The Path Of All That Falls

by Franz Neumann

  He recalled the quick, fresh phrase that had come to him. What kept him good... Since arriving in Paris, he’d been infatuated with words that hooked the flesh of the city, especially those descriptions that were born unfettered by allusions, like a Chinese fruit with a blood-red peel, or the name of a mountain range heard for the first time—unlike familiar words, like banana, or Appalachia, or anything that was more than itself, that could alter taste or the way it sounded by the baggage of connotation it carried. The descriptions David favored had to do with a facade’s ornamentation at dusk, the weight of a carafe of water in a tired hand, the sound of the city’s sirens waking one from sleep, the color of metro tickets and the speed at which the slips of paper rode through the turnstiles’ slots to emerge validated. In short, any observation that came first-hand and wasn’t weighed down by footnotes. Fiction writers had it easy, with imaginations sparked by something as simple as flashing bands of white. David wrote down the images in his mind for pleasure. He enjoyed the luxury of being flagrant in the face of the inevitable forgetting, the kind of pure experience that leaves no record. The act of remembering wasn’t always a good thing. Besides, some things were better forgotten. And yet, he’d written down this line. What kept him good… Where could the phrase have come from? David waited for an answer, his right leg bouncing up and down in silent syncopation, a family tic, a gene for impatience. Diesel exhaust floated upon the waters. He rapped Bombay’s wineglass with his fingernails. Nothing came. Again, he wondered if these weeks of wine could be the culprit for his own haziness of mind. He told himself to order water. And then he reminded himself to say carafe, or he’d get mineral water that cost more than wine. He was still learning.

  A boat drifted in the opposite direction, back toward the Eiffel Tower. What had Bombay called these boats? Bateaux-mouches. River flies. David cocked his head. Music played somewhere, a piano rippling over the clang of tines and serration. The boat was already three or four bridges from the Eiffel Tower. David marveled that, had Mr. Eiffel’s original site choice been approved, the tower would have been erected somewhere in Germany, rather than Paris. The artifacts of history, it seemed to him, were so precariously placed.

  He got up and leaned against the railing, easily feeling the three glasses of wine now. A group of women and children waved from shore and he waved back. Life was good. The river frothed a V behind the aquatic purr of the engines, and over that, spilling into the river, David observed how the city gave off a Friday rush-hour sigh of exhaust mixed with renewal, a turbulence created by the week-long desires for sleep edging out of the city and hitting other vehicles returning for the trace start of night life. The Pont Alexandre III gleamed golden, the bridge’s baroque entanglements like the lacy edges of a long spring day. David heard and saw the rush of people and vehicles on the crowded bridge, moving like the endless stop-start spurting of plasma in films detailing the workings of arteries. Rushing, slowing, rushing again, this flow of cars near the heart of the city, near the blood-pump, near the proper noun that is Paris, with the silent s, always on the upswing. He wondered why he didn’t get drunk more often.

  A Chopin Nocturne wafted from the shore. David recollected Chopin’s moments of being lost in thought—holes filled with fear, hallucinations or lost consciousness. Espaces imaginaires, Chopin had called them. David had done so much research and spent so many hours gazing at his scribbled notes, that there were times he too felt as though he’d entered some imaginary space, one where Chopin’s life and experiences seemed on the verge of breaking into his own. Often, David had felt that the research was too intense, too pleasurable in a keeping-busy sort of way, without the finished book indicating his intensity over the past year. Of course, he was glad that his book on Chopin would go into print, though he felt a little saddened knowing that publication would be but a pale shadow of the effort it had been to write. It made him feel old. At one time, he had considered training to be a pianist. Ten, no, fifteen, no, twenty! years ago. But a resolution had been made somewhere, sneaked in during a moment of frustration, to give up the heart-gnawing ambition to play and compose music. He decided to teach its history instead, maybe write a few books in his lifetime, take his three months of summer vacation and let the struggle of practice and perfection echo out to nothing. An enviable life, he often reminded himself, though that consolation was weak. Nowadays, the idea wasn’t so much to achieve abstinence from composing music, but to only write snippets of song in his head, to not put anything down where his eyes could latch onto the notes and begin constructing and deconstructing melody lines, unearthing tonalities and layers of possible sound that would feel like genius at first, pure genius, then show up the next morning weary and derivative. Better to keep it in his head, back behind the eyes, where the only desire to put it all down on paper came late at night when he was near sleep, when the eyes roll up in their sockets for the night and spy the lines playing out on the blackboard of brain. The only lines he put down nowadays were all grammar—exposition to find its way into a couple of music journals, now this book on Chopin. In truth, he knew he wrote a better sentence than a bass line. Though, sometimes, when a sound in the night snapped him awake, he found his fingers twitching for honky-tonk, or his bladder all Wagner, marching him from bed. Restless.

