Paris Twilight

by Russ Rymer

  “Because only you know the answer, so tell me: Will I be?”

  “No,” he said, and he had gotten close enough, and I punched him on the shoulder.

  “Will I?”

  “You are not, dear,” he said. “No, you are not!”

  Hitting him felt surprisingly therapeutic and so I hit him again, harder and in the middle of his chest. “Because I don’t feel sure, Emil. I don’t feel sure about anything. Because something’s very wrong.”

  “Because . . .”

  “Because, damn it, you aren’t sick!”

  “You mean because you’re hitting me?”

  “Yes!” I shouted. “Yes, because I’m hitting you! Because we walk all over town, and go to restaurants, and climb the steps to Sacré-Coeur! Because of marzipan, and profiteroles! And cordon bleu. And foie”—and I poked him in the sternum with my fingers—“fucking”—and I poked him again, and he reached out for me, and I guess unfortunately the way he reached, his touch found my neck beneath my ear and I felt the restraint, you know what that does, you could have told him, Daniel, you’d have explained what even that gentle restraint might cause to occur, considering the circumstances, me as upset as I was.

  “—gras!” I yelled, and let him have it full in the face.

  Then Sahran disappeared; he disappeared from view. What with the coffee table being right behind him, I guess, and I must have hit him pretty hard, he vanished. There was a terrible ka-whump sound with a frightening croûton crunch inside of it, and I looked down and saw him lying there on his back with one leg up on the table. He didn’t move except to lie there blinking and I dropped down onto my hands and knees and for some reason, ever tidy, I first scurried over to grab my glass, which was spinning where I’d flung it, bourbon on the Aubusson, and then I crawled back over to Sahran with the glass in one hand, and with my other I stroked his chest.

  “I’m sorry!” I said to him.

  He raised one hand and gingerly checked his mouth. “Not at all!” he said—dazed, he made no sense, his voice kind of jaunty like it was teatime and he was getting set to offer me a crumpet and inquiring lemon or milk?, like the needle had skipped its groove and I’d knocked him into a completely different protocol. “Not at all! It’s just, there’s been a . . . some misinterpretations, you see. You have the wrong . . .” His speech was slowed to a stutter by his dabbing at his lip, and I had to wait for him to come up with the word. He dabbed and thought and dabbed some more, and then it seemed to occur to him. “Sahran!” he concluded.

  “Sahran,” I said.

  “Yes, the wrong Sahran. Because, of course, as you can see, my heart’s not sick.” I leaned my ear closer; he was getting kind of wispy. “Odile’s is,” he said. “Mine’s not, but Odile’s is. She’s your patient. She’s very, very sick, Odile.”

  “Oh,” I said, but it wasn’t a word, it was just an exhalation, and when I kissed him I could taste his blood like rich living salt on his lip.

  It was some time much later that I woke in the dark, startled out of a drifting, lost, gossamer happiness by some odd barb of anxiety and then relaxing as I recognized what it was. “I completely forgot to call,” I marveled.

  “Zut,” the voice replied, sleepy.

  “Is that bad?”

  “Très! You must.”

  “But I’m here, I’m with you.”

  “I’m only the boss,” he said. “I’m not your coordinator.” He chuckled as I struggled out from the crisp sheets and, as payback for such cheerfulness, I pulled a blanket off him to drape around myself as I headed for the telephone, the phone I’d seen in the hall. There’s one right here, he protested, right by the bed. “Just be sure they don’t trace it.” His grin audible.

  When I hung up, I found the chair where I’d laid my things and I felt along its pillow for the hush of my dress, for my slip and undies and bra and the clingy hose, was that everything? (Surely there’s a mnemonic.) Shoes downstairs. Purse downstairs. I leaned to kiss Emil lightly as I passed, his forehead smelled so sweet. His fingers reached for my arm, but I said, no, I should go, and when he made to rise I put a hand against his chest, he knew by now to pay attention to that. “Please, don’t. I’ll let myself out.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “It’s what I want.”

  “Are you . . . it’s all okay?” he asked.

  The dear, I thought.

