Paris Is Always a Good Idea - Jenn McKinlay Page 0,63
I think of his country and its people fondly, unlike that other miserable little man.
Instinctively, I reached into my handbag for my phone. I wanted to share this moment with someone. Annabelle, my dad, or maybe Jason, who would get a laugh when I told him France had its own people with the grumpy personality of Michelle Fernando. When my hand grasped nothing, I remembered why I was walking to an Internet café. Snap! With a sigh, I trudged on.
Sure enough, I took the designated right, and the building loomed up ahead like a two-story monster with a trendy exterior and signs announcing that it offered use of the Internet, printing, and an e-sports arena that was open twenty-four hours per day. Good to know that if I got a wild hair to go on a Zelda quest at three o’clock in the morning, there was a place for me.
I walked in, surprised to find virtually every computer in use. As I approached the service desk, I took in the bright interior. It was nice to find that the place did not look like some dark, smelly teenage hangout space, but rather it was slick and professional. I asked to use a computer to check and send email. The man, who appeared to be in his twenties and had a perpetual-student air about him, told me the rate was one euro per hour, and when I paid, I was assigned to a vacant computer with a large monitor over in the corner on the far side of the room.
I settled in and opened my nonwork email. I quickly sent a message to my dad and sister, explaining that I’d lost my suitcase and that my phone was in it. I told them to call Café Zoe if they needed me and that Zoe would get the messages to me. I wasn’t a big user of social media, so I didn’t bother going to those pages.
Lastly, I opened my work email. This was a bad idea. Despite having set it to a “temporarily out of office” auto reply option, the emails had clearly kept coming in like a tsunami of neediness. I scrolled through, glancing at the volume of new messages, which made my rage for order itch like a bad rash. I knew if I opened one, I was done for, and this was not how I wanted to spend my hour. Instead, I sent my colleague Julia a message, asking her to tell everyone the same thing I’d told my family—basically, I’d be in touch. I hoped this would put everyone’s mind at ease.
Once that was accomplished, I hunkered down to do an Internet deep dive on Jean Claude Bisset. As Jason had suggested, I wanted to find out if he was married, engaged, or other. I was not going to get caught flat footed again. While I had done some research on him before I left the States, there simply hadn’t been time to follow all the references for Jean Claude. Where Colin had been nonexistent, Jean Claude was everywhere. Frankly, it intimidated the heck out of me. This time when I met up with an ex, I wanted to know as much as I could about him before I showed up on his doorstep, potentially making an idiot of myself.
My initial search didn’t offer much more information than I’d gotten before, which was pages and pages of his image with all the movers and shakers of the fashion industry. Jean Claude did not have a clothing line of his own, as had been his dream, and he was now listed as a designer at Absalon instead of the House of Beauchamp, where I’d met him. I’d heard of the designer Absalon Brodeur, known just as Absalon to the world at large. He was a hot ticket in the fashion scene, judging by the buzz that was generated after his show, where Anna Wintour had been seated front and center.
As I scrolled through the most recent Absalon shows, I saw several pictures that included the designers currently in-house. I scanned the faces, looking for him, and just like that, my breath caught. There he was, looking out at the camera as if he knew all the secrets of the person taking the picture. I felt a thrill ripple from my head to my feet. That! That was the sizzle and zip I was looking for, and he—Jean Claude—was right here in Paris 8.