Paris Red: A Novel Read Online Free

say.
    “Victorine?”
    “Not like that,” I say. “Not fancy. Vic’trine. Maybe just Trine.”
    “Straightforward.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Not sweet like Daisy.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Now we’re getting somewhere,” he says, and picks up a menu. “Order what you want. No soupe aux choux tonight, or whatever you’re used to down on La Maube.”
    He says it to tease us, but it is true enough. Except we live on less than cabbage soup sometimes, less than even what he imagines. There is no place to cook in our room, and even if there were, we would not. We eat fritters at lunch and whatever we can bring home to our room for dinner. We do not sit down in cafés, not even for thin soupe aux choux. We eat in our room or on the street.
    “We don’t go hungry,” I say. “We’ve never gone hungry.”
    “I didn’t think so.”
    What I meant is there is a difference between going hungry and wanting more. Between having something and having enough. But somehow everything at the table changes then, as if there is a wire connecting the three of us. Almost as if we are touching knees under the table. But we are not touching. It is just the three of us sitting, and everything alive in the space between us. Maybe just because I used the word hungry , which is another way of saying want .
    But all he says is, “Order what you like.” And nods at the menu.
    We eye the list of truite à la Vénitienne, poulet à la Singarat, filet de boeuf Richelieu and something à la printanière. Then, we order not just enough, but enough to fill us.
    So that is the first thing he gives us. Bellies tight and round as drums.

    Sometime during the meal I take a long time to study him. I thought I knew what he looked like the day we met him, but I did not. He was not a person to me then, and I could only see what I thought he was. This is what he really looks like:
    Nose crooked, the bridge going off to the left and the tip to the right. But it is a fine-tipped nose, with elegant nostrils, if you can say such a thing. Hazel irises that look pale because of his deep-set eyes. One vein that shows slightly under the skin of his forehead. Deep lines carved down to the corners of his mouth. There is something fine-grained about his face in spite of the riotous beard and mustache. He would look younger without them, but he wants to hide behind them.
    He wears a black coat, pale clay-colored pants. At first I thought his vest was black, too, but it is not. It is dark purple, sister of black, the darkest shade there is, skin of blackberries. Why that and not plain black? How much money and how much trouble to buy a color instead of black? It must matter to him. But why?
    His tie is dotted. Held with one pin whose head is a dull, red stone. A garnet? A ruby? To me it is the color of jam.
    In all he could not be more different from my soldier, and just thinking that makes me remember the soldier’s kiss and the salty way his skin tasted when I put my mouth on his collarbone.
    But by then he has seen me looking, studying him.
    “Do I pass?” he asks.
    “You do all right,” I say.
    He watches me for a second—maybe he can see what I was thinking, maybe he knew I was thinking of what my soldier’s skin tasted like. Yet if he could see what I was thinking about my soldier, then he must know what else passed through my mind: that I’ve held his arm in mine through the streets, that I already am beginning to imagine what it is like to be with him.
    Neither of us moves—not him toward me or me toward him—and he turns back to Nise. He does not even go on looking at me. But that is when I feel the wire between the two of us get a little tighter.
    Just a little tighter.

    Somehow during dinner it comes out that we work not so far from there, on Rue Pastourelle.
    “That’s how we met,” Nise tells him. “In the big Baudon workshop room.”
    “What’s Baudon? What exactly do you do?”
    “We’re brunisseuses . Silver