Honey and Leonard (7 page)

The couple dressed in black had returned and stood on the sidewalk watching the older folks having a good time dancing.  Honey saw them gawking and broke away from Leonard to grab the young man by both hands. At first, he stiffened in surprise, but Honey was not about to take "no" for an answer. He couldn't help but follow her back into the street, dancing quite smoothly along the way.

The young girl held out her tattooed hands for Leonard. Leonard forgot his prejudices for the moment. He took her hands and was soon spinning her like the air was filled with big band jazz music. Traffic had now stopped completely. Leonard started singing. So did Honey and the younger dancers. Each was singing a different song, but it didn't matter. The two couples moved around each other like they were finalists in a dance competition. The four of them even joined hands for a jitterbug circle. Their spontaneous joy was catching. A waiter from the nearest restaurant waved a towel over his head with a hoot. Drivers got out of their cars to cheer them on. A small crowd of onlookers assembled on the sidewalk, amazed to see the generations coming together through the language of dance.

Horns began to blare from trucks in the rear of the backed-up line of traffic. The dancers twirled each other back to the sidewalk.

The young man was the first to run out of breath. He'd been the most energetic dancer. His hipness had been yearning to bust a move for way too long. He danced like a dog off the chain, a dog with plenty of sexual energy to burn.

The two couples wound down the dancing, breathing hard and laughing. Each of them was pleased and satisfied to have participated in such a joyous, surprise event. They had brought their own little corner of Paris to a standstill.

The celebration conversation couldn't last long because of the language barrier, but they communicated quite well with hugs and high fives. They said goodbye for a short time and then walked away. No phone numbers were exchanged. Their dance had been a once-in-a-lifetime happening.

Something important had happened to the younger couple although they were only beginning to feel it. Their impromptu jitterbug with the older couple had given them a glimpse of something they had previously regarded as corny and unattainable.

By the time they walked away, the Goth couple was holding hands. Their days of being tragically cool and detached were over, although they hadn't realized it yet.

Honey and Leonard sat down for a coffee and lunch. A break in the action was what they needed. They would be paying tourist prices for the meal but they didn't really care.

"See now, sweetie," Honey said. "She was a lot more interesting and sensitive and fun than she looked like at first."

"The girl was so beautiful when she smiled. Now, if she'd only get rid of all those piercings."

"It won't be long until she's having babies of her own. Nothing like a child grabbing at your face to make the piercings go away."

Leonard laughed at her imagery. He thought for a moment and commented, "Those kids could dance. Where did they learn to jitterbug?"

"Everybody knows how to dance. We just had to give them a little encouragement. By the way, did you see they were holding hands when they left?"

"I did notice that. They'll probably get married and settle down and have four kids and always talk about that crazy, old, American couple in Paris that made them fall in love."

"Don't laugh," Honey said. "Love is contagious."

Leonard was determined to see the Arc that had welcomed parading armies from Napoleon III to Charles de Gaulle. "The best thing about it," he said, "is The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from World War I. That's right beneath the Arc. It has an eternal flame."

"How do you know all this?"

"I love to read. All my life I've loved to read. What? You think farmers don't read? Ever heard of
The Farmer's Almanac
?"

Honey laughed and marveled at her man's ability to dredge up tidbits of historical information from things he'd read years earlier. How strange that he could know so much at one moment and forget so much in the next.

As Honey and Leonard arrived at the circular traffic jam around the Arc, cars from all directions were forming a seamless web of horn-blowing, tire-squealing chaos. It looked like a merry-go-round that was spinning too fast to catch a ride. The smell of burning grease and gasoline hung in the air like a sooty fog.

They didn't know about the underground walkways beneath the traffic that allow pedestrians safe passage to the Arc. All they knew was the Arc was right in front of them in all its glory and, by God, they were going to get to it, traffic be damned.

"Sweetie," I don't think this is a good idea," Honey said as he grabbed her hand and prepared to make a dash.

"Nonsense, pumpkin. What's that you always say about helping little old ladies across the street? Just let me help you. These cars will stop. All we need is a break in the traffic."

Honey assessed the situation. Both she and Leonard were wearing cross-training footwear, the same shoes that had just jitterbugged on the Champs-Elysees. They were both still pretty mobile thanks to their dancing and swimming and yoga classes. But they weren't fast runners by any means.

The cars are only going twenty miles an hour. They could stop in time, couldn't they? So, why not make a dash for it? There are four lanes of traffic. All we really have to do is take it one lane at a time.

"Okay, let's go for it," Honey said.

"Look, here we go, come on," Leonard urged as he pulled her onto the cobblestone circle to make it through a break in the traffic.

