That evening Paris was pretending, once again, that the rain had come as a surprise.
Paris liked pretending that a great many things came as a surprise.
Rain.
Strikes.
Love.
Electricity bills.
The last, admittedly, always had the most convincing dramatic structure.
Jorji was sitting by the window of a small cafe with his laptop and a cup of coffee that had long since ceased to be coffee and become an argument for staying.
On the screen was a sentence he had been fighting for the past fifteen minutes.
The problem was not the meaning.
The meaning was perfectly respectable.
One word annoyed him.
It sat in the middle of the sentence like someone accidentally invited to dinner, whom it was now impossible to throw out without an explanation.
Jorji replaced it.
Read the sentence.
Put it back.
Deleted it again.
Sometimes the only difference between literature and ordinary life was that in literature, at least, you could delete the wrong person with Backspace.
Jorji looked out the window.
Paris: a city people came to for romance and stayed in because of the rent.
The rain intensified.
Jorji had no umbrella.
This was not forgetfulness.
Forgetfulness implied a mistake.
Jorji preferred to think of not carrying an umbrella as an aesthetic position.
He saw the umbrella first.
Large.
Black.
Then her.
And that presented a minor problem.
Jorji was usually quite good at understanding what a person was trying to tell the world through their appearance.
Sometimes the message was short.
I have an excellent tailor.
Sometimes it was more complicated.
I don't care what people think of me, but I spent forty minutes achieving this effect.
Sometimes a person communicated nothing at all, which was also a form of statement.
With this girl, the system malfunctioned.
She was walking calmly along the pavement, making no attempt to hurry because of the rain.
Tall.
Slender.
A short black dress, unusually simple in cut, with a dark leather jacket thrown over it. Fine black fishnets on her long legs, almost invisible from a distance, and heavy lace-up boots.
Black should have made her look more severe.
Somehow it only made her more noticeable.
But the real problem was higher up.
Her hair.
Not platinum.
Not gold.
A pale wheat-blond shade that looked almost cool in the gray evening light and then, under the streetlamps, unexpectedly turned warm.
Her long hair was gathered into a loose braid thrown over one shoulder.
Not a perfect one.
Several strands had already escaped around her face.
A narrow black ribbon was tied at the end of the braid so simply that it looked as though no aesthetic decision had been made at all.
Jorji was not convinced.
At her throat, a narrow strip of black velvet.
No pendant.
No ornament.
Just a line.
Taken together, it should have looked overthought.
It didn't.
Most irritating of all, she clearly wasn't trying to make an impression.
The impression had already been made.
Jorji looked again.
Purely to refine the diagnosis.
Her eyes proved particularly inconvenient.
Cool blue.
Almost unfair on an evening this gray.
The girl disappeared from view.
Jorji looked back at the screen.
The wrong word was still sitting exactly where he had left it.
He closed the laptop, slipped it into a slim dark leather bag, and paid.
This, naturally, had nothing whatsoever to do with the girl.
Work had simply exhausted the resources of civilization for the day.
A minute later, Jorji stepped out of the cafe.
Without an umbrella.
The rain immediately took advantage.
He stopped at the edge of the pavement as though he had not yet decided which way to go.
Almost at once his hair darkened with water, and wet patches appeared on the shoulders of his coat.
A drop ran down his temple.
Jorji adjusted the strap of the leather bag on his shoulder and remained standing in the rain with the calm expression people generally wear when trying to convince the world that everything happening to them was planned.
It wasn't working.
He looked faintly ridiculous.
A tall man in a good coat, with aristocratic bearing, an expensive leather bag, and a complete absence of umbrella.
And that was when he saw her again.
She was walking toward him.
The same large black umbrella.
The same loose wheat-blond braid.
Now the distance between them was shrinking, and for the first time Jorji could see her without a rain-streaked cafe window between them.
She noticed him too.
First, simply a man standing in the rain.
Then, as she came closer, the details began to assemble themselves.
Tall.
Lean.
Dark hair, already wet and curling slightly more than usual.
Good coat.
Calm bearing.
A face that would have looked almost aristocratically grave if its owner had not at that precise moment been standing voluntarily in the rain.
She looked at him a little longer than politeness required.
Jorji noticed.
And, for some reason, did not look away.
They drew level.
She looked at his wet hair.
Then at the bag.
Then back at his face.
One corner of her mouth twitched, almost imperceptibly.
She raised the umbrella slightly.
“Want to share?”
Jorji looked at her.
Then at the umbrella.
“Thank you. I prefer getting wet on my own.”
“All right.”
She kept walking.
Jorji watched her go.
He had just produced a very good line and made a completely idiotic decision.
The first happened often.
The second required verification.
“I've changed my mind.”
The girl stopped.
Turned.
“Too late.”
“Why?”
