Chapter Six
I made the grave error of googling “painting plaster walls” and went down a rabbit hole that even Alice in Wonderland would have found overwhelming. Two hours and nine YouTube videos later, I thought I was ready. But standing in an empty room with twelve-foot ceilings, windows almost as tall, with crown molding and a picture rail, not to mention base molding almost a foot high and two doors, I could feel my confidence slipping away slowly like water down a clogged drain.
“You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?” Bing asked, straight-faced but with laughter bubbling just under the surface of his voice.
“Shut up,” I muttered between clenched teeth. “We start with the ceiling. Then walls. Moldings and trim last. All perfectly logical.”
“Perfectly.” He cleared his throat. “But shouldn’t we prime first? You’ve got new plaster and some water staining.”
Right. Primer. I knew that. I looked at the cans lined up on the floor. I had primer. Good start. “Of course, we’ll prime first. What do you want? Ceiling or walls?”
He looked carefully at the tall but somewhat disreputable-looking ladder in the middle of the room. “How are you with heights?”
Did I want to get up on that ladder and try to balance myself while maneuvering a paint roller at the end of a six-foot pole? Did I want to have to climb up and down that ladder several times to put new paint on the roller, as well as moving the ladder from one place to the other? Did I want to crane my neck while squinting up at an almost-white ceiling to make sure I was covering every inch with primer that was almost the exact same color?
No. Of course not. “I have no problem with heights at all.”
His mouth twitched. “Why don’t I take the ceiling first?”
I did not throw myself at his feet, weeping with relief. “Sounds like a plan.”
We spread tarps, which the hotel seemed to have in abundance, opened paint cans, and poured.
“Maybe we should have gotten one of those sprayer things?” I asked, half to myself.
“Have you ever used one before?” Bing asked.
“No. But how hard can it be? Point and spray, right?”
He made a noise that may or may not have been a snort. “It’s a bit more complicated than that,” he said in a tone that suggested I should have known.
I was willing to take his word for it. Besides, I had rollers, brushes, and poles, not to mention trays and tarps. I had everything I needed.
I loaded up my roller and began to paint the wall. Apply the paint in a W pattern, I kept thinking. W. And another W. And another. Then reload the roller and do it all over again. And again. And again. And …
“Ah, Lucia?”
I glanced up at Bing. He had managed to prime half the ceiling in the time it had taken me to cover the wall between two of the windows. He did not have primer splashed halfway up his arms. His fingers were not blotchy. His T-shirt was not spattered.
“Yes?”
He backed down the ladder and put down his roller. “May I make a suggestion?”
Oh, please, God, yes. “Sure.”
“You need longer strokes. Load up your roller.”
I dipped the roller into the paint tray and moved it back and forth.
“Just once or twice is sufficient,” Bing told me. “The roller can only hold so much. Physics, you know?”
Really? It’s physics?
“May I?” he asked.
May he what? I nodded.
He turned me to face the wall and stood directly behind me, his chest against my back, and I swear I could feel his heartbeat. He reached around and covered my hand with his.
“Longer strokes,” he said again, moving my arm up and then down in a sweeping motion. “See?”
“Yep.” I did see. I was also having trouble breathing, and the heat of him against me was more distracting than it had a right to be.
He let go of my hand and stepped back. “Go on.”
I reloaded the brush and tried again. Why did I think those silly little W shapes were going to get the job done?
“Better?”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
He went back up the ladder, and we continued to work in silence.
Once I got into a different rhythm, things moved more quickly, but Bing was done with the ceiling long before I was done with the walls. He switched from roller to brush and began to work around the windows and molding.
I could feel a whole new set of aches starting in both of my arms and my back. Was I really this out of shape? I mentally shook my head. No, I wasn’t. I had to stop beating myself up for things that were out of my control. If I had sore and achy muscles tomorrow, it would be because I hadn’t used them for anything as strenuous as painting walls in years.
