If the colonel and Livvy believed in making safe choices, Mosjoukine clearly had not. Mosjoukine had left a secure life as a landowner’s son and future lawyer to become an actor. His early success in Russia made the chance he had taken seem like a bet on the roulette wheel that paid off handsomely. He’d been rich. He’d been famous. At least until the revolution. Again, he’d chosen risk, fleeing to France, and there his good fortune returned. He spent his days writing and acting and directing, doing the very things he’d jumped off the train to Moscow to do.
Then sound swept his world away. But how could he have seen that coming? Even if he could, there was no stopping it, any more than he could have stopped the Bolshevik revolution. Where was there a life that pain could not touch? Look where the careful woman who raised me had ended up, in a bed soaked with her own blood.
I opened the paper bag of food Apolline had packed for me. I took a bite of the leftover croissant, but my mouth felt so dry I couldn’t chew. She’d tucked the photographs of Sophie Desnos, including the one with the address on the back, and the Mosjoukine card next to the croissant. I laid out my alleged parents like a game of solitaire on my little meal tray and looked at them in the bright hot spot of the reading light. Mosjoukine had a high forehead, a strong, straight nose. But it was his blue eyes, so large in his face, that defined him. Sophie’s dark eyes were even more overwhelming. She had a button nose, a trembling bow of a mouth, but her eyes swallowed the light, pulled me in. Could we really be related? They were both so handsome, so much more handsome than I was. Mosjoukine looked out at me, one eyebrow slightly raised, as if he, too, questioned the entire idea.
After a while, I put these people I did not know in my purse with the pictures of my other family and ate the orange, reminder of my childhood, small Florida sun, that Apolline had packed for me. For good luck. Bonne chance, I thought, trying to warm up the woefully rusty French side of my brain. When I was little, when we were newly arrived in the States, my father and I had spoken French to each other every day, usually when my mother wasn’t around. On the way to a Disney movie. In the pool at the officers’ club. My mother, increasingly, had disapproved, sensing there was something between us she couldn’t share. By the time I was in sixth grade, without ever talking about it, my father and I stopped.
After that came years of no French, then four years of bad high school French teachers. When I was in college and returned to Paris for the first time, I could get by, even have moderately deep conversations, but no one accused me of being French. It was clear as soon as I opened my mouth that I was yet another American.
I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. But in my head I kept seeing lights flashing, hearing brakes squeal. The sound of metal on metal. In the real world, inside the pressurized tube of the plane, I heard someone new joking softly with the seal woman. I opened one eye. The pilot was perched on the armrest of her seat. She had her hand on the blue sleeve of his uniform jacket. Didn’t she ever sleep? Or frown? He was looking down at her with an expression on his face like the ones the Wise Men wore when they beheld the baby Jesus, the child they found by following a star. The pilot basked in her glow.
I felt the opposite of luminous, like a chunk of bituminous coal in my itchy, heavy black sweater prickly with cut hair. I felt tired and sticky. Had I ever glowed, a candle in somebody’s night? Had I been the light of the world for my husband? I thought so. Maybe. For my own daughter. God, I hoped so. I closed my eyes again and made myself keep them shut until finally I did go to sleep, though I was so much less comfortable in my first class reclining leather seat than I had ever been tangled, leg to leg, in economy class with my husband, I couldn’t bear to think about it.
Morning in first class came with coffee and steaming hot towels. Then after a steep descent that made my bones feel leaden with gravity, we landed with a bump and a squeal at Charles de Gaulle.
We all stumbled down the jetway. Paris, we were finally in Paris. Right away, there was an ATM machine. I put one of my credit cards in, got a cash advance in euros. Just like that, I was living in a different economy. I stood at the baggage carousel watching the suitcases go around for a good five minutes before I remembered that I had nothing to claim. The seal woman was chatting with her companion, pausing every now and then to point out another piece of matched black leather luggage as it went spinning by. He would hop to get it and add it to the growing stack. I saw another, a small rolling suitcase, slip down the chute and head onto the conveyor belt. I could see it. They could not, the pile of already retrieved luggage momentarily blocking their view. Before they could, I reached out and grabbed the handle. Then I headed for customs, the stolen suitcase rolling smoothly behind me.
