by Russ Rymer
By the time I made it close to the pulpit, the woman named Alba had long since departed the stage. The headliners were done and the dead horse had been turned over for flogging by second-stringers, and the rally had lost enough steam and spectators to permit a few atoms of oxygen back into the air. I stared at the frayed ranks in the presbytery and saw no women there at all, and I pressed up toward a carved wooden side door that looked as though it led backstage. A man sat on a stool by the door, reading a book as calmly and intently as though he were ensconced in a carrel in the Bibliothèque Nationale. I made for the door, and his arm shot out.
“Please, I need to meet someone,” I said.
“Credentials,” he stated. It wasn’t a question, any more than he was swayable. He was tall and sallow and dressed in a ridiculous Sgt. Pepper jacket, with epaulets and brass buttons, and sucking on a bonbon in his cheek.
“I need to see Alba,” I said, and he gave me a look that said Doesn’t everyone?
When there’s nothing left to do, I reminded myself, there’s no risk in a chance. “Bingham,” I said, with energy. “Her name is Bingham. Please tell her Dr. Anselm’s here.”
He mulled over this careful confection of specificity and title, sucked on it meditatively the way he did the bonbon, and then he stood and put the book on the stool and went through the door. Several minutes later, he was back.
“Sorry, lady,” he said, and made to sit back down. But before the door closed I caught a view of the person he’d been speaking with, and it seemed to me I could place her somewhere—something about her hair, her hair seemed to shine like fire. And then it clicked, and as it did and before the shock of it enveloped me, I put the probabilities together. The probabilities were precise—goose egg, absolute zero—but I thought: If it’s so, I must try. I opened my albatross, my ship’s anchor of a society purse, and fished around in it until I found the tattered cloth.
“Please, could you just give her this,” I said, my hand outstretched.
He sucked on the bonbon some more, this time with mild irritation, then disappeared, and after a much shorter interval the door flew open and Corie stood there, clutching the bandanna, her hair glinting red in the backlight and a look of confusion on her white face, verging on vague emergency. Her eyes went straight to mine. Could I call the look recognition? Hiding in her eyes was something I had seen only occasionally in my career and never outside the ward. I stood in her gaze for a length of time I couldn’t and still can’t measure because all the things I might have measured it by had ceased: the room’s cacophony and the fidgeting of the bouncer had frozen into silence and a statuary stillness, and there was only the light off her shoulder and her hollow gaze, the tin gaze of a returner.
“Saxe is dead,” I said.
XI
THE CAT WAS MOSTLY black, with a white chest and forehead and long hair, and it was coming down the street following the child on the scooter. It had a housecat’s character, I guess naturally enough, a berserk alertness to everything real or imagined, distracting it in so many directions that when a car passed or a pigeon flew by, you could watch the synapses sizzle—it would halt and dawdle, jolt and wander, and then, just often enough to stay in the game, jog full tilt down the sidewalk with its tail straight up till it caught up with the child.
I watched through the windows of Portbou, thinking about it: how differently we get through the world. The child was four or five and was wearing Day-Glo sneakers, taking a walk with her father on a placid morning—for her it’s an event—and he a slight gentleman in a drab corduroy coat and woolen cap, and she’d insisted (on threat of a tantrum: I can hear the ultimatums!) on bringing along her scooter, which was yellow and had blue wheels and a red handle, and which she pushed with her right foot down the sidewalk carefully, at a snail’s pace, her head bowed in focused concentration on the wheels and on her Day-Glo foot and on the pavement, trying so hard to get it all correct, it was serious work, learning how to scooter, learning how to scooter as a next installment in learning all there was to be learned, and by her side her patient, drab father—it’s not an event for him; for him, it’s an hour out of events—ambling in place with his mind far away, present just sufficiently to pleasantly attend to his daughter’s progress, a soft lumbering bass line to the child’s tense melody, and then zoom, here comes the electrified cat, the personification of a nonlinear line, blasted off course by every ion, by every backfire and stray thought and sun mote and passerby, but getting there, nonetheless, nonetheless the quickest of them all. I sat and watched them through the café window and waited for Corie to arrive.
