Paris Twilight

by Russ Rymer

  That’s what he came to tell me. He’d thought I’d want to know. That it had been, as Odile said to Corie, not an accident, but fate. I guess you and I were different that way. You fell so quickly off the end of life, and I crashed through the center of mine. But you don’t have to drop off the edge of the earth to drown, Daniel. “Death inhabits you,” Maasterlich assured us, and didn’t it, Daniel, didn’t it, for happily I drowned where happily I dwelt. If you were fated, does that mean I was too?

  “It won’t be your undoing, though.” Maasterlich again. “Life will.” And wasn’t it. Last lecture, semester’s end, the creaking old hall packed to its rafters. Even his detractors had come to gawk. They couldn’t pass up a show, and the finale of Introduction to Surgical Practices had earned its reputation for providing one. No one knew what the old man would say except that it would surely be whatever was on his mind. He’d titled his peroration (vapor trail of chalk through the chalk cloud) Systole/Diastole, but I’ve long ago rechristened it (neuronal trace through clouds of recollection) Silence v. Silence, or Maasterlich’s Musical Mystery Tour.

  Everyone, he was sure, had warned us, the professor said, smacking his pointer rhythmically against the flank of the lectern, how a doctor must deaden his mind against the constant prospect of death, “the way a soldier does, even though that can be a dying in itself.” He was right, for they had. They’d warned us to steel ourselves, warned us how sometimes we’d see death coming but wouldn’t be able to stop it, how that particular trauma would take its inevitable toll on our spirits, “or, what will take a worse toll, you’ll even cause it someday, and kill the patient you’re trying to cure,” Maasterlich said, but that was okay, because it was all a part of the fight. We’d elected to earn our daily bread by daily going head-to-head and toe-to-toe with mortality, “and if you do that”—a whack with the pointer—“and suit up every day for the battle”—whack—“once in a while”—the pointer fell silent—“you’re bound to lose. Because your enemy is implacable and huge, is profound beyond all knowing,” too dark, too mysterious, too big, too silent for anyone to fight against it and prevail.

  “And isn’t it all such crap!” he declared and we’d known it was coming, this wasn’t September anymore, when we still might be gulled into the misimpression that this man was swayed by his own svelte logic. We knew the drill and its penalties by now, knew that his every stroke was a windup for the whack. So cheerfully we girded ourselves and greeted it when it came. “Crap!” Maasterlich repeated. “Oh, everything they say you’ll see, you’ll see. But a surgeon afraid of death is an undertaker for the living,” embalming his patients prematurely against their certain rot. “That’s not medicine.” It especially wasn’t surgery. “Every good surgeon I know is romancing life, not ‘contesting death,’” and the distinction should guide us. “What you’re setting out to do, it isn’t war,” Maasterlich said, though war and its opposite were oft confused. “It’s worship.”

  Worship: “the highest form of fear” by the old man’s definition, “and the truest worship is awe to the edge of terror.” The thing worth fearing isn’t death, because death is not profound, not meaningful, is “not even much of a mystery. It’s the only thing we know enough about,” Maasterlich said, and then he got to his question.

  “I suggest for your consideration two varieties of silence,” he said, “and you must tell me which is larger, longer, deeper, more immense, more eternal, more frightening, more fearsome, more worth worshipping: The silence that follows the last note of a musical piece and continues on forever, or the silence that precedes it and lasts a single beat?”

  Acoustically, they are identical, he said, for as long as they each last. So by all rights, the silence forever should be the more profound, “correct? But it is not. The opposite.” He found the lowly musical rest, “the presence of a silence, not a vacancy of sound,” by every measure more sublime. And grander, and longer, long precisely because it fell between two limits, “for without limits there can be no length at all.” The meaning of the rest is suggested by two things, he said, “the melody leading up to it, and the anticipation of the note yet to come,” and anyone who’d waited for anything dear understood the enormousness of that, how “expectancy makes a second into centuries.” Unbounded time is instantaneous, as death is short, as the shoreless sea is shallow. But a span—even the briefest span endures, endures because its moments hold meaning, are fraught with meaning. Since there’s no end to the meanings that a moment may contain—“it may just contain the universe”—any living moment may be endless, and endless its depths.

