“Look!” says Jeneviève to Jules. “See how he stares at me.”
The two girls rest on a blue bench near Tranquil Fountain.
Across the way, a street performer dazzles the trickling crowd with random bursts of rapid words, silly magic, and song. He wears a heavy coat, old and worn. His playful eyes remain on Jeneviève’s.
“Like what?” jokes Jules, nudging her friend, smiling.
Jeneviève does not break eye contact with the stranger. She finds herself in disbelief at the undeniable sincerity locked at the core of his pleasant, ever-present smile. There’s a hint there so powerful it somehow replaces her whole world with one in which looking away proves less comfortable than staring.
“Like we share a private joke?” Jeneviève suggests.
“Do you know what the joke might be?” prods her friend, now staring at the stranger as well.
“No,” says Jeneviève, unable to keep the joy she sees from crossing to pierce the space of her own features, delivering her expression up from all such as irony, detachment, safety, fear…
The stranger retrieves a small stringed instrument from his coat. He begins to sing:
On the steps in Paris
With my hat out
And a gleam in my old eye.
“Is he singing to us?” asks Jules.
“Yes,” says Jeneviève, confident.
A fat man strolls by eating a sausage on a stick and drops a rare silver coin into the stranger’s hat down on the ground.
The stranger cuts short his song, still smiling. He reaches into the hat and flicks the coin back up at the fat man.
The fat man, bewildered, gulps down the rest of his meal, and asks, “Where can I hear your music, then?”
“Here!” the stranger beams.
“How—?” begins the fat man, but the stranger has already cascaded away once more like a skipping stone:
It’s often said,
Let’s speak in French…
The fat man lowers himself awkwardly to another blue bench across from Jeneviève and Jules.
Many others stop to hear the stranger’s jovial tunes.
A light breeze rustles nearby leaves in an ancient dance, not competing at all for attention.
Jeneviève giggles as she finds herself approaching unafraid, glad for how the stranger’s twinkling eyes have reduced her usual shyness to an absurd impossibility. “What about the man’s coin?” she asks, having not once broken off her gaze.
“We all have the moonlight,” he answers.
Jeneviève squints and shrugs, not understanding, though the sense of sharing some private joke with the stranger is only heightened. It matters not that she has no idea what the joke might be, nor that he looks at Jules and all the rest with the exact same…
Could someone really share a private joke with every single person?
She wonders how such a soul could have ever come to be. Could it all just be an act? But why? How?
“What’s your name?” she asks.
“Ironisait,” he says, nodding slightly like nothing and smiling all the more.
I don't know anything 