by Ted Mooney
“Yes, why not.” Groot smiled modestly. “Just let me coordinate with our captain over there”—he pointed to the barge’s pilot, who was loudly cursing everyone present—“and I’ll get back to you.”
The two diesel engines lay side by side on the deck, bleeding oil into a thin, rainbow-hued slick that seemed to be swirling in on itself. Max set up the camera and filmed the engines at repose for fifty seconds. Later he would find the right audio to run behind the image, preferably a bit of pithy dialogue between Rachel and Groot, something oblique but not entirely inapposite. Not that anything, in his films, ever really was.
Stalking the deck of the little barge, he began to construct the impending shot in his mind. They’d pass through a lock at the south end of the marina to get to the Seine and then drop some seven feet to reach river level. Anything facing west would start out bathed in golden light and move gradually into shadow as the barge entered the iron-gated lock and descended, before emerging into light again once on the river. Visually, the shot explained itself, but getting something useful out of Groot was another matter entirely. It would take ingenuity and, Max suspected, force.
He picked out a spot on the port side of the barge and set up his camera as the pilot prepared to cast off. Max was about to reclaim Groot and bring him to his mark when his cell phone began to vibrate. It was Odile.
“I’m working,” he told her. “They got the engines. So I’m shooting.”
“Good. That’s great. Will you be home for dinner?”
Max caught Groot’s eye and beckoned urgently to him. “I don’t know. Maybe. Can’t promise.”
The barge started to move away from the dock.
“I see. Okay. And are you going to let me know later or do I just guess?”
Her tone of voice, disproportionately angry, brought Max up short. Dinner hour was not something either of them worried much about. “I’ll try, all right?” Then, before he lost his temper, he ended the call and pocketed the phone. “Groot, I want you over here, by the railing. Closer. Good. Not facing me, though. Look toward the river. That’s perfect.”
Through the viewfinder, Groot appeared to belong to another era, his features timeless beneath the flat-brimmed hat, the declining light imbuing him with a kind of elemental grace, part Vermeer, part Dutch comedy.
“What will we talk about?” he asked Max.
“I want to try a few things. But you can start by telling us about the engines, how you plan to use them, that kind of stuff. Don’t be afraid to look at me if it feels right, but mainly we want to see you looking forward—you know, to the river, the future, whatever. Okay? Here we go. Three, two, one, rolling.”
Max filmed, Groot talked. In the background, the hulls of the various pleasure craft tied up there slipped by, lending the shot an agreeable intermittence. The words Groot spoke barely registered on Max; he was too absorbed to notice more than their overall tenor and pace. He was waiting for the lull, the break, the moment when the face turned soft. Whatever would give him a way in.
“… so it’s like finding an organ donor,” Groot went on. “Both engines run surprisingly well. They’re probably the last two in the country. Maybe the world. So, now we’ll match up the best parts from all four to make two ideal engines, and, well, that’s it. We’ll have done it.” He glanced at the camera and looked back out toward the river. “Restored her to life. A kind of miracle.”
Max kept filming. “And Rachel’s parents? What’s their role in this?”
“They gave her the money to buy the engines, yes. Wired it to her.”
“And she gave the money to you. Do you think Rachel told them what it was for?”
Groot hesitated. “I don’t actually know what she told them.” Max waited and filmed. The barge was halfway to the lock. “Does Rachel love you?”
Nodding minutely to himself, as if he’d expected this question, Groot said, “Rachel loves me, yes.”
“And do you two ever talk about getting married?”
A faint smile flickered over the Dutchman’s features. He took a pack of cigarettes from the pushed-up sleeve of his jersey, shook one out, and lit it. After a couple of drags he said, “I proposed to her, yes. Just recently. She was … taken by surprise. You can say it? Taken by surprise? She said, well, that she needed time to think about it.”
