He pushed her back on the bed and pulled her hands above her head. He took the film and bound her wrists together. It doesn’t hurt you, does it? he said. No, she said. You can’t get away though, can you? he said. No, she said, I can’t get away. He opened her coat and then her clothes; when he pulled her clothes from her legs he bound her ankles. She stared up at him while he unbuttoned his own clothes and dropped them to the floor. He fell to his knees beside the bed and bit her back. He wrapped the strips of film around her body till they crisscrossed her from neck to thighs; she could hear the second of two francs drop in the small heater and the hum of the coils as they grew hot. She couldn’t see the heater’s glow slip over the room around her, throwing the corners into dark. She felt him take her and separate her; she felt a spasm when he slipped his tongue into her. When she felt his teeth sink into her thighs, she tried to pull away and heard the film reel fall from the edge of the bed and hit and roll across the floor. She strained against the knotted celluloid around her wrists and feet, and he took her by the breasts as she began to move desperately. Nothing around her made an impact, not the sounds from the boulevards below or the cold through the window or the voices from other rooms—nothing until she smelled the burning of the chestnut trees: and that took her back somewhere: the sensation of his tongue inside her felt like a wisp of smoke winding up through her, and she remembered once long before in Kansas waking in the middle of the night and smelling the fires outside her window, and the patter of her brothers running in the hallway outside her door; and terrified she had gotten from bed, a small girl, and stumbled sleepily out into the hall, and then out to the porch to see the commotion in the night: people running back and forth in the dark, figures outlined by the huge bonfires on the flat landscape and the fall leaves crackling from the heat, the long full skirts of women sweeping by, the wide spinning umbrellas they held to shield themselves from the raining soot, and more and more leaves fed to the fires. The terror of the autumn night burnings thrilled her; she turned and saw him standing in the distance, his hair black like the soot. Michel, she said. She tried to push him away but his tongue slid further up. Michel, she cried, Adrien. He gripped her hips and pulled her closer. Do you feel my tongue there? he said. She nodded speechlessly. Can you feel it in the chambers of your heart? Michel! she said, please I can’t stand it; but no sound came from her when she saw the tip of his tongue wind up through the aorta, along her throat and dart before her eyes. There was that heart-stopping ascension from the fork of her body upward, and she thought she was falling from the bed only to look up and see his eyes looking into hers as he drove himself into her. She held her hands to her chest and collapsed before him, her own eyes stark and wide and her mouth parted and frozen, and she languished beneath him while he had her. He pulled her hands away from her breasts and took those; he pulled her hair from her mouth and took that. I knew from the first, he told her. I know, she said. I knew in the dark on the stairs, he said, when I kissed you. She said, I know that. I had taken off my clothes for you, he said, there in the dark—did you know that? Yes, she answered; were you this big for me then? He buried his forehead in the shadow of her neck. She said, You could have not have been; and she lowered her arms and pressed the celluloid and flesh into the small of his back. You could not have been this big, she said; and he told her, muttering in her ear, I was, I was this big, and I was there on the stairs for you waiting in the dark. And I heard your footsteps on the stairs and I grew erect for you in the dark, with the lights all over the city gone out; I thought when I crossed the floor to you and kissed you I would fill the world. Lauren, he said, and he laid his hand on her face and began to thrust furiously, I was a dead man before you; and then he was released, in a tremor that seemed to catch and suspend him upright: he gave a small scream. She watched his face pass from stricken to dazed; he folded into her. With the long hard breath he seemed to expel, he only said, You. His fingers slid away. His body slipped from hers.
Winter broke. For several days the sun even shone, white and wintry, and after the light one could feel its heat: the roofs of houses ran in the streets, and the ice cracked readily on the sidewalks. Walking to the river, Lauren felt among the people palpable twin senses of relief and debasement. Crossing the river to American Express, she passed one charred hovel after another; the mix of ice and ash covered her shoes, snow and soot settled on her coat. Doorways were blackened, windows were gone, debris littered the distance, all the way up the avenue de l’Opéra to rue Scribe.
Another wire from Jason was waiting for her when she got to American Express just before it closed. She didn’t have time to send a reply. She could send one the next day, she thought, after she said goodbye to Billy. She left the office and went into a café, laying her coat on the accompanying chair and setting the cognac bottle on the table before her. She ordered hot tea. She asked the waiter for the time, and though she still had an hour and a half before meeting Michel, she decided to drink the tea quickly and be on her way. She watched the crowds in the streets and then saw the streetlights come on for the first time in weeks, and dreaded everything.
She picked up the bottle and left in the dark, and realized how novel the partly lit streets seemed; for months, the only light had been the fires, and army searchlights sliding across the city in pursuit of arsonists. Even now not all the lights were on, but rather every two or three; people hurried from one light to the next through alternating pockets of darkness. They seemed to resent the light; they had learned to do that.
