The Hands of Strangers

by Michael Farris Smith

  “Are you sure you want to go in?” he asks.

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  He shakes his head and bites his lip, then says, “I needed to ask. That’s all.”

  The light in the hallway is out and the small space is filled with shadow. A light shines from beneath Iris’s door. Jon knocks and they wait. There is movement, but she doesn’t answer, and Jon knocks again and says, “I know you’re in there.”

  “J’arrive,” Iris answers. “I am looking for the answers to your questions before I let you in.”

  “What questions?” Estelle asks.

  “Iris. Open the door. I’m not alone.”

  This time, the door opens, and Iris is as she has always been—old clothes splattered with paint, bare feet, her hair an artistic mess. “Come in,” she says.

  They all move into the center of the room, the women around them on easels and leaned against walls. Estelle scans the room, then looks at Iris.

  “This is my wife,” Jon says.

  Iris nods and introduces herself and Estelle does the same.

  “I hope you don’t mind us coming over. Estelle wants to see the painting of Jennifer.” When Estelle turns again to the paintings, Jon looks at Iris as if to say quit being stupid and she nods.

  “How many are there?” Estelle asks.

  “Many. Many have come and gone.”

  Iris moves over and stands next to Estelle. While they look, Jon slips out of the room and into the bathroom. He closes the door and splashes water on his face, then he sits on the toilet. He hears the women talking and covers his ears. After waiting a few minutes, he gets up and flushes the toilet, then before returning to the big room, he checks the door of Jennifer’s room. The knob turns and he pushes the door open and a painting sits on an easel next to the window, but it is covered with a sheet. The scrap of paper with his three questions is on the floor. Iris calls him and he closes the door and rejoins the women and finds them smiling pleasantly as if they were old friends.

  “We want to see her,” Jon says.

  “I’m not finished.”

  “I don’t give a shit. I told you before she’s not yours and we want to see her right now. You either show me or I’m taking her.”

  “Calm down,” Estelle says.

  “Okay, Jon,” Iris says. “We will look. Will you go and get us some wine before?”

  “How many times have you been here?” Estelle asks.

  “A few. I already told you that, too.”

  “He likes to watch me work,” Iris says.

  Estelle looks at Iris in a way that explains to her that she is not a fool.

  “I’d like that wine,” Jon says.

  “No,” Estelle answers, looking back at Jon. “I think we should look at the painting. I don’t care if it isn’t finished.”

  Iris claps her hands together and rubs them, then says, “She is in the back room. The door is open and a sheet is over her. I think that I will let you look at her together and I will stay here.” Iris walks to the window and takes a pack of cigarettes from the ledge. Then she lights one and goes into the kitchen.

  “This way,” Jon says.

  They pass through the hallway and enter the room. Jon turns on the light. Estelle walks over to the easel, stepping over the scrap of paper, and Jon comes behind her and picks it up and stuffs it in his pocket.

  “What poster did she use? The new one or the old one?” Estelle asks.

  “The new one.”

  Jon reaches and takes hold of the sheet, but Estelle grabs his arm and says, “Wait.”

  Jon lets go and says, “What is it?”

  “Something,” she says. “Something is not right.”

  “We don’t have to look.”

  But she moves her hand from his arm and nods and this time he takes the sheet with both hands and removes it from the painting. Then he steps back, drops the sheet on the floor, and says, “My God.” Estelle covers her open mouth with her hand and she starts to cry.

  The classroom setting is gone from the background of the painting and a deep purple surrounds the child, the color reaching every corner of the canvas. Jennifer’s neck remains long and bare, her hair remains down, and there is her forehead, eyes, cheeks, and nose, the work stopping just above where the mouth will be. The eyes and cheeks are eager and appear as if, once the face is finished, she will be smiling.

  “Jon,” Estelle says. He is still as she leans against him. She wipes her eyes and sniffs.

  He says quietly, “I didn’t expect it to be so much like her.”