“How about a break?” Bing suggested. “I’ll make some espresso.”
I tried not to look too relieved. “That would be great, thanks. I could use a pick-me-up.”
I started to wipe my hands on my thrift store jeans, then stopped and looked around for the rags I knew I had brought in for the sole purpose of wiping my hands. They were in a small pile on the other side of the room. As I stepped off the tarp to get them, I looked back to see a trail of faint footprints on the scuffed wooden floor.
How had I managed to get primer on the bottom of my shoes? I picked up a rag, wiped my hands, then knelt and tried to wipe the faint footprint. Instead of magically disappearing into the rag, it became a larger, slightly fainter footprint, more a milky sort of blotch that seemed to grow larger with each swipe. I stood to get another rag. I also had primer on the knees of my jeans, because there were new spots in the exact area where I had tried to clean. I took a step back. Another footprint.
I closed my eyes and took several long, deep breaths. This was not terrible. This was easily fixable. All I had to do was strip off all my clothes and hope that I hadn’t gotten any primer on my actual skin.
“Lucia?”
I opened my eyes.
Bing was standing in the doorway, holding a small tray and looking at me in an odd sort of way. “What did you do now?”
I managed a big smile instead of hurling the entire bucket of paint at him. “I didn’t do anything. I just tried to walk from one part of the room to the other.”
He shook his head and put on a “Not again” kind of expression. “And yet you somehow managed to create a disaster.”
“This,” I said, trying to keep my voice level, “is not a disaster. It’s just a bit of a mess. I’m tracking footprints everywhere, but all I have to do is strip naked to clean them up.”
“Well, I doubt that’s true, but I’ll be happy to watch and take notes if you really want to try it out.” His mouth twitched. “You can’t clean up with dry rags, Lucia.”
“Why not? Is that another physics thing?”
He shook his head impatiently. “No. It’s just a common-sense thing.”
“You’re suggesting that I lack common sense.” Just three minutes ago, he was the sweet, thoughtful man suggesting a break and making espresso. Now, he was back to being an insufferable know-it-all.
“Well, you’re the one tracking primer all over the floor and then trying to clean it with dry rags,” he said.
“And perhaps it’s because I have never primed or painted rooms on this scale and am ignorant of the process, rather than lacking common sense.”
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “That’s another possibility,” he said. “Why don’t you take off your shoes, follow me, have a little espresso, and we’ll figure this all out.”
He turned and was gone. I slipped off my shoes, balanced carefully as I checked to make sure there wasn’t anything on my socks, and padded after him.
He wasn’t in the salon. He was sitting outside on the patio, pouring espresso from a small copper pot into tiny china cups. The air was still. I sat and took a sip, closed my eyes, and felt the bitter coffee against my throat. The jolt came a few seconds later, and I opened my eyes. He was looking at me with that half smile on his lips.
I wanted to ask him if he was always such an insufferable jackass. I wanted to wipe that slightly smug smile off his face. I also wanted to kiss that smile off his face, a thought that came out of left field and threw me off. So …
“Do you believe there’s a ghost?” I asked him.
He raised both eyebrows. “Where on earth did that come from?”
I shrugged. “I like it out here. No bad juju. In fact, I’m more relaxed out here than anywhere else in the hotel.”
“Maybe because this is one of the few places in the hotel that doesn’t need a massive overhaul?”
“I hadn’t thought about it quite like that. You’re probably right.”
He leaned back. “Some people are more intuitive than others. Claudine is convinced. She says she feels her, the ghost. Karl and Vera also have said they can tell when she’s here. And Marie Claude, why, she feels like this spirit is a long-lost friend. But then, she is a very fanciful young woman. I have never felt anything at all, in all the years I’ve been here. But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe. I’ve lived long enough to know that you should never discount another person’s beliefs just because they aren’t in line with your own.”
“Wise words.”
He chuckled. “I’m old.”
“How old?”
“Fifty-five.”
