by Nick Dybek
“The lady asked for a grand meal,” he said, finally.
“The lady would still like a grand meal,” Sarah said. “Bring us everything.”
“I’ll certainly bring you everything we have,” he said.
“Tell me,” she said once he had returned to the kitchen. “Were you afraid when you first came to France?”
I thought for a moment, feeling I owed her an honest answer. “No. The fear came later. I didn’t know enough at the time. My father’s telegram completely changed my thinking. Did something change yours?”
“Not exactly. Around the time I was to graduate from high school my aunt, without telling me first, wrote directly to my mother, begging her to let me visit. As it turned out, my mother was actually quite excited about the idea.”
The waiter appeared to relight the candle, to refill our glasses and take our plates. He returned with a platter of rouget baked in breadcrumbs and parsley.
“You’re supposed to laugh at that,” Sarah said. “You realize, it’s supposed to be funny.”
“You told me that you hadn’t been to France,” I said.
“I lived in France for five years.”
“You implied it then, certainly.”
“I don’t recall that, but why should I have told you anything true?” she asked.
“Why should you now?”
* * *
In May of 1914 she left for Europe in wet weather. As the ship lurched into the Atlantic, Sarah was relieved to see her mother—blowing kisses with both hands from the safe distance of the pier—fade into the crowd. But she was too afraid of the liner’s listing to enjoy walks on deck. She was afraid of the card games and of the magician who pulled scarves from the mouths of debutantes and dowagers. She was afraid of the small crowd gathered at Le Havre, afraid of the single man playing trombone along the quai.
She was afraid of Maud’s apartment in Montmartre. The smells of pork fat and pipe smoke flooded her new bedroom; the thunder of footsteps on the stairs jolted her awake. Maud kept the windows open in the rain.
Sarah was afraid: a blue tinge to the streetlight gleaming on the greasy faces of maids and dishwashers coming home from shifts in the bowels of hotels. Stone staircases grouted with moss, dead-ending up Montmartre. The carts of rag pickers, piled with sheets and shirts washed gray. Waiters staring out from empty cafés, faces mangled by warped glass.
“What about your aunt?”
“I wasn’t afraid of her. But I didn’t like her nearly as much in person.”
Maud was thin, with hair that had gone white early, kept long and braided over one shoulder. She was prone to talk for hours, prone to touch you on the arm if she didn’t feel you were paying absolute attention.
“Now that you’re here it’s time to find yourself,” she said. “Obviously, it’s a cliché, this idea of finding oneself, isn’t it? That is, it’s cliché for a man. And tragically not so for a woman. I need only mention your mother.”
“What would you advise?” Sarah asked.
“Simply that you listen.”
Sarah tried. Sometimes they’d go to Chat Noir to watch the cabaret and sing along to the piano played by a friend of Maud’s. But more often, her aunt would usher her to a particular flat lined with Persian tapestries where a host in purple satin robes greeted them. Sarah would sit, propped on a cylindrical pillow, conscious of little more than her effort not to betray her own confusion, as someone—often her aunt—lectured on the secrets of the Rose Cross, or Schopenhauer’s influence on Wagner’s late work. Once, her aunt gestured at the full moon, glowing above the sooty rooftops. “That will is our will. It’s the same will,” she said.
And Sarah tried to listen, seated in a velvet box at the Opéra, as the third act of Parsifal began. She could feel her aunt turning her gaze toward her in the dark, willing Sarah to gasp, to shudder, to fall in love. Sarah felt nothing, but she didn’t want to disappoint Maud. As the holy knight held up the lance that had pierced Christ’s side, Sarah pressed her thumbnail into her palm and thought of her father, alone on the Boston Common, offering directions to strangers. Finally, just before the house lights came up, she was able to cry.