  “Will I see you?”

  “Yes.”

  Emil said, “Drôlet’s by the curb.”

  He was indeed, dozing with the bill of his cap pulled down onto the bridge of his nose, in the passenger seat of the slumbering limo, a shade within a shadow, but I didn’t disturb him. I turned and walked the other way. I was doing him no favor, I knew—had I allowed him to drop me off, his duties would have been concluded for the night, and now he would rot by the curb till dawn, poor Drôlet, crumpled up like Jonah. It was not that I was still trying to protect my hideaway’s whereabouts—somehow that privacy too had been shed when I shed my clothes, but I didn’t care. There was a place I wanted to visit that had to be visited alone.

  In a way, I’d already reached it: the city at night. Remember how we used to walk around Manhattan, you and I, in the wee hours, visiting the chestnut vendors’ encampment, the night stalls of the carriage horses? Such secret places, and how glad I was that I had you to go with, Daniel. But resentful too. I knew we weren’t there as equals; at 3:00 A.M. in a city like New York, you could go wherever you wished, but I could go only with you. How fiercely I sensed that my town had things to tell me, private murmurings so delirious and strange they could be heard by no one else, if I could only slip away from convention some night and meet it one to one. Which is why the Paris that I loved best was the one that insisted on being a place where the office girl could stop on her way home and drop her briefcase by the zinc and have a glass of Belgian by herself and watch the game, and set down her francs and pick up her briefcase and go, without attracting interest or incident, where the sound of heels on a deserted sidewalk at midnight might be just a woman lost in thought or compelled by the plain necessity of getting from somewhere to somewhere else and not the sound of some poor creature driven by fear for her life.

  After leaving Emil’s, I walked toward the river (it’s the thing about Île Saint-Louis: from equals to there, and you can’t possibly walk away from the Seine without walking toward the Seine) and then down the length of the Quai d’Orléans. I crossed the little frog’s jump of the Pont Saint-Louis—Let us cross over the river—to the prow of the other island, and skirted the back gardens of Notre-Dame, and hopped another bridge to the sycamore shore of the mainland—Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees—and went up through the scatter of smaller streets that lay between the river and the boulevard. When I’d peered down from the span, the Seine had glinted back as scalloped as chipped obsidian, and now, blocks away, I could still smell its lush, heavy cold. A car passed; somewhere a clochard sang as he clanged his way through a garbage can. Then I was beyond them, and my own clicking heels were all that was left to be heard, though the tiny mechanical click my heels made was hardly much of a racket, was the dry precise ratchet of giant calipers sizing up the silence. My one heel clicked and then the other, and the duration between them was profound.

  Then at some point, midblock on some blunt, straight street, the sky transformed. The river of arctic ice that had led up to Sahran’s place now led me away from him, flowing overhead, idling around me, herding me gently along, pooling around the bridges and over the squares and quickening again as I entered narrower channels. I noticed it when I slowed or turned a corner; then I could feel the current brace against my back, but in all it was dim—dim, faint, and languorous—until, on the blunt street on the way to Saint-Séverin, the river jolted to vivid life, blared rudely into color as though a circus roustabout had pulled the big lever to set the grand carousel spinning in the sky and opened the curtain on spectacle.

 
The river above me wasn’t at all like the one I’d crossed on the Pont Saint-Louis, my Old Man, my customary river, a tide of darkness lugged by its own rumbling weight to drown in a distant sea. This one was a crosscurrent and a contradiction, a rippling, twirling treadmill, all farce and carnival, a clanking mad contraption (Confetti borealis? I amused myself. I was daffy with delight) that stooped to engulf me then billowed aloft again, beckoning me through dun alleys, along blank défense d’afficher battlements, on an upended carpet of light, orange and turquoise, violet and blood. Is it any wonder I wished to fall up, to be swept away? You don’t feel abandoned, Daniel, do you, that I would desert my dark, my slow, my gradual descent toward you to chase this shiny banner? Oh, silly, sagging, ridiculous me, wasn’t I more than fifty? Oh, what had I done?