That was how we’d left it: We’d agreed to meet. It was all we’d been able to manage amid the chaos and with her handler standing guard—not the bonbon gendarme, but one of the suited impresarios I’d spotted earlier loitering behind the cordon in the apse, a compact, too-well-appointed hard-faced man with a heavy gold bracelet and thinning hair pulled back in a ponytail who stepped out from the back room to eye me with open suspicion. “Massue—” she started by way of introducing us, but he was having none of the friendly with me. He shook my hand brusquely and herded Corie back behind the carved wooden door before we could trade more than two dozen words, though not before she’d assented, with a nod, to my suggestion of a time to meet. Then she was gone, a beefy forearm around her shoulder, and that brought an end to the evening, though the evening wasn’t over. It lingered like a headache. I went home and got to bed past midnight, knowing there’d be no music, not tonight, but wondering what she might have chosen had she played, what ceremonial Internationale she would have picked as the soundtrack for her triumph.
I was dreadfully on edge, and every drift toward dream dead-ended in a recollection that brought me wide awake again. What on earth was it? Something Sahran had said, I thought, but pound as I might on my memories of the day, I couldn’t quite dislodge it. The border of sleep was guarded by confabulations. A woman raced toward me down a garden path littered with bears, counting the bodies, Un, deux, trois, deux, trois, as she tapped them each blindly with her parasol. A man wheeled past in an office chair chased by puppets through a thicket of tree-sized flowers. Sahran had said . . . Sahran had said . . . The music caught me slumbering.
At first, her playing was exceedingly pianissimo, in deference, I suppose, to its being two A.M. Whether on account of the hour or not, her anthem was a brief one, a short, whispered Chopin nocturne that frightened me with its sadness. It was a piece more bare than any I’d heard her perform. I rose from the sheets and went into the closet to attend to the notes more closely, and as I did I edited my impression: the nocturne itself was familiar—no, not a nocturne, one of his waltzes. I’d just never heard it played so desolately.
Then, before I could press my ear to the door, the crash came: a horrible pounded mis-chord, as though the pianist were out to destroy the piano, chopping off the elegy midphrase with the violence of two hammered fists. I stood in the closet as motionless as one more garment suspended on a hanger, alarmed, on alert—but there was no coda. The silence got long, and after a while I returned to bed. At least the commotion had dispersed the sentry of Chimeras, for I slipped past them successfully into sleep.
The woman who stepped through Portbou’s door at ten thirty prompt the next morning seemed a thorough stranger until I realized what the strangeness was: it was the first time I’d seen her unattended by drama and emergency. I’d wondered how she would approach our little command performance, this summit with an older woman who had already, in two brief previous encounters, assaulted her with an automobile and stalked her through a church (and also, although I hoped she didn’t know it, raided her domicile and rifled through her books). Had I been her, I might not have shown at all. But ten thirty came, and Corie stepped through the door.
“Bonjour, madame,” she said, reserved, as I stood to greet her. The poise in her voice was businesslike, as was her hair, twirled into a chignon. It was a negligee pose; it emphasized the shape it prete
nded to obscure, the shape of confrontational unease. Her valise was a bicycle messenger’s bag. Judging from the bag, I felt bad for the bicycle. But I liked the girl all the more. At least I had an answer to my question: How did she intend to play the morning? Demonstrably undemonstrative. She clasped the bag awkwardly under her elbow so that she could pull off a wool glove to shake my hand, and I confess the awkwardness gratified me: the maneuver entailed a little unintended curtsy.
“En anglais, si vous voulez,” I said, gently. Gentle was the only stance I could come up with to undercut such poise. “Je suis américaine aussi, you know. Like you, mademoiselle.”
“Yeah, sure,” she said, her Midwest drawl asserting itself as soon as she reverted to her mother tongue. Her reversion invited my own. I’d been confounded myself, frankly, about how to approach this business. I wasn’t sure that I wouldn’t be the one in the hot seat, justifying my actions to my junior. But now the roles were suggested and set, and if she wished to hide behind a pugnacious propriety, I had my own safe refuge. Professor was something I knew how to do.
