Paris Twilight (23 page)

“Why assume he's a he?”

“Good point. She's tall, blond, and brooding. And your Little One will never, ever replace her.”

“And she cannot believe the pain,” I said. “And she will spend her life playing over and over her half of all the duets they used to play together.”

“Aïe!”
Emil exclaimed, stricken.

“Ouch!” I agreed.

When we'd driven a while longer, he said, “She will, though.”

“What?” I asked. We'd turned a corner, and the shadows had shifted inside the car.

“Find another. Everything that happens, happens over again.”

I agreed with an “Uhn” and dusted off my Marx to suit the premise. “The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. That's in history.”

“Life, just the same,” Emil said. I'd made him laugh. “Except that in life the first time's a tragedy and the second time is too.”

A ways farther, and he said, “What if she's facing something worse?”

“Than?” I said.

“A broken heart.” Even more awful than the pain that will never end, he said, was the moment Corie realized that it would end, “when she sees she'll get over it perfectly well.”

“And that everything worth dying for turns out to be survivable, and life is larger than all the things she thought her life was about, and what did it all mean if the most important thing in the world didn't mean anything anyway? That sort of thing?”

“Precisely,” he said. “What if she thinks she's figured it out, that the only way to make love last a lifetime is to cut the lifetime short.”

And I thought,
What wishful nonsense—do we really so easily outlast love?—
but I thought it to myself.

We'd navigated the detour and were invading the inner city when Emil asked, “So, who is it I should be jealous of?”

“What do you mean?”

“Your tragedy,” he said. “Who was your musician?” I didn't answer. I was flashing on you while trying to look like I was thinking of no one at all, but he persisted. “Tell me about Willem.”

In general, I never minded our pokes and jabs, Emil's and mine. I knew that someday our relationship would decline into sweetness and pleasantry, and I was happy that we weren't there yet, that we maintained our disputation. Ardent is as ardent does. But this—this was beyond the pale, even or especially for us. I felt sucker-punched, after all our speculative Corie silliness, and I made to say so. “Tell me about Willem,” he said, and I burst out, “Oh, now!”

But before I could get my breath in gear, he interjected, “I know, I know.” He knew, he said, that Willem didn't mean anything to me, and said, “I just wonder what you might mean to Willem.”

“That's not what's going on,” I said.

“Ahh, so something
is
,” Emil said, all pleased and gotcha. “Going on.” And I allowed that I'd been worried about it too, but you had to know Willem; just because he and I were squabbling didn't make it a romance.

“What would you call it, then?”

“Diplomacy,” I answered. “Can you handle another plausibility?”

“Fire away,” he offered. So I explained how I saw Willem, that he wanted assurance that he was okay in my eyes, because he couldn't stand the thought that someone out there might disagree with how he viewed himself. We used to be a team frequently but hadn't worked together in years. The last time we had, things hadn't ended so well. That's all. “He wants to be sure I still respect him,” I said. “Wants it enough it resembles a passion. But it has nothing to do with affection.” Except for himself, maybe. “Exoneration is more like it.”

“Over the Singleton thing.”

“Oh,” I said. This was getting worse and worse. “You know about that.”

Sahran shrugged: of course. “But Willem won.”

“He did indeed.”

“And you did too.”

“In a way. Yes, we both won. The suit was dismissed.”

“And then Willem kept on going without a blink and became this saint on the medical-mercy front, acclaimed for his humanity. And you quit your profession.”

“I did nothing of the sort!” I protested. I'd left my staff job to teach more, was all. Okay, to teach much more—much, much more and to run a department. I still operated. “I'm here, aren't I?”

Sahran said, “It looks to me like you're the one who's needing exoneration.”

“Look,” I said, and now I was irritated. This wasn't ardent, this was tedious. There was, as he might say, a distinction. “I'm sorry, sorry to disappoint you. It was a terrible thing, a terrible case, and I actually don't feel good about it, win or lose.” Win or lose, I wanted to say, someone had still died on the table, under the influence of nature or anesthesia or the shock of surgery, the jury deciding in favor of the first, fortunately, but my own internal jury being not so thoroughly convinced. I'd put the patient under and she'd stayed there, was how it looked to me, stayed there where I couldn't get to her and couldn't pull her back, no matter what I tried. Such things happen, but it isn't something you want to relive after a lovely picnic on a leisurely day off. “And if you are really interested, you should probably just get the court transcript and read it for yourself and decide if you want me working on Odile, or anywhere near her.”

