Paris Twilight (4 page)

Press in the code, leap the transom; I spun in the center of a cobblestoned courtyard for a moment, an umbrella ballet—Pas de Deux with Bumbershoot—searching for a resident, a concierge, a stray deliveryman, anyone who could direct me. No one was about. The atelier windows lining the ground floor were dark, and most of them shuttered, and so I headed through the only door that seemed a likely bet, in the corner farthest from the street. It admitted me into a little oval alcove at the foot of a narrow spiral staircase. The stairs curved up steeply for five or six stories, hugging the silo wall. All this felt like a rear exit to some establishment, not a main entrance, but it was what I had, so I went up. Top floor, Rouchard had said, and I climbed until I couldn't anymore and the ascent leveled out into a short, brutish stub of a hallway. The hallway had three doors. One door sported a ceramic tile decorated with a blue amphora and a Greek surname, another emitted the hollow plink of a slow drip into a water tank—the WC, I surmised—and the third was distinguished only by a coir mat reading (was it the exclamation point that made it seem sarcastic?)
Bienvenue, Mes Amis!
I smoothed my dress and turned the key in the lock.

The door cracked open, and I staggered back a step. A breath of air had splurged out, and what an evil breath it was, corrosive, mephitic. My eyes smarted, and I turned my head as I stepped inside as though to evade the brunt of something. “Anyone here?” I called. No answer, no echo; the place was neither occupied nor empty. “Hello?” I felt the wall for a light switch, found none. Clasping the bandanna against my mouth, I stepped urgently through the darkness to where a scrim of light announced a window obstructed by a shade. The shade was like any window shade except that it was made of an infernal heavy flesh, the grasping black fabric of a mourning dress. I gave its hem a quick yank and the curtain reeled to the top of the window and slapped a couple times against the molding for good measure. I twisted the window lock and flung the sashes open as wide as they could go. The air and light of a rainy November midday flooded the room.

What there was of it to flood. The apartment before me was hardly larger than a parking space, so tiny that I didn't feel
inside
it so much as perched upon it. A narrow bed covered with an embroidered, tasseled counterpane and a bolster to serve as a daytime divan took up half of one wall; a small yellow writing table and hard-bottomed chair were set against another, next to a vertical dresser with a dozen drawers. In addition to the front door, there were two others, behind which I would discover, later, a bath with a half-length clawfoot tub and a sink in one case, and a cluttered walk-in closet in the other. That was all. My European real estate portfolio apparently comprised a single smelly room. And within these walls a man had lived for more than half a century! Most of his life! With that knowledge burdening my appraisal, the room didn't strike me as a room at all, more a coffin. Tidy as one too, I thought. The counterpane's tassels were lined up evenly an inch off the floor; its surface was still dented with . . . what? . . . the shape of Saxe lying there?

The notable piece of disorder was an old camp stove tipped on its side on the floor halfway under the dresser. A plume of spilled kerosene, evaporated now, had spread from it across the wooden planks—I could see where the wax had lifted into an eczema of scales and chips and blisters—to a shabby hook rug. That explained the odor. That and a lead-lined wooden icebox containing no ice but half a quart of milk gone to cheese and two rinds of cheese gone furry and some other perishables that had perished long ago. I emptied the little crypt's contents into a plastic bag I found beneath the sink, and then righted the stove—only for ceremony; its reservoir had long since gone dry as bone.

Why hadn't the place exploded! The spooky silhouette etched into the floor wax, a flattened phantom with its arm flung out, gave me a shudder. Raindrops spattered in off the windowsill; they seemed restorative. I bundled up the corrupted rug and lugged it clumsily down the stairs, trying not to grasp it close against me, trying not to trip, trying not to breathe any more than I had to. I ejected it through the door into a puddle.

No sooner had I turned to head back inside than a voice yelled,
“Non! C'est interdit!”
I peered around—no one at all in the courtyard, but, once again, the screech of the raptor, and in a few seconds the door of one of the ateliers burst open to emit a short, round woman in a brown housedress, herself emitting great effusions of protest. The sheer volume of her invective protected me; had she spoken more slowly, I might have caught every word. The point was certainly clear. I was not to dump my crap in the
cour
for her to have to pick up, what did I take her for, a mule, a slave? I fully intended to move it, I promised her (dodging the question of what I took her for), as soon as I figured out the
lieu
of the
poubelle
. My journeyman's French slowed her for a critical second, just as she drew near.

