Paris Twilight

by Russ Rymer

  We’d met again in Le Faux Henry, Willem and I. If he’d picked the place to reinstate our vanished camaraderie—hadn’t we argued more civilly here than anywhere since?—the ambiance let him down. What a difference the weeks had made! The yard chairs were folded away, and the patio, absent its sun worshippers, had the cracked desolation of an abandoned swimming pool. Willem was waiting for me in the curtained vestibule, his eyes wary and his expression bruised behind the smile. His welcome was efficient, a quick hug before we marched off to our table, a perfunctory patting of shoulders. His cheer blew through me like a desert wind.

  “Well, I hear you’ve been having fun,” he said, a tiding so oddly accusatory I felt a “Yes” would be a confession and didn’t respond at all. He ordered a bottle of sparkling water and told me to go ahead and get whatever lunch I wished, that he’d had a late breakfast. “Thought we should touch base one last time,” he said, “before the surgery.” Was there anything I needed to talk over?

  “Such as?” I asked.

  “You’ve expressed some concerns,” he said, dryly. “At times.”

  “I think we’ve got them ironed out,” I assured him, adding, dryly, “It helped to find out who the patient was.”

  “The matter was delicate,” Willem stated.

  “Meaning you didn’t want to tell me I was putting a heart into a blind woman in a wheelchair. I agree. She’s not the most obvious candidate, Odile. On paper.”

  He said, “It was decided it would be better if you met her first in person.”

  “Precisely what I asked for, as I recall.” I felt my exasperation rising, all this insipid thrust and parry, padded and masked with courtesy. “And by chance,” I said, “it’s precisely what happened.”

  Willem, vehemently: “Nothing in his world happens by chance!” The venom in the words was more than a taint, was enough to choke the speaker. He sputtered before continuing, “Well, Emil’s not easy, is the thing, Tilde. That’s all.”

  “He’s a perfectly nice man,” I said.

  “He can be,” Willem said. “He can. And he can also be very determined. Overwhelming, in fact, I’d say. And don’t think for a moment he’ll let what he loves stand in the way of what he wants.”

  If I sensed a warning, I had no idea what he was warning me of or what he was trying to imply. I knew only that I didn’t wish to hear any more about it. I cut him off with a not-so-secret secret smile. “Will,” I said. “You’ve known Emil a long time, but I may know some things you don’t.”

  “I’m quite sure that you do!” he snapped. We were moving to a place beyond the courtesies, at least, and the first thing I saw there astonished me. Despite my lifetime of Willem experience and all my years of Willem analysis, it hadn’t occurred to me where Willem’s jealousy resided, that he might be desirous not of my esteem and my affection, but of Emil’s. Now I saw it clearly for what it was, and saw myself as he perceived me: the home wrecker stealing Emil’s (lucrative) attentions, stepping between longtime partners. Little wonder he’d like to pry us apart.

  “Just remember who’s leading this team,” Willem finished, and I saw I’d sideswiped his professional preeminence too. “And remember who we’re here for. The patient. That’s all. No one else.”

  The bitterness of the conversation lingered in my mind the following morning as I headed to the banlieue to see no one else but Odile.

  Drôlet and I had arranged to meet at Portbou. I wanted to stop in and return Passim’s photograph. I’d spent much of the night looking at it, looking at Carlos and Alba, imagining their brilliant lives by my dim lamplight, but now I wanted them back among their comrades, in their rightful place on their rightful wall, and so I arrived at the café a few minutes early with my absurdly burdened bag burdened all the more. In with all the usual kit, the passport and ibuprofen and hand cream and wallet and powder and brush, et cetera ad absurdum, was a stethoscope and a blood pressure cuff, an extra pair of light shoes so I could ditch my boots in the car—and a wood-and-glass-framed eight-by-ten photograph still a bit dusty with café dust and aromatic of fry grease and cigarette smoke and smeared with the fingerprints of recent adulation. I didn’t think to ask (as if there were time) if that’s how the courier identified me, by the morbid obesity of my handbag.

  “Madame Anselm?” he asked. He was a young man, and he stepped across the sidewalk to intercept me before I could gain the sanctuary of Portbou’s steps. “Are you Madame Anselm?”

