Just One Day(24)

“I have some money left,” he says. “And you just paid for the boat.”
“But I don’t have a single euro on me. What if I wanted to, I don’t know, buy a postcard?” I stop to spin a postcard caddy. “Also, there’s drinks and dinner, and we’ll need somewhere for, for . . .” I trail off before getting the courage to finish. “Tonight.” I feel my neck go warm.
The word seems to hang out there as I wait for Willem’s response, some clue of what he’s thinking. But he’s looking over at one of the cafés, where a group of girls at a table seem to be waving at him. Finally, he turns back to me. “Sorry?” he asks.
The girls are still waving. One of them is beckoning him over. “Do you know them?”
He looks over at the café, then back at me, then back at the restaurant. “Can you wait here for a minute?”
My stomach sinks. “Yeah, no problem.”
He leaves me at a souvenir shop, where I spin the postcard caddy and spy. When he gets to the group of girls, they do the cheek-cheek-kiss-kiss thing—three times, though, instead of twice like he did with Céline. He sits down next to the girl who was gesturing to him. It’s clear they know each other; she keeps putting her hand on his knee. He throws darting glances in my direction, and I wait for him to wave me over, but he doesn’t, and after an endless five minutes, the touchy girl writes something down on a bit of paper and gives it to him. He jams the slip deep into his pocket. Then he stands up, and they do another cheek-cheek-kiss-kiss thing, and he strides back to me, where I am feigning a deep interest in a Toulouse-Lautrec postcard.
“Let’s go,” he says as he grabs my elbow.
“Friends of yours?” I ask, jogging to keep up with his long stride.
“No.”
“But you know them?”
“I knew them once.”
“And you just randomly bumped into them?”
He spins toward me, and for the first time today, he’s annoyed. “It’s Paris, Lulu, the most touristy city in the world. It happens.”
Accidents, I think. But I feel jealous, possessive, not just over the girl—whose number, I suspect, he now has in his hip pocket if he hasn’t already transcribed it into his little black book—but over accidents. Because today it has felt like accidents belonged solely to us.
Willem softens. “They’re just people I knew from Holland.”
Something in Willem’s whole demeanor has changed, like a lamp whose bulb is dimming before it burns out. And it’s then that I notice the final and defeated way he says Holland, and it makes me realize that all day along, not once has he said he was going home. And then another thought hits me. Today, he was meant to be going home—or to Holland, where he’s from—for the first time in two years.
In three days, I will go home, and there will be a crowd at the airport. Back at my house, there will be a welcome-home banner, a celebratory dinner I’ll probably be too jet-lagged to eat. After only three weeks on a tour in which I was led around like a show pony, I’ll be given a hero’s welcome.
He’s been gone two years. Why isn’t Willem getting a hero’s welcome? Is anyone even waiting for him?
“When we were at Céline’s,” I ask him now, “did you call anyone?”
He turns to me, his dark eyes furrowed and confused. “No. Why?”
Because how does anyone know you’re delayed? Because how do they know to postpone your hero’s welcome until tomorrow?
“Isn’t anyone expecting you?” I ask.
Something happens to his face, for just the slightest of moments, a slip of his jaunty mask, which I hadn’t realized was a mask until I see how tired, how uncertain—how much like me—he looks underneath it.
“You know what I think?” Willem asks.
“What?”
“We should get lost.”
“I’ve got news for you, but I’ve been lost all day.”
“This is different. This is getting on purpose lost. It’s something I do when I first come to a new city. I’ll go into the metro or on a tramline and randomly pick a stop and go.”
I can see what he’s doing. He’s changing the scenery, changing the subject. And I get that, in some way, he needs to do this. So I let him. “Like traveler’s pin the tail on the donkey?” I ask.
Willem gives me a quizzical look. His English is so good that I forget not everything computes.
“Is this about accidents?” I ask.
He looks at me, and for half a second, the mask slips again. But then just like that, it’s back in place. It doesn’t matter. It slipped, and I saw. And I understand. Willem is alone, like I am alone. And now this ache that I can’t quite distinguish as his or mine has opened up inside of me.
“It’s always about the accidents,” he says.

Nine
I pick a doozy.
Using the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey strategy, I close my eyes and spin in front of the Metro map and land my finger on the benign-sounding Chateau Rouge.
When we come out of the Metro, we are in yet another Paris altogether, and there’s not a chateau, rouge or otherwise, in sight.
The streets are narrow, like in the Latin Quarter, but grittier. Tinny, drum-heavy music blares out from the shop windows, and there’s such an onslaught of smells, my nose doesn’t know what to breathe first: curry coming out of the patisseries, the ferric tang of blood from the giant animal carcasses being trundled through the street, the sweet and exotic smell of incense smoke, exhaust from the cars and motos, the ubiquitous smell of coffee—though there aren’t so many of the big cafés here, the kind that take up an entire corner, but more smaller, ad-hoc ones, bistro tables shoved onto the sidewalk. And they’re all packed with men smoking and drinking coffee. The women, some wearing full black veils with only their eyes showing through the slits, others in colorful dresses, sleeping babies tied to their backs, bustle in and out of the stores. We are the only tourists in this area, and people are looking at us, not menacingly, but just curiously, like we’re lost. Which we are. This is precisely why, on my own, I would never in a million years do this.