friendly tug to destroy the somber moment. “A disaster for me too,” she said. “They would throw me out of the prostitutes’ union!”
“I wouldn’t want that to happen,” Jerry said, and found to his peculiar delight that he was able to laugh back and mean it.
“That is much better,” Nicole said, snuggling back against him. “I am not for falling in love with, I am for enjoying like the great work of art I am. But I am a work of
performance art
, mon cher, to be experienced like a play or a dance or a symphony, not possessed and collected like a painting or a piece of sculpture. Do you understand?”
“I do believe I do,” Jerry said truthfully.
“And it does not make you sad?”
Jerry thought about it. “No, it doesn’t,” he said. “Why should it?”
“Et voilà, you see, you have become a man of the world,” Nicole said. “Bienvenue à Paris!”
Ah yes, my son, he thought as he drifted off to sleep, it is indeed a long way from Downey!
They slept late the next morning, made love, had a petit déjeuner of croissants, coffee, and champagne with orange juice, then strolled down to the Seine through the Tuileries, crossed the river to the Quai d’Orsay just in front of the museum, where they boarded a strange little catamaran riverboat with a flat deck and a funky wooden deckhouse.
They took seats in the sun up at the front of the boat, which warped away from the dock, sailed eastward past Île de la Cité and Île St.-Louis, up a lock and through the Bastille boat basin, and then the boat entered a long tunnel beneath the city, ancient vaulted stonework punctuated at regular intervals by big round gridwork manholes through which circles of sunshine filtered like Victorian arc lights, transforming the tunnel into a magic reality of dusky twilight and cool misty shadows.
The boat finally emerged from the tunnel and moved slowly up the Canal St.-Martin, a channel rimmed by a long thin park and running straight through a residential part of the city, through a series of ancient locks that took forever to negotiate. It was more like spending the early afternoon sitting on a park bench than a boat ride, watching the gray stone buildings, the shops and cafés, the traffic circles and the pedestrians while slowly moving by at the pace of a walking man.
And if Jerry Reed had indeed become enough of a man of the world to understand the foolishness of allowing himself to fall in love with someone like Nicole, by the time the boat had docked at the Parc de la Villette, he certainly had allowed his feelings to generalize themselves, which was to say he saw no reason not to fall in love a little with Paris, with a city at once timeless and energetically modern, a city happily rooted in its own past while it boogied forward into the future.
And that was the Parc de la Villette in spades, a vast and sprawling collection of museums of science, industry, music, and cinema, of amusement rides and slick restaurants, surrounded by a futuristic quarter of hotels, restaurants, and fancy condo buildings that looked like downtown Mars—a kind of Disneyland of the future done right, and with a French accent.
They ate lunch at a sleekly modern Chinese restaurant and thenspent a long afternoon taking in the exhibitions. This was Jerry’s kind of place, and he would have felt entirely at home if only it hadn’t all been in French, or even if Nicole had had the technical background to translate it all properly for him. Instead, she did her best to translate the words into English, and Jerry tried to make all the technological wonders comprehensible to her, and in the end quite enjoyed it, for here, at least,
she
was the innocent, and
he
got to be the tour guide, and he suspected that, professional that she was, Nicole had planned it just that way to please him.
By unstated mutual agreement, they left the European Space Agency exhibit for last, for somehow Jerry knew that it would signify the last act of their
“I wouldn’t want that to happen,” Jerry said, and found to his peculiar delight that he was able to laugh back and mean it.
“That is much better,” Nicole said, snuggling back against him. “I am not for falling in love with, I am for enjoying like the great work of art I am. But I am a work of
performance art
, mon cher, to be experienced like a play or a dance or a symphony, not possessed and collected like a painting or a piece of sculpture. Do you understand?”
“I do believe I do,” Jerry said truthfully.
“And it does not make you sad?”
Jerry thought about it. “No, it doesn’t,” he said. “Why should it?”
“Et voilà, you see, you have become a man of the world,” Nicole said. “Bienvenue à Paris!”
Ah yes, my son, he thought as he drifted off to sleep, it is indeed a long way from Downey!
They slept late the next morning, made love, had a petit déjeuner of croissants, coffee, and champagne with orange juice, then strolled down to the Seine through the Tuileries, crossed the river to the Quai d’Orsay just in front of the museum, where they boarded a strange little catamaran riverboat with a flat deck and a funky wooden deckhouse.
They took seats in the sun up at the front of the boat, which warped away from the dock, sailed eastward past Île de la Cité and Île St.-Louis, up a lock and through the Bastille boat basin, and then the boat entered a long tunnel beneath the city, ancient vaulted stonework punctuated at regular intervals by big round gridwork manholes through which circles of sunshine filtered like Victorian arc lights, transforming the tunnel into a magic reality of dusky twilight and cool misty shadows.
The boat finally emerged from the tunnel and moved slowly up the Canal St.-Martin, a channel rimmed by a long thin park and running straight through a residential part of the city, through a series of ancient locks that took forever to negotiate. It was more like spending the early afternoon sitting on a park bench than a boat ride, watching the gray stone buildings, the shops and cafés, the traffic circles and the pedestrians while slowly moving by at the pace of a walking man.
And if Jerry Reed had indeed become enough of a man of the world to understand the foolishness of allowing himself to fall in love with someone like Nicole, by the time the boat had docked at the Parc de la Villette, he certainly had allowed his feelings to generalize themselves, which was to say he saw no reason not to fall in love a little with Paris, with a city at once timeless and energetically modern, a city happily rooted in its own past while it boogied forward into the future.
And that was the Parc de la Villette in spades, a vast and sprawling collection of museums of science, industry, music, and cinema, of amusement rides and slick restaurants, surrounded by a futuristic quarter of hotels, restaurants, and fancy condo buildings that looked like downtown Mars—a kind of Disneyland of the future done right, and with a French accent.
They ate lunch at a sleekly modern Chinese restaurant and thenspent a long afternoon taking in the exhibitions. This was Jerry’s kind of place, and he would have felt entirely at home if only it hadn’t all been in French, or even if Nicole had had the technical background to translate it all properly for him. Instead, she did her best to translate the words into English, and Jerry tried to make all the technological wonders comprehensible to her, and in the end quite enjoyed it, for here, at least,
she
was the innocent, and
he
got to be the tour guide, and he suspected that, professional that she was, Nicole had planned it just that way to please him.
By unstated mutual agreement, they left the European Space Agency exhibit for last, for somehow Jerry knew that it would signify the last act of their
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