Paris Twilight (3 page)

Well, no, not
us
. But there he was, so we went. The car was a godsend, I confess. It was drizzling out. How blessed I was, headed for my rendezvous, not to have to rely on the fabled patience of a Parisian cabby as I slowly scanned the façades of buildings for the door bearing Rouchard's number. And how relieved I was, coming back out of Rouchard's office, not to face the daunting implausibility of hailing a return cab in the rain, vacant public Peugeots being as magically water-soluble in Paris as empty yellow Checkers in Manhattan. So I was feeling kindly toward Drôlet and his conveyance as I hopped back in and he asked me where to go next.

Kindly—but I still wished to give him the slip. As I looked down at the memo paper covered with Rouchard's scribblings, caution whispered that this location wasn't one I wanted the world, or at least my chauffeur, to know about just yet.

“Hotel, please,” I answered.

“As you wish,” Drôlet said, and something about the tone of his consent, the hint of ironic distance, the temperature-less control, affirmed my decision. I would think better of him, with time. Now, I had a momentary urge to throw acid on all his virtues: the absurd professionalism, the compliant pliability that so thinly veiled a resolute contempt, his confident familiarity with a world that seemed out to confound me at every turn. I upbraided myself that my tempest had more to do with jet lag than Drôlet. Or maybe I wasn't accustomed to servants, only students and patients, and the specter of obedience deranged me. Or maybe it was just that, after Rouchard and Saxe, I had no tolerance left for even one more mysterious stranger in my life.

Whatever its source, my annoyance had the happy effect of sealing me away from everything. I was securely, familiarly alone. The Mercedes accelerated, turned, turned again, and as we twisted our way out of the quiet neighborhood and into the havoc of the bigger streets, I snuggled into the leather as into a nest. The greater the chaos outside, the calmer and more sequestered I was in my rolling cloister, defended by Drôlet's guardhouse silence and the sentinel raindrops coursing down the tinted glass. My mind cleared. I let all that had just happened sink in.

Or, let us conjecture
, the lawyer had said,
family
. Could he know how fraught the word was? Did he understand my impoverishment? Of course he did—at the very least, he knew that I was a foundling. Whatever he had been able to ascertain about the deceased apartment owner—which didn't appear to be much—he'd vetted the heir quite thoroughly. He'd even resurrected old Bettina, my gadabout, globetrotting black sheep of a Quaker elder aunt. He must have known how absolute my solitude was.

There was something, though, Rouchard had no way to comprehend: the security I'd established within that solitude. I grieved—still grieve—the loss of Alice. She and Roy, my “legal” father, were far more than legal in their parenting, were parents complete and entire, and their collegial home and the whole collegiate world of two esteemed professors (he the classicist, she the mathematician) exceeded every need and want a child growing up could have. You knew them, Daniel. Did I ever begrudge them their due? I still can feel the tug at my waist as Alice cinches, from behind, the ribbon of my communion dress, the rough grasp of intensely interlocking gratitudes. I'd arrived in her life when she'd reached an age when she'd given up wishing for children.

When Alice died—two years after Roy did, Daniel, and sixteen years after you—I found a consolation to assist me through my grief, a stance: I exulted in my invulnerability. I offered fate no more hostages. No parent of mine was going to get sick and need care; no child of mine would lose her way and need rescue. Where could hazard attempt to invade such a life? There was no one around me to leave the door ajar, to forget to latch the latch.

Though now it seems I'd left more than a door unattended. A whole side of my life, of which I'd had no inkling, was gaping to the elements, and through that gap had walked a man as parentless, spouseless, childless (as Rouchard took pains to stress), sisterless, brotherless, cousinless, loverless—as solitary—as myself.

Was that how he had recognized me, this Saxe person, whoever he was, through the kinship of our kinlessness?
Let us conjecture
. The question was more than a perplexity. The experience of being recognized by a stranger unsettled me. Not because I didn't know who
he
was—quite otherwise. I had a panicked intimation that I didn't know myself, had been oblivious to my own existence, for here I'd been given notice that there was something essential about me an unknown man had known but I had not. Still did not! The stranger who could explain it all was dead.

Did I really desire the explanation? Obviously, anyone else would. Offered the key to her life, with an apartment thrown in for good measure, she'd not be so quick with the “I must decline!” Never mind avarice: Where was my curiosity?

