And so he would lie with Mélodie on his coverlet, the cemetery outside his window like some burning woods, and even as she devoured him with her green eyes, he couldn’t wait until she left. But when he tried to stop seeing her, Josh suddenly appeared with a split of champagne.
‘I don’t believe in Mélodie Montesquieu,’ Cal sang while he sipped. ‘She belongs in fantasy baseball. She could play shortstop without her clothes. She’d win every game.’
‘Don’t knock the kid,’ Joshua said. ‘She visits you as a personal favour to me. Our people worry, worry that you’ll crack. That you’ll wander into some hole that belongs to the feds. Uncle Sam could haul your ass right back to the States.’
‘And Mélodie writes reports and convinces your money-men that I’m more valuable to you alive than dead.’
‘That’s the equation – in a nutshell.’
2.
Josh had left him some mad money – a thousand euros, in case there was a sudden call from Lightning’s lawyers to vacate the rue Boulard and hide somewhere else. He sat on the euros like a squirrel, slept with Mélodie, promised himself he would see a tiny piece of Paris before he died.
He had to deflect the concierge, who was Josh’s own gatekeeper. He went down the back stairs, entered a garden with its own glass gazebo, climbed a wall that led him onto the rue Daguerre, a market street that emboldened Cal, made him feel that he’d discovered a little paradise of cafés and stalls and shoppers clutching little baskets composed entirely of string.
How much of a sin could it be to stroll among the shoppers, sit at a café like some hidden king of fantasy baseball? But he couldn’t take the chance. Suppose the concierge saw him on one of her own shopping sprees? So he climbed back over the wall to his tomb above the cemetery. And after a few days he went on a second outing, to the cemetery itself, where he found Maupassant and Maria Monte: among graves that were scattered like broken teeth.
Montez was a sultry Technicolor queen of the 1940s who starred in a series of flicks about the harem girls and thieves of a Baghdad that rose up ludicrously on Hollywood’s back lots. What he loved about Montez was her long silences even when she was asked to play Scheherazade. She could barely mouth a single line of dialogue – she belonged in fantasy baseball rather than Baghdad of the back lots. Perhaps he could remake Montez into a manager of some fantasy team. He had discovered her years ago in a late-night festival of B-movies, her face all aflame, her lipstick as red as lacquered blood, and Montez had remained with him, like a ghost at the very edge of sleep.
And then he saw her – not in the cemetery, but in a salon on the rue Daguerre, after Cal had decided to have his hair cut. The hairdresser herself couldn’t intrigue him; it was the shampoo girl, Marie, who wore lipstick and nail polish right out of the Arabian Nights. She looked at Cal with her own Arabian eyes, and he muttered ‘Maria Montez’.
He had a kindergarten command of French, but it didn’t seem to matter with Marie. She sat him down in her private throne where she shampooed customers’ hair, put a huge plastic napkin over his shirt, clutched him around the ears, and drew his head back into the hollow of a sink.
She rinsed his hair, poured shampoo on his crown, and rubbed the shampoo into his scalp with the palms of her hands. Then there was a curious surprise – the shampoo girl began to massage his scalp with her ten fingers, like ten little animals with their own moist mouths. Cal had never considered until that moment how alive his scalp was in all its bumpy terrain.
He never wanted to leave Marie’s throne. He couldn’t have told you how long she had massaged his scalp, and when she rinsed his hair, Cal suddenly felt his own strange isolation – he was more connected to a shampoo girl and her ten fingers than he had ever been to his wife, his mistresses, his daughters, and Josh.
3.
He didn’t have to get his hair cut each time; he could simply have a shampooing with the fille, as everybody called her – the salon’s own little girl who would never graduate, never grow up into a full-fledged hairdresser. The other girls in the salon poked fun at Cal, this perverse little American who looked like a hobo; his cuffs were frayed, his trousers wrinkled, his shoes beginning to unravel. He was Marie’s one and only ‘fiancé’, offering her his own head of hair like some wild flower that had to be rinsed and stroked.
They did have a conversation of sorts, but they could just as well have been the inmates of a madhouse with its own elemental language of long silences. She called him ‘Monsieur’, and he discovered with a series of groping questions that she lived in one of Paris’ poorest banlieues with her parents and three older brothers. She herself had hardly gone to school, but would rather wash men’s hair than scrub kitchen floors or bathe the bodies of old people in some sanatorium.
It was hard for Cal to manoeuvre while he sat on Marie’s throne, but she did agree to meet with him one afternoon during her lunch hour. They bought sandwiches at a bistro on the rue Daguerre and smuggled them into the cemetery.
He couldn’t explain his affection for Marie. They had little to talk about. The rigid rules and laws of fantasy baseball would have baffled her, and she’d never heard of Baudelaire. And while he blabbered in her ear, sang to her about the mysteries of Maria Montez, she scratched the side of his face – gently, gently – with a polished fingernail; it was the most erotic gesture he had ever experienced. They kissed for twenty minutes right on the Allée Transversale, in front of tourists with their little guidebooks to all the notable graves, and Cal could hear his own heart pound like some maddening earthquake.
She laughed and wiped the lipstick off his mouth, and led him back by hand to her salon. She had never once pronounced his name. He fumbled against her – could he ride home with her on the Métro?
‘Non, chéri.’
She called him darling but wouldn’t pronounce his name. She did promise to meet him for another stroll in the cemetery. But when he returned to Marie’s salon the very next afternoon, three sombre men were waiting for him. They looked like taller, harder replicas of Marie, each with a pencil-thin moustache. He searched inside the window – Marie wasn’t near her throne.
The three men kicked him like a dog and left Cal lying on the rue Daguerre. The concierge had to bring him back to his apartment. She washed his face with a little rag. She’d lived in London for a year, and could admonish him in his own language.
‘Monsieur has been a bad boy,’ she said. ‘Monsieur is not supposed to kiss la shampouineuse.’
Cal loved the sound of it - shampouineuse.
He was crazy about the shampouineuse of the rue Daguerre. But how would he ever find her again? She disappeared from the salon, and none of the hairdressers would offer him a clue. And then Mélodie Montesquieu stopped visiting him on Tuesdays, stopped visiting him at all; she was his courier to the world outside his little tomb.
Lightning & Lightning had decided to shut him down. He’d have to flee, but where could he go? He called American Express – his account had been frozen. He called his bank collect – his new balance was one dollar and twenty-six cents. And all the codes to his retirement accounts had been changed. He was locked out of his own past, like some mechanical monster without a persona.