Sorry for Your Trouble: Stories by Richard Ford

Author:Richard Ford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction & Literature, Short Stories, Literary
ISBN: 9780062969804
Publisher: Ecco
Published: 2020-05-12T07:00:00+00:00

Jimmy Green—1992

They were in a taxi, on their way to the American Bar down General Leclerc, to watch the election returns. Rain had begun blowing sideways, three minutes past midnight. The little Fiat, its windshield dimpled and furred with water, all at once began sliding, veered left and (almost) into the Denfert-Rochereau lion, but swerved again, wheels spinning, then sped all the way around the rotary and half again and stopped, facing up Boulevard Raspail the wrong way. “Ooo-laaaa,” the driver said, exultant. “Maximum machine-gun racket effect.”

The French woman, Nelli, had squeezed Green’s hand ridiculously hard in alarm.

“We’re almost there,” Jimmy Green said. “He just wants to make it interesting.”

“Asshole,” the French woman murmured, touching her hair and glancing out the taxi’s smeared window. Cars were pounding by, honking.

The tiny driver (unquestionably a Turk) beamed at her in the rearview, a look of delight and rebuke, then juiced it, spun the wheels in the slick, and shot away. Small-scale near catastrophes apparently pleased him.

Green had several times gone past where the French woman worked, on the walk to and from his good little lunch place in rue Soufflot. She was the proprietress, he thought—of the little photo gallery in rue Racine—or else she was the clerk. It didn’t matter. He wanted to see her closer up. The gallery sold famous unauthorized, unsigned prints for a great deal of money. To tourists. The faceless couple waltzing on a Paris street (which everyone knew to be staged). Two clochards drinking on the quay. The ubiquitous Lartigue of an upside-down man in a skullcap, diving (so it appeared) into a shallow, shining pond. If you bought one, Jimmy Green thought, you were happy to go home.

Each afternoon, the woman could be seen staring out the shop window at the street, her face mingled in the glass with the lurid Capa image showing Japanese officers in jodhpurs sharing a joke and a cigarette, while a hundred Chinese, trussed and on their knees, waited patiently for what was soon to come.

Green had stepped inside with a made-up question about the Capa. The camera? The film? Where it was published first? The woman smiled at him with her violet eyes. She was older, he now could see. The flesh under her eyes was slightly wrinkled, shadowed, her face longish, eyelids heavy. Thin lips, a small mouth, not perfect teeth. The parts weren’t so attractive. But she was—the smooth skin, her hands, ankles, her bland expression pronouncing an expectation of being looked at. She wore a flimsy silk shift with blue and pink flowers, and stylish cherry pumps. Her hair was the red-black they all did, with bangs. A look, Green thought, that did not bother about age. She was Jewish, he somehow guessed, like him—though the French were French first. He’d decided he would ask her to go to the American Bar, where he’d never been. It wouldn’t matter what she said. He didn’t want to sleep with her, just go someplace. He cared almost nothing about the election at home.

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