The Path Of All That Falls

by Franz Neumann

  “Wine. You bring fresh bread and a bottle of wine. And I use a pen and paper. And you’re naked.”

  “Fat chance.”

  “I’ll be.”

  On the bateaux-mouches, David swallowed a mouthful of wine and felt Bombay’s blue eyes fix on him.

  “Where are you off to?” she asked.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m bad company.”

  “No, not at all. Here, take the pen if you’re thinking of something again.”

  David smiled. “No, it’s okay. I don’t have anything to write now.”

  “It’s okay. I have even less. Take it.”

  David took the pen and ran his finger over the white star set into the snub-nosed cap. He pulled the cap off, pushed it back again, felt it click softly.

  “A gift,” Bombay said. “To you.”

  “What’s the occasion?”

  “Your book. Your Chopin book.”

  David leaned back. He was becoming increasingly aroused by Bombay’s voice, or perhaps it was just this breeze of elevated ego that came from being reminded of the prospect of his book soon being in French for the academic bores to read, his book swinging on a turnstile in a university bookstore or stacked on a display table. His ego was actually quite small when sober, and even though he could feel its boisterousness now, while a little drunk, he felt it was deserved. He recalled how Chopin, in a library in Vienna while on his way to Paris, came upon a volume of music with a composer of the same name, only to discover, when he read the score, that the name was his own, the music his. That innocence no longer existed. Every accomplishment, for the non-genius, had long since become a struggle.

  Bombay turned to stare in the direction of the bow. A wind, made of the inrush of night, blew her napkin from her lap. It rose at the fold, then spun end over end and fastened itself on the surface of the Seine like a cherry blossom. Bombay hadn’t noticed. David’s eyes lingered at the nape of her neck where her hair ended in wisps and gave way to blonde skin. This boundary, along with the paper skiff now far behind them, seemed things for him only, knowledge of places and happenings that she would never know or see. He gazed past her. Notre Dame and its scaffolding appeared in the distance. He chided himself for not yet having gone inside. He would go there tomorrow, early, while his wife still slept. He had been raised Catholic, Bianca on self-help books. David had always felt a little shame for his occasional church-going—not for having abandoned his faith, but for liking to revisit it for sentimental reasons, or when his mind strained too far in the philosophical direction of night. Winter, with Christmas and darkness, put him in brief moods for candles and uncomfortable pews. He resolved to enter tomorrow before Bianca rose and could ask him where he was going, making him feel foolish. He then considered taking Bombay tonight, if there was time before he met up with Bianca and Regi for dinner. The idea brought an illicit feeling to his mind. Strange, he thought, how it was the prospect of the darkness of a church that seemed to hold the most potential for making him feel guilty. And then it didn’t seem unnatural at all.

  Though she was turned away from him, David felt as though Bombay were peeking over her shoulder to spy his thoughts. She was smiling, the corner of her lips just visible. Behind her, floodlights and sunset bathed Notre Dame and its scaffolding in a warm glow. Ivy hung over the brick banks and trailed on the water. Realizing they’d passed the Louvre, David remembered wanting to find an apartment across the river there where George Sand, Chopin’s lover, had resided. The apartment had been given to her by the then publisher of Le Figaro. Before David had time to think further of Sand’s residence, Bombay moved to the empty chair between them. Her eyes took in his, then she kissed him, and continued kissing him, past his moment of surprise and then into wonderment, then arousal, then brief guilt. Last time, guilt had tasted of spearmint gum. This time, it was stewed zucchini.

  “I’m paying the bill, is that it?” he said, pulling away. She was tipsy too, he realized. He was drunk, but knowing he was drunk, he was responsible for what he touched—her back, the hem of her skirt, the smooth skin just beneath. He pulled away and ran his finger down her nose. A woman at a nearby table leaned toward the man beside her and covered her words with cupped hands, even though he knew he was there, in the hot moist breath of gossip. Just ahead, the shadowy archway of a bridge yawned open like a mouth.

