by Ted Mooney
While she and Odile retired aft to the galley, Max stowed his camera in his hosts’ cabin, thinking he could always retrieve it later, at a more advanced stage of the festivities. Then he returned to the main compartment, helped himself to a beer, and began prowling the party.
He spoke for awhile with Katje, the photographer. She had come to Paris to shoot a series of images documenting life on the Seine, but, present company excepted, her intended subjects had refused to cooperate. They viewed her as an interloper and nuisance, someone to be chased away with a marlinespike if necessary. Puzzled by this lack of gezelligheid, Katje quietly abandoned the project. Now she was shooting large-format portraits of transvestite hookers in the Bois de Boulogne, and life had regained its savor.
“To be what one is not,” she told Max. “We all have this dream.”
“When I was growing up,” he replied, “the big dream was to become yourself. You had to work at it.”
“Yes, the age of psychology.” She smiled politely. “That must have been interesting.”
“Not the way you might think. Anyway, it’s all over now.”
He excused himself. A passing bateau mouche threw spikes of light and amplified accordion music in through the open portholes. When the larger boat’s wake reached the Nachtvlinder, she rolled hard, causing several guests to stagger a step, spill their soup, laugh. Meanwhile, running beneath everything—the conversation, the music, the bilge pumps’ electric drone—the Seine could be heard in its many mutterings, a syntax of gurgles and splashes that lapped at the boat, tirelessly wheedling a path in through the fittings, offering at every moment to bear the vessel northwestward through Normandy and out to sea.
Max found Groot, as he’d known he would, alone in the engine room. The parts of one of the diesels lay spread out on tarps, and he was examining them by the light of a single safety-caged bulb that swung back and forth overhead, casting spiderweb shadows. In his straight blond hair was a stroke of engine grease.
“Couldn’t tear yourself away, Captain?”
Groot stood solemnly, but as they shook hands he broke into a shy grin. “I had an idea about the exhaust manifold, a kind of workaround, so I thought I’d have a look. I’m not really hiding.”
Fair-skinned and finely made, the Dutchman would have seemed delicate were it not for the breadth of his shoulders and his startlingly round face. The latter gave him an air of unflappability, which was well deserved, and of innocence, less so. Lately Max had been thinking of including him in some of the Rachel footage. Visually, they made a striking couple.
“So it’s coming along?” asked Max, surveying the ranks of engine parts.
“I make progress, but slowly. These diesels are quite old. Everyone around here who ever worked on one is dead. Maybe I will go to England for parts or maybe I’ll make them myself.” He wiped his hands on a cloth. “It’s a mystery, this boat.”
Max said nothing. From a rack affixed to the bulkhead, Groot took a tape measure and a flashlight and, from his pocket, a carpenter’s crayon, which he handed to Max. “Fifteen minutes,” he said. “Twenty at most, I promise.”
THE MUSIC HAD SWITCHED to techno—a maddeningly wistful piano figure floating above the beat—and though the Nachtvlinder wasn’t spacious enough for actual dancing, Odile saw a number of people rearrange themselves subtly to the melody. A man she barely knew was explaining the placebo effect.
“In short,” he concluded, “one gets something from nothing. Belief alone—misplaced belief, yes?—stimulates the immune system. It is better than Catholicism.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. Catching sight of Rachel, Odile pointed to the companionway and made smoking gestures. Rachel nodded.
Topside, leaning on the foredeck rail, they shared a cigarette and gazed up at Nôtre Dame, its apse, steeple, and iconic twin towers dazzlingly floodlit, not six hundred yards away. The cathedral looked massive but somehow fragile, like a shop-window wedding cake.
“What’s the matter, O? Aren’t you having a good time?”
“Yes, of course I am.”
“What, then?”
Odile took a long drag on the cigarette and passed it back. “Is it going well, the filming?”
“Oh, really excellent. Max makes me see things I’d never notice on my own, just by what he decides to shoot. It’s eerie sometimes.”
“Max is very talented,” Odile replied. She spoke neutrally, stating a fact.