I slid through customs, declaring nothing. My heart pounded. The French official looked barely awake. What could an American, a blonde American in baggy, unfashionable jeans and sweater, possibly be smuggling into France? Any second, I expected to hear the seal woman’s voice behind me, low, melodious, “Excuse me, I think you have my suitcase.”
Or something sharper, her companion shouting, “Stop, thief!”
I shot across the lobby and out the automatic doors. I heard them suck shut behind me and stood blinking in the cool sunlight of a March morning in Paris. “Taxi, Madame?” a voice asked me. When I had been in Paris before, by myself or with my husband, I had always carefully taken the RER, the train, into the Gare du Nord. Never a cab all the way into the city. Too extravagant, too foolishly expensive. I heard the doors open behind me, heard the sound of many tiny squeaky wheels on a host of suitcases. I didn’t turn around to see if they matched the bag I was pulling.
“Yes, taxi,” I answered in French, then I hopped in the open door, pulling my suitcase in beside me. “Go,” I said to the driver, scrunching down in the seat. “Please.” He went. The driver was young, maybe Tunisian or Moroccan. Once we were free of the airport, we flew past the concrete suburbs where the new immigrants who worked at the airport lived. After a while, I saw the sign up ahead for the Périphérique, the ring road around Paris built where the old city walls once stood.
The driver looked at me in the mirror, one eyebrow raised. Where now?
“Gare du Nord,” I said. I would get off there and take the Metro. And head where? I dug in my purse for the photograph of Sophie. “No, wait, I have an address. It’s near the Canal St-Martin.” Leaning over the seat, I showed him the address Apolline had given me. He looked at it for a full ten seconds, then put his eyes back on the road. He shook his head.
“No,” he said.
“No, what?” I asked. “No, you won’t go there. Or no, you don’t know where it is?” We shot through the Porte de Clignancourte, still headed for the Gare du Nord.
“It isn’t a real address,” he said.
“It is,” I said. “Or, at least, it was.”
He didn’t answer, but sighed loudly, as if I had deliberately set out to ruin his day. We went spinning past the great doors of the Gare du Nord, and then he pulled up in the queue at the taxi rank, braked to a hard stop, and got out of the cab. He waved over an older driver. They both looked at the address. The older man shook his head, too.
I should have bought a Paris map at the airport, I thought. I shouldn’t have been spooked into the cab. Okay, I shouldn’t have stolen the suitcase. My driver got back in the cab. He pointed to the older driver. “He says the street isn’t there anymore. That it used to be, in the sixties. But no more. The government tore down the old houses to build apartment blocks, and the old alleys like this got wiped away.”
The older driver was looking through the window at me, as if he were waiting for me to insist. I thought, He knows where it is. Or rather, was. Then someone came running out of the station and got in his cab, and he was off.
Okay, okay, I thought. Stupid to go there first, anyway—an Aunt Z sort of thing to do. Show up at the address and say, “A woman who might have been my mother used to live here. Can I spend the night?”
My cabb
ie tapped the steering wheel with the ring on his right hand, clearly restless. He seemed to have suddenly noticed how odd I looked, with my razor cut, my wrinkled clothes, and expensive bag. “A hotel, perhaps, for Madame?” he suggested, as if I, in my current deranged state, might not have considered that possibility.
I hadn’t. “Yes,” I said, “a hotel then. Hôtel Batignolles,” I added. “On the Rue des Batignolles, near the end, almost to the square.” As soon as I said it, I regretted it. We pulled back into traffic. The Hôtel Batignolles was where my college put up faculty and students on their way to its far-flung foreign studies programs. My husband and I had stayed there. Someone might well be there who knew my whole sorrow-soaked story. I caught a glimpse of myself in the taxi’s bead-festooned rear mirror. This time I kept myself from jumping at the sight, but I thought, No one is going to recognize me. I wouldn’t have recognized myself, not even in the International Herald Tribune under a banner headline with my name.
