The Path Of All That Falls

by Franz Neumann

  “If you wanted to stay you could find a place here,” Bombay said.

  “We could,” David said, noticing Bombay’s still-red neck.

  “Though it is expensive. You could get a room from Regi for a while. He has so many rooms in his apartment. But you’d soon want to leave Paris. It will only get cold here. Dark, too. Winter. If it weren’t for the fact that winter cleans out most of the tourists and sends them away, I’d wish to be in California, too.”

  There was the awareness of what he was again, not letting him slip from his tourist status.

  “We get winter too,” David said. “Mostly rain and fog. Actually, not too much of winter. Overcast mornings.”

  “Here it rains all the time, and the Seine freezes over.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, rarely. I’ve heard it has. I sometimes leave for the winter. Italy or Spain or Turkey.”

  He imagined Paris in winter, and the air grew cool. A homeless man sat on the bank in the last of the sun, peeling an orange with a knife. David felt shadowed again and wondered if his imaginary pursuer was merely the sentence which had dropped into his head. The guilt trying to ignore the fact that it had been forgiven. Or a new guilt.

  Chapter 3

  Bianca noticed the blinking light on the answering machine. She knew, just from the light. She knew as she reached across the bed to the opposite nightstand and pressed the button. But the message was only some distant acquaintance of the apartment’s true occupants, a caller who didn’t know that the owners, at this moment, were finishing their vacation in Bianca’s house in California. And then there was another message.

  Bianca? It’s David. You there? I’m...where am I? I’m somewhere on the Seine. Hello? Nope, not there. Okay. And then, in a crude digital voice, the time. Jeudi, dix-sept heures douze.

  Bianca felt she was momentarily safe until a wide wash of sorrow followed. She sobbed for an hour. Her feet felt like ice, her hands grew weak and her heart seemed a decade older. She quickly crawled onto David’s open suitcase and sat on his folded jeans, on the colored T-shirts, the mated socks, the paisley boxers, curling herself together into the slippery aerodynamics that come instinctively to ease the passage through grief. She breathed the clothes and pulled her body so close in on itself that it hurt. She wished the two sides of the suitcase would envelope her and snap this pain to sudden closure.

  An electronic melody perforated the silence. Bianca turned to see a woman whispering into a cell phone. She’d forgotten about Bombay. Bombay had taken Bianca back to the apartment in a cramped taxi. At the morgue, they’d said that Bombay had been sitting beside her husband at the moment of the accident. Now, in the apartment, Bianca watched as Bombay whispered into a cell phone as she massaged her neck with her free arm. The last thing David had said was probably to this woman.

  Bianca peered out a window. The neighborhood was alien, as though the weeks she had spent here had been somewhere else, in another Paris. Not just the apartment, but the entire city gave off an air of exclusivity that mocked her for thinking it functioned in a slow and kind way, with a place in it for her. There were new rules to life now. The old passage of time seemed a glorious luxury weighed against the absence of her husband. She felt as though her life and all things that touched it had, just now, been taken off the gold standard. As though everything was paper and without security, impossible to exchange for innocence or return, everything tied not to infidelity or betrayal, but to the commerce of eventual death. In the bathroom, she emptied a meal she’d forgotten having eaten. Her throat burned no matter how many mouthfuls of tap water she scooped, swallowed or spat. She stared at herself in the mirror. She appeared unchanged. This mirror was not a mirror. It lied terribly. It did not show the ache in her chest, like a tightly bored screw. While she stared, a voice inside her had the audacity to utter—this will pass. Knowing this could happen, would happen, filled her with fear. It meant that the present she, this lump of pain, would have to be replaced with someone else. A single woman. A widow. She flushed the toilet again and again to fill the small room with the mundane sound. She felt she would betray David if she let slip the taste of his mouth in a kiss, or forgot the warm feel of his hand on her. This will pass. Cruel comfort. She picked up David’s can of shaving foam and squeezed a rotund pinch into her palm and inhaled—and he was there, more miraculously than transubstantiation. She filled the entire sink with his shaving foam and flushed the toilet a dozen times more.

