8 I’ve Seated You Together at the Table #2
As soon as the guests set foot on the ground, the cocktail hour began.
A line of waiters welcomed them with a drink and a potato soufflé stamped with the date and Alain and Julie’s names.
The bride and groom were not the last to arrive.
They had taken a shortcut from Fontenay to La Fermette, and once it appeared that everyone had arrived, they exited from the restaurant, greeting everyone from left to right, distributing kisses and smiles.
After the photographs, in front of a kitschy little fountain, Júlia hurried to rescue her cousin, who she saw standing stiff as a board, not interacting with anyone.
“Come. I have to introduce you to someone.” She grabbed her cousin by the hand and pulled her along like two girls playing hide-and-seek in the schoolyard.
“Him?”
“I told you you’d have fun today.”
“Please, Julie, I don’t like surprises.”
“I told you, didn’t I? Come on, he’s very nice.”
“Júlia, please . . .” It was too late.
“Jean-Pierre, I’m so happy you could come!”
The bride threw herself around his neck and hugged him with more warmth than mere courtesy required.
Paulina had perfectly guessed where they were heading: toward the man in the unusual jacket.
She had even underestimated it. Up close, she saw it was a linen piece, white, unstructured, without pockets, fitted at the waist. The stitching on the lapels was visible and in red thread, like the seams of a baseball.
One needed elegance, a flat stomach, and a lot of personality to wear such a distinctive jacket without looking ridiculous.
His tie didn’t go unnoticed either. It was a garnet-colored piqué wide necktie with a horizontal cut that ended three fingers above the belt.
Paulina had already noticed, during the aperitif, that Júlia’s friend smoked a pipe and removed the stem from between his teeth when he spoke, holing the warm base of the bowl in his hand.
“Jean-Pierre, this is my cousin from Barcelona, Paulina. I think I might have mentioned her to you at some . . .”
“Oh, Poline, so nice to meet you.” He bent down slightly to give her three kisses.
“Nice to meet you. Pau—Paulina Homs,” she said, emphasizing the correct pronunciation of her name. Back in school, anyone who called her Poline as a joke was annihilated without trial or mercy.
“Sorry . . . Pauline,” he repeated in the French version, stressing the a and the u, eager to apologize despite not having the slightest inkling of her childhood trauma. Without asking for permission, he had already made her name French. “Jean-Pierre Zanardi. It’s a pleasure.”
“Jean-Pierre . . . I’m not sure we non-French speakers can pronounce the r correctly. Jean-Pierre, Jean-Piegue . . .”
“You said it perfectly well,” her cousin added. She was already kissing other friends who had pulled her by the arm. Before the whirlpool of people carried her off, she had time to say one last thing: “I’ve seated you together at the table. You were the only two who came unattached . . .”
Paulina looked at Jean-Pierre and instantly and shyly lowered her gaze.
“So you’re alone, then?”
“No, no, not at all . . . My husband stayed in Barcelona, he had a lot of work and . . . and someone had to stay with our daughter.”
“Oh, you have a daughter? You’re so young.”
What a pest, Paulina thought. My cousin saddled me with the divorcé who’s shooting his shot before dinner even starts. Or maybe he was only trying to be nice to a stranger who, Julie was right to say, had been left without a plus-one.
“Yes. A little girl. She’s five years old. Gina.” She added details almost like a protective shield. “What about you?”
“Me? No. I don’t have any children. I’m célibataire . . . How do you say it in your language?”
“Single.”
“Yes, single. That’s the word. And I think I’ll stay that way.”
“Oh, you can never say that for sure . . .” She looked around. “It’s a nice place, n’est-ce pas?”
“Yeah, I’ve never been here either. When I read on the invitation that it was in the Bois de Vincennes, I thought, oh dear . . . But no, not at all. And you can see Julie’s touch in everything: all the details, everything is thought out, everything is nicely arranged . . .”
“Are you on Julie’s side or Alain’s?”
“No, no, on Julie’s. We’ve been friends—phew—for many, many years.” He put the pipe back in his mouth and picked up two glasses of champagne from a waiter passing by with a full tray. He offered one to Paulina.
“To the newlyweds!”
“To the newlyweds!”
They clinked glasses.
“Hey, Pauline, here in France, when you toast, il faut look people in the eyes.”
Maybe he was only trying to be polite, sociable, but the move was . . . They toasted again.
