Because She Is Beautiful

by Cameron Dougan

  They walked in silence until they reached the Seine. Scott wanted to browse the bookstalls. Most of them were shut because of the weather. A couple were open. Plastic drop cloths kept the books dry. A man sat in a chair with a green poncho covering his head and his hands folded over the handle of a cane.

  Scott held up a brown leather book. The binding was crusted, the cover dried and crumbling at the edges.

  "A Bible," he said, putting it back. "These stands are a graveyard for Bibles. I find them all the time, sometimes in Latin. Guess they belonged to dead people."

  He returned it and thumbed through a stack of vintage photos. He showed her one of a bony-kneed boy in shorts, staggering under the weight of a magnum of wine.

  She struggled to think of the photographer's name. So well known; it was on the tip of her tongue.

  "The kid's very strong," said Scott. "This one's a keeper."

  He gazed lovingly at the postcard. The boy's toothless grin was genuine and full of pride, spreading across his face like a banner.

  He paid the man, and they walked back to the café. He put her in a cab, and she rolled down the window, and he leaned on the door.

  "See you around," he said.

  "See you around," she said.

  He patted the roof of the car and waved. The taxi began to move. She felt sure she would see him again. And she wanted to.

  The wipers squeaked. The driver had his side window cracked to prevent the windshield from fogging. Droplets of rain splattered off her armrest. She asked him to close it and he tried to explain that he couldn't. He rubbed the window emphatically with his shirtsleeve and took his hands off the wheel to shrug with both shoulders.

  "Arrêtez," she said.

  "Ici?"

  He stopped at the curb and she jumped out. He started to shout, but she quickly climbed into the front seat. There were papers and she shoved them to the middle.

  "Qu'est-ce que vous faisez?" he said.

  She had her handkerchief out and leaned over as far as she could and wiped the front window until it was clear.

  "There," she said.

  The man looked at her and laughed. "Vraiment?"

  "Allons-y," she said, and he pulled into traffic. Every few minutes she would reach across to blot away the fog. Droplets of rain beaded on the windshield. Tiny round shadows dotted the man's smiling face.

  The bedcovers in her room were turned down, folded at the same angle each night. She took off her coat and ran her hand a last time across the feathered collar and let it fall to the floor, not caring if it wrinkled. She kicked off her shoes and wandered dreamily to the bathroom, undoing the buttons of her blouse. "This one's a keeper," she murmured, as she knelt beside the tub. The porcelain was icy, and she tried to reach the faucets without its touching her bare stomach. A quick nip and she let out a shriek. But then it was pleasant, cool against the skin, and she pressed against the side. The faucets chirped and gave and the water exploded into the tub. She chose a vial of bath salts from a tray, blue crystals that turned the water turquoise. She added soap and watched as the bubbles mounted and spread and the pitch of the gurgling seemed to climb.

  She was eager suddenly to throw off her shirt, so she yanked her arms free and cast it rippling toward the bidet. It settled around the base like cotton snow under a Christmas tree. She dropped her pants to the floor and kicked them into a heap and lifted her bra above her head without unfastening it and shot it into the sink like a rubber band. She stretched her hands toward the ceiling light and breathed the steam, feeling the heat deep in her throat. The mirror was fogging. She thought of the taxi driver and laughed.

  She shut off the water and went naked back into the room for a magazine. The phone began to ring. She stared at it, waiting for it to stop, but it kept on. At last she plucked the receiver from its hook.

  "Hello?" she said.

  "Madame Reilly, there is a Monsieur Sanders on the line from New York."

  "Please tell him I am in the bath."

  "He is calling several times and says it is an emergency."

  She took a deep breath.

  "Madame Reilly?"

  "Put him through."

  There was a click, then the line seemed clear, empty.

  "Kim?"

  "I got your messages," she said.

  "I thought you would never answer."

  "It's just that I've lost count of the days. I don't even know how long it's been. I'm walking everywhere. You don't realize how huge the city is until you walk it. I spent hours in the Louvre today. You would have died. I'm doing all the things you hate to do."

