Paris Twilight
Page 33
So at last I’m alone in the great house, alone with Saxe and Alba and Carlos, without the garlic of Corie’s presence to protect against the ghosts, and now the din of the echoes grows too loud. The wind blows through, and it’s no use pretending I can flee again into Saxe’s hideaway, whose air would be empty of music. I thought of returning to the Clairière, or finding some nearer hotel. Instead, I think I will open up my parents’ bedroom and pull out the linen from the closet and make my home there in whatever way a home can be made, for the little time it’s bound to last. Tomorrow the man from Century 21 arrives to give the joint an estimate. Céleste will hate me, but it is for the best.
And then I can begin my preparations for my return to New York. I’m postponing a while longer, to see Odile through her convalescence, and so she can see me through mine. She does not know my injury, but she does know me, whoever I may be, me, unchanged at last into the woman I always was. For I am Magdalena, born and marked and abducted and rescued, and I am her twin, Matilde, who had no idea what past lay in her future, who was raised by friends and summoned by a stranger, to whom it was restored what she had lost, and who lost what she was given, for whatever I love I will cause to be slaughtered, as I did you, Daniel, you remember. I’ve instructed Odile to move in here with me for several weeks, until she’s stronger. She can care for me better that way.
And I think to myself, Isn’t it funny how we get through the world? At some point in our wanderings, we stumble on a home. And then, in our wanderings, we are never again to leave it. And somehow what has happened here has brought me back to an older place, though not to the place you’d suspect. I see now the chamber I’ve occupied all this time, the scant few moments that expanded to envelop my life, from which I’ll never depart, for all of my departing. For I have burst out of my smallness and entered the whole grand immensity of it.
This you will remember: that afternoon. We’d gone up to New Haven for the day; I had an appointment and we’d thought we’d stay for a meal and race home in time for you to get to work, but then the snow started. It drifted down so light at first, white out of the white-gray, then heavier, and we recognized its determination, knew this was a gathering siege, and we thought of phoning your students and canceling their lessons and getting a room for the night but decided instead to catch the early train back into the city, while we could.
What with the blizzard, the day got dark so early, and Connecticut through the train window was a pen-and-ink Connecticut, a charcoal wash through a gauze of falling snow, the land stunned senseless by multitude, and every sign of life, the headlights at the grade crossings, the smoke trails lashing from chimney pipes, bundled against the mobbing. The forest flew by fast in its nearness, I couldn’t begin to grasp it, and the fields ran blue with twilight. You slept. I caressed your head and watched the still world pass.
Then it seemed that we were the ones who were stationary, and the world was the thing in motion, whirring past my watchfulness. I felt your love around me like a kingdom. All was peaceful, not a peace of quietness, but of perfect equilibrium, and my peace took everything into account, understood how it—it itself—would come to an end and dissolve again into the ordinary mess and noise of life, but that’s just the thing: its comprehension of its own destruction only compounded my peace. I thought how I loved you, and how someday I would lose you, and I kept you close and perfect inside me through Darien and Stamford and Greenwich and down into the Bronx, the night solidifying outside, and then kept it with me as you roused and gathered and we walked through the clamor of Penn Station—such ominous thunder; above us, the wrecking ball was demolishing the old terminal—and took the local downtown and got off earlier than we had to because, after all, we had the time, and the city was ours entirely, and the snow was falling that would powder every step with confectioner’s dust. Every step of every adventure, even a crazy couple assaulting each other in a rocking automobile, even a sonata through a recital-hall window—absurd, sublime—and in between them that other time, incalculable.
We cut through the park after our little curbside intervention, laughing at the joke of it, laughing in relief that it hadn’t been what we took it for. Nervous. Laughing in sheer silly nervousness over all that was impending, of just what happiness could be. And then you stopped laughing. We were nearly out of the park. You stopped beneath the giant elm there at the corner of Waverly Place, the enormous branches umbrella’d high above us, and you gathered me to you. I was shocked that your face seemed so serious and sad, as though shaded by that bare-limbed elm. You set your violin down right in the snow and asked me if I would marry you.
