3.

Jonah sat with the sunlight on his shoulders, sufficiently removed from the city streets, the talking bodies, the wandering pigeons who begin to rot even as they continue to live. At the office de tourism, he’d collected a small library of pamphlets on the sights and sounds, the tastes and smells of Paris and began to browse the photographs of chapels and monuments, pictures full of people – silent and at varying distances from the page he held in his hand – all dressed for summer.

“Beauty, my dear Jo, is only ever personified, never possessed. If you for instance were to recognize that you are a beautiful creature and to then endeavor, having whiffed the hint of an enlightening prospect, to track down the location of your beauty and to encourage a rapid enhancement of those natural qualities, just as a farmer tills the earth which might have grown feral, useful aliments for generations, in order to put that land to its most economic use, and as that beautiful and idiosyncratic landscape becomes involved in the industry of manufacturing a thing which may possess indeed a likeness to the unique beauty of its forbearer, the man who finds and cultivates his interiority turns over, with each furrow on his brow, the artifice of a visceral memory of the sublime.”
“Stop playing with your hair. Jo.”
“John?”

A waiter asked Jonah something he did not need to understand audibly, and he felt the calm that he always associated with a place, with its familiar ways and rituals and answered confidently, “Café au lait.” The sun gave off a bright but cold light that made the photographs of the gardens and museum installations vivid and lustrous. He thought of the chocolatier he’d passed that afternoon and checked his watch, added seven hours to the time and was reminded of his displacement and distance from home. As a rain cloud passed overhead, the shadows grew richer and colder, the brilliance of his moment with the photos – washed out and pallid. Then the sounds which composed the convulsive beat of the city’s heart stopped, and due to his uneasiness, Jonah raised his eyes and noticed, behind the waiter who had returned with a small white cup and saucer, three women rise from a table and walk single file toward the bathroom door.

“I want you to consider the woman who, though her milk is sour, accomplishes the artifaction of youth.”
“Ok John.”
“She is the fossil of youth. Her bones composed of sediment – the residue of a manufactured likeness – will show through the veneer of her skin. Her skeleton shows the tracks of her years passed, buried in this muck we currently edify.”

The women filed into the bathroom, and Jonah felt that he was witnessing the commencement of a feminine bonding ritual. He became mildly alarmed, left the café in the cup and snuck across the street to sit at the café that was across the street from where the women were exiting the bathroom, single file through the narrow door, having borne no visible change. Their normalcy, however, did not console what had become Jonah’s bewilderment, but in fact, inflamed it. He listened, through the pedestrian bustle and traffic, to the three women’s voices giggle and swoon like pigeons. He found the clarity of their voices enchanting. He closed his eyes and listened.

“Therefore, Jo, do nothing. Action only makes solutions of matters, and matters, the worser the better, are what make life durable until death.”
At this point, Jo dropped his fork and began to reach for it, but John interjected.
“No Jo. You will finish with your hands.”
His arm hanging on the air, Jo’s lips broke to ask,
“Won’t that just make matters worse?”
“Yes Jo. You may even be asked to leave the café. Do you want me to tell you of the spice of life?”
Jo sat up in his chair and looked into the steamy, plastic dish of spaghetti bolognaise.
“All you do is consume Jo, without a thought as to what you consume.”
John sat back and locked his hands behind his head.
“Ah, I need a good laugh. I think I’ll pass the afternoon at the Louvre.”
Invigorated by the thought, John stood, scattered too little change on the table and walked away, but before seeing him turn the corner and leave the square, Jo became distracted by the slender hips and blue eyes of a rather aged Parisian blonde, and by some feat of misdirection which he might have mistaken for self-restraint, Jo buried his fingertips in the hot pork pasta, smelled the air, then lowered his head to eat.