“My dad drove a forklift most of his life,” she said.

  I waited.

  “I needed a scholarship or no way I go to culinary. So I get one. I do culinary. And I have this friend at CIA, Frankie. He’s going to France after graduation.”

  “To work at Le Dauphin.”

  “He didn’t even have a job lined up. He just announces he’s going and he’s going to find work. That’s what Frankie was like. I was dying to get out of there. So I travelled with him because Frankie offered to pay my flight. When we got here, we were roommates. Together but not together. He’d found this amazing place, which you’ve seen. He wanted me to stay. But I didn’t.”

  “Then you started at Femke?”

  “No,” she said, blowing out a thin stream of smoke, up over the hedge, into the hanging lights. “Is it a bit early for war stories?”

  “No,” I said. “No, it’s not.”

  So I heard. She started in a French kitchen. She’d started at Jardin Jardine, which was high end. No stars, but run by a chef from the U.K., a bright light coming out of the Marco Pierre White constellation. I didn’t know the guy and Stephanie didn’t even want to say his name. She got in a month of shifts before the hands started. Stroked across the ass. Full grab over a breast. From behind across her stomach, pulling her back into him so she could feel his erection. The day he got her in the walk in was the last incident, less than a year after she started. No worse than the others, just final. He pressed his face to hers, kissing her cheeks and down her neck. He was wasted on something — crystal, coke, didn’t really matter. She hit him with a closed fist. He fell. Then he fired her in a torrent of screams, being held back by apprentices while doing so. But her apron was on the floor already. She was out the door.

  “You look shocked,” she said to me.

  “I’m just sorry that happened to you,” I said.

  “It wasn’t a freak thing, you realize,” Stephanie said. “I struggle to think of a single woman I’ve known well enough to talk to in any depth at all who hasn’t had some story like that.”

  “In Paris,” I said.

  “Anywhere, man,” she said. “Not just here. Not just kitchens.”

  On another day, in another mood maybe, Stephanie might have bailed on me right there, just another guy who thinks he’s been taken into a very special confidence having learned of something like this in a woman’s past. But she only sighed and looked away a moment, then back.

  “Frankie had heard of Femke and made the intro,” she said, finally. “I’ll give him that much. So she gave me a job and that’s when I got my own apartment.”

  I was staring at her, not sure what to say. Not wanting to follow what she’d said with something stupid.

  “Your turn,” she said.

  “Got grabbed by the balls once,” I said. “One of the Pellerey Pricks. Which is not quite the same I realize.”

  “Not great though.”

  “Question?”

  She butted her smoke.

  “Once, early on,” I said, “you said Angela had told you about me.”

  I waited. And here Stephanie shook her hair back. She did this in a way I can close my eyes and see. Chin up just a fraction, her green eyes still on me. Then the tiniest of shakes, right, left. And the ringlets of gold fell away to the side of her forehead. A stroke of the finger and these were tucked behind her ear.

  I didn’t actually get any answer in the café over third glasses of Calvados and a plateful of breadcrumbs and smears of cheese and jam. Walking later, nothing definitive. Not on the midnight cobbles between the quay and the street outside Stephanie’s apartment. Not between the street and the courtyard inside with the garbage bins, on the worn marble stairs, the wooden treads winding up to the very top floor. In the narrow hallway, in rumpled sheets on an unmade bed. In between breaths that I could feel on my neck and my chest.

  “Are you sure you want this?”

  Who said that? Was that me or you, Stephanie? Who wondered if the next move, which would change everything, had really been properly considered? Maybe it was, in the end, both of us speaking the same things in the same moment, merging. I wanted nothing else. I wanted the world. But the world was only you.

  “Yes.”

  “Me too.”

  There was a space pried open by those spoken words, a space that we then wordlessly closed with the very same lips that had spoken them. We closed the space, fused, and afterwards in the silver light there were slate-grey motes of dust and a tiny spider on the lampshade, still and perfect, as if it were watching. That’s when you finally answered.

  “She said you were very romantic.”

  Up on an elbow in stripes of blue. A clatter of traffic rose and fell outside the window, rain came.

