Lunch in Paris Read Free Page B

deadlines and to-do lists. My purposeful steps slow
     in front of darkened store windows and blackboard menus begging to be considered for our next meal.
    Any weekend in Paris begins with dinner, and Gwendal and I quickly find our local. The Bistro Sainte Marthe is not the kind
     of place you just happen into. It’s like a scene out of a fifties detective novel:
at the end of a narrow one-way street, tucked in the corner of a small square, under the burgundy awning, behind the velvet
     curtain, ask for Jacques
. When these buildings went up at the turn of the twentieth century, they would have housed blue-collar Paris, maybe the families
     of the men who worked at the old printwarehouses down by the canal. Now they are full of immigrant families; fluorescent light glows harshly from the windows, illegal
     electricity cables creep up the sides of the buildings like vines. There’s a Chinese revivalist church across the square,
     and one or two brightly painted facades—evidence of artists in residence, in search of cheap real estate and “authenticity.”
     A pack of boys kick a soccer ball, barely avoiding the terrace tables where women with increasingly expensive handbags come
     to dine. I’m the last person in the world anyone would call a hipster, but I recognize a hipster hangout when I see one. Just
     as well my pearls are in a drawer in London. It’s like Avenue C meets Beirut.
    Inside is one narrow room with bloodred walls and eight or nine tables nestled around the bar. The high ceiling is covered
     with mismatched chandeliers. While we are waiting to be seated, I tuck my cold nose into the warmth of Gwendal’s neck. There’s
     always a moment after we sit down at the cramped wooden table, face-to-face after weeks apart. An awkward silence or too much
     talking before we fall back into the easy intimacy sparked by a long look or his hand in my hair. When I was a teenager I
     would have called this “twinkle toes”—the long-awaited touch you can feel from the top of your head to the soles of your feet.
     Though everyone (my mother, my best friends, my boss) knows where I’m off to, these weekends in Paris feel like a preciously
     guarded secret.
An affair
. All I need now is a trench coat and a cigarette holder.
    Thinking ahead is a reflex for me, so before I order dinner I’m already doing strategic planning for dessert. Even as Gwendal
     translates our choices, I’m distracted by the smell of melting chocolate. Plate after plate leaves the kitchen, held aloft
     by waiters as they inch past the bar. I strain my neck to see which way the chocolate wind is blowing. The plates land at
     a table in the corner, crowded with scruffy young men and the women who love them. My view is obscured by a haze of smoke.
    When
le dessert
finally arrives, it looks like an innocent upside-down chocolate cupcake, accompanied by a small cloud of freshly whipped
     cream. But when my spoon breaks the surface, the chocolate center flows like dark lava onto the whiteness of the plate. The
     last ounce of stress drains from my body. I feel my spine soften in the chair. The menu says
Moelleux au Chocolat
“
Kitu.
”
    “ ‘
Kitu
’ is a pun,” says Gwendal, with his best Humphrey Bogart squint. “It means ‘which kills.’ ”
    I have discovered the French version of “Death by Chocolate.”

    I LIKE TO think I was born in the wrong century. I’m sure I would have done very well with a hoop skirt, a fan, and a drawing master.
     (My mother likes to remind me that, more likely, I would have been a very nearsighted scullery maid.) Paris is the perfect
     city for my kind of mental time travel. There are very few streets that don’t bear some small imprint of a grander, more gracious
     time—the swooping curve of a wrought-iron balcony or a fading stencil above the window of a
boulangerie
.
    I’ve been playing this particular game for as long as I can remember. Like many only children, I spent a fair amount of time