1200 PM Mia
Mia looked into the bakery’s display case. On the other side of it, a man with enormous earlobes and a white apron watched her with his arms folded. Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill” played from speakers hidden in the ceiling.
“That’s a carrot cake?” she asked.
The man said, “Yes.”
“Why does it cost a hundred dollars?”
“It’s a very good cake.”
“Is the red velvet better? Because it costs a hundred and twenty.”
“They’re both very good.”
A woman wearing oversized black sunglasses and a pearl necklace cleared her throat, and Mia moved out of the way.
With a joyless smile, the woman whispered, “Thank you,” and pushed her grocery cart along.
A black Pomeranian sat in the cart’s uppermost level.
The dog watched Mia as it passed her, its tongue lolling from the side of its mouth.
She said, “I guess I’ll take the carrot cake. Is it possible for you to write something on it?”
“For an extra fifteen dollars.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Is that a yes?”
Mia curled her lips in. She looked over her shoulder for Lev. When they’d arrived at the store earlier, she’d sent him searching for candles.
“How about ‘Happy Birthday Richie,’ ” she said.
Five minutes later the baker gave her the carrot cake, set in a blue box held shut with a long piece of twine.
She lowered it into a shopping basket hanging from the crook of her arm, then left the bakery and walked down an aisle lined with bags of dried artisanal pasta and mason jars of marinara sauce.
At the other end of it, two women in identical black polo shirts loaded a pair of carts with pounds of bucatini, penne, angel hair.
Mia stepped around them. She entered the produce section, passing mounds of tomatoes and tubs filled with corn, the cobs still in their husks.
Picking up a peach, she turned it over, brought it to her nose.
She set it in the basket next to the cake.
“There you are.” Lev kissed her neck. He dropped two rectangular boxes of birthday candles into the basket. “Was the cake mission successful?”
“I had to sell a kidney, but yes.”
He laughed, kissing her again, then took her hand and together they walked toward the register.
Mia adjusted the basket on her arm, its handle leaving creases in her skin.
Lev led her through more aisles. Crackers, tinned fish, organic cereals, triangles of creamy Brie.
A girl in flip-flops and wet hair begged her mother for ice cream.
Mia watched as the woman ignored the pleas, tapping at her phone.
She leaned her head against Lev’s shoulder, smelling the pine in his aftershave.
They’d met more than two years ago, at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris.
She had gone to cover it for the Times, and Lev for the New Yorker, and even though she had read his work enviously for the last decade and had created a space for him in her own professional pantheon, when he first asked her to get a drink, she’d told him no.
Back then she had a rule against dating other journalists, one that she had managed to follow for all of her twenties and the beginning of her thirties.
There was no particular basis for it. As a twenty-six-year-old, she had read an interview with a glamorous news anchor who had said the same thing, and Mia had adopted it as her own.
Since then the rule had hardened into a maxim, one of those things she liked to toss out at cocktail parties to sound independent and sophisticated.
But because Lev had been insistent—and also because Lev was Lev—the second time he asked her, Mia had agreed.
They met at a café called Cuba Compagnie in the 11th arrondissement.
Without asking what she wanted, Lev ordered them both mojitos.
Mia opened her mouth to say something—they were in France, and she hated rum—but then he looked at her and she glanced up and nodded at the waiter.
Lev smiled and leaned back in his chair.
He wore a wool jacket and a shirt that was unbuttoned to his sternum; when he repositioned himself, Mia saw a patch of soft, grayish hair.
As they waited for the drinks to arrive, he asked her how long she had been at the Times, and what she thought of the newspaper’s decline in quality.
Mia stumbled over her answers—she had not thought the newspaper was in decline—her eyes drifting from the cleft in Lev’s chin to the peak of his lips to the incisive crease between his eyes.
She tried to parse how she was feeling. On the one hand, she was perfectly capable of asking for a drink for herself, and was a little irritated that Lev evidently thought otherwise; she also didn’t like being interrogated.
On the other hand, he was Lev fucking Archaki.
She had been reading his stories since she was in college, and had bought tickets two years in a row to hear him speak at the New Yorker festival.
