Paris Twilight

by Russ Rymer

  “Madame,” he said with disapproval, staring off somewhere else as though I were an impediment to his destiny soon to be circumvented, and I felt more an interloper than I had on the palace lawn. I asked him for a black tea, and managed to get in “et aussi” before he fled, for he’d sprung from my side as though jettisoned by a shock, and when he turned around, I asked if anyone here might know a man—at this the waiter backed up a dismissive step and his head began to shake—named Byron Manifort Saxe. That stopped the headshaking, all right, but I got no response; instead, he sped off as he’d tried to do before, and the hand that brought my tea, and with it a piece of cake, was very sweet and generous and slow, but it wasn’t the hand of the waiter. It belonged to another man, young enough that his face was fresh and still unlined, though his sandy hair was thinning, who sat down across from me and introduced himself with a handshake as Passim.

  He wore a tan suit without a coat, the vest buttoned across a starched white shirt. The jacket would be hanging behind a door in a back office somewhere; that would make him the manager. He pushed the plate with the cake in front of me. “This is our grande torte Portbou,” he said. “We are famous for it. In truth we order it from a bakery in the banlieue like everyone else, but the truck arrives early, and our wonderful customers are kind enough not to notice.” He pushed a napkin next to the plate and set a fork on the napkin. “You are searching for someone.”

  I allowed that I was.

  “Tell me, who might you be to this individual?”

  Good question, I thought to myself, and responded, “I understand he may have owed you some money, and I would like to settle the debt.” This had not been, in fact, remotely my mission in entering, for the reason that I’d had no mission at all, only a chance opportunity. On the spur of the moment, though, the phone charges seemed a plausible bandage to cover my raw curiosity.

  “Ahh,” Passim said with relief. “I was worried I would have to inform you of the news.” He placed his hands flat on the table. “Byron was a regular here, yes. He was also a friend of ours. Cafés have friends, just as people do, and he and this room enjoyed quite a history. In truth, he doesn’t owe us anything. He could have used the phone for free, of course; it was not a problem. He paid for his meals, which is more than some people do; he came every day, and paid by the week. But he insisted on reimbursing us whenever he made a call.” He shrugged. “That’s okay; it’s how he wished it. Then for a while he didn’t come in, and I sent him that phone bill. Mostly, I was kidding him, trying to find out what was going on. Now I’m sorry. I will ask that you please ignore what you’ve received. Byron owes me nothing, and I am sure he owed nothing to anyone else.”

  “Is there anything,” I asked, “anything you can tell me about him?”

  I could feel Passim appraise me—who was this woman who knew too little to care so much? A wisp of suspicion crossed his eyes, then fled. “You must come visit us, madame,” he said. “As it turns out, you have chosen monsieur’s favorite table, though he would have been here promptly at five, and I would have served him a beer.”

  Passim left me alone to finish my cake, which indeed tasted famous and which the waiter, though still not seeing me, nevertheless refused to let me pay for, and when the fighter-jet game screamed “Air war!” I bolted back the dregs of my tea and left, but not so quickly that Passim couldn’t meet me by the door, his hand outstretched, and if the thing he held in his hand had been a grenade, it could not have caused a greater explosion in my life.

  “This may be yours, then,” he said. “I wasn’t sure what to do with it.”

  To tell you about that, I must explain about the letter—the first letter, signed A., from the woman whose name was Alba—and I am mystified that I haven’t already done so. Perhaps it is because the letter, or rather the event of the letter (the letter itself being so obstinately unremarkable), occupies a space in my mind that is so nonplussed, so dumbfounded, that it exists as a kind of abeyance, a reality I still can’t quite let myself admit to, though, God knows, it’s a reality I’ll never escape.

  The large manila envelope I’d pulled from Saxe’s mailbox had stayed safely sealed until one night in the apartment when I got the lamps glowing and settled down to wait for the music (with some anxiety! I was never sure on any given night if the serenade would commence again or not), and I decided the time had come. I say this like it was an occasion, but it wasn’t, not at first. After all my avoidance of it, the envelope’s content proved to be as ordinary as a shopping list, which, in fact, it was, in a way: the single page, carefully penned, was primarily about some shoes. It began with no date. That is, the first thing it said, at the top of the page, was No date. No place. This was in English, as was the rest of the text, which continued with Beloved.