  Which brought him back to the heart, the magnificent pump whose wondrous efforts—its systole contractions and diastole relaxations—take place in the silences between the audible beats.

  “As you watch your patients’ vital signs cross the screen,” he said, and resumed whacking the lectern with his pointer, “as you monitor their pulse and pressure, remember why you are doing this, why you are undertaking this endeavor at all”; the pointer fell, and fell again. “It’s not out of fear of the silence of the grave. It’s wonder, at the silence that falls between heartbeats. A systole inside diastoles has a beginning”—whack—“and an end”—whack. “And between those two beats lies the only eternity on earth.”

  I understand, Daniel, why my euphoria and my terror were intermingled. More than intermingled: after my conversation with Rouchard they were identical, one to the other. Over the course of one short dinner he’d given me back my family and my beginnings. He’d asserted my existence by restoring its first border (whack). With that came expectancy (no whack yet), and I’d never felt so mortal in my life.

  I spent the night on the couch in the library, where I could hear the front door open. If it would only just please open. Surely she would return by her usual way up the lift, and not come up the back stairs through the chamber of betrayal she’d fled from, the offending apartment. Wouldn’t she? What a dreadful dolt I’d been, so enthralled with my savior act I was oblivious to the damage of revealing, unexplained, the secret of my residence next door. As the hours crept and she didn’t come home—seconds into centuries—my thoughts darkened and my vision swiveled more and more to view things as she’d viewed them, and the damage swelled in my imagination. Losing Alba, the protector so alive in the girl’s mind that she’d imagined her footprints in the carpet, must have been horrible. Alba’s Scheherazadean chronicle had been Corie’s counsel against recklessness and risk, calling her away from principled self-demolition. Accident unlikely, rang the klaxon in my mind. What Alba does, she follows came the echo. Oh, what must she be going through!

  And then to suffer, simultaneously, the rape of her sanctuary and the violation of a trusted friendship. For I’d considered myself trusted, though now I was exposed as a liar and a sneak and a spy—Impersonating a doctor? she’d asked, and I could hear Massue swearing, Flics, fuckin’ merde—and how was she to know that I wasn’t, wasn’t with the police?

  Though were I only impersonating Tilde, that would seem monstrosity enough. Sneak.

  Spy. When would it dawn on her I’d been eavesdropping on her piano playing too?

  I lay awake in a riot of indecision. Lights off? If she saw them from the street she’d feel cornered. Or lights on, so she wouldn’t feel ambushed when she stumbled upon me in the dark? The truth: it hardly mattered. Toward morning, racked by a vision of Corie grappling in the shadows with a ghoul, a professorial impostor turned home- invading, wall-piercing poltergeist—I suppose I must have dozed off for a bit—I retreated to my own penitential chamber and pestilential bed, leaving the closet door wide open as an invite, just in case. In the morning, the bright sun streamed through the window glass into an empty and unvisited study whose every drifting, sun-struck dust mote screamed that Corie was nowhere, that Corie was not coming back.

  The day began its spiral. I was afraid that if I left my room I’d miss her, miss my chance to explain, the only thing that would stop her from clearing o
ut for good. At the same time I was eager to escape the unbearable vigil and shatter this spell, to go somewhere, anywhere, so I could return and discover she’d arrived. Twice I stalked out to Portbou. Only the first time did I ask directly—had she by any chance come to look at the photo wall?—because only once did I have to. When I stepped back in for a quick late lunch, Passim shook his head as soon as I met his eye, and then I wasn’t hungry and waved a thank-you and left.

  I considered going out to Odile’s, but I knew that that would be nothing more than bustle. The girl would not have absconded from me in the direction of anyone I knew. For a full thrilling minute I was convinced it would be a brilliant move to call up Capitaine Cassell, the police inspector whose business card sat in my pocketbook, and get him on the case. Worst idea yet. I bumped into Céleste in the courtyard and inquired if she’d seen the young lady. My offhandedness fooled her not a bit. The indictment in her gaze was as blank and cold as river ice. So you’ve done it after all, it said. You’ve run off the last of the Landerses. Could I protest? Could she read, in my eyes, my guilt?

