From the start, Clive had said that the more I participated in the experiment, the more effective the Golconda would be. You’ll find coincidences pick up naturally. He also said the system itself would grow stronger. It would train itself to herd cats, to see which bait worked and which did not, thus expanding the scope of the Golconda. Chinatown first, then the rest of Manhattan, then the whole city, then the whole world. If I doubted this before, I believed it now. Because for its grand finale, it had gone international.
It took me a moment to register Pierre. He was sitting on a low stoop, a lip of concrete at the weary tip of East Broadway, where the bustle of the preceding blocks petered out. He was reading a book with the jacket removed, sitting with his feet too far out into the sidewalk, disheveled and louche. Like deposed royalty. He was drinking from a lidless coffee as if he were looking out over the Luxembourg Gardens.
You know who gets to drink coffee at nonsense hours? I thought. The French.
An electronic sign flashed above Pierre’s head, advertising cell phone repairs. He sat in between rows of cheap luggage wrapped in plastic. I could tell he was smoking, even from a distance, by the clawlike way he turned the pages. More than just casually Parisian, Pierre detested and adored Paris in direct opposition to the way Americans detested and adored Paris. He also pretended never to have heard of major cities in Normandy. I’d quit smoking after Amos, but Pierre got me back at it the night we met.
Which was the same night I met Boots. It was Pierre’s surprise party.
Since then, Pierre had moved back to Paris and married a woman he’d just started seeing when we met. I spoke to her in passing at his party, while we were waiting for the bathroom. She was Ethiopian and French, raised in Belgium and London, and she now ran a theater company for at-risk teenagers in the Paris suburbs (it was a long wait for the bathroom). She wore a campaign-style button with a picture of baby Pierre pressed into it, a bowl of which was available at the door. For a while after the party, Pierre and his then-girlfriend had been one of my preferred social media pit stops. They spent a lot of time outdoors, kissing each other’s cheeks, angling their phones for optimal sun flare. If Willis’s online presence had made me feel alienated, Pierre’s had made me feel almost familial. I used to worry when she didn’t appear in photos for a prolonged period of time. Had she been written out of his life? Had she fallen out of love or into a canal? Maybe Pierre had cheated on her. After all, there’d been a moment when I felt I could’ve usurped her sun flare.
Halfway through the party, Boots had volunteered to go on an ice run, and I stepped onto the balcony to get some air. Pierre was already out there, looking as if he’d been born on the balcony and was fated to stay on it. But when I slid the door shut, trapping the noise of the festivities behind me, he looked up. He didn’t want a surprise party, he said. Like most people, he didn’t like surprises, and “like most men, I don’t love the attention.” He offered me a cigarette as he said this, so I took it instead of arguing. He lit it for me, cupping his hands close to my face. There were other people on the balcony with us, but they were low on wine and so they ducked back inside.
Pierre and I chatted about the obvious differences between New York and Paris, both of us pretending they were more revelatory than they were. He connected himself to the woman I’d met while waiting for the bathroom with a literal flick of the wrist, a hand gesture indicating that no, he had not come here alone but yes, he was still free to go.
He asked me if I was with Boots, and I explained that we’d only met a few hours prior. As I did, I looked over my shoulder to make sure he hadn’t come back yet. It was because of the cigarette. I didn’t want Boots to see me smoking.
“So we’re both taken,” Pierre reflected.
“I’m not taken,” I said, even though I was eagerly awaiting Boots’s return. “I don’t know him yet.”
“Ah, you see? But you’re already planning to know him. You can’t fool me, I saw you two. You are taken.”
He wagged his finger at me like I’d been caught, a romantic unmasked. But I was only hedging because I knew better than to jinx whatever might happen with Boots by agreeing with Pierre. I had fallen in lust with enough men over the years and, by my count, not one of them was standing on this balcony with me right now. Pierre thought he was sharing a joke with a fellow slave to seduction, but he was only engaged with someone who’d had a harder time making relationships stick than a scruffy Frenchman for whom people threw surprise parties.
“It’s a shame you’re so taken,” he said, “because you have my baby.”
He smirked and pointed at my lapel. I, too, had baby Pierre pinned to my chest.
“Why do I sense you’re trying to get me to kiss you?” I asked.
I wanted to make him uncomfortable right back, to bend the tenor of the conversation. Pierre raised an eyebrow, roused by my directness.
“How do you do that?”
“Kiss women on balconies?”
“No, the one eyebrow thing.”
“It’s muscle memory,” he said. “You must take control of your face.”
“You’re not going to kiss me on a balcony,” I decided. “It’s a cliché.”
“You’re pronouncing that wrong.”
“Oh, who cares?” I said, rolling my eyes.
“I care. It’s my birthday.”
Then he pulled me away from the door and into a breezeless dark corner, sheltered from view. Sheltered from relevant view. The people in the apartment complex across the way could make up any story they liked about us, just like we could make up any story we liked about each other. Was this not the point of living in New York? He tugged at my lip, pulling my back toward his waist with each audible exhale. We broke away at the same time, cutting the mood with laughter. It’s impossible to kiss someone if you’re both grinning. Like sneezing with your eyes open.