  "Wait."

  Someone else was talking on Robert's end.

  "It was like going to church," she said. "So many religious paintings. I'm learning about art—"

  "Kim, she's tried to kill herself."

  Again Robert's voice broke off.

  That explained Nicole's skipping her trip to be near her doctors, Kim thought. Like a hammer descending on a glass bowl, the break was inevitable. She had seen it happen again and again in her mind, had imagined Nicole's suicide with each desperate warning, each paranoid threat and changed plan. Expectation lessened the shock, the shattering jolt and crash. The fragments were there, nonetheless. She was rooting for her, of course.

  "I'm losing my mind," Robert said, returning.

  "Are you at home?"

  "I'm at the hospital."

  "Which hospital, Robert?"

  "Mass General."

  "Where?" she said disbelievingly, with a touch of sarcasm that she couldn't help, because it seemed ridiculous and typical that there would be some bizarre circumstance to the tragedy. Boston? And then it caught her like a current. Clarity and calm vanished as the event transformed and she tried to backpedal. With less than a year of law school left, she thought.

  "He broke off the engagement. That bastard Winthrop called off the wedding, and she slashed her wrists with a broken bottle. She's in intensive care. I'm going to lose my baby."

  "Robert—"

  "I don't know what to do. I need you here."

  "She'll pull through."

  "What do I do? It's all my fault, Kim."

  "No."

  "It is. I feel so guilty."

  "Darling, you didn't do this."

  "Then why does it feel as if I did? What am I supposed to feel?"

  "I'm so sorry, Robert."

  "I don't know what to feel."

  He seemed willing to accept her emotions in place of his own.

  "Is Nicole with you?"

  "She's down the hall. She got here on an earlier flight. Just think if I hadn't arrived in time."

  "Don't think that way."

  "I got on the first flight I could."

  "You made it, Robert. That's what matters."

  "But if I didn't get here in time? If Christine had died with only Nicole at her side? Imagine how it would be. She'd never let me forget that."

  "Robert, just worry about Christine."

  "Please fly back," he said.

  "I can't."

  "Damn it, I need you. I'm falling apart."

  "But there's nothing—"

  "Kim!"

  "If Nicole's there—"

  "I need you, Kim, you."

  "Okay."

  "Christ, I—do you hear me?"

  "Yes, yes, okay."

  "You're coming?"

  "I'm coming."

  She promised to be on the next flight. She promised anything, listening to the sounds of her own voice churning out assurances, the assuaging effect of her words as she took down the hospital number and information.

  She hung up the phone with every intention of calling the airline.

  She thought of pictures Robert had shown her, of Christine with her horse, with her mother and brother. She stared at the note pad and realized that along with the number, she'd written the date and Christine's name.

  Her foot snagged the crumpled pants she'd left, dragging them a step, and she realized
she was back in the bathroom. She could not remember having moved. Time elapsed in bursts. She stared at the tub and shivered, thinning suds popping like bubbles of saliva: a gaping, rabid mouth waiting to consume her. She sank in, water sloshing over the side, and lay back, staring at the ceiling. Her ears filled and echoed the prayers her lips formed. "Please let her live," she pleaded. But Kim knew whether Christine lived or died, she, the mistress, was irrevocably a part of her sorrow, and to ask God for some reprieve . . . no, she would not mock him with a conscience.

  Her fingertips were crinkled and numb when she climbed from the tub. She allowed the bath to drain and wrapped herself in towels. She went to the closet and took out a pair of tapered tuxedo pants and a black knee-length jacket with thirty tiny pearl buttons up the front. She laid them on the bed. Then she returned to the bathroom. She combed her hair out over the toilet and flushed down the loose strands. She blow-dried bending at the waist so that her hair touched the tiles. It was straight when she finished, and she patted it away from her eyes and sprayed it to stay. She chose black heels, thin as nails, dressed, and left for dinner as planned. She had to be out. Everything would be fine. Stay in motion, she told herself.