* * *
Father Perrin often said that a face looks different when you know its story. I’d pictured Sarah’s face at five and fifteen, transposing the green of her dress to the ocean she’d crossed. I could see traces of pink on her nose from when she’d cried as the curtain fell. Surely, Lee was in that face too. But I couldn’t see him. Perhaps that should have come as no surprise. Stories, after all, are told to conceal the truth just as often as they are told to reveal it. Father Perrin often said that too.
The waiter cleared the table, plucking the wineglass from my hand, changing out the dishes and flatware. “You’d like the Pommard with the duck, I think,” he said. “But we have other Burgundy.”
“Don’t dare ask my opinion now,” Sarah said.
He poured the wine into our glasses. It was like nothing I’d ever had.
“It’s leather,” I said.
“Yes.” The color of the wine was on her cheeks too. “Very good leather. We haven’t toasted.”
“To what, then? What should we drink to?”
“In my family, we don’t actually touch glasses. If my father is in a jovial mood he raises his to the founder of the feast, like the Cratchits in A Christmas Carol.”
“To begin with, Marley was dead,” I said. I only realized then that I was drunk.
“Deader than a doornail,” she said.
“My mother read it to me every December. I used to love ghost stories.”
“Do you?”
“I used to.”
* * *
The waiter presented the duck breast, sliced in dark sauce, ringed with juniper berries and sprigs of rosemary. Already my body felt like a thing only vaguely under my control, and I realized how alike pleasure and fear can feel in their extremes.
“Just a moment,” the waiter said. “Perhaps I could tell you about this duck?”
“Please,” we said, roughly at the same time.
“Because you are speaking English, I will try in English.” He held his palm in front of his face as if he might find the words there. “So, you know—maybe, perhaps!—it is difficult but special to grow ducks in Lorraine. The bad water, because of the bad dirt, you understand.” We nodded. There were few things I understood better than the bad dirt and water of Lorraine. “These ducks my wife and I raised. When we left in 1915 we brought them with us to Bordeaux. Bordeaux is a very different region for ducks, much easier, even before the war. These ducks taste, I don’t know how to say, they taste very particular, very good.”
“It’s the best I’ve ever had,” Sarah said. The waiter flushed pink.
“Perhaps no duck will taste like this one ever again,” he said. “I hope you like it. His name is Michaud.”
“That’s a bit unappetizing,” Sarah said, and the waiter began to laugh, embarrassed.
“No. So sorry. It is my poor English. The duck has no name. My name is Michaud.”
He had the kind of thick, round face you couldn’t help but call honest.
* * *
“There are days,” she said, “when I have to remind myself how I got here. So then I have to step back to the thing before that and the thing before that. I suppose that’s why the story’s taking so long. Is this all terrible for you?”
Her face had relaxed. Her soft expression suited her soft features. It seemed to me this was how she was supposed to look.
“If anything you’re going too fast,” I said.
* * *
Sarah began listening to Cleo Muller in May of that year. At least the plaque on the buzzer read Muller. Her husband called her Cleo, or when he was pleading with her, as was the case most nights, Clo, Sarah could hear them through her thin bedroom wall when they shouted. What was he pleading for? Sarah took an interest at first because she assumed it was sex.
Cleo had auburn h
air, feline eyes, and two children, a girl and a boy. Sarah guessed Cleo to be about forty years old, though it was difficult to say because she glimpsed her in person only a handful of times. She could set her watch to the sound of the children’s steps echoing in the stairwell everyday at 13:00, to the view from the window as they filed toward Sacré-Cœur, the girl first, then the boy, then their governess. But never Cleo.
Why? Because most days, it seemed, Cleo would wake up completely paralyzed, unable to get out of bed, unable even to sit up. When René—that was her husband’s name—came home in the evenings he would explode in rage, then grief and shame. He promised to take Cleo to Cannes and buy her the best view of the ocean. He promised to take her to Cannes and drown her. He promised to kiss her feet if she would only walk across the room, if she would only agree to resume psychoanalysis.
“It was hysteria?” I asked.
Sarah’s smile was wry and amused. “You really think there is such a thing?”