Plane trees flanked the lock, and the shadows of the leaves of their outermost branches now began to run softly over Groot and dim the boats docked behind him. “I agreed to this, of course. A woman making up her mind: it is normal, ordinary, but at the same time … worth waiting for. True, she is much younger than me, but this has never been a problem between us. We live our lives, day to day, and that’s how it is. Neither of us likes a drama, but we know how to be happy. It’s … not so hard.”
The barge slipped into the lock, and his face passed into deeper shadow. Behind him, the view of the marina was replaced by the timber, sodden and marvelously dark, that the lock was made of. Its iron gates ground slowly shut.
“But now, you know, now I begin to feel that I broke the spell. By asking her to marry me I made her think about the future—where she’ll be, what she’ll be doing, who she’ll be with—and just by asking the question I put a limit on the present. You might say I wrote its death warrant.”
The water level in the closed lock began to drop and the barge with it.
“But isn’t it possible,” Max said, “even likely, that she’ll say yes? Then the present goes on as before, into the future, right?”
With the barge inside the lock, Groot no longer had a view forward, so he looked up at the light overhead. “No, I would say not. It’s strange, I know, but already things that were easy before have become … elusive. We breathe, but now we are aware of our breathing. It’s like that.”
“Do you think Rachel will accept your proposal?”
Groot looked around uneasily. Behind him, the lock walls that till moments ago had been underwater were now revealed to be completely covered with blue-black mussels.
“I think she will stay with me until the Nachtvlinder is rebuilt,” Groot said. “She wants to see that through. But love is brutal. I accept this. What is difficult—” He broke off, distracted, and, shielding his eyes with a forearm, turned toward the timber wall behind him.
The mussels, in their thousands, were spraying Groot and everything around him with a fine mist of water that the light refracted into a rainbow fog.
SEATED AT THE VANITY she kept downstairs in her studio, Odile examined herself in the mirror. She’d lost weight since renouncing meat, and it seemed to her that the change was most noticeable in the planes of her face, whose high cheekbones had taken on a new prominence, not at all displeasing. Dipping a bit of sponge into the bowl of water before her, she began wiping her features down roughly, stripping away the dead skin and bringing fresh color to her cheeks. That’s when it really started, she thought. When I refused the veal chop. And, a moment later, I am so predictable.
The night of the storm, she’d returned from Turner’s apartment to find Max upstairs, strenuously absorbed in painting the garret guest room a pale brick red. Her first instinct was that he had somehow sensed where she’d been and had sought to stifle that awareness in mindless accusatory labor, but a few minutes of conversation convinced her otherwise and she went back downstairs to bath and bed. By the time he joined her, she was dead asleep.
Setting aside the sponge and bowl of water, she brushed her hair out hard, stroke after stroke. She had been wrong to press Max about his dinner plans. She’d done it out of guilt, appealing to their domestic selves in an effort to protect them both from the consequences of her actions—actions past, present, and, most especially, future—but all she’d done was make herself tiresome. She felt no remorse at having slept with Turner. Maybe later she would be sorry, but for now she believed in what she was doing, even if she couldn’t explain it. A life was to live. Anything else could take a number and wait.
She had jus
t finished plaiting her hair when there came a sharp triple knock at the door. Wheeling around in her chair, she saw four youths at the window, desperately signaling for help. When she opened the door they came tumbling in, and she pressed the door shut behind them.
“What’s wrong?” she demanded.
Her visitors—three boys and a girl in their late teens—had thrown themselves to the floor, just beneath the window. “The cops,” the girl hissed, and immediately clapped a hand over her mouth.
Before Odile could inquire further, a policeman did in fact appear at the window. She cranked it open. “Hello, Officer.”
“I’m sorry to bother you, Madame.” The man grimaced to suggest the distasteful necessity of his errand. “But I would like very much to talk with your neighbors in number eight, if at all possible. However, they don’t seem to be home. Perhaps you know them?”
“But of course. The anarchists.” Odile smiled at the officer. “My husband and I, though, we haven’t seen them for weeks. I think they went to Maastricht for the trade conference.” She frowned in citizenly concern. “Is there trouble?”