Anyone else wasn't me, though—hadn't that always been true! The futures of these
anyones
had surely grown seamlessly out of uninterrupted pasts. The progress of their young, budding lives hadn't been determined by a decision at some crucial point, a decision made, a decision carried out, the juncture of the carrying-out still evident in the invisible scar of psychic sutures, like the line in the bark of a grafted tree. For me, as not for them, the offer to unseal the past, to expose the full inheritance, was not a blessing I could blithely accept. What horror might lie beyond the curtain? I traced, with a fingertip, the edges of the other—the not-so-invisible—scar, the cicatrix clasped like a round pink barnacle to the back of my left hand, the surface of which always felt beneath my touch like the face on an antique cameo. It was a villainous face on a cameo of abuse. No. Only the bravest adoptee could welcome such an offer without a hesitation in the heart.

I deliberated over this as the Mercedes angled deftly through the snarl until, as we approached a great wide circle, our advance was cut off by a rapid flash of moving color and a thump so loud it wasn't drowned out by Drôlet's
“Merde!”
The car lurched, and I grabbed the back of the front seat to keep from landing on the floor.
“Conard!”
Drôlet yelled as a crowd of runners dodged around us across the road, noisily, for many of them were blowing whistles, flowing through the traffic as heedlessly as loose leaves driven before a great wind, and a couple of them ended up bouncing over Drôlet's hood. They bounced well, fortunately; fortunately, we hadn't been going very fast. One of the two never lost stride and evaporated into the confusion; the other one did a somersault and tumbled out of sight beside us. I leaped for the door—this drew a further ejaculation from Drôlet—and then nearly fell myself, for we hadn't quite stopped when my heel hit the pavement.

A delivery van screeched to a halt behind us; its driver laid on the horn. I squeezed between bumpers and knelt beside the person we'd collided with just as he pushed himself up onto his knees. He wore jeans and boots and a wool cap and was pillowed in layers of shirts and jackets; a brown bandanna masked his face. I grabbed an elbow to help him to his feet, and the bandanna slipped its knot, and it was then I saw that it wasn't a man at all. She was russet-haired, young like the others. The expression in her copper eyes was caught crazily—seized—between two extremes, opposite realities, like those frames in a film where one scene dissolves into the next and for a moment the overlap forms a single image. Her eyes and her cheeks were flushed with elation and fear and exertion, the excitement of danger, a residue of anger. Intruding on that was a grave still gaze of watchfulness. Could I call her gaze recognition? It was exactly such for me, one of those moments when amid the haste of everything else, everything comes to a stop. The two of us knelt on the wet pavement in the canyon between two automobiles, she in her boots and her road-soiled jeans and me in my dress and my overcoat, bathed—amid the blaring horns and receding keening of whistles and pounding of footsteps—in silence, and for some expanse of time briefer than a second, that was all there was, that silence, and then elation won, and haste reclaimed her and she pushed me away and was gone.

I stood and looked out over the sea of cars frozen in their odd array, bobbing at rest like boats in a harbor, and then they all moved forward a few yards and halted again, as though the tide had turned. The Mercedes remained where it was. Drôlet's door was open and I couldn't see him—had he run for help? Was he coming around to find if I was okay?—but then I spied his coattails. He was doubled over, popping up and down, searching between and under cars, until at last he stood, triumphantly gripping a chrome hood ornament. He held it aloft like a scepter and smiled, and I smiled back.

I could hardly hate him at the moment. I'd gained my own souvenir, a brown rumpled square of cloth, and when I bent to pick it up, my eye settled on something else for which I felt a sudden and overwhelming and unexpected fondness: the oil-marbled cobblestones of a rainy Parisian street.
I'm here!
I thought to myself.
Here! Standing where American professors of anesthesiology so rarely get to stand, in the middle of lanes on l'avenue de la Grande Armée!
, and when Drôlet ushered me back into the sedan with a ceremonial flourish of the Mercedes logo, I waved him off with my bandanna and told him, no, I'd walk. From the distance, I could hear the sirens of the police vans racing in reinforcements and caught on a gust of the vaguest breeze the faintest ghost of tear gas. I extracted my bag and my umbrella from the car and slammed the door and zigzagged toward the curb through the idling maze like a last straggler hoping to catch up.