He was an old-school journalist, the kind who pinned his phone to his shoulder instead of using AirPods, and who subsisted on coffee and cigarettes as he typed. He wasn’t even on Twitter.
She couldn’t tell if the person she was falling in love with was the real him, or rather the idea of him that she had created, but everything he did, which included ordering her a mojito that she didn’t even want, took on a sort of aspirational swagger that she knew she was supposed to hate, but that she actually found unfathomably compelling.
Sitting there in Cuba Compagnie, his questions started feeling like foreplay.
She didn’t like them, but the tone with which he asked them suggested they were leading to something better, and she didn’t want them to stop.
“Why do you like adjectives so much?” The mojitos came with a sugarcane garnish. Lev removed his and chewed on its end.
“Who says I like adjectives at all?”
“Your article from yesterday on the International Solar Alliance suggests you do.”
Mia ground her teeth, looking down so he wouldn’t see her blush.
She sucked down some of her mojito, feeling bits of pulverized mint leaves track across her tongue.
Two hours later, when she was back at her hotel room, she opened up her laptop.
She had a story due that evening—one thousand words on nationally determined contributions—and she scanned through it as she bit her lower lip.
Toward the end of her second read, her phone buzzed on the desk next to her.
She illuminated the device’s screen and saw it was a text from Lev.
Lev Archaki: How many?
Mia: Seven
Lev Archaki: Told ya ;)
Grinning, Mia stood and walked to the room’s window. In the distance she could see the top third of the Eiffel Tower, glowing against a cloudy sky. She looked at the faint outline of her reflection, a ghost staring back at her, then went back to her phone.
Mia: I deleted them
Lev Archaki: Good girl
Mia: Any other pointers?
Lev Archaki: Stop being so sexy. It’s distracting.
Mia bit her lip again. Pulling her legs up to her chest, she set her chin on her knees.
Mia: I’ll see what I can do.
For the next three days it went on like this.
They would see each other at the conference, and at the hotel bar, where Lev would wink at her as he drank scotch with a friend from the Financial Times.
At night, as Mia was typing up a story about carbon capture or the disintegrating ice sheets, her phone would buzz with more edits from whatever she’d last published.
She needed stronger ledes, Lev said. She was being too timid with her sources.
It should have annoyed her more than it did, but the truth was she was too excited to be talking to him, too afraid that their game of journalistic foreplay would abruptly cease.
Then on the fourth day, while she was reworking a paragraph, her phone’s screen lit up at the normal time, though when she unlocked it, she saw not a text from Lev, but rather a picture of his penis.
It took her a second to realize what it was—the shot was blurry, and Lev’s hard-on was poking through the unbuttoned fly of a set of checkered boxers—but once she did, she yelped and threw her phone on the desk.
She performed a series of indignant, offended gestures, because that’s what she figured was the politically correct response, but then she remembered that she was alone in a hotel room and there was no one there to see her, so she picked the phone back up and zoomed in.
Too much? Lev wrote, and Mia immediately called Adam.
“Is it, like, a full cock shot?” he asked.
“Yes. Well, sort of. It’s poking out of his boxers.”
“Oh, that’s very tame.” Mia heard the rush of traffic, the wail of a siren. “You know, I don’t think I even know what Lev Archaki looks like? When I try to picture him, all I can think about is that story he wrote about the treasure hunter in the Congolese jungle.”
“He won an ASME for that story.”
“It was a fantastic story.”
“I’m sorry to call you about this.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re causing me to be late for a lunch with an intern that I’ve been dreading for a week. Your timing couldn’t be more perfect.”
“I thought about calling Sasha, but she never picks up. Also, it feels somehow disrespectful talking to a mother about a dick pic?”
“Which is weird, because it’s Sasha.”
“Adam, tell me what to do.”
“Okay, so let’s game this out. You want to sleep with him, right?”
“Yes. He gives great edits.”
Another siren, this one European.
Adam said, “I think you need to send something back.”
“Like what?”
“Well, if you were gay, this would be a different conversation, but straight people are very boring, so I think something PG-thirteen would be fine.”
“Cleavage?”
“Do you have the tits for cleavage?”
“I can have the tits for cleavage.”
“Then, sure. Cleavage works. He was wearing his boxers, for God’s sake.”