“Making me a book?”
“I don’t know who it’s for.”
“What’s it about?”
“Don’t know that either. That’s what I like. You make a book, and then the idea falls into your brain, and off you go. If you hate it, you throw it out. Super low pressure. Stop talking to me or the idea won’t come.”
Sabine looked around. Photos of writers and artists, yellowed sheet music on the old piano, overflowing bookshelves. Books piled on the floor of uneven, worn pentagonal orange tiles. A pentagon was a five-sided polygon. Pentagons, Sabine remembered from math class, were everywhere, in a cross-section of okra (a terrible vegetable with worthy geometry), thepart of an apple that held its seeds, a morning glory, a starfish. On her book’s cover, she drew the tile pattern, then opened it and wrote:
A five-sided message not in a bottle but a bookstore
Away from home, away from people I call home,
adulting, broke, disguised, putting on a smiling face,
trying to blend in, trying hard, excited, enthusiastic,
scared, lonely, free, dreaming.
What is there to discover in France?
Maison Perdue, Sabine, Marlow, Aubin, Yves
Five sides of my pentagonal life.
She caught Aubin watching her. “What?”
“I’m thinking how beautiful you are,” he said. It made her blush.
“Ready?” It was Yves.
“You didn’t show us the cool thing,” she said, following him downstairs, Aubin behind her. So Yves took them to the TV and Film section and showed them a glossy big book calledThe Art of No-Budget Filmmaking. He was on the cover.
“If you’d told me in film school I’d be on the cover of a book about filmmaking,” he said, “I would not have believed you. Never give up on your dreams. Clichéd perhaps, but still.”
“You assume we know what our dreams are,” she said.
“If you don’t have one now, remember, there’s a crack in everything—that is how your light will get in. Lunch?”
Aubin put down his book. Sabine picked it up again and bought it for him. The bookseller at the front desk stamped it with “Kilometer Zero, Paris.” On impulse, she held out her palm, and he smiled and stamped her skin, too.
“How long do we have?” asked Yves, heading out to the street.
“We’re taking the six PM train back,” said Aubin.
“Then we’d better get going,” said Yves.
Sabine eyed the still-wet, delicious souvenir on her skin, suddenly realizing it was incriminating evidence she’d have to scrub off before they got home that evening.
Luc took Marlow in his little, rusty Renault back to Vittel. They passed the five-star spa and drove beyond it, leaving the tourist area and turning into an unmarked, weedy gravel lot where they parked the car by three or four others. He got out, tossed her a bathing suit and started stripping down. Right there. In front of everyone.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Getting changed. You should do the same.”
“Whose bathing suit is this?”
“An old girlfriend’s. I am sure it will fit. And if it doesn’t, no one here cares.”
