Paris Twilight (16 page)

 

The woman who stepped through Portbou's door at ten thirty prompt the next morning seemed a thorough stranger until I realized what the strangeness was: it was the first time I'd seen her unattended by drama and emergency. I'd wondered how she would approach our little command performance, this summit with an older woman who had already, in two brief previous encounters, assaulted her with an automobile and stalked her through a church (and also, although I hoped she didn't know it, raided her domicile and rifled through her books). Had I been her, I might not have shown at all. But ten thirty came, and Corie stepped through the door.

“Bonjour, madame,”
she said, reserved, as I stood to greet her. The poise in her voice was businesslike, as was her hair, twirled into a chignon. It was a negligee pose; it emphasized the shape it pretended to obscure, the shape of confrontational unease. Her valise was a bicycle messenger's bag. Judging from the bag, I felt bad for the bicycle. But I liked the girl all the more. At least I had an answer to my question: How did she intend to play the morning? Demonstrably undemonstrative. She clasped the bag awkwardly under her elbow so that she could pull off a wool glove to shake my hand, and I confess the awkwardness gratified me: the maneuver entailed a little unintended curtsy.

“En anglais, si vous voulez,”
I said, gently. Gentle was the only stance I could come up with to undercut such poise. “
Je suis américaine aussi
, you know. Like you,
mademoiselle.”

“Yeah, sure,” she said, her Midwest drawl asserting itself as soon as she reverted to her mother tongue. Her reversion invited my own. I'd been confounded myself, frankly, about how to approach this business. I wasn't sure that I wouldn't be the one in the hot seat, justifying my actions to my junior. But now the roles were suggested and set, and if she wished to hide behind a pugnacious propriety, I had my own safe refuge. Professor was something I knew how to do.

“Please,” I said, and motioned her to sit as though this were my private office and the chair were the scholar's chair across my desk. She slipped out of her coat and hung it on the rack by the door, then came back and, instead of sitting, opened her bag and pulled out the brown bandanna. She held it toward me, exhibit A, and then let it drop onto the table, her head held a little to the side, her eyes transmitting suspicion.

“A coincidence,” I said. “Purely.”

“That was you,” she rejoined.

“I know, it's strange. I'm very glad you weren't hurt. I'm as surprised as you are, believe me.”

“But you kept it,” she said.

I nodded. “Yes, I kept it.”

She stood silent for a moment more, her thoughts seeping through some deep slow aquifer, and then, as though she'd reached a resolution, she pulled out the chair and sat down. She replaced the bandanna in the courier bag and dragged out one of the familiar envelopes. “I guess you want this,” she said, all business again. “I usually deliver them to Mr. Saxe, but I guess it's okay . . .”

“It's okay,” I assured her.

“They're—”

“Alba's letters,” I said.

“Yes.”

“But you are not Alba.”

“No.” Her face pinkened defensively. “I'm Corie Bingham.”

“I see,” I said. Corie. It was the first time I'd heard her Christian name. I let the silence hang in the air awhile, waiting for her to challenge me again—
how come you don't know who Alba is?
Was it a sign of surrender that she didn't ask? If so, it was the only one I was going to get.

“I liked her name,” she blurted, recalcitrance resurgent. “I mean, I do like
her
too, especially. But I'm a Spanish translator. Spanish, Catalan, Basque. I translate these for Mr. Saxe.”

“And Mr. Landers?” I said.

“I've never met Mr. Landers.”

“Don't you work in his house?”

“Yes. I stay there. Mr. Saxe said it was okay. He gave me the key.” She'd been there, she said, three months, almost. I was dying for a description of Saxe but didn't dare ask. She reached back into the messenger bag, extracted a cardboard box, and set it heavily on the table. “These are the ones I've already done,” she said. “Mr. Saxe approves them, and then he gives them back for me to attach to the originals and file.”

Her face looked stricken; she feared a faux pas. “Gave,” she corrected, and grimaced. “What
happened
to him?”

