I like to travel, read, write, dance and pretend. At the moment I am suffering an insufferable phase of self-aggrandizement, premature maturity and lack of wit.
If you think you can help me out of this funk, write me at idaman.z@gmail.com
Today, after more than a year of silence, I received an email from Daniel, the half-Spanish Frenchman I had met in Paris last summer. Daniel (not to be confused with Joël, the Frenchman whom I had met in Madrid two summers previous) is your typical Gaelic gentleman – fashion conscious, food connoisseur, inexplicably sexy - with an atypical affinity for tropical women.
Daniel and I met under the most coincidental of coincidences. I was walking very hurriedly away from the horrifying & heartbreaking spectacle of my ex-boyfriend drunkenly kissing an 18-year-old Valley girl. Daniel was walking very leisurely away from the restaurant where he had had dinner with friends celebrating France’s win over Portugal in the 2006 World Cup semifinals. We were both heading west on the Champs Élysées.
A little angry, a lot sad, and not entirely fluent in French, I stepped apart from the crowd, and slouched next to a street lamp. I did not want to cry, so I lit up a cigarette, cursing myself for agreeing to travel strange parts of the world with an ex-lover. In that moment of excruciating self-doubt, Daniel walked up to me, and in the feline way of the French, asked for a light.
Cigarette ignited, he continued to stand next to the lamppost, and we watched the wine-damp crowd rowdily pass us by. He said something in rapid French, assuming I would understand.
“Comment? Pardonnez-moi, je ne parle pas Francais bien.”
“Espanol?”
“Un poco.”
“Anglais?”
“Oui.”
“Where are you from, and what are you doing out here on your own?”
“California, by way of Malaysia, and I’m trying to escape my past.”
His eyes lit up.
“Ah! Malaisie? You are from Kuala Lumpur, yes?”
I was glad he spoke enough English to understand me but not enough to understand the second part of my retort.
“I had thought you were! Your women are beautiful.”
“Your women are sophisticated. Your men, dangerous.”
He laughed. We bantered. A group of adolescents began chanting in front of us, and someone somewhere threw a wine bottle to the pavement. Little bits of glass flew our way, and Daniel gracefully pulled me aside.
“Lets move over there.”
“Over there” was a small patch of grass, an island of relative peace in that sea of drunken celebration. We sat, legs crossed, me with my back against the slim trunk of a tree and Daniel at the edge of the knoll.
“I have been to Malaysia. I was there for three months. It was the best times of my life.”
It was hard to concentrate, engaging and attractive as he was; my mind was on J, and which curve on the barely-legal girl’s body his hands were. But as the hour passed it got easier to talk to Daniel. He was smart, and his presence assured me that even if I had been so roughly rejected earlier, I was still desirable.
He talked of his Spanish mother, whose temper he told me he inherited, and his strict banker father. He asked me about Kelantan, of which I knew nothing of, and told me of his adventures there.
“Why don’t you wear the cover, you know, to hide your hair?”
“I don’t like it.”
“But you are Muslim?”
“You could call me that if you want. I call myself Ida.”
He laughed.
“What do you do, Daniel?”
“Ah, I do not like to talk about work.”
“Please.”
“Well, you see that billboard over there? That magazine?”
“Yes.”
“I do that.”
“Ah, OK.”
“We should get a drink, or at least coffee.”
“That sounds perfectly reasonable.”
And off we went. We walked side by side, and when another group tumbled belligerently across us, he took my hand, and kept it in his for the rest of our walk.
It was past midnight. Every café we came across was either unbearably full or closed. Tired, we rested at a deserted bus stop.
“I think we might have to postpone that drink,” I said wryly. If he asks me to stop by his place I shall bolt, I thought. He did nothing of the sort.
“How long will you be in Paris?”
“I’ll be leaving for Geneva in four days.”
“Ah! So short a trip.”
“Yes. It’s a pity. Paris is beautiful.”
He looked me in the eye. I didn’t look away. It’s better to put on bravado in situations like this.
“Can I take you out on date, for a drink, tomorrow?”
I was surprised. I thought he would have gone in for the kill.
“Well. That depends. Are you homicidal?”
“Comment? I do not understand.”
I grinned. Why not?
“Of course. I would love to have a drink with you.”
“And later we go to a party, over there on les Champs?”
“A party?”
“Oui, it is of work, but I think it would be fun for you.”
My cell phone was rebelling against the foreign environment and refused to work, so he wrote down his particulars in my little black book.
“You must promise you will call me.”
“I promise.”
“And you must seal the promise with a kiss.”
I laughed very hard at that. Daniel grinned, and the very endearing combination of a schoolboy’s smirk on a thirty-year-old face made me grin in return.
“Well, Daniel, tonight you get the three cheek kisses you Europeans are so fond of. Tomorrow, if everything is fun, you’ll get a Malaysian kiss.”
“I have a secret to tell you.”
“Oh?”
“My apartment is across the street.”
I must have looked alarmed, for he joked, “Don’t worry, you will not see it tonight. It is very messy, and for you, it must be made pretty.”
He walked me to a taxi stand – the buses had stopped running and being Paris, taxis apparently do not pick up passengers at bus stops – and we waited for a car.
“I will see you tomorrow, then, Mademoiselle Ida. Good night.”
“Good night.”