  “Something else.”

  “That you’re sweet. That you worry too much.”

  I waited. Something else. There was something else there, darkening the corners.

  April in Paris. It actually was. I was cooking in France, brigade at Le Dauphin. Twenty-four years old, my future unfolding on the top floor in the Nineteenth near Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. I had no idea that I was passing through a window, that I was floating free of things that had come before. You up on one elbow beside me, leaning over now. At the time I knew only that you were the sound arriving, Stephanie. I knew only that you were carrying the truth. I wanted the whole truth.

  Right next to my ear. You at a bare whisper: “She said I might regret it.”

  Hangtown Fry

  Hurry up and wait. That’s what the military guys said. So Arthur had his big inspiration and takes the job and hits the road, leaves the girl behind with her fuming father. Then he gets to San Francisco to discover there’s a dock strike well in progress and the whole west coast is frozen like the Northwest Passage used to be frozen in January.

  “Fuming father?” Stephanie said.

  “That’s what he told me,” I said. “He splits for San Francisco and leaves this girl behind. I guess her dad was pretty pissed.”

  “He would be,” Stephanie said. “Your dad deflowers the man’s daughter then ghosts her.”

  “I guess that’s one way to look at it,” I said.

  “Yeah it is,” Stephanie said.

  “So then he gets to SF and there’s this dock strike and he’s stuck there for three months.”

  “Poor him,” Stephanie said. “Meanwhile, Jeanie’s back in Toronto probably getting married off to some dork who works for a bank.”

  It was Sunday afternoon after both our workdays were done. My dad had just phoned at his regular time. Stephanie lay smoking next to me, having listened to my conversation with my dad, a neutral but seemingly peaceful expression on her face and she drew in that Gauloises smoke and released it in slender streams toward the low ceiling.

  It did sound pretty good, I thought, the whole SF delay business. My dad was working for Hessen Worldwide in those first postwar years, a construction consulting firm doing postwar cleanup in countries around the world. Buildings, infrastructure. Dams and power stations. But during the dock strike, as my father described it, all the Hessen guys in San Francisco seemed to do was go to lunch. Crab sandwiches at Joe’s near Fisherman’s Wharf, Rico’s for oysters on the half shell washed down with ice-cold beer, Connie’s diner on Eddy Street for overloaded blue-plate specials of meatloaf smothered in mushroom gravy.

  I’d told him that on the phone too. “That sounds pretty great.”

  But he just grumbled about being ready to get to work. About being impatient to get to Asia.

  “And what was the gig there?” I asked him, as Stephanie passed over the cigarette, then slid off the bed to go to the bathroom. I watched her cross the room, T-shirt, no panties, bare feet whispering on the hardwood.

  My father never told me much about the work lined up in Tokyo. There were U.S. Army people involved, a power station off in the jungle somewhere that had to be rebuilt, two other guys who’d be his crew: Maitland and Simms. Like out of a movie, yes. Only a bad movie.

  “Bad movie how?”

  “Oh, they were jackasses,” my father said that day. “Coulda gotten me killed.”

  “What? How?” I said. But then my dad got shy about the details.

  “You with your new girl there?” he asked me.

  “Well, as a matter of fact, yes I am.”

  “Why don’t you put her on the phone? She sounds sensible. Maybe she won’t have so many questions.”

  He liked Stephanie from the get-go, long before he even met her. If I’d done a runner on Stephanie like my dad had on Jeanie, he probably would have flown to Paris to intervene. But no way was I doing that. I was infatuated. Plus, I didn’t have that kind of stuff in me, I didn’t think. And I glanced over to the bathroom door with that thought, willing her back into the bed.

  Maitland and Simms took my dad out to International Settlement, he remembered. That was the entertainment district along Pacific Avenue east of Columbus. Maitland wore a brown leather jacket with aviation patches. He’d apparently flown Hellcats off the USS Essex. His friend was Simms, some sort of mechanic who came out dressed in one of those shirts from Hawaii patterned over with girls in hula skirts playing ukuleles.

