Coq au Vin Read Online Free Page A

reservations—the only reason I had for believing I’d get a table on a Friday night. The cross streets were beginning to look familiar now. Yes, this was the block. The café was near.
    Except it wasn’t. It was not there. The Café Cloche, where I’d once been seduced by a chain-smoking academic from Toulouse over a fine daube of beef, was no more. I stared stupidly, dejected, at the darkened window of the boutique that had replaced the restaurant.
    Well, what was the big deal? Things change. So I’d find someplace else to eat dinner. A restaurant closing was a small thing, yet, inexplicably, it unsettled me. I walked back slowly into the heart of the crowd and found a friendly looking if undistinguished place where I ordered foie gras and then went on to langoustines and a half bottle of white wine. Afterward, I browsed somnolently through a few of the late-night bookstores on St. Michel, buying nothing, and found my way back to the hotel.
    I got into my nightgown almost immediately. It was cool in the room but I opened the window wide and let the low night sky fall in on me. Another one of those singular Paris moments. The lights on the Pantheon were silver blue and I watched them for a long time, wondering how many others were doing the same thing, their hearts moving in their chest. But, curiously enough, I had stopped crying.
    I made a bet with myself as I called downstairs to order breakfast. At every hotel I’d ever lived in on this side of the Seine, the maid’s name was Josette. I figured that would never change.
    I lost. Marise bid me good morning in her musical colonial accent—was she from Antigua? maybe St. Croix?—and set the wooden tray bearing my soupy black coffee and croissants down at the foot of the bed.
    I spent the late morning and all afternoon checking out the really low-rent hotels on streets like Gay Lussac, thinking that Vivian might have got her hands on a few bucks to live on, but not enough to go back to the hotel in the Square. The next day, I figured, I’d go another rung down on the ladder and try Pigalle and the parts of Bastille that had not yet been gentrified. Then, if I didn’t turn up any leads, I’d head out to the edge of the city, Buttes Chaumont or someplace, where I’d probably be mugged and left for dead somewhere.
    I put in a full day. Nothing. At six o’clock I returned to the hotel and put in a call to my mother, reporting on my progress, or rather lack of progress.
    I took a long soak in the pay-per-bath room down the hall and changed into something slightly slinky. There was a fabulous wine bar on the rue du Cherche Midi that I loved. It had been the scene of two or three major flirting triumphs.
    They sold lighting fixtures there now. I stood on the pavement watching the clerk clear the register and begin to close up for the evening. I could have cried.
    I wandered down into the métro and took the train to Pont Marie, on the right bank. Surely the much more staid wine bar that a friend’s father had once taken us to would still be there. And it was. But it was obvious there would be no lighthearted seductions taking place that evening. Oh no. No sharing a steak frites with a cute translator and then a nightcap at some avant garde jazz loft. No and no. Average age of the patrons at this stately establishment: 55 by my calculations. Successful businessmen and their co-workers, or their Chanel-clad ladies. I put away two lovely glasses of Medoc and was on my way.
    I walked along the Seine in the twilight, feet hurting in my strappy heels. The magazine/postcards/junk stands on the quai were all closed now. Here and there I could hear voices down below, along the water. I had to smile. One thing you never forget, your first kiss on the banks of the Seine. I just know it’s one of those pictures that go flying across your vision as you lay dying.
    I had had nothing to eat except the breakfast croissant and a