Honey moved quickly to keep up and immediately tripped on the uneven surface of the road. She felt herself flying into a major fall until Leonard grabbed her under her right arm to keep her from going down and to keep them both moving forward. He heaved her up like he was throwing a bale of hay onto a wagon.

By the time she regained her balance and was finally standing upright, they were stopped and stuck between the second and third rings of traffic from the center. They were surrounded by blaring horns. The air was chokingly thick with the sooty smell of diesel exhaust fumes. Cabs and cars and trucks were swerving dangerously to avoid hitting them.

They realized it had been a terrible mistake to try and cross through this much traffic. Honey couldn't see any way out of the predicament they had gotten themselves into. The drivers were negotiating a tight circle so they couldn't see pedestrians until it was too late to stop.

"Leonard!" Honey screamed as an overloaded lorry screeched on its brakes and looked like it would be unable to avoid hitting them as it went into a sideways skid.

"He's blocking for us," Leonard said as he pulled Honey across the final two lanes of traffic.

Sure enough, the lorry had slid to a stop not a foot from Honey and Leonard, blocking the two inner lanes of traffic. Cars screeched to a stop to avoid hitting the lorry. One cab slammed into the rear dual tires of the stopped truck but didn't seem to do any damage.

"Vive la France,"
Leonard shouted from the safety of the sidewalk island as he held up both arms to indicate a touchdown had just been scored.

The lorry driver grinned wildly as he straightened out his truck and got going again with a gear-grinding lurch. He flashed the peace sign as Leonard yelled, "You saved our lives! You're our hero!"

Honey went to find a place to sit down. She felt too light-headed and nauseated to be exhilarated by their narrow escape. She still felt like the truck was about to run them over. She could still smell the burning rubber from its sideways slide. Now, it was her turn to feel uncertain about the escape to Paris.

"I don't know if this trip was such a great idea," she said as they sat down on a green, wooden bench.

Leonard realized it was his turn to take up the slack. "You sound like me in the Indianapolis airport. You slapped some sense into me when I was down. Now, what am I going to do to get you back on track?"

He hugged her and said, "I'm sorry I dragged you into all that. I wasn't thinking too clearly. Here I am, having a ball dodging traffic, and you're scared to death. I am sorry. I should have my head examined."

"At least you caught me before I hit the bricks, face first," Honey said. "I'm always surprised by how strong you are. If you hadn't grabbed me, I would not be sitting here talking to you. Those crazy drivers would have run me over a dozen times."

She took a couple deep breaths and looked up at the blue sky as she started getting herself back together. "No, I won't think about how close I came to meeting my maker. I think I'll just be grateful to my knight in shining armor for saving me on the streets of Paris, France," she said in a Southern drawl.

Then, she turned serious and said, "You know what's good about us, Leonard?"

"I know a bunch of things."

"No, what's good about us is when one of us gets down the other one always seems to be up. We're a good team that way. We balance each other out. It's not always me who has to be strong. All my years with the doctor, rest his soul, it was always me who had to take the lead. I mean, he was the boss at his work, but when he came home, it was always me who had to make the rest of our lives happen. With you, it's just . . . I don't know. We seem to do things together."

Leonard took her hand and kissed it. He seemed lost in thought.

"What?"

"It's odd you should talk about your marriage like that," he said. "You know, I loved my wife dearly, but I swear that woman never took the lead on anything, especially after our daughter died. Even cooking. She was a great cook but she always asked what I wanted and then she made it. I'm glad it's not like that for us. We're a team. Don't you think it's perfect we're getting a second chance to work things out?"

"Yes, I do, Mr. Atkins. Yes, I do," Honey said, standing up. "Now let's go see that eternal flame you've been talking about."

Gretchen Atkins, Leonard's niece and Power of Attorney, hired a private investigator out of Indianapolis named Adam Wolfe. She paid Wolfe a $10,000 retainer from Leonard's checking account and let the investigator know there was more where that came from. Wolfe was on a plane to Paris the day after Honey and Leonard's departure.

It took two days for Maria Gomez from Adult Protective to convince the FBI to put an agent on the case. That didn't have any immediate impact on the chase. The agent soon realized the French police would be no help at all in locating the elderly lovebirds in flight. In fact, once
The Chicago Tribune
reported Honey and Leonard had fled to France, the French news media picked up the story in a big way. Honey and Leonard were front-page news in the newspapers and breaking news on television and radio. French readers and viewers and listeners were cheering for the elderly couple, laughing at the fools in the U.S.A. who were trying to capture them. It took a week for the French police to get motivated and that was only after the press started making fun of them and calling for the Pink Panther to get on the case.

The third force after Honey and Leonard was the reporter who made their love story front-page news in the first place, Jack Crumbo of
The
 
Chicago Tribune
. Never, in his twenty-five years of reporting, had one of his stories caught fire like this one. It was old folks in love. It had elder law and criminal consequences. And now it had an international chase scene adding fuel to the fire.