  They stand against each other motionless. Jennifer looks back, so real that if she had a mouth, they would expect words.

  “The purple is for faith,” Iris says behind them. They turn and look at her. She is wearing shoes and a sweater over her splattered shirt. “I kept putting her in different places but it did not seem right. So I chose a color that I thought might help in some way. When you are finished, lock the door behind you,” she says and she leaves.

  Estelle sits on the floor and looks up at the child. Jon walks around the room. Outside the window, the twilight has turned to night and a crescent moon is low in the sky. Jon goes into the other room, hoping to find the cigarettes on the windowsill but Iris has taken them. When he returns, Estelle is standing next to Jennifer, and the mother so close to the child reminds him how similar they are.

  “I like her hair down,” Estelle says.

  “It makes her more like you.”

  “Do you think she’s too pale or is it the dark purple?”

  “The purple.”

  “There is much of it. Maybe you will have faith now that Iris has put it here for you.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I will not say things if you will not do things.”

  He stands against the wall and doesn’t answer.

  “How many times have you been here?” she asks.

  “Estelle. You have asked me that.”

  “No. I don’t mean it like you think I mean it. I don’t mean how many times have you walked into this building. You know what I mean.”

  He looks at his feet, then back to her. “Only once. I swear.”

  Estelle looks back at the painting and says, “I don’t understand you, Jon. Of all the things to quit. You quit Jennifer. You quit me.”

  “I haven’t quit.”

  “Yes, you have,” Estelle says, looking at her daughter’s unfinished face. “You have quit or you wouldn’t have fucked this woman. Once or twice or twenty times. It doesn’t matter. Did you expect me to shrug it off because you say it was only once?”

  “I didn’t expect anything.”

  “Exactly.”

  He moves off the wall, closer to her, and he stops an arm’s length away.

  “I think you should go,” she says.

  “Okay. I’ll see you at home.”

  “No. That is not what I mean. I think that you should be the one to leave for a little while. Not me. I will wait here and let you go home and take what you need.” She speaks without taking her eyes off the painting. He wants to argue but her indifference has built a wall around her. So he nods, says, “I’ll call you later.” He touches her shoulder but she is unaffected, and he leaves the apartment.

  On the sidewalk in front of Le Café Perdu, he finds Iris smoking. When she notices him, she tosses her cigarette and takes a piece of paper from her pocket. She holds it to him and he asks what it is.

  “Don’t you want to see my answers to your questions?” she asks.

  He shakes his head. “Nope. I don’t care what you think. Can’t believe I thought I did.” He leaves her and goes down into the station, and instead of taking the train home, he takes the train to Solférino and he walks to the bench in front of the Musée d’Orsay and sits. Like the days, the nights
are warmer and more welcoming. More people walk along the river. More cameras flash from the Pont des Arts toward the Île de la Cité. More tables make it from the morning to the night along the sidewalks. More taxis are full. In the weeks to come, the crowd will grow, the prices will go up, only the sunshine will be free. An Italian family stops and asks Jon to take their picture and he obliges. He gets a cigarette in return and sits down again. When the cigarette is done, he tosses the butt onto the sidewalk, leans back and stretches out his legs and arms, and says toward the clear night sky, “Where the fuck are you?”

  He gets up and walks back to the metro station, needing to hurry home and get out quickly as he has wasted the time Estelle has given him. Going down the stairs, he passes Jennifer’s poster and he takes it off the wall, folds it, and puts it in the garbage. Then he opens his wallet to see which credit card he has, and two metro changes later, he is standing at the ticket counter at the Gare de Lyon, buying a ticket for the late train to Geneva.