“I've read it,” Sahran said.

That took me aback, I confess. I felt simultaneously surrounded and exposed, trapped in the moving car in the deepening dark and impending weather, maneuvering through the snarl of central Reims with a man who'd seemed to like me, or so I'd thought until I found out he'd vetted my dossier.

“So,” I said, aiming for a little bitter irony, sidestepping injury, trying for a stance. “Yet he deigns to accept me anyway!”

“Because,” Sahran said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I wanted you
because
, not
anyway
. Because of the case. Because you quit your practice. It's why I wanted you.”

 

Notre-Dame de Reims was a fortress of night when we arrived, its buttresses rising out of the low, yellow puddle of streetlight like the palisade of some terrible
île des morts
, its heights unseeable against a glowering sky. We dodged in through the transept doors, car to chapel across a moat of cold. A Mass was in progress. A smattering of congregants, or tourists more likely, speckled the pews before a droning sacerdote. A religion in remission is as mournful to behold as a religion ascendant is scary, and the opulent desolation of the scene unsettled me, obscurely. I felt I'd stumbled on a cluster of survivors of a plague.

“And they demolished a neighborhood to make this big enough to pack the whole crowd in,” Sahran informed me; so now he knew everything about the thirteenth century too. I was still unnerved by our malpractice conversation. But I didn't speak. Neither of us spoke much at all, out of self-consciousness, not pique. Every step on stone echoed like the bang of a gavel, and I could hear my whispers slither up into the vaults to join a permanent sibilance, an incessant sly vesper of accumulated gossip that heckled our progress around the transept and back down the aisle of the nave. I've visited cathedrals in daylight, when the sun streaks in through the rose windows and the bus hordes gawk at the names chiseled on the floor tombs, tablets burnished by travel sandals to the brink of legibility—
We read their monuments; we sigh
—but here, tonight, as the votive candles glowed in their niches, ruby ranks of sins committed, sins confessed (they were the sole heat in the enormous room, a vast cold cavern of virtue warmed only by flickers of remorse), I felt the tables turned. How few our numbers, beset by these legions, these perished generations—
and while we sigh, we sink; and are what we deplor'd
. The sparse house was packed to overflowing.

In a while, outnumbered by the solitudes and jostled by emptiness and more chilled indoors than we would be out on the street, we cast our lot with the barometer and fled for a stroll around the block.

The barometer had betrayed us. A cold rain had started up. The cobbles were flashing with quicksilver gusts as though schools of minnows were pestering the surface from below. Sahran deposited me under a stone angel and dodged out to the car and returned with an umbrella, his arm outstretched to gather me beneath it. “Up for this?” he asked, and I assented. I didn't want to get back in the car with our conversation still so uncomfortably unresolved, and the church had offered no respite. A walkabout, even a drippy one, seemed advisable, though there was little use conversing even away from the church. The cloister's whisperings had crescendoed into the drumroll of rain on our umbrella, and when we rounded the corner behind the great church and spied the glowing marquee of an open pub, we made for it.

 

The interior of Le Chemin Vert smelled of yeast and old damp wool and sawdust and was predominantly dance floor, or what I took to be, though there was no band, and the jukebox and an old plywood upright piano were both blessedly silent; the piano didn't even have a bench. A necklace of unoccupied tables was strung one deep along the walls. The crowd, such as it was, was convened at the room's far end, plastered against the zinc in rough single file, standing (there were no barstools) like a police lineup run amok or a boozy reenactment of the Elgin Marbles.

