"Cafe apres le Nuit"

The Green Fairy turned, inevitably, with the coming of winter.

She went early to the café, her head bowed and hooded, her boots crunching in new-fallen snow. The proprietor let her in and she sat by the window, close enough to feel the chill off the pane. She ordered claret. She was given coffee: dark, strong, deliciously bitter. Like her men, she thought, wearily.

Like me.

She was tired of being their muse. Tired of being handed from one to the other, of being admired and abused, of the continual play between drunk and hungover. She was nineteen and felt ancient. Ragged, wrung out, on the brink of being tossed aside for the next shiny new trinket. She had not bothered with a mirror this morning. Her hair was uncombed and her dress lacked the odd button, and for once, she did not care. Pierre had let her in, expecting a favour in return. Tonight? She wondered, eying him behind the bar. She decided not. He was too cautiously avoiding her gaze. Wisely, she realized. Tonight was Henri’s turn, and Henri disliked sharing her with his companions. He would not willingly forfeit her to the café owner.

He would not fight for her, either.

She sipped scalding coffee as the café stirred around her. China clinked and steam hissed from the counter where the exotic grounds were brewed to magical elixir. The back door slammed and murmured voices drifted her way, heralding waiters arriving for the midday shift. Snow fell indifferently outside, frosting the street in pristine white. Fresh. Unspoiled. As she had been, when she first came.

“Why did you come?”

She looked up, sharply. The boy François stood by her chair with a cup of heaven in his hands. “Is that for me?” she asked, hopefully.

He set the cup before her. She almost wept at the sweet creamy scent wafting upward in the steam. Her favourite, as only the boy could make it, her sublime café au lait.

Pierre appeared behind him. “Drink up and be gone,” he advised, gruffly. “We open soon.”

She understood. She could not be seen by respectable customers. Only after hours, when the artists and writers arrived to quaff forbidden absinthe and smoke opium cigarettes, when the music was racy and the laughter raucous, was her presence truly welcome, at least for as long as she continued to beguile.

She had not expected the attraction to fail her first.

“Go back to Georges,” the boy whispered.

“Georges is a snoring pig.”

“Go to Paul, then. Or Henri. It’s his night, is it not?”

She glanced up in surprise. “How do you know that?”

François flushed like a shy girl, but he was in it now and could only go forward. “I know,” he said, simply.

She looked hard at him, seeing him clearly for the first time. A genuine boy, straight and slender with ingenuous eyes and a pale wisp of mustache adorning his upper lip. “What business is it of yours?”

“None, I admit. How can I not know when I am here every night that you are?”

“Go away,” she said, dismissing him as irrelevant.

He made to obey, then hesitated. “Where will you go?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then come with me.”

Again, she looked up, this time astonished. “What?”

“Come with me.”

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen.” He stood a little taller as he said it, as if being eighteen made him a man of the world.

She smiled. “You can’t even grow a proper mustache.”

“Does that make me less a man than the apes who paw at you every night?”

Her smile vanished. “Don’t speak to me that way!”

François stepped back, turning from her as if she had cut him when he had been the first to draw blood. She put out a hand to stay him.

“The truth, it hurts when spoken harshly by one so tender.” She rose from her chair. “I must go. Thank you for the café au lait. No one makes it better than you do.”

“Don’t go,” he blurted. He shook his head briefly, impatient with inexperience. “I mean, wait. I’ll fetch my coat. You can’t go back to Georges.”

She could, but she would pay. Georges habitually passed out on her breast and woke in the morning eager to finish what he had begun, only to spend himself in a brutish rage when she was not roused quickly enough. He would forgive her for slipping out while he slept if she did not return too soon. Returning now, though, would subject her to attentions more urgent—and even less effective—than usual. She could try Henri, she supposed, but she was not up to appeasing his manhood with the required blend of praise and ardent moaning. Jean-Claude performed like the virile hero in a play, sometimes dressed for the part and spouting his own poetry as he thrust. And Paul, Paul was likely the safest of the four because he liked to look and feared to touch, being attracted to boys yet willfully unaware of it.

“Why do you bother with them?” François asked, walking her through the snowy streets.

She sighed. “Because they bother with me. They buy my clothes and my meals and all I need do is be their inspiration.”

François was silent. She fell silent with him, knowing as well as he did that the life of a muse was vastly different from the life she was living. She may have started on the right course, but somewhere along the way, she had lost sight of herself.