“Okay, Hôtel Batignolles,” he said and took me straight there, cutting down Clichy to the Boulevard des Batignolles to the much smaller Rue des Batignolles without a second’s hesitation, proving he did know Paris, if not the street where a woman named Sophie Desnos once lived.
Batignolles was a neighborhood that had once been a separate village, as was true of so many stray parts of Paris, and it still looked like it, with small shops and a worn grassy park behind a church at the end of the street. It was cut off from the rest of the city by the steep rise of Montmartre to the east, by the Gare St-Lazare to the south and its endless tracks to the west. It was still mostly a working-class part of town, and it was not near anything, in the touristic sense of that word, not even a convenient Metro stop, though a bus ran down the street to the Gare St-Lazare, and then further, to the Opera.
The taxi driver dropped me in front of the hotel, which was neat white stucco with a courtyard, as if it had wandered from the south of France and come to rest here in Paris. It was small and very clean and someone, sometime, had gained the loyalty of our dean of students and the deans of a half-dozen other midwestern liberal arts colleges, so there were usually little knots of blonde co-eds waiting for the bus in front of the bakery next door, with maps and guidebooks clutched in one hand, on their long way to the Louvre or Notre Dame or whatever it was they had been told by their teachers they must go and see.
When I got out of the cab, though, the street was empty except for an old man in a fedora walking an equally elderly dachshund.
“Good morning, Madame,” he said, tipping his hat.
“Good morning, Monsieur,” I replied, as if we were in a small town, as if we had known each other, at least by sight, all our lives. For a moment, I wanted to pretend I had stepped back in time and might run into Sophie, Apolline, Mosjoukine, and the colonel on the sidewalk in the Paris of the 1950s. Instead, I went into the dark lobby of the hotel.
I managed to check in without anyone seeing me except the desk clerk. A large sign announced in English, German, and Japanese that the check-in time was 3:00. It was barely 11, but the clerk, taking in my advanced state of dishevelment, handed me the room key.
In my room, I locked my door. The room was small, clean, and absolutely ordinary with a single bed and a small black-and-white TV. I put the suitcase on the bed and unzipped it. Inside was a single matched outfit, packed separately, as if for a quick overnight trip. I shook out a pair of black rough wool pants, a soft grey shell, a long merino and silk sweater with subtle gold and green flecks. Also, a cosmetics bag with more makeup than I owned, not a hard feat. In it was a large vial of Percoset, more than anyone who wasn’t dying or in chronic, crippling pain should have. No wonder the seal woman had kept smiling. I pulled off my black sweater and jeans, old dead clothes, and stripped to the skin. Then I threw myself down on the bed beside the suitcase and closed my eyes.
When I opened them, it was late afternoon. The sun slanted through the window. I went into the bath and took a long hot shower, using all the hotel’s small largess of soap and shampoo. It felt strange to wash what was left of my hair. I ran my hands over and over the smooth shape of my head. I washed out my underwear, hung it in the shower to dry. I got a clean pair out of my purse and put it on. Then I slipped on the black pants, the loosely knit shell and sweater. They fit like no clothes I had ever owned, like a soft second skin.
I took the makeup kit into the bathroom. Early in my husband’s silent movie making, he had press-ganged me into helping with the makeup. He’d gotten old manuals on film makeup out of the depths of the college library. He’d raided Walgreen’s for some dark and primitive colors. Really, I’d shown no talent for it. I only owned one tube of lipstick, which I wore on occasions like New Year’s and to friends’ weddings. Each semester, he had at least one female student who knew lifetimes more about makeup than I did. But now I wanted this stolen makeup to complete my transformation. I wanted nothing about me—not hair, clothes, or skin—to be the same. I wanted magic. I wanted to be wearing a mask. I stared and stared at myself in the mirror, unsure what to apply where.
Finally, I gave up and tucked the makeup kit in my purse. I would think about it later. Now I wanted to find a good map, and for that, I needed a bookstore.