B
EFORE I COULD TURN
the key, but after I'd inserted it in the lock, I was swept by a strange compulsion to check my hair and smooth my dress, as though someone might actually greet me, might be at home to usher me graciously into the life of Byron Manifort Saxe. Perhaps a welcome feast had been prepared! I'd already dutifully wiped my shoes on the doormat, the entrance's only amenity, and knocked, timidly, and then again, less so. There was no bell. My shoes were soggy. The outfit I had chosen for consulting with a lawyer had turned out to be not so smart for a foul-weather crosstown hike. I had pictured this as my leisure day, one in which I would recover from travel and act the tourist, take a saunter, sit in a café, get reacquainted with the city: an uncomplicated day
à Paris, avec moi-même
, since I had myself to myself for the moment, before my official duties closed around me and I had to start thinking professionally. Already, I was scheduled to be at the hospital on Saturday, and for a Sunday brunch with Willem. Well, at least I'd achieved the
moi-même
part by getting rid of Drôlet, but I was hardly alone with Paris. My adopted mission clung to me like an overzealous chaperone. It was a condition unbefitting a
flâneur
.

I did attempt a bit of a wander, strolling down avenue d'Iléna and then veering off through quieter side streets toward the river. The Seine, I saw as I reached the
quai
, was at full flow, not flooding (not close), but straining its granite channel—the weather must be dreadful in the Vosges! The current that usually makes such a decorous curtsy as it courses through the city had a rumbling rudeness in it: France's river acting boorishly un-French. Thinking it might be fun to traverse the rampage over the most delicate of the city's bridges, I headed toward the Pont des Arts.

I'd spent a lot of time in this city over the years, beginning (encouraged by Roy and Alice) with a college semester abroad (in Lyon, but near enough) and continuing through a convention here, a consultation there, the last of them, come to think of it, years ago. As a result, I have the sort of elementary familiarity with Paris that means I can usually get where I'm going though I never really know where I am. As people tend to, I've loved the city since the moment I set foot in it, though not as so many Americans (and, I suppose, so many Frenchmen) do, in a quaint Maurice Chevalier way, and not in a Hemingway or Scott Fitzgerald way. My favorite Paris has never been one of mustaches and gastronomies, wartime intrigues over pot-au-feu and slow indiscretions involving Gitanes and calvados, of madness by absinthe and death from dissolution or cheese mold or
l'amour
. We don't die of
l'amour
, anyway, Daniel, as I told you, as you know, as we both know, love dies of us.

At any rate, I don't have the attention span required for proper dissolution, or even for proper indulgence, can never remember the name of the dish that was so divine last night, or the vintage of an excellent wine. If, as the master said, Parisian life is dominated by two passions, for ideas and for fornication, my Paris was dominated by only the first. My affection was not for the voluptuary's city, but for a harder and lighter one—of music on the one hand and science on the other, Gabriel Fauré to Marie Curie,
Tannhäuser
(second version) to the Observatoire, a city of cosmic order strung together by endless miles of cold stone streets that could be walked as beautifully on an inclement day as any. Which is good, since I love to walk, though on this day I gave up, finally, and took a coward's refuge in the Métro. I changed trains at Concorde and rode four stops, slipping beneath the angry river, and exited at Sèvres-Babylone.

The escalator carried me to a place where I'd never been. A vast intersection, a busy bend around a park lined with Beaux Arts façades—it struck me at once as not only un-Parisian but oddly un-itself. Its grand expanses lacked grandeur, and its grandeurs—those façades—lacked the conspiratorial confidentiality that makes impressive Paris enticing as well. I'd been in the
quartiers
that lay to either side of here, rue du Bac and Saint-Sulpice, tourist places, retail places, sure, but nevertheless as intricate in texture as this strange place was bald. Its baldness wasn't ugly so much as deadpan, undistinguished, interchangeable. Unlike any Paris I'd ever seen, this spot could be anywhere, or at least in any of many elsewheres: Buenos Aires or Beirut, Dupont Circle, Astor Place. There was one exception to the elevated drab: the nouveau-deco face of the (according to its neon tiara) Hôtel Lutetia. Rouchard's instructions directed me quickly down boulevard Raspail away from the square and into a warren of narrow and narrower streets, where I walked until I found myself at the dead end of an impasse, facing a giant gray door.