“Merci.”
We all clinked glasses.
“You’ve been here a while?”
“More than a month,” I said. “But Paris is a moveable feast. You don’t get to know it well for years.”
“A Moveable Feast. That’s Hemingway, right?”
“Yes. My uncle gave it to me to read a few weeks ago.”
“What?” Denise asked.
“A book Hemingway wrote about his days in Paris,” I explained. She squinted, still not sure what that meant. “Ernest Hemingway is a very famous American writer.”
“Oh.”
“This is a nice rosé,” I said, twirling it in my glass and taking another sip. “Not sweet and yet not too dry.”
“You’re familiar with wine?”
“Very much. My parents had wine at dinner almost every night. Almost always it was a French wine. My mother taught me the correct way to taste wine.”
“You didn’t tell me that,” Denise said.
“There’s lots to tell each other, Denise. We haven’t known each other that long,” I said, and she blushed again. What exaggerations had she told him?
He didn’t seem upset. There was a new light in Vincent’s eyes, in fact, more amusement, now accompanied by some new interest.
“Most Americans your age whom I have met didn’t strike me as being very sophisticated, especially about wine.”
“It’s not good to generalize about any nationality,” I said. “People are people.”
“What’s that mean?” Denise asked. “People are people?”
“Everyone is different,” I said.
“Vive la différence,” Vincent said, raised his glass, and sipped his wine. “Especially when it comes to women.”
“And men,” I said.
He and I laughed. Denise looked lost.
“Let’s eat,” he said. “My father will be combing the streets if I’m too late.”
I studied the menu, but while I read it, my eyes drifted toward him.
For someone forced to work day and night in a pastry shop, he had a dark complexion, and he didn’t look as tired and unhappy as Denise had made him out to be. He certainly didn’t look unsure or ashamed of himself. Roxy once told me that you could tell a great deal about a man by the way he sat.
“Confident men have good posture, and when they’re sitting across from you,” she had said, “they don’t avert their eyes. You can feel the strength and security. A man who is indifferent to his appearance will be indifferent to you eventually, if not sooner than you’d expect. No matter what,” she added.
I could sit and listen to her lessons about men, about love and romance, for hours, or as long a time as she wanted to devote to it. She told me that some of what she knew she had learned from her mentor, Mrs. Brittany, but most of it was from her own experiences. In the life she led, her instincts about the men she was with had to be sharp. It was self-preservation.
Vincent wore his arrogance well, I thought. I could see that he had a secure sense of himself. He sat and looked out at the other patrons confidently. I think his strength came from his intelligence. It wasn’t physical or cocky. There was nothing like the military demeanor I had grown to know so well in my father. There was instead an air of expectation. It was as if he assumed a role the way a royal might. All the young women working and eating here should pay him some attention. He was a good-looking, intelligent, and sophisticated Frenchman. Who in the world could compete? It should have turned me off, but instead, it captured my interest. I knew I was staring at him. He turned slowly, that smile softening even more.
“Have you decided?”
“Decided?”