The Path Of All That Falls

by Franz Neumann

  “I told Jade we’d get something to eat in an hour or so,” Chase said, thinking how that time would allow him to nap, too. Journeys of any kind made him tired, sudden-like, and he now felt the desperate need to doze. He shut the door between the rooms, felt the pull of his own bed and fell into it, easily. The fatigue of his muscles pushed the unfocused rambling of his thoughts into one tight hard slumber.

  Every few years, he’d find himself in a dream in which he’d experience an emotion previously foreign to him. As though bottled in his head lay the chemistry behind all possible emotions. These rare dreams concocted emotions into being before any physical antecedents could give them cause to exist. In Lyon, on a holiday as a child, he dreamt he was forty. He had felt older than his age, since. In Paris once, he dreamed he was a woman about to be married, later, that he was a dog, complete with a sense of how walking on four legs felt, a sensation that stayed with him for half a week. Now, in Orange, he dreamed he was a father. The mother he could not identify clearly, though she felt familiar. But what he felt, so unexpectedly, was the sensation of having a son, a family, of how it felt to hold a baby which was his, which gazed into his eyes and made him feel a wonderful mix of pride, protection and utter joy. And when he woke the feeling stayed with him, as though he had just turned away for a moment from that wife and son, as though they were as real to him as Gaudin in the next room, or the tight weave of the bed cover’s blue and yellow threads.

  Chase stood and opened the door to rouse Gaudin, but found the bed empty, and on it a note: Too hungry. Left. Meet us at the ice cafe by the Théatre Antique after dinner.—G.

  Chase felt strange, alone. He could not tell the day or hour, the usual disconcerting effect of napping during the day. The hallway was just as hot as before. He knocked on Jade’s door. It opened just as he turned away to descend the stairs.

  “Oh, you haven’t left,” he said.

  “For dinner?” She checked her watch. “Not quite an hour.”

  “I thought you went with Gaudin.”

  “Bianca did. I wasn’t in the mood for Indian food tonight.”

  “What do you feel like?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll find a place, won’t we?”

  “Definitely,” Chase said.

  He waited on the landing for her to get ready. He watched her so closely as she descended the stairs that he nearly tripped on his neglected feet, twice.

  Outside, the rain had let up. The buildings loomed up in rejuvenated reds, browns and blues that had begun to dry and fade in the fresh air. Jade wasn’t dressed in the blouse and jeans she had worn earlier. Instead, Chase noticed she had changed into a skirt and a thin sweater. The way she walked the pedestrian alley charmed him, her gait almost weightless, like her shoes were soled with springs. He couldn’t help but comment as they took a narrow alley into the main square. “You drag yours,” she answered. Though he thought she was kidding, he lifted his feet so as not to make himself appear to drag them, yet not so high that she would think he had taken heed of her observation. What did it mean when a woman made you feel awkward?

  They paused in the square. Balconies woven from iron and flowers jutted from walls the color of unripe watermelon. A banner announced a dance in the square the following night. A fat man in a T-shirt and a feathered hat sat in the doorway of a tobacconist’s shop reading the paper. Chase slipped his camera off his shoulder, backed up a few paces and took a picture. He had Jade stand beside the local.

  “Like this?” Jade asked.

  “Perfect.”

  The man looked her up and down before turning the page, then cocked his head slightly as she walked back to Chase. It was then that he took a photo. Chase smiled to himself. Here he was, finally out of Paris, just when he had resigned himself to never leaving. The air smelled of brass, espressos, beer foam, and freedom. They paused at several menus posted outside the cafes, but the light fare on the tables didn’t appeal to Chase, and Jade, too, admitted she was up for something more substantial. He also didn’t care to dine in the same square where he and Gaudin had lost Regi just a couple hours earlier. There was something weak to visiting the site of a small failure, like going out of one’s way to walk past the apartment of a former lover in the hope of a chance-like encounter. He took a picture of the square to remember it, though.

