“I don’t know. You could make a case that he did and that he’s so racked by guilt he’s taken on the guy, kept him alive this way. Though I don’t see what he has against Regi.”
“That was your evaluation?”
“No. I don’t make people guilty or innocent. I said he has a personality disorder, probably brought on by alcohol, stress, familial predisposition. The usual suspects.”
“And between you and me? What do you think?”
Luc paused at the corner. “The wine. Stress.”
“What about the wine?”
“He’s an alcoholic with a bar. And he owes a number of creditors.”
There was a stillness to the air, as though the last fading light had taken with it all noise.
“Hear that?” Luc said.
“What?”
“The silence.”
“What about it?”
“It’s voluptuous.”
“So?”
Luc smiled and headed down an alley. “That’s my new favorite word. I’ll send you a copy of the journal entries if I get anything interesting. I’m late for dinner.”
“I’ll give her two months, tops,” Chase called back. He was answered by the sound of a cow.
He turned and headed back into the silence. He had never believed in ghosts.
By the time Chase entered his apartment building, he was angry. While feeling for his keys, he’d discovered that his wallet was missing from his pocket, and instantly remembered bumping into someone on his walk home. At the time, he’d believed it was his own inebriation that had make him stumble into a stranger’s path, not the classic dance of a pickpocket. As he climbed the stairs, he was angry for letting his guard down. His inability to spot a mere pickpocket made him feel less at ease about entering much more dangerous territory. He would have to sharpen his senses.
His apartment leaked with the odor of something not meant to burn. It was this odor, more than the sight of flames in his small fireplace, that struck him with a sinister incongruity. Emilia squatted like a far-Easterner beside the fireplace, throwing photographic prints and film into the chemically-colored flames.
“What are you doing?” he asked, looking into Emilia’s face.
The fingers of her left hand threw a black tangle of negatives into the fire while her right hand touched the floor to steady herself. He could see the sprocketed edges of film melting in the heat of the fire. About her on the floor lay fifty or so empty plastic sheets in which the negatives had been stored. She seemed to pause for words, but instead of saying anything, she reached for more plastic sheets and threw them, complete, into the fire. The plastic blistered in a rapid burn, releasing the negatives that then curled up as though longing for the safety of film canisters and darkness. The negatives were his.
A metallic snippet of Mozart played from inside Emilia’s purse. She plucked out a cellular phone and silenced the musical ring by answering.
“Yes,” Emilia said to the phone. “Yes. Yes. I know. A little late. He’s standing right here.”
Chase stared at her, as though she had unclad the familiarity with which he had come to know her and, in the place of that comfortable and tiring skin, he was faced with someone foreign and unpredictable. He noticed her spider veins for the first time.
Emilia placed the phone back within her purse and stood, steadying herself with a hand on the mantelpiece. Chase picked up one of the remaining sheets of negatives and walked to the window. He felt so angry that he was calm, and this scared him. Holding the negatives to a lamp, he examined what remained. They were negatives he’d never sold to a magazine because the model’s face, despite all the influence of her body, had no allure to it. A face so flat, expressionless, so neutral that just looking at it long enough would make what it bore change from aloofness to disinterest, from discomfort to distaste. Chase held up another sheet. These were landscapes he’d taken long ago on a trip to Portugal. He couldn’t bear to think of what was lost. He stared at Emilia for a moment, feeling a kind of betrayal he’d never felt before. He held up another sheet of negatives and began to discern what was missing. His photos of Regi.
Emilia moved beside him. She put her hand around his wrist and pulled it toward the dying flames of the fire. “Please,” she said. “For me. Burn all these women.”
“You’re insane,” he said, throwing off her hand. He gripped the back of her hair and pushed her face toward the negatives he held in his hand. “Look. I know what you’ve burned. I’m no idiot.”
Chase seemed to smell her for the first time, her skin free of fragrance, revealing a scent that was foreign to him and older. Even her clothes seemed to say she had come to his apartment with no intention of meeting him. They were drab and spoke of camouflage. She tried to touch him lightly on the chest, but he grabbed her arms and marched her toward the door.