“Why did you come to Paris?” he asked at last.

“I followed my heart. Regrettably, when I knocked and his wife answered the door, my plans changed.”

“You couldn’t go home?”

“I thought perhaps I could make something of myself. This is Paris, after all. A world of opportunity, full of potential for a pretty young thing. I didn’t know how cold it would be, or how cruel.” She shook her head clear of broken dreams. “Why did you come?”

“I was born here,” the boy said.

Startled, she glanced up at him. He walked with his head up and his eyes forward, his profile as clean and pure as the snow clinging to his lashes. A waiter in a café, his coat was wool but well-worn, his boots scuffed and sporting new laces. He wore no hat, baring his fair hair to the elements in a most un-Parisian fashion. “I thought you were from the country,” she said.

“Like you?” He smiled when she balked. “The absinthe recalls your accent.”

“When did you learn to speak?” she inquired, tartly.

He laughed. “I learned not to. Here we are.”

She stopped with him. “This is a boulangerie.”

François grinned, digging in his coat pocket. “Upstairs,” he said, nodding to an alcove by the display window. Artfully arranged loaves of bread and trays of pastries so dazzled the eye that no one who was asked could say a door, let alone an alcove, existed beyond the entrance to the shop. François slid a key into the lock and motioned her ahead of him. She went carefully up the stairs, feeling her way after the bright snow light.

“In the morning,” he said, unlocking one of two doors when they reached the second floor, “the smell of baking bread fills the apartment and lingers all day long. It’s the most comforting smell in the world.”

It was making her hungry. François ushered her over the threshold, leaving the door open as he showed her about his home. Small, neat, smelling of bread and sweet pastry, its simplicity made her want to smile and weep at once. The lavatory was shared with the other tenant, a little old woman who brought leftovers from next door almost every day. “She fears I don’t eat well,” the boy confided, chatty with nerves but utterly charming for it. “I ask you, how does one live above a boulangerie and not eat well?”

“I’m not good at riddles,” she replied, unable to disregard the single bed in the corner. She confronted him. “François, have you ever been with a woman?”

He blushed so fast and so violently that she had her answer before he could lie. She thought he might stammer a bit or stay quiet, but he did neither. “I didn’t bring you here for that.”

“I know. I wouldn’t have come otherwise. I can’t repay you for your kindness.”

“Accepting it is payment enough. I want you to be safe and—and—” He cut himself short, clearing his throat and half-turning to the door. “I must get back before Pierre dismisses me. My home is yours, mademoiselle. Please, make yourself comfortable.”

“Should I be here when you return?”

He turned back, suddenly unable to make his eyes meet hers. “I hope you will, but that is up to you. There is no obligation, mademoiselle. I have only wanted to do something kind for you.”

“You do that every night, François. You make the best café au lait in France, let alone in Paris. I’m sure that no one else savours it as dearly as I do.”

“I don’t make it for anyone else,” he said, softly. His eyes came up at last, sky blue and shining. “I make it only for you.”

She smiled. “Je sais. Merci.”

He nodded, suddenly awkward, and turned to go.

“François—”

He faced her again, his blond brows raised above those sweet eloquent eyes.

“You said you want me to be safe and—something. You didn’t finish.”

“I don’t know your name,” he said.

“They call me Anise.”

“I know what they call you. That is not your name.”

“No,” she allowed, suddenly fearful of this intimacy. She had come to Paris on the heels of romance and been dismayed. Disappointed. Disillusioned. Romance, pah. There was nothing but lust and power and misdirected dreaming. How often had she glanced past this boy and laughed at the soul in his eyes? How often had she bared her flesh and taunted him with the others who begged for it? How often had she hurt him with her carelessness, her bawdy drunken behaviour and derisive jeering, yet through it all, every night without exception, at closing time, there was the café au lait, made just for her, delivered in silence and tasting of love.

“My name is Odette,” she said.

“I want you to be safe and loved, Odette.”

“By you, François?”

“By whomever you choose,” he replied. He paused, but when she said nothing, he inclined his head and pulled up the collar of his coat. He left his key on the table by the door. She watched through the window, waiting until he appeared from the alcove and retraced their steps to the café, nodding politely to passersby and deftly sidestepping the horses in the street. He looked neither up nor back, and when he returned hours later after closing the café, the snow had stopped and she was still there.

copyright 2013 Ruth R. Greig