  “I recall a good restaurant near here,” Chase said, leading them out of the square and down another alley. He felt a curious sensation being so far from Paris and his circle of friends after having been there so long. His dream of being a father also made him feel so much more removed than just a day’s travel from Paris, as though he had recalled a life forgotten. The mother in the dream, the child, they filled him with an elation he’d never felt. Everything seemed so different, even the way his feet touched the cobblestones.

  Simple Romanesque residences lined the alley. Were it not for the wisps of TV chatter floating down from the open windows, they could have been in another era. The sound of the evening news mixed with the drip of water running into a stone basin. A couple centuries’ patina stained the stone and the wall behind the pipe green, like moss. He stopped to take a picture, but not for the colors of the rust and patina. A Great Dane stood with its front paws on the edges of the basin, its muzzle around the faucet, its tongue cooling in the water. The idea of reincarnation crept into Chase’s brain. For a moment it seemed a real possibility, the dog drinking so human-like, a prisoner within a canine form. The thirst of dogs seemed no different to him than human thirsts. The shutter of his camera scissored at a sixtieth of a second. The light was fading.

  Chase had photographed hundreds of dogs over the years, intending to one day assemble them together in a book. The Great Dane followed them down the alley to an empty dog park. In the center sat a tipped Roman column, rainwater trapped in the flutes. There was also a fragment of a cornice, and everywhere a scattering of stone blocks. Jade pet the dog, then sent it on its way with a slap to its flank. Chase was endeared to women who liked dogs. He also liked Jade because she was American and he’d never had a relationship with an American woman. He had only known French and Spanish women. A Portuguese woman, too. Not that he was having a relationship, now. But he wanted one, a real relationship. He had tricked himself into believing that was what he had with Emilia, but it made him feel so duped to consider her now. With Jade, it was only by keeping his hands in his pockets that he managed not to reach for her hand.

  He could scarcely understand his overwhelming urge to be with Jade, and with a constancy he’d rarely felt around a woman. He hadn’t even held her. He could not recall ever spending more than the duration of two full days in the company of a woman. Nor, even at the outset, knowing any women with whom he’d want to. Even two days in the company of friends could sometimes be too long; he’d wander off for a few hours to take pictures, or develop them. With the same rush of emotion from his dream of fatherhood, he felt a sudden rush now in his feelings toward Jade, like a wind he could sense but whose source he did not know, nor when it would hush into a breeze, a faint stirring, stillness.

  They stepped from the alley onto the same street the taxi driver had driven them earlier in the day, the street in front of the Théatre Antique. From the mouth of the alley they could see the massive wall of the amphitheater where the major music festival performances were held. They crossed the street. Jade was his height, which is to say short, but had a thinness about her that made him feel stocky. He slowed in the middle of the street to look at her. Her legs shone brightly when she stepped through a wink of fading sunlight.

  They dined at Le Grotto, a restaurant built in a cave that ran deep enough into St. Eutrope hill to hold a dozen tables. The restaurant was less genuine than he remembered, and he felt a little embarrassed by the light-bulbed torches hanging on the walls, and by the cave drawings which tried, but failed, to appear as genuine Lascaux articles. On one side of the cave ran a bar lined with imposing wine bottles, each bottle larger than the other. Throughout
dinner, Chase spent most of the time listening to Jade. She talked about herself, about living in California, about how she hated driving in L.A. because parking was hell. She pulled silver-gray strips of sardine from her salad and placed them on her napkin. Her tongue, oiled by a pizza, rolled on and on, wonderfully. It didn’t bear that mixture of exhaustion and laziness that came to mind when he thought of American English. He didn’t even notice he had smothered his pasta in spiced oil until his mouth burned from it, his nerves flickering on the threshold of pain.

  When they left the restaurant, the western sky was darkly iridescent, like the wings of a beetle. Barricades cordoned off the street in front of the Roman amphitheater to everyone but a traffic jam of waiters setting up tables for the after-opera crowd. Chase felt excluded from an event which everyone else in town seemed to be attending.

  “Listen,” Jade said.

