Free Because the Rain by Daniel Buckman Page B

on the gum stains at Charles de Gaulle Airport, forgetting the cop, and how he didn’t run last night with the streetlight in his sweatshirt. In the cab, Raymond Poincaré became Malakoff, and the city disappeared between wiper passes. There was only the Arab, herself, and his eyes rising into the rearview mirror. She drew the coat over her legs, and didn’t think about the cop running, or the way his eyes stuck to the ground. Paris was time for the quiet. Dreaming, she thought, kept you from living.
    Without notice, Annie left Nick for short weeks like this, five days every four months, but never in the summer. Then, it was her heels on the Gold Coast sidewalks, Erie, Ontario, Chestnut with the cars’ headlights against bumpers, the virgin daiquiris with hedge fund managers from Atlanta, road time with Bobby up to the North Shore where oncologists paid big money to love her like a dream wife. Paris was long walks with headphones and Billie Holiday, love that’s fresh and still unspoiled, and the Peugeots with hard clutches going fast past the Invalides. Billie Holiday’s eyes lifted her until she thought herself the golden leaves. For five days, it was only she and the music: Gerry Mulligan and Stan Getz, their sounds like waves hitting rocks, the feral, bent notes of John Coltrane, Bill Evans making the silence loud enough to lilt. She wore the headset and didn’t talk for the week. Not a word. She played mute for the hotel staff and carried a notepad and wrote what she wanted in her University of Illinois French.
    In Paris, she liked being jazz. Just one loud silence.
    Goetzler and hotel johns gave her Dizzy Gillespie and “Night in Tunisia” on an iPod, and hot peppermint tea while the altitude winds pushed night clouds from O’Hare to de Gaulle. There were walks along Raymond Poincaré with the shop windows wet from the October storms, perfumed lotion in glass jars, a king-size room at Le Parc Mur, smuggled joints smoked slowly in hot baths, Miles Davis playing in the taxicab, his horn tense like cats about to fight, and the driver speeding across Pont d’Iena in the early night. They got her these five days.
    The wind quit her last afternoon and the fading light turned oddly warm. The people walked up the Trocadero steps in their coats from the morning. She crossed to the left and walked along the brown Seine. Some pouty Germans went by in a tourist boat, then the winds came again. The river turned choppy and the current went sideways into the stern but the old men remained on the top deck, their hands upon the railings. She held her sunglasses to her face and wondered which men would try offering extra money to dig feces from her rectum. There was no way of guessing the type who’d ask. The first guy who did, a Lincoln Park intellectual property lawyer, inquired while he picked a toddler’s juice cup off the dining-room table. Is a hundred dollars enough, he said. There was a picture of his green-eyed wife, a wedding shot, some gazebo in the suburbs with Honda Accords passing in the background. It was on the mantel, the wall up the stairway, the nightstand. Annie had seen the picture for three paid hours and forgot the woman’s face every time she looked away.
    Later, Annie sat on the Metro, the number ten to Place d’Italie, watching the people bounce in the next car. Only the windows truly moved, twisting and raising, but the people bounced the same.
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    In Vietnamese, Annie’s name was Vu Le Thuy, tornado teardrop, the family name written first. Her father believed the hard wind came before all. Huong meant perfume and a river the emperors once watched. Annie was wet on cheeks.
    The woman from the Lutheran church, her foster mother, held up a card with her name written on it. Le Thuy in thick black letters. It was the cue for Annie to pronounce her name slowly. She practiced for the women that came for coffee, gray ladies with hard hair and plastic flower arrangements on their kitchen