The little one ate toast and cheese and kissed the cloth with buttered lips. The older chose a soup and sipped it plaintive from her spoon. Napkin in her lap, poor love, ever obedient, white lace twitching in the breeze. This crumb-coated pair, arms lifting for Mama, only know to take in love and churn it out again, offered up still warm from the soft shell of their delicate hands.
What is love but fingernails and backward glances? Picking the pills from the lace laid square at her neck, the girl smooths with spit the cotton rose pinned over her heart. White socks and soft shoes, sleeves like diving bells. The tailor blessed this dress and wished her well, stitching her name into its seams: Deirdre, ever serious, minding her manners while the grownups talk.
Her brother, Patrick, fresh as cut grass. Buttered baby in a high seat, soles of his kicking feet soft as a calf’s new cheek. Flour-skinned in curls, knowing without lesson the whole of love in golden waves. Patrick of the rumpled pleats, framed in red wicker. His sweetheart mouth! That handsome hair! He fusses when his toast is gone and gnaws the cloth his papa presses to his face.
There’s a winsome Pop, collar sharp and tied. The man feels most at home in a city that bears and shares his name, a proud piece of him inked on every calling card, cut into doorframes and hanging signs as greeting and deference in one: Paris. He came here as a sweet young man and grew to become as hungry and moneyed as the city itself, as damp-spirited in the mornings, as shining after dark. He skims the paper’s late edition, twisting his thick ring as he reads. Black onyx in gold, a gift to himself for his most recent birthday, rare only in the sense that he usually doesn’t need an excuse for extravagance. The resident men of Neuilly-sur-Seine retreat at the sight of him. They crowd the corners, hands to their lopsided mouths.
The body is a column. It begins with each foot steady in the dirt, rocklong fastened to the ankle, shin to knee bearing the pelvis, that busy fulcrum, friend to the waist, spanning wing from root, the cup of power and the seat of it. The belly and back, jaw to the trunk, its sternum a wagging tongue. And there, buried in the rib like a line of charged powder, the solar plexus. Its ray powers far-flung satellites of the hands and mind, belly and breast, shoulder and sex, willing the feet to move. Any café in the world is a crowded constellation of these rays, a sea of waves, cut with men bearing cakes and tea on silver trays agleam through the drizzling spring.
The head waiter distinguishes himself immediately from the rest. The tallest among them, he works the patio on his toes to avoid ladies’ skirts and discarded silver, dogs using their own thin leashes to strangle themselves among chair legs, baguettes upended from inexact baskets, three pigeons angling at a forgotten slice of steak, a nosegay trampled to a purple smear, a pat of butter rolled in a grime comprised of chalk dust from the specials board, the dried mess from a practical-minded prostitute, and half a handful of sand from Sausset-les-Pins hitched on the suitcase of an old man who has just this afternoon returned, for the last time, from the sea.
The waiter leans benevolent, a cyprus over scrub, gracing the service with a subtle pot of tea, its silver spout an extension of his hand. He slides a cup without comment out of baby’s reach. His vest cinches with a polished clip, but he is otherwise unadorned: collar loose at the gentle skin of his neck, shoes free of hook and eyelet, hands bare to the unlinked cuff of his whites. His chin cradles the thin rind of his lips, browline carved with the blade of a boning knife. He draws a silver file from his vest, easing crumbs into his cupped hand before he slips away.
Following him means keeping close as he goes, dodging lesser staff as he vanishes to all but the one tucked into his wake.
The two of them glide inside to find a slick-walled cave of bolsters and peeling paper, a pastry case flanking one wall. A bulb strains to light an empty booth where a pile of cloth napkins await folding beside a bowl of soup.
By the booth, a bannister, from which a painted white birdcage hangs.Two wood-carved lovebirds touch beaks in a permanent state of distant affection. The stairs rise to another floor, growing darker, windows painted shut beside another set of stairs that lead in silence to the attic, where the wet jewel of a rat’s eye glitters to witness the single cot and basin in a room where the waiter sleeps. The day the others find the head waiter dead, they will bury him in the back under a sack of flour, and the rats will bring their own dark offering.
The waiter examines a haze of sickly tarts under glass, selecting a square of lemon cake to place on paper lace as a warm hand lands gentle on his gut. He tries to go, but it holds him still. The hand moves with enough leisure to belong to him, but with his own two in sight, this third is curiously foreign. Searching for a witness, he finds only the wooden birds.
The strange hand is joined by a second, and the pair slide across his slim hips. In watching the birds, he misses his silver file slipped away, a souvenir, before the hands twin themselves around his trunk, spreading to root at his waist.
The lemon cake shudders on its tray as a woman arranges herself before him. The waiter sees her shoulders, broad and bare, stretching two ways her smooth expanse of skin. His father, who sold cavern stones to sculptors, once found by touch a precious marble and laid it into his hearth as proof of his skill, a daily lesson for his boy, born with the man’s ears but not his gift, dull-eyed in the cradle, like a fish his mother said, but here it seems the son has found a monument to make any stoneman dash rasp and hammer to the ground—