  Bombay seemed about to say something, but just then David felt an enormous weight tumble upon him, throwing him from where he sat. His chair shot out from beneath him and flew out over the rolling lines of wake. The wooden slats were broken and hit the water just as the early evening snapped to night in the darkness beneath the bridge. Turning back to where he’d been sitting, David found two men lying on the deck of the boat. He realized they’d fallen from above. Their bodies held each other in a weak embrace, one behind the other, as though this was a chance encounter after an estranged friendship, a moment where neither is certain how to use their arms, ignoring a deeper embrace as though a renewed commitment were some indelicacy.

  As the boat pulled out from beneath the bridge, David heard a woman scream. It was the woman who’d hid his name in gossip. She grasped her hair, her mouth agape, her fists shaking as though from anger. Time, which had clenched around the moment of the fall, now restarted on a passage that was rapid and unstoppable.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay,” David said, bending down beside the fallen men. He knew it was unwise to make such judgements, these small lies he directed at no one in particular.

  The topmost man moved slightly. David was shocked to discover himself facing none other than Regi, his translator. Bombay let out a strange sigh, high and sharp, with none of the huskiness of her former voice.

  “Å, Gud,” she said. She moved her fingers to her mouth and rubbed her lips.

  David examined the man below Regi, leaning forward only to be shocked by yet another recognition, this time a face whose lips and cheeks were red with lipstick, and whose nose trickled blood. A face he’d seen a million times in the mirror, but never like this. His own face. David stumbled upright and brought his hands to his face, but saw no hands. Instead of his shoes, he saw the floor of the boat. Rather than air, a sense of empty collisions filled his chest. He felt a sinister exchange of body for emptiness.

  “Ja, ja, ja,” he heard someone say, then the sound of group laughter. David spotted five wooden ships plowed ashore on banks of mud. A group of men clad like Vikings stood at the bank, their faces and bodies dark, their laughter as ebullient as their blonde hair. A bonfire billowed behind the men, flames thin and long, sucked into the night sky in tiny vortices. Behind them stood Notre Dame, partly entangled in scaffolding. Were it not for the electric spotlights, David would have almost taken it to be under construction.

  He looked at this body that appeared to be his, blood dribbling from the body’s ears—his ears. He looked at the wooden boats, at the tourists on his boat, at the crowd on the bridge behind them. Despite the incomprehensibility of his own sudden sense of transparency, everything was bludgeoned with realism. David sat down on an empty chair as the boat’s engines cut and the bateaux-mouches made for the quay of the left bank, opposite the Vikings. This was nearly where the boat’s journey was to end, where Regi would have met them and the three of them would join David’s wife for dinner. Regi had doubtless been watching them approach from the bridge. David hoped that this expected night had transpired. Perhaps he was dreaming off a night of too much wine. He tried to remember Regi meeting them, tried to recall an evening with his wife, but nothing came to him. Instead he heard the painfully authentic sound of Parisian sirens, close enough to be losing the Doppler waver in their cry. He no longer felt an affinity for the sound, as he had when first arriving in Paris. In the distance, he thought he could see the huge white ferris wheel turning and turning, never moving closer no matter how much he felt the yearning that it roll his way, the giant white wheel, the colored lights, the amusement. The tourist boat rocked as it moored against the
bank, and as it did so, David noticed the Mont Blanc, lying where it had fallen on the deck, slide and roll to the edge. It stopped for a moment, and then the pen and white star-like cap dropped soundlessly into the inky Seine, like something made to sink.

  Chapter 5

  The darkroom in Chase’s apartment held a duotone hush of red and black. The air sweat the scent of vinegar. The microscopic mist drizzled onto Chase’s clothes, stung his eyes and ascended his nostrils with a pungency he’d once perversely adored, like the effect the bouquet of gasoline held over him as a child. But no longer. He checked his watch. The phosphorous glow in the tips of the hands had gone out. An entire afternoon had been spent in his cramped darkroom making prints he’d taken for a client. There was more room in the studio he shared with a few other photographers, but the studio and its darkroom were on the edge of Paris and he didn’t feel like two metro transfers and a bus ride today. And because he didn’t trust the content of his photos to most photo labs, there was no chance of a one-hour wait. Right now, in the dark, he felt he could trade anything for sixty solid minutes of sleep, outside, under the bright, searing sun.

