Paris Red: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

burnishers.”
    “You polish silver?”
    “That’s the last step,” I say. “We’re the step before. We ground the silver plate onto the metal.”
    “How much does that pay?”
    I know he is just curious, but I do not feel like saying. When I look over at Nise, I know she feels the same.
    “It pays better than some jobs,” she says.
    He nods and takes Nise’s hand and runs his thumb over her fingertips, and then he takes my fingers with his other hand.
    “You’ll have to walk me by there after dinner,” he says. “By Baudon.”
    “I don’t think so,” Nise tells him. “We see enough of the place during the week.”
    “There’s nothing to see anyway,” I say.
    “How many girls in your workshop?”
    “Twenty-four? Twenty-five? Some come and go.”
    “That would be something to see,” he says. “Two dozen girls working.”
    “They aren’t all girls. Some are women and some are old hags,” Nise says. “I’ve been there since I was fifteen.”
    “I’ve been there a little more than a year,” I tell him.
    He does not say anything then, just keeps our fingers in his hands.
    “What, did you think we just went around drawing, picking up men?” Nise asks. Teasing. She looks down at her plate when she says it, but then she raises her eyes to look at him, to see his reaction.
    There are plenty of whores. Or what people call whores. A girl we know, Marie Mousseau, got picked up in bed with two firemen. Her landlord gave her up. But she was a cook. We saw her go to work, we saw her at work. If she was just a whore, why would she bother cooking and cleaning up in a shitty café on La Maube? So money changes hands because one person has more and one has less. Why call it anything?
    “I knew you worked,” he says then. “I didn’t know at what. I just wondered how you got on.”
    “As an apprentice, you go three months without pay,” I say. “Then you get a franc a day. Now we get ten francs a week.”
    Each of our dinners will cost 1.50 francs, the prix fixe, plus the wine. I start adding, then multiplying. I want to say, we do not make much, but it is enough to live on. I want to say we are with him because we choose to be, because he interests us. That if he had been someone else—crude or boorish, or if we did not like the smell of his hair or the way he wore his jacket—we would have never said yes. That one thing does not mean another.
    He rubs his fingers over the pads on my palm, then over my fingers again.
    “I can tell you both do the same job. You have calluses in the same places,” he says, and gives us back our hands.

    At the end of the meal, when he goes to pay the check, he pulls a handful of coins from his pocket, but that is not the thing I notice. What I notice is how, after he counts out the ones he wants, he lets them fall to the table. He does not lay out the coins, he does not present them. He opens his fingers and—how can I say it? Both drops and tosses them to the table. One small flip, hardly a motion at all, and the coins lay where they fall.
    Then the money-holding hand brings everything that is left back to his pocket.
    I have never had a coin that I did not finger carefully or part with reluctantly. Never dropped money or tossed it with a small flick of the fingers. Never brought a jingling handful of coins back to my pocket or a purse.
    Of course he knows how to do all those things. He does not know he knows, but he does all the same.

     

    A fter dinner we go out walking on the boulevard. We walk three abreast again, Nise and me on either side of him.
    “We’re some kind of slow-moving animal,” I say, swaying into him.
    “One with three heads,” Nise says, and I feel her sway into him.
    He can feel her breast against one arm and mine against the other.
    “We’re our own kind of animal,” he tells us.
    Yet it is not awkward to walk that way. Sometimes people have to make room for us, but they do. It is not just the space we take up, I think, that makes