The Path Of All That Falls

by Franz Neumann

  “I just realized something,” he said, the room spinning slightly.

  “What?”

  He held the lingerie encircling her large breasts.

  Emilia smiled. “What did you just realize?”

  The room was absolutely quiet as he pulled down the lace and pinched her pencil eraser nipples. “I’m a motherfucker,” he said, staring into her eyes. For the first time, he noticed that she wore contact lenses.

  Her lips were still screwed up on one side in a flirt and now, in a laugh, they rose higher to show off the small worn canine on one side. He took in the sight of her hard nipples, the skin descending over the faintest rolls of her belly to more lace, the tight cords on either side of her inner thigh, the wrinkled bottom of her feet behind her, her toes curled as she balanced on her knees. The only sound was the interior silence, the stowed-away brick silence, and he realized, as she reached with thumb and forefinger to pluck open the top button of his pants, that he really wanted to be with someone else. She unbuttoned his shirt, pulled the T-shirt over his head and there, in the dull white world of cloth and smell of himself, she whispered.

  “Motherfucker. Adulterer. You’re bad.”

  He then took from this enough of an illicit sense to recapture their last time together, when she had been an older woman, and not the Emilia who arranged birthday parties, the woman who poured out her troubles, the woman he could see bathed in red light, now, reaching inside his briefs with experienced fingers.

  In the morning, waking with Emilia’s hair wound around his face, he could not help thinking she smelled of dog shampoo. He changed while Emilia slept, then quickly grabbed the photos he’d developed for Ostrich and slid them all into an envelope. Heading for the door, he paused to leave a note—he had never, ever, left a note in his own apartment. Yet he wrote: merci mille fois, then headed into the street.

  Regi, Emilia’s step-son, had his residence on the top floors of a building on a narrow street in the western end of St. Germain de Prés. His neighborhood was a wedge-shaped island bordered by fast streaming avenues of traffic—a barrier to the casual ambler. Chase loved it. It was a pocket of old Paris spared by Haussmann’s dream of endless boulevards. Narrow wrought iron balconies emerged from the residences with bits of clothing catching the sun. A bookstore with an academic bent lay around the nearest corner and past it, a triangle-shaped garden just large enough to hold a small fountain, a patch of grass, flowers and a bench. Chase walked on the cold, shaded side of the street. The other side baked in the sun and seemed to drip with yellow paint, reflecting the color onto the shadow side where the cafe he was after had its awnings out, awaiting the sun’s visit. Chase knew cafe Le Coin from the many days tailing Regi, many of which had initiated or ended here on the fuel of an espresso and biscotti.

  He scanned the tables of Le Coin and found an older man sitting alone, shades over his eyes, his hands clasped over his coffee, prayer-like. Chase switched the large envelope into his other hand.

  “Have you waited long?” Chase asked.

  “No,” the man said. He spoke softly, making it difficult to hear. Some porous quality in the wind made the city loud today.

  Chase pulled out a chair and sat down.

  “Chase,” he said, holding out his hand. The man did not move. “So. What now?”

  “What do you want?”

  “I was told you wanted some help. That I’m to help you.”

  “I don’t need any help,” the man said.

  Another man took a seat at a nearby table. This second man was in his fifties.

  “Are you Gaudin?” Chase asked the first man whose table he’d joined.

  “No.”

  Chase stood. “I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

  The other man, newly planted at his table, laughed. “Here,” he said, gesturing to a chair. “Should I have put a flower in my lapel?”

  “I don’t look anything like him,” said the first man.

  “No, you don’t,” said the second.

  Embarrassed, Chase sat down at the other table, turning his back to the mistaken contact.

  “Smooth,” Gaudin said, making Chase feel all the more inept.

  Gaudin’s face was boyish, but puffy and furrowed with age. A low voice was roughened by tobacco. He had a youthful shock of hair, though gray everywhere but for a few streaks of brown. Chase observed Gaudin as he took out a cigarillo, pulled both ends through his wet lips, and lit it like a cigar, twirling and whisking the end through his lighter’s flame. He had no lapels for a flower, and although Chase couldn’t see Gaudin’s shoes, he bet they were worn. Gaudin had the appearance of someone who’d once had money but didn’t see any reason to slip from the appearances of relative prosperity. Or, Chase thought, he might be completely mistaken. The day was making him wary of his assumptions.