I sniffed. “That’s not old. Sixty is the new forty, haven’t you heard?”
He smiled. “They have been fifty-five very long years.” He shrugged. “But they mostly have been good years.” He stretched out his legs. “How about you?”
I drank more espresso. “I’ll be fifty in three months. I had planned on retiring at fifty. I had a bunch of money in a private pension fund, managed by Fielding Enterprises. I had a separate IRA. I had my eye on a little condo in Cape Cod, right on the bay, where I was going to spend the next thirty or so years sitting on a beach and writing bad poetry. Then Tony Fielding cleaned out all the money—mine and everyone else’s who worked for him—and dropped off the face of the earth. I spent every penny of my IRA to keep out of jail. The little condo is still there, though. I check on it occasionally. It’s a rental now.”
He reached over and put his hand on my arm, giving it a gentle squeeze. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
I took a breath. I had talked this out so many times—with myself, my lawyers, Julia, my parents—but I heard words coming out of my mouth I had never said before. “He asked me to go away with him. I didn’t know at the time what he was planning. But he asked me, just a few weeks before it happened, if I would run away with him, leave everything behind and spend the rest of our days together in a cabin in the woods somewhere. I said no.” I moved away from him, just enough that he dropped his hand. “I didn’t think he was serious. Who says something like that and means it?” I put my empty cup on the tray and closed my eyes again.
“Knowing what you know now, would you have said yes?”
I felt tears begin, tears I thought had long ago been cried out and brushed away. “I loved him. With all my heart and soul. I would have followed him anywhere.”
I felt the wetness on my cheeks, and then the cool air dried them, and finally, I opened my eyes and Bing was still just sitting, his arms folded against his chest. He looked over at me and spoke quietly. “We need to clean up the floor and finish priming our room.”
I nodded. “Yes. And tomorrow we paint, and by the end of the week, we can move in furniture and maybe have one room complete.”
“Hopefully, things will speed up as we figure out what works and what doesn’t,” he said.
“Hopefully.”
“And on the weekends, Claudine and Colin will help.”
“Yes.”
“And once Raoul is done with all his work, I’m sure he’ll pitch in.”
“Yes.”
“So, you have a plan.”
I managed a smile. “I always have a plan.”
He was still, then nodded. “Yes. I’m sure you do.”
Bing met me as I crossed the courtyard, walking into the hotel. He stood in front of me and shook his head.
“Change,” he said briefly.
“Why?” I was dressed in my painting uniform: rolled-up men’s jeans and a now paint-spattered T-shirt.
“Because it’s Saturday, and we’re going to the market.”
Right, Saturday market. I was about to argue. After all, we’d just started getting into a rhythm with the painting of the rooms. But I felt the ache in my shoulders, felt the new blister on my thumb, and nodded. “Change into what?”
He shrugged. “I’m not familiar with your wardrobe. All I can tell you is that Frenchwomen dress well to walk the dog. And make sure you have comfortable shoes.”
Fifteen minutes later, in a pair of black linen pants and a colorful tunic, with my feet in comfy oxfords and my newly acquired mesh shopping bag over my shoulder, we set out.
It was a fairly short walk. Bing pointed out a few landmarks, gave a brief history lesson of the rebellious Bretons, and as we suddenly turned a corner, I stopped and stared.
Sloping gently down an incline, the morning sun was bright on the various stalls and vendors that lined the cobblestone street before me. All was color and noise, stretching out for what seemed to be forever. Was there an end to this? And if there was, how could I possibly run this gauntlet with just one single mesh bag?
Everything I saw I wanted to buy: fresh flowers, live plants, vegetables of every description. Separate stalls for herbs, mushrooms, leafy greens I’d never seen before in my life, tomatoes in shapes and colors that defied logic, fruit in woven baskets that seemed to mock the grocery stores of what I thought was the greatest food city in the world, New York.