  Back at the window, she breathed in the air. Across the street, a planter of geraniums hung from an apartment balcony. Despite having disliked geraniums in the past, she realized they held the secret of the commonplace. They were a peaceful chloroform to the struggle of panic, to the way the room changed dimensions and her name fell out of her own memory. For a few brief seconds, she was not staring at the plant; she was nothing more than an image-holder of geraniums.

  “Would you like me to get you a drink?”

  She ignored Bombay. The geraniums grew in a long plastic planter hung along the top of the balcony railing by two rusting metal loops. Roots dangled from the bottom of the planter like wet strands of cobweb, catching the light of the apartment behind them. She could not see the holes through which they crept free from the dirt to dangle in the air.

  “A drink?”

  She did not want to hear Bombay’s coppery voice. It would have been better to have heard no news than bad. If not for Bombay, Bianca felt she could gaze at the geranium’s nearly translucent roots and forget, completely. But Bombay’s presence made the evening true, the night undeniable. She felt a touch on her shoulders.

  “No,” she said. “Nothing. I want nothing.” She wanted everything.

  Outside, grief fell like snow and coated everything. She sat in a chair and watched it fall for hours, through the nightmarish insomnia and into the leaden nearness of morning. She could discern the dusting of grief upon the stumble of two drunks, on the passage of a black car with a burned-out headlight, in the pre-dawn swoop of a pigeon the color of ash.

  In the morning, Bombay came behind her and hugged her. Bianca could only hold the arms that wrapped around her waist, clutching them as though onto a seat belt. Then Bianca rose and they held each other. Bianca was all cried out but she cried again and it hurt all the more, as though the pain had to tap deep within her to find tears. She could only wheeze and shake and try not to frighten Bombay, the woman waiting for another phone call. The calls had come intermittently through the night. Her boss Regi, the translator for her husband’s book, was in the hospital. Bianca had overheard enough to know that Bombay was waiting for someone to arrive. Someone to watch over her so Bombay could visit Regi in the hospital.

  When Bombay left in the gray of interminable dawn, she was replaced by an elderly friend, an art student who spoke no English, nor French it seemed, but who held Bianca’s hand as Bianca lay in bed. Bianca didn’t want to fall asleep. She fought the fatigue, as though to sleep and wake again would put the barrier of unconsciousness between herself and the day that still held David in it. Sleep would spell impossible transit back to him.

  She woke to the smell of dinner being prepared by the older woman. Dusk was settling again. A day had passed. Bianca rose from bed. On the floor she found several sketches in an artist’s pad. Pencil lines of herself in sleep with her arms tight about herself, her hair covering her mouth, her hands in fists. She sat beside the nightstand and pressed the answering machine button. She knew how wrong this was, but she had to hear his voice. But the only sound to play back was an enunciation of the time. She pressed button after button. Then she crept to David’s suitcase, bent down, and grabbed the clothes he’d worn a few days ago. She took them back to the bed, where she brought the bundle to her face, hiding it just under the covers. A shirt, pants, the smell of him, the liveliness, the atoms of sweat and fabric that made her reach deep into the cool emptiness of the bed hoping to touch his body. She was here. Where was he?

  Chapter
4

  After what seemed like deliberate slowness, the waiter arrived with a another bottle of wine. David looked down at his own hands and at the ink Bombay’s pen had left on his fingers.

  The waiter placed the opened bottle on the table, not bothering to pour.

  “Merci,” David said, trying to affect sarcasm in French, but finding he didn’t know how. He filled Bombay’s glass, then his own.

  “Salud,” she said, lifting the glass and raising her eyebrows, as though expecting a toast.

  “To the fair lady,” he said.

  “To the unfairness of having to leave,” she said, misunderstanding him, or perhaps understanding him completely.