Any new angle he could come up with was making headlines across the nation and flooding his publication with reader response. After breaking the story and developing sources through several trips to Honey and Leonard's hometown, he was the recognized expert on North Manchester, Indiana, and its most intriguing couple.

Television reporters were interviewing Crumbo about every aspect of the case, particularly the alleged poisoning of Leonard and the no-contact order against Honey. Two publishers and an agent called about possible book deals. Someone from The American Association of Retired Persons offered him a job. Even so, it took Crumbo two days to convince
The Tribune
to fly him to France. The paper was so cheap they made him take vacation days and only paid his round-trip flight and $75 a day for expenses.

"The first thing you need to know," Nimmo said, "is Honey did not poison Leonard."

"Everybody tells me that," Crumbo said, "but nobody can prove it. Gretchen Atkins keeps waving those blood tests with high arsenic levels in everybody's face."

"Okay, we're off the record, right?" Nimmo asked.

"Right."

"This is strictly confidential?"

"Absolutely."

"Good," Nimmo said. "Because here it is. Proof that Honey did not poison Leonard."

Crumbo was all ears.

"I've got a good friend who's a forensic pathologist. I've hired him on the case, and he knew right away what it was."

"What 'what' was?"

"He said the high levels of arsenic in Leonard's blood are most probably the result of his life as a farmer."

"I don't get it."

"Yes, you do. Farmers spend their life around pesticides. In the old days, the pesticides were loaded with arsenic. That's why Leonard has arsenic in his blood. Not because anybody tried to poison him."

"Whoa. That's a hell of a story, right there," Crumbo said. "I'll have to get my own pathology source since I can't quote you. That shouldn't be too hard. How long until your guy can go public with this?"

"It's going to take a while, weeks probably, maybe months. Getting the blood from Maria Gomez and Adult Protective will be tougher than stealing Dracula's midnight snack."

"Why not just take Leonard's blood?" Crumbo asked.

Nimmo looked at him to make sure he wasn't joking. "You mean you don't know?"

"Know what?"

"Honey and Leonard left town last night, early this morning. The sheriff called me a couple hours ago, looking for them. Now, I'm hearing the cops stopped them on the highway late last night and let them go because they didn't realize they were on the run."

"Holy shit," Crumbo said. "Where are they now?"

"I'm not sure. I heard something about a flight to Paris, but you'd better check that out with the sheriff."

"Paris, as in France?"

"You got it. Evidently, they got tired of being kept apart in Indiana."

"What about the protective order?" Crumbo asked as he prepared to make a hasty departure.

"Honey is in clear violation if she's with him. It's a D Felony in Indiana, up to three years in jail. They charge it as Invasion of Privacy."

"What about Leonard?"

"Leonard's not doing anything wrong. The protective order is against her seeing him, not him seeing her. All he's doing is allegedly getting kidnapped and that's not a crime."

Crumbo couldn't believe the scoop he was getting. He asked flurries of questions and took copious notes before he had to leave to confirm the outrageous story. 
As he was heading toward his car, he asked Nimmo, "Why didn't you stop them?"

"They never told me they were leaving. All of a sudden, they were just gone. They left before I could get them news about why the arsenic was in his blood."

Upon landing in Paris, he hired the first attractive, bilingual woman he met and paid her enough to have her quit her job at one of the airport bars on the spot. Wolfe and his new employee interviewed taxi drivers at the airport and found their man within two hours. He recognized Honey and Leonard by the photos he was shown.

The driver accepted Wolfe's $150 bribe and proceeded to drop off the investigator and his interpreter at the wrong hotel on the opposite side of town. This would be the first of many bum steers Wolfe would get from people who had been charmed by Honey and Leonard's story and instinctively wanted to protect them.

By the time Wolfe suspected the taxi driver had misled him, he also realized the driver might have been pretending to recognize Honey and Leonard in order to make some easy money.

The investigator called back to Indianapolis from a pay phone to have his office do a credit card check on Honey and Leonard. Gretchen had provided him all the necessary account numbers and information. No Paris charges popped up. Honey was paying cash for everything.

Wolfe and his interpreter, Simone, began the tedious process of checking out all the hotels in Paris. It didn't take long for them to realize they had much in common. This was Paris and neither of them had a significant other. Simone was 15 years younger than the 50-year-old Wolfe. She was blonde and vivacious and athletic. By the fourth hotel, she was beginning to remind him of a French movie star whose name he couldn't remember. Before he knew what was happening, the investigator was becoming more interested in chasing Simone than he was in completing his assignment.

The ride was a welcome relief for her as well. They'd been running around Paris like a couple of teenagers on Spring break. Once the novelty of being in France began to wind down, the jet lag started taking its toll. They'd only slept a few hours in the last two days.