  The murmur of a crowd came over the high red-brown wall. A few stragglers still entered the theater’s gate for the evening’s performance.

  “Chase!”

  He turned and spotted Gaudin and Bianca at the ice cafe down the street.

  “Look who’s finally here,” Gaudin said to them as they neared.

  “Is it good?” Chase asked.

  Bianca looked at her serving of ice cream and shrugged.

  “It wasn’t simple getting her to have a dessert,” Gaudin said, then popped the end of a cone into his mouth and wiped his fingers on a napkin.

  “I was full.”

  “She eats like a bird.”

  Chase had noticed that Bianca avoided dessert in the few meals he’d shared with her. He had wondered if this was related to her husband’s death. If the pleasure of eating some after-dinner sweetness violated the solemnity of being a widow.

  “What flavor did you get?” Jade asked.

  “Pistachio,” Bianca said.

  Chase could hear the crowd talking loudly over the amphitheater’s walls.

  “I’m going to have a coffee,” Jade said. “Anybody?”

  “Me. Thank you,” Chase said, taking a seat and watching Bianca pick at her green dessert.

  He told Bianca the story of one of Luc’s patients, a man who could only taste green food. Medical doctors had ruled out a problem with his tongue, leaving neurological or psychological reasons, or some combination of the two. Luc had spent a day with the man, watching him shop for groceries. The man never ate out because so little on the plate appealed to him. He bought and ate broccoli, lettuce, cucumber, split-pea soup, leek, spinach. One day, on a whim, his wife added green food coloring to a crepe batter and, miraculously, the man was able to enjoy this favorite food. More remarkably, he could even taste the melted chocolate spread concealed within the wrap of green crepe. But as soon as he visualized chocolate—visualized food that wasn’t green—the taste left him. Sometimes he’d only taste this concealed food for a few seconds. Sweetness known only until the sweetness is recognized.

  The remains of Bianca’s dessert was melting quickly. He knew she tasted it without wanting to. California pistachio. The green nut of sorrow.

  The looming wall of the amphitheater gave off the sound of singing. Jade turned one ear to the wall, her face bright with concentration.

  “What opera is that?”

  Chase listened. “I can’t be sure,” he said.

  The waiter brought out the coffee, with a side of brown rock sugar. Chase felt the crystals with his fingers.

  “I’ll have it, if you don’t want it,” Jade said.

  He handed her his sugared stick and watched her stir until the spear came out clean, all geometry gone.

  Gaudin rose from his chair.

  “Where now?” Chase asked.

  “We managed to get two tickets to the opera,” Gaudin said. “I couldn’t get any more.”

  “No, that’s fine.”

  “Maybe you and Jade would like to go, instead,” Gaudin said, looking at Bianca.

  In an instant, Chase knew his chances at spending the rest of the evening with Jade were now shot. Instead, in another evening of inaction, Gaudin would talk about the case while Chase thought of Jade and Bianca at the performance.

  “No,” Jade said. “You go. I’m fine listening to it from here.”

  “It’s okay?” Gaudin asked.

  Jade nodded.

  “Bianca?”

  Bianca slid her dessert to Jade. “Finish it, would you? It’s actually delicious.”

  Chase moved his chair closer to Jade as Bianca and Gaudin began walking away. He felt elated that he’d spend the evening with Jade after all, a kind of happiness that made him feel closer to twenty than thirty.

  “Oh,” Gaudin said, turning. “I almost forgot. What we’ve been waiting for has arrived. I’ll show you at the hotel. Bonsoir!” They were already at the gate now. Gaudin pulled tickets from his wallet and gave them to an attendant.

  “Bonsoir,” Jade shouted, watching them disappear into the theater. “What does he mean?” she asked.

  Chase shrugged, though he was curious. It seemed a wonder to him that Gaudin had found anything at all.

  “Perhaps Gaudin has traced the motorcycle,” he said.

  Jade crossed her legs, the shin of her right leg reflective along the bone. His eyes dozed upon the widening softness that rose to the hem of her skirt.

  “Shall we go?” he asked.

