Chapter One #3
Him of all people! To be honest, I knew little about Benoit Levin outside of his work.
Aside from that first interaction, I’d only seen him around a few times.
We’d acknowledged each other in passing.
But he was still the object of my professional rivalry.
I read all his stories, skin prickling with a desirous disgust. His attractiveness only made him worse, more of a force to be reckoned with.
Something about him—many things—stoked a rivalry that, for all I knew, didn’t exist in his life.
He probably didn’t think about me at all.
Perhaps most infuriating was that his work was so well-liked.
He’d traveled to the Far East and published stunning and well-respected stories about the people he met and the food he ate.
He probably lived on some generous inheritance that allowed him a lavish life of travel and intrigue.
It had caused a big stir in our newsroom when he started at L’Etoile .
People speculated about why he’d take a job that kept him in Paris.
Why he’d settle for a less exciting subject matter and lifestyle.
How long he’d last. And everybody loved his stories.
His smart takes and keen eye for emerging trends.
Other writers talked about whatever he wrote about.
Everybody cared about what he had to say.
Everyone raved about his talent. I got raves too, but not like he did.
And now here he was, walking into my place, merging. This was not a reality I was prepared to face.
I had never been so grateful for the ability to pedal off tension.
I rode as fast as I could across the ninth, up Rue de Rome, passing the tall wooden fence separating the road from the subway construction, and then left on the tree-lined Boulevard des Batignolles.
I pumped my legs and wove through traffic like I was being chased.
By the time I was home, the realization had fully settled over me: everything was going to change and there was no way to tell how.
I parked my bike under the ledge and clicked my tongue a few times to see if the tuxedo cat that hung around the carriage house would come say bonjour.
We had cats come and go from time to time, most of them just passing through.
This little beauty, with big green eyes and white mittens on her paws, had been here for weeks.
She came around the corner then, rubbing her chin on the door frame because, while she was curious, she was not usually eager.
“There you are, pretty kitty.” We had cats at the orphanage, long elegant things that grew fat and lazy off our food scraps.
They kept the rats at bay and all had little personalities.
Some were so scared they’d never let us close; others, like this one, could be friendly.
When she’d had enough coaxing, she trotted up and extended her nose to my skirt.
I bent down to rub her behind her velvety ear, and she cocked her head and pressed into my hand.
She meowed and purred and let me scratch her shoulders and run my hand down her back to the tip of her tail.
She dropped then and rolled onto her side, gazing up at me.
While tempted to bury my fingers in her soft belly fur, I knew better than to push my luck.
She could turn from sweet and inviting to ready to kill in an instant.
Every time I tried to pick her up, she turned into a furious ball of fluff and claws that didn’t stop swiping at me until I put her down again.
She followed me to the door, and I let her into the kitchen.
Soft heart that she was, Cook had started keeping a bowl for kitchen scraps just for the kitty, who was less and less of a stray every day.
“Bonjour, Cook.”
“Bonjour, dear.” She was stirring something on the stove that smelled herby and divine. The cat whizzed past her skirt. “Ah. There she is. I saved you some chicken, kitty.”
The cat trotted straight for her bowl like she owned the place, while I stole a berry from a colander on the counter and headed upstairs.
Madame Tremblay inherited the house from her husband when he died, and having no children, she opened the place up to renters. There were five of us—respectable, professional women.
I passed the first floor, where there was a wide hallway, the dining room where we all ate, and the drawing room with the arched set of glass doors that connected the pension side of the house with Madame Tremblay’s personal quarters.
The next floor up was where the American sisters Diane and Catherine lived.
Across from that was a small parlor where we often gathered in the evenings, especially after Madame had gone to bed.
I continued up to the top floor where my room was one of three.
Nadine had lived here longer than anyone else; her room was next door to mine.
She was practically a daughter to Madame, though we were all practically that to some degree.
Charlotte, the up and coming literary writer, was on the other side.
I didn’t know her well, as she’d only just moved in two months before. No one seemed to be around.
In my room, I slipped off my shoes, removed my hat, and then let down my hair.
The latest copy of L’Etoile was on the edge of my desk where I’d set it that morning.
The culture section was always the first page I checked, and of course there was Benoit Levin’s story, right on top.
It was regrettably a good profile of Anatole France and his new novel Monsieur Bergeret .
I’d hung on every word and then set about finding or inventing flaws so I wouldn’t feel inferior.
Now, I unfolded the paper and flipped back to the interior of the first page, where the masthead took up the bottom third.
This was basically a list of my future coworkers.
They were probably moving into the building right then, shifting things around, planning what to wreck.
The L’Entreprise was a Paris fixture. An institution of France.
An arm of the country’s identity, the one holding the mirror.
How could something like that even be sold?
And what would become of it? What would become of everything I’d built for myself there?
They’d bought it right out from under me.