Babayaga

followed by more servings of Oliver’s effervescent chatter, this time about a conspiracy he was obsessed with, a cover-up involving a silver flying saucer that had been found somewhere in the deserts of New Mexico. Everyone laughed at his imitation of a little green man from Mars.
    The two girls began asking Oliver’s opinion on various topics, and Will realized he should know a bit more about the range of subjects they touched upon, the fashionable filmmakers like Chabrol and Truffaut and the new authors he had never heard of—Robbe-Grillet, Butor, and Duras. He knew a little about current events, the situation in Algiers and the return of de Gaulle, but only what the headlines told him, not enough to have anything resembling an informed opinion. Listening on as the subjects went by, one by one, like train cars clattering along through the night, Will was aware again of how, despite the time spent here and all the things he had done, Paris remained vast and impermeably foreign to him. For the first time since that heady season when he was literally fresh off the boat, the city once again felt exotic.
    When he had arrived, more than two years before, Will had earnestly planned to immerse himself in the arts, the museums, the theater, and great stacks literature, to become more cultured, even sophisticated. He imagined taking tours of the Louvre’s galleries and attending lectures at the Sorbonne. But, wearied from the tedious days at work, he had wound up spending his leisure time focusing only on the food, the wine, and the women. He had spent more time chatting up the owl-eyed girls with the straight gray skirts and bare legs he met browsing the shelves at Shakespeare & Company and Galignani than he did reading the actual books. In fact, he rarely got to the books. But it was hard to feel guilty about it when even the basest pleasures of Paris were so abundant and entirely elevating. Tonight, though, he did feel a slight pang of guilt for all the time he had wasted. He nodded and smiled along, feeling the shame of his ignorance as he quietly scraped the last mocha out of his pot de crème while his dinner companions chattered on about protosocialist revolutions and structural linguistics.
    To Will’s relief, not only did all the intellectual conversation finally peter out, but, as the last cheese plate was picked clean and the table finally cleared, Oliver picked up the check too, with a reassuringly confident gesture indicating that he had it happily covered. Then, still laughing and chatting, the four of them crowded into a taxi and began a drunken, fruitless search for a mythical Latin Quarter jazz band. Oliver claimed to know the players in the band. “These cats are mad with talent! Their music is absolutely phosphorescent!” he kept shouting, though after many stops and drinks, it turned out the band wasn’t playing at any place they could find, nor had any of the various waitresses or bartenders ever heard of them. Eventually, the prettier girl yawned and peeled off, leaving polite farewell kisses on Will’s flushed cheeks. He wandered on with the other two as they eventually found their way to this secluded spot beneath the bridge on the Seine.
    The last of the bottle of Drambuie that Oliver had bought off the last bartender had been finally drained dry and the Chesterfields were all ground dead into the stone. Will lay on the bench, listening to Oliver hum his little waltz to the girl as they danced along the gravel path. Gazing past them, across the water, Will watched a low barge slowly work its way up the river. To his sideways mind, the small glimmering gas lanterns on the boat’s sides seemed to be heading off to a rendezvous with the flickering stars above, their luminous sisters in the floating constellations.
    The sound of the water against the barge’s bow reminded Will of being a young boy back home, standing on Jefferson Avenue, watching the massive gray cargo ships churn down the Detroit River on their way to the enormous and looming Rouge mills. Those vast, ugly ships, so large they seemed to barely fit bank to bank, were laden full of the raw, mined ore pulled from the Iron Range that would be forged and molded and stamped into the new industrial skin for the whole wide world. And what were these charming Parisian barges filled with? Sacks of grain for little baby lambs? Ground corn for pecking geese? Fresh-milled white wheat flour for warm morning croissants and baguettes? And