Chapter 3
CHELSEA
The sound led me to a dead end.
Not literally—the street continued, narrowing into a lane that bent left and disappeared—but the courtyard I'd been following the noise toward turned out to belong to a school, and the children were already filing back inside by the time I found the gate.
The gate was closed, so I stood on the pavement looking at an empty courtyard with the feeling of someone who has followed an impulse to its logical conclusion and found nothing waiting there.
The lane smelled of damp stone and something faintly sweet from a boulangerie I couldn't see.
The buildings here were older, less maintained than the eighth's careful elegance—paint weathered at the shutters, a drainpipe doing its best against the wall, a bicycle locked to a post with a kind of optimism I found touching given the state of the lock.
It was a neighbourhood that had not organised itself around anyone's aesthetic expectations, which was either charming or simply wet, depending on the weather.
The weather was wet.
I turned and walked back the way I'd come, which took longer than it should have because I hadn't been paying attention on the way in. Not to mention, the streets here bent in ways that resisted the basic logic I kept trying to impose on them.
I'd been in Paris long enough to know that the city's street plan had been designed by someone with a hostility toward the right angle, but knowing this hadn't made me faster at navigating it.
Three wrong turns. A cul-de-sac that hadn't been a cul-de-sac two minutes ago, or hadn't looked like one.
A map app that told me to continue for two hundred metres in a direction that ended at a wall.
I stopped. Breathed.
This was fine. I was not lost—I was temporarily mislocated, which was different.
I had a phone with a functioning map app that was giving me directions I couldn't follow and a general sense that the Seine was roughly south, which was the kind of navigational confidence that would have been more useful if I'd known which direction I was currently facing.
I turned around twice and picked a street that looked like it might be going somewhere, and it was—eventually, after another wrong turn and a passage under an arch I nearly missed, it deposited me onto a broader road I half-recognised.
From there, I found the river, and from the river I reoriented and headed back toward the eighth in the mental state of someone who has won a small, stupid battle at significant cost to their dignity.
My boots were not made for this. They were made for the streets I usually walked—smooth pavements, short distances, the occasional taxi rank.
The cobblestones here were uneven in a way that was probably picturesque from a moving car and was, on foot, an ongoing negotiation.
I could feel a blister forming on my left heel.
I stopped at a pharmacy near the pont. I needed headache tablets—the headache had arrived somewhere between the cul-de-sac and the arch.
I went in with what I considered reasonable confidence, given that headache tablets were a finite category of product and the word for pharmacy was on the sign outside.
The pharmacist listened to my French and then responded in a stream of words that arrived too fast and too close together for me to locate the edges between them.
"Pardon?" I said.
She repeated it. Faster, somehow, in the way that people sometimes spoke louder at someone who hadn't understood them, as though the problem were volume.
The woman behind me in the queue shifted. I felt it without turning.
"Je ne comprends pas," I said.
The pharmacist switched to English. They didn't stock that brand. There was a chemist near the Opéra. I could also order it online.
"The French website," I said.
She looked at me.
"Never mind," I said, and bought whatever she handed me because I couldn't bear to stand there any longer.
Outside, I stood on the pavement and looked at the paper bag in my hand.
I had not purchased my own headache tablets in approximately three years. Thomas restocked the cabinet before it needed restocking. I hadn't thought about this until now, which was itself information I wasn't entirely sure what to do with.
I put the bag in my pocket and walked.
I had several hours before Dr. Devereaux. I didn't go back to the apartment. I followed the river instead.
The bouquinistes were open along the quai, their green metal boxes propped against the stone wall, paperbacks and prints and postcards arranged in the dishevelled logic of people who'd been doing this long enough to have their own system.
I stopped without deciding to. Old postcards, black and white, Paris looking fundamentally itself, but quieter.
I turned them over one at a time and thought about money.
Not in the abstract way I'd been thinking about it since Robert's dinner. I thought about it practically. Mathematically. In the way that the pharmacy, and the wrong turns, and the blister currently making its case on my left heel had made it suddenly difficult not to.
What I had, independent of Robert, was a savings account I'd contributed to without urgency because urgency had never been required.
I did the calculation while I stood at the bouquiniste, turning the same postcard over twice without noticing.
The number was not as bad as it could have been and considerably worse than I'd allowed myself to know.
At the standard I was accustomed to, I had perhaps four months. A little more if I adjusted.
Four months.
I put the postcard down and then picked it up again. A photograph of the Tuileries in winter, a woman at the far edge of the frame, her back to the camera, walking alone.