  Oh yeah! The last of the Landerses! It was afternoon before I gave any thought to that other small matter, Rouchard’s recounting of Saxe’s old adventures, the cosmic alteration to my history and my identity. My joy in my ascendancy had been eclipsed before it could shine, and even as it emerged again from behind the shadow of worry, it seemed to me wan and immaterial, and its blessing beamed down like a final desecration.

  What pulled me through was the prospect of seeing Emil. He’d been off on one of his missions since our jaunt to Reims, and I’d hungered for him. Now he would be home again. His party was scheduled for this evening, the dinner that he’d invited me to so long ago as we stood in the drizzle in the hospital parking lot on that day he’d insisted on addressing me by my title and then called me Matilde instead. A first lapse. A glimmer of intimacy, the source point of that whole wild sweet arc extending from his silly rain hat through his bleeding lip and the blanket on the church lawn and the night of Le Chemin Vert and the miracle snow to some warm intense conspiracy of the stars, the predestiny I sensed we were constructing. What news I had to tell him! I’d have to talk fast—as he’d amply warned me, he would have to be gone again by the time of Odile’s surgery, which could be just days away.

  I wished it weren’t to be such a busy, public evening. Now I had an added reason to wish for Corie’s reappearance, and the wish was sharp enough that I fashioned it into a weapon, a way to get angry at the girl I grieved and feared for. How could I be expected to enjoy my gala night out and conjugal morning with Sahran with her Royal Brattiness so inconsiderately lost? Immediately I forged my weapon into revenge. If she could abandon me, why, I could abandon with the best of them, couldn’t I? As I’d reminded Willem, I knew how to use my feet. Happiness would be my riposte.

  With that resolve to relieve me, I slept, as I had not been able to for two nights running, and awoke in the early evening suffused with a great, grateful, tattered peacefulness, as though I’d overslumbered, like Rip Van Winkle, the advent of the armistice. I bathed, and slipped back into my good dress—the do was to be a formal one (I’d even received, hand-delivered to Portbou, an ornately engraved invitation)—and renovated my lipstick and mascara. (I was getting so good at maquillage by candlelight I felt myself downright Josephine.) Drôlet’s limousine whispered up curbside, and I jumped in the back with Odile. She was, I’d been forewarned, one of only two among the celebrants whom I was likely to know, the other being, God help me, Willem, but I wasn’t concerned about that. With my happiness already steel-plated and bulletproofed against Corie’s absence, the presence of Willem presented no problem at all.

  The house on Île Saint-Louis was igneous, its windows ablaze as though it were being consumed from within by inferno. The orange heat blushed through the gray stone façade like smolders of magma in a lava field. The eruption came the instant the front door opened. Cacophony burst out, a hive of chatter fervent and indecipherable above the strains of a string quartet. I’d expected formal; I’d had no idea how grand.

  Emil stepped outside to preempt Drôlet with the car door, and he kissed me on both cheeks and then full on the mouth, and lingered there an adhesive moment before leaning into the car to lift his sister, an arm under her knees and another around her back, and carry her up the steps like a slumbering child, though she was anything but sleepy. She was as radiant as the house, and I remembered that this had been her childhood home as well as Emil’s, and I wondered how often she got back to it, when the last time had been.

  Emil introduced me around. He was attentive, and resplendent. A martial stripe of satin ran down each black leg of his trousers; he was shod in patent leather slippers and wore a white bow tie and a white tuxedo jacket with a rosette in his lapel, and did I imagine in his eyes (for his eyes seemed haunted) the same desire I felt, a frustration with the price of his expansive hospitality, a wish like an ivy itch for when we could be alone? In the living room, the discreetly enabling liquor cabinet had been supplanted by a vast open bar staffed with starched shirts and cummerbunds. The buffet in the dining room was still in a primal hors d’oeuvre stage of existence, though that would evolve over the coming hours through an accelerated time-lapse Linnaean order of flora and fish and bird and mammal, culminating after the quail and lamb (and Darwin claimed evolution had no goal!) in chocolate mousse.

