Anyway, so it wasn’t a case of being lazy. It was a case of being practical.
In the slim-fitting black dress though (I always chose clothes to disguise the bits I didn’t like, especially at the back), with the huge eyes…suddenly I looked like someone completely different. Not the young, who cares, back of the class Anna. And not the more recent Anna, with the slightly shell-shocked expression, the definite lines of weariness and wariness around the eyes. No, I looked like someone totally strange and new. I attempted a smile, but it didn’t go with my new look, which was more mysterious, less friendly.
Sami laughed at me.
“Are you pouting?”
“No!” I said, jumping up and blushing.
“You are! You are loving looking at yourself!”
“NO!”
“That is good!” he said. “That is exactly right. Now. Come. Martini.”
I followed him out into the darkening city night. The tourists with their colorful backpacks and upside-down maps had retreated now to their hotels and the large restaurants with pictures on the menus that thronged the Place de la Concorde. Instead, the night felt like ours. We jumped on a bus that took us over the bridges and up the steady hill to the north, to Montmartre again.
Claire had often spoken about Montmartre; it was her favorite place in the city. She said on hot days it was often the only place you could get a breath of wind, climbing up the steps and sitting at the top. She said they used to park their little car up there—good luck, I thought, seeing the parking restrictions there now—and picnic at the top of the steps.
Sami hopped off the bus and led me down a side alley and through another. I had not the faintest idea where I was. Occasionally I would hear snatches of clinking glasses and happy conversation, or smell the scent of garlic and onions and oil simmering in a kitchen, or the bakeries that ran all night, releasing their bright warm scent of bread. Finally he came to a stop and indicated a large building that was completely silent. There was a tiny side passage and it was up here he led me; in the side was a tiny door, behind which shone a bright yellow light.
Sami knocked brightly three times, and the door was opened by a young girl dressed like a ’50s cigarette girl. As she opened it, a huge blast of heat and light and noise blew out at us, and I stepped backward. She accepted some cash from Sami and ushered us inside.
Down a long flight of stairs, we found ourselves underneath the street in a huge crypt. It must have been a cellar of some sort, or some kind of storage.
At any rate, now it had been transformed into a club. At one end was a makeshift stage, and on it was a group of musicians playing fast and furiously for all they were worth: a trumpeter, a tall man wearing a fedora playing the double bass, a drummer who reminded me of Animal from the Muppets, and a tall woman in a fuchsia dress scatting into the microphone. Around people were dancing or sitting at cheap foldaway wooden tables. Condensation dripped off the walls. Many of the people were wearing ’40s clothes. I noticed to my horror that most people were smoking; I knew there was a smoking ban in France too, but nobody seemed to observe it, and down here in this place with one rickety stairwell and no fire exits as far as I could see, it felt dangerous.
Over in one corner was a hatch serving great pitchers of wine and nothing else; there was also corner seating further away from the band, and Sami immediately saw some people he knew and bounced up to introduce us. A waitress stopped by and asked if we wanted wine, but Sami immediately demanded she go make us a proper martini, and after rolling her eyes, she agreed.
I’d never had a martini before. Not a proper one, at any rate, clearly. It tasted like someone had nicked it out of someone’s gas tank. I spluttered and coughed until I attracted attention, then had to pretend that nothing had happened.
The music was very loud, and as soon as we sat down, people started to circle our table and come up to Sami, who obviously knew everyone there. Obviously this wasn’t that surprising; of course he did. People who are very friendly, I have found, tend to be friendly to everyone. I felt a little foolish, in fact, thinking that Sami’s eagerness to take me out was to do with something intrinsically interesting about me, rather than a typical benevolence toward everyone in the world. In fact, as I sipped my martini, I saw he greeted everyone with the same excitement, launching into high-volume complaints about how shitty his job or his love life was. Sami, I concluded, was simply one of those people who likes everyone, requires an audience, and wasn’t terribly fussy who it was.
Well, that was all right, I told myself, as everyone else barely looked at me. I wasn’t truly surprised; the girls were all so glamorous, with heavy dark eye shadow that had gone out of fashion in the UK years ago, set against pale skin—no fake tan—and they were all fashionably skinny. The boys were even more so, and they dressed better. They wore heavy rimmed glasses and nobody smiled or laughed except for Sami; they just waved their hands in the air. Eventually one of the skinny boys grabbed one of the skinny girls to take her dancing. She pouted even more than she had been doing previously, which clearly meant yes. I watched them disappear into the sweaty moving crowd, looking sinuous and elegant and somehow strangely out of time.
I took another sip of my cocktail—in fact, a second cocktail; I appeared to have finished the first—and felt strangely dislocated and dreamy. The odd thing is, although I knew on one level that where I was glamorous and interesting and different—everything I was meant to be here to discover—it wasn’t me, I could see, looking around. I didn’t fit in. I wasn’t Parisian and sophisticated and skinny and beautifully dressed. I was too old, too parochial. It was an interesting world to see, to visit, I thought, looking at Sami with his head back, taking part in four conversations at once, downing his martini, and smoking a cigarette through a holder. But these easy bohemians…I didn’t think there was much point in me trying to ingratiate myself, even if I did manage to understand a word anyone said. Sami had briefly introduced me to everyone, but no one had given me a second glance. And I looked at my watch. It was late. I stood up.
“I have to go,” I said to Sami.
He looked up at me, surprised. I didn’t think it was just tobacco in his cigarette; the pupils of his eyes were huge.
“Go? But we’ve just arrived! And there’s a sky-top party we all simply must go to later…in a bit…”
“Thanks,” I said, “but I have work tomorrow.”