  11

  The train leaves the station at 9:34. Jon sits in a smoking car, alone except for a man at the other end who smokes a pipe and blows his nose frequently. He sits next to the window and watches the lights of the houses in the countryside pass by methodically. When the lights disappear and there is only the dark farmland, he reads random sections of random newspapers left behind from the train’s daily run. At midnight, the train crosses into Switzerland and stops in Lausanne for forty-five minutes. During the wait, he sits alone in the café car and drinks two beers. He sits facing the station. Passengers trickle off the train and disappear into the station. No one gets on. Finally, the porter blows a whistle and the train departs and arrives in Geneva at two a.m.

  As Jon walks, Geneva sleeps, its night lacking the randomness of Paris. Through Centre Ville, the shops and restaurants are closed, the sidewalks clean, the outside tables neatly stacked. He crosses the water and comes to the rue du Rhône. He walks along the trendy, expensive street, mannequins staring back from the windows of boutiques and salons. The lampposts give a dull glow as if rationing the light. The tram has made its last run and the rails won’t click again until six a.m. As far as he can see ahead or behind, he is the only one out.

  He leaves the shopping district and walks into the Old Town. The cobblestone streets are narrow, the height of the cramped buildings blocking the moonlight. Shutters are closed over shop windows, windows that during the day hold flower boxes and let the light in on fresh bread, decorative chocolate, antiques, cigars. But in the late night the facades are bland and expressionless as if they were hibernating. He twists through the neighborhood, somewhat lost, then found again as he turns a corner and sees the light of the Irish pub shining into the street. He goes to the door and pulls and it is locked. Behind the bar, a young woman with curly blond hair and a tight shirt counts cash. Jon knocks on the door and she looks up and says, “We’re closed.” He mouths, “I used to work here,” and she shrugs her shoulders and begins to count again. He knows of only one other place along the lake that might still be open, but it’s a half-hour walk and instead he walks out of the Old Town and to Place Neuve and he sits on the steps of the Musée Rath.

  A small concrete island is in the middle of Place Neuve and holds a statue of a man riding a horse, the name and its importance unknown to Jon. Surrounding the streets are the Musée Rath, Le Grand Théâtre, and Le Conservatoire de Musique, the lawns of L’Université de Genève, and the sidewalks that lead into the park of Plainpalais. Five streets cross at the intersection of Place Neuve and give Geneva the look of a hustling, bustling European city during the working hours. On the other side of the intersection from where Jon sits is rue du Conseil-Général, stretching straight like a plastic straw, and without the people on the sidewalk and cars in the street, he can see ahead several blocks to Café Commerce. He reaches for his wallet, takes out a picture of Jennifer in her soccer uniform, and sets it between his feet. From a cathedral somewhere, tenor-toned chimes echo across the city, signaling three a.m.

  “Right there,” he says to the photograph, and he points. “Right over there, Jennifer. That’s where it started. That’s where your dad decided it was time for all this to start. Like I was missing something. Like I needed something.” He looks toward the café and can see himself moving about the kitchen, pouring a pastis behind the bar, hiring shapely, inexperienced waitresses. Then he imagines himself at the end of a day, upstairs in the apartment with a book or a plate of leftover pasta, with his shoes on the floor and his feet up, the safety of solitude surrounding him like a brick wall. He closes his eyes and wishes tonight were one of those nights. It was a roundabout way to blame himself but it worked. But there would have never been Estelle, he thinks, then he opens his eyes and looks at Jennifer.

  A fair trade. And he tries not to imagine who is touching her, the hands of strangers that he feels around his own throat.

  He finishes the cigarette and puts away the picture and walks down the steps of the museum. He crosses the intersection and walks along rue du Conseil-Général toward Café Commerce. A tempered excitement fills him, the notion that Lucien is sitting on a bar stool waiting to welcome him home, ready to hand him the keys to the front door and the apartment upstairs. “Thank God,” Lucien will say. “You know where everything is. I’m going on holiday.” And then after he and Lucien have discussed what to tell his wife if she asks, he will go upstairs and sleep like he hasn’t slept in years, a comalike sleep that he will awake from refreshed and eager. He’s almost nervous as he gets a block closer and can see familiar tables on a familiar sidewalk, the twelve years that have passed merely a mistake about to be erased.

