Cult Classic(67)

“And to think,” he gasped, agog, “I came to an office for you.”

“I have to get back to work,” I said. “I have one night left at the fair before Clive packs up the tents. Boots is home tomorrow night.”

I made a gesture of checking the time, consulting my wrist. My naked wrist, naked as it should be. I followed it to my naked finger, naked as it shouldn’t be.

Zach got up, leaving the map on the bench.

“I could have just emailed this to you,” he said, walking toward the entrance, raising his voice. “And don’t talk to me about legality because we both know Clive wouldn’t arrest you. He needs you. Maybe I am using you, but they’re definitely using you. I love you like a second cousin, Lola, but you’ve always been a deputy for that man’s agenda!”

The security guard looked up like a startled wolf cub.

“I’ve come to terms with it!” I shouted, passing back through the turnstiles.





15




From the start, Clive had said that the more I participated in the experiment, the more effective the Golconda would be. You’ll find coincidences pick up naturally. He also said the system itself would grow stronger. It would train itself to herd cats, to see which bait worked and which did not, thus expanding the scope of the Golconda. Chinatown first, then the rest of Manhattan, then the whole city, then the whole world. If I doubted this before, I believed it now. Because for its grand finale, it had gone international.

It took me a moment to register Pierre. He was sitting on a low stoop, a lip of concrete at the weary tip of East Broadway, where the bustle of the preceding blocks petered out. He was reading a book with the jacket removed, sitting with his feet too far out into the sidewalk, disheveled and louche. Like deposed royalty. He was drinking from a lidless coffee as if he were looking out over the Luxembourg Gardens.

You know who gets to drink coffee at nonsense hours? I thought. The French.

An electronic sign flashed above Pierre’s head, advertising cell phone repairs. He sat in between rows of cheap luggage wrapped in plastic. I could tell he was smoking, even from a distance, by the clawlike way he turned the pages. More than just casually Parisian, Pierre detested and adored Paris in direct opposition to the way Americans detested and adored Paris. He also pretended never to have heard of major cities in Normandy. I’d quit smoking after Amos, but Pierre got me back at it the night we met.

Which was the same night I met Boots. It was Pierre’s surprise party.

Since then, Pierre had moved back to Paris and married a woman he’d just started seeing when we met. I spoke to her in passing at his party, while we were waiting for the bathroom. She was Ethiopian and French, raised in Belgium and London, and she now ran a theater company for at-risk teenagers in the Paris suburbs (it was a long wait for the bathroom). She wore a campaign-style button with a picture of baby Pierre pressed into it, a bowl of which was available at the door. For a while after the party, Pierre and his then-girlfriend had been one of my preferred social media pit stops. They spent a lot of time outdoors, kissing each other’s cheeks, angling their phones for optimal sun flare. If Willis’s online presence had made me feel alienated, Pierre’s had made me feel almost familial. I used to worry when she didn’t appear in photos for a prolonged period of time. Had she been written out of his life? Had she fallen out of love or into a canal? Maybe Pierre had cheated on her. After all, there’d been a moment when I felt I could’ve usurped her sun flare.

Halfway through the party, Boots had volunteered to go on an ice run, and I stepped onto the balcony to get some air. Pierre was already out there, looking as if he’d been born on the balcony and was fated to stay on it. But when I slid the door shut, trapping the noise of the festivities behind me, he looked up. He didn’t want a surprise party, he said. Like most people, he didn’t like surprises, and “like most men, I don’t love the attention.” He offered me a cigarette as he said this, so I took it instead of arguing. He lit it for me, cupping his hands close to my face. There were other people on the balcony with us, but they were low on wine and so they ducked back inside.

Pierre and I chatted about the obvious differences between New York and Paris, both of us pretending they were more revelatory than they were. He connected himself to the woman I’d met while waiting for the bathroom with a literal flick of the wrist, a hand gesture indicating that no, he had not come here alone but yes, he was still free to go.

He asked me if I was with Boots, and I explained that we’d only met a few hours prior. As I did, I looked over my shoulder to make sure he hadn’t come back yet. It was because of the cigarette. I didn’t want Boots to see me smoking.

“So we’re both taken,” Pierre reflected.

“I’m not taken,” I said, even though I was eagerly awaiting Boots’s return. “I don’t know him yet.”

“Ah, you see? But you’re already planning to know him. You can’t fool me, I saw you two. You are taken.”

He wagged his finger at me like I’d been caught, a romantic unmasked. But I was only hedging because I knew better than to jinx whatever might happen with Boots by agreeing with Pierre. I had fallen in lust with enough men over the years and, by my count, not one of them was standing on this balcony with me right now. Pierre thought he was sharing a joke with a fellow slave to seduction, but he was only engaged with someone who’d had a harder time making relationships stick than a scruffy Frenchman for whom people threw surprise parties.