“I am,” she said.
They kissed on the cheek, and when he asked if she would have a coffee with him, she said yes.
“Your friend looks angry. Homicidally angry.”
Pari glanced behind her, saw Collette standing with Eric, still chanting and pumping her fist but also, absurdly, glaring at the two of them. Pari swallowed back laughter—that would have wrought irreparable damage. She shrugged apologetically and ducked away.
They went to a small café and sat at a table by the window. He ordered them coffee and a custard mille-feuille each. Pari watched him speak to the waiter in the tone of genial authority that she recalled well and felt the same flutter in the gut that she had as a girl when he would come over to pick up Maman. She felt suddenly self-conscious, of her bitten fingernails, her unpowdered face, her hair hanging in limp curls—she wished now that she’d dried it after the shower, but she’d been late, and Collette had been pacing like a zoo animal.
“I hadn’t pegged you as the protesting type,” Julien said, lighting her cigarette for her.
“I’m not. That was more guilt than conviction.”
“Guilt? Over seal hunting?”
“Over Collette.”
“Ah. Yes. You know I think I may be a little frightened of her.”
“We all are.”
They laughed. He reached across the table and touched her scarf. He dropped his hand. “It would be trite to say that you’re all grown up, so I won’t. But you do look ravishing, Pari.”
She pinched the lapel of her raincoat. “What, in this Clouseau outfit?” Collette had told her it was a stupid habit, this self-deprecating clowning around with which Pari tried to mask her nervousness around men she was attracted to. Especially when they complimented her. Not for the first time, and far from the last, she envied Maman her naturally self-assured disposition.
“Next you’ll say I’m living up to my name,” she said.
“Ah, non. Please. Too obvious. There is an art to complimenting a woman, you know.”
“No. But I’m certain you do.”
The waiter brought the pastries and coffee. Pari focused on the waiter’s hands as he arranged the cups and plates on the table, the palms of her own hands blooming with sweat. She had had only four lovers in her lifetime—a modest number, she knew, certainly compared to Maman at her age, even Collette. She was too watchful, too sensible, too compromising and adaptable, on the whole steadier and less exhausting than either Maman or Collette. But these were not qualities that drew men in droves. And she hadn’t loved any of them—though she had lied to one and said she did—but pinned beneath each of them she had thoughts of Julien, of him and his beautiful face, which seemed to come with its own private lighting.
As they ate, he talked about his work. He said he had quit teaching some time ago. He had worked on debt sustainability at the IMF for a few years. The best part of that had been the traveling, he said.
“Where to?”
“Jordan, Iraq. Then I took a couple of years to write a book on informal economies.”
“Were you published?”
“That is the rumor.” He smiled. “I work for a private consulting firm now here in Paris.”
“I want to travel too,” Pari said. “Collette keeps saying we should go to Afghanistan.”
“I suspect I know why she would want to go.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about it. Going back there, I mean. I don’t care about the hashish, but I do want to travel the country, see where I was born. Maybe find the old house where my parents and I lived.”
“I didn’t realize you had this compulsion.”
“I’m curious. I mean, I remember so little.”
“I think one time you said something about a family cook.”
Pari was inwardly flattered that he recalled something she had told him so many years before. He must have thought of her, then, in the intervening time. She must have been on his mind.
“Yes. His name was Nabi. He was the chauffeur too. He drove my father’s car, a big American car, blue with a tan top. I remember it had an eagle’s head on the hood.”
Later, he asked, and she told him, about her studies and her focus on complex variables. He listened in a way that Maman never did—Maman, who seemed bored by the subject and mystified by Pari’s passion for it. Maman couldn’t even feign interest. She made lighthearted jokes that, on the surface, appeared to poke fun at her own ignorance. Oh là là, she would say, grinning, my head! My head! Spinning like a totem! I’ll make you a deal, Pari. I’ll pour us some tea, and you return to the planet, d’accord? She would chuckle, and Pari would humor her, but she sensed an edge to these jokes, an oblique sort of chiding, a suggestion that her knowledge had been judged esoteric and her pursuit of it frivolous. Frivolous. Which was rich, Pari thought, coming from a poet, though she would never say so to her mother.
Julien asked what she saw in mathematics and she said she found it comforting.
“I might have chosen ‘daunting’ as a more fitting adjective,” he said.
“It is that too.”
She said there was comfort to be found in the permanence of mathematical truths, in the lack of arbitrariness and the absence of ambiguity. In knowing that the answers may be elusive, but they could be found. They were there, waiting, chalk scribbles away.
“Nothing like life, in other words,” he said. “There, it’s questions with either no answers or messy ones.”
“Am I that transparent?” She laughed and hid her face with a napkin. “I sound like an idiot.”
“Not at all,” he said. He plucked away the napkin. “Not at all.”
“Like one of your students. I must remind you of your students.”
He asked more questions, through which Pari saw that he had a working knowledge of analytic number theory and was, at least in passing, familiar with Carl Gauss and Bernhard Riemann. They spoke until the sky darkened. They drank coffee, and then beer, which led to wine. And then, when it could not be delayed any longer, Julien leaned in a bit and said in a polite, dutiful tone, “And, tell me, how is Nila?”
Pari puffed her cheeks and let the air out slowly.
Julien nodded knowingly.
“She may lose the bookstore,” Pari said.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Business has been declining for years. She may have to shut it down. She wouldn’t admit to it, but that would be a blow. It would hit her hard.”