  “Yes.” (Imagination fails me at crucial moments.)

  He had a message, he said. Could I come immediately? “You must help her,” he blurted, back-dancing in front of me, and he handed me a folded scrap of paper.

  Drôlet was already waiting, of course, had stepped out of the Mercedes to receive me and he rushed to the curb to intercede, but the boy took off at a brisk clip. We watched him glance back at the end of the block and resume a casual gait and round the corner. “Do you know where this is?” I asked. The name on the note was not that of a court or jail, but a hospital. Drôlet’s eyes were elsewhere, on the other item the boy had handed me, by way of credential, obviously, and I deemed it to be a nice touch, though Drôlet was clearly dubious: the brown bandanna.

  And that’s how it came to pass that when I arrived at the lycée my opening question for Odile was not about her health, as I’d intended, but the welfare of somebody else. Frankly, I was thankful that Odile couldn’t see the stranger I introduced her to, for the girl who arrived on Drôlet’s arm was a pitiful, beaten, waifish mess, her tresses straying upward in tense red spirals like the feathers of some exotic sea coral, my overcoat covering her hospital slip, her feet afloat in my gum boots.

  “She rescued me,” Corie exulted sullenly to Odile, her voice a rasping, drugged whisper, but I wasn’t sure, I wasn’t sure. The line between savior and impostor, by that time, had grown too impossibly thin.

  The hospital was mid-city, a gritty old relic of a charity ward that seemed to me, on entering, closer to my notion of a French colonial prison than to anyone’s idea of a modern medical facility. The receptionist at the guichet was harried and overwhelmed, the admitting nurse outnumbered. She guarded the cosmic boundary between order and chaos, but before her, chaos was all she surveyed.

  “I’m here to see a patient,” I said when the approximation of a queue had nudged me to its fore, and she flipped through her ledger to locate the name.

  “No visitors,” she said with finality, that French finality that is more quintessentially French than anything else could ever be. “Security,” she said, and held her finger at the ledger line for me to relish. When she was satisfied she’d rubbed it in sufficiently, she slammed the book closed. I deemed that a nice touch too, and I reminded myself: When there’s nothing left to do, there’s no risk in a chance.

  “I’m not a visitor,” I told her, with a little New York persistence. I fished in my purse and found my laminated hospital ID on its neck chain, the one that Mahlev had given me. “I’m a visiting doctor.” And to get past the public issue and negotiate with the private one (I couldn’t quell the childish thought that Sahran would be proud of me), I held the ID up a little too close to her nose, so that she had to lean back to focus. “Consulting.”

  “With . . .”

  “Dr. Ulmann,” I said. She should never have rubbed my nose in that ledger entry.

  I watched her warring impulses: Her imperious desire to inspect my credentials tussled with her proud refusal to be in any way subservient to my imperious demand that she inspect my credentials. She was a pro; she played it down the middle. Maybe she took in anesthésiste and the name of the unknown hospital, or maybe just photo and filigree; whatever, I could hear the pace of decision—challenge or not?—and it lasted as long as the silence lasts between snowfall and downpour when you’re standing beside a cathedral at night in Reims, and then the verdict arrived and she said, “Orthopedics, third floor,” and handed me a visitor’s sticker.

  So far, so good, I thought as I
walked toward the elevators. I didn’t usually do things like this, was the truth. If I’d planned it, I could never have pulled it off. The forethought would have registered on my face. Receptionists at public hospitals are the reigning facial code breakers. They have to be. A stranger walks up to say that he’s stubbed his tibia or misplaced his sick mother, and the nurse has a third of an eyeblink to diagnose his character and motives and condition: Stroke? Shock? Deranged? Hostile, and if so, to a particular patient or to doctors in general? Munchausen? By proxy? Out-and-out kook? Or just needs a restroom? So I was certain she’d see right through me. And what she had seen was a harried and borderline-irritated physician who’d had other and nicer plans for her day before an unexpected duty call added a troublesome patient to her rounds. What she’d seen was a hundred percent correct, and the correct answer to what she’d seen was “Orthopedics, third floor,” and I thought, So far, so good, and then, as I got into the elevator, I thought, Now comes the rest.