“The other day,” Rachel continued, “he really surprised me. We were shooting at that Roman ruin in the fifth—the Arènes de Lutèce?—and he told me that all he wanted me to do was walk across the open space, the arena, that was it. So he set up, and I started out. When I was almost halfway across, suddenly, running toward me from under the trees, there were all these children, maybe twelve or fifteen of them. It was like when the Gypsy kids swarm you, but this wasn’t about robbery. It was a kind of game where they ran up and touched me—my hips, arms, back, whatever—laughing and shouting the whole time. Then they ran a circle around me, really fast, and went back where they’d come from, all in different directions again. They just disappeared into the trees, and I finished walking across the arena. That was all.” She laughed. “But it was enough, too.”
“Were you scared?”
“A little. It all happened so fast.”
For a time, neither of them spoke. The night smelled of diesel, tobacco smoke, and beauty products. A junked TV floated past.
“You don’t mind, do you?” Rachel asked.
“Mind?”
“That he’s filming me.”
“Don’t be silly, Rachel. I’m his wife.” But even as she spoke these words Odile wondered why she had chosen them. It was as if she were addressing a third party, someone who’d asked a different question, and a spasm of doubt made her catch her breath.
“I knew it wasn’t that,” Rachel was saying. “It’s just that you seem so tense lately.”
“Do I?”
“Since you got back from your trip. I don’t want to interfere, but is there anything I can do to help?”
Her pride, her will to win, her half-shaded fears and inadequacies … Odile failed to understand why she’d withheld from Max the details of her Moscow trip and its continuing consequences. She’d said nothing about the Russian thugs, or Turner, or what had happened in Brest, or Thierry and his disappearance. But now, from a different quarter, she was being offered a chance to rectify her silences, or at least to compensate for them, and she discovered it was the opportunity she’d been waiting for.
She took it.
• • •
BY ONE O’CLOCK, when the lights on the Eiffel Tower flicked out, the party had sorted down to an inner core of seven. They were seated in deck chairs on the quarterdeck, blankets draped over their shoulders, drinking poire. The man with whom Odile had been speaking earlier, the editor, said, “Gustave Eiffel—a true visionary. He designed the tower, yes, but his greatest achievement, for which he receives tragically little credit, was the invention of the garter belt. An essential cultural innovation, and, why not say it, an icon of modernity.”
“Show us your legs, dear,” the performance artist told Rachel.
“I think everyone has had enough of my legs for one night, Weston.”
“Such a pretty dress, though,” said Katje, who was drunk.
Max had spent a good deal longer than twenty minutes working with Groot but they now sat with the others, mildly fatigued and bound by the wordless comradery of labor. From his shirt pocket Groot produced a cigarette. He slit it open with a fingernail, mixed a dozen pellets of hashish into the tobacco, and rolled it back up again. After he had lit it and taken a drag, he passed it to Max.
Odile said, “That won’t help anything.” She and Rachel sat side by side, a little apart from the group.
“On the contrary,” said Max, exhaling. He gave the cigarette to Katje, who drew on it hungrily. “Already I notice an improvement.
”
Weston looked pained.
“No need to be alarmed,” the editor advised him. “We’re all frivolous people here.”
Both Rachel and Odile declined the cigarette. The editor, after a pantomime of inner debate, accepted it and took two long drags before surrendering it to Weston.
Then, wafting in on the breeze, there came a man’s voice, conversational in tone but very distinct. It seemed to originate across the near branch of the river or beyond, on the Île Saint-Louis. “But my darling, of course we can start over. Why not?”
Putting his hands behind his head, Groot leaned back in his chair. “It’s strange how voices carry over water.” He spoke dreamily, as though to himself. “Listen.”
“Don’t be an imbecile! We can’t start over!” A woman’s voice this time, equally clear and distant, answering the first. “One can end many times but one can start only once. You and I started years ago. And since, we have ended many times. We end and end and end and end. That’s all we can do. And then we can end some more. But to start again? This is impossible. Completely, utterly impossible. Don’t you understand anything?”
