Chapter 10
Ten Weeks Ago
The second stop on our Epic Pastry Quest was Comme les Anglais tea salon for its famous mille-feuille.
The three of us simultaneously went silent as we took our first bite of the pastry.
I put down my fork. “This is one of those life-changing moments, isn’t it?
” I asked. Martine grinned. “I mean, the réligieuse was amazing, but I have now eaten the perfect mille-feuille, and I can never leave Paris. It would break me forever to part from such perfection.”
“It is very good,” Noor agreed, “but I think I require a larger sample size before I can determine whether it is perfect.”
Martine laughed. “I will make another spreadsheet that addresses only mille-feuille.”
“That sounds like months of work.” I broke another corner of the pastry off with my fork.
“It is a challenge that I could be persuaded to undertake.” Noor popped another bite of mille-feuille into her mouth as Martine and I nodded. It was a worthy undertaking.
“We should rank them in order of excellence,” Martine said.
Noor nodded. “Of course.” As we scraped the last crumbs off our plates, she told us that she’d painted a new piece the previous day.
“Did you pin it?” I asked. She nodded. The three of us had been getting together when we had a spare hour to photograph and geolocate all Noor’s pieces.
We’d also persuaded her to post TikToks of her making drawings in her sketchbook or at her caricature-drawing job on her feeds.
She drew constantly, and I never got tired of watching her.
She was a natural performer; she’d sketch as we talked, barely glancing at the page, and a drawing would grow under her hand as if by magic.
Her followers loved it, too; engagement had gone up since she started posting the videos.
“Is it nearby?” Martine said. We always did field trips to her new pieces.
“Yes,” Noor said as her phone chirped. She read the text, then looked up.
“I am sorry; we will have to go see it another time. Right now I must go to the print shop of my friend and pay him all the money I earned last week for prints of my Joconde so I can paste new ones up where the old ones are painted over. And then I must go to work, so I will have enough money to pay for the posters I will need to buy next week. It is very annoying,” she growled.
“There’s got to be a better strategy,” I said.
“I would love a better strategy.” She slipped her messenger bag across her body and picked up her portable easel. “But what?”
We promised to brainstorm ideas for her.
She headed to her friend’s shop, and Martine and I decided to walk home along the Seine rather than take the Métro.
It was just cloudy enough to cool the day off, and we tossed ideas back and forth as we walked.
A tourist boat cruised by. I looked at the people aboard and realized that to them I was just another Parisienne, having a promenade with her friend.
A sense of belonging bloomed in me. I imagined an ongoing Epic Pastry Quest with Martine and Noor.
When we were forty, we would still be meeting at patisseries, discussing our jobs and families, laughing, being there for each other.
“What about anti-vandal paint?” Martine said, bringing me back to Noor’s problem. It sounded like a great idea, but Google said it was expensive and needed special equipment. Not the best choice for a street artist.
“Maybe we’re thinking about this wrong,” I mused.
Martine nodded. “Perhaps it is not a question of making it impossible to paint over, but of making it impossible to disappear if it is painted over.”
“That’s genius,” I said. “But how would you do it?” We walked on. A group of tourists on Segways passed us.
“I think I know,” she said, stopping just before we entered deep shade under the arch of a bridge. She pointed up. “Do you see that carving? The head of a man? If you painted it black, you would still see the man, yes?”
I nodded, thinking it through. “So if Noor can make Mona 3D, then nobody can erase her, right?”
“Exactly,” she said. We texted Noor, and she replied after a minute with a heart and a link to a guy who made huge animal installations out of scavenged trash. She thought she could do something similar, although finding discarded stuff might be a problem.
Me: I love you, but I’m not dumpster diving lol
Martine: Flea market?
Noor:
Martine told her we could swing by les puces de Montreuil for her right now if she sent a list of things she wanted.
She said just to get lots of whatever was really cheap and had interesting shapes.
So we swept through the market, finding tons of usable castoffs, including dead electronics, broken costume jewelry, worn-out hand tools, and formerly fashionable scarves.
Since it was almost closing time, several vendors were happy to offload their unsellables to us for super cheap.
