No, the bottom line is she’d rather die in Paris, she thinks.
But now she feels incapable of writing even a suicide note.
When Anna calls from Oslo, Shay is wondering where her next meal will come from. Literally, she is thinking this when the phone rings, and she hears Anna’s invitation – she has a one-night stopover in Paris, and would Shay join her and some Norwegian friends for dinner that night, her treat?
There seems to be a bit of magic left in her world.
But no money left. The biggest problem now is that the restaurant they are meeting at, Hotel du Nord by Canal St Marttin in the tenth, is way the hell across the city from her apartment near Convention. It is too far to walk in bad shoes, in bad weather – it is a record a breaking winter – too far to walk even in good shoes in good weather, and all she has in her pocket is a used Métro ticket with a smeared date stamp. It has already saved her a couple of tickets for ‘stealing trains’ – not paying the fare, in other words. If the cops stopped her at one of their random underground check stops, she just showed the old ticket and babbled in English and they waved her through.
You couldn’t jump the turnstiles any more, not since they’d all been replaced with electronic turnstiles and six-foot gates. But you could still sneak through if you went right behind someone with a ticket, so close you were touching. It helped if the station was crowded. The trick was picking out someone who wouldn’t mind and wouldn’t rat you out, or someone so preoccupied they wouldn’t notice – people on cellphones, with small children, too many bags, or muttering to themselves. She slips through by helping an African woman struggling with her two tired, dead-weight children. There is no check stop, so she is able to get off without any problem at Jacques Bonsergent and walk the four blocks to Hotel du Nord.
The windows of Hotel du Nord are frosted, it’s so cold outside, but the warm, amber lighting glows through. The cold follows her inside and clings to her like an aura, which makes the maitre d’ shiver when he approaches her. Anna is already there with a male pilot, Peter, and two other, flight attendants for her airline – a gay man, Baard, and another woman, Liv. While waiting for Shay, they’ve already polished off a couple of bottles of wine, so it’s a pretty happy group. Shay gets into the mood, sharing some of her favourite stories about Anna back during Anna’s modelling days in New York, when they had both been twenty-something and beautiful, invited everywhere. There was that night at Elaine’s, a book party for some friend of Anna’s. They’d brushed shoulders with Arthur Miller and Robert Altman, and Jerry Stiller had introduced them to Matt Dillon. Or the night Shay had turned off her phone to write, hearing Anna’s message too late, ‘I’m hanging out with Mick Jagger and Carly Simon at Whiskey. Where are you? Come down.’ There were parties with free food and drinks almost every night, and too many nights dancing after hours at Splash with gay boys. Anna still parties occasionally with glamorous people, but not exclusively – obviously, or Shay, long past glamorous with her two pairs of jeans and three shirts, all fraying, would not be here.
Exuberantly joining the many wine toasts, snapping photos of the happy group, Shay is now the picture of gaiety, enjoying herself for the first time in she doesn’t know how long.
Just before midnight, Shay announces she has to leave if she is going to catch the last Métro home and Anna says, ‘No, stay. You can take a taxi.’ Then she slips a bill to Shay under the table when the others are distracted by cellphones or off in the bathroom. Fifty euros. Too much! Shay whispers.
Anna insists, and Shay puts the bill in her purse. It is a godsend. If traffic flow is good, she can get home for under twenty, and have enough left over to eat for a week. Maybe in that week she would have The Idea, the one she would write that would save her. In any event, she won’t starve.
After dinner, she walks the Norwegians back to their hotel – it is 2 a.m. and they have an early call the next morning so they all kiss and say goodbye to Shay. She looks for a taxi, but the streets are full of people who have missed the last Métro, and the lines at the taxi stations are ridiculously long. So Shay walks further, looking for a street where she might find a free cab without competition. Occupied taxis whiz past her. When she sights a rare free one on the horizon, people pop out of nowhere to grab it from under her. At one point, this means a handful of late-partying Chinese tourists whose bus has broken down near Folies Bergère, all of them in bright red scarves and hats so they’ll be easy to find in a crowd. Even the infrequent Noctabuses that roll by are so jammed she can’t get on.
Clapping her gloved hands to keep them warm, her collar up and scarf around it to keep out the cold, she walks on, wondering if she might freeze to death before she finds transportation, and what her obits might say in that case, a drunk and bankrupt American found frozen stiff in a taxi-hailing posture? Would her life mean anything then, other than as a martyr for the late-night Métro service movement?
Then, on a little street off Sebastopol, a car pulls up beside her, and the driver rolls down a window. Before he can say anything, she says, ‘Are you free?’
He nods, and she jumps in, calculating that her miserable, bone-chilling walk has saved her five euros at least. With this, she can treat herself to a pouch of tobacco, which will aid the creative processes in untold ways. After a few minutes in the cab, she realises that the driver hasn’t turned his meter on, which will save her a few more euros – life is going her way again. Traffic is light and signals are turning green as far as the eye can see.
After a few blocks, though, she feels guilty about cheating a working man, and mentions the meter. He clacks it on. It’s then she notices he is taking a strange route to get to Convention, heading east instead of south and west. She suggests a faster route. He ignores her. She sees his eyes in the rear-view mirror. They are shiny and red, the pupils dilated. He has no driver ID for her to see. The doors are auto-locked.
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she says. ‘You can let me off here.’
He keeps driving. He looks like a smallish man, like many men here not much bigger than she is. His hair is brown and greying. But she cannot see his face or get a clear image of what he looks like.
Vaguely, she remembers a story about a young woman in England who was picked up by a fake cabbie, raped and killed, her body left in a mattress factory dumpster in Shropshire. She remembers it only vaguely because it was in French, and she read it in a detective magazine while waiting at a doctor’s office, preoccupied as usual by her own problems. Now it has happened to her and this will be her obit: ‘American in Paris slain in grisly rape-murder’, a dripping blood-red headline in a pulpy barbershop magazine.
He turns south. They cross the river to the Left Bank, over a bridge whose name she doesn’t know.
There is a button to unlock the back passenger side on the door beside her, but she will have to wait for a red light, then move fast in order to escape. Tonight, of all nights, they are hitting all the green lights in a seamless journey to hell.
‘You are American,’ he says, in English, with barely an accent.
She says nothing. He wants to make small talk?
‘You are frightened.’
She says, ‘Please let me out. I just want to go home.’
‘You love to scare people. How does it feel?’
‘I don’t like scaring anyone. If you’re talking about Bush, didn’t vote for him, I despise him. Can you let me out here?’