The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [74]
32.
CAROLINE’S NARROW STREET WAS ONE SPOKE IN AN INTERSECTION of five streets. It reminded him of an étoile, like the design one could see from the top of the Arc de Triomphe. Marshall had picked up more tourist lore in his past few weeks in Paris than he had in all the years of flying in and out of the city. Then, he was thinking only of his next flight, or reviewing his last flight for mistakes. Now, he was surprised to notice occasionally that he hadn’t been thinking about flying. It had been twenty-two days since he had been at the controls of any vehicle. Instead, he had been zipping around on the Métro, the subterranean opposite of the limitless friendly skies. He liked the speed of the trains. He liked the way the train to Saint-Mandé twisted and turned just before it reached the station.
At the intersection he passed two drugstores, a tabac, and two small cafés. He detoured around a minor motorcycle accident—a disheveled, shaken biker, his mangled moto, two police cars. Caroline’s building, a stone structure with pale blue shutters, was a block from the accident. She had told him to ring number 3A. There was no name listed. After she buzzed him in, he walked up the three flights, proud of his sturdy heart and hardly out of breath.
Caroline was waiting on the landing outside her open door. She was wearing a short, silky Indian dress in a soft pale green color. Her lipstick was slightly off-center, accentuating the slant of her smile.
“Please be comfortable,” she said, settling him on a hard divan. Her dog slept through his arrival.
“Bobby is getting old,” she explained, caressing the dog’s head. “He must have his little naps.”
“People are crazy about dogs in the U.S.,” Marshall said. “And cats.”
“Did you have a pet?”
“No. Well, my children did, but I never had one that was my own pet.”
She gave him an aperitif, something sweet and gingery. Her apartment was chock-a-block with bric-a-brac, hanging beads and bells, and curling posters of movie stars and impressionist painters. There was an atmosphere of musty old Paris in the room. He couldn’t take in all the gewgaws.
Sitting down with the dog between them, she said, “Tell me about the United States! Tell me about your home, and where you were born.”
“I started out in Kentucky.”
“Kentucky! Oh, I want to go to Kentucky. What a marvelous word. My life’s dream is to go to the United States.”
“Really?”
“I used to know an American who said he would marry me and take me to the state of Minnesota, but he was teasing me. He never meant it.”
The talk meandered. She seemed less nervous with him, more aware of him. He was aware of her legs, her smooth knees, her lips, her clinging dress. Her earrings struggled inside the flow of her hair. But as she talked, he examined her features for hints of Annette. The slight curl in her lip? The same shade of hair?
At her insistence, he described the life of an airline pilot. He avoided the technicalities, skipped the frustrations with the management, skirted the stews, and probably made the whole enterprise seem as glamorous as she wanted it to be.
“I flew to Rome five years ago and got airsick on the way back,” she said with a frown. “Did you get airsick when you crashed your bomber?”
“No. When you’re in a situation like that, you don’t pay attention to your body.”
“Like opera singers,” she said. “I always wonder if they péter when they are singing. A good time to let go without being heard!”
Laughing at her own crude wit, she went to a shelf and seized a wooden cigar box next to an arrangement of porcelain poodles.
“This is what you came to see. I had to search for this, and I almost did not find it.” She opened the box and plucked from a pile of loose photographs a scallop-edged snapshot of a young man.
“That’s him!” Marshall held the picture under a lamp. “I remember him. I knew your father! He was the agent connected to the