Sabine shifted uncomfortably. She didn’t want her father to think she was taking advantage. “No, it’s OK thank you. I can pay.”
“Ah bah non,”he said, lifting his shoulders in a “you’ve got to be kidding” way. “You are my daughter. This is the first time we spend together as friends. Allow me this small pleasure, buying you pastries. Especially, if I can help it, award-winning ones.”
She looked at Aubin as if he might know what to say. He just nodded.
“Let me confide in you a secret about all this travelling I do. In London, New York, Toronto, people try to get me to move, but already I live in the best city in the world. I miss it when I am away. When I come back, I take the train from Charles de Gaulle straight to Quai Saint-Michel, without even taking my luggage home. I come here and order one of everything. Even as people are texting, saying, you are home, come take some wine with us—I go straight home and shut the door, and I do not open it until I have taken at least one bite from each pastry. So. Buy. Maybe you, too, will come to think that they taste like Paris.”
So she ordered one of almost everything. Each time she thought she was done, she saw one more thing she wanted. A piece of flan. Atarte aux abricots. Apain au raisins.Anéclair.Areligieuse. Imagine a pastry called areligieuse! Maybe it gave you a religious experience?
“It’s made to look like a nun in a habit,” said Yves, “or the pope’s hat. Let’s have two.”
The woman put the desserts into a box. The croissants and pains au chocolat came in small paper bags twisted closed at the corners. The baguette,still warm, was wrapped in a piece of paper, twisted closed, too. Sabine couldn’t hold back her child-like grin. Yves looked like he was having fun, too. For once, she decided not to worry.
“Let us eat onÎle Saint-Louis,un peu comme des flâneurs,” he said.
“What’s that?” asked Sabine.
“Someone who wanders so they can drink in ordinary life. It is the best thing to do to get to know Paris, better than rushing to see the Louvre and Notre Dame and the Tour Eiffel.”
“Except I want to do those things, too,” said Sabine. “You can’t come here and not.”
“Maybe, but you can do them slowly.Flânergives you time to think.”
They walked down Boulevard Saint Germain, passing a newspaper stand with a huge poster for Yves’s latest film in its display case.
“That’s embarrassing,” he said.
“Why?” asked Aubin. “You’ve done amazing work. You are being recognized for it.”
“It is as if I am saying, look at me, how important I am. People don’t realize filmmaking is yes, art, but also a business. There are many people behind every film—the crew, the cast, everyone in postproduction—well, not so many for me, because I continue to make films in this independent way, like a student, with three people in my crew, and sometimes only myself. But most big budget crews have many people. When you count marketing, publicity, sales, it’s more. They all need the film to succeed, because there are many people to pay, and a machine to keep turning. You don’t have the luxury to say on the last day of filming, I am onto the next film Monday morning. You have to feed this marketing monster, too. And it is hungry. It desires all of your time. It forces you into meetings and screenings and interviews with the media. It’s a fight between art and business. Anyway. This is too boring to discuss.”
“It’s not,” said Sabine almost in a whisper, wanting to hear all the details of her father’s life, wanting a hundred brush strokes to fill in a blank picture.
Marlow and Luc left the springs and got back to the parking lot. She stepped to her side of the car and opened the door to getchanged, peeled off her wet bather, got into her clothing and peeked to see if he was dressed yet. He was. Too bad.
They stopped to buy a roast chicken and wine. On the way back to the car, he asked to see her Instagram video. She pulled out her phone and showed it to him. The magpie on the wall.
“You capture a moment and give it meaning,” he said. “You are a filmmaker.”
“I told you, this isn’t filmmaking. There’s no story.”
“Not by your definition. But, for example, some people are suspicious about seeing one magpie alone. That it is bad luck. They could interpret from your movie that something bad is going to happen. That is a story, no? I interpret that you see strength in the single magpie. Strength and beauty. That is a story, too.”
“You’re just a romantic.”
“True. But being a romantic is better than living a too-heavy existence.”
Sabine, Aubin, and Yves sat on a bench on the stone quay at the tip ofÎle Saint-Louis, in a spot called Place Louis Aragon. Named after the French writer, its royal blue street sign read:
Do you know the island
In the heart of the city
Where everything is quiet
Forever
They each took a bite of a dessert and passed it along so the others could do the same.