Not in Cleo’s case, certainly. Often Sarah could hear her pacing her bedroom at night—like Sarah’s father, René seemed to have his own room. She could hear the strike of a match, perhaps the crumple of a newspaper. She could hear René’s heavy steps in the hallway, but never a knock at the door.
“You were planning to help her?” I asked.
“No. I was planning to find myself paralyzed. To wake up like that one morning.”
In the restaurant, Sarah pressed a bare forearm to her brow as she laughed. This time, I laughed too. But then, I couldn’t resist.
“What about Cleo’s little girl?” I asked. Sarah looked at me, annoyed.
“You do want me to skip to the end, I see. It is late, I suppose. You’re right, once I pictured her standing outside her mother’s closed door it wasn’t fun anymore. And, yes, I felt an unbearable disgust with myself. That summarizes it pretty well. I found an address in my suitcase, wrote a quick note, and went down the stairs to send it before I could lose my nerve.”
“To whom?” I asked, though I didn’t need to.
* * *
We finished the duck, leaving the rosemary sprigs on the plate like a trampled wreath. I tried the bottle, but there was only sediment. The candles on the empty tables had all gone out and a velvet darkness filled the room. Not a single customer had come in.
“Was there really a Cleo Muller?” I asked.
“Why do you ask that?”
“It’s not uncommon—there are so many reasons why the people who come here make up stories, or pieces of stories. You learn to tell when things fit together a little too well.”
“And do you usually try to embarrass them?” she asked.
The answer, of course, was no. But I wasn’t trying to embarrass her. I was trying to impress her.
“Don’t worry about the bottle,” she said. “He’ll bring Sauterne with dessert, I’d bet my life on it. No, it didn’t really all happen quite that way. There was a Cleo, though. There still is. And there was a René, but he died at the Marne. I suppose I should also say that my childhood wasn’t quite so gothic either. I just wanted to give you a sense of it all.”
“A sense of what?”
“Well,” she paused, as if embarrassed. “Of why I fell in love so fast, and so deep.”
* * *
“You enjoyed Michaud?” the waiter asked, still laughing as he cleared the final set of plates. We clamored to compliment him.
“Excellent, excellent. The crème brûlée is named Maurice.” He laughed and presented a bottle of Sauterne.
Sarah clapped, and said, “Sauterne, you see? I live.”
I felt myself drifting, less than aware of what I was saying, feeling somehow that I had already said the wrong thing, but unsure of when or how. The right thing to say in the moment seemed clear enough.
“Lee was in Paris?” I asked.
“Yes. He’d gone over around the same time I did—just before, actually. He was working at the Paris branch of a bank. His father’s bank. He was the only person I knew in Paris aside from my aunt. Fate or not-fate, you decide.”
“I’m not sure that’s my place.”
“It’s just something Lee and I used to say. That was the sort of thing we began to joke about almost immediately. Fate or not-fate that we came together as we did.”
“You knew him well before?”
“Not well, though I’d known him all of my life.”
He’d grown up one town over and in those days there were many Lees, many boys with mild, northern European faces, who sat politely at church, or spoke politely to her at picnics. Many boys she avoided.
In high school he played the Pauper to her Lady Jane Grey. He looked the part, all right. He was tall with silver-blond hair and the kind of round chin that looked like it could take a punch. He was almost supernaturally untalented, though, with a tendency to falsify even the most inconsequential moment with oddly placed pauses and cramped expressions.
Later, in Paris, he would claim he’d only auditioned because he wanted a chance to talk to her. It was true that at their chaperoned wrap party he brought over a plate of Linzer hearts and asked if she would like to sit outside. Of course the answer was no. She was sixteen by then and there were still many Lees.
“I can imagine,” I said, my tongue too loose from the wine. She rolled her eyes.
“What I think a man really wants from a woman above all else,” she told me, “is fear. So I was very desirable. Not because of the way I looked especially. They could sense my fear.”
“You don’t seem afraid now.”
