Twilight

by Katherine Mosby

  Harold Baker had told her that the Jews in Germany who removed their stars and went underground were called “submarines.” She had laughed; it had seemed clever at the time. That was before she had any understanding of what it felt like to hide or be shunned.

  As she became intoxicated by the wine, and by the ways she’d been wronged, she felt herself on the verge of dissolving.

  “In the end, I’ll be invisible,” she said a little too loudly.

  “What do you mean?” Gaston asked, but his eyes were elsewhere. He was looking for the waiter on the other side of the room. She could see from Gaston’s demeanor he found her statement tedious instead of moving and it made her furious. It made her furious too that she knew him so well she could read it in his shoulders, in the set of his mouth, whereas he could not read her at all.

  “You never ask me anything,” she said.

  “You make no sense, my dear. Would you like one of my oysters, or do you just want to pick a fight?”

  “Do you never wonder about me? Have you no curiosity at all?” she asked. “Are my parents still alive? Who was my best friend in elementary school? Have I ever stolen anything? What poems do I know by heart? Does it matter to you?”

  Lavinia felt herself getting swept away by the riptide of her unhappiness. She began to butter a piece of bread angrily.

  “Do I prefer my butter salted or plain?” she asked without waiting for an answer. “Do I hate cinnamon? Do I love strawberries or am I allergic? Am I afraid of spiders? What was the worst punishment meted out to me as a child and why? Did I have a nickname at school? What do I think must be the worst way to die? Because no one else will ever know if you don’t.”

  Suddenly, her anger was spent and all that was left behind was a grief so piercing she had to leave the table abruptly. In the ladies’ room, Lavinia ran cold water over her wrists until they were numb and she could no longer feel her heart pounding. She was drunk. She’d realized it as soon as she’d stood up. As she reapplied her lipstick, she examined herself in the mirror. She looked gaunt and the bags under her eyes were more pronounced than usual. “Because no one else will ever know…” she said to the mirror in English. In her drunkenness, it seemed the saddest thing you could say.

  It was a thought that haunted Lavinia: one ceased to exist by degrees. Near the Place des Vosges she had passed a pile of possessions that had been put out on the street, the detritus of a life heaped on the narrow curb. Most of what remained had been scavenged and scattered, leaving only what was broken or unwanted. Lavinia had stopped on the narrow street, struck by the terrible loneliness of it: packets of letters, soggy with rain, a bicycle basket bent out of shape, clothing too used or out of style to have been taken by passersby.

  A few books with damaged bindings were left, a guide to mushrooming from which the illustrations had been torn out, volume R of an encyclopedia, stained intermittently with blue ink. Spilling off the sidewalk, clogging the gutter, were canceled checks and receipts and bills, which had been annotated as paid, Réglé written in a delicate, wispy script. It was the handwriting that made Lavinia pause and then bend down to examine it. It seemed so personal, like a tiny voice trying to give meaning to what had become meaningless. She knew it was a woman’s hand even before she found the name: Solange Montagnac.

  So this was it, Lavinia thought. In the end, this was all that was left. A life could be reduced to an inventory of odds and ends of no particular importance. She thought of Marcel Feydeau and the way she had come to care about a man she didn’t know by opening his desk drawer. She remembered the contents because there were so few items, and they were all so poignantly without value to anyone but their owner.

  There were a few foreign coins including a buffalo-head nickel, a lizard address book with only three entries, one of which was a candy store on the Rue Fontaine in the 9th arrondissement, nowhere near where he lived. The other two entries had been scratched out so sharply the paper had torn. There was a brass button and a small round tin of lozenges, long emptied but still exuding the ghostly breath of spearmint, in which a small flat black stone had been saved. Two stubs of pencils still bore Marcel Feydeau’s teeth marks, and the silver cap to a missing fountain pen rolled noisily in the drawer when it was opened or closed. An envelope, gray from handling, contained a broken watch fob, and several gold stars, of the kind that rewarded the good work of schoolchildren.

