Paris Twilight

by Russ Rymer

  “For what?” Corie interrupted. “Impersonating a doctor?” It wasn’t quite a scoff, but she definitely seemed to be feeling more herself.

  That brought a laugh from us all, and it also brought a chapter whimpering to a close, and not a long chapter either, malheureusement. For a little while there, since the big event, I’d felt an unaccustomed thrill, felt myself visible at long last, the fuddy duckling who molts into cool, not some medical Auntie Mame but a street desperado who could spring a friend from a foreign jail and then (the more astounding) whisk her into an all-girl Muslim safe house, and the whisking, it should be noted—bonus points for élan—effected via chauffeured limousine. The gambit that had begun with no preparation and proceeded move by move on the improvisational fly had turned into a bravura piece of work, if I might say so, and as I say, I hardly recognized myself until Corie exclaimed “For what?” and my newfound identity collided with who I’d always been. Which was a doctor, of course, and I remembered, of a sudden, that I’d put off doing the very thing I’d come to do, and I got out my stethoscope and my blood pressure cuff and went over and pushed up Odile’s sleeve.

  “So now you must tell us where you’ve been,” I said to Corie over my shoulder as I worked. I hated my voice for its pleadingness. In the car I’d asked what the hell had happened and she’d been too druggy or stubborn to say, but now she recounted the story of her night, the civil disobedience gone haywire, the tear gas and the water cannon and the police truncheon that finally caught up with her, her arrest for resisting arrest. (“Felony tautology!” Odile interjected, miming the fall of a gavel along with her verdict, and I had to say, “Don’t move.”)

  And then, her tongue loosened, Corie filled Odile in on the general construct of her current life—on Alba, and on Saxe’s death, and how she and I had first met twice, once in a church and once on a road by accident (“No accident,” Odile judged, miming another gavel. “Fate!”), and about the old letters we studied in the vast apartment, and I saw that any wedge that Massue’s tirade had driven between Corie and her life on rue Nin had been expelled by her night’s heroics: she had nothing to apologize for anymore. The adventures had liberated her from something more onerous than the clutches of the police: the indictments of her thuggish handler. Massue had tried his damnedest to evict her from her garden, but Alba had brought her back home. And I thought, She’s proud. The lacerations her face bore were hardly hallmarks of bourgeois indifference, and I thought, They honor the scars on Alba’s breast, and, What Alba does, she follows without question. Alba had freed Corie from Massue. As a result, Corie was more than ever Alba’s captive and disciple. “Why do you have a mirror?” she asked suddenly.

  I looked around at Odile’s “window” set in its heavy oak frame. I was aghast (I wish I could say astonished) at Corie’s rudeness, but Odile laughed, delighted. “Vanity,” she answered as she held up her sleeve for me. Her voice was blithe. She asked if Corie was surprised and noted that she had a lamp too. “Did you notice? No, I can’t see them, but I can’t see my lipstick either, yet I wear it,” she said, and said that if she was going to be vain, “I want a mirror to be vain in.” She lowered her voice to a confidential rumble. “Would you put on lipstick without a mirror?” The question was sly; Corie never wore even the simplest makeup, though how could Odile know that?

  I reached for my bag to grab Odile’s chart and pulled out with it the awkward weight I’d been lugging around through all the day’s adventures. I dropped the photograph slowly into Corie’s open hands. Even before she looked at it, she received it as something to revere. She scrambled up painfully and carried it to the table and held it in the lamplight and peered through the glass intently.

  “Is it her?” she asked.

  “Mm-hmm, with Carlos,” I said as I put away the cuff.

  “Are we done?” Odile said, and then, as though 90 over 50 were something to celebrate (it isn’t), she wheeled to her dresser and returned with three small earthenware cups and set them in front of us. She reached into the drawer again and came out with a mischievous half bottle of liqueur.

  “Santé,” she declared when she’d uncorked the contraband and poured us each a thimble’s worth. “To rescue!” We had our sips and she asked, without a sequitur, “Aren’t you ever afraid?” She had the Sahran tenacity with a topic, I had to give her that.

  “How so?” I said.