  Nothing terrible, nothing wrong came the answer. Nothing at all bad. And hadn’t it been lovely, with lovely Emil, whatever would we be now? He and me, Emil and I, what were we to do? Nothing came the answer, again. There’s nothing to be done. He’d been such a prince, Emil had, understanding what a younger lover couldn’t, how to bring me to the river’s edge, knowing he wasn’t the river. And hadn’t he been gentle, Emil, and hadn’t he known the gentlest thing of all, to let me glimpse his gratitude, how grateful he was to get to know this girl. This old girl could have kissed him, and didn’t I! Kissed and kissed and kissed him, and felt his grateful heart pump hard beneath my palm in the plummeting dark, beneath the skin and breastbone where I’d hit him, how life breaks out afresh when you think you’ve long ago spent your allotted due.

  A car roared into the square by Mabillon, managing the corner on two wheels and looking as close to capsize as a dinghy in a storm. It was a powder keg of rolling noise, flapping flags waved by screaming men perched on its windows and pounding the roof as they chanted the slogan of the fútbol team that had just won a match in some longitude where the sun still shone, a one-car victory parade lost in space. It orbited the block twice in search of an audience and finding no takers (except startled little me) roared away in the direction of Saint-Sulpice. I was afraid the commotion had dispelled my celestial overtow, but then the silence returned, and after an insecure second or two, the aurora emerged from hiding and winked back into place, and the conveyor clanked into motion again, tugging me onward, though its ribbons now were darker.

  “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees,” the chaplain had said, the trees on this gun-gray day being a row of spreading tulip trees not far from the family homestead of our several summer vacations, though it wasn’t summer now, but wintry, and though the lawns sloping down to the Delaware were marked by no shade at all from the trees that were bare beneath the drizzle and the sunless clouded sky, and I could hear beneath his plush, practiced sentences the threadbare warp of an oft-used eulogy. “Those words,” the military chaplain said, “were pronounced by the general”—General Jackson, he meant, Thomas “Stonewall”—“and they were Stonewall’s last,” and he informed us that the wounded Jackson had delivered two final messages out of his delirium. The first was an order to his lieutenants to pass the infantry to the front. The second was an order superseding the first and all before it, “an invitation to peace, to rest.

  “And so we must honor these two sides of the life of the young hero who will be with us now no longer. That he pushed to the front of life’s battle, that he answered the call of his generation and gave full willing measure in defense of his country. Now he calls us to that harder mission, to let”—minuscule pause as he pasted in your name—“Maxwell Daniel Coddington rest, rest in the grace of God’s mercy, under the shade of these trees.”

  And, oh, how I loathed him, the military chaplain with his chapbook eloquence, hate him still and have never hated anyone more faithfully, with the one exception. Hated him first for even thinking he could sum you up so tidily, you fucking hero, “full willing measure” indeed, and at such a moment, before such people as we were, and then, much later, and growing with each year, hated him for even thinking that we could conceivably let you rest, that you would ever conceivably let us let you rest, you hero. The unholy, lying, incompetent, duplicitous impostor of a pasteboard priest.

  When the chaplain had done all the damage that words could do, the honor guard accomplished the rest, firing its volley into the air. The honor guard, Maxwell Daniel, being a day-labor cadet with a target-practice .22, and after the gun had been emptied, and the trumpet played by a high-schooler on loan from the halftime band, and the dirt shoveled onto the mahogany, and before everyone had made it back into the sorry cortege of a hearse and one sorry limousine, the sergeant sought me out to chat. He stood there in the drizzle, he having met you over there, he said, and having driven across the state when he learned the news, to be here at the graveside, done up in his dress greens, because he remembered you, and you’d struck him as a nice young man, someone to watch, that’s what he said, someone to keep an eye on. In full dress greens, though I suspected he was no longer in the service, suspected the real reason for his extravagant long-distance courtesy call was not to bury the dead but to keep alive his own unresolved experience, to keep it unburied by time, and so he’d come here to me, wanting to reminisce, of all things, with me, of all people.