  Perhaps that’s what made Lavinia squat over the debris of Solange Montagnac and paw through the remnants of her life, to the bafflement of pedestrians. Lavinia didn’t even look up to see who remarked rudely that someone in a fur coat did not need to pick through the trash of the less fortunate. It was not clear to her what she was looking for until she found it in a biscuit tin. As soon as Lavinia saw the pink ribbon that bound the contents of the tin together, with a Saint Christopher’s medal pinned to the ribbon just at the center of the bow, she knew she’d found Solange Montagnac just as surely as if she had heard, amidst the rubble, a beating heart.

  In her hands, Lavinia held the small collection of treasure: a First Communion card, a folded lace handkerchief with the elaborately embroidered monogram SJM, a postcard from Juan-les-Pins with the message “Next time will be our time,” signed R with a flourish. Under the postcard was a telegram announcing a death, an obituary and several photographs.

  The top one showed a young couple standing in front of a Ferris wheel. In another, taken in a photography studio advertising itself in gold at the bottom of the cardboard frame, the same young man smiled awkwardly. Attached to the back of the portrait with a paper clip was a canceled Métro ticket and a small passport photo of Solange Montagnac. Lavinia took the picture of Solange because it seemed too painful to put her back on the rubbish pile. Lavinia put the picture in the zippered compartment of her purse, where Solange would be safe.

  Lavinia remembered being told by her brother Gordon, when she was still very young, that there was no Father Christmas and no Heaven. She had taken the news about Santa Claus with equanimity: presents arrived under the tree with or without his agency. It was the loss of Heaven that had concerned her. When she asked Miss Kaye about death and what comes after she was told, “You will live on in the memory of those who love you.” It had not had the comforting effect intended.

  “What if no one loves you? What if those who love you also die?” she’d asked Miss Kaye. “What if they forget or get amnesia?” Lavinia imagined a kind of evaporation occurring in which not only did the person no longer exist but all trace and record disappeared as well. It had so terrified her she’d briefly taken comfort in the notion of Hell because in order to suffer one had to still exist in some sense, and there one certainly had company. Nothingness, on the other hand, was what gave her the nightmares that had required Miss Kaye to sleep in her room on a folding cot. Now as an adult, Lavinia knew that not being known in life was worse than being forgotten after death.

  Lavinia my unforgiving darling,

  When we fight the world is a miserable place. Do you remember my telling you about Jacques Lucien, the colleague at the bank who married a Scotswoman and learned to play bagpipes? He’s been let go.

  It was very upsetting. The stenographer wept. On the way out, Jacques kept his head down, like a schoolboy going to the paddle. As he passed me, I saw he was making an enormous effort not to cry. Officially, it was said he’d gotten sloppy with his reports but we all knew it was because he was Jewish. I was on the verge of tears myself. Not just for Jacques Lucien, but for you, and the handful of words you threw at me like daggers.

  Lavinia replied immediately, making Jean-Marc wait while she hastily wrote on the back of Gaston’s note, so as not to lose even the time it would take to get a sheet of her own stationery and compose a longer response. “Blow on it,” she said to Jean-Marc, because the ink had not yet dried when she handed the note back to him. Jean-Marc smiled and began to blow noisily, tiny beads of spittle flying with each puff of breath. “And don’t stop for another
Ricaud until after you give this to Monsieur Lesseur,” she instructed him. He was turning to the door when she reached out her arm to stop him. For a moment she didn’t say anything. His eyebrows knit in worry as if he had already done something wrong.

  “I’ve missed you,” Lavinia said, straightening his collar. Then she rubbed his cheek with the back of her hand, letting it graze the stubble. He pushed his face into her hand and made a raspy sound that was meant to emulate the purr of Grisette. It had been months since he’d let her do that, and she found herself deeply moved. Dirty, illiterate, and often difficult, he was still the only person in Gaston’s life she knew and as such he was the tenuous link connecting their two disparate worlds.

  Gaston my sweet,

  There are a hundred things I want to tell you tomorrow, but I felt as if I would explode if I didn’t at least send you this caress. Je t’adore.