  “Oh,” Odile said, “I’m afraid of so many things. For instance,” and she mentioned fear for her brother, whose profession was very dangerous, who went off on missions from which he might not return, who was running off more and more with this war impending, who could be away for months at a time to who knows where, who’d warned her that any time they got together could be the very last, who was not as sturdy as he pretended to be and who’d recently looked (it was her word) unwell, like he was fighting something, “though he’ll never admit it. He always has to be the strong one, because”—and she motioned around her as though flouncing a skirt to indicate the circumference of her infirmity. “So he can never be sick, even when he is. He’s like all of us, he is who he has to be. And I’m his sister, who’s made him be that way. Have you ever had someone disappear from your life?”

  I could feel Corie’s attention shift, though her eyes stayed glued to the photo. I pulled the cork and poured myself another. “Actually, yes,” I said to Odile. “I have.” And maybe it was the experience of being there and being as we were, so very dislodged, displaced, each the other and none of us ourselves, maybe it was something I’d wished to tell Corie already, or maybe I just wanted to be seen for myself again, having had a momentary taste of it, but whatever the reason, I talked about you, Daniel, you, whom I’ve never, ever talked about with anyone, gave them the bones of who you were and what you’d meant to me and what had happened, the base-camp accident with the drunk fools launching the mortar, a party goof gone haywire, how it hit the munitions cache. How the box was too close to your tent. How you’d remained in a coma all that long time after the wounding, long enough for them to airlift you to Saigon to cut out some of the shrapnel and then to fly you to Honolulu for additional treatment, and then on to Philadelphia to get you closer to home, though it wasn’t in time for me to see you alive.

  Corie’s silence, as I talked, was as absorptive as dark is to light, looking at Alba and Carlos and listening to me and thinking I’m not sure what. When I was done, Odile said quietly, almost to herself, “That’s exactly what I mean.” And then, to Corie, in the bright voice of an older woman who wishes to cordon off and cradle her own grief and fear while bringing a younger one into the conversation, “And you must get afraid, living alone and doing all these things you do.”

  “No, not really,” Corie said absently, but she conceded that she’d been scared for a while in the apartment, because it was haunted. When she wasn’t there, she said, someone came through it. “I sense it,” she said, had sensed it for a long time, and then when nothing bad occurred, she’d realized that maybe she wasn’t being threatened at all, but “looked after.”

  “I’m sure it’s Céleste. Doesn’t she come in to clean?” I asked.

  “Nope, it’s not her,” Corie said, and then confided, “But I know who it is.” Before I could fear I was about to be unveiled, she pointed to the photo. “Who else?” she demanded. She’d seen small footprints—not shoe prints; footprints—in the den carpet once, and then the other day, the clincher, someone had undone the chain lock—“From inside! You know how I always lock up”—and then mysteriously evaporated, leaving not even a trace. “You think I’m crazy!” But she didn’t sound crazy. She sounded happy, staring into the photograph and seeing there her guardian made tangible, and when she looked back up at me, she belched a little gray grunt of surprise.

  “You okay?” I asked. I had an urge to get the cuff back out and get a quick read on her vitals.

  “Look!” she said. She grabbed my arm and pulled me over to stand in front of the mirror, then raised up s
lowly beside my head the photograph, her hand held over everyone but Alba. We stood that way awhile, three dim female faces, Alba’s, mine, and Corie’s, lined up in the mirror, and then she said, “Oh.” It was a lament, as though she’d lost the thread. “In the dark, for a moment, when you moved—” and didn’t finish her thought.

  I gave her hijabbed, bandaged head a consoling pat. “Get your stuff,” I urged her, but Odile broke in firmly. “She can’t go.” Then, to Corie, “What if you get home and they’re looking for you?”

  “I’m in disguise!” Corie said, her enchantment evident, not so much with the costume as with the whole experience of ruse, until Odile tapped herself on the forehead, right where Corie’s forehead was scabbed and scarred. “I suspect they may spot you anyway. Give it a night, to be sure.”