  Have I thanked you for your beautiful shoes? Oh, not enough! I know how you are, you won’t even remember buying them. Or perhaps you will remember the abuse I heaped on you for your kindness. So I must also thank you for forcing them on me. Who ever could suspect that the item she sees for sale through a pretty vitrine on rue de Rivoli will save her life in some other and unimaginable world, & that’s where I am now, for what I have seen these last recent days is nightmare. I write quickly because Valentín and Rosa will be departing with the mail. There were moments I didn’t have the will to get to here, it was so very far. Even my faithful alpargatas would have given up, I’m sure, & it was only your lovely Rivoli boots that soldiered on, took one step and another and dragged me to safety. Oh, that they might abduct me home (is that what you instructed them, or did you just say to take me away? I wish I knew!). How I love you, my dearest & only & I will write more soon.

  I suppose my reaction to this missive could have been embarrassment—professions of love and commercial satisfaction mushed together in a sort of purple-prose product endorsement. Had I just read a bodice ripper, I asked myself, or a brochure for bodices? But whatever questions I had for the letter, and I had some—Byron, you salty dog, you were a bit more spry, weren’t you, than the doddering image I had of you!—the letter posed a greater one to me: Is this what I wished to be doing, is this who I was, an eavesdropper, a peeping Tom?

  The effect was saddening, and I could feel its immediate undertow. The intimate glimpse of Saxe’s life estranged me from Saxe’s surroundings, just when I was feeling so . . . residential. You trespass, the letter admonished me, and the scolding was sufficient that I locked up and left before the piano could begin to play and spent my concert hour stalking the back streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, seeking out bookshops and art galleries, anywhere I could pretend to stare at a wall of bindings or a wall of paint while my mind beat me bloody. Who was I fooling, inhabiting this man’s vile little corner as though it were my private pied-à-terre? Though, okay, it was mine, veritably, by the fluke of his bizarre intent, but still, what could I be thinking, lurking around in the evenings, kicking off my shoes and getting all comfy in my fancy quilt with a cup of tepid tap-water tea (I had even considered buying a kettle and was stopped only by the thought of rehabilitating that murderous stove) and settling in to read a book—or, for that matter, a stranger’s mail?

  This wasn’t why I was here. I’d been put in charge of disposing of an estate, a simple bit of business, especially since the estate was on the order of minuscule and of the character of dingy. Except for providing me with the amusing diversion offered by the Mystery of Mr. Saxe, my duty hardly rose above the onerous and needed to be dispatched with, not indulged in.

  With that self-caning, I set to work over the next few days, arriving at the premises early and diving into my chore with admirable purpose. Out went all the miscellaneous bric-a-brac of Saxe’s life, the ordinary items that may have been as meaningful as prayer beads when strung along the habit of his days but that were now utterly valueless. The developing chemicals I emptied down the drain, and the camp stove hit the trash with a little more vengeance than perhaps it deserved. I dispensed with my superstitions and flew in
to the dresser drawers. The top ones held socks and T-shirts (into the trash) and boxer shorts (trash!) and the bottom ones a horrible collection of paperwork, a bureaucratic midden of twentieth-century domestic life—more bills, tax documents, correspondence of complaint and request, all consigned to neat stacks of neatly labeled file folders. I gave the drawers a cursory rifling—I found a folder marked Electricité but nothing particularly enlightening; nothing, for instance, labeled Anselm—and shut them again, leaving them as I’d found them. It would all require more sober dissection on another day. But the closet!

  I flung open the door as though my assault required the advantage of surprise. Perhaps it did—I was certainly outnumbered. The space was crammed with an impressive wardrobe hanging from two rows of rods lining all three walls. Cotton shirts, woolen pants, short coats and long for varying degrees of cold and inclemency, shoes, boots, two bathrobes (one silk jacquard, one flannel), and five suits, two with vests. I caught myself finding all of this interesting, musing on what it meant that his suits had Spanish labels and his shoes were a forty-three, that his raiment cost more than his apartment. Were his dress clothes meant for church (or for synagogue, actually, since the only thing I’d not discarded from the sock drawer was his yarmulke), or for promenading through Père-Lachaise on Sunday afternoons, or for gift shopping on rue de Rivoli? But I snapped out of my musings and turned myself back forcibly to my task, my more literal deconstructing of his closet. All of this—all of it—would have to go. I pulled much of the wardrobe out onto the divan, with a double satisfaction—there, try reposing on that!—and drew up a quick inventory, and when I got home to the Clairière that night, I called Goodwill and arranged a pickup for the next day, which was the day I encountered the armed roadblock and discovered my detour and met the proprietor of Café Portbou, who’d handed me the second letter and said, “This may be yours.”