“Please,” I said, and motioned her to sit as though this were my private office and the chair were the scholar’s chair across my desk. She slipped out of her coat and hung it on the rack by the door, then came back and, instead of sitting, opened her bag and pulled out the brown bandanna. She held it toward me, exhibit A, and then let it drop onto the table, her head held a little to the side, her eyes transmitting suspicion.
“A coincidence,” I said. “Purely.”
“That was you,” she rejoined.
“I know, it’s strange. I’m very glad you weren’t hurt. I’m as surprised as you are, believe me.”
“But you kept it,” she said.
I nodded. “Yes, I kept it.”
She stood silent for a moment more, her thoughts seeping through some deep slow aquifer, and then, as though she’d reached a resolution, she pulled out the chair and sat down. She replaced the bandanna in the courier bag and dragged out one of the familiar envelopes. “I guess you want this,” she said, all business again. “I usually deliver them to Mr. Saxe, but I guess it’s okay . . .”
“It’s okay,” I assured her.
“They’re—”
“Alba’s letters,” I said.
“Yes.”
“But you are not Alba.”
“No.” Her face pinkened defensively. “I’m Corie Bingham.”
“I see,” I said. Corie. It was the first time I’d heard her Christian name. I let the silence hang in the air awhile, waiting for her to challenge me again—how come you don’t know who Alba is? Was it a sign of surrender that she didn’t ask? If so, it was the only one I was going to get.
“I liked her name,” she blurted, recalcitrance resurgent. “I mean, I do like her too, especially. But I’m a Spanish translator. Spanish, Catalan, Basque. I translate these for Mr. Saxe.”
“And Mr. Landers?” I said.
“I’ve never met Mr. Landers.”
“Don’t you work in his house?”
“Yes. I stay there. Mr. Saxe said it was okay. He gave me the key.” She’d been there, she said, three months, almost. I was dying for a description of Saxe but didn’t dare ask. She reached back into the messenger bag, extracted a cardboard box, and set it heavily on the table. “These are the ones I’ve already done,” she said. “Mr. Saxe approves them, and then he gives them back for me to attach to the originals and file.”
Her face looked stricken; she feared a faux pas. “Gave,” she corrected, and grimaced. “What happened to him?”
And with that small thaw we began our exchange, which dispelled a few mysteries and opened so many more. She told me how she’d encountered Saxe: a colleague at the university where she studied comparative linguistics asked her if she knew anyone fluent in English, Spanish, Catalan, Basque, and the smaller languages of the Pyrenees, which she did, because she was. Fluent, that is. They happened to be her specialties. Saxe had interviewed her right here, at this very table, and retained her to translate a trove of old letters into English, for which he paid her in installments (the last of which she mysteriously had not received) and with the bonus that she would be allowed to camp out in a nice apartment not too far from campus, as long as she maintained a minimal footprint there, until the job was done.
“So, are you throwing me out?” she said, in a tone that invited me to do so.
“You mean you’ve finished?” I asked.
“No. But . . .”
“How many to go?”
“Twenty, maybe. Twenty-five? A couple more weeks, I guess. The semester’s ending and . . .”
“Then I sincerely hope you’ll continue,” I said. I told her to let me know how much she was owed and said there was only one amendment I wished to make to the arrangement she’d struck with Saxe. “I prefer not to do this here. We’ll meet at Landers’s, and you can show me whatever you’ve finished. We’ll start tomorrow.”
In her impassive face I read relief and comprehended suddenly the fear that had haunted her morning, of imminent homelessness. That was the chip on her shoulder. Or at least the most recent and evident among her collection of shoulder chips. Did it also explain the violent chord? I had imagined (luridly, but without any evidence) that she was upset at being brutalized by her brutish handler, the ponytailed thug she called Massue, but maybe her fear was of someone closer to hand: brutish me.