  Gaudin drew on his cigarillo and held out his hand. Chase shook it. Gaudin did not withdraw the gesture, but kept his hand in the air, even when Chase had withdrawn his.

  “The pictures,” Gaudin said, motioning with his fingers.

  “Oh.” Chase hesitated a moment before handing the photos over. For several weeks, his job had been carried out in private. Only he and the camera had been a witness to Regi’s trysts and tantrums, to the apartments he visited, slept in, the midnight meals he took in the crowded club scene of the Bastille district after an evening in the concert house. Chase felt he was losing something as Gaudin opened the envelope and took his first glimpse of the photographs.

  “Where’s this?” Gaudin asked, pointing to a blurry photograph of Regi. Regi was asleep, the collar of his jacket turned up, his lips parted and numb-looking.

  “On the metro,” Chase said.

  “Very artsy. You were close.”

  “Yes. A Leica’s shutter whispers.”

  “He doesn’t seem the kind of guy to take the metro.”

  “He can be a plebeian when it suits him,” Chase said, then signaled the waiter. “A beer,” he said, though it was still early.

  “Two,” Gaudin added. “So tell me. Why am I here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No. I mean, to look into Regi’s fall, I guess.”

  “Hmm.” Gaudin didn’t say anything for what seemed like a minute as he browsed through the photos. Chase watched a thin trickle of water in the gutter. It pooled in the resistance of summer dust before breaking forward and pooling up again. The water seemed to run uphill. Gaudin tapped his cigarillo free of dead ash.

  “You didn’t know he fell?” Chase asked, finally.

  “Who?”

  “Regi.”

  “Of course.”

  “Onto a bateaux-mouches.”

  “Our man on the metro.” Gaudin asked.

  “Our man on the metro, yes,” Chase said, picking out photos. “And in the park, in this cafe, in a taxi, in a carpet shop.”

  “With his hands in dope, with his dope in friends, with his friends in a club,” Gaudin continued.

  “It’s hard to know.”

  “What about the other photos?”

  “This is all. You mean the negatives?”

  “No, the other ones. From last night. Of Regi falling from a bridge.”

  “I wasn’t there,” Chase said.

  “Of course you were,” Gaudin said. “I’ve been keeping an eye on Regi for at least two weeks. You were there.”

  Chase reached into his jacket and pulled out the final few shots of photos from the roll he’d developed the night before. He handed them over and waited as Gaudin examined these as well.

  “You can’t really see it in the photos, but I swear he was pushed.”

  The water arrived with their two beers.

  “These are terrible,” Gaudin said.

  “He was far away.”

  “They’re grainy and bleached.”

  “It was against the sun.”

  “Okay.” He rapped the stack of photos against the table
to straighten them, then slid them back in the envelope. “Now, first things first.” He raised his glass. “To summer.”

  Chase raised his own glass of beer but didn’t say anything. The air smelled of perfume.

  Chapter 8

  The west was all patina as Gaudin turned onto his street. In his hand he held the photographs he’d received from Chase. Over the course of the day, the envelope had gone from being featherweight to a millstone, the crisp manila edge now ragged and soft from the sweat of pursuit and confusion. Gaudin was still astounded at how the meeting with Chase had gone on to end in gunfire. Not only was he uncertain as to how to act next, he didn’t know whether he wanted a further part in the whole affair. He worked as a security consultant in this pre-retirement decade, a time in which he planned to lay low and invest his savings in a house with a view of the Mediterranean and bikini briefs. The way times were going, the decade was going to be tight.