And with that small thaw we began our exchange, which dispelled a few mysteries and opened so many more. She told me how she'd encountered Saxe: a colleague at the university where she studied comparative linguistics asked her if she knew anyone fluent in English, Spanish, Catalan, Basque, and the smaller languages of the Pyrenees, which she did, because she was. Fluent, that is. They happened to be her specialties. Saxe had interviewed her right here, at this very table, and retained her to translate a trove of old letters into English, for which he paid her in installments (the last of which she mysteriously had not received) and with the bonus that she would be allowed to camp out in a nice apartment not too far from campus, as long as she maintained a minimal footprint there, until the job was done.

“So, are you throwing me out?” she said, in a tone that invited me to do so.

“You mean you've finished?” I asked.

“No. But . . .”

“How many to go?”

“Twenty, maybe. Twenty-five? A couple more weeks, I guess. The semester's ending and . . .”

“Then I sincerely hope you'll continue,” I said. I told her to let me know how much she was owed and said there was only one amendment I wished to make to the arrangement she'd struck with Saxe. “I prefer not to do this here. We'll meet at Landers's, and you can show me whatever you've finished. We'll start tomorrow.”

In her impassive face I read relief and comprehended suddenly the fear that had haunted her morning, of imminent homelessness. That was the chip on her shoulder. Or at least the most recent and evident among her collection of shoulder chips. Did it also explain the violent chord? I had imagined (luridly, but without any evidence) that she was upset at being brutalized by her brutish handler, the ponytailed thug she called Massue, but maybe her fear was of someone closer to hand: brutish me.

Jeko stepped over to take our orders, gingerly. The drama of my yelling match yesterday, followed by my abduction in a limousine, had produced a marked effect on Portbou's proprietors: I turned out not to be the woman they'd assumed, was more interesting, possibly, though possibly radioactive. I had their full attention, at least, and as Mademoiselle Bingham reverted to French to order, I gave my attention to her.

The girl before me was smaller than I'd realized. She was beautiful in whole, without, I saw, being beautiful in any particular part. Her fingers were tapered and slightly crooked, and her mouth was thin-lipped and straight, a quick, acerbic slash across her softly rounded face. Her compact solidity was redeemed by a striking grace. It wasn't a willowy grace, or delicate, or athletic. It was, withal, intelligent, for she was as smart as she was obstinate. Her intelligence was of the nitroglycerin variety, unstable, dangerous to carry, and the grace it occasioned was one of fluid moves and gentle settings down, the eternal care and extreme self-awareness of bearing an incendiary burden.

All this I figured out later, after I'd seen an explosion or two. Right then, she struck me simply as an example of a physical self overmatched by its aura, and I flashed on the game your nieces used to play during those Pennsylvania retreats, those family vacations. Remember those getaways? Remember Stamps and Buses? We'd spring ourselves from the homestead to go out prowling for ice cream. Your parents' old Impala, Delaware River glinting past the windows, Olive and Ruth amusing themselves in the back seat—how old those girls must be by now!—dividing the world up according to this system they'd devised.

As they explained it: There are things in the world that are marked with where they're from—postage stamps, for instance. And then there are things that are marked with their destinations, like interstate buses. But you never knew to look at it where the bus was coming from, or where the stamp might go. And how long did we sit there, careening through the Water Gap with those two girls, their hair blowing in the river breeze, dividing the universe into stamps (Candlelight! Seedlings! Cedars of Lebanon!) and buses (Raindrops! Immigrants!). You had to be a kid to truly comprehend it—I never could get why meteors were stamps and meteorites buses. (When I tried to explain the system to Sahran, he asked what it was called when something that was in one's past was in one's future too, and I answered, “I'm a doctor. I call it remission.”) But I do remember there were things you couldn't know whence they came or whither they went (Shooting stars!), and the girl before me struck me as one of those. All I could know of her was that she was here, graceful and willful and momentary.