  The torrent of light above me dimmed to a trickle, and then as suddenly as it had appeared, it dispersed in a last high scattering of sparks, leaving me with a standard-issue Paris night sky and with the realization that I was walking up rue Nin. My beautiful neon stream was sutured shut, and the street lay quiet and soft below the streetlights, the buildings dormant and mute. The only lit window on the block was on the top floor of 136, in the study of Carlos Landers’s apartments.

  I stopped across the street to peer up, wondering if she was busy at her translations, wondering why my happiness must ever be like this: not quite happiness, but a happiness now and then, systole, diastole, as the heartbeat goes—on again, off, a joy, an interminable contraction, another brief joy, the duration between my joys so deep that it would swallow you up if you let it, Daniel. And, oh, how I’d been swallowed. It was a terrible thing, always knowing ahead of time the end place of every runaway gladness—the smell of chestnuts in the night mists of Manhattan, the weight of Emil above me in the dark—to know how every gladness would end up: as a foil, a measure, a yardstick for grief, calipers sizing up sorrow.

  Standing across the street from the Wisteria, I wished that I smoked cigarettes or that I had a broken heel or some other outward and evident excuse to linger like this, watching for a shape or shade to cross that square of light and provide me with a sign. Might I somehow glimpse the creature whose name, I now knew, was Corie? Might she somehow see me, if she looked out? If she did, what would I do? How would I explain standing here at such an hour, alone as I was? Or as I thought I was, until the shadow moved.

  I feel that I saw it before I saw it move, but by then it was almost upon me, a vague apparition, some burlap pilgrim loosed from another time, the shawl that covered her bowed head clasped at the neck in cold fingers. When she passed under the streetlight I could see that it was the concierge, Céleste, in her tattersall coat, her feet shod in boots that looked as though she’d torn them off a Cossack, back when Cossacks existed. She reached the Wisteria’s entry pergola and unlocked the gate and let herself into the yard but didn’t proceed up the path. Instead, she crossed to a far back corner of the lawn, where she disappeared into blackness. I watched her through the pickets as she reemerged, and as she turned from closing the gate, she saw me too. She seemed shocked without being in the least surprised. “It’s you,” she said, in her customary milk-of-kindness rasp, and asked me had I gotten lost or had I quite stupidly locked myself out, and I said no, I was only headed home, and she said, “Now?”

  We walked together toward the end of the block—she would escort me all the way around the maze and back to our courtyard, grousing, “Alone at this hour, complètement folle, the crazy thing, doesn’t she know she�
��s not in New York anymore?,” as though my nighttime indiscretions didn’t describe hers equally. My mind was still stuck in some other place, on the sergeant in his dress greens relating his story, the awful story I’ve never told you of the fated soldiers, and of lying on the grass beside the airfield, and I remembered how I’d listened, taking in his tale while I silently inscribed his name on the list of those whom I would ever after hate, the list that was now up to three and included the sergeant in his dress greens, and (in ascending order of importance) the duplicitous military chaplain, and you.

  We weren’t far down the sidewalk when the light snuffed out, and Céleste and I both noticed it, our heads jerking toward the darkened window, and noticed each other noticing, the window gone as dark as all the others.

  XIII

  PALMA, MAJORCA

  Boo! It’s a letter, my love, can you believe? They are letting us send mail! We’re no longer categorized as incomunicado. Did you get that carte postale they permitted me, forever ago? “Señora Alba Solano Landers is pleased to announce, from her unending confinement, the end of her confinement . . .” I am well, generally. My current illness is worry and is chronic. They promise we can receive mail too, even packages. Please write today and say you are safe. May this long silence have been our last!

  “Do you have this postcard from Alba?” I asked.

  Corie shook her head. “Unless it’s out of order,” she said. We were sitting in Landers’s study drinking the orange tea, she in an armchair, me on the neighboring couch, clutching a blue aerogram in one hand, its English twin in the other. “So many are,” she said. “Anyway, it’s the first one I’ve had like this . . .” Leaving “this” undefined, she stood and went over to her writing desk and began to rummage through her papers, and I turned back to the page.