“To the newlyweds.”
“To the newlyweds. Now this one counts.” He took a sip, raising the glass by the base.
“It’s too bad they can’t go away on a honeymoon now.”
“Alain doesn’t have any vacation time. Not until August. But it’s worth waiting for a trip to California.”
“California, wow, I had no idea . . . What a trip!”
“Have you been?”
“Yes, yes, I love traveling. Whenever I can, I escape. In fact, I rearranged things so I could be here today. If it weren’t for the wedding, I’d have to be in Helsinki right now.”
“You travel for work?”
Paulina kept the conversation going just to have someone to talk to.
She wasn’t interested in the answers of this man—older than she was, well put together, with an appealing look, but who, in any case, clearly wanted to draw attention to himself.
Up close, the two layers of stitching made the texture of the tie even more noticeable. She had never seen one like it.
“For work, for pleasure. It’s all the same. I’m lucky that I work at what I love. My work is my hobby.”
“How nice.” Why should I even care? she thought.
“I’m in the art world.”
“You’re an artist?” The quirky jacket was starting to make sense for the character.
“Oh, no, no.” When Jean-Pierre laughed, he showed his straight teeth.
“I have . . . I have—it sounds very pretentious to put it that way—I have, I have . . . It’s an art gallery.
I buy and sell paintings. I organize exhibitions, I travel for that, to meet painters, close deals, transport works . . . Are you staying here many days?”
“Me?” What’s it to you, snob?
“Because I was thinking—I don’t know—I was thinking you’d enjoy seeing the gallery. It’s over there, on the rue de Seine, by the river. You must have walked past it a thousand times.”
“I don’t . . .”
“It’s a narrow street with art galleries and antique shops, one right next to the other . . . You know the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés?”
“I’m not sure. I’m familiar with Paris, but usually Julie guides me around. I’m not good at remembering . . .” She set her half-finished glass on a counter among other champagne leftovers. “It looks like they want us to go sit down.”
“The aperitif was delicious, don’t you think?”
Paulina didn’t answer. She was surprised because the man with the pipe had placed his hand on her shoulder to guide her toward the Orchids table.
She wrinkled her nose. Julie had wanted each round eight-person table to bear the name of a plant or flower she liked, instead of a number.
Someone had told her that at a wedding an orchid symbolized fifty-five years of marriage.
Jean-Pierre, more or less, knew the other three couples assigned to their table, and he introduced Pauline Homs correctly in French, careful to pronounce both her first name and last name correctly.
He always added: la cousine de Barcelone.
It seemed that everyone had heard of her.
The women—who seemed sincere, despite being Parisians—complimented her on the elegance of her dress.
“A good choice.”
“It looks so good with your blond hair.”
“Yves Saint Laurent, n’est-ce pas.”
Jean-Pierre then tried to join in the compliment.
But it was too late. There was no need for him to say that the geometric shape had something cubist or futurist or .
. . whatever. Júlia had made sure that Paulina was seated with a view of the head table.
From time to time they looked at each other and winked, or sent some secret signal as if to say: Everything is fine, the food is delicious, everything is turning out just as you deserve.
During dinner, Paulina’s improvised partner did not stop talking. It seemed that the rest of the table silently mocked him, and he kept talking to her nonstop, saying one thing after the other. Perhaps he didn’t know everything, but he did tell her everything he knew.
“Did you like the Schubert song they sang at the church?”
“That was Schubert?”
“The second song, yes. Do you know how many songs Schubert composed?”
“No, no . . .”
“More than six hundred. But get this—he died at thirty-one. By then he had already composed six hundred plus . . . phew . . .” He made a gesture with his well-proportioned hands.
Paulina didn’t trust men with small hands.
“I like Schubert a lot. Each song of Die schone Müllerin is like a drop of honey. And the poor man died without any success at all, without a penny in his pocket, and without ever having premiered any of his operas or orchestral works. Life can be so cruel.”
“Yes, and unfair.”
“We’ve been enthralled with his music for two hundred years, but he died in utter poverty, never knowing that, in centuries to come, he would be one of the most performed and lauded composers. Do you know what he died of?”
“Schubert, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Is this a test?”
“No, no . . . Please, Pauline . . .” He didn’t want her to feel offended in the slightest.
“Did he commit suicide?”
“No, no. Of syphilis. He died at thirty-one of syphilis.”
“I see . . .”