“No. That’s changed.”
Maurice had arrived. Michaud poured more Sauterne.
“Would you like to do the honors?” she asked, pointing to the crème brûlée and offering me one of the spoons.
“No, you, please,” I said.
“Good. It’s my favorite part of the whole meal.” She crashed the spoon through the burnt sugar like a boy falling through ice on a lake.
* * *
Lee had plans, a trip to Chartres with the son of his boss, but he begged off when he received her note. And, as they walked through the blooms of the Tuileries, Lee told Sarah that her mother had written and asked him to look in on her, but that he’d known enough not to.
“Known what?” she asked.
“That if I did you’d never speak to me again.”
“It’s likely I never would have spoken to you anyway.”
“I know,” he said. “But you have.”
He touched her arm to signal that they might stop and sit on a bench. When he held the door to the café on Rue Custine he touched the small of her back as she stepped through. And yet there was no expectation in his touch, only warmth. And this difference surprised her—just the feel of his hand on her back, at her elbow.
When he invited her to dinner the following Friday, she asked that her aunt come as a chaperone. Maud agreed to meet them at the brasserie, but never showed up.
“I’d be happy to call someone,” Lee said. “I’m just trying to think who.” They were already seated at the pewter-topped table.
“No one else seems to mind,” Sarah said. “Perhaps I shouldn’t either.”
“It’s one of the nice things. No one seems to mind anything here. One night, I slept under an embankment.”
“Why would you do that?” Sarah asked.
“Adventure, I suppose. I guess adventure always seems more appealing when you’re lonely.”
Sarah had always felt the opposite to be true. Even so, she said yes when he asked her to marry him. In the month they’d been together she’d done everything wrong—did I understand? Everything. She’d had the intoxicated feeling that nothing could harm her. She had invited him in everywhere. And still he asked.
In June they glided across a grassy patch in the Tuileries, holding hands, pretending they were on Lake Waban in Wellesley. Just weeks before, she would have found such behavior maudlin and embarrassing. Now they ignored the Parisians who jeered beca
use they assumed Lee and Sarah understood no French. Just as they ignored the cables from her parents asking that they at least wait to marry in the States. Just as they ignored the note from Lee’s mother wondering if he understood what an eccentric family he was marrying into.
“It was very interesting,” Sarah said. “Suddenly it was so, so easy to shut everything else out. I didn’t expect that.”
I nodded, thinking of my room in the Episcopal palace, the creak of the bed slats, the steam on the windows, the clink of the lamp chain—often the loudest sound in the hour before I tried to sleep.
* * *
“I must confess something. We do have Campari,” Michaud said. “But I don’t like it. Fernet-Branca, though, is better than anything in France. I don’t often admit that.” He set the bottle on the table beside two small glasses. We asked him to join us, and he set out a third glass and pulled up a chair. He asked after Father Gaillard in a sleepy voice. I only realized then that he’d recognized me when we’d come in, that he must have been wondering who Sarah was and why we were together.
As he refilled the small glasses we spoke of his childhood in a village outside Strasbourg—his family had moved west after Alsace was annexed by the Germans in 1871. He’d always planned to return, but now it felt like a duty to stay and help rebuild Verdun, even if he was going bankrupt in the process.
“You must excuse me for interrupting you so much,” he said. “I’m supposed to be invisible, but I’m not used to cooking for such happy people.”
* * *
By the time we left the restaurant I half-expected daylight. I could smell the roasting almonds and hear the din from the cafés on the river. It was still before midnight.
“Verdun was famous for its almonds before the war,” I said.
“Mmhmmm,” she said, as we turned back toward the hotel.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
“How happy we looked,” she said.
* * *
Without the detour it was only a few minutes back to the de Guise. She stumbled on uneven stone. I steadied her with my arm and she shrunk away. As we turned the corner on Rue Margot, the hotel awning, ringed with electric bulbs, blistered the darkness. As I opened the door for her she said she could do with another drink.
