Coq au Vin Read Online Free Page B

yogurt taken on the run midday. I was starving but I hated the thought of eating alone again.
    What choice did I have, though? I went to Au Pactole, a perfectly nice place on St. Germain, just the tiniest bit stuffy, up the block from a hotel I’d once lived in—the Hotel de Lima. It was almost pleasurable to behave so formally with the maître d’, like playing a role, or wearing a disguise. Hmmm — she is black and French speaking. Must be an immigrant. Spinster on vacation from the provinces , I could almost hear the young waiter thinking. Trying to dress Parisian. Not bad looking. Needs to get laid, though . I was the only solo table in the good-sized room, which was awash in fresh white flowers and skyscraper-tall candles. After an already too heavy meal, I pigged on goat cheese and a big-time dessert.
    The thing is, I mused during my meandering walk home along the quai, the main thing is: the police have to be avoided.
    If nothing happened with my search for Vivian in the next day or so, I might have to contact the American embassy. But not the French police. It was half instinctual cop-o-phobia and half worry that maybe Vivian had wandered into something not on the up and up; then there was the plain gut-clenching terror based on the Gallic mind-set. Guilty until proven innocent was not a metaphor over here, it was the law. You just did not fuck with cops in this country—not even traffic cops.
    What does a foreigner do when he or she is broke, in trouble—no friends, no resources? I didn’t know. True, I had bummed around Europe before, hitchhiked with companions, smoked dope with kids I met at discos, and so on. But I had never been anything like stranded or in trouble with the law. I always had a return ticket in my pocket, and help was a collect call away. I thought about the asshole white boys who thought they were slick enough to get away with smuggling hashish out of Turkey. I found myself shuddering.
    The Herald Tribune? What about placing an ad there—“Aunt Viv: You’re richer than you think. Call home. All is forgiven.” Something to that effect.
    Not a likely venue. Vivian had lived in Paris before. She had enough French that if she read the newspapers at all, she’d read a French one.
    I was at the Pont Neuf. Shit, I had been so lost in my thoughts that I’d overshot the hotel. I was beat, my toes crying out for release.
    Give me your tired, your poor…your Manolo Blahniks…your tart tatin.
    Not just tired now. I was slappy. Maybe I hadn’t escaped the jet lag after all. I stood on the quai for a few minutes more. Well, good night, old Notre Dame. And if it’s not too much trouble, help me find Aunt Viv before I have to go to the 19th. Amen.
    I visited at least fifteen fleabag hotels and hostels the next day. I was seeing the side of Paris they don’t print up on the picture postcards. The homeless, the druggies, the bag ladies, the nut jobs were nowhere near as numerous, as filthy, or as desperate as their New York cousins, but they did nothing for tourism either.
    Just to make myself feel less like a mendicant, I went and had lunch in an overpriced, overdecorated restaurant in Montmartre and then took the funicular up to Sacré Coeur. I looked out over the city while the shutterbugs swarmed all around me. Maybe there is a heaven, I thought, and it’s nothing more than these rooftops.
    As long as I was doing the American in Paris bit, I figured I’d go to American Express, on the very remote chance that Vivian had left a message there. Of course, she’d have to know I was in Paris. But what did I have to lose? Perhaps she had spoken to my mother by now.
    No such luck. And now I was stuck in the busy 9th, clogged with crazed shoppers and sightseers, the traffic like a million killer bees. I had to admit, the Opéra was looking a great deal spiffier than the last time I’d been in Paris. Choking on exhaust and too