Of course I would, Daniel. Of course I would marry you. If I hadn’t just wished to dwell a while longer in anticipation of the thing I most wished for, if the suspension wasn’t such a bliss that I wanted just to relish it for a day or two, a week or month, before I said, “I will, I do.” And if only you hadn’t been so pure about it all. You could have—no, I have waited all the years to make you hear this, so you must hear it—you should have told me what was going on; keeping such a secret from me all the way until your induction wasn’t the least bit right, now you know, don’t you? Of course you do, you found out worse than I did, though quicker, at least, so who’s to say what worst is. You said (later, in your uniform, and damn you for being so proud of it) that you didn’t want to contaminate my decision by telling me what depended on it, a deferment, your future, your life, as it turns out. That you would want me to marry you only for love and not to save you from something as drab as the draft, but only out of love, and for that, my love, I have hated you all these years. Hated the memory of every step we took that dear night, you with your secret, me with my hesitation, how it could all have been different, and the cramped room that I have lived in could have been our palace all this time. But I didn’t hear your need. I stroked your face and said you were lovely and that you must ask me some other time, soon, since for some things I wasn’t ready. Wasn’t ready.
We walked on through the Village, as beside each other as we’d been before, but pulled away now an increment too, and I wanted us back in the space of the peace that had held us, on the train and along our walk. I was crying out against this wedge of air that had let your thoughts and mine run off apart. And there before the conservatory, listening to the piece that spilled through the window: What possibilities perched on that last bridge of silence? How much of almost fell into the time between those notes? I wanted so much to say, Put down your fiddle. Hold me again. If you ask, I’ll tell you that I love you as I’ll never love another, that I was yours and that we were young, so, yes, let’s begin. But there was the increment to cross, and the moment passed and the chord landed, and you said, again—it was your second invitation of the night—Come in, and we’ll hear the rest. But I didn’t.
And you went through the doors and I went off, and those several weeks later you showed up in your uniform and your hilarious scary haircut, and we made some talk about what would happen when your tour was up; you seemed content to be going, and resolute, and it all seemed so strange and public, this was a war, there was a war to be fought, for you to fight, and who could get their lives straight with the world demanding so violently into every soft thought? I got your letters, and the announcement of your furlough, coming up soon, and then the call from your mother when the visitors came with the news, and we prepared to see you bedside except that you just didn’t give us time, Daniel. And where you went as you lay in that bed, and why you didn’t come back, back to me, has been my prison for all these years, until now.
For now I know something I didn’t know a month ago. That across the path at the bottom of the well lies a string. And at the location of the string lies decision. And maybe you couldn’t have, maybe you knew the damage done and preferred it to be like it is, but I’ve touched where you were, and I know the step you took. And what I have to tell you, Daniel, is that I have hated myself for a lifetime for your death, and found myself past fo
rgiving. But now I have found forgiveness, at last: I forgive you.
At last I can live in that moment without remorse. For that was my time, Daniel. On the night the stranger steps into my Chemin Vert, that is the moment I’ll relate to him, along with the question of what it all meant, how one person’s heart can beat for so long in the center of the story of another.
And with that little bit to console me, I will close up this house as soon as I can, and will have the carpenters and the painters come and seal up the wall in the oval room for good, for I think I will have Saxe’s apartment spruced up a bit, and the peephole plastered over and the shade taken down and some curtains put up, and maybe have it wired with an outlet or two in case I’d like to plug in a radio. In a certain way, my life has existed longer, more continuously, in that small room than in any other place on earth, and though I’ll never meet the man responsible for that, I’d like to keep his room in the family, since family he is, as a pied-à-terre for the occasional trip back to Paris, or in case Corie might find the French at some point hospitable to her return. And I will take some of the money from Saxe’s will, a little of what’s left over from supporting Céleste, and make a donation to l’École Islamique de Jeunes Filles. This is what I will relish telling Odile tomorrow, when she arrives to take up her recuperation: that I intend to buy the painting from Madame Ralanou, the portrait of the woman on the garden path. I will pay an exorbitant price for it. It will fill the wall over the day bed.
Odile and I have planned a few things to do as she gets stronger. I told her I’d like to go shopping on rue de Rivoli to buy a good pair of traveling shoes. And then we’ll go to visit Buttes-Chaumont, to stroll through the park along the paths around the lake. She will wonder where her brother is, what mission has pulled him away for so many weeks this time, and I will tell her to think about happier things and not to strain her precious new heart, and we will visit the belvedere temple on the island on the far side of the bridge that spans the chasm, and there I will leave a coin for the sibyl, and a little blue flower too, in honor of being older, and to tell you that I forgive you. For I know why we must try so hard to live. And why we must not live too long, for we mustn’t tire love. For love will outlast us, however long it takes, Daniel.
Daniel, however long it takes.
About the Author
RUSS RYMER is the author of Genie: A Scientific Tragedy and American Beach: A Saga of Race, Wealth, and Memory. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute fellowship, and the Whiting Writers’ Award, and he was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Rymer has contributed articles to The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times, and National Geographic. Paris Twilight is his first novel.