  And as I pressed the button: Pray it’s a whirlpool.

  I took the elevator not to the third floor but the seventh, which didn’t have an orthopedics office but seemed like it might hold the room whose number had been listed on the ledger page: 7134. The doors opened onto a corridor, not a ward with a reception desk—that was handy—and I followed the arrows around a corner to another corner and then caught sight of my goal.

  It was the right place, all right. A policeman sat in a chair at the end of the hall, engrossed in a newspaper, and I didn’t turn down the corridor but kept on going straight. A few corners later I found what I was looking for, another bank of elevators. I wanted the one that didn’t stop in the lobby, the one marked Accès Professionnel. I pulled off my visitor sticker and hung the ID Mahlev had given me around my neck and then reached into my bag and pulled out the badge for my teaching hospital and hung that around my neck also, and to be sure I was adequately lei’d and garlanded, I threw on my stethoscope too. In for a dime.

  There were several people in the lift, and we ascended ensemble, stopping at floors to take on or disgorge. It was one of those padded garage-sized elevators with stainless-steel doors back and front, and when we got to the top I let everyone else get off and stayed on for the descent. I had to ride up and down twice before I got what I hoped for. The doors opened and two orderlies steered in a gurney with an elderly woman on it, her gray head swiveling on the pillow, tubes in her hand, hooked up for her pre-op.

  They pressed a button for a basement floor and when we got there I held the door ajar while they rolled her out and then I tagged along. Thank God I’d decided (at the last minute too) on humble attire today, on account of the snow. A dress would stand out in these precincts, these precincts being a surgical ward, what sort of surgery I didn’t know or care. What I did know was that just inside the swinging door would be a canister of soiled, discarded scrubs, and indeed there was, along with something better. Set on a shelf above the canister were boxes of fresh green scrub hats and facemasks and shoe covers, and I grabbed what I needed and headed back to the elevator. By the time I reached floor seven I was in my doctoresse camouflage, a facemask tied loosely around my neck and flopping open against my chest. It wouldn’t fool a doctor—scrubs and a purse?—but it wasn’t a doctor I was out to fool. If a doctor had been guarding the hall, I’d have gone with a dime-store sheriff’s star.

  I was as prepped as I could be for my performance when happenstance volunteered a grace note. An orderly was coming down the hallway. “Excuse me,” I said and inquired if he’d left the wheelchair I’d ordered in 7134. Non, he replied, and I told him, Oh, darn, we need it immediately, could he bring one tout de suite, merci bien, and I bustled on before he could claim to be busy. Then I reached the guard.

  He was young and bored and professionally suspicious, but being professional, his suspicions were targeted, and I didn’t look like anyone he had prepared himself to fear. I knew better than to breeze on by. I asked him how his day was going and if the natives were restless and such—I’m not sure what I came up with—before I asked about Dr. Ulmann. He said Dr. Ulmann wasn’t in, and I pursed my lips a bit to express my mild professional disapproval and asked after another couple doctors whose names I just made up, and he hadn’t seen them either. I then pulled out Corie’s chart—actually, it was Odile’s chart on its clipboard—and with a weary sigh and an air of studied distraction, I edged on past. The policeman was monitoring three or four rooms; I saw 7134 and turned into it.

  There were two patients inside: a snoring woman in the first bed and Corie, lying by the window, her back to the door. I went around and paused long enough to get a good look before touching her shoulder to wake her. Her appearance shocked me. Her cheek was bruised yellow and violet and she had an abrasion on her forehead. A cut on her temple had bled into her hair, red on red, coagulated into stringy, clotted brown. The blood had not been cleaned away, nor had anything been treated that I could tell. Her lips were chapped from dehydration, and the knuckles on the hand on the hospital blanket looked as though they’d picked a fight with a cheese grater, but I was elated that I didn’t see casts or, worse, a traction sling— the invoking of orthopedics had given me a scare. She should have been receiving fluids, but here, too, I was thankful for the neglect. She had no IVs or catheters, wasn’t tied down like Gulliver with ropes of polyethylene. I shook her, and before she could even register who this new person was, I demanded, “Where are you hurt?”

