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“What does it mean?”
Willem gives me that look of his, licks his lips, smiles. “You’ll have to look it up.”
We walk along the river and onto a main road full of restaurants, art galleries, and high-end boutiques. Willem parks the bike in a stand, and we take off on foot under a long portico and then make a few more turns into what, at first, seems like it should be a presidential residence or a royal palace, Versailles or something, the buildings are so huge and grand. Then I spot the glass pyramid in the middle of the courtyard, so I know we have arrived at the Louvre.
It’s mobbed. Thousands of people are flooding out of the buildings, like they’re evacuating it, clutching poster tubes and large black-and-white shopping bags. Some are energized, chatty, but many more look shell-shocked, weary, glazed after a day spent ingesting epic portions of Culture! I know that look. The Teen Tours! brochure bragged that it offered “young people the full-on European immersion experience! We’ll expose your teen to a maximum number of cultures in a short period of time, broadening their view of history, language, art, heritage, cuisine.” It was supposed to be enlightening, but it mostly felt exhausting.
So when we discover that the Louvre just closed, I’m actually relieved.
“I’m sorry,” Willem says.
“Oh, I’m not.” I’m not sure if this qualifies as an accident or not, but I’m happy either way.
We do an about-face and cross over a bridge and turn up the other bank of the river. Alongside the embankment there are all kinds of vendors selling books and old magazines, pristine issues of Paris Match with Jackie Kennedy on the cover and old pulp paperbacks with lurid covers, titled in both English and French. There’s one vendor with a bunch of bric-a-brac, old vases, costume jewelry, and in a box on the side, a collection of dusty vintage alarm clocks. I paw through and find a vintage SMI in Bakelite. “Twenty euro,” the kerchiefed saleslady says to me. I try to keep a poker face. Twenty euro is about thirty bucks. The clock is easily worth two hundred dollars.
“Do you want it?” Willem asks.
My mom would go nuts if I brought this home, and she’d never have to know where it was from. The woman winds the clock, to show me that it works, but hearing it tick, I’m reminded of what Jacques said, about time being fluid. I look out at the Seine, which is now glowing pink, reflecting the color of the clouds that are rolling in. I put the clock back in the box.
We head up off the embankment, into the twisty, narrow warren of streets that Willem tells me is the Latin Quarter, where students live. It’s different over here. Not so many grand avenues and boulevards but alley-like lanes, barely wide enough for even the tiny, space-age two-person Smart Cars that are zooming around everywhere. Tiny churches, hidden corners, alleys. It’s a whole different Paris. And just as dazzling.
“Shall we take a drink?” Willem asks.
I nod.
>“Same, same, but different,” Willem says.
“More like same, same, but same.”
“Next time when you go to Cancún, you can sneak out into the real Mexico,” he suggests. “Tempt fate. See what happens.”
“Maybe,” I allow, just imagining my mom’s response if I suggested a little freelance traveling.
“Maybe I’ll go to Mexico one day,” Willem says. “I’ll bump into you, and we’ll escape into the wilds.”
“You think that would happen? We’d just randomly bump into each other?”
Willem lifts his hands up in the air. “There would have to be another accident. A big one.”
“Oh, so you’re saying that I’m an accident?”
His smile stretches like caramel. “Absolutely.”
I rub my toe against the curb. I think of my Ziploc bags. I think of the color-coded schedule of all my activities that we’ve kept tacked to the fridge since I was, like, eight. I think of my neat files with all my college application materials. Everything ordered. Everything planned. I look at Willem, so the opposite of that, of me, today, also the opposite of that.
“I think that might possibly be one of the most flattering things anyone has ever said to me.” I pause. “I’m not sure what that says about me, though.”
“It says that you haven’t been flattered enough.”
I bow and give a sweeping be-my-guest gesture.
He stops and looks at me, and it’s like his eyes are scanners. I have that same sensation I did on the train earlier, that he’s appraising me, only this time not for looks and black-market value, but for something else.
“I won’t say that you’re pretty, because that dog already did. And I won’t say you’re funny, because you have had me laughing since I met you.”
Evan used to tell me that he and I were “so compatible,” as if being like him was the highest form of praise. Pretty and funny—Willem could stop right there, and it would be enough.
But he doesn’t stop there. “I think you’re the sort of person who finds money on the ground and waves it in the air and asks if anyone has lost it. I think you cry in movies that aren’t even sad because you have a soft heart, though you don’t let it show. I think you do things that scare you, and that makes you braver than those adrenaline junkies who bungee-jump off bridges.”