“Listen to me, my sweet—”
And here, with a shift in the breeze or a change in the air pressure, the voices abruptly ceased to be audible.
Weston laughed softly and passed what was left of the cigarette back to Groot.
“Madame does have a point,” the editor said with a shrug. “Though I myself would have suggested a more indirect approach.”
Odile said, “But your opinion is irrelevant, isn’t it?”
Raising an eyebrow, the editor glanced at Max. “If you like.”
Katje leaned forward suddenly and, finding herself within reach of the poire, poured herself another drink.
“Living on the river,” said Rachel, “you hear all kinds of things. The other day I was here repotting the geraniums, and there was, like, this eruption of singing from upstream. A man’s voice, opera, something famous. At first I thought it was a recording, but then I wasn’t sure. He sounded … maybe a little off. Anyway, when he finished, another man, closer to us and live, definitely live, shouted, ‘Shit! Complete shit!’ And then he, this second guy, sang the whole … aria, I guess, over again, the whole thing. And it was great, even I could tell. People applauded.”
Groot nodded approvingly. “Rachel understands the river.”
“And vice versa,” added Max.
They sat in silence. Groot reengineered another cigarette, and it made the rounds.
Odile and Rachel’s change of mood had unsettled Max, and now he felt a pang of anxiety that his camera’s interim subject might be getting away from him. All the qualities that had led him to Rachel in the first place—her openness, her readiness to understand, her physical exoticism—seemed suddenly to conceal a deeper, more elusive self that he had failed utterly to penetrate, or even to appreciate, until now. This lapse was like an intimation of failure, and with it came the further realization, petty but impossible to ignore, that he and Odile had begun to vie for Rachel’s attention like jealous schoolchildren. Foolish, even damaging behavior. And Max saw that he would have to rethink his approach.
“So maybe,” Katje was saying, “in a past life, I too understood the river. But now …” Her attention seemed to waver. “Now what I understand …” She trailed off into a bewildered silence.
“Some things are best not put into words,” said the editor firmly.
There were fireflies in the corners of Max’s sight—phosphorescent lights flashing on and off in two-part synchrony. He blinked them away.
“But the boat!” Katje announced. She appeared agitated. “Will there be enough room?”
“Room?” said Odile.
“Don’t worry,” Groot assured Katje. “She’s more spacious than she looks.”
And with that the amber party lights, the lights below, the music, the bilge pumps, and everything else electrically powered aboard the Nachtvlinder switched abruptly off.
“Max?” Odile called softly.
“I’m right here.”
“It can’t be another fuse,” Rachel said. “Or can it?”
Already Groot was on his feet. He had taken a halogen flashlight from his pocket and was headed forward to the gangway.
“It’s probably a short on board,” Max told the others. “He’s going to start at the quai-side hookup and work backward. I’ll take a look below.”
“Don’t, Max,” Odile said.
“Are there candles?” the editor asked.
“Candles?” Katje looked left and right in panic. “Is that what those are?” Weston sighed. “Relax awhile, sweetie. Think of your skin.”
Groot’s footsteps sounded on the gangway. He hadn’t yet switched on the flashlight, and halfway to the quai he was swallowed by darkness. The others peered after him.
Max had heard the note of appeal in Odile’s voice, the half-stifled distress, and he hesitated, trying to make sense of it. But sense wouldn’t come, nor could he reconcile her sudden apprehension with the moodiness that had preceded it, and he was just making up his mind to go below when, on the quai, something small—a rag, a rolled-up newspaper, a sodden bit of sponge—ignited and lifted into the air, seeming at first to rise straight up. He heard the slap of shoe leather on packed sand—two people running. Someone laughed.
The bottle came toward them in a shallow arc, trailing flame, then struck the wheelhouse and exploded. Fire splashed up from the wheelhouse roof. More fire streamed down onto the foredeck. In seconds the Nachtvlinder was burning.
“The hose!” Rachel called into the dark. “Turn on the hose, Groot!” Then, to Max, “Quick! There’s an extinguisher on the port side.”
