Second Fiddle (15 page)

“What about the youth hostel?” Giselle said. “That’s another hundred fourteen francs each.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I want to go home a lot more than I want to sleep in a bed tonight.”

I took my feet out of the fountain and let them drip dry on the ledge in front of the stone lion. I looked at Giselle’s cello case, with its engraved plate and built-in wheels. We could probably charter a jet home if she sold her cello. It was a hundred and fifty years old. But I couldn’t even think about selling my violin, and I was totally not brave enough to ask Giselle to do it. Vivian wrapped her arms around her violin case and rested her head on the top. I bet she was thinking the same thing.

“We could look for a bridge to sleep under,” I said. “Arvo slept under one for three whole days, and he was fine. The river is just a couple blocks away.”

“Whatever we do, let’s get out of these clothes,” Giselle said. “We look like waiters.”

We walked back to the train station and changed into jeans and comfy shoes in the bathroom. Vivian and I took
our hair out of buns, and Giselle passed around the lip gloss. We headed back toward the Seine feeling much lighter and cooler and more peppy thanks to the candy the Australian girls had given us. I probably should have been more worried about being homeless, but honestly, it was hard to be gloomy in Paris on a sunny Saturday in the last week of May. Everywhere you looked there were little angels peeking at you from church rooftops and the smell of bread and coffee. France obviously didn’t have that rule about a flower box in every window like Germany, but people did a lot more humming and kissing in Paris than they did in Berlin, that’s for sure. Plus there was art around every corner. It’s true that the sculptures were much more naked than they needed to be, but I didn’t mind so much. There was never art of any kind on an army base.

By the time we got to the Seine, we were starving, so we sat by the water and got out the last two croissants and the strawberries. The bread was disappointingly flat after spending all afternoon in my backpack, but the strawberries I’d kept on top were divine. I couldn’t help wondering why Arvo would steal from us and then go buy us lunch. It just didn’t make sense. Wasn’t he worried about getting caught? Or maybe he didn’t want us to think he was a bad guy. But he could have at least left us the train tickets. The more I thought about it, the less sense it made.

I was hoping to see the Australian girls again, but they
wouldn’t have recognized us out of our concert clothes. Lots of Japanese tourists walked by, and some Americans, probably college students. We saw a group of American MPs on the far bank of the river. It’s hard to miss the armband that army policemen wear, and no one walks like an American soldier. Giselle and I immediately hid—she behind her cello case and I behind the paperback copy of
A Wizard of Earthsea
I’d stuck in my backpack to read on the train. They probably weren’t soldiers who knew our dads, but we’d be in so much trouble if they were. Soldiers gossip like old hens.

By the time we’d finished eating, the shadows were long. Church bells chimed all out of phase with each other and in complete disagreement about the right number of rings. It could have been any time between two and seven o’clock. No wonder people in Paris never looked like they were in a rush.

“Come on, guys,” I said, brushing crumbs off my lap. “We need to find a camping spot and then another spot to play music. Someplace with lots of traffic and cafés.”

We gathered up our backpacks and instruments and started to walk down the sidewalk that went along the Seine. The first bridge had a smooth pale yellow stone arch very low over the water. There was only enough room underneath for the sidewalk, with no cozy camping spot up under the roadbed like you get with American bridges. We walked to the next bridge, and it was exactly the same, but this one
had statues on top. The one after that was identical but with flowers all along the railing.

“Don’t these people know how to make any other kind of bridge?” Giselle said, pulling her cello along to the fourth bridge in four blocks. “What do homeless people do around here?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe we could just find a bum and secretly follow him around and figure out where he sleeps.”

“I bet they keep the bums pretty far from that,” Vivian said, pointing across the river to the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

It looked exactly like all the posters, with square towers in front and spider-leg buttresses in the back. We turned south away from the river and headed back toward the Sorbonne because a university seemed like a logical place to look for bums. We turned onto a street called Saint Jacques. On the corner was a little green fountain with four cast-iron ladies holding up a basin of water. There were two trees with benches going all the way around the trunk and a bookstore with green windows and a sign that said
SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY
in yellow and green letters.