She was, then, amazed by what she came upon just a block from American Express. It was a premiere, with limousines in front and huge generators in the street hooked up to klieg lights sweeping over the cold white facade of the Opéra. People were dressed in gowns and formal evening wear, even top hats, parading in to see a movie. It was as though the winter had never happened. A crowd was gathering outside, held back from the arriving elite by velvet ropes and gilded posts, and several very serious cops; Lauren could already hear the muttering. The people in the crowd all had the hard look of the winter in their faces, and the people exiting their limousines were soft and shining and obviously hadn’t been cold for a handful of moments between them.
It was when the last of the limousines pulled up that the commotion began. Out of the back came a tall, serious-looking younger man with glasses, and behind him a small, very old man; he gave Lauren a start because for one ludicrous moment she thought it was Billy. He seemed in a daze, not really a part of what was happening; the younger man took him by the arm and led him up the steps. The guests of the premiere applauded; and when the celebration had become intolerable, the applause was answered by a cobblestone hurled from somewhere behind Lauren. The stone struck the wall of the Opéra, tearing a gash in what appeared to be an old mural depicting a scene from the film. The young man stopped and stared at the hole in the painting. Another cobblestone went into one of the kliegs, shattering the glass that fronted the light but not the light itself. Voices rose from the crowd, obscenities were shouted; and those who had arrived for the showing rushed anxiously inside. Another cobblestone was hurled and the police began pushing the crowd back, moving the gilded posts in an attempt to extend the borders of the velvet ropes. On the steps before the Opéra, both the young man and old man stood without stirring, the former just looking at the painting and the latter just looking at the klieg. Lauren saw the old man’s face light for the first time with an almost odd anticipation; as the shouting around her rose to a howl, the younger man closed his eyes and his face turned in color, until finally he grabbed his head with his hands as though trying to hold something back. The sound of the crowd seemed to become unbearable for him. He pivoted wildly in his place and stepped forward on the steps facing the crowd. “Don’t you know this is the greatest picture ever,” he called, his eyes wide and his hands still holding his head, “don’t you know I’ve spent my life—” He did not finish. She saw the stone rise and fall almost so slowly she would wonder la
ter why she didn’t scream. In a moment everything stopped, and in the next moment everything shifted; she was to remember vividly the gold frames of the young man’s glasses skipping across the steps to the bottom; the expressions around her froze as though winter had returned. She looked back to the young man and watched his face explode in red.
He dropped. The old man stood looking down at him, stunned. Outnumbered police found themselves falling back before the rampage. People were rushing into each other, some trying to get into the Opéra, others—including Lauren—trying to get away. In the jostling she kept looking at the old man, horrified that he was going to be struck down too. “What about the old man?” she cried, to no one, really; to which someone else shouted, “Yes, get the old man!” She shook her head, kept glancing back at him; he just stood there as though fixed on something, entranced and drawn. To what she didn’t understand, until he finally began to run, or at least move as quickly as he could move, not toward any sort of safety, not toward the crowds: he ran for the klieg. He was held by its blinding brilliant light, and he ran for it as though he would hurl himself into it. He had gotten from the steps, the broken glass of the klieg crunching beneath his feet, and he was almost at the light when a cop pulled him back. Literally dragged away, the old man continued to reach for the light; it was clear to Lauren he saw something in the light no one else could see. She clutched the cognac bottle closer to her.
She felt what seemed like a dozen pairs of hands holding her; she kept trying to free herself, becoming more immobilized. It was when she couldn’t move at all, and she thought her legs were about to be pulled from beneath her, that suddenly she was alone, the tide suddenly changed, and she was loosed from the rest. She ran, blindly, to the other side of the avenue. She stopped, looked back at the melee, and ran on; blocks away, she could still hear the shouting and sense the ground trembling below her.
The old man walked to the river. The dawn receded before him; as though in a trance, he was thinking nothing. He wasn’t thinking of lights, he wasn’t thinking of La Morte de Marat, he wasn’t thinking of Fletcher Grahame’s faceless body, he wasn’t thinking of her. Had someone stopped him on his way to the river and said, Adolphe, have you heard from Janine? he wouldn’t have known who Janine was. Had someone stopped him and asked of the night before, and what had happened, and why, he wouldn’t have remembered it. Had someone stopped him and asked where he was going, he would have said, The river, and had they asked him why he was going to the river, he wouldn’t have been able to answer. So he walked along the streets that morning, and occasionally someone looked strangely after him as he passed; when he reached the river, he walked to the Pont-Neuf, and stopped and stared, for no reason he understood, at the bottom of the steps that led from the bridge to the quay.
The young woman walked to the river. She was going to say goodbye to an old man on a boat. Her lover had said he would meet her after getting some bread at the boulangerie. When she got to the river she saw that much of the ice had broken up; in some places rushing water could be seen, and the ice was floating in small bergs. There was still a thin sheet between the quay and the boat, which hadn’t yet broken free. The old man on the boat saw her and waved, and she waved back. Can I cross the ice? she called to him.
He shrugged, and called something back. She couldn’t make out the French. She held on to the cognac bottle tightly and tested her footing on the ice. Halfway to the boat, she heard the ice crackling beneath her, and as she moved on frantically, it began breaking in her wake. The old man helped pull her aboard the boat as her last step gave way. They both looked back. “I think you have freed the river,” he said to her. “Until next winter, at least.”