  A second letter!

  I knew what it was right away, of course—in all outward aspects, it was identical to the one I’d pulled from the mailbox (Passim had left that one there when he delivered the phone bill): a large flat envelope with Saxe and confidentiel scrawled across its face. Its effect was utterly different, though. Its detonation was retroactive. The first letter had seemed to me a plain enough relic, a memento mori, some laggard piece of Saxe’s corpus slow to get the word, that had, like hair and fingernails, gone on growing an hour or two after his decease and would by now be as dead as the man was, dead and over. The second letter told me that the first had been no such thing. What I received from Passim and now held in my hand was a live, ongoing correspondence, and what did that mean for me? I’d been put in charge of tidying up for a dead man; was I now supposed to drive a stake through affections still alive?

  “Under the door, just yesterday,” Passim said. “Some of them arrive like that.”

  “Some,” I said.

  “The others she drops off in person. He liked to read them over his dinner.”

  “How many . . . ?”

  “Once a week, twice,” he said. “Other weeks nothing.” The news so obliterated the obvious question that it didn’t occur to me until I’d turned away and almost left, and I had to lean back through the door to inquire.

  “Not the least idea,” Passim answered. “Couldn’t tell you her name.”

  I had no time then to look at the envelope’s contents; I had to race. The Goodwill truck was idling in the impasse when I got there. My consternation was running a little high, but in emotion, at least, the driver had me bested. He seemed furious to be there, furious at having to wait. I couldn’t tell if this was a provisional condition or simply how he was, his personal expression of what he thought it meant to be Parisian. At any rate, his irritation rose with every stair he climbed (“Pas d’ascenseur?”) and soared when he got a good look at the state of my gift (“Pas de cartons?”). No boxes and no elevator and I had to plead (“S’il vous plaît! Désolée!”) and ply him with a tip, but at last he did the job.

  Actually, his underling, a gangly and beleaguered teenager, did the job, the part of it that I could see, mounting the stairs over and over to grapple with armloads of loose garments while the driver handled the truck end of things, which evidently took a lot of handling. The transfer consumed most of an hour. On the teen’s last climb, I tipped him also, gave him more than I’d given his boss just for the satisfaction of it, and he handed me an ornately itemized receipt (so that’s what Pas de Cartons had been doing down there!) on which the monetary value of my generosity was left blank for me to fill in, I’m sure because the job boss didn’t want to climb five flights to haggle.

  The receipt listed seventy-three items of clothing, seven pairs of shoes and boots, and three hats (two felt fedoras and a Panama), and how I wish I had it all back to look at again, knowing what I now know of Saxe and wishing as I do for any piece of evidence of which I might ask questions. I would check every sweater for Spanish moth holes, every pocket for Algerian sand, peruse his trousers for waist size and inseam length and every coat’s collar for a tailor’s label, its shoulder for the shadow of a nonexistent star. But they were all gone, and in their place a dark, vacant chamber that showed all the traditional signs of residential rout: shards of shirt cardboard anchoring skittish caravans of dust, a coin or two, a regiment of decommissioned hangers, a paper clip. The closet, stripped, presented only three surprises: a door in the far wall obstructed by clothes rods and anyway locked and sealed (I tried it), a shiny right shoe—should I adjust the receipt to read six and a half pairs?—and a square metal security safe, also locked. The music that night was more spectacular than ever before, and Liszt rolled like a tide into my chamber, along with the Brahms again—rumbled amplified through the ransacked closet as though through the horn of an enormous gramophone.

