He opens the window, breathes in, presses his knees into the guardrail. The grandeur of Paris -its tallness and broadness and hardness and softness, its perfect symmetry, human will imposed on stone, on razored lawns, on the disobedient rose bushes-that Paris resides elsewhere. His own is smaller, containing himself, this window, the floorboards that creak across the hall.
By 9 A.M., he is trooping north through the Luxembourg Gardens. By the Palais de Justice, he rests. Flagging already? Lazy bastard. He forces himself onward, over the Seine, up Rue Montorgueil, past the Grands Boulevards.
Charlotte 's shop is on Rue Rochechouart-not too high up the hill, thankfully. The store isn't open yet, so he wanders toward a cafe, then changes his mind at the door-no money to waste on luxuries. He gazes in the window of his daughter's shop, which is full of handmade hats, designed by Charlotte and produced by a team of young women in highwaisted linen aprons and mobcaps, like eighteenth-century maids.
She arrives later than the posted opening time. "Oui?" she says upon seeing her father-she only talks to him in French.
"I was admiring your window," he says. "It's beautifully arranged."
She unlocks the shop and enters. "Why are you wearing a tie? Do you have somewhere to go?"
"Here-I was coming here to see you." He hands her the box of candies. "Some calissons."
"I don't eat those."
"I thought you loved them."
"Not me. Brigitte does." This is her mother, the second of Lloyd's ex-wives.
"Could you give them to her?"
"She won't want anything from you."
"You're so angry with me, Charlie."
She marches to the other side of the shop, tidying as if it were combat. A customer enters and Charlotte puts on a smile. Lloyd removes himself to a corner. The customer leaves and Charlotte resumes her pugilistic dusting.
"Did I do something wrong?" he asks.
"My God-you are so egocentric."
He peers into the back of the shop.
"They're not here yet," she snaps.
"Who aren't?"
"The girls."
"Your workers? Why are you telling me that?"
"You got here too early. Bad timing." Charlotte claims that Lloyd has pursued every woman she ever introduced him to, starting with her best friend at lycee, Nathalie, who came along for a vacation to Antibes once and lost her bikini top in the waves. Charlotte caught Lloyd watching. Thankfully, she never learned that matters eventually went much further between her father and Nathalie.
But all that is over. Finished, finally. So senseless in retrospect-such effort wasted. Libido: it has been the tyrant of his times, hurling him from comfortable America all those years ago to sinful Europe for adventure and conquest, marrying him four times, tripping him up a hundred more, distracting and degrading and nearly ruining him. Yet now it is mercifully done with, desire having dwindled these past years, as mysterious in departure as it was on arrival. For the first time since age twelve, Lloyd witnesses the world without motive. And he is quite lost.
"You really don't like the candies?" he says.
"I didn't ask for them."
"No, you didn't." He smiles sadly. "Is there something I could do for you, though?"
"What for?"
"To help."
"I don't want your help."
"All right," he says. "All right, then." He nods, sighs, and turns for the door.
She comes out after him. He reaches to touch her arm, but she pulls away. She hands back the box of calissons. "I'm not going to use these."
Back home, he runs through his contact numbers and ends up calling an old reporter buddy, Ken Lazzarino, now working at a magazine in Manhattan. They exchange news and get nostalgic for a few minutes, but an undercurrent runs through the conversation: both men know that Lloyd needs a favor, but he can't bring himself to ask. Finally, he forces it out. "What if I wanted to pitch something?"
"You never wrote for us, Lloyd."
"I know, I'm just wondering if."
"I do online strategy now-I don't have a say in content anymore."
"Is there someone you could get me in touch with?"
After listening to several variations of no, Lloyd puts down the phone.
He eats another can of chickpeas and tries Menzies again at the paper. "What about me doing the European business roundup today?"
"Hardy Benjamin handles that now."
"I know it's a pain for you guys that I don't have this email stuff working. I can fax it, though. It won't make a difference."
"It does, actually. But look, I'll call if we need something out of Paris. Or give me a ring if you have something newsy."
Lloyd opens a French current-affairs magazine in hopes of stealing a story idea. He flips the pages impatiently-he doesn't recognize half the names. Who the hell is that guy in the photo? He used to know everything going on in this country. At press conferences, he was front-row, arm raised, rushing up afterward to pitch questions from the sidelines. At embassy cocktail parties, he sidled up to the ambassadors with a grin, notebook emerging from his hip pocket. Nowadays, if he attends press conferences at all, he's back-row, doodling, dozing. Embossed invitations pile up on his coffee table. Scoops, big and little, pass him by. He still has smarts enough to produce the obvious pieces-those he can do drunk, eyelids closed, in his underwear at the word processor.
He tosses the current-affairs magazine onto a chair. What's the point in trying? He calls his son's mobile. "Am I waking you?" he asks in French, the language they use together.
Jerome covers the phone and coughs.
"I was hoping to buy you lunch later," Lloyd says. "Shouldn't you be down at the ministry at this hour?"
But Jerome has the day off, so they agree to meet at a bistro around Place de Clichy, which is near where the young man lives, though the precise location of Jerome's home is as much a mystery to Lloyd as are the details of the young man's job at the French foreign ministry. The boy is secretive.
Lloyd arrives at the bistro early to check the prices on the menu. He opens his wallet to count the cash, then takes a table.
When Jerome walks in, Lloyd stands and smiles. "I'd almost forgotten how fond I am of you."
Jerome sits quickly, as if caught out in musical chairs. "You're strange."
"Yes. It's true."
Jerome flaps out the napkin and runs a hand through his floppy locks, leaving tangled tents of hair. His mother, Francoise, a tobacco-fingered stage actress, had the same hair-mussing habit and it made her even more attractive until years later, when she had no work, and it made her disheveled. Jerome, at twenty-eight, is tattered already, dressed as if by a vintage shop, in a velvet blazer whose sleeves stop halfway up his forearms and an over-tight pin-striped shirt, cigarette rolling papers visible through a rip in the breast pocket.
"Let me buy you a shirt," Lloyd says impulsively. "You need a proper shirt. We'll go down to Hilditch & Key, down on Rivoli. We'll take a taxi. Come on." He speaks rashly-he couldn't afford a new shirt. But Jerome declines.
Lloyd reaches across the table and grips his boy's thumb. "It's been ages-we live in the same city, for God's sake."
Jerome takes his thumb back and studies the menu. He settles on the salad with goat cheese and walnuts.
"Have something proper," Lloyd protests. "Have a steak!" He grins, though his gaze runs down the menu to the price of steak. He clenches his toes.
"Salad is fine," Jerome says.
Lloyd orders the salad himself since it's the cheapest item. He offers his son a bottle of wine and is relieved that this, too, is declined. Lloyd wolfs down his food and all the bread in the basket. Too many chickpeas, too little meat. Jerome, meanwhile, pecks at his goat cheese and ignores the lettuce.
Teasingly, Lloyd tells him in English, "Eat your greens, boy!" Jerome's face creases with incomprehension, and Lloyd must translate into French. Jerome could speak English at one stage, but Lloyd moved out when the boy was six, and he had limited chances to practice after that. How peculiar, then, for Lloyd to see in this French kid's face the features of his own long-gone Ohio father. Ignore the hair and otherwise the resemblance is striking-the flat nose and the foggy brown eyes. Even Jerome's habit of using three words where twenty would do. Except, of course, that Jerome's words are in the wrong language. An unsettling thought crosses Lloyd's mind: one day, his son will die. It's a plain fact, but it had never occurred to him before.