“That I cannot say. At present they are wanted only for questioning.” He sharpened his gaze and looked her sternly in the eye. “Tell me, Madame, have they ever mentioned La Santé prison to you? Maybe asked you to sign a petition, join a demonstration, something of that nature?”
“La Santé? No, never. Why?”
The policeman shrugged. “Certain sources …” But already his interest seemed to wane. “There’s no cause for alarm, I assure you. However, should your neighbors return—” He handed her a card.
“Of course, Officer.” She let her eyes linger on his until he blushed, then bid him goodbye.
When the sound of his footsteps had died away, the fugitives stood up, shaken and uncharacteristically silent.
“So things are heating up, I see.” Odile knew all four by sight, but she could never keep their names straight.
“Yes, they are,” said the oldest-looking one. “Things are heating up because that is our single purpose, always and everywhere to engage the oppressor.” He stroked his wispy blond mustache thoughtfully. “But the cop, he was just bluffing about La Santé. A stab in the dark, right, Chantal?” He turned to the girl, who regarded him with fathomless contempt.
“We must thank Madame for her help,” she said evenly.
“Absolutely,” said the boy, returning his attention to Odile. “We are in your debt. Thank you.”
“Not at all,” she told them. “Activism runs in my family.” She opened the door. “So until the next time …”
When they were gone, she went over to her worktable and studied the drawings for the wedding dress she’d designed for her client Fatima. Despite the girl’s liberal views, or maybe because of them, Odile had taken her inspiration from the burka and other Islamic garments of concealment: she wanted to emphasize the drama of exposure by framing it within an expanse of fabric that veiled and draped and trailed behind in a tantalizing train. Now she realized her design wasn’t radical enough. She made some new sketches that heightened the tension, then she stripped the muslin pattern pieces from her dressmaker’s dummy, tossed them into her scrap bag, and went upstairs.
Without really having a plan, she opened a wardrobe that held the clothes she’d designed solely for herself. Sorting peevishly through them, she shoved garment after garment aside until she found something she could stand to look at—a deep blue microfiber shirt-dress that fit her like a skin. She got out of her jeans and put it on. She was considering the question of footwear when the phone rang: Eddie Bouvier, with news for Max.
“He’s down by the Nachtvlinder, shooting,” she told him. “Where are you?”
“On Richard Lenoir, headed north.”
“Ah, you’re driving! Perfect. Come pick me up and we’ll surprise him.”
Eddie hesitated. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? While he’s working?”
“Look at the light,” she said. It was barely seven o’clock, and, with two and a half hours till sundown, the air over Paris glowed a heatless but prodigal gold. “He won’t even notice we’re there.”
“Okay,” Eddie said, downshifting audibly. “Five minutes.”
• • •
AFTER JACQUES FILMED the transfer of the engines from the barge to the deck of the Nachtvlinder, Max sent him to buy a case of rum and several liters of orange juice. Now, with the twin diesels secured topside, Groot and Rachel had invited their houseboat neighbors aboard to view the new hardware, other friends were arriving by the minute, and what had begun as an ad hoc celebration was rapidly turning into a drunken revel. Ray Charles’s voice issued from belowdecks at high volume.
“Okay, now I get it about the rum,” Jacques said. “But what if things spill over into incoherence?”
“We keep filming,” Max said firmly. “That’s what we’re here for.”
“And Rachel?”
“What about her?”
“She’s noticed you’re avoiding her. She thinks she’s done something to disappoint you. As material, I mean.”
“Really? She said that?”
“Pretty much, yes.”
“Excellent. Keep her guessing. And, in the meantime, get as much anecdotal footage as you can. Anything anybody does or says that we might use for local color, shoot it. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to go in on her, okay? Oh, and Jacques?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t worry about coherence. It’s usually just a matter of how you frame the shot.”