  VII

  BELOVED,

  I fear we are to lose our refuge. Nothing has happened, but it won’t be long. I haven’t told Lotte or Maria Xavier. I don’t wish to worry them. I heard the propeller overhead yesterday, its drone peeking through whenever the racket of the wind & the children died down. Again this morning. It’s maddening, like having a mosquito in your skull. I can’t spot him, but I know he’s there & what he’s doing. If death is a seamstress, as they say, she’s a conscientious one, & she’s come to take our measure. Oh, it makes me weary! Not even afraid, just tired again, in advance. I’m looking back on what is to come and bearing the weight in my bones. I hope they come in loud this time. When the Heinkels cut their engines out at sea and coast in silent, there can be no rest at all, it’s the worst of waiting. How are you, dearest? You see, I don’t even ask. Poor you! I load you up with my sorrows & never inquire of your news. Received letter of 17th, thank you. So Byron’s sticking with his plans? I think it is good, please tell him. Yes, you are right, Ganivert 40 is a distant mirage, our glycinage [?] so impossibly long ago, but you are real, and I carry you next to me always. Bless you for tuning the piano. If it awaits, I know I won’t be long. There, I hear him. When did their everywhere god become so tiny? They’ve reduced omnipresence to a mean little speck in the sky. Do you know what makes me mad? That this little speck understands my fate & I do not. Is that what war is? A migration of the senses such that one’s life is visible only from afar & to a stranger? But oh, well, we are always at war, if that’s the definition.

  Save me (and you, pobrecito!) from all my loose thoughts. I love you.

  —A.

  “Madame.”

  I looked up from rereading the letter, rereading it for the twentieth time and re-mulling its implications, and saw that we had reached the hospital. Had reached it, evidently, a while ago, since we were parked on the pea gravel with the wipers off, the windshield dappled with rain. I offered, “Oh, I’m sorry,” and hastened my things together, and instructed Drôlet to come inside. “It’s cold. I’ll be at least an hour.” He said he’d stick with the car.

  Upstairs—I’d been bequeathed a precious key to the elevator—I went to find
a coordinator. I wanted to check over the setup. Not for any practical purpose, mostly for reassurance. Whatever had been gnawing at me since my arrival in this place had been gnawing harder and harder in recent days and with every conversation with Willem. The nurses’ station was vacant, so I wandered down the hall to Mahlev’s door and stepped inside. Stepped with trepidation; he was such a big guy, Mahlev, but whatever majesty his bulk conferred was stolen away by enthusiasm—he was recklessly kinetic and always, for some reason, on the three or four times we’d now met, so glad to see me that he’d smash into others or, as today, the corner of his desk on his way to say hello. I could never greet him without fearing I’d bring on a zeppelin disaster.

  When it was clear we’d both survived, I said, “You thought by now you’d have the room assigned.”

  “Yes, yes!” he said. “Let’s see, where are we putting you? Three, I think.” But he seemed determined to double-check and tapped away endlessly on a keyboard on his desk, his face all pallid in the green glow of the computer monitor. Was the issue really so complicated? In my several visits, the hospital, or at least its surgical ward, had never seemed anything but idle, an impression emphasized by the whiteboard calendar on the wall over Mahlev’s desk, on which the end of November and beginning of December were snow-blind white, except for a name in brackets. The name was Sahran. Mahlev peered darkly at the monitor, muttering dates (“The twenty-ninth? No, no, the thirtieth”) and hours and room numbers and looked up at the ghostly whiteboard again, and finally he said, “Yep,” and led me down the hall and through the recovery room and deposited me at the door to OR 3.

  The wall switch inside the door didn’t ignite the room lights, only the big surgery lamp over the table, but that was okay; the lamp was more than ample. The operating room was among the finest I’d ever had a chance to use: table, anesthesiology machine, scrub table, displays, x-ray light box, bypass machine, even the IV poles as gleaming and unblemished as if they’d just come out of the box, which they well may have. I spent some time making sure I knew where my essentials would be, going through my mnemonic, the helpful phrase all of us have tucked away in our brain tissue whose acronym spells out a checklist of must-have items. “Us” being me, of course, the anesthesiologist, the person you find in the minutes before any surgery mumbling the mantra that isn’t a prayer. There are some standard, garden-variety mnemonics—Maasterlich had offered up a few of his favorites, mostly ribald—but I’d adopted a ditty from a Greek tragedy, since I’d already been made to memorize it for some classics seminar. Or maybe Cassandra just suited the scene. Where others go funny, I tend to go tragic, anyhow.