The back seat of the cab smelled delicious to her, like Cognac and good cigars and French bread. The city of light and love rolled by in a kaleidoscope of statues and flowers and famous paintings come to life.

"Everything feels so bright and colorful," she cooed as she put her head on Leonard's shoulder.

"This is even better than I thought," Leonard agreed. "The whole street is one big art show. Look, there's a statue every twenty yards. Some are modern and crazy and others look like they're three hundred years old."

Honey caught the driver staring at them in the rear view mirror. "We love your city almost as much as we love each other," she said.

The driver laughed and began giving them detailed descriptions of the sights along the way. It didn't matter that he spoke little English or that he usually despised American tourists. Honey and Leonard were lighting up the back seat of his cab.

The Frenchman became most animated when they came upon the Luxor Obelisk in the center of Place de la Concorde. Somehow, he communicated that the 23-meter erection of yellow granite had been imported from Egypt in the 1830's.

"It reminds me of you," Honey chuckled.

"On a good day," Leonard laughed, "with some help from you."

The driver drove them around the Tuileries Gardens and chatted excitedly about its centuries of history and unparalleled public beauty. Honey and Leonard marveled at his smooth, French accent and apparent depth of knowledge but they decided not to walk the gardens. The cab was too perfectly comfortable.

Upon arrival at the Louvre, Honey managed to pay and tip the driver in the French francs she had exchanged earlier. "This is like funny money," she joked as she joined Leonard and folded the artistic bills back into her neck pouch.

Leonard was staring in disbelief at the glass and metal pyramid that had nearly taken over the classic French architecture of the world's most famous art museum. I.M. Pei's Louvre Pyramid, surrounded by three smaller, glass pyramids, completely dominated the courtyard. Honey gasped in disbelief as she took in the object of modern art.

"It looks like aliens have landed," Leonard said.

"What on God's green earth have they done?" Honey asked.

"They've ruined everything. That's plain to see."

"Now, Leonard, let's not be old fuddy-duddies."

The cab driver, seeing their shoulders sag in disappointment, got out of the car to agree with them in no uncertain terms. He pointed at the modern structure and held his nose and spit on the pavement. He looked at Honey and Leonard and shrugged his shoulders as if to apologize on behalf of the people of France. Then his expression lightened and he said, "
c'est la vie
," as he got back in his car and drove away.

"You must have tipped the hell out of that guy," Leonard laughed.

"I don't know how much I gave him but it was at least twice the price of the ride. He was so nice."

"Brutal art critic."

"I love the way they say '
c'est la vie
.' What, exactly does that mean?" she asked.

"It means, 'That's life.' And I'm glad you asked because that's about the only French I know."

Honey threw her arms around him and hugged for all she was worth. "You know a lot about the world for a farm boy from Indiana."

"You know more than me," he said as he squeezed her back.

The two lovers savored their embrace at the center of the world's art. Honey finally broke the silence and said, "You know, that new art in front of the old building is a little like you and me."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, we're old, like the buildings, but we're new together, like the glass pyramid."

"I hope we don't look as stupid as that thing."

"Some people think old folks falling in love is ridiculous," Honey said. "They don't understand love. They think it's for young people. They think love has to have perfect skin and sexy, short dresses. They think old people should just get out of the way and die. They don't seem to realize that, one day sooner than they think, they'll be as old as us. And it's been so long since most of them have been in love that they forget how wonderful it feels."

Leonard held her as she continued, "You know, I'm not sure I was ever really in love until I met you. I mean, I loved the doctor. He was tall and had broad shoulders and he was smart. But I think I was more in love with the idea of being a good wife than I was with him as a lover. That's when we were young and trying to have children. We tried everything but nothing worked. The doctors told us everything seemed fine, but for some reason, we never had children. We never talked about adoption. I don't know if having children would have been good or bad for us. I burned way too many dinners waiting for him to come home late from the hospital."

"I never felt the way I feel now," Leonard said, helping her change the topic. "Running away to Paris with you feels like we've died and gone to heaven. Everything has a warm, rosy glow to it. My heart feels like it could bust right out of my chest. When I look in your eyes . . . "

"What?" Honey cooed as she took his hands in hers.

"I feel young again."

"This is better than feeling young," Honey said. "I never knew what to do when I was young. I was always worried about making a mistake. Now, I know what I've been missing."

"What?"

"Being in love with you."

"You know, now that I think of it," Leonard laughed, "maybe that glass pyramid doesn't look so bad. At least it's something new. It's interesting. And it sure isn't keeping people away from the museum. Look at that line of people waiting to get in. It curves around and loops. It must be a three-hour wait."

"That line is not for us," Honey said. "I've waited in enough lines for one lifetime."