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“And would you even tell me if you did?”
Her eyebrow goes up into that perfect arch as smoke curls out of her mouth.
“Can you even tell me his last name? Can you tell me that much?”
And here she smiles. Because in this little game we are playing, have been playing since last summer, I just showed my hand. And what a rotten hand it is. She takes a pen and a scrap of paper and writes something down. She slides the paper over to me. His name is on there. His full name! But I won’t give her the satisfaction of my eagerness, so I casually tuck it in my pocket without even glancing at it.
“Do you need anything else?” Her tone, haughty and gloating, manages to carry over the sounds of the band, who have started playing again. I can already hear her laughing about me with all her hipster pals.
“No, you’ve done quite enough.”
She eyes me for a long second. Her eyes aren’t so much blue as violet. “What will you do now?”
I force a bitchy smile, which I expect doesn’t look bitchy so much as constipated. “Oh, you know, see the sights.”
She blows more smoke on me. “Yes, you can be a touriste,” she says, as though tourist were an epithet. Then she begins ticking off all the places lowly people like us go. The Eiffel Tower. Sacré-Coeur. The Louvre.
I search her face for hidden meaning. Did he tell her about our day? I can just picture them laughing about me throwing the book at the skinheads, telling Willem I’d take care of him.
Céline is still talking about all the things I can do in Paris. “You can go shopping,” she is saying. Buy a new handbag. Some jewelry. Another watch. Some shoes. I can’t quite fathom how someone spouting off Ms. Foley–like advice can be so condescending.
“Thank you for your time,” I say. In French. Annoyance has made me bilingual.
Thirty-one
Willem de Ruiter.
His name is Willem de Ruiter. I rush to an Internet café and start Googling him. But Willem de Ruiter turns out to be a popular name in Holland. There’s a Dutch cinematographer with that name. There’s some famous diplomat with that name. And hundreds of other nonfamous people who nevertheless have some reason to be on the Internet. I go through hundreds of pages, in English, in Dutch, and I find not one link to him, not one piece of evidence that he actually he exists. I Google his parents’ names Bram de Ruiter. Yael de Ruiter. Naturopath. Actor. Anything I can think of. All these combinations. I get vaguely excited when some weird theater thing comes up, but when I click through, the website is down.
How can it be this hard to find someone? It occurs to me that maybe Céline intentionally gave me the wrong name.
But then I Google myself, “Allyson Healey,” and I don’t come up, either. You have to add the name of my college before you get my Facebook page.
I realize then it’s not enough to know what someone is called.
You have to know who they are.
Thirty-two
The next morning, Kelly and her friends ask me if I want to join them for a trip to the Rodin Museum, followed by some shopping. And I almost say yes. Because that’s what I would like. But there is still one more stop. It’s not even that I think I’ll find anything; it’s just that, if I’m facing down demons, I have go to there too.
I’m not sure where it is, exactly, but I do know the intersection where Ms. Foley had me picked up. It is seared into my brain. Avenue Simon Bolivar and Rue de l’Equerre, the cross streets of Humiliation and Defeat.
When I get out of the Metro, nothing seems familiar. Maybe because the last time I was here, I was flipping out in such a panic. But I know I didn’t run that far before finding the pay phone, so I know it can’t be that far to the art squat. I methodically go up one block. Down the next. Up and back. But nothing seems familiar. I attempt to ask directions, but how do you say “art squat” in French? Old building with artists? That doesn’t work. I remember the Chinese restaurants in the vicinity and ask for them. One young guy gets really excited and, I think, offers a recommendation to one supposedly good place across on Rue de Belleville. I find it. And from there, I find a sign for double happiness. It could be one of many, but I have a feeling it’s the one.
I wander around for fifteen more minutes and, on a quiet triangle of streets, find the squat. It has the same scaffolding, same distorted portraits, maybe a little more weather-beaten. I knock on the steel door. No one answers, but there are obviously people inside. Music wafts out from the open windows. I give the door a push. It creaks open. I push it farther. I walk inside. No one pays me any notice. I go up the creaking staircase, to the place where it all happened.
I see the clay first, bright white, yet at the same time, golden and warm. Inside, a man is working. He is petite, Asian, a study in contrasts: His hair white with black roots, his clothes all black and strangely antiquated, like he stepped out of a Charles Dickens novel, and all covered in the same white dust that covered me that night.
He is carving at a piece of clay with a scalpel, his attention so focused I’m afraid he’ll startle with the merest sound. I clear my throat and knock quietly on the door.
He looks up and rubs his eyes, which are bleary with concentration. “Oui.”
“Bonjour,” I begin. And then I sputter. My limited French is no match for what I need to explain to him. I crashed your squat, with a guy. I had the most intimate night of my life, and I woke up utterly alone. “Umm, I’m looking for a friend who I think you might know. Oh, I’m sorry—parlez-vous anglais?”
He lifts his head and nods, slightly, with the delicacy and control of a ballet dancer. “Yes,” he says.
“I’m looking for a friend of mine, and I wonder if you might know him. His name is Willem de Ruiter. He’s Dutch?” I watch his face for a flicker of recognition, but it remains impassive, as smooth as the clay sculptures that surround us.