In the lobby, two co-eds were sitting at one of the small tables where they served breakfast, drinking with straws from cans of Coca-Cola. I glanced at them. They looked familiar, in a generic sort of way. Were they my former students? My husband’s? One of them, with long purple hair, was wearing the perfect makeup. Eyes shaded in, brows dark. In my husband’s class, she would have been the makeup artist.
“Um, hi,” I said, stopping in front of them at the little round table. I held out the makeup kit. “Could you guys help me with this makeup? I’m a little out of practice.”
The girls stared at me for a moment, then at each other. I thought they might burst out laughing. Then the one with the purple hair nodded. “Oh, sure,” she said, with a nice round midwestern O. “I could get into that.”
We crowded into the small WC off the lobby, the makeup girl, me, and her friend, who was chunkier and boyish but who wanted to act as consultant. “I like your hair cut,” said the girl with the purple hair. “So what kind of look do you want?”
“Like yours,” I said.
“Really?” her plainer friend asked, doubtful. She went back to the lobby for her pack and brought back a couple of wrinkled American magazines, a Vanity Fair and a Cosmo. This was a full consultation now. We flipped through the pictures, and I picked one.
“Kind of like that,” I said, pointing at a hyper-thin girl in a fashion spread. Her eyes were raccooned with dark shadow and her lips blue-black.
“Are you sure?” the purple girl said. “I mean, I can see going there. But I think she looks like her boyfriend beat her.”
I dug in my purse and pulled out the picture of Sophie. I wished I’d had a picture of Vera Holodnaya in full film makeup to show her. “Like this,” I said.
“Oh, okay. Diva, right?”
“Diva,” I repeated, a bit of the silent film world slipping into this crowded, twenty-first-century space. Amazing how styles outlived artists like Vera Holodnaya.
The makeup artist carefully circled my eyes, then shaded the hollows above them. Her friend chipped in a pair of tweezers from her Swiss army knife and watched as the makeup artist shaped my eyebrows, each pluck making me wince. “Not too thin,” the friend said, pointing to the picture of Sophie. “Hers are pretty full.”
The makeup artist nodded. She penciled my blonde eyebrows a soft sable. Then she dug in the bag for some lipstick and came up with a dark garnet. She painted my lips into careful bows, trying to make them look as full as Sophie’s. She made me smack my lips on a Kleenex to blot off the excess. She frowned at the result. “It should be brighter,” she said. “More kissy. You should maybe buy some.”
She stepped back, and I looked at myself in the mirror. The eyes were definitely Vera. Or at least Sophie. My ha
ir, though, short as a man’s and still slicked back from my shower, looked like Ivan Mosjoukine’s.
“Thanks,” I said to the two girls. “I really appreciate it.”
“No biggie. It was fun,” said the makeup artist.
“Can I ask you a question?” said the friend.
I nodded, afraid what it might be.
“Is there something wrong with your feet?” she asked, pointing down at the clogs I was wearing. “Because, I mean, if there isn’t, you definitely should not be wearing those shoes.”
I looked down at my feet, the feet of a woman who had stolen better clothes, but not better shoes. “What should I wear?” I asked.
“Boots,” said both girls at the same moment. “Definitely.”
“Okay, boots,” I said. “I’ll get boots.”
I waved over my shoulder as I opened the door of the WC and slid into the lobby. Behind me I heard the friend say, “Do you think she just got out of prison or something?”
“I think she was a nun in a convent,” the makeup artist said. “And now she’s on the run.”
I caught the bus outside the hotel. The sun was setting over the train tracks as we neared the Gare St-Lazare. The street lights came on. It had rained while I napped or showered or got my face painted, and the pavement gleamed with the headlights of the cars.
The last time I had been in Paris was nearly six years ago. My daughter had been two and a half, and though she’d outgrown it at home, she spent most of the trip in her old stroller. My husband, with us in tow, had headed straight to look for discounted film books at a large store a friend had recommended near St-Michel. Probably it was still there and would have maps and guidebooks. I would go there. At least from the window of the bus, a bit fogged by the rain, Paris looked as if it hadn’t changed, as if six years were nothing. I felt like I was the one who had aged a century.
My Life as a Silent Movie Page 6