Behind the zinc, a bartender patrolled like a priest behind a communion rail. He was doing a more prosperous business than his counterpart in the cathedral. He had a clientele and, from the looks of it, a faithful one. It was a local crowd. You could tell by the way the conversation paused as we entered, and the heads turned. But we weren't a friend requiring greeting, and we weren't the wind blowing the door open, requiring that someone traverse the expanse and slam it shut again, and so the heads turned back, and the hubbub recommenced. I made a note of it: we were less than the wind. But the place was warm and the warmth embraced me. Sahran shook out the
parapluie
and stashed it with our coats, and we fitted ourselves into the frieze and bellied up to the bar.

He was still brooding on the cathedral, and after we'd ordered some fermented and unprohibited hops (“Cistercians of the Strict Observance. Two, please,” he instructed the barman), he resumed narrating how the church was shelled by the Kaiser's artillery in 1914 and everything in it set ablaze. You could still see the damage from the street if you stepped out and looked up, which was a nonstarter for me. I'd had my faceful of rain. To escape the long shadow of Big Bertha I drifted into an inspection of our companions at the bar. On the far side of Emil stood two men, similar in age (older) and disrepair (extensive), but of opposing physiques and demeanors, the one being carved of abiding stone and the other strung of wire. The first man was a monument of concentrated force and brooding solidity, his face rough as a quarry road and his voice like grit in a concrete mixer, qualities undoubtedly fostered by an infinitude of hand-rolled cigarettes like the smoldering stub now staining his fingers.

His companion was a flibbertigibbet scarecrow, a lanky imbecile who hopped in place in St. Vitus calisthenics whenever his friend spilled a gravelly word, grunting in response and keening wide-eyed from a mouth distended in a perpetual whistle. His hands jerked and glided in a spastic choreography whose exaggerations endowed them—and him—with an odd ceremonial stateliness, a psycho pomp and circumstance. Even at a bar none of whose patrons were much less shopworn, the two men made an exotic set, though I was the only one paying them any mind.

The drafts came, and Emil and I toasted each other for the second time that day. His prescription had elicited a brew called St. Hermes, which arrived in Trappist tulip glasses that had me feeling all the more serendipitous about our choice of location, as if we'd done much choosing. When I looked back over at Emil, I could see his complexion sombering, as though he'd held off crying until he had a beer to cry in.

“I have a favor to request of you, and it's much more than a favor,” he said.

I waited—the inevitable needs no prompting—and he said, “Odile's going to need you.”

“She has me, of course,” I assured him, softly. I patted him on the arm. “But the person Odile needs is Willem. He's the best I've ever seen at what he does. He'll make her right.”

“I know he will,” he said, inspecting a spot on the bar, his lip gnawing tight against his teeth. “But she'll need you especially. Will you promise me something? Will you not let anything come between you and her?”

“Of course. What could possibly?”

“This kid.”

“Corie?” I said. “Corie's okay.”

“Uhn,” he said, unconvinced. “She sounds like a brat, to tell the truth.” To which I insisted no, just smart and young, and he asked what my attraction was. “Do you know?”

I couldn't consider the question without picturing the damage in her eyes and feeling her touch on the back of my hand. “I don't,” I said. “Somehow I keep thinking there's something she could tell me if I just knew what to ask. Like she's a witness.” And as I spoke, and as I asked myself,
A witness to what?
, another's eyes appeared to me, and the touch I felt was yours. “Or a messenger,” I said. “She's like a for-­ tuneteller turned backward.”

“A survivor,” he guessed.

I nodded. “I see her injury . . .” Then I tailed off, but he picked up the thought and completed it. “And you think she can say what happened . . . You know what, though?” he said. “Everyone's not built that way. Odile is. She was scarred at birth. She was a survivor from day one. But what if your Little One's the opposite? Maybe fate is pulling her, not pushing,” he said, and said it was a known phenomenon with political radicals. They might be motivated by some personal or historical injustice, but more often their grievances grew out of no bad history at all. “The hard core, terrorists, you search their pasts and you know what you find? Happy childhoods in Pleasantville.” If they were haunted by something, it was a something-in-waiting. Emil christened the syndrome pre-traumatic stress disorder. “What if this disaster in your Little One's eyes is one on the way? Do you really want to be around for that? I wish you weren't mixed up with her, is all, and for purely selfish reasons. I want you around for my sister.”