  She pointed to her ribs, and I winced. Aïe. Careful movement. This could require some time.

  “You’ve been x-rayed?” I asked and she knew who I was by now because she looked at me dumb with wonder and shook her head no. Clearly, they had her doped up a bit.

  Astonishing, I thought, about the x-rays, but I said, “Good,” and told her, “We’re doing that now. Do you have any possessions here, or identification? Anything personal?”

  “Of course not,” she said.

  “Clothes?”

  “In the cabinet.”

  “Leave them.” I heard a little commotion outside and I went out into the corridor to redeem the orderly with the wheelchair. The guard was getting antsy; the appearance of a conveyance with wheels was enough to start making him nervous, and he’d stood up. He looked down at me from the crumbling cusp of suspicion and opened his mouth to frame what would have become a challenge if I’d allowed him sufficient time.

  “Can you give us a hand, Officer?” I asked.

  The request had the happy effect of insulting two professional prides with one blow. The cop’s irritation that he might actually have to do something distracted him from his suspicions even as the orderly objected, “Non, non! Docteur, it’s not a problem. Where does she have to go?”

  “X-ray,” I said. “Be careful with her ribs,” and I stayed with the guard to sign Corie out for transit—thank heavens, doctors worldwide are known for illegible signatures—while the orderly went in to collect the goods. By the time the elevator doors opened at the emergency entrance level, the helpful orderly had been dismissed, and my badges and stethoscope were safely stashed in the bowels of my bag, along with my purloined scrubs, and Corie and I hightailed it sedately out to the curb, where I’d instructed Drôlet to wait for us.

  Odile had told me to meet her in the lycée’s nurse’s office, a functional little room outfitted nicely with the rudiments—tongue depressors, cotton balls, half-bath with spritz shower. It was unequipped in one regard, to my relief—there was no school nurse on duty today, thank God. Then I realized who the school’s nurse was: Odile. I soon saw why. Despite the fact that she couldn’t actually see her visitor’s dilapidated condition, Odile didn’t hesitate for an instant. She fled to Corie like a magnet to steel and commenced her mending immediately. I’d imagined this hour ahead of time as a ritual establishment of our respective roles: mine as the doctor, Odile’s as the patient. Now everything was getting all swiveled up. Odile became the room’s attending physician, and among the miracles of the m
iraculous day was the sure insightfulness of her sightless ministrations. Her hand went straight to the bloodied temple as though drawn by the heat of the wound, and her grunt of dismay when she found that gash wasn’t one of surprise but of disgust at suspicions confirmed. This nun, it turned out, wasn’t so cloistered from the world’s ways.

  She appointed me her sous-nurse—Get me hydrogen peroxide; get me the gauze—and cleaned and bound Corie’s hurts and searched her over with a blizzard of squeezes and pinches, arms lifted and knees twisted, a tactical reconnaissance for signs of further damage. She pushed her into the half-bath to rinse off, then zipped from the room and returned with a change of clothes: a one-size-fits-the-whole-Arab-world abaya and a brightly colored hijab. She combed out Corie’s matted hair and patted the headscarf into place—it nicely hid the bandage she’d wrapped around Corie’s skull to keep the gauze tight to her temple—and said to her, “There. Now you’re one of mine.”

  We were all, in truth, indubitably hers, for that afternoon and into the evening (I’d dismissed Drôlet until a late hour). Odile escorted us back to her chamber, the square, dorm-ish, windowless room whose austerity reminded me of Saxe’s flat, where she sat in her chair and we lounged on pillows on her carpet and her bed, Corie propped at a comic angle on account of her ribs, which appeared to be only contused, not cracked, Corie and I yakking away quite outside ourselves, as though our outlandish morning had kicked our identities reeling and indeterminate until Odile had come along to gather us into her basket like windfall chestnuts, like foundlings. We were foundlings, chestnuts, newborn chicks; we were giddy with safety and hardly recognizable to ourselves, though I consoled myself that Corie was looking more normal again, if it was yet a somewhat bruised and burnoosed normalcy.

  “Weren’t you awfully afraid?” Odile asked me, turning the conversation to my daring raid. “You could have been arrested—”