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‘Bret in Bordeaux’
by
Bret travels to Europe on the auspices of
taking the continent by storm. His savings are stored in a bank
account linked to the shiny, gray credit card in his wallet. He
will be in hotels and eating in restaurants, not in hostels and
assembling various avocado and cheese baguettes as he did
during his previous backpacking trip seven years ago. He is in
his thirties now. He is more accomplished and more deserving of
spending his time with the best people or at least the best
people his money can afford him.
It is a lonely opening two weeks. He is
restless. One day he takes the train to Bordeaux, he
doesn’t know why. Probably the wine, but he cares little
for it and has already spent two weeks in Paris pretending he
didn’t. At the train station he waits, hoping a sign will
appear and tell him what to do. He walks behind a woman in
heels he is vaguely attracted to until she steps into a taxi
just outside. He imagines the gaudy American luggage he rolls
beside him to be the source of humor for both fellow travelers
and locals. Finally he gets into a taxi and goes to one of the
best hotels in the city. With his paltry grasp of the language
he whispers to the clerk to put him on the floor containing the
most single women. Only the fact that the clerk is off in a few
minutes stops him from shredding Bret’s passport in a
small alcove behind the front desk.
In the hotel’s fine dining room Bret
eats an extravagant meal of Boeuf Bourguignon with a 1999
Cabernet Sauvignon. He is surrounded by mostly elderly couples.
There is not even a woman below forty-five he can fantasize
about. At his two person table he thinks of the opening scene
in North by Northwest where a hotel attendant calls out Cary
Grant’s name ‘Roger Thornhill’ in order to
alert him of a false phone call sending him into high
adventure.
Getting known, Bret mouths and looks into
the expensive napkin in his lap.
A bus boy passes his table and places a
small piece of paper by his breadbasket. Bret picks it up with
his thumb and index finger. On the paper is an exquisitely
wrought erect penis made from pencil. It is as if Bret’s
jaw is no longer affixed to his head.
Quickly and quietly he pays his bill and
leaves. He walks the streets. It is a very warm evening. An
airplane with a red light blinking floats overhead. Near
closing time he returns to the restaurant. Seeing the bus boy
he twice uses his fingers to communicate his three-digit room
number.
Sometime after midnight there is a knock at
the door. Before answering Bret notes he wears a Baltimore
Orioles tee shirt and frantically removes it, heaving in his
wide, digesting stomach.
Wordlessly the bus boy, who is probably
near 22, enters. He stands by the bureau, draws his hand to his
face and wipes the side of his hair down. Bret offers him some
bottled water but he declines. A car speeds by on the street
outside.
The bus boy casually looks in the direction
of the bed and quickly, as if there were a jump cut in the film
of reality, is on it. After a moment Bret sits down as well,
Indian style in the middle of the floor. The bus boy removes
his clothes and kneels in front of Bret, whose shoulders he
presses his fingers into.
It feels good, Bret thinks. It is not a
commitment. I need to be touched. Yes, touch me more. Touch me
there. Just don’t stop. Whatever you do don’t stop.
And he doesn’t until four
o’clock in the morning. After the bus boy, whose name is
Antoine, leaves he walks to his girlfriend’s apartment
and climbs into bed with her showering kisses on her small,
firm breasts.
Bret wakes up in the early afternoon. He
peeks into the street a few stories below. There is no lunch
served in the hotel so he buys a cheese and tomato pannini a
few blocks away. He wants to buy a gift for the bus boy. He
knows he will probably never see him again, not after he takes
the train back to Paris and buys a plane ticket to the United
States.
In a shop he sees an expensive silk shirt,
purchases it and has it gift-wrapped. He explains to the hotel
clerk he will be checking out and asks if he will give a
package to the bus boy he describes. The clerk refuses and
orders him to the kitchen to do it himself, as he knows the
young man has just arrived for work. Bret nods and walks to the
empty dining area being readied by the staff. The bus boy sees
him and approaches. “I should tell you,” he begins
in a crisp English before Bret interrupts, putting his hand
over his mouth. He hands him the package, smiles and leaves.
In lieu of the TGV, France’s
high-speed train, he takes a slower regional one with an eye to
the money he will need to rebuild his life back in America.
Shortly after departing a man born in Algeria with a stolen
passport places an intricate suitcase bomb in the car before
Bret’s, set to explode in forty minutes when the man will
have debarked in Libourne some ten minutes before. The bomb
detonates on time and the fireball in the car of origin throws
all subsequent ones, four in all, off the track. No one in the
car of or behind the explosion survives.
When the bus boy hears from a cook later
that evening that the ‘fucking Arabs’ have struck
again he winces, stares at the breadbasket he must deliver to a
couple just arrived and then calls his girlfriend on his cell
phone to tell her he loves her.
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