  Even with all the things that Gaston didn’t know about her that Lavinia felt he should have, there was still so much about her he knew that no one else did. He knew as well what to do with the information he learned, whether it was secret or common knowledge. Others might have known that she loved clementines but no one else would have blindfolded her and fed them to her, out of season, wedge by wedge, between verses he read out loud from the Song of Solomon until she was intoxicated with pure pleasure.

  Sometimes Lavinia asked Gaston about the other lovers he’d had during the course of his marriage to Céleste, but it was never of the mistresses that Lavinia was jealous. There had been three and they had all been married women. When Lavinia asked why, he said, “Because married women are discreet, grateful and gone.” Only one had lasted any length of time.

  They had been chosen specifically so as not to threaten the marriage but merely provide occasional relief from it. The tales he told about them were amusing and it was clear from the way he discussed them that the genial affection he felt for them now was emblematic of what he felt for them then. Their claims had never been on his heart, nor had any of them wished to complicate an otherwise satisfying arrangement.

  Only Danielle Davidot had endured, despite the fact that Gaston found her mind prosaic and her couture pedestrian. “No flair, anywhere,” he said, waving his hand in the air dismissively, but the sex was dependably good, and she was pleasant company. Didi thought of herself as a freethinker and had been in “analysis” for several years with a Swiss doctor who had studied with Freud. The stories about Didi had always been the most humorous, often making Lavinia laugh aloud. Her favorite anecdote was the one in which Gaston took Didi to La Rêveline while Céleste was on the Riviera with her mother, and Didi’s husband was traveling on business.

  The couple had spent an illicit night together in the master bedroom. Because the plumbing at La Rêveline was famously bad, being both noisy and ineffective, Didi had tried to pee sitting on the sink. She had only just begun to relax when the ancient fixture pulled away from the wall and crashed onto the tile floor. When Gaston opened the door without knocking, he found Didi sitting on the floor, beside the two halves of the porcelain sink. Her mouth was open in shock, and a broken pipe sprayed her with water, as if she were the statue in a garden fountain.

  “Not a French garden, il faut dire,” Gaston added, “because French gardens are never silly, even when they are trying to be.”

  Lavinia had been amused when she heard the story but it was Gaston’s imitation, his eyes bulging and his mouth open in the shape of shocked modesty, that made her snort with laughter. Later, Gaston would assume the comic mask to make her laugh when other gambits had failed. It became a gag between them and while it continued to amuse Lavinia every time, she also noticed how lazy it was. But by then the prism through which she viewed Gaston had already developed cracks.

  His failings did not shift from minor to major arcana until Lavinia learned that Danielle was also a friend of Céleste’s, and that Gaston had known her prior to his marriage. This was the first dose of irreparable disillusionment Lavinia choked down like a bitter tonic. It made her previous complaints, that he sucked air through his teeth when he was concentrating or walked half a beat in front of her on the sidewalk, seem endearing by comparison.

  It was not Danielle’s adulterous liaison with Gaston that Lavinia found repellent; Lavinia was not a hypocrite nor was she a moralist: it was Danielle’s relationship with Céleste that offended Lavinia. Didi, as she was called affectionately, by both husband and wife, never felt uncomfortable socializing with the unwitting Céleste, or Didi’s equally oblivious husband. That Gaston had involved himself with someone Céleste knew and trusted, someone she entertained in her home, disturbed Lavinia deeply. She was shocked by it, and Lavinia had come to think of herself as being shock-proof. That the situation was merely the construct of convenience rather than the heart’s command only increased the distastefulness.

  It was the first time too that Lavinia felt sorry for Céleste—protective even. There was something obscene in the thought of the two couples dining out together at Le Grand Véfour or Tour d’Argent, making small trips to charming places, letting Céleste collect happy memories at her own expense. To Lavinia, it was the difference between infidelity and betrayal. It spoke of a moral corruption that was the difference between a gentleman and a bounder. For the first time she questioned Gaston’s character.

