Page 135 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

you think?”

Before the meal they smoked, all three of them, and Maman and Julien had
beer in oversize frosted mugs. They finished one round, Julien ordered a second,
and there was a third as well. Julien, in white shirt, tie, and a checkered evening
blazer, had the controlled courteous manners of a well-bred man. He smiled with
ease and laughed effortlessly. He had just a pinch of gray at the temples, which
Pari hadn’t noticed in the dim light of the emergency room, and she estimated
his age around the same as Maman’s. He was well versed in current events and
spent some time talking about De Gaulle’s veto of England’s entry into the
Common Market and, to Pari’s surprise, almost succeeded in making it
interesting. Only after Maman asked did he reveal that he had started teaching
economics at the Sorbonne.

“A professor? Very glamorous.”
“Oh, hardly,” he said. “You should sit in sometime. It would cure you of that
notion swiftly.”
“Maybe I will.”
Pari could tell Maman was already a little drunk.

“Maybe I will sneak in one day. Watch you in action.”
“ ‘Action’? You do recall I teach economic theory, Nila. If you do come,
what you’ll find is that my students think I’m a twit.”
“Well, I doubt that.”
Pari did too. She guessed that a good many of Julien’s students wanted to
sleep with him. Throughout dinner, she was careful not to get caught looking at

him. He had a face right out of film noir, a face meant to be shot in black and
white, parallel shadows of venetian blinds slashing across it, a plume of cigarette
smoke spiraling beside it. A parenthesis-shaped piece of hair managed to fall on
his brow, ever so gracefully—too gracefully, perhaps. If, in fact, it was dangling
there without calculation, Pari noticed that he never bothered to fix it.
He asked Maman about the small bookshop she owned and ran. It was across
the Seine, on the other side of Pont d’Arcole.

“Do you have books on jazz?”
“Bah oui,” Maman said.
The rain outside rose in pitch, and the bistro grew more boisterous. As the
waiter served them cheese puffs and ham brochettes, there followed between
Maman and Julien a lengthy discussion of Bud Powell, Sonny Stitt, Dizzy
Gillespie, and Julien’s favorite, Charlie Parker. Maman told Julien she liked
more the West Coast styles of Chet Baker and Miles Davis, had he listened to
Kind of Blue? Pari was surprised to learn that Maman liked jazz this much and