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FIRE SALE
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- I like showing off.
- Your friends are leaving.
- They'll be waiting outside. They love being insulted.
-Why?
- For a lot of complicated reasons that have to do with blood
and colonialism.
I
don't like talking to you because you want me to
be
witty, and that isn't what
I
hoped for.
- What did you hope for?
- You see? Goodnight.
- Stay with me. Come to my hotel, it's up the street.
-No.
- Then let's walk.
- I
feel like going for a drive.
- I
don't have a car.
- I
do. I'll drive you.
Just from the point of view of the professional,
I
was glad to
see that the Nouvelle Vague was creating real-life types, and that like
any
good
style it was accessible in acceptable distortions to many
people. From the point of view of the man she had stared at,
I
was
in
a
fearful panic that she would walk away at any second and leave
me
with a number of authors
I
hadn't trusted for years.
She had parked her car on another block which we reached
ann
in arm, the three Algerians trailing us at distance of
20
feet or
so,
calling her name, Michele, Michele, over and over like children
in
a
street-side singing game, an unexpectedly pleasant escort. We
were
sitting in the closed car when they hung their thin faces outside
her window, arms around each others' shoulder. The two with free
anns
tapped at her window and she rolled it down. At close range
they released mouthfuls of spit they had been saving. She rolled up
the window and locked both our doors. Pulling out of the space as
quickly
as
she could manage, she tried unsuccessfully to run them
over.
She drove slowly, too slowly, through the little streets that bristle
up
from the river on the Left Bank, and soon there were five angry
cars behind us, honking and headlights flicking. When she reached
a street wide enough for passing she hugged it at dead center. I was
unalarmed when a police car cut us off at an intersection. She was
ordered to pull over and the accumulation of early morning cars
IUetched away. She showed her papers .and in the brief interroga-