Bing knew some of the vendors and greeted them by name. I just followed him, mouth hanging open, occasionally stopping because I simply could not take another step without six of those small, blush-red apples, a bunch of fragrant lilies, or a basket of pearl onions. Just when I thought I had seen it all, we turned into a row of prepared foods, men and women cooking on giant grills and propane-fueled cooktops. My mouth began to water, and we stopped to buy a few pastries, delicate buttery rolls wrapped around berries and honey.
“We’ll come back and get something for lunch,” Bing said in my ear. “Come on.”
Inside a large, lofty building were the butchers. Meat and poultry and fish lay on beds of ice. Here were the cheese sellers and smiling women selling pots of homemade jam and jars of honey.
Bing had his favorites, and he bargained loudly and with a smile. Some sort of fish I’d never seen before, not even in an aquarium. A piece of beef as red as blood, a chicken small and pink.
“Why doesn’t meat look like this in the States?” I asked.
“Here, the small farmer is encouraged. All these people sell their own goods, not something raised or bred for some megacorporation.” We watched as two thick pork chops were wrapped in brown paper. “This is how meat is supposed to look.” He grinned at me. “Something else you’ll have to get used to.”
Finally, we found an empty bench and opened cardboard containers filled with something Bing had purchased from a smiling woman wearing a hijab. I didn’t know what I was eating, but it was delicious: rice and chopped vegetables and spicy, tender chicken in strips.
“You come here every week?” I asked, taking a swig of cold cider from a bottle.
He nodded. “I don’t cook much. I only have two burners and not much skill, but with this food, it’s hard to make a bad meal.” He grinned. “Unless you’re Claudine.”
“Really?”
He brushed the crumbs from the flatbread off his fingers. “Never accept an invitation for anything other than wine and cheese. Marie Claude is an excellent cook. So is Vera. Colin still prepares food in the English style he grew up with, so unless you like overcooked lamb and mushy peas, find an excuse.”
“Don’t you all have communal meals? Big potluck feasts? Aren’t you all one big happy family?”
He stretched out his legs. “Yes and no. Most of us have been living at the hotel for a very long time. We used to share meals more often. But we all value each other’s privacy very much. We have to, or we’d become too much like family and start quarreling with each other over the littlest things. As it is, we all try to live our separate lives. And when we do get together, we tend to enjoy each other’s company very much.”
I was full. Actually, I’d been full three-quarters of the way through the container, but it was so good I’d finished every bite. “Has there ever been someone living at the hotel who didn’t fit in?”
He pursed his lips and thought. “Well, we’ve had a few other so-called general managers try their hand at what you’re supposed to be doing. They didn’t last long. They were all overrated and underqualified. And they were, to a man, arrogant know-it-alls who tried to tell Claudine the job was impossible.”
I looked at him and raised an eyebrow. “And yet,” I said, “here you are.”
He stared for a moment, then threw back his head and laughed. “Two points to you. Yes, I think this is impossible. But…” He turned slightly on the bench, his body leaning toward mine. “I think you’re different. I haven’t figured out how or why. It’s an interesting puzzle for me, and I like interesting things.” His eyes held mine, and I felt the color start to rise in my cheeks.
“Maybe,” I said, looking away from him to gather my napkins from where they had drifted to the ground, “I’ll get the job done because I’m good at this. I used to be highly respected. I once had an entire magazine article written about how I had turned The Fielding from midtown’s version of Motel 6 into a five-star showplace.”
He nodded slowly. “I found that article. The New Yorker.”
I looked at him in surprise. I still had the framed article that had once been on the wall in the lobby of The Fielding. It was in one of my suitcases, under my bed.
I stood and walked to the trash can, dropped in my used napkins and the empty container, and rubbed my palms against the rough linen of my pants. As I turned, Bing handed me my mesh bag, laden with my treasures.
“Can I come with you again?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said. “I’m here every Saturday. You can come with me anytime.”
“Thanks,” I said, and we walked back to Hotel Paradis.