time being fluid. I look out at the Seine, which is now glowing pink, reflecting the color of the clouds that are rolling in. I put the clock back in the box.

We head up off the embankment, into the twisty, narrow warren of streets that Willem tells me is the Latin Quarter, where students live. It’s different over here. Not so many grand avenues and boulevards but alley-like lanes, barely wide enough for even the tiny, space-age two-person Smart Cars that are zooming around everywhere. Tiny churches, hidden corners, alleys. It’s a whole different Paris. And just as dazzling.

“Shall we take a drink?” Willem asks.

I nod.

We cross onto a crowded avenue, full of cinemas, outdoor cafés, all of them packed, and also a handful of small hotels, not too expensive judging by the prices advertised on the sandwich boards. Most of the signs say complet, which I’m pretty sure means full, but some don’t, and some of the rooms we might be able to afford if I were to exchange the last of my cash, about forty pounds.

I haven’t been able to broach tonight with Willem. Where we’re staying. He hasn’t seemed too worried about it, which has me worried our fallback is Céline. We pass an exchange bureau. I tell Willem I want to change some money.

“ Ihave some money left,” he says. “And you just paid for the boat.”

“But I don’t have a single euro on me. What if I wanted to, I don’t know, buy a postcard?” I stop to spin a postcard caddy. “Also, there’s drinks and dinner, and we’ll need somewhere for, for . . .” I trail off before getting the courage to finish. “Tonight.” I feel my neck go warm.

The word seems to hang out there as I wait for Willem’s response, some clue of what he’s thinking. But he’s looking over at one of the cafés, where a group of girls at a table seem to be waving at him. Finally, he turns back to me. “Sorry?” he asks.

The girls are still waving. One of them is beckoning him over. “Do you know them?”

He looks over at the café, then back at me, then back at the restaurant. “Can you wait here for a minute?”

My stomach sinks. “Yeah, no problem.”

He leaves me at a souvenir shop, where I spin the postcard caddy and spy. When he gets to the group of girls, they do the cheek-cheek-kiss-kiss thing—three times, though, instead of twice like he did with Céline. He sits down next to the girl who was gesturing to him. It’s clear they know each other; she keeps putting her hand on his knee. He throws darting glances in my direction, and I wait for him to wave me over, but he doesn’t, and after an endless five minutes, the touchy girl writes something down on a bit of paper and gives it to him. He jams the slip deep into his pocket. Then he stands up, and they do another cheek-cheek-kiss-kiss thing, and he strides back to me, where I am feigning a deep interest in a Toulouse-Lautrec postcard.

“Let’s go,” he says as he grabs my elbow.

“Friends of yours?” I ask, jogging to keep up with his long stride.

“No.”

“But you know them?”

“I knew them once.”

“And you just randomly bumped into them?”

He spins toward me, and for the first time today, he’s annoyed. “It’s Paris, Lulu, the most touristy city in the world. It happens.”

Accidents,I think. But I feel jealous, possessive, not just over the girl—whose number, I suspect, he now has in his hip pocket if he hasn’t already transcribed it into his little black book—but over accidents. Because today it has felt like accidents belonged solely to us.

Willem softens. “They’re just people I knew from Holland.”

Something in Willem’s whole demeanor has changed, like a lamp whose bulb is dimming before it burns out. And it’s then that I notice the final and defeated way he says Holland, and it makes me realize that all day along, not once has he said he was going home. And then another thought hits me. Today, he was meant to be going home—or to Holland, where he’s from—for the first time in two years.

In three days, I will go home, and there will be a crowd at the airport. Back at my house, there will be a welcome-home banner, a celebratory dinner I’ll probably be too jet-lagged to eat. After only three weeks on a tour in which I was led around like a show pony, I’ll be given a hero’s welcome.

He’s been gone two years. Why isn’t Willem getting a hero’s welcome? Is anyone even waiting for him?

“When we were at Céline’s,” I ask him now, “did you call anyone?”

He turns to me, his dark eyes furrowed and confused. “No. Why?”

Because how does anyone know you’re delayed? Because how do they know to postpone your hero’s welcome until tomorrow?

“Isn’t anyone expecting you?” I ask.

Something happens to his face, for just the slightest of moments, a slip of his jaunty mask, which I hadn’t realized was a mask until I see how tired, how uncertain—how much like me—he looks underneath it.

“You know what I think?” Willem asks.

“What?”

“We should get lost.”

“I’ve got news for you, but I’ve been lost all day.”

“This is different. This is getting on purpose lost. It’s something I do when I first come to a new city. I’ll go into the metro or on a tramline and randomly pick a stop and go.”

I can see what he’s doing. He’s changing the scenery, changing the subject. And I get that, in some way, he needs to do this. So I let him. “Like traveler’s pin the tail on the donkey?” I ask.

Willem gives me a quizzical look. His English is so good that I forget not everything computes.

“Is this about accidents?” I ask.

He looks at me, and for half a second, the mask slips again. But then just like that, it’s back in place. It doesn’t matter. It slipped, and I saw. And I understand. Willem is alone, like I am alone. And now this ache that I can’t quite distinguish as his or mine has opened up inside of me.

“It’s always about the accidents,” he says.