He found it at once but could not, for several long seconds, detach it from its bracket.
“The blankets! Use the blankets!” said Odile, undraping hers from her shoulders as she ran. The others followed her and began slapping at the fire with their moth-eaten lap robes.
Rachel laid out the garden hose to starboard and called again for Groot to turn it on. She moved swiftly, resolutely, without panic.
Cursing himself for not having the vidcam to hand, Max pulled the pin on the extinguisher, squeezed the lever, and directed the chemical blast at the base of the burning wheelhouse. It had little effect. He squeezed harder. The flames fell back.
“Smother, don’t fan,” counseled the editor. He had rolled his blanket into a tight tube with which he flogged the foredeck fire. The others did likewise.
When at last the water came on, Rachel stood one step from the top of an aluminum stepladder and, half choking on the oily smoke, systematically hosed down the wheelhouse roof. The fire had not eaten far into the wooden superstructure—mostly it was the gasoline from the hurled bottle that burned—and gradually the flames began to yield. Groot reappeared with a bucket on a chain; he and Max worked in relay, filling the bucket from the river, pitching the water across the deck. The others continued to beat at small patches of resurgent flame with their blankets. And working together like this, vigilant and unspeaking, they were able finally to extinguish the fire.
La fluviale arrived some minutes later. While the officers questioned Groot about what had happened—repeatedly referring to the bottle of gasoline as “la bombe”-—Odile and Rachel stood a little to one side, whispering. No, Groot said, he could think of no one who wished him or Rachel harm. No, he was not politically active, he avoided social causes. No, there had been no warnings, no threats, nothing at all out of the ordinary.
Odile and Rachel ceased their whispering and now looked on with an air of stoic hauteur, their faces expressionless.
Max thought, I’ve been paying the wrong kind of attention.
CHAPTER 8
THAT WEEKEND, obeying an impulse that she dared not examine too closely, Odile took the train to Nantes to visit her father. He met her at the station in a distressed-looking Italian sports car she’d not seen before. Like most of the obje
cts with which he surrounded himself, it suited him.
“So,” he said. “You’ve come.”
“You knew I would.” Embracing him, she wondered if he’d lost weight.
Sebastien lived some distance outside Nantes in a quiet town called Vertou, and as he drove them there, leaving behind the small bustle of the city, continuing past the shopping malls and suburban housing tracts that had sprung up on its outskirts, Odile saw the land open out into fields and vineyards and little towns with churches, and she began to feel something like relief. Here, she told herself, I’ll be able to think.
Her father had just returned from a three-week stint in Africa, and he told her about it as he drove. A geographer by training, he had been hired by the government of Mali to assess the environmental impact of a hydroelectric plant it proposed to build on the Niger. The undertaking was quixotic and grandiose in the sub-Saharan manner, almost certain to come to nothing, but it appealed to Sebastien’s sense of social betterment. He was an engagé and Trotskyist of the old school, a natural contrarian. This last trait Odile had inherited in full, but, without the politics to give it shape, it expressed itself unpredictably. She had learned to live with it.
“The case of Mali is special,” Bastien told her as he drove, “and it would seem that now, despite my best efforts, I am a specialist.” He had a toothy smoker’s smile that had always captivated her.
At the house, a small nineteenth-century stone structure two stories tall and roofed in blue slate, Odile retired to her bedroom to change clothes. Although this was not the house of her childhood—Sebastien had moved here only after her mother’s death, five years ago—she had come to feel unexpectedly at home in it. Nestled amid a tumult of magnolia trees, now in brick-red bloom, the house was for her a kind of refuge, a place to seek shelter, and she often came here when Sebastien was away. When he was in residence, things were sometimes less restful.
She emerged from the house to find Sebastien in the back property, leaning a ladder against the old oak that marked its limit. The tree had been struck by lightning while he was in Africa, and its upper half was now split and splintered with one massive limb hanging off the trunk, broken but not detached, reaching almost to the ground. Sebastien climbed the ladder, chain saw in hand. When he started up the saw and its howl obliterated thought, Odile went back into the house.