  He moved his plate of half-eaten zucchini aside and rested his elbows on the table. He read the napkin. Perhaps it was only the appetizer that had let that line slip into his mostly unperturbed day, some unusual oil or rare inciting spice that had led his mind back to actions from which he’d spent months distancing himself. He figured the onset of these thoughts on guilt could be caused by something this simple: his enjoying a meal in someone’s company while holding a mental picture of his wife alone in a city continuously pairing itself off. In his mind, he put extravagant hats on his image of Bianca, dressed her in outfits that would, he half-hoped, run them into debt. At this moment, he wanted badly for her to do something irrational, regrettable, forgivable. Another thought he hadn’t held in months.

  He tried to relax his mind by using it to describe the wine. Cherries, chocolate, earth. He was guessing. He’d learned one thing: when visiting a Frenchman, never bring a bottle of wine. It was a scorecard of his ignorance. He yawned. With the pop of his ears, the air grew vigorous. He heard the true volume of wind and chatting and music and traffic. He’d had water in his ears since his morning shower.

  “Do you want coffee after?” Bombay asked.

  “Sure,” David said, hearing his own voice all too well. Too late for retractions and replacements.

  “Good.”

  David now decided that Bombay was interesting when silent, but beautiful when speaking. He’d always been a sucker for voice, even when he’d been young and his body had been unable to detect the purpose of sensuality in women. Since being old enough to be stirred, even an angel’s face or a fabulous bust or legs held nearly no weight compared to a voice that revealed the husky tone of a fine mind—all the girlish squeaks long gone, leaving only the liquidity that would move down his shoulders and back like a soft rain. He remembered how his wife, in the beginning, could make the hair on his neck rise wonderfully just talking about the weather. Eighty degrees and humid. Say it again.

  “How hot do you think it is?” David asked.

  “Twenty-two,” Bombay said. “Celsius.”

  “Thanks,” he said, still feeling the sibilance of her voice.

  “It’s supposed to be hot tomorrow too.”

  “How hot?”

  “Thirty degrees, I read. You can keep cool in there.” She pointed an arm at the river bank and began naming the contents behind the stone facades: a department store with the city’s best view, the Musee D’Orsay in the distance, the apartment of a famous mistress of a more famous lover. But as she narrated, what David found himself admiring more and more was not stone or glass but the way Bombay’s words continued to throw a wonderful rain of static across his neck and shoulders. The perfect fullness of her vowels ached in his ear, her voice like a cello at the end of a bow’s draw. A connoisseur’s favorite. He reached for his wine glass and enjoyed the most rewarding of all forms of voyeurism—listening. Somehow, his glass was empty.

  The boat passed beneath another bridge as they neared the Louvre. Near the museum, an enormous white ferris wheel rose into view behind the colored booths of a summer carnival. David refilled his glass halfway and slouched in relaxation. “What’s that area called? I walked there a few days ago.”

  “Rue de Rivoli. Le Jardin des Tuileries.”

  David watched his namesake object spinning clockwise. As the family story went, his great-great-grandfather had come from France, alone and orphaned, at the age of six to live with relatives. Approaching Ellis Island, he’d seen a ferris wheel on the Jersey shore. At some point during his processing, through some miscommunication, the name had made its way to the record book.

  “You know how they say ferris wheel in Danish?” Bombay asked.

  “How?”

  “Parish. Paris wheel.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “No shit.” David smiled as he watched the ferris wheel spin against the darkening sky. It paused to unload and take on new passengers.

  “In the late 800s, there were Vikings here. They camped for a long time. Years.”

  “What were they doing in Paris?”

  “Attacking.”

  The carnival lights speckled the dusky light with orange, blue and electric white. “I guess the Vikings didn’t win,” he said.

  “They were paid to go home.”

  David tried to imagine Paris at that time, Viking ships moored along the bank of the Seine. “How large was Paris?”

