Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down by Rosecrans Baldwin

Author:Rosecrans Baldwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

22

At the end of January, our shower basin leaked. Asif turned up at eight a.m. because our downstairs neighbor had knocked on his door, Asif said, after the guy’s ceiling began raining when I showered.

Asif lit a cigarette and squeezed into our bathroom. He tapped on the drain. He took a breather from contemplating the situation to brush his shag in the mirror.

The previous week, drunk one night, Asif had told me about his women problems. “Ach, it’s difficult, man, but what can I do?” Those words summed up his whole regime. Asif said he was keeping several chicks on the line. One was a widow who lived near Versailles. She was wealthy, she called him “pet,” and while he slept she stuffed euros into his jeans, rolls of bills in rubber bands. None of which he minded. “I love her, you know? And not just for the money.” Recently, though, he’d begun seeing a new girl, and the widow was upset. She’d said to Asif, it was her or nothing, and if nothing then no more fat money rolls.

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “But my new girl, waouh. From Marseille, you know Marseille? The real France.”

Unable to repair the bathroom, Asif dropped his cigarette in the toilet and said he’d telephone for a plumber. I left for work with an apologetic look while Rachel reorganized her plans.

The doorbell rang at eleven. Plumber: handsome, young, big-armed. He said quietly, Bonjour, and Rachel said back to him, Bonjour.

I had to interrupt at that point: “Give me a break.” Rachel was telling me the story later that evening over dinner. “Hey,” she said, “when do you know me to exaggerate?” Anyway, Rachel said, the plumber didn’t speak English, so they’d relied on her French.

The plumber brought in his tool bag. She showed him the bathroom. He removed his jacket. Rachel returned to the dining table to resume writing. Twenty minutes later, the plumber came back out—he was down to his undershirt by that point—and began speaking in French.

“I’m sorry, excuse me,” Rachel interrupted him, also in French. “I telephone my husband? He speaks French, please wait.”

But when she called, I was in a meeting. It would be hours before I got her voice mail saying she needed help translating Le Colin Farrell.

Rachel had hung up the phone and returned to the bathroom.

“My husband is not there,” Rachel told the plumber. “But, okay, you explain to me. I’m sorry, but my French is bad.”

The plumber nodded. He added bashfully, “I will go slow.” The plumber explained there was a leak behind the tub, beneath the outer layer of molding, and he needed to make a hole—

“Make a hole in the wall of tiles?” Rachel asked in French.

“Yes,” the plumber said.

“But not big?”

“No, a small one. But first I need to turn off the electricity.”

“Why the electricity?” Rachel said.

“Well, I do not want to be injured,” he said.

“Oh no,” my wife said. “No, of course not.”

Soon they were crouching on their knees, shoulder

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