  So I left them there, the two scheming sisters, and headed back into town, without the photo, but with a question. For a moment, in the dark, in the mirror, I thought I’d seen something too.

  XVIII

  “HE WOULDN’T EVER TALK about it,” she said. “Not to me, not that I care. Who cared where he’d been?” What mattered was the war, “La guerre etáit finie,” and with it over, she’d returned, and found she was still the housekeeper, thanks to the saintlike beneficence of the late Monsieur Landers, “God rest his most generous heart. And your Jew returned too, and crawled right back into his wretched little hole.” What he’d been up to in the meantime, “God knows.” It was something he never said.

  Céleste paused for a while. “Not that I care a whit.”

  And she paused a while longer, a longer pause this time. “I have some idea, though,” she said. “As it turns out.”

  I had been relieved, as usual, when Drôlet dropped me off and I’d gotten my tired bones back up the stairs to my wretched little hole, but it soon became clear that it would do me no good to be home that night. I had no luck sleeping, none at all, thinking on what I’d seen and done that day and what it might mean for tomorrow. I could see where Odile’s prediction might come true, that the police might find a way to track Corie home. Oh, wouldn’t that just make Willem blow an aorta, if I turned up in jail! It was almost delicious enough to contemplate actually doing. Less delicious: the thought of what Emil might think when he found I’d broken my solemn promise to keep my distance from Corie.

  Or maybe the thing that I really feared had tracked me home already: thoughts of you. The conversation in Odile’s room had set them loose to rampage like jinn. Of course, as much as I told the two women, I hadn’t told them all, hadn’t told them any more than would permit their full-faith sympathy. The rest was left to beset me.

  “There was nothing you could have done!” Corie’d consoled me, but Corie had never heard of a marriage deferment and didn’t know the full or the half or even the least, least piece of it, that indeed there really had been, there in the snow, in the dark by the steps, something I could have done. You’d given me the chance to save you, and I didn’t take it; you’d thrown me the line that I didn’t grab. Come in and let’s hear the rest, you said, and what if I had, for the rest was the rest of everything. But I shook my head and left.

  What if.

  Though there’s also this, and I say this with all understanding, Daniel; I’ve thought about it, and I understand, so don’t take this wrong: It wasn’t only me who was silent that night. Do you hear? It can’t have been only me.

  Lying in the dark, pursued by these thoughts through half-sleep and half-awakeness, chasing an emptiness down doomed paths under blind, forsaken windows, I was jolted by a certainty. I sat up and gave it a body check—yes, it was so, it was clear—and without needing an oil lamp to light the way for my resolve, I slipped into some clothes and put on my coat and went through the closet and the closet door. I walked through Landers’s rooms with no more worry or speed or caution or stealth than if they’d been my own and I was headed to the fridge for a midnight snack. I dallied long enough to purloin a flashlight and one of Corie’s class books from the study and then went through the flat’s front door and exulted in the bang of the latch as it closed behind me. At the bottom of the stairs I exited the door to the street, but this one I didn’t let lock. I blocked it open with the Lexique définitif d’langue Basque.

  My one concern was timing, but as soon as I got outside I saw that my optimism had reason to celebrate. The tracks leading from the gate to the corner of the yard had melted somewhat during the daytime and then glazed into a shining archipelago of rotted dents and craters as the evening air rechilled. The night crust had been broken by a fresh set of footprints, sharp-edged and crumbly new, and I followed where they led me.

  The park was landscaped at its inner corners with a dense hell of rhododendron or mountain laurel, and the tracks led me through a gap in this thicket and into a little clearing rimmed half by hedge and half by edifice, a secluded chamber walled around in evergreen and brick. In its center, at the base of the base of the wall, in a circle of swept snow, stood a little cross. It was only a foot or so tall, crude-hewn out of rough stone, its fashion more Druidical (in the beam of my flashlight and to my anthropologically innocent eye) than Catholic. At least, I sensed some pagan power beyond straight Christian symbolism. On its face was the inscription 16 février 1942. At its foot was a nosegay of small blue flowers, still fresh enough that they hadn’t been frozen into black. I pinched off a blossom with my fingernails, and headed back inside.

