I’d messed everything up with my savage tongue and my quick temper. I always did. But when I got to the rough café where I always stopped in the pre-dawn hours, already full of loathing for everything I would find in it – for it was many years since I’d found any tragic charm in the dark poetry of human perdition – the American girl I’d been thinking about for so many hours was sitting at the bar. It seemed so unbelievable that she would be here that, for a moment, I blinked, in case she just vanished. Rich girls didn’t come to places like this. Everyone (except me) stayed in their own fixed orbit. I knew that. I’d known it for years. But nothing changed when I opened my eyes again. Her golden curls were still bobbing above the heads of Monsieur Martini, completely drunk by now and only an hour or so away from being ejected on to the street, and of Suzanne, with her rough white-blond hairdo and gold teeth, having a night off, perhaps, from the maison de passe where she’d recently found grander employment, and of the middle-aged woman with grey hair sitting quietly with that familiar big oilskin shopping bag, waiting for her clients, and of the cloth-capped heads of the other drivers playing cards while they waited for the dawn train.