  What kept him good was the fear of facing death during a moment of guilt. There was the line again, dropping into the present. Full-formed phrases like this never appeared to him before. He felt the need for vigilance, to move with dog-like curiosity. He really needed more wine. David eyed both directions on the upper deck, searching for the white jacket, the bread-bringer, the lean French student on a summer job who had laughed when Bombay had spoken to him flirtatiously on their first order of drinks. She refused to tell David what she had said. Those seconds he hadn’t been able to catch—the internal joke, the Parisian discourse—had been the first time that day he’d felt like a tourist. He knew, though, that this act of concealment on Bombay’s part was all play; even his interest in knowing what she’d said felt like acting. They could have a conversation about sea snails and she’d somehow make it feel flirtatious. In fact, there was something about her that made David feel like he and Bombay had already done something illicit, as though their smiles belied the shared remembrance of a past event which, David reassured himself, had not occurred. A line from one of Chopin’s letters came to him: You can’t think how delightful it was to meet her more intimately, just in the house, on a sofa.

  Just as he began thinking of her again, Bombay reemerged up the flight of stairs. Through the stockings, her kneecaps resembled a worn bas-relief of a man in a Russian winter hat. She took her seat by the water and he joined her. A breeze had begun to blow, raking the surface of the water in waves of lapis lazuli and gold, and making the direction of the Seine’s flow impossible to read.

  “Did you miss me?” she asked.

  “I was about to throw myself overboard in despair.”

  “That wouldn’t be good,” she said, then laughed.

  She was laughing the first time he met her, in Regi’s home office. She was on the phone then, as he and Regi sat in the other room and discussed the Chopin book. He had found himself listening to her talking in the other room, even as Regi spoke. David had first believed Bombay to be a native of France. Her transparent fluency awed him now, especially as he was the one with French blood—an eighth or so. But even with that loose package of genes, he couldn’t shake his broad accent or the way it broke down the French language into a lazy swagger of its native insistent gait. When he and Bombay had left Regi’s apartment earlier that afternoon, about all he knew of Bombay was the secretarial work she did for Regi. He’d yet to call her by her name, had yet to say something along the lines of Bombay look at this, or How did you like the appetizer, Bombay? To begin doing so now would sound too deliberate.

  “You haven’t told me about your name,” David said.

  “It’s a nickname,” Bombay said. She picked up her empty
glass and raised one eyebrow at him in question.

  David nodded to this sub-conversation. “The waiter hasn’t come around. What about your name?”

  “I picked it from a map when I was a kid. India, you know.”

  “You picked it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it’s not really a nickname, is it?”

  “It’s what my friends call me.”

  “What’s your last name? A good Danish name, right?”

  “Just Bombay.”

  “But you have a last name, right?”

  “No, not any more.” She smiled at him. “Isn’t one enough? Life should be about simplicity.”

  “I guess,” he added. “But doesn’t it make things difficult?”

  “How?”

  “If you go to the bank, or when you give out your address, or on your driver’s license.”

  “I don’t have a driver’s license.”

  “Still.”

