The Radiant City. Lauren B. Davis

“Look, no harm, no harm.” And I saw that this was true and held out my hand to the man to shake, to say I was sorry, but the man scuttled away, muttering. We went home, Kate and I, and made love and I lost myself for a moment in her butterscotch skin. Then she’d dozed off with a book on her stomach, and her head tilted toward the sun coming in the window. It made her face look pale, too pale, pale as a phantom in the afternoon light. It was sudden, the way I couldn’t stand to look at her and how I had to get out of the apartment right then, immediately, or I would choke. When I returned, drunk as Davy’s sow, in the wee smalls, Kate was mad as hell and how could I explain?

      Sack of skulls.

      Matthew sits back, his fingers cramped around the plastic shaft of the ballpoint pen. Don’t read it back; don’t read it back. He opens the drawer, grabs an envelope, scribbles a note to Brent and stuffs it, and the pages he’s just written, inside. Licks the seal. Flattens it with a pound of his fist. Let’s see what you make of that. Matthew laughs out loud, addresses the envelope, and then sticks a stamp on the letter and grabs his jacket. He will mail the damn thing. He will. Still laughing, he heads for the door.

      After mailing his pages to Brent, Matthew strolls back to his apartment, but realizes he does not want to go in. He stands at the heavy wooden door with his hands in his pockets. He has nowhere else to go, at least not until tonight and dinner at Anthony’s. He wonders how this can be. How can a person live in Paris and have nowhere to go?

      On previous visits to Paris over the years he had always been contemptuous of a certain type of expatriate and how the city supported their illusions. All the beachcombers, and soon-to-be novelists, painters, dancers, jazz musicians. They teach English or work as babysitters or moving men or at some other bad-paying job, or else they live off their trust funds or savings or, yes, disability checks, and don’t actually do any writing, painting, dancing, whatever. They sit in cafés and smoke Gitanes and they bolster up each other’s lies and they tell each other they are all Hemingways, or Josephine Bakers, or Picassos. Back in some place like New York, say, they would have to make it quick or be chewed up and spat out in record time and back to a bus to Minnesota and the Mama’s lutefisk. But not here. Here they slink along café to café. Now, he fears he is becoming one of them.

      “Mr. Matthew!” The teenager from Chez Elias, stands in the doorway of the café. He is dressed like any American teenager: baggy black track pants slung low on his hips, oversized jean jacket hanging almost to his knees. Trainers. He fills up the doorway. Matthew considers that if it were not for the ear-to-ear grin he would be a pretty intimidating kid, the kind old French ladies move away from in the metro, clutching their pocketbooks. That lower lip is strange. When Matthew first met Joseph he thought someone had given him a swollen lip, but it is clearly some sort of birth defect, as though someone has pulled down that side of flesh, turning it slightly inside out.

      “Hello! My uncle says hello,” he calls.

      “Hello. It’s Joseph, right?”

      “Yes. Joseph. You busy?”

      “Nope.”

      “Then you come. Have coffee.”

      Another café, another coffee. Matthew shrugs. “Sure,” he says.

      Ramzi greets him warmly and pulls out a chair at a table where the old man already sits.

      “Sit with us. Joseph, you get the coffee.”

      Saida is behind the counter. She looks tired, with hollows under her eyes. Smiling at Matthew, she adjusts the scarf around her neck, and Matthew senses that this hiding of her scars is an automatic gesture. He has noticed that when she is not using her right hand, which is also badly scarred, she keeps it behind her back. When Saida smiles, the brightness of her teeth makes her skin look darker and the smudges under her eyes more pronounced. She says something to Joseph and the boy comes back with a tray of tiny cups, a pot of Turkish coffee, a plate of dates, oranges and baklava.

      Joseph sits and pours the coffee. Matthew looks at these three generations of men and can’t help but wonder what it would be like to sit like this, with men of his own blood, of his own stories. To be known in that way. Where you come from. Who your people are. I know my people, he thinks, and I am not proud.

      They ask him how he is and he says he is fine. They talk about the weather and about the sans-papiers and the recent strike by public employees, which brought the country to a near-halt for one day, closing schools and grounding flights. Saida does not enter the conversation, but watches them and serves the occasional customer, wrapping preserved lemons in jars, packages of haloumi cheese, olives and pita. Matthew sips the coffee, rich and smoky, alive on his tongue after the sweetness of the date, the sparkle of the orange.

      Joseph asks him questions about being a reporter, and at first he answers in monosyllables, not wanting to bring the dark memories into this place. Then he looks at the boy, who runs his hand self-consciously over his shaved head, his heavy eyebrows raised in eagerness, a smile of encouragement on that bruised-looking mouth—and Matthew sees himself as he never was, but would like to think he might have been: hopeful for the world, for tales of adventure, for someone to open a hand and show him a treasure from a far-off place. He sees how Joseph tries to be tough, dressing like that, with the swagger and the pout, but how he is, after all, just a boy champing at the bit and restless in this, the world of his family. Matthew finds he does not want to disappoint him and so he tells a tale or two—harmless stories of exotic places—the Khyber Pass, Bejing, New Guinea, Borneo. He tells of eating slugs with the Australian Aborigines, and snake meat in China. He tells of entering the bowl of a Hawaiian volcano with a film crew from National Geographic and of travelling with storm-chasers across the dust bowl of America on the trail of tornadoes big as mountains, moving at the speed of freight trains.

      Matthew discovers he likes telling tales to Joseph, and when he looks at his watch he is surprised to find three hours have passed.

      “I have to go,” he says.

      “Stay for dinner,” Elias says, his leathery face a mass of wrinkles when he smiles. “We make lemon chicken and spinach. Very good. Tell him, Saida.”

      “I’d love to but I can’t.” He is shy, suddenly, at the comfort he feels here, does not entirely trust it, and is therefore happy to have dinner at Anthony’s to use as an excuse.

      “You come back, then?” says Joseph.

      “Sure.”

      “Tomorrow?”

      “Joseph, do not be rude. Mr. Matthew is very busy,” says Ramzi.

      “I’ll come back soon. Maybe tomorrow.”

      “Good,” says Joseph, rubbing his head. “I’ll be here.”

      As Matthew leaves, Saida calls out, “Thank you.”