Paris Times Eight by Deirdre Kelly Page B

Devoid of people, Paris was a solid mass of stone and glass and shuttered windows. It slipped by me silently behind the glass of my cab window. The driver expertly maneuvered the twisting corridors around the Arc de Triomphe, still as an ice sculpture. I took in the chiselled detail on its massive walls—winged angels blowing trumpets, naked boy soldiers clutching their swords. We continued down the Champs-Élysées, sleek and elegant, a street paved with money. We passed the Jardin des Tuileries, where the trees and chairs that surrounded the ice-covered fountains sat dormant, waiting for the sun to come back out. We turned onto a bridge spanning the turbulent Seine. Our destination was the Marais, where Tova lived on the tiny Rue du Bourg Tibourg, near the Hôtel de Ville. It was a residential area, intimate, familiar, with boulangeries already drawing people into their brightly lit interiors to buy freshly baked baguettes and croissants still warm from the oven. My taxi pulled up at the corner, in front of a café where the windows were thick with steam rising from the tidy lineup of bodies inside.
    I was hoping that Tova would have coffee ready for me when I buzzed her apartment from a downstairs intercom. The entrance door clicked, and I entered her pristine white building, hauling my bags up two flights of immaculate stairs. I could feel my fatigue. I hadn’t slept a wink on the plane ride over, too consumed by nerves. My stomach was still in knots when I knocked on her door. I felt weak and winded. My head whirled like a top. Tova pushed open the door and, flashing me a big toothy smile, pulled me quickly into a friendly hug. In that instant I felt better, just knowing I was with someone I knew. She rushed me in, marvelling at the amount of luggage. “There’s not really room for the three of us,” she said with a laugh that made her head of light brown curls slither and shake around her narrow shoulders. I looked around the apartment. It was small and spare, the only furniture a navy-blue divan pushed up against a wall. A rolled-up futon was in a corner of the room, heaped with blankets. I assumed this was my bed, for a couple of nights, anyway. The air felt clammy and cool. There was no coffee. No warmth apart from Tova’s fleeting embrace.
    When she had held me close, I had felt the bones protruding through her sweater, which, along with her leggings and ankle boots, was black. A uniform of chic. Her skin seemed almost translucent, and her hands were ice cold to the touch. I figured she was back to her old habit of purging after she ate. She had done that when we lived together in residence at university, and I never understood it. She was beautiful, with sky-blue eyes and dark lashes, a gently sloped nose and a mouth shaped like a rose. She loved beauty, wearable beauty, and ever since I had known her, she had wanted to work in fashion. She had first moved to the city over five years previously to get away from her upper-middle-class parents. It had been her dream to work in fashion, and now she worked for a big-name designer. I had assumed she’d be happy. But her thinness made me wonder. She caught me staring. “I can’t be late,” she said, quickly wrapping her body in a high-collar coat that she buttoned up to the throat. “Just unroll the futon and get some sleep. I won’t be back until very late, anyway. There’s a restaurant across the street in case you get hungry.”
    She laid a key down on a counter inside her minuscule kitchen, alongside some Paris guidebooks. “I got them for you,” Tova continued, “to help you find a hotel. When’s he coming again?”
    â€œOn Friday,” I said. “In two days. Will I get to spend some time with you before then?” I asked.
    She explained that packs of American buyers were arriving over the next few days to see her boss’s new collection at his Left Bank atelier. She had to