  “Does it bother you that I don’t use two names?”

  “No. Bombay is nice,” he said. “Though it doesn’t fit your blonde hair.” His eyes browsed through her Scandinavian hair. “Couldn’t you put a red dot on your forehead? Otherwise, your name sounds too different for a complexion like yours.”

  Bombay was smiling, so he continued.

  “It seems overly exotic, like a stripper’s name.”

  “Really?” she asked, and he immediately regretted saying it. The wine was letting thoughts through.

  “No, I don’t know. Not a stripper. I just mean exotic. Someone exotic.”

  “I do some modeling for the university,” she said. “And some photos, too, when I was younger. I only pose for art now.” She must have caught David’s thought on the subject because she added, “Nude at the university, but not for photos.” She held her bust in her hands. “Not enough for them. Not enough for a stripper.” She said it like it had been her ambition all along.

  David crossed his legs. “What do your enemies call you? You let them have the same single-name intimacy?”

  “I don’t have enemies. It’s bad form.” She took the last zucchini spear and moved it around in the puddle of marinade, the vegetable squeaking on the plate. “Do you have enemies?” she asked, then took a bite.

  “No. But I keep my home number unlisted.”

  She seemed to ignore him for a few seconds as another boat passed them at a languid drift. “You know, I’ve lived here eight years and never been on these boats. They move so slowly.”

  “It’s leisurely,” David said. “No. You’re right. It’s slow. That could be why you’ve been avoiding them.”

  David suspected that Bombay had taken him for this cruise in part because he served as an excuse for her to take indulge in a tourist act. The old amusement of boats and gondolas, started back in the days when Chopin still lived here, seemed to have been outgrown by the residents. He’d partly accepted her invitation because he felt bad for having turned down her previous offer—owing to his fear of heights—to see Paris from atop the Eiffel Tower. Now, he wished she had suggested some cafe in an inner courtyard with an unmarked entrance and a waiter who knew she didn’t trail a last name behind her.

  “Have you had California wine?” David asked.

  “Not much. What do they say? Coals to Newcastle? It’s not bad, though.”

  The boat approached another bridge and they went under. There, in the cooler breeze that swirled in the dark, the phrase returned, like a particularly nagging melody from a song he’d rather forget.

  What kept him good was the fear of facing death during a moment of guilt.

  He was getting tired of this tangible grammar. He now preferred the incoherent mumbling of everyday half-ideas on the skulled boundary of his mind. Nothing to get him thinking. Peace. He was bothered by the trespass of this line into his thoughts. The line was different from say, describing the weight of a carafe of wine in a tired arm or any other pleasant and non-threatening phrase that had come to mind here in Paris. This one was too sharp. His dog-like hesitancy nosed forward as the boat emerged from beneath the bridge.

  A moment of guilt.

  David wondered when this idea had come into the current hour. In the last pour of wine, in the sight of the Eiffel, in the love of a laugh? He glanced at Bombay. She had turned her head towards the shore. Why the line when his wife would be meeting him in a couple hours for dinner in a pleasant cafe down an unknown street? Why the line when all day he’d had the stirring to make love to her again, tonight. His thoughts turned toward the theoretical. What kept guilt alive? What constituted its boundaries? Was guilt different if the law trespassed was civil rather than moral? Did forgiveness take away guilt, or was forgiveness only an invention to dull and pacify the gnaw of guilt, the sourness of soul, the yearning to undo what must remain done? Why was sin so easy to define, and one guilt so hard to discern from another? He considered this lightly, the way one wonders about the property line between oneself and a friendly neighbor, without considering the rearrangement of a single stone. He could do this because not one question was new. They were all recollections of previous thoughts he’d had. They were that clutch of notes that couldn’t be completely forgotten. Perhaps he was guilty.

