Behind the Tunnel

The brasserie on Rue des Trois Rois had maybe nine tables and a ceiling fan that spun like it resented its job. It was the second week of July and the city was in the middle of a heatwave that made the pavement soft in the afternoons. I got there twenty minutes early, which is a habit from teaching yoga. If a student shows up early and the room is empty, that's your fault, not theirs.

I ordered a beer and sat where I could see the door. I'd been messaging Yuri for about four months. We'd met on one of those apps where you mostly talk before you meet, which suited me fine. I'm forty-four, I teach yoga at two studios, I live alone with a cat that doesn't like me much, and I've been happily single for years. Not bitter single. Just settled single. The last thing I'd done with anyone was six years ago, a guy from my climbing gym, and it had been casual and fun and had ended the way casual things end, a nod in the parking lot and nothing after.

Yuri was forty-one. He cut costumes for a theater company across town. His messages were odd in a way I liked. He asked questions nobody asks, like whether I thought fabric had a memory, and he sent photos of buttons he collected, loose ones he found on sidewalks. I'd told myself the whole thing was just entertainment, pen pals with a low chance of development.

At 7:40, the host, a thin woman with reading glasses on a chain, came over with the reservation book open on her palm like a waiter's towel.

"Sorry," she said. "I don't have anything under Yuri. Nothing under any name for two, tonight."

I checked my phone. Nothing new. "He said he booked for 7:30."

"There's a company dinner of fourteen at 7:30, but that was booked in May."

I waited. At 7:55 the door opened and Yuri came in like the heat was a rumor he hadn't heard. He was shorter than me, dark hair going gray at the temples, wearing a linen shirt with the sleeves rolled and a canvas bag over one shoulder. He spotted me and waved with his whole arm, which was very him.

"Carl. You got a table, look at that. I booked the window one for us."

"The reservation doesn't exist," I said. "She checked twice."

He frowned, but it was a theatrical frown, the kind you could see the hinges on. He went to the host and there was a short exchange in fast French, and he came back with his palms up.

"She has nothing. I called a few days ago. I know I called." He sat down across from me and put his bag on the chair beside him. "I'm sorry. This is embarrassing."

"Is it? Because I sat here for forty-five minutes in a sauna."

"Yes. That part is bad." He flagged the waiter and ordered two more beers without asking me, then caught himself. "Is that okay? Beer?"

"That's fine."

He looked at the menu, then pushed it aside. "Here's what I think happened. I think I called the wrong brasserie. There are two with almost the same name, one on this street and one over by the market, and I mix them up constantly. I once sent a costume delivery to a bakery for that reason."

I should have gone home. I want to be accurate about that: I considered going home and then didn't. The beer was cold. He was funnier in person than on a screen. And there was a part of me, the part that had spent four months reading about fabric memory at midnight, that wanted to see where the evening went.

"One drink," I said. "Then you owe me a plan."

He told me about his week instead of a plan. The theater company was doing a summer production of some underwater thing, an opera, and the workshop had flooded, not with water, with paint, and they'd lost a week of dye work. He talked with his hands. He had a scar through one eyebrow he'd never explained and I'd never asked about. Around eight the fan gave a shudder and stopped entirely, and we both looked up at it, and he laughed.

"Okay," he said. "I have an alternative. But you have to promise not to decide I'm insane before you hear it."

"I make no promises!"

"The aquarium. I have a key to the staff door. My company is storing our costumes in their basement while the workshop dries out, and I have to check on the fabric anyway because of the humidity. The building stays cool. It's empty after nine."

"You're inviting me to hang out in a basement."

"First we walk through the gallery. Nobody's there at night. Then I check the costumes, and you can sit in the cool air and judge me for how I store silk." He turned his beer glass a slow circle on the table. "Or say no, and I'll pay for dinner somewhere with a real reservation, made in front of you, on the phone, speaker on."

The aquarium was maybe fifteen minutes walking. I thought about my cat, who would be fine. I thought about the heat, which would not be fine either way. I thought, this is either the strangest first date in the city or a story I'd tell for years.

"Fine," I said. "But if there are other people there, this is a crime."

"There won't be. It's July, the tourists come at noon."

He paid for the second round over my objection and we walked. The streets were still giving off the day's heat like pavement was a storage heater. He carried his canvas bag on one shoulder and the jar inside clinked a little. I found out later that was the jar of buttons.

The staff door of the aquarium was a plain gray door in an alley side wall, and his key stuck and needed a wiggle. Inside, the temperature dropped maybe ten degrees in three steps and I made a noise I'm not proud of, something between a sigh and a groan.

"Good, right?" He locked the door behind us, which I noticed, and approved of.