  Having just come from the police to file a report, Gaudin wanted nothing more than to get upstairs to his apartment, pour himself a drink and take a bath. In his profession, a certain callousness should have formed on his responses to the police’s questions, but he was a little shaken by the one-way fire fight. It had been years since a weapon had been fired at him. After a long hiatus from the work of his younger days, a feeling of unrest was returning, brewed from the knowledge that someone out there wanted to do him harm, hypocritical as that was. It tainted the day, like the emotion from a bad dream refusing to lift at dawn.

  The entrance to his building lay wedged between a small grocery store and a laundromat, in what had been an alley, a century ago. Gaudin sometimes pictured the dank opening running where the stairs now led, the ground slanted to a central groove carrying off waste and rain. Once, after having successfully found his street under full stupor, he’d been unable to locate the stairwell. Since then, he anticipated that the entrance would vanish one day, like its alley predecessor. Even under full sobriety, he’d be unable to find it as it faded away from its current undistinguished presence to invisibility.

  Gaudin let himself in from the street, hit the light switch at the bottom of the stairwell with his fist, and hurried up the stairs to beat the clock, one minute of light before the hallways and stairwells were plunged into darkness. The apartment complex was a fusion of dissimilar buildings. The apartments did not begin until the second floor and by the time one reached the fifth floor, his, the hallway dropped several steps as it merged with the fourth floor hallway of an abutting building. Even with the lights on, the hallways intertwined with a kind of dendriform structure that made it nearly a necessity to meet first-time guests down on the street. Gaudin enjoyed the tangle. Climbing the twists and steps between the entrance and his apartment was like ascending from the chaos of the city without making it easy for the chaos to follow. Though, at times, especially in summer, the climb could be a bit much. All the hallways were windowless and tight, as though the apartments were encroaching on the hallway and shrinking it. The carpeted steps, which he’d yet to hear anyone vacuum, hushed away the time. Sometimes an urge came upon him to draft the dark out of the airless corridors.

  Gaudin reached his door on the fifth floor just as the knob began to sigh with a curious high-pitched overtone of wheeze. He was tired from the walk, the metro having been cordoned off because of a bomb threat. He exhaled purposely to see if there was some tiredness in his nostrils or lungs that had caused the sound, but when the door sighed again, he knew.

  “Of all days,” he muttered, just short of inserting his key. Exhalations of passion were the last things he needed. They stood—or leaned, lay, or kneeled—between himself and his drink and bath. On the other side of the door, perhaps on his couch, or in the sitting room or study, the silent, wealthy, source-of-nearly-all-paychecks employer was taking out a little lust.

  Gaudin pulled up a chair in the dead-end hallway. His neighbor across the hall had set up a small narrow table with a vase and dried flowers that flourished in the pitch-blackness. He heard a click at the foot of the stairwell and then, after the shortest of delays, the light vanished. The passionate grind grew louder, followed by silence, a shimmy, an inadvertent kick. Gaudin recognized the hollow sound as his kitchen cupboards being molested. He made a mental note to eat out for a while.

  Gaudin sat in the dark, not out of some man-to-man understanding, but because Wrest, the man inside his apartment, was lately becoming Gaudin’s only source of income. He’d even loaned Gaudin money that he’d needed to secure a bid for a piece of land down south that the bank just didn’t think his patchy record of work and credit warranted. Too much freelance, too much sway in the income flow, highs followed by lows, lows followed by even thinner margins of subsistence, the occasional spaghetti months. Then, sudden riches. But Wrest, Wrest had steady money. In the past few years, Wrest had not only sold his half of an import/export business, he’d also bought a vineyard and a second home in southern France. There he could retire and turn his attention from his wife to girls at the high end of their teenage years. It was like Gaudin’s own dream of retirement, only sullied and made baroque.

  Gaudin was single. He’d been married long ago, but that hadn’t worked out in the long run, though taken in small portions he’d quite enjoyed the experience. Had he been given a few months free every couple of years, he’d have perhaps been married still, although that decision hadn’t been entirely his. His former wife had found her life woefully unfulfilled and left him for someone else, who she then left a month later. Gaudin had been puzzled. He had resigned himself to an unfulfilled life years earlier. That his wife hadn’t seen the ledger of her own life by then told him she wasn’t as introspective as he’d believed her to be. She should have known her life was unfulfilling years earlier.