  The cellar corridors were notably easier to negotiate with a flashlight in hand and no assassin chasing me. I’d hoped for some sign, some crease of lamplight under Céleste’s door or the sound of a radio inside, anything to indicate the concierge might be up and awake, but there was no such thing. Still, I didn’t pause. I knocked on the door and waited, my fist held up, prepared to knock again, breathing the dormant detergent smell from the room just down the hall. I didn’t have to wait that long before the voice barked, “Oui?”

  “C’est moi,” I answered. There was a clatter of locks, and the door opened to reveal Céleste in her housecoat, unapoplectic, but ready to be. She looked at me gloweringly, expecting, I could tell, some way-past-bedtime maintenance nightmare whose solution would just have to wait until dawn. Her expectation was as impassable as a granite wall, but she didn’t expect what I gave her: I held out the flower.

  She took it all in silently: me, the book, the flashlight and the open coat, and the tiny blue blossom between my fingertips, and then she left the door open and walked back inside. She gave me no invitation. I saw a light in a farther room, and I stepped in and closed the door and followed.

  She was sitting at a round oak table in the center of a modest dining room, in a corona of intensest pink. Her apartment obviously lacked for windows—I saw only a couple of high transoms in the two rooms I traversed. Yet the room was bathed in a cotton-candy radiance, and entering, I saw its source. Banks of fluorescent grow lamps shone down on tables that lined three walls, tables crowded with clay pot after clay pot of identical dark, round-leaved plants bearing tiny, pert, violet-blue, yellow-centered flowers. In the middle of this, Céleste sat staring at her hands as though she were entirely alone.

  “I suppose . . . Was it this time of night?” I asked.

  She stared at her hands as though she had only her two hands for company and nodded, almost imperceptibly. “An hour ago,” she said.

  “But why do you go there the long way, around the block, through the gate from the street? I don’t understand,” I said. “Why not just go up the basement stairs, through the lobby, and out the front door?” She cleared her throat before giving me the faltering answer that I’d more than half expected, that she’d walked all night that first night, and preferred to walk each night since, something I heard Druidically, that hers was a pilgrimage that convenience would defile. If his spirit was alive in the night air, she would share the night air with him, were it full of ash or full of sleet or full of nothing at all. I understood. I’m a walker too.

  “S
o,” I said—I had to be sure—“he jumped.” She nodded again. “From the window?” She wasn’t offering, and she wasn’t shying away, and I pulled out a chair and sat down, to be closer to her words.

  “The roof.”

  And landed where? I thought, and didn’t pursue it, but she heard my thought and nodded: There.

  “You must have loved him,” I asked, and she allowed that she still did, though not in the way I implied.

  The young Landers couple had hired her not long before their engagement—and all perhaps she’d ever known of happiness had transpired in the not-quite-a-decade between her arrival in Paris from her ancestral village on the banks of the Loire in the Massif Central, a provincial young woman only yesterday a girl, and the date on the cross in the mountain laurel. She worked for them through the best times, and then worked on as things darkened and turned complicated, a juncture she attributed not obscurely to the arrival, a year after hers, of the Franconian Jew who had taken over a room that had formerly been her supply pantry and who had quickly assumed a prominence in family affairs she could never hope to equal.

  It was the beginning of the beginning of the end. God knows what outrage he’d perpetrated against the Franconians before absconding and arriving here, but soon all of Germany was pouring in in pursuit. After the nox horribilis of February 16, she had continued in the house and worked for her new overlord—one had no choice in those days—starching death’s-head uniforms and serving wine in Landers’s crystal and canapés on Landers’s china from Landers’s silver trays to strangers, until she had the chance to plead a family emergency and get herself back to Le Puy, and when the war ended, she returned to find some things different—the apartment walls had been stripped of art, for one—but other things very much the same. And in good time, as matters straightened out, she discovered that she miraculously had her same old job as a lifetime paid appointment, if she wanted it, and that the little stark room with no electricity where he’d holed up as a fugitive still belonged to that Byron Saxe, who had stumbled his way back to Paris after her, though God only knew where he’d spent the meantime.