  They walked around the base of the St. Eutrope hill. A pizza delivery scooter passed them with the high two-stroke whine of a battered Vespa. He felt the driver’s elbow brush his sleeve.

  “Careful,” Jade said.

  The line found on David’s body dropped into his head. What kept him good was the fear of facing death during a moment of guilt. He had memorized it. He always felt unsure of his English, but he could say this phrase perfectly, now. He could say it without thinking, though afterward the thinking would come. This is what he thought: there was guilt of the present and guilt of the past. Both existed only when a deed or lack of action lay bare against the judgment of some kind of code. He had guilts of the past—the avenue his profession had taken him—but it wasn’t until now, in the company of Jade, that he felt regret.

  “Do a lot of people jump off Paris bridges?” Jade asked.

  “You mean suicide?” Chase asked.

  “No. Not high enough, usually,” Gaudin said. “They prefer the Eiffel, if they’re the type who prefer falling.”

  “So this is the first time you’ve tried to solve something like this.”

  “I don’t solve anything. I’ve never tried to figure out crimes or, what is the word?”

  “Happenstance?”

  “Yes,” he said, not completely knowing the meaning of the word, but trusting her.

  “Me, either,” Jade said. “I was hoping it was all an accident. I thought we’d visit the bridge, maybe some places Bianca had been with David. I didn’t know Bianca would be this absorbed with wanting to know. Every night she reads the things David wrote. I even know she’s jotting down everything she can remember about him, anything that will help, she says. But I think she’s afraid of forgetting. Forgetting even the tiniest thing about Dave.”

  “Dave?”

  “That’s what I called him. He looked more like a Dave than a David.”

  “What was he like?”

  “He was home a lot between teaching, so I’d see him next door, hanging around the house, playing the piano.”

  The tip of Chase’s tongue was numbed by the hot coffee. “Was he good?”

  “Maybe. He sounded good, but he only played the same dozen pieces. He’d lie up on this roof deck they have, wearing the widest hat you ever saw, drinking iced tea and typing on an old manual typewriter.”

  “Writing books.”

  “I suppose. Every couple minutes or so he’d have to reach into the typewriter and unstick two of the hammers. He typed too quickly for the machine. And he liked to look at me.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’d be sunning on my
deck and he’d be staring at me. Well, I didn’t see him staring, but I knew.”

  “You could feel his eyes, you mean?”

  “No. His typewriter would be quiet.”

  “Maybe he was thinking.”

  “Maybe.”

  A bottle smashed far down the street behind them. Dogs barked. Chase wanted to take Jade someplace romantic. They continued walking along the base of the hill until he found the steps he was after, half-hidden between a pizzeria and a private home.

  “There’s more than one way to see an opera,” he said. “Follow me.”

  Soon, they were above the town on a path of fit stone which, for all Chase knew, might have been the same one trod on by Roman leather. He told Jade this and she actually stopped a moment, bent down, and touched the stones. They were above the rooftops and could see the ice cafe and the seats in which they’d been sitting. A boy and a girl had pulled the chairs close together and were locked in a kiss. The music of Don Giovanni wafted up from the base of St. Eutrope as they continued up the path. They stopped to catch their breath. Already, the streets and alleys seemed to disappear in the rectangles of roofs. To the right they could now see the amphitheater’s massive stage wall, this time from the audience’s perspective. The stone seats rose along the hill’s slope, filled with the glistening of eyes, jewelry and glasses of wine. The set was spare, black, the singers tiny upon the stage. A remnant statue of Caesar in a niche high on the stage wall was a giant compared to the singers, but tiny against the enormous wall.

  They’d climbed high enough now that Chase could see the lights marking the edge of the town, there where the fields of sunflowers began, though the fields appeared as dark plains in the fading light. Though it was dark, Chase could see a ruddiness in Jade’s cheeks from the climb.

  “How old are you, Jade?” he asked.

  “Twenty-nine,” she said. “Really twenty-nine, not twenty-nine as in thirty-five. Why?”