“Je m’appelle Lola.”
“You don’t speak French, Lola. But you do have a charming name. Now, shall we go back inside and begin our lives?”
I leaned back and turned my neck as far as it would go until I could see the party, wall to wall. Pierre’s girlfriend was dancing, arms in the air, nails grazing the low ceiling, hips pivoting. Boots, meanwhile, had returned with a bag of ice in each fist, choking each one by its neck. I felt my whole body warm upon seeing him. He was talking to people with whom he’d not yet caught up because he’d devoted the first half of his evening to me. Now he was sneaking glances around the living room, searching for me the way Jonathan and I used to do in college. By the time he saw me, Pierre and I had gone our separate ways, into separate pods of conversation. How enchanting it was, to be the transparent source of someone else’s relief, of their unmarked joy. Go back inside and begin our lives. Why not? Really, why not?
Now I was engaged and Pierre was married.
I approached him slowly, observing his mannerisms. Our conversation and corresponding kiss had meant something to him too. Clearly, it had. When I got within a few feet of him, close enough to see the gray in his stubble, he looked up at me with those massive brown eyes that I’d noticed in the shadows of the balcony. The same nose I’d pressed with mine, gently boxing his cartilage.
But something was off. Pierre’s expression was different than all the others. He looked neither mystified nor nervous nor happy to see me. He looked … relieved. He held his book to his side, kissed me on both cheeks, and said:
“What took you so long, chérie?”
I felt as though the air were being sucked downward, as if the ground itself was gasping through its grates. The street went silent.
“I knew I would see you today,” he went on. “I’ve been feeling it ever since we landed. My wife, she was invited to a theater festival here and so, last minute, I came too. I have always been a little bit psychique.”
He grinned, his teeth buttery yellow from smoke. I found myself unable to look at him, not unlike the way one holds up one’s fingers to block the sun in order to look at the sun.
“And so I went for a walk,” he continued, “and I thought to myself, I will sit here and I will wait and if Lola From My Party does not appear before it gets dark, I will go. But here you are! Phenomenal. Tell me, are you still in love with the tall man?”
“He is tall, isn’t he?” I asked, laughing a disproportionately long time.
When I was through, I held Pierre’s face lightly in my hands. Then I kissed him on the mouth. Is this how I tasted after I smoked only half a cigarette, even after I’d brushed my teeth? Boots never said a word about it. Pierre kissed me back, but the reality of his situation put a stop to it. He pinched his bottom lip, folding it.
“Okay,” he said, resuming smiling. “Well, okay. I suppose this is what we do. We have a perfect record!”
“I’m so sorry.”
“No, it’s nothing.”
I squeezed my eyes shut as I hugged him as tightly as I could. He was the wrong one to hug. This relative stranger who thought I was crazy, whose body mass was utterly alien to me. I’d spent more time with Barry the barista. Pierre and I had shared only one moment, albeit a significant one. But it was as if I were hugging everyone I’d seen, as if they’d been freeze-dried into a big pill and Pierre had swallowed it.
“Are you okay?”
I could hear the international tone of “how do I leave this interaction?” I shook my head and rubbed my thumb against my unobstructed ring finger. Pierre patted my back, tentative but soothing pats. I either had to go or explain myself, but I couldn’t remain like this, a mad American in his midst. I fought the urge to apologize a third time. It’s the guilt, I thought, exiting my body.
“I’ve just been thinking a lot lately of how we lose people.”
This was the same casually philosophical tone I’d employed when we were on the balcony, comparing Paris with New York as if no one in the world had done it before.
“Of course,” he said, relieved to be speaking in abstractions. “But don’t we find them just as often? I found you.”
“You did.”
Knox used to say that falling in love was like trying to remember something you never knew. The first time I heard him say it, I told him it was beautiful. But when he said it again, a pat piece of poetry thrown into the evaporating pool of our love, I told him that it sounded sad. It meant that love was always out of reach, happiness forever floating on the tip of one’s tongue.
After Pierre took his leave, citing jet lag, flinging his blazer over one shoulder, strolling back to his wife, I started, finally, to feel it—the completeness of my package. Something like peace. But then a realization hit me like a dart: I’d never told anyone about Pierre. Not one soul, not even the soul belonging to Vadis. I’d left him out of the story of the night I met Boots because I wanted her, wanted both of us, to focus on the possibility of permanence. This did not include the distraction of a third party, of a mysterious stranger who, because I knew he would remain a mystery, would clobber the reality of Boots. I’d never written about Pierre in a diary or an email or had so much as a text exchange about the man I’d kissed on the balcony. I had no keepsakes of him because there was nothing to keep. Not even the button with his face on it. I hadn’t perused his social media accounts in years. There was no list on which Pierre would appear except perhaps for the one I kept on an invisible scroll, curled in my memory.
So how on earth did he get here?