The public galleries were lit only by the tanks themselves, blue and green light on the walls, the floor dark. It smelled faintly of salt and chlorine. Somewhere a filtration system hummed, a steady low note under everything, like the building was snoring. We walked past a tank of something small and silver that turned as a body, all of them at once, and I stood there longer than I meant to.

"See," he said quietly. "Better than a brasserie."

"It's cooler than a brasserie. That's not the same."

"Take the wins you get."

We passed the big tunnel, the one where you walk under the tank and the fish go over your head. He put his hand flat on the glass. "We're building a set that goes down here, actually. Not this gallery, but the tunnel. Singers on platforms in the blue light. The director wants fog, which the fire marshal wants nobody to have."

"That sounds like a lawsuit."

"Every production is a small lawsuit," he said. "That's how you know it's serious art."

We ended up on a bench in front of the jellyfish, which was the dimmest spot in the building, the tank glowing a soft pink and the moon jellies drifting up and down like slow breathing. I used to teach breathing, so I noticed it. He sat closer than a stranger would, shoulder just touching mine, and neither of us moved away.

"I'll tell you something," he said. "Since we're here and it's dark."

"Go ahead."

"There was never a reservation. Either brasserie." He was watching the jellies, not me. "I called the number off their website and got a haircut place, and instead of trying again I just told you I'd booked. I wanted an excuse to get you somewhere that wasn't a table with a number on it. Somewhere strange. I knew you'd say no to my apartment and yes to an adventure."

I sat with that. Annoyed, a little. Flattered, more than a little. Four months of messages, and the man's grand plan was a lie and a fish basement.

"You could have just asked," I said.

"Could I? You're a very settled person, Carl. You told me so yourself, three times." He turned to look at me then, and in the pink light his scar was just a pale line. "Settled people need a story to tell afterward so they can pretend it was the evening's fault."

"That's cynical."

"That's theater."

I laughed, and he took that as something, I suppose, because he reached into his canvas bag and brought out a small glass jar, maybe half full of buttons, all shapes, bone and brass and one that looked like a knight's helmet.

"What is that?"

"My collection. Found ones only. This one I found yesterday, outside the restaurant I failed to book." He unscrewed the lid and held it out. "Hold it. It's good luck for a first date that never technically started."

I reached in for a button, because apparently that's who I am now, and our hands met in the jar, and neither of us pulled out fast, and the hum of the filters filled the room, and that was where the evening stopped being a story about a restaurant.

Our hands stayed in the jar a beat longer than two hands in a jar should. His fingers were cool from the bag, mine still warm from the walk, and the buttons clicked around us like the world's smallest percussion section. Then he pulled his hand out and I pulled mine out, and I had a brass button in my palm and he had nothing, which seemed unfair.

"Keep that one," he said. "Finder's rights."

"What do you actually do with these? You mentioned mockups once."

He took the jar back and held it up to the pink glow, and the buttons inside threw little moving shadows on his face. "For costume mockups. When I'm cutting a pattern and I need to plan where closures go, I pin buttons on the toile. But they can't match, ever. Mismatched only. The director hates it. He says a costume reads as unfinished if the buttons don't match." He shook the jar gently. "I think a costume reads as finished when it looks like a person made it. So we fight about it, politely, twice a season."

"That's the weirdest artistic principle I've ever heard."

"It's not a principle, it's a rule I made up so I could keep collecting buttons off sidewalks and call it work." He screwed the lid back on loosely and balanced the jar on his knee. "My last partner thought it was charming for a year and then thought it was a symptom."

"And now?"

"Now it's a first date prop, apparently." He looked at the jar, then at me. "I've never actually shown anyone the jar before. That's not a line. I just realized it as I said it."

Here's what went through my head, in order. One, this man lured me to a fish basement under false pretenses. Two, he collects buttons off the street because matching is tyranny. Three, I was forty-four years old and sitting closer to a stranger than I had sat to anyone in six years, and the stranger smelled like the brasserie and chalk dust, and I was not unhappy about any of it. The jellies drifted. The filters hummed their one low note.

"Okay," I said. "Since we're doing confessions. You got me here on a lie. I want revenge."

"Revenge." He said it like he was tasting the word. "What kind."

I took the jar off his knee and held it between us. "A game. We each pick a button. Blind. The color decides it. Whatever color you get, you have to say one true thing out loud about what you want tonight. No dodging, no theater talk. One true thing."

"That's your revenge? A parlor game?"

"It's revenge because you'll have to be honest and I know how you people feel about that."

"You people."

"Theater people."

He grinned, and in the pink light it looked like something from a movie I'd have made fun of. "Fine. Deal. But I pick first since