Paris Red: A Novel (5 page)

“
I
knew he wouldn’t come,” Nise
says as she scrubs her face back in our room. “That’s why I could ask him.”

“He liked that you asked.”

“Did he?”

“You know he did,” I say. “And I just followed up on your invitation.”

I am tired but I am also wide awake. Aware. I feel something from Nise, but I cannot trace it, not just yet.

“It’s awkward, isn’t it,” she says then.

“What is?”

“The three of us. Waiting like that to be kissed. I had to look away when he was kissing you.”

I nod because I do understand. In the past when we met men, there was always one for her and one for me. Always. But in another way I do not know what she means at all because tonight he kissed me first. I did not have to wait. And when he kissed Nise, I watched. I made a point not to look away.

“Do you like him more than you thought you would?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say.

I do know, but it is too soon to talk about. And I think she must feel the same because she does not ask or say anything else about him. When she speaks again, it is about work the next day.

“When do we ever want to go?” I say.

When we get in bed, I listen for Nise breathing and keep trying to hear the change, the passing from wakeful lying there to sleep. It is the quietest change, but some nights I am still awake when it happens, and when I hear it, it soothes me. Tonight I want to lie in the darkness, being soothed by Nise’s breathing, want to look at my green boots across the room, which now seem black, at the blue box of candles, which has now turned gray.
Exiger le nom
.
Éviter les contrefaçons
.
La Favorite
.

But I do not hear the change in her breathing tonight, at least not that I can tell, and when I fall asleep I am thinking of the way his mouth felt on the nest of veins in my wrist, and Nise is the one awake. Or so it seems to me.

D
orure Argenture Plaquage
.
That is
what the sign for Baudon says. We do not go in the front door under the sign, though—we walk around to the side courtyard and go through a blue door that slides open on a pulley and chain.

To burnish silver plate, you do not rub it with cloth—hard needs hard. I use a thin steel tool, the tip a third the width of a finger, to ground the silver, and then I use a tool with a wider tip to blend out all the edges. The tools are called almost the same thing as the workers:
brunissoirs
. I use shop tools for everything but the last wide, feathering strokes—that is when I use my own burnisher. The tip is bloodstone, not steel. The stone is as wide as my thumb, set in a forked wooden handle, and held in place with a steel band. Bloodstone is not red like its name but shiny gray, the color of river water in sunlight. I can see myself in it, and it is the mirror of the bloodstone that makes a mirror of the silver.

Whenever I am not using my burnisher, I keep it in its own leather pouch. If anything scratches the stone, that scratch will start to pull on the silver and ruin anything it touches. Baudon is a clean shop with good enough tools, but I know the feeling of my own burnisher and it knows me. I know the way the stone slips out over the grooved edges of grounded silver, I know the way I can steady the handle with my little finger, and I know the smooth feeling of the wooden end in the center of my palm. It is my tool and I know it better than I have ever known any man’s cock—that is what I am saying.

I got the importance of tools from my father. He is an engraver, a ciseleur, with his own set of burins, and he told me you could not be anybody until you had your own tools, whatever your trade. When I was growing up, my mother screamed about whatever boy I was running around with, but my father worried about how I would make a living.

I guess they each worried in their own way, but I cannot help that it was my father’s lessons about tools that I took to heart.

There is a beauty to the burnishers, each one with its own tip and own purpose. Sometimes I want one of the old-time dog’s tooth burnishers. Some of the gold workers at Baudon use them, though most have switched to agate. But not all. Those dog’s tooth burnishers are just what they are called—the curved eyetooth of a dog is set in the end of a wood handle. You do not use them on silver, only on gilt, but I would like one for myself all the same. A dog’s tooth, a piece of bone set in wood.

As I said, Baudon’s not bad. We even have work in August when everything shuts down. And the shop does not scrimp. Silver plate can be as thin as a scraping of butter, but the thinner the deposit, the grainier the matte finish is and the harder you work. Not Baudon. They are not cheap.

Burnishing makes your hands ache but also the muscles in your back, too, right beneath the shoulder. That is where the strokes come from—it is not just your fingers doing the work, but your back, too. Sometimes it feels like someone is poking me with a hot needle or a knife. The spot that burns the worst is just below the shoulder blade on my right side, just to the right of my backbone. The spot where a wing would be if I were a bird. But I am not a bird, just a working girl, and sometimes that spot feels like fire.

At times during
the day it seems like everyone in the shop is talking, and the place is loud with conversations and shouts across the tables. Other times, first thing in the morning or midafternoon, the place goes quiet and you hear the click-click-clicking of the burnishers going over the silver. Nise and I do not work at the same table—we see enough of each other is what we always tell people. So she gets the gossip from her end of the room and I get it from my end.