  “Strictly contractors,” he said. “They had guys like this around. Bored ex-pilots, stokers who weren’t socialized outside an engine room. A lot of those guys were into motorcycles, I discovered.”

  “Hessen was linked to the CIA,” I said. “Or that’s what I read.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know anything about any of that,” my father said, exasperated. “I was an electrical engineer! That’s all I was! Anyway, I avoided them after that. Stuck to sightseeing and hanging out with Bella.”

  “So tell me all about Bella then.”

  “Don’t get any ideas,” my father said. “She was married. Boston married.”

  “To a guy from Boston.”

  “To a woman,” my father said. “Mina was her name. You never read Henry James?”

  I hadn’t, actually. But on he went. Bella ran a shoeshine down at the corner of Market and O’Farrell. Arthur, who spent his days and nights being ready to leave, would stop every few days for a shine. He hardly had anything else to do. So the day he heard the strike was over, Bella was the first person he went to see about the matter.

  Bella in her San Francisco Seals ball cap and white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up showing a bicep tattoo that read One Sweet Girl.

  “I got my berth assignment,” Arthur told her.

  “Oh yeah?” Bella said. “So who’s your mother?”

  “Very funny,” he said. “SS Fortune out of Pier Thirty-one. Got an officer’s stateroom on the boat deck, my own head and everything.”

  “Fancy,” Bella said. “Where to?”

  He was sure as far as Japan, only not so sure after that. Bella was squinting up at him, bemused. And that was when she had her big idea to take Arthur swimming.

  “I didn’t know how to swim,” my dad told me. But Bella insisted.

  “We’re going to dunk you in the Pacific Ocean briny we are, Mr. Wolf. Then we’ll go to The Tadich Grill for Hangtown fry. Game?”

  And he was too. He was game to go and game remembering. And I could hear it in his voice as he told me that day, Stephanie now tucked back into bed in the crook of my elbow. My father just then rolling on down to Ocean Beach, sunny Saturday in June, the three of them.

  One thing in particular he remembered of that day: these four kids on a homemade raft making their way out into the bay. They’d lashed together some fair-sized timbers and nailed down a piece of plywood as a deck. They had a big sheet for a sail, rigged up on a mast and a stay made out of old brooms. They were using an oar as a tiller. They were moving, too, they really were. Shirtless and barefooted. Their expressions so serious. They were trimming the sail and catching the breeze that was flowing offshore, carrying the smells of the midway, the popcorn and sweat, girls’ perfume and sugar candy.

  My father remembered those boys as they worked their raft out into the swells. They were heading somewhere and he felt it pull on his heart.

  Then I heard his steady breathing on the phone. And I realized my father had fallen asleep.

  Trois-Pistoles

  When the word was finally out about me and Stephanie, I felt new things flourish, growing like spring grass between the paving stones, greening suddenly the spaces between objects and people.

  That’s what it felt like to me anyway. We started very fast. Matthew Wolf and Stephanie Bell. Teo and Steph. I’d catch our reflection in café windows and say our names aloud.

  “We look good together.”

  “Teo, shhh,” she’d say.

  I’d rush to see her on Sundays. Those afternoons, I’d wipe down my station and stow my tubs and jars and squirt bottles in the lowboy. I’d dump my whites in the vestiaire laundry sacks and pull on my street clothes, practically run for the alley and my scooter. Ah yes, the scooter. The Ostrich, we called it. I’d saved just enough. Dented but not defeated, the Ostrich was a thirty-year-old Vespa Struzzo, once mint green, faded to a mottled patina of rust and mouldy grey. It had a one-cylinder two-stroke that popped and farted. But it ran. And I’d push it hard out of Montparnasse to pick up Stephanie at her restaurant, crossing the river at Pont Royal, rattling through the Tuileries where the berries were already emerging on the mulberry trees. I remember that when I’d wrap her in a hug on those days that spring, she’d smell like coconut and chilies, tamarind, five spice. The women of Femke would chuckle at me. I didn’t mind. Femke De Vries herself said at one point, “a regular Latin lover, our Teo.”

  Then she’d haul out tubs of family meal and serve me a cold plate: pork skewers, this hard-boiled egg thing they did in chili sauce and coconut. The food was fantastic.