We spent less than twenty euros for a sizable haul of interesting-looking junk.
I plunked down a few additional euros on things I thought would be good for collagraphs.
Noor was thrilled when she saw what we’d bought.
“These shapes are perfect. I need to work out how to assemble it all, but I think I can put it up this week—maybe Wednesday afternoon.”
“You’d skip school?” I asked. She really was serious about her art.
She shook her head. “We have the afternoon off on Wednesdays.” Probably to recover so they could make it to the end of the week if their classes were anything like mine. And I didn’t have to go all day, just the mornings.
“Do you want help?” I asked. “We could carry stuff for you.”
“Yes, I would love to have some help. We should ask the boys, too. Perhaps Youssef would film it.”
“He would like that,” Martine said, her thumbs moving over her phone, alerting him that he was now the official videographer of Team Noor.
Noor was poking around in one of the bags. “Oh, this is so good. This will be wonderful. If I make a plan of where everything goes and then paste it up on the wall, will you help me glue these things into place?”
“A plan—like a list?” I wasn’t sure how that would work.
“No. Like a map. I will make the composition and put outlines for every object. So if I want to use this flower for her eye”—she held up a silk daisy in front of her left eye—“I would put an outline of the flower where her eye should be, and you would glue the flower there.”
“Oh,” I breathed, starting to understand how it would take shape. “Yeah, I see.” I looked at Martine. “We can totally do that, right?”
She said, “Of course we can,” like helping execute a street-art installation was something she did all the time. Noor picked up the bag with my collagraph stuff. “Oh—that’s mine,” I said. “I found some junk that’ll make interesting prints.”
“When are you going to show us how to do this?” she asked.
“After we do Noor’s piece?” We agreed that Saturday afternoon would work and turned our attention back to planning Noor’s installation.
Tuesday, she and Youssef went out reconnoitering and chose a site that combined visibility with what Youssef called “Excellent environmental framing.” It was also his idea for us to all wear the ubiquitous workers’ blue coveralls and block off the area with portable metal barricades, which one of his cataphile buddies cheerfully delivered from an électricité de France van on Wednesday just as we arrived to do the installation.
Noor pasted up a poster with outlines of where every piece of junk went and handed us each a tube of industrial-strength glue.
We got into position with our bags of junk and started attaching items while Youssef filmed.
When a section was in place, Noor painted it, working with a can in each hand.
I loved how her paint brought Mona to life, how the broken pencils resolved into fingers as she modeled them with her spray cans, how the padlock, along with the watch face glued to the center of a silk daisy, turned into amused-looking eyes under the magic of her art.
La Joconde morphed into something that was almost alive as we worked.
Even though it was Noor’s piece, I felt the rush of helping to create something, of breathing life into a mundane assemblage of castoffs.
When we finished and stood back to look at what we’d done, I fizzed with happy energy.
I’d helped my friend make that beautiful thing.
I’d helped her make a mark on the city. We helped the faux EDF guy load the barricades back into his van.
Youssef had filmed the whole thing, and he promised he’d have the editing done by the weekend.
People were already stopping to stare. One guy asked his friend why La Joconde was wearing a headscarf, and Noor nodded like, That’s what I mean.
When I got home, I was so amped up from having committed art in public that I wanted to tell Dad and Madame Dupuy all about it.
I wasn’t sure, though, whether they’d think it was art or vandalism, so I didn’t say anything.
It was hard to keep it to myself. The feeling of working together with my friends to create something beautiful and important illuminated me. I wanted more of it.
I was still glowing when I met Nick in our lobby at midnight on Friday for my first trip to the catacombs.
As we made our way to a tired-looking, ill-lit neighborhood of grubby apartment buildings with ground-floor businesses jostling next to each other, my euphoria started to fade.
There’d been an attack by the vampire two nights ago.
Whoever this guy was, the night was his kingdom, and I felt exposed and vulnerable.
Nick broke into my anxieties, telling me to turn right, and I saw Noor, Martine, and Youssef waiting for us outside a shuttered shoe-repair shop at the far end of the street.
As we greeted each other with bisous, Nick said, “Le Bec isn’t here yet? ”