Read Chapter 4: Noise Regulations

The first event was a disaster for seventeen minutes.

At six forty-three on Thursday evening, the poet had not arrived. At six fifty, the microphone stopped working. At six fifty-two, a child knocked over a display of cookbooks. At six fifty-five, Luc discovered that the promised "small drum" was in fact a cajón amplified through a portable speaker.

"You lied," he told Clara.

"I was misinformed."

"This is a wooden box designed to attack architecture."

"Smile. There are customers."

There were forty-two people in a shop that became uncomfortable at twenty-five. They filled the aisle, stairs, and small back room. Coats steamed gently in the warmth. Someone had brought a dog. Sabine had sent wine. A bookseller from Saint-Germain appeared with two friends. Three university students sat cross-legged by the travel section.

Clara stood on a stool and improvised.

"Our poet is currently trapped on Line 13, which I am told is both a transport fact and a traditional Parisian explanation for all human failure."

The room laughed.

Luc, beside the till, mouthed Not bad.

"While we wait," Clara continued, "Luc Moreau has generously agreed to give us a live drawing demonstration."

Luc's face changed.

She smiled brightly at him.

He mouthed something in French that she was almost certain Marianne would not have translated for her.

But he stepped forward.

Someone recognised him. Applause began.

Luc gave Clara a look that promised consequences, then took a black marker and a large sheet of paper taped to the wall.

"Since your host believes consent is optional," he said, "I will draw the person responsible."

More laughter.

He began with three lines.

Clara watched a version of herself appear: severe fringe, enormous spectacles she did not wear, one hand gripping a ledger, the other raising a tiny British flag over a trembling bookshop.

"This is propaganda," she said.

"Art. Words matter."

"Your perspective is compromised."

"Your eyebrows are difficult."

The poet arrived during the argument.

Her name was Mireille Benchetrit, French-Algerian, thirtyish, brilliant, breathless, and furious with public transport. She read in French and English, moving between languages mid-poem. The room became still.

Clara had spent years at literary events, many of them expensive, polished, and emotionally dead. This was different. People were pressed against shelves. Wine glasses sat on the floor. A toddler slept under the table of new releases. Rain rattled the front window while Mireille read about her grandmother's kitchen in Oran and her own first winter in Paris.

When she finished, nobody moved for a second.

Then the applause came hard and warm.

They sold thirty-eight books.

After closing, Clara locked the door and leaned against it.

"Thirty-eight."

Luc was collecting glasses. "I can count."

"Thirty-eight books in two hours."

"Thirty-nine."

"What?"

He held up one of his own.

"A man bought this and hid it under his coat because he did not want me to sign it. I respect him."

Clara laughed.

They cleaned in companionable exhaustion. Luc stacked chairs. Clara swept biscuit crumbs and wine cork fragments from the floor. At eleven, the shop finally looked like itself again.

"Food," Luc said.

"I'm too tired."

"That is not a French answer."

He disappeared upstairs and returned ten minutes later with a pan, half a baguette, cheese, and two plates.

"You cook?"

"I heat things with confidence."

He made omelettes on the tiny hotplate in the staff room. They ate at the counter with the lights dimmed, the blue frontage reflecting in the dark glass.

"You were good tonight," Luc said.

"At exploiting you?"

"At making strangers feel they had arrived somewhere."

Clara looked down at her plate.

Compliments had become suspicious after Daniel. Every kind word from him now seemed retroactively contaminated, a coin from a country that no longer existed.

Luc, perhaps sensing the hesitation, changed subject.

"Your French is terrible."

"Thank you."

"But improving."

"My aunt spoke to me in French for years. I answered in English out of spite."

"A strong pedagogical method."

"She said I had the accent of a BBC weather presenter being chased by bees."

Luc nearly choked on his wine.

"I would have liked Marianne."

"You did like Marianne."

"Yes, but now I like her more."

There was a softness in the room after laughter, a small quiet that neither rushed to fill.

Then the pipes clanged overhead.

Clara looked up.

"Your building is haunted."

"Old plumbing."

"Same thing."

Luc gathered the plates.

"Tomorrow I am buying a rug."

Clara blinked. "For your rolling chair?"

"Do not become emotional."

"I wouldn't dream of it."

"And you will put felt pads on the ladder wheels."

"Extortion."

"Negotiation."

"French bargaining?"

"Exactly."

They shook hands over the counter.

Luc's fingers were warm, ink-stained at the knuckles.

The contact lasted no longer than necessary.

Clara noticed anyway.

When he went upstairs, his footsteps were quieter than usual.

For the first time since arriving in Paris, Clara remained in the shop after closing not because she dreaded going home, but because she did not want the evening to end.