“You’re hurting me,” she said.
“I know. Get out.”
“When can we talk?”
“We can’t,” he said. He felt more strength now, more need to shove her across the hall and into the opposite wall. She had destroyed countless days of work, whole weeks now gone up in smoke. The images he could have used as possible protection. He pushed her out into the hallway.
“Why can’t we talk?”
She was too calm, oblivious even to the fact that she no longer stood in his apartment. It infuriated him, how he seemed unable to inflict pain. This whole incident meant he was nothing to her all along. And then he stopped. Wrest had been closer to him than he’d ever imagined. Emilia hadn’t taken his photography class on a whim or out of interest. Perhaps her coming to him for the boudoir photos had been anything but arbitrary. While he had been photographing and spying on Regi, she had been there, nights, spying on him. He felt so stupid for having mistaken her affectations for affections.
“Leave,” she said, as though he were the one standing out in the hallway. “Get out quickly.” She started toward the elevator and gave him a look that confused him with its honesty. He closed his door in the middle of her glance and felt heartened, a bit, that she cared enough to warn him, to stop her acting and warn him of Wrest. He was glad he hadn’t hit her, hadn’t done the bruising things that had jumped into his mind. But she could no longer be an individual to him. She was part of Wrest.
He opened all his windows to let out the acrid stench of the yet incalculable loss of negatives and prints, and the loss of a woman who—though he’d almost dismissed all affections for her—was now out of his life for good. Were he and Gaudin, like Bombay had proposed, merely hired to expose loose threads that could be stitched back to perfect sutures? Why had Emilia destroyed the photos he’d taken? Wrest had only to ask him for the negatives. And had, he remembered. Chase sobered completely when he realized that Wrest knew he could no longer be trusted. He heard his name being called, peered out his window, and saw Emilia in the darkness of the street.
“My purse,” she shouted.
He turned and saw it on the floor and went to it, all the while hearing Emilia buzz his door, waiting to be let in. The purse was soft. He opened it and saw the phone, some makeup, her keys. He found the spare to his apartment and unthreaded it from the others. He rummaged deeper and held an empty vial. He didn’t want to open it and find out that it was perhaps not perfume. He took her purse and tossed it out the window, watching it fall to the ground. Emilia emerged from beneath the alcove of the building and picked her purse up from the sidewalk. It was too dark to read her face. Then he heard Mozart again, the ringing of her phone. Some things take falls better than others, he thought to himself. She took out the phone and walked down the street. “Hello?” she said. “Hello?” She said it over and over as the snippet of Mozart continued to play. Chase set a table fan in the window sill to blow out the smell of the melted negatives. Despite the blade’s mincing, the fan failed to obscure the melody that reached his ears. Then the melody slowed, and died, and all he could hear was Emilia’s faint cursing as she walked a
way.
He examined the remaining negatives. Why had Emilia acted so blatantly, when Chase, until seeing her tonight, had harbored no suspicions of her sinister infidelity? Perhaps Wrest had overestimated him, Chase thought, feeling instantly belittled. He sifted through the sheets on the floor and found only two that contained negatives of Regi. But there was nothing in these negatives that could prove Regi’s actions, done on his own or his father’s behalf. These were images where the most sinister handshake could be misinterpreted as empty. Chase knew the photos wouldn’t have ever been enough to protect himself. A bottle of that wine was the only thing.
It was past nine in the evening now and he gauged that he had enough time for a quick shower before picking Jade up at her hotel. Just that morning he had thought his day would pass peacefully enough, in anticipation of being with her, but now his responsibilities felt weighty, and to lapse at them bore consequences. He had made the blunder of following his curiosity and he had yet to tell if that would prove injurious.
He ran the water in the shower, unbuttoned his shirt and tossed it on the floor. A paper cocktail umbrella rolled out. He reached down and opened it and let it fall to the ground like a parachute. Chase unbuttoned his pants, still wet along the bottom from the rain. He pulled out the belt, removed the change and keys from his pocket and reached to the back to take out his wallet, remembering again that it had been stolen. Later, in the middle of his shower, when the water momentarily fell cold under the hot spray, he realized he had no money or cards to pay for dinner. No identification. He remembered the couple thousand he kept in the darkroom, behind the clock, and relaxed. Boudoir money, tax-free. And then, when the water again flashed to cold and stayed there, he realized that were he to be found dead, no one would even know his name.