“Will next winter be like this too?” she said.
“I don’t worry about coming winters.”
“Did you hear about last night?”
“The riot at the Opéra,” he said. She felt the tremor through the deck of the boat beneath her. “Be careful. The river’s really breaking loose now. The boat will jolt sharply in a moment, when it’s free.”
She looked at the quay. “Michel won’t be able to cross.”
He sat down to wait. “Were you there?”
“Where?”
“The Opéra.”
“No. Yes, I mean.” She looked at him a moment. “Were you?”
“No,” he said. She looked back at the quay. “Isn’t that your friend?” The old man pointed.
“Yes.” She waved to him. He held up the bread. She gestured at the ice and water, shrugged her shoulders, and her eyes wandered from him a bit. She sighed and said to the river, “I have to leave Paris.”
“For Hollywood?” said Billy.
“Venice.”
He didn’t ask her to explain.
“I don’t know what I want anymore,” she said, looking over her shoulder to the quay where Michel stood. She waved again, and there was a resounding explosion heard from one side of the river to the other, almost as though she herself had caused it. “Be careful,” said Billy, grabbing her by the elbow; but it was too late, the jolt came, and she was jarred by the spasm of the boat, barely catching her footing.
The bottle flew from her arms.
It hit the ice, it did not break. But more ice gave way beneath it; the current of the river caught the bottle, juggled it between and past the ice, pulling it under and then surfacing with it. It was already beyond the reach of Billy’s net. Lauren just stood with her hands over her mouth.
The old man watched the bottle, then looked at Lauren. She looked back at him, over to Michel who stood watching everything, and now was walking down the quay trying to follow the bottle’s course. He looked up at Lauren and pointed out the bottle drifting past. For a moment the bottle seemed to come toward him, and he fell to his knees on the quay, and then flat on his stomach, waiting for it to approach within his reach. Instead, the river took it farther away.
Lauren realized then that both Michel and Billy must have thought she was mad. Yet it didn’t seem to matter to them; they accepted that, for one reason or another, the bottle mattered to her and they respected the madness. Billy was pushing the rest of the ice away with a long pole. “Do you want to go after it?” he said.
The boat started downriver. Lauren looked at Billy, looked at Michel, looked at the bottle in the distance. The boat moved past Michel toward the Pont-Neuf.
She saw Michel smile sadly at her, and nod. “See you in Venice,” he said, when she was in earshot.
“I wanted to kiss you,” she said.
He nodded.
She had wanted to kiss him. She didn’t know under what circumstances she would kiss him again; she didn’t know if she would ever kiss him the way she had before.
It was at the Pont-Neuf, by the steps, that Billy looked into the cold black water and saw his own reflection, standing, curiously, not on the boat but rather above him, on the bridge. He looked up just as the boat passed under; and on the other side of the bridge he saw himself, walking across the river.
By the time he took the train, the dreams had stopped.
Something had replaced his passion for the past; something had shut off the flow of memorial fragments that drifted up to him at dawn before he woke. The flashing glimpses of twins and Paris, of uncles and California, found their own level of saturation, until mind and consciousness seemed blind to them; and then he forgot them. That left his nights blank and undisturbed; he could not, offhand, remember the last dream. He could not remember the last returning memory. He could not remember the feeling of being at loose ends; the ends he pursued were clear enough to him now. They led to a train, they led to Italy; and three weeks to the day he waited, since that morning he watched her sail down the Seine with the old man; and five days before the scheduled start of the Venice rally, as the Seine began to mysteriously disappear, he left Paris on the only train still departing the city.
He didn’t miss the past anymore. He cast it from him the way he ripped the patch from his e
ye, and for the same reason. He wondered if the train would near the beach on its way south; he wondered if he might catch the sight of a boat on the edge of the sea.
He met an American playwright named Carl who had lived in Paris off and on for a decade. They ran into each other at a bookshop and got to talking. Carl was staying with some Trotskyites he knew on the other side of the river; he had been there most of the winter. The Trotskyites lived in rather high style but they were loyal to Trotsky in their hearts, and were not deterred by the philosophical inconvenience of so many bourgeois luxuries surrounding them. All the Trotskyite women were named Christine. They invited Michel to stay at their apartment. At night when he tried to sleep he could hear the Trotskyite Christines fighting in the next room.
Carl was planning to leave Paris and go to Toulouse. The Christines told him that Toulouse was the place to go and hear hot jazz; after hearing hot jazz in Toulouse he could investigate the odds at getting a train across the frontier and traveling on to Barcelona. The afternoon Michel and Carl decided to leave Paris the Christines gave them a ride to the Gare de l’Est, where they stood in the station bar and drank until the moment of departure. Michel and Carl got seats on the train, which was full but not packed; the exodus out of Paris had abated with spring, though there was still only the single train running daily out of the city—a situation Carl didn’t think would change before summer, if ever. In their compartment the two men sat across from each other and watched out the window, where the Christines periodically waved to them between shaking their fists at each other. Carl read a French newspaper. People bustled up and down the aisles. Michel sank back in his seat and fell asleep before the train pulled from the station.
Days Between Stations Page 19