Those quiet spots in the days, or times when people are just talking quietly as they work, doing the same things over and over—they can almost put you to sleep. The murmuring sound of women talking and the steady sound of plates and bowls being rubbed by our tools—it lulls. Sometimes it seems the whole place is muffled, even though it is filled with metal, and that is when I can think best. When my hands are doing something but I cannot really make out what anyone is saying about what their husbands did, or who is pregnant or what happened the night before. That is when it seems like I am rubbing out the ridges of my own thoughts with my stone.

Today I think about how it probably only makes sense that each of my parents worried the way they did. They knew they could not control me. The first night I stayed out all night with a boy I was just fifteen. When I did come home, my father had already gone to work, but my mother was sitting there. When I walked in that morning, I said, “I’m back. I’m back now.” But she would not answer. She would not talk or look at me. And when she finally did talk, she said, “If you come home pregnant, you won’t be my daughter.”

As if I would want a child. As if that were not something I wanted to avoid, too. She could have helped me with it, she could have helped me learn how not to, but she did not.

I got over the boy I stayed out all night with, and in the end I did not even care for him, but it was never the same between my mother and me. I never forgot her not speaking to me, or the way she would not even turn her head to look at me. She gave me the side of her face. That was all.

So I grew up. Even though I lived at home for another few months, that was the day I began to leave. And my father’s way was better: he did not hold things against me, and he made sure I knew I needed my own tools. Though maybe by not helping me, by forcing me to find out things on my own, my mother did the same.

We wear big
aprons over our dresses in the shop, and that is what Nise and I are rolling into bundles when we walk out into the street at the end of the day. We are hanging the aprons over our shoulders by their strings the way we always do when we see him.

Except I do not see him at all at first—Nise does. It is the change in how she walks that makes me look across and down the street.

He is leaning against the building on the corner of the street, smoking. When he sees us, he drops his cigarette and glances down to step on it once. Then he looks at us again. He does not walk toward us—he lets us take him in. Lets us decide how we want to proceed.

“Is that what you caught?” Adèle asks us.

She is a little older than we are, works at the table next to Nise, and she sees where we are looking and who we are looking at. I glance over at Adèle and see the expression on her face, but for once she does not say anything loud or rude. Does not even stop moving. She is going home to her husband and her baby, and she does not care who is waiting in the street to see us. She is someone to gossip with to make the day go quicker. A work friend.

When we get closer, I see he is dressed poorer than we have seen him before: dark pants and some shapeless coat. But it does not matter. Even if he thinks he has disguised himself, there is no way he fits in here where people have worked all day among the metal and rags and sawdust and heat and dirt. I want to laugh at him but I do not, and in another second I am there in front of him and I do not want to laugh. I look at him full on, but Nise stands off to the side. He just goes on waiting, watching us, letting us be the ones to decide.

“What, have you come down in the world?” Nise asks him, turning to him for just a second. Acknowledging him.

“I was around,” he says. “In the neighborhood.”

She shakes her head, and rewraps her apron so it is like a muff in front of her. “In this neighborhood. On this street. After we told you where we worked,” she says straight ahead, into the air, not turning toward him again.

She will not look at me, either, so I do not know exactly what she is feeling, but I know how I feel. Caught out somehow. We are in our work clothes with dirty hair, and there is something odd about all of it. I think about the way he threw the cigarette down as soon as he saw us, how he toed it out almost without looking away from us. And yet he stood there so we could have time to think. To decide.

It makes me wonder who is hungry, really.

I do not wrap my hands in my apron the way Nise does—my apron is still hanging in a bundle from my right shoulder. It dangles between me and him as the three of us set off down the street. He walks with his hands behind his back. And we go for a block like that. Not talking. But before too long I find myself drifting closer to him. Even though we are not touching, I feel connected to him.

“I missed my working girls,” he says then. “With the calluses on their hands.”

No one says anything then but I see Nise turn toward him once, and her face looks miserable. That is when I understand that she is embarrassed about our filthy hands and dirty dresses and the stink of our armpits and about being caught out like this. And I see something else in her face, too, and I think it is this: that whatever he is doing with us is more real now because he has come to our work, because he has come to us in the daylight. Because he stood in the street and watched for us. It is not just about him buying us a couple of dinners or teasing with made-up names and stories.

It is about us. Something specifically about us. And I think we should not be surprised. It is what we wanted. With our tablets and our scheming, all the trying not to be ordinary—didn’t we want someone to notice us? To see we were different? Isn’t that why I wear the green boots of a whore? Because I do not feel ordinary. Or because I feel ordinary and different at the same time.