Chapter 16
Bianca lay on her hotel bed unable to sleep. It was two-thirty in the morning and Jade was still out with Chase. Bianca told herself it could be after breakfast before Jade’s return. But this added no weight to her eyelids, nor helped smother the thoughts that fueled her insomnia.
This waiting, even worrying, was a cousin of one of marriage’s emotions. Whenever David had been out late, even when he’d phoned, she’d been unable to sleep until he came home. At first she’d talk to him when he came in and he’d say how sorry he was for having kept her up. But after a year or two, he seemed a little annoyed at her alertness at such late hours. She had begun to feign sleep, eyes closed, ears listening to the sound of the garage door, the shuffle of his feet—he always removed his shoes—his keys clattering on the kitchen counter, sometimes even the faint slump of his wallet. Then she’d hear the bathroom door closing, the pipes squealing ever so slightly, the silence hissing with the abrasion of a toothbrush. She liked to hear him urinate, the forcefulness and duration, the occasional sigh which, if she was in a sulky mood, told her he was at least glad to be home, doing this. She even missed the small irritations now, like how he’d turn off the bathroom light a fraction of a second after opening the door, momentarily blinding her with brightness, though she knew he was trying not to, that he was trying to keep her sleeping, as he must have believed she was.
In her Paris hotel room, Bianca lay in bed with the lights on. That childish fear of the dark, which she thought she’d outgrown forever, had reemerged. She was thankful for the sound of singing. Members of a choir were staying in the room next door and had been having a party for hours, the bass and altos carrying steadily through the walls, a soprano half-heartedly reaching for a high note the way they were probably reaching for drinks. The angels’ night off. The hotel had been full of French boy scouts the night before. She didn’t know what the scouts were doing in Paris. The city didn’t seem especially safe for orienteering, though there were certainly alleyways enough to compete with the most confusing of natural landscapes. She’d observed the scouts doing nothing but bound up and down the halls, their voices carrying the baggage of shouts which, when they reached her ears, had no weight left to them other than intonation.
Bianca hadn’t left the hotel room since returning from having coffee and dessert with Gaudin. He had escorted her to the elevator in the cramped lobby of the Hotel Pasadena. She had eaten too much and her stomach hurt with a mild pain that helped distract her from the other pains in her body: the headache, the feet sore from walking, and the grief that could still make her throat raw. As the elevator doors closed, Gaudin had said something to her that she didn’t catch. She waited a minute on her floor for him to come up. When he didn’t, she took the elevator down again but found the lobby empty. The night watchman was watching porn on the lobby TV. He switched channels, the elevator doors closing on the violence of snow in front of her. How wonderful life could be if it were nothing but sex and white noise, she’d thought.
As she waited for Jade to return to the hotel, Bianca tried to stumble upon the possible reason anyone would have wished David harm, if indeed there was nothing accidental about his death. His manuscript was scattered about her on the bed. David’s writing seemed harmless enough. If there were any persons who bore animosity toward him, they would have to be the academician who believed his own ideas stolen, or a grammarian enraged by her husband’s taste for sentences over-seasoned with punctuation. David had never been a political man. He took sides to issues because of his interest in the climate of aggression and action in the discussion itself, not because he felt one way or another. He enjoyed playing devil’s advocate.
She couldn’t fathom, nor find, any indication that David had written something damaging about a right-wing political faction, whether in the U.S. or here in France. Without a motive, however, his death entered the uncomfortable realm of the accidental. Her husband had told her of translators misreading, altering, or weakening a work, but a translator who literally crushed a writer was too much. She couldn’t believe the world was crapped up with physical puns to this degree. Nor could she accept that the overwhelming sinister mood that had draped itself over her was merely the weave of her imagination, or the trappings of grief. And so she continued to read David’s notes, searching for clues.