  Tour d'Argent was one of Robert's favorite restaurants, one of the handful of pit stops from their few previous weekends that suggested no city between. The head chef had left to open his own restaurant. Earlier that day she'd called and used Robert's name.

  The chef made a point of coming to the table. He was disappointed not to see Robert.

  "He could not make the trip," she said.

  "We will take special care of you. You are more beautiful than in my memory. If you please, I will prepare for you the duck. It would be a pleasure if you would allow me to cook it at the table."

  "Thank you."

  "Would you care for wine? D'accord, allow me then. I will offer something to start and the wine will accompany. We are going to make Monsieur Sanders a jealous man tonight. Oui? That will be our prize."

  The walls of the restaurant were stone, as thick and impregnable as a fortress. The building had been a medieval convent. There were two stained-glass windows, alternating gold and red diamonds with a king's crest in the center, and heavy velvet curtains that matched, red facing in, gold out, the last of the evening light slanting across the rippled folds. There were four other tables in the room. All were filled. Hers was adjacent to a portable stove. It was covered in white linen. The chef stepped behind it and began to inspect an ornate silver and gold press, spinning the gleaming propeller-like handle to the top of its screw, lifting the lid, and peering in. He smiled a wide bullish smile. His chin was shadowed, even though he was clean-shaven. His white jacket was spotless.

  "Monsieur Sanders works too hard," he said.

  The sommelier introduced himself. His face was as thin as the chef's was broad. He started to describe two Burgundies, a red and a white.

  "You will like both," he said.

  The chef was at her side again, holding out the duck on a large dish. The skin had been removed and the meat was the color of a fading bruise. The wings hugged the sides. The neck was tied off. She nodded her assent and the chef swept over to the stove.

  The chairs were high-backed and she stayed very straight and stared only at the chef, focusing on each step.

  Now the pan was on the burner. Blue flames licked bronze. The sommelier was pouring the Burgundy: swirling green-yellow-gold, the hazelnut aroma at her nose, a tinge of truffles. "Hazelnuts—Corylus avellana," she could hear Robert saying. Thin tendrils of wine slid down the glass side like the oil in the chef's pan as he tilted it right, then left, to coat it. The sommelier's smile. A plate before her: fish finely chopped with tomato, herb like green mist, cupped in endive with wine and a touch of vinegar. She raised her glass to the chef, and he smiled, not taking his eyes from his work. He slit the bird down the center of its breast. The two sides sprang apart, and she thought of the Roman, moved to drive a spear through Christ's side, that crescendo of guilt.

  The chef carved slivers that he laid across a plate. He cut off more pieces, which he placed in the press. Each twist of the handle thickened the trickle of blood, which flowed from a gold duck-bill spigot and collected in a cup. The waiter brought another plate: firm white asperge, a single line of dressing banding the stems like a silk thread. The red Burgundy was breathing now in a crystal silver-rimmed decanter. She could no longer hear voices, only the sizzle of the blood simmering, the crackle as the chef added wine and tipped the pan to even it. He repeated these steps, putting more meat in the press, drawing more blood, exorcising the last drops of life from each remaining piece until there was only the carcass, the choice slices saved, and the hissing blood dark as an unlit window. The ritual took an hour and a half; the actual cooking time, only a few minutes. Two of the tables had emptied. He served the plate himself and bowed his head, and the husband and wife next to her and four businessmen applauded. The front of his white jacket was sprinkled with blood like a thousand tiny pinpricks.

  A waiter served the businessmen coffee. A man with dark sideburns stubbed his cigarette in a small silver ashtray and picked up the check. They all rose to leave. Minutes later the husband and wife were finished. The waiters were helping with the chairs.

  "Was it worth the wait?" the man said to Kim, stepping aside so that his wife could pass before him. A gold leopard brooch with ruby and sapphire spots was pinned to her lapel.

  She nodded.

  "Enjoy," the man said.

  Kim ate in silence. The waiters watched. She ordered dessert and coffee. A busboy went from table to table, snuffing out the candles. She paid and stood to leave. A waiter ducked into the kitchen and reappeared with the chef. The chef, the sommelier, and the maître d' all saw her to the door.