  Emil introduced me not just as a doctor but almost the hostess of the fête, and when he drifted off to apply diplomacy to one or another social tangle, I felt all the more family, because Odile stayed faithfully by my side, holding my hand, introducing me to everyone who engaged her, as many did with cries of astonished fondness. Her homecoming, I could tell, was a restoration before the restoration, poised as it was before her surgery, and she seemed at times almost breathless under her scarf as her chariot did a victory lap through the rooms where her life had gotten its start. She took my hand, not to be guided but to guide, and though I performed such courtesies as regaling her with buffet options and reaching for her water, she was otherwise the leader, steering me deftly around armchairs and coffee tables and standing lamps and potted palms. Here was the oldest tactile map in Odile’s mind.

  It was a map of a vanished geography. All the furniture she steered me around was gone. Emil’s grand divestment was proceeding apace. The house sale had gone from pending to closed, and the furniture had been sold along with the walls, and whatever appointments the acquiring owners didn’t want, including everything downstairs except the carpets, Emil had had removed. The resulting cavern must have been desolate by day; tonight it glittered like a discotheque.

  Which it became. At some point the old map was altered further by means of rolled rugs to expose an acre of bare parquet, and the quartet returned from a brief intermission transmogrified into a jazz combo, and shoes were shed as though at the door of a mosque, and people danced. I did a couple of turns with Emil, as it seemed the only way for us to be together alone for a blessed moment, and a jig or two with Willem for the opposite reason: it permitted us proximity without our actually having to talk. He didn’t seem hostile, but I sensed the risk. In a very few days we would be intensest collaborators; I didn’t want to jinx things with a reanimated swelter of grudge and animus, and I could tell he didn’t wish that either, though his wish had the oddest quality to it, a lovely warm netsuke of resentment clutched in the fist of aloofness.

  I was glad to get away from all that when the time came to wheel Odile out of the havoc and into the sanctuary of a back bedroom. Her party was over and her victory lap done. Now began the launch of her other restoration, gathering peace and strength for her surgery. As I helped her disrobe, her animation dropped away and I saw her weariness. It crept across her face like gratitude. Even her concern was becalmed by the weight of tiredness. “Did you notice?” she asked as I lifted her legs into the four-poster bed and smoothed the sheet down over them.

  “Notice what?” I asked.


  “My brother,” she said. “It’s exactly as I told you.” And no sooner did she bring it up than I knew what she meant, for I’d already registered what I wouldn’t admit about Emil, that something was off. I’d caught him staring at me across the room, as though behind his party cheer, he harbored a dark thought dense in his mind. His expression dissolved instantly into a wink as soon as he noticed I’d seen him, but too late. I’d caught the eviscerated glance. “Who are all these people?” he kvetched into my hair as we danced, and I explained away his mood as distraction. “We have so much to talk about!” he said, and promised we’d reclaim the night for ourselves as soon as we could, “though we may have to settle for the dawn.” Wouldn’t anyone be distracted, I thought, with so much going on? But distraction wasn’t his sister’s diagnosis.

  “I can see he isn’t well,” she declared as I pulled up the counterpane and tucked it around her shoulders, and that’s the phrase I was pondering as I came back through the vestibule and stumbled on the commotion and encountered, as though I’d dropped through a hole in the earth, the disaster that would both end and initiate my evening. Out on the stoop, people were arguing. One of the voices reminded me of a voice I knew, though vaguely. I stepped through the foyer and out the door into the cold night. All I saw at first was the uniformed back of the doorman, his coat’s blue bulk obscuring his antagonist, someone below him on the steps whom he refused to let past into the party. The gatecrasher must have attempted a lateral move because the doorman’s back jerked adeptly to counter it, and then she emerged from below him in her Cossack boots and tattersall coat. Céleste. No wonder I’d only half recognized her voice—I’d heard her angry, and I’d heard her sorrowful, but I’d never heard her so out of control. Her face blazed with an abject frenzy bludgeoned by desperation; her eyes were those of a madwoman. Then her eyes found me.