“Hey, look, it’s in English,” Vivian said.

It’s funny how your own language jumps out at you when you’re in another country.

“Oh my gosh,” Giselle said. “I’ve heard of this place.”

“Me too,” I said. “I think it was in the
Stars and Stripes
newspaper.”

“This is perfect,” Giselle whispered. “Come here quick!”
She tugged us around the corner. “It’s an American bookshop, and it’s run by this really old guy who’s a little crazy. He has beds in the shop, and anyone can stay for free as long as they are a writer.”

“Okay,” I said. “That would be perfect—if we were writers.”

“We’re liars, aren’t we?” Giselle said. “What’s the difference?”

“Um, the lack of actual writing.”

“Oh, come on, Jody,” Giselle said. “Have some imagination. Everybody writes. You don’t have to have a book.”

“We’re going to have to look older,” Vivian said, already on board.

“Yeah, and let’s write some books while we’re at it. I’ll just get started now.”

“Don’t be lame, Jody,” Vivian said. “You write music, remember? ‘Canon for Three Friends.’ ”

Giselle began to sing the cello line of my composition. Vivi chimed in with her violin part on the fourth measure. They remembered my music! And we’d only performed it once! I could have hugged them both.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m in. So how do we look older?”

“We just have to fool an old guy, right?” Vivi said.

“No problem,” Giselle said. “First, we can’t all wear jeans. I’ll change back into my skirt and blouse from the contest. Vivi, I think you should keep the T-shirt you have on, because it’s nice-looking, and it doesn’t have any words on it, but you should put your skirt back on. What are we going to do
about Jody? Because we can’t all wear the same black skirt, either.”

“Definitely lose the ponytail,” Vivian said. She looked at me with a critical eye. “I think if she puts on her white blouse and wears nice shoes with the jeans, she’ll be fine.”

“So where are we going to change?” Giselle said. “Because I am not lugging my cello all the way back to the train station to find a clean bathroom.”

“There’s a church over there,” I said, pointing to a square steeple with a triangle roof on top. “It looks like it’s just a block away. It’s Saturday afternoon, so most churches will be open for confessions before evening Mass.”

“Are you serious?” Giselle said. “We can just walk in and use the confessional?”

“Yeah, I guess. You just have to say some sins, and how hard will that be—lying, kidnapping, treason. I bet you’ll be able to think of something. It’s not scary, Giselle. I’ve been doing it since I was seven.”

“Seven? Are you crazy?” Vivian said. “Seven-year-olds don’t sin.”

“You don’t babysit very much, do you?”

“Well, I don’t think I can go to confession. It’s not my religion.”

“Giselle,” I said, reaching up to put my arm around her shoulder, “it’s not about God. It’s about clothes.” I steered her down the street toward the steeple.

The sign outside the church said it was Saint Séverin. I guess the main thing with churches in Paris was to choose saints no one has ever heard of. Inside it was cool and quiet. There was a forest of stone columns that spread ribs across the ceiling like the branches of palm trees. There were chairs instead of pews in the middle of the church. We took our places on the right, beside the confessional doors. There were a few tourists walking around the edges and some grandmas with scarves tied over their hair sitting in the chairs. We watched the old ladies go in and out of the first confessional, but no one went into the second one.

“That one’s empty,” I said. “Watch the door for me.”

I slid my violin under the chair and took my backpack in with me. It was dark inside the confessional except for a shaft of deep blue and amber light from the stained-glass window behind me. It was only a little bit bigger than a bathroom stall, with a kneeler, a dozen boxes of votive candles stacked in the corner, and a layer of dust on the armrest. I changed as quickly as I could without making any noise and slipped back outside.

Giselle went in, and I started praying out of habit. I asked forgiveness for changing in the confessional, just in case it was a sin, and then I confessed ahead of time about lying to the bookstore owner, but that didn’t seem like much of a sin to me, either. Not compared to stealing from your friends—from someone who saved your life. I thought about Arvo
lying on the ground spitting up river water, hiding under the bridge, all bruised and bloody, and sneaking around on the train because of the spy guy.