  Lavinia thought with a sickening pang of her eldest brother, Ambrose. As the eldest of the siblings, he had always liked to calibrate the distinctions between wrongs, and negotiate apologies or bribes accordingly, and now as an adult he did so professionally, as a judge. “The world abounds with bounders,” he liked to say with a harsh laugh. “There’s low, and then there are the rungs below.”

  It was confusing to feel sorry for Céleste after having suffered such jealousy because of her. Much as Lavinia had fought against it, the passion with which she had come to envy Céleste had been powerful, and demeaning. Lavinia never suspected, however, that it had also bound them together just as surely as it cleft them apart, or that she would come to feel compassion for Céleste for many of the same reasons that had initially inspired contempt.

  The ruthlessness with which Gaston had betrayed Céleste by sleeping with her friend, so casually, for so long, suggested to Lavinia something much more complicated than just infidelity.

  “In all of Paris, you couldn’t find a woman to amuse you who didn’t share your wife’s affection and trust? Does Céleste have so many friends that she can afford your turning one into a traitor?” Lavinia demanded. The betrayal had in it a kind of cruelty that was particularly difficult to justify because it was so gratuitous.

  If Gaston had been compelled by love or even spite, Lavinia would have been better able to understand, but this was laziness, and arrogance.

  A line from a Gilbert and Sullivan song came to mind: “A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience…” and Lavinia had trouble banishing it. Her ability to trust Gaston was the linchpin on which her sacrifice depended, and her ability to admire and respect him was what her love required not to wither. Lavinia remembered Mavis talking about the way to choose a lover as they rode a crowded Madison Avenue bus together.

  “The body is an instrument capable of expressing both the heart and the soul. But without either engaged, sooner or later the pleasures of the flesh are bound to disappoint, no matter how priapic the performance. Any relationship is only as limited as its participants. Sex with anyone less than an equal is just opportunistic and unsatisfying. Better to have sex with yourself. At least that won’t lead to regret or disease.”

  Lavinia had been embarrassed by Mavis’s candor and volume, and later, when Lavinia looked up priapic in the dictionary, she had blushed. Mavis had been in her own unconventional and uncouth way more honest and moral than almost anyone else Lavinia had known, and suddenly she wished fiercely for the friendship she had been relieved to let lapse years before.

  There had been a time when even hearing Céleste’s name had caused Lavinia�
�s stomach to knot and yet she’d been helpless before her driving desire to know everything she could about her rival. Céleste, she learned, had been selected like a piece of furniture or a draft animal, not for aesthetic reasons but for sturdiness and temperament. Céleste had been chosen to breed: she was sweet and simple and a virgin. Gaston could make the word sweet sound like a disease and at other times he used the adjective in a way that was tender and painful to hear.

  Gaston had become bored by Céleste; he freely admitted it. In bed and in conversation she had never held his attention the way even Didi had, but he loved her nonetheless and couldn’t bear to hurt her.

  “Céleste not only goes to church, she fervently believes. Divorce would kill her.” The more Gaston talked about his marriage, the more it came to resemble in Lavinia’s mind her relationship with Boswell. Lavinia knew how compelling devotion could be. Regardless of the source, it yielded a kind of loyalty that almost nothing could replace.

  There had been times when Gaston had been tempted to leave Céleste, times when Gaston’s sense of claustrophobia in her presence had almost driven him to decamp. But he had never been able to go through with it. “It would have destroyed her,” he said repeatedly, but Lavinia suspected otherwise. Alice Baker, who donated generously to a British organization formed for the protection of animals, had told Lavinia that animals caged too long would not leave the cage even when the door to the cage was left open.

  In fact, many of the chimpanzees shrieked with fear and clung to the bars of their cage when rescuers tried to liberate them. “It becomes all they know and trust; they become their own jailers. If freedom comes too late it’s no longer recognized or wanted. They won’t save themselves even when they have the chance.”

  The fact that Céleste had been so easy to deceive seemed sad. It began to erode Lavinia’s happiness to know that it depended on the humiliation of another. Gaston saw it merely as convenient. “What she doesn’t know doesn’t harm her” Gaston argued, and Lavinia wondered if Gaston had also used that reasoning to deceive her.