The thing that no one told you—the thing that couldn't be told, that had to be arrived at—was that growing up with money didn't feel like privilege.
It felt like weather. You didn't experience the roof keeping the rain off; you simply weren't wet.
You had no reference point for wet. And then one day you stood on a quai in Paris with four months of runway and a blister and a paper bag of wrong headache tablets, and wet suddenly became imaginable.
I had a degree. English literature, from a good university, chosen because I loved it and because no one had asked me to think about what came after.
What came after had been a series of roles at galleries and cultural foundations and one film production company that made documentaries about architecture—interesting, unpaid or nearly so, conducted on the currency of good lunches and people to know.
I was not unemployable. I needed to keep believing that. I was perceptive and socially capable and good at reading situations. I'd simply never been required to deploy any of that for money.
"You've looked at that same postcard three times," said a voice beside me. American. Female. Young, I thought, without looking.
I looked. She was perhaps my age, in paint-spattered trousers and a coat that had seen weather.
Dark hair approximately contained. She was examining a tray of prints with real attention.
She had, apparently, said the thing without fully intending to, because she glanced at me sideways with the expression of someone checking whether their thought had escaped.
"Is it that obvious?" I said.
"Little bit." She moved to the next box. "Paris will do that. Make you stand somewhere longer than you meant to."
I bought the postcard—fifty cents, or the centime equivalent—and stood with the coin in my palm for a moment before handing it over. The smallest transaction. And I counted it, which I hadn't done consciously, which was new.
My phone buzzed as I tucked the postcard into my bag.
Robert.
I looked at it. Then answered, because two days of not answering had its own accumulating weight.
"How are you getting on?" Not hello. He'd never said hello.
"Fine," I said. Which was mine.
"The course?"
"Really good, actually." The lie came out smoothly, the way it always did, worn to a shine by years of delivering palatable versions of things to the one person whose opinion of my life I'd never quite been able to stop caring about.
A pause that meant something. "Dr. Devereaux?"
"We have a session today. I think it's going well."
"Good." A beat. "Chelsea—"
"I know."
"I just want you to think—"
"I know, Robert. I am." This came out slightly sharper than I'd intended.
He let it go. He always let it go, which was either patience or a form of avoidance. I'd never been sure which.
"Ring me at the weekend," he said.
"I will."
He was gone. No goodbye—symmetry between us, at least.
I stood on the quai while a group of schoolchildren appeared from a side street, herded by two adults with the depleted look of people managing more variables than anyone had properly planned for.
Small coats, miniature backpacks. They moved past me in a ragged stream, too loud and too slow, two of them locked in a dispute that neither adult had noticed.
I watched them pass, then I turned and walked back toward the eighth.
Dr. Devereaux's office was on a quiet street in the seventh, on the second floor of a building that had the correct Parisian restraint about it.
There was nothing on the door except a small brass plate with her name, the kind of discretion that signalled she wasn't looking for patients who didn't already know where to find her.
The waiting area was two chairs, a low table, a plant that looked cared-for.
No receptionist. You simply arrived and sat, which I appreciated because it removed the element of having to be charming at someone.
I'd been sitting for four minutes when she opened the inner door.
"Chelsea." She stepped back to let me in. Her English was excellent—lightly accented, precisely chosen.
I sat in the chair across from hers. The room was calm and neutrally furnished in a way that gave you nothing to look at except yourself, which I suspected was intentional.
"How have you been?" she said.
"Fine," I said, and then heard myself say it and stopped. The word sat between us doing very little.
She waited.
"I got lost," I said. "This morning. After the course. It wasn't serious, but I—I ended up somewhere I hadn't meant to go and couldn't find my way back, and the whole thing took much longer than it should have." I paused. "Which is not a significant problem."
"No," she agreed. "And yet you mentioned it first."
I looked at the plant on the windowsill. Someone watered it on a schedule. The leaves were even, considered, nothing dying at the edges.
"I've been thinking about money," I said. "Practically. About what the numbers actually look like." I told her what I'd worked out on the quai—the account, the months, the gap between what I was used to and what was actually mine. I said it plainly, which took more effort than it should have.
She listened without expression.
"How did it feel," she said, "working that out?"
"Like standing somewhere high," I said, "and suddenly noticing."
She wrote something, briefly. Then she looked up. "You've known this was coming for some time."
"Yes."
"What's different about today?"
I thought about the pharmacy. The wrong turns. The coin in my palm at the bouquiniste, the automatic counting that I hadn't chosen and hadn't been able to stop.
"I think it stopped being abstract," I said.
She nodded once, which was as close as she generally came to yes.
"That," she said, "is not nothing."