In a very real sense, David had vanished from the world and from her. It was, of course, one of the most elemental of acts—the dying thing—but never before had Bianca realized the sense of irrecoverability that accompanied it. How David could be someone she could touch, and then not—ever again. Bianca reached to the nightstand and picked up the line Gaudin had given her, the phrase on a napkin. What did these fifteen words mean? These seventeen syllables that brought up a spring of untested water. Not counting the message he’d left on the machine, he’d last spoken to her on the morning of the accident. He’d sung good-bye from the shower—he’d taken to making up opera—as she left their rented apartment to spend a day shopping. She had bought a red hat but misplaced it somewhere along the course of the day. At the morgue, on a taxi, down on the quay.
Instead of simply vanishing, he had left this note. He had written:
What kept him good was
the fear of facing death
during a moment of guilt.
Did this sentence mean he was a good man to the end? She knew his infidelities, both of heart and mind, but were there other things that had vanished with him, leaving, now, nothing but the gleaning of suspicions from what had actually been a good life? What guilts did he have, or, as the note defined, what guilt did he have or not have at the moment of his death? And what, taken together, did the line insinuate? That he tried to keep himself good because of the possibility of dying in an unrepentant, or not yet repented, state? Did it mean he believed in some divine judgment and punishment? Or, rather, that he feared being found dead in some guilt that would tarnish the memory she had of him? Too many questions, too late in the night. One single line was making David’s passing a double loss—not only of his body, but of her sense of who he was. Bianca thought then that one conception of sorrow was never being able to reconcile who we thought a person was with who they really
, and unanswerably, were.
Bianca continued browsing through her husband’s writing, hoping to glimpse his final line in the context of a paragraph. She read but without taking in the meaning of the words. Instead, she gazed at the shape of his hand, even turning the pages upside down to make the words illegible to her, like an Arabic script. The flow of lines and letters were familiar, making her feel as though David were in the other room and she was looking at what he’d written as she waited for him to come to bed. And once in bed, they would talk about a friend or the amount of broken glass in the beach’s sand, or about what color to paint a room of their house. And she would put his pages on the nightstand and reach to extinguish the light. She wished for such a moment more than anything. Instead, she came upon a few lines David had quoted from one of Chopin’s letters.
But inside something gnaws at me; some presentiment, anxiety, dreams—or sleeplessness, melancholy, indifference, desire for life, and the next instant, desire for death: some kind of sweet peace, some kind of numbness, absentmindedness; and sometimes definite memories worry me. My mind is sour, bitter, salt.
She reminded herself that though these words were written in his hand, they were not his, though, come to think of it, she could easily take them to be her own. She thought of all the years that had shaped David’s handwriting, the first awkward years of oversized pencils, the careful diligence in writing letter after letter, whole lines of vowels—she, too, remembered. Flimsy gray paper filled with exercises in copying down unintelligible utterances; but which were now like the truest words she could send out from the constricted alley of her heart. Aaaaa, eeeee, iiiii, ooooo, uuuuu. The art of writing seemed such hard work, especially considering it could never be deeded nor passed down. It was a beautiful thing he had taken with him. It was a beautiful thing made worthless.
She climbed out of bed, went to her purse and pulled out the photos developed from David’s films. The floor was cold and the coldness did not leave her feet even when she returned to the warmth of the bed. She’d flipped through the photos often: during breakfasts, in a slow elevator or a busy street, on the toilet or, like now, lying in bed. Though David had taken many photos, he was only in a few. It was this small latter pool she carried with her. She also carried her favorite photograph of David pressed within her wallet, taken on a vacation in Mexico the previous year. David was dressed in a red short-sleeve shirt and clashing Bermuda shorts. He was barefoot, his face as tan as his legs, his hair uncombed after a swim in the sea, and wild from the wind. It was wavy and seemed almost blonde in the sun. He was wearing the accidental smile he got whenever squinting. Behind him, a trinket salesman walked by, leading his horse.
The Path Of All That Falls Page 21
