It took me long enough, but here is Chapter Five - with a thanks and special shout-out to a gal on the Front Range, whose good words prodded me to get this together already - and you know who you are. Herewith:
“Mikhail, what were you thinking last night?”
Joanne held a makeshift cold compress, ice cubes rolled up into a damp washcloth, to her forehead.
“Right. Thinking had nothing to do with it. We almost crashed the bike, didn’t we?”
Mikhail had brewed a pot of espresso, using his screw-top metal percolator. It was stiff stuff. She needed it.
“I know. Close call. Very stupid, but lucky,” he said.
“You passed out, I think?” she asked. She had left him sprawled, strewn among a pile of giant, fur-lined, Russian overcoats, on the floor.
“I sleep, I sleep enough,” he mumbled. “Today, I go to Porte de Clignancourt, les marchés aux puces.
“What’s that?”
“The flea market. I buy chairs. I need chairs.”
“The freakin’ flea market,” she muttered.
“Joanne, what do you say?”
“You make me think of the flea market around 24th Street, in New York. All that noise and garbage. Those people, they’re not antique dealers. They’re bottom feeding swindlers, frauds.” She paused, then asked, “Wait, don’t you need a kitchen sink? First?”
“Yes. But today I buy chairs. Kitchen waits until next week. Maybe. You come with me to the flea market?”
She stood up. “Baby, no. My head. I might need to take a walk, hit a café, kick back.”
“You break my heart.”
“Not on purpose. Give me a spare key, the door code, call me later. I’ll take you to dinner or something. We can do that, right?”
“Maybe. Okay, okay. So, I run. I go now.”
He was up and out the door in ten minutes, a whirling dervish in red trousers and a long red and white striped scarf wrapped round his neck. On a lesser mortal, he would have looked like The Cat in the Hat.
She reckoned that he knew to give her space, it was that nonverbal part of their friendship. He was something of a genius, in more ways than science and mathematics. She was grateful.
She cleaned up the coffee debris, and checked the clock. It was after one. She took the next hour and put her body through the stretching and strengthening exercise regimen she practiced for years. The physical exertion decompressed her mind from the thousands of miles of travel, from the events of the previous night.
Shit, they could’ve been killed, or at least wound up in some hospital. Fucking luck. Let it go. She didn’t want her mind to replay the near motorcycle crash over and over. She needed to make phone calls back to New York, let Morris know where she was, that she took an unexpected detour on the way home.
A shower, an hour, and many glasses of water later, she walked down the long boulevard toward the Opéra. The name changed along the way, from St. Denis to Bonne Nouvelle to Poissonière, to who knew how many more. Her brown leather bucket hat and sunglasses shielded her face, even as the sun peeked in and out from behind the clouds and the threat of rain. She selected a café, and went in, past the rattan chairs lined up under a broad awning. It was quiet. A handful of patrons stood, smoking at a long zinc bar, a few others sat at tables nursing coffees, reading Le Monde, Le Figaro, or one of the salacious tabloids. A waiter motioned her to a table, and Joanne rustled up her shaky college-level French to order a café and chicken sandwich and frites. She realized that she had not used any French the night before. Everyone spoke to her in English.
The headache receded. She pulled out her phone and called Morris. It was nine in the morning in New York. His assistant patched her through to his voicemail, and she recorded a quick message, explaining the last-minute trip to Paris, Mikhail’s contact information, and the expected date of her return. She cleared the call and made another.
While it rang, she murmured, “Be there. Come on Nat, pick up.” The line connected. She needed to hear Nat’s voice, the gravel pitch, she needed the instant connection they shared their whole lives.
“Hello?”
“Nat. It’s Joanne.”
“Jo. It’s morning. I’m late for work. Where are you?”
“Do you know, we always ask each other that anymore? Instead of how are you?”
“Yeah. So where are you?”
“In Paris.”
“My god. What’re you doing there?”
“Visiting Mikhail.”
“What?”
“He’d been bugging me forever, Nat, practically begging. And with all that crap in Colorado.”
“Good god. Has he driven you into the ground? When’re you coming home?”
“No he hasn’t yet,” she started, not mentioning the motorcycle. “A few days. I’m not sure yet. He put me through the ringer last night. My head just stopped hurting, but it hasn’t stopped spinning. Remember when he dragged us to Brighton Beach? All those Russians? Until what, five in the morning?”
“I remember it took me two days to recover.”
They both laughed.
“Make sure he doesn’t kill you…”
“You’d have to bury me where Jim Morrison is buried.”
“Jo!”
“Kidding. Anyhow, I wanted you to know where I was. My stuff is on a trailer somewhere between Colorado and New York. I need to be there when it arrives. If anything changes, I’ll call right away. Okay?”
“Okay. Gotta fly. Call me again. Soon. Big kiss, pumpkin.”
Joanne reached into her pocketbook and pulled out a folder of papers. She put it on the table next to the sandwich and opened it. She looked at the photocopy of her birth certificate, one page in French, two more in English. The French document was ornate, with two seals and an embossed coat of arms. It read, Extrait des Registres de l’état-civil de la ville de Mayenne, and gave the details of her birth, the date, the name of the hospital, the quartier of the town, the names of her parents, and a scant word or two in a section called mention marginale. Her mother had given her the original and copies years earlier. She often mused over the birth certificate, ran her fingers over the inscriptions, wondering why she and her brother were born in France.
She let her mind search her past, and she hit on a specific conversation she had with her mother. Joanne was not yet eighteen years old. Her mother had a deplorable sense of propriety, and blurted the story in a torrent.
It was her mother's wedding night. She was a twenty-year-old virgin, and Lyndon B. Johnson was president of the United States. Joanne’s father, already working in France, returned for his wedding and a quick honeymoon in Niagara Falls. Joanne’s mother explained that she was frightened, that it was painful, and that the sheets wound up covered in her blood.
What stuck in Joanne's memory was the comment Joanne’s father made to her mother afterward, “I’ve had French whores that were better than you.”
Joanne supposed that she was conceived that night.
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