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Chapters (45)
  1. Cover
  2. Blame Iton Paris
  3. Copyright Notice
  4. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  5. Book One
  6. One
  7. Two
  8. Three
  9. Four
  10. Five
  11. Six
  12. Seven
  13. Eight
  14. Nine
  15. Ten
  16. Eleven
  17. Twelve
  18. Thirteen
  19. Fourteen
  20. Fifteen
  21. Sixteen
  22. Seventeen
  23. Eighteen
  24. Nineteen
  25. Twenty
  26. Twenty-one
  27. Book Two
  28. Twenty-two
  29. Twenty-three
  30. Twenty-four
  31. Twenty-five
  32. Twenty-six
  33. Twenty-seven
  34. Twenty-eight
  35. Twenty-nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-one
  38. Thirty-two
  39. Thirty-three
  40. Thirty-four
  41. Thirty-five
  42. Thirty-six
  43. Thirty-seven
  44. Thirty-eight
  45. Thirty-nine

I smiled weakly at the little sister I was supposed to be keeping safe. She didn’t speak French, but when two men start screaming at each other in the middle of a dark street, it’s so rarely a good sign.

Across from Le Relais du Vin, the neon words SEX SHOP blazed red. Up and down the street, rivals in the sex sales business competed using their own sledgehammer-subtle titillation, neon glistening on rain-wet cobblestones. “Ssss, ssss, miss, miss,” men called, coming out from their crêpe stands or their straps-and-leather clothes shops or, not tied down by any job, simply strolling along behind us.

We were actually doing better this evening than the last time I had walked across Les Halles, in broad daylight. Two men had fallen into step behind me as I headed from the Métro down to rue de Rivoli, which has at least a hundred shoe shops but somehow never a shoe without four-inch heels. “Oh, girl, you’ve got to stop walking like that. My dick’s gonna bust if you keep walking like that. It’s rising, it’s coming up, it’s gonna bust. I told you to stop. . . .”

Ah, Paris. City of Love.

In the midst of this sordid world, Le Relais du Vin took up the space of a handkerchief. From the street, we could barely make out the faded gold name swirling above the door and could see only a crowded bar through the glass front window. I hesitated, but the hissing men moved closer at that first sign of weakness, so we plunged in. An American restaurateur couldn’t have fit five people comfortably in this spot, but the man behind the bar, with the balding pate and the wild gray hair, had managed to orchestrate seating for a cheerful twenty. We slipped past a Prévert poem painted above the dumbwaiter as we fit our way between the bar and two round bar tables. The mural on the Relais’s wall appeared not to have been touched in twenty years. The trompe l’oeil painting gave the impression that we were looking out from our own homey apartment over the rooftops of the old Halles, in the days when it was an ancient, famous marketplace.