Jeko stepped over to take our orders, gingerly. The drama of my yelling match yesterday, followed by my abduction in a limousine, had produced a marked effect on Portbou’s proprietors: I turned out not to be the woman they’d assumed, was more interesting, possibly, though possibly radioactive. I had their full attention, at least, and as Mademoiselle Bingham reverted to French to order, I gave my attention to her.
The girl before me was smaller than I’d realized. She was beautiful in whole, without, I saw, being beautiful in any particular part. Her fingers were tapered and slightly crooked, and her mouth was thin-lipped and straight, a quick, acerbic slash across her softly rounded face. Her compact solidity was redeemed by a striking grace. It wasn’t a willowy grace, or delicate, or athletic. It was, withal, intelligent, for she was as smart as she was obstinate. Her intelligence was of the nitroglycerin variety, unstable, dangerous to carry, and the grace it occasioned was one of fluid moves and gentle settings down, the eternal care and extreme self-awareness of bearing an incendiary burden.
All this I figured out later, after I’d seen an explosion or two. Right then, she struck me simply as an example of a physical self overmatched by its aura, and I flashed on the game your nieces used to play during those Pennsylvania retreats, those family vacations. Remember those getaways? Remember Stamps and Buses? We’d spring ourselves from the homestead to go out prowling for ice cream. Your parents’ old Impala, Delaware River glinting past the windows, Olive and Ruth amusing themselves in the back seat—how old those girls must be by now!—dividing the world up according to this system they’d devised.
As they explained it: There are things in the world that are marked with where they’re from—postage stamps, for instance. And then there are things that are marked with their destinations, like interstate buses. But you never knew to look at it where the bus was coming from, or where the stamp might go. And how long did we sit there, careening through the Water Gap with those two girls, their hair blowing in the river breeze, dividing the universe into stamps (Candlelight! Seedlings! Cedars of Lebanon!) and buses (Raindrops! Immigrants!). You had to be a kid to truly comprehend it—I never could get why meteors were stamps and meteorites buses. (When I tried to explain the system to Sahran, he asked what it was called when something that was in one’s past was in one’s future too, and I answered, “I’m a doctor. I call it remission.”) But I do remember there were things you couldn’t know whence they came or whither they went (Shooting stars!), and the girl before me struck me as one of those. All I could know of her was that she was here, graceful and will
ful and momentary.
Her eyes had appraised me just as sharply. At least, that’s how I explain the uncanny thing she did halfway through our breakfast, a simple action that subtly, by her grace, changed everything into its reverse, for afterward I was never again, with her, the professor in control of the defiant student, far from that: I was never again in control. She reached her arm slowly across the table, over the pot of tea and her pain au chocolat, and lay four narrow, crooked fingers on the back of my left hand, covering the scar. I was shocked at the feel of it, the feel of skin on my skin, the feel of her shock at the way the rough scar felt. I looked down at her fingers on my hand with the dumb, searing focus of the child on the scooter staring at her foot on the sidewalk, and then back at Corie’s silent face. “A burn,” I explained. “An accident, maybe, I don’t know. I was a kid. I don’t remember.”
Did I imagine that her wide eyes were moist, staring at me so forcibly? Moist and smart and impassively calm, setting me down gently. And then, of a sudden, all those things were dispelled by a second emotion that washed through like a shore wave over beach pebbles, and for a moment her expression reeled with panic and I thought: Panic for me. Then she was calm again, empty-eyed, and I watched the calmness harden into the same suspectful opacity she’d worn when she walked in the door.
When we were done talking, which is to say when we’d wrapped up the preliminaries and were too tired or timid to descend into the next deeper level of things, we left Portbou and said goodbye on the sidewalk. Of course we were headed in the same direction. For reasons I couldn’t quite name, I did not want her to know that, or to know where I lived; there was a cold deceit hidden in my fond farewell. More dangerous, as it turns out, there was a fondness within my deceit. As we took our leave, I felt the heat on the back of my hand spread into general yearning. She headed off toward rue Nin, and I turned to wander—where? I didn’t know—until it would be safe to follow, and no sooner had I wheeled about than I found myself face to face with my little gypsy-ish family clan—the father and his daughter and her housecat—straggling back on my side of the street.