“Because I've already decided you're an idiot.”
Jorji noted that the sentence was unpleasantly complete.
Nothing could be removed.
It irritated him almost as much as her eyes.
“Decisions can be revised.”
“Some of them.”
“That's discrimination.”
“Of course.”
She started walking again.
Jorji remained in the rain.
For one second.
“So is this still an offer to share your umbrella, or is it a character test?”
The girl stopped for the second time.
Looked at him.
“Come on.”
A few seconds later, they were walking side by side.
* * *
Under one umbrella, two strangers almost inevitably end up closer than propriety permits at the beginning of an acquaintance.
Especially when one of them is tall.
And the other is not exactly petite.
Jorji kept slightly to one side, trying not to force her into the rain from territory that technically belonged to her.
The umbrella had been designed for one person with moderate ambitions.
Neither of them was particularly strong in that department.
“Do you always accept help like this?” she asked.
“Like what?”
“Refuse first, then run after it.”
“I didn't run.”
“You were standing in the rain.”
“That still isn't running.”
“Fine. You deigned to catch up with me.”
“More accurate.”
She looked at him.
“Is accuracy important to you?”
“Very.”
“Why?”
Jorji shrugged.
“Imprecise words start behaving as though they've been forgiven everything.”
She was silent for a moment.
Now she was looking at him more carefully.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“I don't like that word.”
“Why?”
“It gets away with far too much.”
The corner of her mouth moved.
Barely.
Jorji decided to count that as a success.
They turned into a narrower street.
Rain drummed against the umbrella, cars hissed over wet asphalt, and shop windows reflected in the puddles with the kind of self-assurance permitted only to light and very beautiful people.
From the corner of his eye, Jorji noticed her braid again.
With every step it brushed lightly against her shoulder.
A loose strand had stuck to her cheek.
She made no attempt to move it.
For some reason, that was irritating too.
Jorji could not stand disorder that looked better than order.
“Do you turn everything into a philosophical question?” she asked.
“Only things that haven't been phrased well enough.”
She looked at him.
“Then you're going to have trouble with me.”
“Why?”
“I'm badly phrased.”
“That can be fixed.”
“You're very sure of yourself.”
“I usually am, until compelling evidence to the contrary appears.”
“And then?”
“I become more certain.”
She laughed.
Quietly.
But for the first time.
Jorji discovered that laughter changed her face slightly.
Until then it had seemed almost cold: composed, high-cheekboned, with a gaze that was much too direct.
Now a small asymmetry appeared in her smile.
And it turned out to be considerably more interesting than perfection.
“Do you always talk like this?” she asked.
“Like what?”
“As if somebody is going to edit every sentence afterward.”
Jorji looked at her.
“I generally try not to let editors near the first draft.”
“So they do exist.”
“Unfortunately. They're a species of urban wildlife.”
She smiled again.
But did not ask the obvious question.
Jorji did not explain.
Better that way.
They walked another few meters.
“And you?” he asked.
“Me what?”
“What do you do with words?”
“Mostly I read other people's.”
“Dangerous occupation.”
“Sometimes I look at what people left behind.”
“Bodies?”
She turned her head.
“Do you always start with the most optimistic possibility?”
“No. Sometimes I start with taxes.”
“Diaries. Photographs. Clothes. Ordinary domestic junk.”
“So you professionally go through other people's things.”
“Only as an amateur, for now.”
“I respect the academic honesty.”
She looked at him a little longer.
Jorji looked back.
It was enough.
Not enough to understand who she was.
The opposite.
Enough to be certain that, for now, he didn't.
And for some reason, that felt good.
At the intersection, she stopped.
“This is where I turn.”
The rain had softened.
Jorji realized for the first time that for the past several minutes he had barely heard it.
“Jorji,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow.
“What's that?”
“My name.”
“Oh.”
“I decided that if we meet again, you'll need a more precise formulation of the charge.”
She held his gaze.
“Ani.”
“What's that?”
“My name.”
“That's unfair.”
“Why?”
“I just used that construction.”
“Now it's ours.”
He smiled.
They did not exchange numbers.
Neither suggested meeting again.
It looked almost deliberate.
Ani stepped out from under the umbrella and turned toward her street.
Then she looked back.
“Try not to drown.”
“In Paris?”
“In yourself.”
And walked away.
Jorji remained in the rain without an umbrella.
He watched her go.
The long loose braid.
The heavy boots.
The black silhouette gradually disappearing among wet pedestrians.
Then he said:
“Strange girl.”
He considered this.
“Very strange.”
And it was only after he got home that he realized what had stayed with him all evening was not her blue eyes.
Not her legs.
Not the braid.
It was what she had said about other people's things.
He opened the laptop.
The wrong word was still sitting exactly where he had left it.
Jorji deleted it.
This time without regret.