  He crosses the street and stands in front of Café Commerce. Except that it’s not Café Commerce. Where CAFÉ COMMERCE had been painted in large letters above the doorway, COMMERCE has been blotted out and replaced with RIVE. CAFÉ RIVE. Jon steps back and looks up and down the street but he is in the right place. Underneath RIVE, the letters of COMMERCE can still be made out underneath a thin coat of paint, and an awkward blank space separates the words CAFÉ and RIVE as RIVE is centered over COMMERCE. He moves a table and cups his hands and looks in the window. The bar has been moved from the right to the left. The tables are fewer and the extra space is filled with two couches. The exposed brick of the back wall of the café has been painted something light, either cream or lavender. Rectangular scraps of mismatched carpet cover the wooden floors underneath the bar stools and tables. And the jukebox that once sat in the corner next to the bathroom door is gone, a video poker machine in its place. The sidewalk tables are all that remain from the place that Jon knew. He steps back from the window, takes a chair off a table, and sits down. He wonders if Lucien is dead.

  A Volkswagen turns onto the street and passes Jon, the driver slowing down and staring curiously at the man sitting outside of Café Rive hours early for the day’s first coffee. He sits until the cathedral chimes four a.m., then he gets up, takes one more look inside, and he walks away. He takes his time on his way back to the train station, stopping at a park bench along the river, stopping at another park bench in Plainpalais, then having coffee at an early bakery in Centre Ville. The first morning light appears and it is true and welcoming, filtering newness into the cracks and crevices of the sleeping city. Jon leaves the bakery and goes to the train station. He buys a ticket for the earliest train to Paris, then he walks to a row of benches in front of the train station near the taxi stand. He watches the day awake. The tram makes its initial appearance, moving sluggishly as if it would rather be sleeping. Men in suits get out of taxis with their briefcases and check their coat pockets for tickets and passports. Café doors open periodically along the street across from the station, women in house slippers sweeping doorways that don’t need sweeping. Dogs on leashes piss on garbage cans and street-sign posts as owners squint and smoke their first cigarette. The morning light changes the sky from gray to a tainted blue. Two security guards join Jo
n on the bench row and unwrap their breakfast from white paper bags. A recorded female voice sounds throughout the station and outside, announcing departure gates and times. Before the security guards have finished eating, the voice announces Jon’s train to Paris. He gets up, stretches, and takes a long look at Geneva.

  He turns to the security guards and says in French, “It’s like I was never even here.” Then he goes to the train, lies across two seats, and falls asleep before the train leaves the station. He doesn’t open his eyes again until a porter shakes his shoulder and says, “Monsieur, we have arrived in Paris.”

  Estelle doesn’t sleep all night. She rearranges the kitchen cabinets, watches bits of a movie she has watched bits of before, tries to read but can never make it more than a handful of pages. Everywhere she looks, she sees the painting of Jennifer. And when she is able to rid the image of Jennifer’s long neck and bright eyes from her mind, the image of Jon on top of Iris takes its place. She figures she will never sleep again and doesn’t care.

  At daybreak, she opens the window of the living room and listens to M. Conrer sing as he wipes the dew from the tables and chairs. Then she makes coffee and an omelet and watches the news. After she finishes eating, she goes into the bathroom and runs a bath. She gets undressed and eases into the tub, the water a fraction too hot. She settles and catches her breath and leans her head back on a hand towel. She wonders where Jon has spent the night and is glad it wasn’t with her. With her foot she turns the knob for the cold water and brings down the water temperature. Then she shampoos her hair and shaves her legs. She sits until the skin of her fingers and toes begins to wrinkle and she puts on her robe and lies down on the bed. She stares at the empty wall where the mirror, and then the woman, had been. The sound of the day picks up outside, more cars passing, more voices. She lies still for only a moment, then she gets dressed and dries her hair and goes downstairs to the café.