“On what to eat?”
“Oh.” A bit flustered, I looked at the menu again and said I would have the caprese salad.
Denise started to order the lamb stew. She claimed she wanted to see if it matched Maurice’s, but Vincent reminded her that she had already had it every time she ate here.
“Oh, right. Then I’ll have the caprese salad, too,” she said. She started to reach for the bread and stopped, sipping her wine nervously instead.
“Can we have some olive oil for the bread?” I asked. “Healthier.”
Vincent nodded and signaled to the waitress. He gave her our orders. He decided to have the same salad, and he ordered some huile d’olive.
“For our American friend. She eats well,” he added, all in French. “Actually, very smart,” he told me.
He looked at Denise. I could see she was anticipating something devastating about her unhealthy eating, but he glanced at me instead and sipped some more wine.
“How is your work, Denise?” he asked her, keeping his eyes on me.
“How could it be? Nothing’s different. I get up, and I get dressed, and after I clean some of our apartment, I go to work. I see the same people, even the same customers, and then I come home and help Mama make dinner.”
“You make more money than most of us,” he told her. “Maybe you will support me, and I can be a starving young poet on the Left Bank, n’est-ce pas?”
“D’accord.” She burst into a smile. “We could have our own apartment,” she said, her excitement building. “I would cook and clean it. We’ll get one with a view. We could—” She stopped when Vincent’s teasing smile almost turned into a laugh. “I mean . . . if you need money, you just have to ask.”
“My rich cousin,” he said, nodding his head at her. “So tell me how you came to be in Paris,” he said. “Denise hasn’t told me all that much about you.”
“I didn’t know that much. I know more about her now,” she protested.
“I lost my parents and came to live with my uncle. He was always closer to me than any of my other relatives, despite the distance and long gaps of time between seeing each other.”
He nodded, losing his smile. “For someone who has suffered such tragedy, you seem . . . okay,” he said, struggling for the right words.
“You sink or swim,” I said.
“What?” Denise asked. “Of course you sink or swim.”
“No. She means you either give up or keep going. She keeps going. You’ve chosen a good friend, Denise,” he told her, still keeping his eyes on me. “A good friend is someone you want to be like in some ways, no?”
Denise looked at me with a little annoyance in her eyes. She shrugged. The waitress brought our salads and the olive oil.
“So tell me,” Vincent said, “what should I not miss when I go to New York? And don’t say the Empire State Building. We have the Eiffel Tower.”
I laughed. “I was going to say the Statue of Liberty. It came from France. You should be sure to check out what you gave the United States.”
“Touché,” he said, and we began to talk more about the two cities, what tourist traps to avoid, and where to get a real taste of the flavor of each city. Eventually, I realized Denise was almost a bystander. I tried to bring her into our conversation, but she had nothing much to say, even about Paris.
“Perhaps you and I will be able to visit some of the places in Paris that Vincent has mentioned,” I told her.
She shrugged. “I don’t know them that well.”
“So you’ll be like me, exploring.”
That seemed to please her.
Vincent checked his watch. “Normally, I would suggest some coffee,” he said, “but if I leave in five minutes, I can walk back to the shop before my father has a . . . how do you say . . . a fit?”
“What’s a fit?” Denise asked.
“A little bit of hysterics,” I explained. “D’accord. Denise and I have more walking to do, right, Denise?”