  His first and only meeting with this client had been three weeks ago in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Chase had waited for ten minutes, then noticed a short heavy-set man waving to him from the other side of the pool. He’d walked towards the man, maneuvering around the children pushing and retrieving rented sailboats with long sticks. The man’s paper-white hair granted his lined face the kind of gentle innocence usually associated with grandfathers and gardeners. Call me Ostrich, he’d said, as they shook hands.

  The job entailed tracking and photographing the habits of Ostrich’s son. If Chase hadn’t recognized the man’s face, he’d have thought he’d been ensnared in someone’s delusional life. The birdman detective of Paris. But this man’s face made the front page of newspapers, or had until his recent retirement from politics. There, in the gardens, he told Chase how, with the election coming up, he wanted advance warning of any indiscretion on his son’s part that could bring unwanted publicity to Ostrich or his party.

  As they were parting, the politician reminded Chase to call him Ostrich whenever they spoke over the phone. The gardens seemed a conspicuous place to be worried about telephone etiquette, or to even keep one’s voice down, as Ostrich did. There wasn’t anyone around except strolling lovers or readers planted in green metal chairs. No one, Chase imagined, who could possibly be interested in a right-wing politician or a photographer. Besides, the gardens were Ostrich’s old haunt, with the Senate there in the Palais beside the pool. Perhaps Ostrich really was mad. Maybe that’s why he’d retired from politics. Chase couldn’t say then. Though now, after weeks of shadowing the politician’s son, he knew otherwise.

  The latest turn had come yesterday. Ostrich had called to tell Chase that he wouldn’t be needed that day as his son would be attending the auto show. Chase didn’t correct Ostrich by telling him how, at that moment, he was following Ostrich’s son and there was certainly no car show in the day’s itinerary. The photos he’d captured the rest of that afternoon were the ones he was nearly finished developing—surveillance photos that Ostrich didn’t know existed.

  During the past half hour spent developing these photos, the darkroom had began to swallow Chase. He knew he’d been holed up alone for far too long. For the past hour, the darkroom had begun to buzz with a stowed-away brick silence, so unlike the open field kind of quiet Chase longed for, the light humming of infinity which nothing but wind or the long inflating curse of a plane’s contrail can interrupt. He couldn’t remember his last vacation.

  Chase had only one more photograph to print. He slid yet another strip of 35mm negatives into the matte-black holder. The holder was shaped like a hand mirror and opened on a hinge along the squared-off top. He reinserted the holder below the bulb housing of the enlarger and brought down the black square of bellows that clamped out all light except from the waiting filament above. He did all of this without thinking. Under his feet, he could feel the floorboards dip.

  “Emilia?” he shouted.

  “I’m here,” Emilia answered, her voice muffled as it passed through the door.

  “Don’t come in,” Chase said. “I’m almost done. Fix yourself a drink.”

  “I just finished one.”

  “Fix yourself another.”

  “I will.”

  He hadn’t yet seen Emilia that day. He didn’t know what she wore or what her hair looked like. He couldn’t even conjure up her face. They hadn’t been seeing each other long enough for a wave of anger, rage, or fear to contort her face and leave an indelible impression in his memory. Usually, the only thing he pictured when he considered her face was how she seemed younger than fifty. Now, though, he wondered what emotion played across it. Her voice just now had been flat and unhinting. He wondered because, as of late yesterday afternoon, her step-son had been in the hospital. Chase walked to the sink where the finished photos were floating in a wash of clean water. He picked one up and held it to the red bulb. There, he was. Regi. Not at a car show, but falling from a bridge.