  "Merci, merci," she said. "Merci mille fois."

  "It was to your liking?"

  "You are truly an artist."

  Outside on the step she gulped air. For the first time it seemed the night sky was visible, cleaving through cloud like a deep blue blade. She swallowed, forcing cool air to her lungs, her stomach so burdened it hurt to move. She forced herself—one block to the Seine, two more to the nearest bridge. She leaned against the stone rail staring down at the black water beneath. Wasn't it here at Île de la Cité that Marie Antoinette was held prisoner? She remembered reading so long ago at her mother's bedside. There'd been a drawing of a woman sitting on a crate with other women kneeling at her feet.

  Kim stumbled across the bridge and turned to walk along the Seine, passing from darkness to light to darkness again, ovals of lamplight and the gaps between where the cobbles were black and grabbed at her heels. Small parked trucks jutted into the street. There were voices, two teenagers coming the other way with a bottle in a paper bag, singing "Cluck, cluck, cluck"—animal noises. Their laughter momentarily drowned out the staccato of her footsteps. She rounded the corner.

  Notre-Dame loomed at the far end of the vast square like a crouched animal ready to spring, a sphinx with its head to the ground, towers rearing into the night like hunched shoulders, fearsome and hulking. Taller and taller it grew as she neared until she was standing at the guarded entrance. She gripped the rough iron bars and shook the gate on its hinges. The eyes of saints looked back at her, unblinking, one holding its severed head in its hand, embedded in the cold, dark facade.

  She backed away looking up, gazing at what was surely the altarpiece of the city. Stones upon stones, a structure born from many deaths, many accidents that did not matter because they were in the name of faith. She turned. A man and woman approached, walking arm in arm. Like her, they stopped before the gate, two silhouettes in the faint moon shadow joined in a kiss, worshiping unwittingly with their love.

  It was past midnight when Kim staggered into her room. She went to the phone and dialed the hospital in Boston. After several connections and transfers, she reached a nurse.

  "I'm calling from overseas," Kim said. "I'm trying to find
out the status of a patient."

  "What name, ma'am?"

  "Sanders, Christine Sanders. She was brought in yesterday."

  "Yesterday? I'm not showing—"

  "Today, I'm sorry. The time change."

  "What is your relation to Ms. Sanders?"

  "A friend. Is she all right? It's very important."

  "Sorry, but I can't give out that kind of information."

  "I'm calling from France. I need to know if I should fly back."

  "I understand, ma'am, but if you're not family . . . look, Mrs. Sanders is here. Let me see if she's available to come to the phone."

  "Can't you just tell me if she's stable?"

  "Mrs. Sanders is right here. If you hold on a minute—"

  "You can't just tell me? Tell me if she's okay? That's all I need to know."

  "I told you—"

  "How about Mr. Sanders, is he there?"

  "I don't think so. Listen, do you want to speak to Mrs. Sanders or not?"

  Kim put back the receiver. She forced herself to be logical. Nicole was there alone. Robert wouldn't leave Nicole alone unless there was some reassurance from the doctors.

  Slowly Kim slipped the top button of her jacket from its eyelet. Her fingers found the next pearl down as though they were linked by a thread. She didn't have to look. With each button, the note of her prayers changed. They were no longer needy or wanting; they were illuminating. She could not fly back to Robert. He wanted her to hold his hand, but any support would be a distraction. What he needed was her absence, regardless of his desire. She would not contribute further to Christine's unhappiness. The damage was now irrelevant. What mattered only was that she take responsibility for her own anguish and return Robert to his family. By not flying back, she was helping.

  She continued to unbutton her jacket, fingers tracing the buttons in succession, repeating silent thanks, and grieving, not for what was lost but for seeing so late.

  "I've been involved with a married man," she said.

  Clouds had crept back that afternoon. The streets were shadowless, and she could not see the rain, but she could hear its patter like impatient fingers. Scott held her umbrella between them as they walked. He pointed to a dip in the sidewalk.