  He felt indignant. Why should he feel the least bit guilty just because he was in the company of a woman whose bust he saw nothing wrong with, a woman with short bangs and flashing bands of white leg. The questions began to lift, but slowly, as he made justifications where he saw fit. David lifted the empty wine bottle in his hand. “Blanco,” he said to the passing waiter. The waiter left him with only the impression of a nod, and only after he’d gone did David remember that he’d also meant to order a carafe of water.

  “So you cannot stay with us longer?” Bombay asked.

  “No can do.” He’d never said this short phrase before in his life. He’d heard it a million times, it had rode along in his head through the years, and now it felt good to test out its cocky bluntness.

  “That’s too bad. It’s a great city for you.”

  David liked the way she homogenized the city into something like a family, eager for him to extend his stay. He had to admit he liked it here. He felt as though his insides were full of wet newspapers, books with the pages yet uncut, the scent of smoke, the glistening leaves on wet pavement, stained corks. He felt imbued with a sense of enormous past, a rich compost of history that generated its own heat. He didn’t want to think of leaving.

  “I wish my wife and I could stay, but we only have the apartment for another week or so. And I have to be back for the fall semester.”

  “Tell me about your wife. I hardly spoke to her.”

  “You met her?”

  “That day she stopped by to get you for lunch.”

  “What’s to say about Bianca?”

  “She likes traveling?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Yes.”

  He imagined the French couple who were now living in their cramped, two-story bungalow in Long Beach, California. Before leaving for Paris, he and Bianca had stocked their refrigerator with fresh fruit from Farm Boy, wine from Trader Joe’s, and—held to the refrigerator door with magnets—directions to the stores in case the French couple had a palette for more from the valleys of Napa and Imperial. The Parisian apartment had a refrigerator that went up to David’s knees and which greeted them on their arrival with nearly white emptiness, but for one near-empty bottle of orange marmalade. That first evening, unable to sleep from jet lag and the heat, they sat in front of the open refrigerator door and paged through the French couple’s photo albums. They then read the spines of the books on the shelves, they checked the spice rack, set the records in a pile and went through them one by one in a desire to familiarize. Or, David wondered now, had he been searching for guilt, for something to shock them and make this French couple seem flawed? A desire for the old Jamesian cliché of Europe corrupting Americans to ring true? In a closet, his wife found handcuffs and a peacock feather. They had
n’t yet found keys.

  Relaxing on the Seine, David wondered if their own house had been nosed through. Had the French couple found Bianca’s handgun, a relic from her life alone? Had they watched the porn flicks Bianca had bought for that time they’d tried to have a baby, when she desired a little of himself several times a day, and from which nothing had taken hold, despite the aid of titles like Schoolgirl Lover, fifty-five minutes, and Three’s Not a Crowd, one hour fifteen? Since then, he’d seen himself as less and less of a potential father, though at times it did make him profoundly sad. He had never really wanted children, though not being able to did make him feel slightly robbed of at least the possibility. But that wasn’t worth dredging up again. Had these Frenchies sifted and extracted any signs of acts which might have gestated other regrets? Could they surmise what lay behind the glued seams in the vase? The one that had been knocked over while stumbling through the house with a student from one of his classes—his first and last full-blown indiscretion, and what a flop. If he had it to do over again, had to do the wrong thing again, it certainly would have been with a different woman. Despite the slim satisfaction, at the time, of that little affair, there was still full-grown guilt from it, the kind that hadn’t passed away, even after the telling of it, even after the words of forgiveness. His weakness gave leverage to his wife and the college, transmuting the guilt into a wicked forgiveness. He had forever lost the ability to reinstate a virginal sense of trust in others. So strange, how one afternoon with his student could reveal everyone’s unhappiness to such a degree. He fell into depression, until his sabbatical and the book on Chopin. Somewhere along the way, he had regained a sense of normalcy. And here he was now, in a mostly happy afternoon. No, he didn’t think the hairline cracks in the vase held any stories to the eye. If he had it to do over again, he would have chucked the cracked vase in the trash, rather than try to conceal its flaws. And since he’d been forgiven, he almost wished he had done so much more at the time.