April in Paris
“Elle, have you noticed anything…odd…about our waiter?” Louis said as he finished his crème brulee.
“How do you mean, darling?” His wife looked up languidly. She was stirring a second sugar cube into her café filtre, and generally relishing the end of one of the most blissful meals she had ever eaten, at the end of one of the most magical days she had ever lived.
“Well—I think—I think…he’s a” (Louis’s voice fell to a whisper) “a … mime!”
She turned to look at the waiter, who was standing in the door between the dining room and the outside dining area of Chez Charcot, the most elegant restaurant either of them had ever eaten at. Their table was on the famous Place des Reves, with its commanding view of the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre Museum, and Notre Dame de Paris.
They had made the most of their day in Paris, visiting those three sites and, in between, strolling the busy streets. Both of them had particularly loved the view from the Eiffel Tower, which poked up through the clouds so high that, from the highest observation deck, they could at least imagine they saw London to the northwest and Barcelona to the south. Though the weather was splendid—a sunny, cool April day—there were for some reason almost no other tourists out and about. They’d lingered all they wanted in front of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, exclaimed at length over the flying buttresses and rose windows of Notre Dame, then wandered into Chez Charcot (two stars in the Michelin guide) almost on a whim, assuming that there would be no table for two informally addressed American walk-ins.
In fact, the headwaiter, in his white tie and tails, had begun to shake his head in dour negation when he took another look at Elle and did an almost comical double-take. Though dressed for seeing the sights, his buxom, stylish wife nonetheless still gave off a certain elegance and hauteur that French men (well, men in general) seemed to find all but irresistible. Now she simply raised one skeptical eyebrow at the maître d’, and his excuses died on his lips. In a great flurry of attention, he had escorted them to a prime table on the plaza, and beckoned over a waiter, attentive but silent in his striped jersey, white makeup, and blue beret.
The meal was sensational—steamed spiced white asparagus, red snapper with pumpkin squash, and finally crème brulee that seemed to float off the spoon and into their mouths. A different wine for each course. They had hardly spoken a word aloud—there was no need—and instead had spent most of the meal simply staring at each other in wonderment at this fabulous, surprising adventure. Their own silence may have been the reason it had taken them so long to notice that the waiter didn’t speak either.
Now Elle looked around and said, “Well, actually, Louis, all the waiters are mimes, if you look.”
Louis followed her gaze and saw two other waiters, wearing the identical clothes and berets, darting back and forth among their fellow diners. “Why in the world?” he began.
“Um… I think a lot of French waiters are mimes,” Elle said. “I think I read it somewhere in one of the guidebooks.”
They had read a lot of travel writing in preparation for this trip, which had fallen into their laps quite unexpectedly when Elle received an invitation to speak at the quadrennial Mesmer Conference, with a companion ticket for Louis—if she would come at once. They had dropped everything and headed for Tri-County Airport.
Elle had visited Paris once before—her parents had performed in a summer drama festival and she had spent a blissful month scampering about the Left Bank without any particular oversight, a shy but adventurous eight-year-old on what she thought might be the first of many such trips. (Not long after, her parents had disappeared, and her Uncle Ray had taken her to live with her mother’s sister, and all the travels ended.) Louis had never visited Europe before, and both of them were determined to make the best of this chance to get away from the Tri-County Area for a continental adventure.
Thus the jam-packed day of sight-seeing and the blowout meal at Charcot. Now Louis flagged down the waiter and asked for the check. With a generous tip, it totaled €500—nearly $550; luckily, Louis had received a hefty royalty payment from his publisher just before the trip, and Elle had given him permission to hold onto it so he could cater to her every whim on their trip. (Tomorrow, Elle had promised to take him to Hermes and do her best to bankrupt him, a prospect he, as usual, found almost unbearably sexy.)
As the waiter made change, Louis gazed with fascination at the crowd passing by—ladies carrying baguettes for dinner, artists in smocks toting their paints and easels after a day in Montparnasse, musicians with their concertinas or French horns, military men in Foreign Legion kepis or Free French forces uniforms, gendarmes strutting in their weighted capes, a teenage boy in knickers trailed by a loyal snow-white dog, twelve little girls in two straight lines, led by a nun—French ladies in their comfortable but sexy heels—
“Eyes front, Louis!” Elle said. She snapped her fingers and he found himself sitting bolt upright staring into his wife’s eyes. “Now you are going to take me back to the hotel and make love to me, do you understand?”
He nodded.
They rose and walked into the famous plaza. Louis paused, then looped an arm around his wife’s shoulders, drew her to him, and bent down to kiss her, thinking for a moment as he did so that they might have been reenacting the famous 1950 Robert Doisneaux photo of a couple kissing in front of the Hotel de Ville.
That thought—the Hotel de Ville—distracted him suddenly. He drew back from Elle, who was gazing up at him with a dazed expression, as if she were a bit breathless at his ardor. “Elle,” he said. “Do you know where the hotel is?”
She frowned. “Oh—well—does it matter? Kiss me again, Louis.”
But her husband was looking around in confusion. “Do we actually have a hotel?” he said. “Did I forget to make a reservation? Do you—”
Then the light flickered—the scene before them, the Eiffel Tower, Louvre, Notre Dame, Chez Charcot grew fuzzy, and faded and disappeared. Louis felt a rug under his back. He opened his eyes and found himself in front of the fireplace in his own living room, entangled with Elle, fetchingly half-dressed in a pair of Ginia leopard-print silk pajamas that he had persuaded her to let him buy for her.
