He believes he has gone native, with his blue pea coat, a Gauloise smoldering in his fingers, and a baguette from the boulangerie beside the hotel tucked under his arm. In his pocket he carries the beret he bought yesterday across from Notre Dame, because his wife won’t let him wear it. His wife seldom indulges his games. But he thinks this afternoon, when she goes back to the hotel to nap, he’ll take the Metro to the Rive Gauche and smoke Gauloises in a café by the Seine, thinking of Edith Piaf and wearing his new beret.
His belief is confirmed just before lunch, at Père Lachaise cemetery. He has dragged his wife there to see the wall where the Communards made their last valiant, doomed stand before Thiers’ traitorous Prussian-backed soldiers, and to visit the tombs of Delacroix, Saint-Simon, and Bizet. As they’re leaving, a bevy of American girls comes up to him and asks, in high school French, directions to Jim Morrison’s grave. With a flourish he waves a smoking Gauloise—filterless, of course—and gives directions in a clipped, busy, bothered Parisian accent.
He watches the girls run up the hill to the Lizard King’s rented plot, giggling at each other, until his wife jabs him in the ribs and says, “They can’t be more than twelve years old.”
“At least sixteen. At least.”
“Still less than half your age. Put that damned thing out, it stinks.”
He puffs defiantly at the cigarette, then lets the smoke curl up and away from his lips like an upside-down mustache. By the time it has vanished, his wife is far ahead on the path and he has to jog to catch up.
There’s a café just beyond the cemetery gates with a case of small pizzas in the window. They’re both hungry, so they step inside. The café is crowded, but he pushes his way to the counter and asks for two pizzas, holding up his thumb and forefinger like he’s seen the Frenchmen do.
The woman behind the counter says something to him very quickly, and he pauses, sifting for the verb. He understands, roughly, what she’s asking, and he pieces together a sentence, stuck on the gender of “anchois.” Before he can speak, though, the woman says, in heavily accented English, “With the little fish, or non?” and smirks as only a woman behind the counter in a Paris café can smirk.
Everyone in the café is laughing, even his wife, especially his wife, laughing at him and his Gauloise and his beret tucked in his pocket, laughing at him and his little fish.
He hates anchovies, but he says, defiantly, “Avec les petits poissons, s’il vous plaît.”