Her eyes had appraised me just as sharply. At least, that's how I explain the uncanny thing she did halfway through our breakfast, a simple action that subtly, by her grace, changed everything into its reverse, for afterward I was never again, with her, the professor in control of the defiant student, far from that: I was never again in control. She reached her arm slowly across the table, over the pot of tea and her
pain au chocolat
, and lay four narrow, crooked fingers on the back of my left hand, covering the scar. I was shocked at the feel of it, the feel of skin on my skin, the feel of her shock at the way the rough scar felt. I looked down at her fingers on my hand with the dumb, searing focus of the child on the scooter staring at her foot on the sidewalk, and then back at Corie's silent face. “A burn,” I explained. “An accident, maybe, I don't know. I was a kid. I don't remember.”

Did I imagine that her wide eyes were moist, staring at me so forcibly? Moist and smart and impassively calm, setting me down gently. And then, of a sudden, all those things were dispelled by a second emotion that washed through like a shore wave over beach pebbles, and for a moment her expression reeled with panic and I thought:
Panic for me
. Then she was calm again, empty-eyed, and I watched the calmness harden into the same suspectful opacity she'd worn when she walked in the door.

When we were done talking, which is to say when we'd wrapped up the preliminaries and were too tired or timid to descend into the next deeper level of things, we left Portbou and said goodbye on the sidewalk. Of course we were headed in the same direction. For reasons I couldn't quite name, I did not want her to know that, or to know where I lived; there was a cold deceit hidden in my fond farewell. More dangerous, as it turns out, there was a fondness within my deceit. As we took our leave, I felt the heat on the back of my hand spread into general yearning. She headed off toward rue Nin, and I turned to wander—where? I didn't know—until it would be safe to follow, and no sooner had I wheeled about than I found myself face to face with my little gypsy-ish family clan—the father and his daughter and her housecat—straggling back on my side of the street.

Maybe they'd been to the park. Now, surely, they were headed home. In retreat they didn't display the neat tripartite experiment in perception that had been their distinction before, with one of them oblivious to where he was, one hyperaware of it but only in terms of her task, and the last oblivious to nothing whatsoever and keenly aware of all. Now they seemed unified in weariness. The father carried the scooter, and the daughter carried the cat.

She lugged it like a stuffed toy, her arm garroting its chest, its forelegs stuck out straight ahead like a sleepwalker in a horror flick, its little pink tongue stuck out a little too, its back legs bouncing loose against her leg—dangled this way, the cat was nearly as long as the child. It didn't seem to object to this rude transport, though as they passed me I discerned a wacko tolerance in its expression, and immediately I retrieved something I'd thought was lost for good, the recollection I had chased around my skull in the middle of the previous night. Sahran had said . . . Sahran had said . . .

Sahran had said “a tragedy survived.” But then later, turning down the museum hallway away from the painting and away from his thoughts of storms and forests and missing ring fingers and folded umbrellas and the woman who had managed to get through the worst and had only good to look forward to, he'd said something else that I've neglected to report to you. Sahran had said, “Or maybe not.”

“I
T'S ALL ABOUT THE CAT
, isn't it?”

“What's that mean?” Sahran said.

“The cat in the painting,” I said.

He waited.

“Yours didn't have one.”

We were strolling under the trees along the Quai d'Anjou, fresh from a lovely dim restaurant, looking out across the river from Île Saint-Louis, indulging in the rarity of a clear-skied twilight that looked more wintry than the standard rainy evening. With the overcast dispelled, winter had lost its veil, and an arctic iciness crazed the wide heavens like frost across a windowpane. I envied the sky. Involuntarily (or maybe not), I was shedding my cover, but with no gain of clarity. The meal had been sumptuous, from foie gras to
île flottant
, and the conversation as seductive as I would allow myself to allow. I rattled on about the Église d'Hiver without putting a name (Corie Bingham) to the quest that had brought me there, and I brought up my other new friends without giving any more than their names. “You have your diplomatic ways,” I prodded Sahran, one diplomat to another. “How would I go about getting in touch with a guy named Carlos Landers? He isn't in the phone book.” Sahran jotted the spelling down on a little notepad and then slipped it back in his pocket and didn't ask me why. “And also a guy named Byron Saxe,” I added, why not. “Middle initial
M
.”