  But I also remember during those early months that work generally became the least of topics between us. Two young people in love in Paris, we had no money, we were exhausted from our shifts, from our weeks. It was almost like the time that had accumulated since we’d met, the great journey to that moment had been itself exhausting. Which was romantic, but glorious too. And on those Sunday afternoons with the powder-blue sky and horsetail clouds above, if we needed dinner at all, a baguette and a round of Saint-Marcellin crémeux, a coffee made in a Zulay on Stephanie’s one-ring burner kept us going long into the night.

  Everything was new, like the world had been upended, the scales falling from our eyes so that we could really see this new place that stretched around us. Plus it was spring — new shoots, new buds, as if the earth were acting it out for us alone. Stephanie’s father had been a gardener in the day, and she knew her flower and foliage from many forest walks and talks. So Sunday afternoons we’d ride from her apartment to look at the cherry blossoms exploding around Notre Dame or in Trocadéro, and she’d take pictures of the ranks of tulips, daffodils, and peonies in the Jardin des Plantes.

  “Peonies make me kind of sad,” she told me. “Can’t explain it.” Then we scootered over to the Luxembourg Gardens, into the orchard near the Pavillon Davioud where we could see the fruit coming out. By harvest time these would be plump green Comptesse de Paris pears or brilliant yellow Reinette apples, which Stephanie told me tasted like pineapple. And I pulled her to me to kiss her again.

  Walking the bridges. Lining up the Arc de Triomphe for a photo. The Porte de Vanves flea market, where we never bought anything for not having the money or any place in our tiny, furnished apartments to even keep our own stuff. Perhaps we were playing at being a couple, acting out what it might be like to one day have a house or an apartment to fill with our things. Did we know it that early? I wanted it already then. I’d catch our reflection in a gilt-framed mirror, Stephanie bent over a box of old vinyl records, me standing holding her left hand in my right. She had a way of doing this where she interlocked her pinky finger with mine, like a secret handshake. First time our hands went together, that was the woven shape they found.

  That’s the way it was, our first spring and summer. In the gardens and flea markets and browsing the bouqinistes. We were trèfles together, wanting no local that extended beyond us. And I remember one evening wandering into Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, following the sound of a jazz quintet playing “Parlez-moi d’amour,” rounding the corner out of Rue de l’Abbaye into a crowd enjoying a public concert. And the band segued as if on cue to “C’est si bon.”

  Arm in arm. Singing songs. Whispering sweet nothings.

  And there we were, two trèfles in Paris, dancing inexpertly across the paving stones, spinning and dipping and laughing.

  We walked down the Quai du Louvre later, up the arc of the Pont Neuf. I’d had a nice find at the stalls that day and bought it for her: a dog-eared, food-stained copy of Saulnier’s Le Répertoire de la Cuisine in paper, in French. She was holding it in both arms across her chest as she walked. She was smiling, not looking at me. I don’t know what exactly she was thinking about just then, but she suddenly swivelled there to face me, right near the apex of the bridge. I remember her rising on her toes, one hand sliding to the back of my neck and pulling me down. Our lips were together. And just then a bright, white spotlight found us, shining up from a river below. A hot white light from a bateau-mouche approaching the bridge, pinning us there at the railing. And from the top deck of the ship, from a hundred tourists assembled with their glasses of wine and canapés, a single low voice as Stephanie and I stood blinded. The voice said: Awwwwww.

  We were seen. We felt ourselves being seen. We were kids happily enacting a cliché, for sure. But we felt like the perfume of Paris, we two just then. The fragrance of love floating above the black water, hovered over by those gothic spires.

  * * *

  And so began my very happiest time in Paris, things settling into pleasant grooves. I honestly lost track of time because I was, for the first moment in my life, precisely where I wanted to be. Work was going tolerably well as my skills increased. Stephanie and I were together almost every night. No point denying it, I’d been anxious how Frankie would react to our relationship. Everyone knew he adored Stephanie. I figured he might be upset by us not only suddenly together, but then inseparable. Upset, jealous. Angry even.

 

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