Jacques smiled and headed with his camera toward the stern of the boat.
Two girls Max had never seen before were dancing to the music, swaying indolently in place and lifting their arms over their heads, eyes closed in wordless transport. Each time the four-word chorus came around, they roused themselves to sing along in fetchingly accented English—Lez, go, get, stoned—before retreating once more into the reverie of movement. Max filmed them at it, then shifted his attention to a group of men who’d gathered around the engines.
He recognized some of them from the day of the flood. Open bottles passed from hand to hand, and the mood was philosophical.
“No one makes such engines anymore, not even the Germans.” The speaker was known locally as Boudu, in ironic reference to the Renoir film. “In fact, I wouldn’t mind having them myself.”
“Fat chance,” said another. “But if you’re serious, you’d better start by finding a rich American girlfriend of your own. Without her, two of us together couldn’t afford these engines.”
“Don’t be idiotic,” said a third man. “She has no money. Besides, since the flood, he is one of us.” He raised his bottle. “To the Nachtvlinder! May we all have second lives.”
Max panned slowly right. Just forward of the companionway, two men in their twenties stood facing each other, absorbed in a rite of mutual discovery. First one of them would take a long pull on the bottle they were sharing, square his shoulders, shout a single insult at the other, and slap him full in the face, causing them both to dissolve in laughter. When they recovered, the bottle would change hands, and it would be the other one’s turn. Another insult, another slap, more laughter. The exchange played surprisingly well on camera, its logic serenely unassailable.
Katje and Yvette, the Ivorian transvestite, cruised slowly by in the middle distance, arm in arm, apparently oblivious to the exertions around them.
“We’re sailing to Sicily!” someone shouted. “We’re sailing to Sicily! We’re sailing to Sicily! We’re sail—” But before Max could locate this enthusiast, she was cut off mid-word and heard from no more. He looked up from the camera. For some time he had been aware of Odile and Eddie Bouvier standing discreetly behind him, scrupulous not to enter camera range.
“Why’s everyone so drunk?” Odile asked him.
“Don’t know,” Max said. “I think it’s the light.” He peered vexedly at the sky, which had begun to go pink around the edges. “Hi,
Eddie. What’s up?”
“The police closed down that DVD operation this morning. No arrests, unfortunately. But they got the equipment. I thought you’d like to know.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it.” Max held up a light meter and took a reading.
“There’s more.”
“Oh, yeah?” Returning the device to his pocket, he watched three children run across the deck holding pinwheels before them, a glossy black dachshund in close pursuit. “Listen,” he said, “why don’t you two go get yourselves a drink, and I’ll catch up with you in a bit. There’s a scene I’m waiting to shoot, but it needs to ripen up a little first, okay? I’m still prepping the principals.” He looked at his wife and business manager directly for the first time since their arrival. “Thanks. It won’t take long.”
Odile kissed him lightly and, taking Eddie’s arm, led him off. Max reflected on his good fortune in having married a woman so innately determined to rise to the occasion, whatever it might be. Her pride was a thing of beauty, a little dangerous, as large as life. It helped him see the world. And for that he was prepared to go quite far indeed.
A woman sitting on her boyfriend’s shoulders whooped and handed Max a bottle. He passed it on without drinking. Someone staggered into him and fell to the deck. When Max realized the man wouldn’t be getting up, he stepped over him and began weaving through the throng to the stern.
The first thing to catch his eye was Jacques’s anxious face. Following his gaze, Max saw Rachel and Groot, standing off to one side clutching the railing unsteadily, engaged in what appeared to be a private discussion. He hurried over as unobtrusively as possible, set up his camera, and started to film. They seemed not to notice. The light decayed.
“But what possible difference could it make?” Rachel said, flipping her French-style braid back over her shoulder. “I mean, really?”
“I want to know,” Groot said. “That’s the difference.” He was drunker than she, stolid in his insistence, ready to wait her out. His hat shaded his forehead to the eyebrows.