Elle’s eyes fluttered open and she smiled at his look of confusion. “Hello, old tiger,” she said. “Next time we should make a hotel reservation, I guess.”
Slowly he re-oriented himself. They were not in Paris at all; they were at home and they were, like everyone else in the Tri-County area, on lockdown, observing social distancing to prevent spread of the coronavirus, masked when they went out for a walk, ordering groceries online for delivery, and spending long days and nights with only each other for company.
For some couples that might have been a trial, but for Louis it was bliss—and bliss that was only deepened when Elle suggested they use the time alone to take some of the trips they had always planned to take later. First stop, Paris.
But in their mutual hypnosis script, they had apparently forgotten to implant images of lodging. The suggestions had been crowded enough—mimes, baguettes, kisses, crème brulee, Eiffel Tower—that they had overlooked the need for a hotel room, and when they reached the point of needing to be alone, they had fallen through a hole in the dream back into their living room.
“Well, never mind,” Louis said. His wife’s face—bemused, tousled, and bleary—drew him like a magnet. He bent down to kiss her again. But she stopped him with an upraised hand. “Oh, not right now, dear. I need to put myself together a bit. Be a love and fetch me my purse right now, will you?”
“Yes, Elle,” he said. He hastened to the front hall and fetched her prized Fendi sack.
“Thank you, darling. Why don’t you pop off to the kitchen and bring us the bottle of Bordeaux and that brie we’ve been saving, with a loaf of French bread? I need to see to my makeup.”
“You look pretty good tasty to me right now, Elle.” Again he bent down greedily, and again she stopped him. “Silly boy,” she said. “I want my wine and cheese. Off you go!” She snapped her fingers and he leapt to his feet. As he hustled off, she called, “Oh, yes, darling, bring a glass for yourself too!” Sometimes Louis got so far into the servant role that he forgot that he wasn’t there just to serve Elle but—when she permitted—to enjoy himself as well.
By the time Louis got back with the bread, cheese, and wine, Elle was sitting upright, her pajamas buttoned neatly, wiping her face with a tissue. As he set down the tray, she pointed to the place by her side.
“Let me touch up my lipstick and I’ll be ready for you,” she said. She plucked a compact and a lipstick from the suede Tamara Mellon bag he handed her. She popped open the compact, peered expertly into the mirror, and began to apply fresh lipstick with exquisite care.
She could see that Louis was trying to look away, but she reeled him in. “Louis,” she said. “Do I have lipstick on my teeth? Look closely—” As she dabbed at her lips, she saw his face blank. “I have to be so careful with this bright red lipstick, it shows up if I do it wrong. I need your help. Look at me, Louis,” she said, drawing his gaze into her brown eyes, which seemed to him to have doubled and then tripled in size in the last few minutes. “Look at me, Louis,” she said again. “Fall into my eyes. Be in me. You’re falling into me. You are dissolving. All that is left is me. Give me your mind, give me your will, you are mine…mine…mine….” His eyes closed, and with an involuntary sigh he lay down flat on the rug and went limp.
Elle suppressed a giggle at the site of her husband entranced again. “Good boy,” she said. “Now you’re going to take a trip with me, do you understand? Nod if you understand.”
His head moved up and down. “Good boy,” she said. “Now, here’s what’s going to happen. In a minute I am going to tell you to open your eyes and you will open them, remaining deeply hypnotized. When I snap my fingers, you will hypnotize me while remaining in hypnosis yourself, and when we return to Paris you will take me to the hotel and make love to me. Nod.”
He nodded but looked vaguely puzzled. “Hotel…hotel…?”
“Now, listen carefully,” she said. “Before I snap my fingers, I am going to read to you from this book.” She reached over to the coffee table and pulled out a large volume with the title THE GREAT HOTELS OF PARIS. “Every word I read becomes the truth, the moment I read it….”
“Here you are—the famous Room 14,” the bellman said as he unlocked the door and waved them through with a proud gesture. “Your Monsieur Hemingway stayed here. And the great Colonel Lindbergh.”
The history—and the gorgeous room, with queen-size four-poster bed and marble fireplace—drew a sigh from Louis. “The Hotel d’Angleterre,” he said. “I’m finally here.”
The waiter placed their bags—Louis’s canvas suitcase, Elle’s ballistic rolling bag, and the prized hardside carry-on that housed her shoe collection—in front of the closet, then gestured grandly to the bedside, where they saw an open bottle of Bordeaux, a baguette, and a wheel of brie. “Compliments of la direction, monsieur, madame—we are honored to have two such lovely and eminent guests. And now, have a magical stay. Au revoir.”
Then he was gone, clutching the 10-Euro note Louis pressed on him. Louis strode to the window. “We can see the Seine from here—and look! There’s Shakespeare & Co—that may be the most famous bookstore in the world. Elle, this is like one of my dreams come true—oh!” He had turned back from the window to find that his wife, alone with him at last, had already managed to shed her tourist clothes. She was now dressed only in a leopard-print pajama shirt (held precariously in place by one button) and a pair of black Jimmy Choo stilettos with crystal wing decorations on the sides. The sight of her, not for the first time, literally took his breath away.
“Come here, monsieur le famous author,” she said, patting the four-poster. “I’m about to make EVERY ONE of your dreams come true.”