GIVE ME A SMILE
The champagne has gone to her head.
Also, there’s the problem of the smoke. It’s everywhere. The smell of burning wood and plastic assaulting her nostrils; the crisp static of smoldering embers. It’s raining, but that hardly helps: fires spill from the storefronts along the avenue. Flames outside of Bulgari; singed mannequins at Hugo Boss and Lacoste. A bank with smashed windows, turned into an open-air theater. Shirts with their tags still on them strewn across the street.
She finds herself part of an organized and slow-moving chaos. Protesters creep up the Champs-Élysées, their jackets slick with rain, until the police, feeling as if they’ve been too generous, force them to relinquish ground. This is how it works, how it surges. Two steps forward, one step back. The sea as the tide rises, climbing over shells on a long stretch of beach. Some of them wear gas masks that make them appear alien, insectile, and those who do not wrap their faces with handkerchiefs and scarves. A strip of wool bearing the logo of Paris Saint-Germain, or—in her case—a square of silk from Hermès. Often, she sees the marchers—patriots to some, terrorists to others—stop to take selfies. Here we are, and here France burns, their smiles say, and when they are finished, they march on. They dodge giant hoses and sing. They balance their lit cigarettes behind their ears so they can use both their fists.
They inch closer toward the Arc de Triomphe and, from behind police barricades, tear gas cannons pop like so many corks. The mob’s anatomy is the structure of an atom: at the center is a tight nucleus, around which orbits a wild tangle of electrons. She is one of those orbiters—she could be eighteen, but she could also be thirty; the smoke smudges out her years, adding lines where there shouldn’t be lines while stealing others away. She wears a black Chanel dress and a pair of Adidas trainers, and in her right hand she holds a half-full bottle of champagne. Beneath her silk scarf she’s smiling, but it’s a different smile from the others; hers is not wild and tenacious but rather curious. The mild surprise of someone who’s just woken up from a long summer nap. She reads some of the signs around her, and joins in some of the chants, but after a few minutes she gets restless, bored. She takes another swig of the champagne and drifts farther away.
Two people follow her—the first, a camera operator from a French news station, the second, a handsome man with full brown hair. They track her as she crosses avenue George V and stops—finally—beneath the bloodred awnings of Fouquet’s. The girl looks at the man with the camera, then up at the iconic restaurant—This, she seems to be saying to him, is the spot. Bits of marble lie at her feet, the detritus of a facade that used to stand here or on the grands boulevards, scabs picked from the face of Paris. She crouches down to touch them, and for a pure, crystalline instant, the sounds of the avenue quiet and the world calms: here is a girl, her hair in her face, running her fingers along the smooth edge of a stone. But then, on rue de Bassano, there is the wail of a siren. Close and high and loud, like the screech of bombers grazing tops of trees.
The girl stands up and whips her head around. She waits for the siren to fade, and once it does she looks down at the champagne, as if she suddenly remembers she is holding it. With her head tilted back, she finishes what’s left of the bottle. Then, she hurls it as hard as she can through the front window of Fouquet’s.
Glass shatters; a waiter screams. Her hands now freed, the girl searches her pockets for a cigarette.
The camera coaxes her into focus and, beside it, the handsome man laughs.
“Greta!” he shouts. “Give me a smile!”
At first, the man with the camera worries that his friend has made a mistake. The girl stares at them blankly, her eyes wide and green and full. But a moment later—aha, there it is: the devilish curl of her lips. The glint of her perfect, American teeth.
Morning Briefing
The phone rings three times, which for Nancy Harrison is two times too many.
“Good morning, Nancy.”
“Cate.”
“I was about to call you.”
“What the fuck is this email?”
“So, you’ve seen it. Are you sure it’s her?”
Nancy presses the phone against her shoulder and brings her laptop within an inch of her nose.
“Oh, it’s her, all right. I’d know those cheekbones anywhere.”
“How? Or, why?”
“Because they’re my cheekbones, Cate. I gave her those cheekbones.”
A cup of coffee steams on the kitchen counter. On the table behind her, a banana languishes, peeled and utterly ignored. Nancy runs both hands through her hair and turns toward the television, where the Today show plays on mute. Cataclysmic fires in California and protests in Paris. The two hosts, smiling as they make sense of a senseless world.
From the hall outside the apartment comes an abominable crash: the sound of a wall being torn down.
“Jesus, what was that?” Cate says.
“They’re installing the new trash-compacting system.”
“They’re actually doing it?”
“They’re actually doing it. Ten years I’ve spent as president of this building’s co-op board, and I’ve finally convinced these idiots that there’s a more efficient way to get rid of their tampons and chicken bones than putting them in a bag and waiting for a porter to pick them up.”
“Well, good for you, Nancy.” Cate pauses. “I thought you said Greta was taking cooking classes.”
“That’s what she told me she was doing.” Nancy rubs her palm against her cheek and stares at Greta’s face. “That little brat. I loved Fouquet’s.”
Cate clears her throat.
“The good news is that the Times more or less buried it. I mean, it’s on the home page, but you have to scroll down to see it. The other outlets … well, there’s a gallery at the Met named after your mother-in-law, Nancy—”
“My ex-mother-in-law.”
“—and this election is going to determine who controls the Senate. So, unfortunately, your daughter mugging for the camera as she destroys property in France is not exactly a story the Post is going to pass up. We need to decide how to respond.”
Copyright © 2022 by Grant Ginder
