“We’re not going to talk like that, remember?”
It was as if he could see through her clothing to the wanting body beneath. “Too bad.”
Too bad indeed.
Sabine woke up and, for a moment, forgot where she was. Outside, merchants greeted each other, unlocking the grills that protected their businesses overnight, rolling them up. Ka-chunk.
Right. Yves’ flat in the Quartier Latin. She rolled over to look at Aubin, but the bedding and cushions were neatly folded on a chair, and he was nowhere in sight. She must have slept in.
She got dressed and went into the living room. No one there either. She checked her phone. A text from her mother about a storm last night in Mirabelle. Shit. She put off replying.
Alone, she had a chance to snoop. Cracked, moody oil paintings. Framed, old black and white photos of … family members, probably. People on summer holidays at the beach in bathing suits that looked like they were from the forties. A woman on a caféterrace, smoking, with cat-eye glasses. Fifties? A little boy in front of a Parisian school gate in shorts and new running shoes: her father, as a child. Early nineties?
There were shelves of old leather-bound books. Silver cigar boxes and crystal ashtrays, covered in dust. Yves was not a housekeeper, that was for sure.
The windows gave onto Rue Xavier Privas. Below were two kebab places and a bar named Frenchy MacGuffin’s. Its awning read “Karaoke, EDM, Beer Pong.” Sabine thought she should take Aubin there, since he liked dance music, although she was loathe to go to a bar with such an American name, one which surely drew foreigners rather than Parisians. All she wanted to do was soak up the local atmosphere.
She found paper and colored pens, flopped into a big armchair and made a little book. On the front, she wrote “FlâneRight.” Then she drew the cover art: the vantage point from the place where they’d eaten their lunch onÎle Saint-Louis. Inside, she wrote:
Are we doing this flâne thing right?
Are we getting outside ourselves but deeper inside?
Are we becoming a part of a place?
Let’s.
She felt like a kid, safe and relaxed in this apartment, but also happily adult in a new chapter of her life where she would learn different things and feel inspired.
Aubin came in, his arms full of baguette and croissants from Maison d’Isabelle.
“Morning,” she said. “You’ve been busy. Did you sleep OK on the floor?”
“I did,” he said, putting the food on a corner of the table that wasn’t covered in scripts and paperwork. “You?”
“I slept great. Thank you for bringing me here. I wouldn’t have been brave enough to come on my own. Somehow with you, I’m braver.”
“I will let myself be braver around you, too.” She didn’t know what that meant but liked the sound of it.
Yves arrived. “You found breakfast, good. I went down to the caféand wrote and forgot I had guests. Now you see what an awful person I am.”
“You’re not,” said Sabine.
“I am, how do they say, off in the clouds. Up in the clouds? I have this new script to deliver, I am getting terrible notes from financiers and my distributor, I don’t see a solution. A poor excuse, but you are adults. I know you can take care of yourselves.”
Yves eyed what she was making. “What is this?”
“It’s nothing. It’s when I’m, you know, in a waiting room or on a train. It’s not finished. It’s silly, really.”
“Can I see?”
Aubin nodded, encouraging, so she passed over the little book.
Yves flipped through it. “This is not silly,” he said. “Art happens when we let our brains go. This is mostly what I am trying to do. Get out of the way, not plan or think too much, not try to say something important. This is much more art, in a sense, than something a person has worked on for ten years. This is pure. An echo of yesterday. I love it.”
He gave it back. She looked at her tiny book with new eyes.
“What train are you planning to take?” he asked. “Because I suddenly wonder if you would like to stay and help me with pick-ups.”