  Working for a man while fucking his wife was not a situation he’d expected to find himself in. What made the situation more complicated was that he hadn’t told Emilia about the surveillance photography he did for her husband. It wasn’t for a lack of opportunity. Emilia had taken to stopping by his apartment several days a week, even after his six-week photography class had ended and he’d released the students with a fragile grasp of composition and depth of field. The students had gone off on their separate photographic holidays, to the hot fields of the south, to the sea, the Alps. One couple was going to Antarctica in a few months and had mostly wanted to know what kind of film to use when photographing snow and ice. But Emilia had stayed in Paris through the summer, taking pictures of Ostrich, her unfaithful husband, while she extracted her revenge by sleeping with a younger man—Chase. She liked to show him photos she’d taken depicting her husband’s infidelities, and he nodded when she told him what her husband was up to even though the prints showed nothing more than her husband on the street or through a window, often not even talking to a woman. If her husband was up to something, he didn’t appear to be engaged in anything that would arouse a suspicion of infidelity. In fact, Chase wondered if she kept from confronting her husband because it would take away the right she felt she had to sleep with someone else. Not that Chase felt uncomfortable pretending to see evidence of her husband’s gallivanting. From what Chase understood, Emilia and her husband had an understanding, one that had her living in Paris and her husband spending at least half the year at his farmhouse and vineyard in the south. In Chase’s mind, if Emilia didn’t demand fidelity in herself, her husband could do whatever he pleased.

  He first met Emilia a year earlier, when she came to him for boudoir photos. Her husband didn’t pay much attention to her anymore, she told him. At the time, he hadn’t known who she was and imagined her husband to be someone far younger than Ostrich. A low-level bank manager with a comb-over, perhaps, or an actuary who had never outgrown his hobby of building model WWII aircraft. Certainly not an influential right-wing politician. Their sex life was pretty nonexistent, Emilia told Chase. Weren’t boudoir photographs supposed to incite a weak sexual appetite? At their first meeting, they discussed the kind of photos Emilia wanted, or what she believed her husband would want—costumes and props and those sort of details. Bosomy milkmaid, it turned out. Chase sawed the end of a broom for the yoke that would eventually grace her shoulders, but it took him a week to find wooden buckets. Of the photos from the shoot, his favorite featured Emilia sitting on a stool wearing only a plain white skirt hitched high on one leg. She’s staring at the camera with a gasp of surprise while she cups a pair of wooden buckets over her breasts like a giant brassiere, spilling liters of milk. He felt proud at having found authentic antique milk buckets. The studio on the outskirts of town still carried the faint scent of soured milk.

&n
bsp; He had not always been a boudoir photographer. He had started off working for a newspaper, then for pornographers. Five years in the porn business had nearly ruined Chase into thinking there was only lust or acted lust between people. Chemicals in the brain, emotions feigned for the camera. But he had left the pornography business for another reason, and this was due to how the business had begun to affect him. His ability to discern between private and public acts had begun slipping. Orifices excited him less, and he’d even taken to thinking of them as orifices. Every woman he met turned into a potential porn model. It seemed shameful when their lips laughed and, for a syllable, formed a red parting O. There were detrimental affects to his sex life, too. He could only make love to a woman in the dark, else he’d go soft. Of course, his reasons for leaving pornography were also economic – he simply couldn’t compete with the dirt-cheap photographers, plus the market was going from high-paying magazines to stingy web sites. He’d found himself more and more on the sets of porn films, relegated to a status hardly better than a gaff, becoming a mere capturer of ancillary print profits for an industry that had gone almost completely to video. Gone were the days of high-class, patiently-lit pornography.

  Boudoir photography, however, had not been as innocent as Chase had expected. If he had been disturbed by the ease with which he could imagine regular women on the street engaged in the acts he’d captured with porn models, he was equally disturbed to find many of these normal, average women in his boudoir studio were up for anything. These girlfriends, housewives, newlyweds and retirees stared into his eyes, through the camera, appealing to the basest of their man’s emotions in a way that was just like a porn shoot. This was his own fault, entirely. Most of his boudoir clients knew he had shot pornography, and considered this his selling point. Chase, though, desperately wanted to regain the innocence of plain, badly lit, unretouched love-making. He wanted to fall in with some shy farmer’s daughter with callused feet and a ruddy face, living deep in the Bulgarian hinterlands. Someone who pretended to love him and who he could pretend to love. Their relationship would be something pleasant, like the pleasure of eating a delicious meal, or taking a swim on a hot day. Emilia, in her milkmaid’s blouse and skirt, seemed to him like an older, belated answer to his desire, but perhaps the closest he was going to get.