What if he was lying about his family in Estonia? Maybe he just hated the Soviet army and would say anything to get away. What if he was going to be all alone and homeless when we went back to Berlin? I bet he thought we were just another pack of rich Americans, even me. He probably thought it wasn’t wrong to steal from rich people, like I think it’s not wrong to lie for a good reason.

Giselle came out of the confessional in her black skirt and white blouse, and Vivian went in. I got up and walked around the edge of the church to look for a statue or window of Saint Cecilia, because she’s the patron saint of musicians, but she wasn’t in this church, so I went to the back where there was a nice statue of Jesus and Mary and a table with votive candles on it. I wanted to light one. I couldn’t even say if I wanted to light it for me or for Arvo. But I didn’t have any money to pay for the candle, so I just lit a match and held it up and watched it burn out in my hand. I closed my eyes, and I could see Arvo sitting beside me singing. I couldn’t believe I’d showed him my music. Why had I trusted him? Was it just because he’d listened and acted like he cared? I’d never see him again.

I opened my eyes. There was Mary with a tender look on her face I hadn’t noticed before, and then I had to look away because I suddenly wanted my mom. I wanted to sit on
the sofa with her and her stupid-looking sweats and fluffy socks. I wanted to have cake with tea and talk, maybe not talk about this, but just talk. I wanted to be home.

Vivian came out of the confessional wearing her black skirt and pink T-shirt and sparkly belt. She did look older, maybe not like a grown-up but sixteen or seventeen at least. We went outside to the narrow alley on the left side of the church under a row of skinny-necked gargoyles, and Vivian took out her makeup case and got to work. I walked out of the alley fifteen minutes later feeling at least thirty years old. We went back up the Rue de la Bûcherie, and I tried to project myself as tall and fierce as Giselle and as pretty as Vivi. Thank goodness I wasn’t doing this alone. We turned the corner to the bookshop. Vivi stopped me. She wet her hands in the green fountain and smoothed the flyaways in the French twist she’d done in my hair.

“Perfect,” she said.

We pulled open the green door and walked into Shakespeare and Company. There was an ancient cash register on a counter to the right of the door and a table stacked with sale books to the left. Every wall was books from floor to ceiling. A shabby upholstered armchair was tucked into a corner. The middle-aged woman sitting in it had dozed off ten pages into a paperback that she held open on her lap. There were dozens of tourists with backpacks, and a man with a baby in a front carrier who rocked from side to side as he browsed vintage books. A tall man with a whole stack of
gray hair and a big nose was moving books from a box on the floor to a shelf up by the ceiling. No one was standing at the cash register. Giselle started to look for the owner, but her cello kept bumping into people.

Vivian was about to go into the next room when the gray-haired man turned around and said,
“Mademoiselle, s’il vous plaît.”
He set his books down and came over to us.
“Mesdemoiselles,”
he said, looking very annoyed.

“Oui, monsieur,”
Vivi said in her most diplomatic tone. “May we help you?”

“Now see here,” he said smoothly, switching to no-accent English. “I did not book an orchestra. If you must bring an instrument into my bookshop, please make it a harmonica.”

“You’re Mr. Whitman, right?” Giselle said. “Well, Mr. Whitman, we’re writers, and we need a place to stay tonight.”

“Funny, you look a lot like musicians to me.”

“We write music,” I said. “Or at least I do.” I could tell he was not impressed. “Writing music is still writing, isn’t it?”

“Show me a composition.”

“Oh.” I looked at the floor. “My music notebook was sort of stolen this morning, and all of our money, otherwise we wouldn’t be bothering you.”

“Nice try, but I’ve heard this story before, earlier today, in fact. If you need help, call the police or visit the American consulate.”

“I’m not lying. I am a composer. I’ll show you.”

I saw a stack of papers on the checkout counter
announcing a poetry reading. I turned one of the pages over and drew lines for music. As I wrote, Vivian explained that she was technically an illustrator, and did he want to look at her portfolio? Mr. Whitman began his no-thank-yous right away, but it took him three tries before Vivi agreed not to show him her drawings. Time enough for me to scribble out the first eight measures of my piece.