  As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, Gaudin noticed how the sighing keyhole shot a gauzy view of his apartment onto the neighbor’s door. From this pinhole projection, Gaudin was able to discern the dark shape of his credenza and the movement of something behind in the space where his kitchen was. The camera obscura image became clearer, almost magical.

  Gaudin stood up and knocked on his door. The image on the neighbor’s door opposite went fuzzy each time his knuckles rapped against the wood. He knocked harder until the sighing stopped. He knocked again and heard commotion and smiled to himself. Light flooded into the hallway, but from behind him, and he turned to see his neighbor’s door opening. The couple there had moved in a year ago. They were Sikhs, or at least the husband was. They didn’t subscribe to any newspapers. From what he could see down the slot of their mailbox on the ground floor, they escaped junk mail as well.

  “Bonsoir,” Gaudin said.

  The woman gave him an unhappy glare, glanced at his shoes, then began closing the door. In the narrowing crack of light, Gaudin could see her husband on the floor, his black beard parted on each side of his chest, his long black hair splayed out without its usual turban, a few gray bands like a clutch of snakes escaped from the shadow of a tamer’s basket. Their son hovered in the air above him, the child’s arms stretched out like wings and his little chest cupped on the soles of the man’s feet as the child made airplane noises. The crack of light disappeared, squeezing out a rich wisp of spice.

  Then his own door opened. It wasn’t Wrest, sweaty and pulling up his pants, as Gaudin had imagined. That image he caught in the background. Instead, he faced a girl. She had brown hair with a single red stripe in it and a nose ring that gave the appearance of one of her many freckles having come to a Midas fruition. Her face and cheeks were somewhere between swollen and a pout, still flushed and radiating with the pant of sex. Gaudin didn’t recognize her.

  “Yes?”

  “Wrest,” he called, ignoring her. “Wrest! Why don’t you use a hotel room. Christ, you could buy a hotel! Wrest!”

  “Relax. He’s coming,” the girl said.

  Gaudin pushed open the door and stepped inside.

  “Hey!” the girl said. />
  Wrest was leaned against the kitchen counter, notching his belt. When he moved away from the counter his legs shook like a newborn fowl.

  “It’s all right,” Wrest said. “It’s his place.”

  “Yeah,” Gaudin said, giving the girl a righteous look. He moved to the credenza, cleared aside a nest of strewn newspapers, and set down his keys, wallet and the envelope of photos from Chase.

  “Well,” the girl said, smirking. “You’re a real shit, then. Letting out your pad so he can fuck a girl my age.”

  Wrest coughed and swept up his jacket. “Not to change the subject, but did you get the photos?”

  Gaudin pointed to the envelope.

  “And the negatives.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Wrest said.

  “Maybe you can take my pictures sometime,” the girl said.

  “Get out, already,” Gaudin said.

  Wrest held the girl’s shoulders. “Come on. Let’s leave him alone. He doesn’t like pleasure.” He turned to Gaudin. “She’s got a friend.”

  “You’re going to get a hernia, or catch something,” Gaudin said.

  “Hey!” the girl said.

  “I mean it,” Gaudin said, closing the door behind them and heading for the liquor cabinet. He heard laughter as they walked toward the stairs, followed by some dull thumping and the sharper cut of cursing. Gaudin laughed. He opened the door, found the hallway switch and flooded the stairwell. “Here’s some light,” he said, then closed the door again.

  Gaudin set about opening all the windows and turning on all his lights. He didn’t see what young women—like this one walking with Wrest below on the sidewalk—saw in older men. He couldn’t discount some form of physical myopia. Gaudin turned on the sconces between the three street-facing windows that gave a view over the rooftops to where the land rose again out of the depression the city sat in. He felt around for a cigarillo and lit it, placing it in a ashtray just to de-perfume the air of the smell of sex. Drink in hand, Gaudin turned on the lights that spotted a couple of Klee prints that he told everyone were reproductions, then moved toward his study with its view out toward the eastern sky, already stained with night.