  “Mostly the islands. Where Notre Dame is. Île de la Cité.”

  David tried to imagine the absence of all the exquisite architecture that ran tightly on both banks. “What was here then, on the opposite shores?”

  Bombay smiled. “You must ask someone older than me, because I don’t remember. Aren’t you the history expert?”

  “Music history, and not an expert.”

  Trees with light-adorned branches shrouded the facades on the far shore as the tourist boat continued along the Seine. David observed Bombay’s rested mouth, waiting for her voice again. The darkening sky made her hair brighter and faintly red, as though she was nearly finished growing out a distant desire for color. Her face was the color of the inside of an orange rind. Lower still, faint shadows and highlights on her arms betrayed a braid of muscles. David imagined her posing for art academy students, filthy charcoal sweeping out clean lines for legs, hips, the shape of chin and armpits, her body held still by muscles that earned their sitting fee. The palm of her hand wrapped around her wine glass, and the sun made the skin there nearly translucent. Lower still, her over-crossed leg ran down to a sudden curve at her ankle. She dangled her sandal over the water from her big toe. David felt himself fascinated not so much with the curve of her ankle, but by the way the world seemed to have fit its own shape, gathered from air and water and stone, to her body. In some ways he was glad his wife wasn’t with him at this moment. Otherwise, this sensation would have never crept in—the pleasure of feeling guilty without the act of following through.

  He had spent the past month falling in love with his own descriptions of Parisian women. His wife Bianca believed he was describing her, and she was mostly right. They were all her in some way, even if the descriptions were of women here in town, or women he had known, or the faces of students, friends or friends’ wives. He had no real experience with French women. There was that woman he’d known while he was an undergraduate, but she’d only lived in France for a couple years. Now, it was safe to remain a voyeur. Here in Paris, he’d developed a theory that made it impossible for him to have a tryst in Paris with a woman his own age. Over the past weeks, he’d observed countless couples—father-daughter pairings which in a sudden outreach for a hand or in an unexpected kiss broke the mis-assigned relationship he had placed upon on the pair. Instead, he realized he was watching forty- or fifty-year-old men shopping with girls who seemed only eighteen or nineteen, but who were doubtless younger. A new blouse, a blow job. A wardrobe, a weekend in the country, never seeing the country. A world view still based on the barter system, the gifts for a kiss, sex, placating the fears of waning youth by transforming materialism into love. And around them, filling in another segment of the female space, were the black-clad beauties, the thirty- or forty-year-olds with the faint tracery of neck wrinkles and crow’s-feet. They threw distasteful glances, as though the re
ceivers of their stares were the ones to leave them and turn them hard and more beautiful. David wondered if they paid union dues.

  As he felt the second bottle of wine renewing its affects on him, David considered how he was here in Paris and nowhere else. He wasn’t at home, he wasn’t in his grim office at school, he wasn’t working on the book—it was done. He was here, the last touches had been made to the translation and the book would soon be published. He smiled openly, and when Bombay reciprocated he did not feel the need to explain himself. Secretly, David had always wanted to appear in translation. Especially now. It gave the years of teaching an illusion of achievement.

  “Let’s move to Paris for the summer,” he had said to his wife one evening over dinner. It was some time after attempting to get Bianca pregnant, after his affair and a few months before his sabbatical. He and Bianca hadn’t been happy for a long time. Her want for a child, and his recalcitrance when nothing became of all that performance, had made them feel always anticipatory, always on the cusp of being satisfied, an exhaustive state. They were both having to work out that sex between them now was just sex again, and not an infertile act, a failure.

  “What do you say?” he’d asked her.

  “You mean take a vacation?”

  “No, we live there all summer. We rent, we pay bills, we find a favorite bottle of house wine in a bistro.”

  “And you sit in a stuffy room behind a typewriter while I bring you fresh bread and coffee.”

  “No,” David said. “Not like that at all.”

  “What then?”