“Qui êtes-vous?”
she asked wonderingly, her voice suddenly bell-like, a wind chime of innocence, and then she figured it out for herself and the rasp resumed. “You're here about that Saxe!” She crossed herself, without piety, and without pity plowed ahead: the garbage area was over in a room behind the mail drop, and, concerning the mail, I needed to attend to it. His box was becoming a problem for everyone, and everyone's problem always turned into hers, she was a human mop for all their messes, a scandal it was, and here came another fine one to burden her more, as though that were possible, as though it mattered. She raged her way back whence she'd come. I managed a shouted
“Merci, madame,”
before the door slammed, then picked up one end of the miscreant rug and dragged it like a corpse across the cobbles in the direction her finger had indicated.

I found the mail drop there also and saw what the scourge had meant—the box marked
SAXE
was so packed that letters stuck from the slot like leaves of an old corsage. It was locked, but when I went back upstairs for the freezer-chest refuse, I found, in the blue bowl on the dresser top, just where you'd expect it to be, a mailish-looking flimsy silver key that opened the postbox nicely to unpin the avalanche. The envelopes I extracted were mainly of two types, neither (let us conjecture) personal: junk, which I trundled around the corner to join the stinking carpet in the trash, and bills, which I carried upstairs, along with the one item I couldn't categorize, a manila envelope with
M. Saxe
scrawled on it but no postage stamp and no address. I placed the little bundle on the yellow table and then, on the Métro heading back to the hotel, I wondered why I'd done that. Who was I so carefully leaving all that for, if not myself? I was probably now responsible for M. Saxe's accounts—I would be, wouldn't I?—and what kind of spendthrift might he have been, though his lodgings implied otherwise. But, oh my God, how long had he lingered in that hospital? And if his debts were now properly mine, what propriety guided me in opening his personal mail, as I assumed the manila envelope to be (the envelope was marked
confidentiel
)?

The more I thought about my unwanted inheritance, this insane imposition, the more agitated I became. I even smelled volatile heading home, my good clothes, already damp, now perfumed with a soupçon of stove oil, and as soon as I reached my suite in the Clairière, I dialed Rouchard's number to make an end of the travesty. I was fueled with resolve and dudgeon, flushed with anger at the presumptuous lawyer and even more at my own compliance, for letting myself be dragooned into spending my leisure day in glamorous Paris performing maid service for a dead man. Perhaps it was the case that the esteemed firm of Rouchard et Associés closed early before the weekends, or maybe there was another explanation involving the brusque secretary I'd made the mistake of deciding to like after all. At any rate, no one answered the phone. That was all right; I would deal with it on Monday.

D
ANIEL, YOU KNOW HOW
I hate it when the rain clears away in the middle of the afternoon, have always hated it. Surely you remember that about me, how I could handle almost any event, weather-wise, could face down a tornado, outlive a drought, except for that one exact, particular thing: the day that starts out stormy, only to abandon its conviction by three or four thirty and dwindle into cerulean. I look up at the empty sky and emptiness explodes inside me! As though love had fled, or a child were lost, as though all intensity—the morning's moodiness, the day's drama, a cloistered inwardness—had come to nothing, had forgotten what it was about. A dreary day that improves by lunch is a parable of youth and optimism. Let it happen at teatime, and it reminds me, creepily, of early-onset Alzheimer's, a blank sky scrubbed, at the edge of evening, of every clue of all that had transpired.

So it was odd for me, as I left the hospital Saturday afternoon, to see that the rains had lifted and be glad. I was even gladder the next morning as I headed to meet Willem through a tinsel-glitter day that verged, almost, on warm. Pristine sidewalks, not a spot of Parisian dust in the spotless Parisian air, all before me appearing so perfect in every minute detail that it was as though a smudge had been snatched from my eye, as though the crystal air itself had been chiseled into a magnifying lens. The morning was all the more precious for being stolen, not from the rainy week just past, but from the season about to descend. There wouldn't be many more like this, not for a while. We sat outside on slat-bottomed chairs, at a trendy little place on a square near the Place de la République, the customers around us hushed and heliotropic, faces arrayed chins up toward the low, sharp sun, like identical daisies in a window box. The place was named Le Faux Henry.

“Tell me all you've been up to,” Willem said. He was enthusiastic to such a cheerful extreme I was afraid he might rub his hands together. He had on a thick, cabled alpaca sweater, jeans, and soft calfskin loafers with the soles still pink, the sort of casual dress that made a point of not dressing down, posh enough to put you in mind of the fineness of the suit left hanging at home, and the fineness of the home the suit is hung in, though his home of the moment was as provisional as mine (albeit, I suspected, even more luxurious). His jeans were creased. His air of ease was plump as a peach. Hadn't it ever been thus with Willem? Even when we were students together in med school: plump as a peach, even then.

We'd met in our first year, when we were both still downy with ideals and indecision, still dabbling in undergrad lit and music and philosophy (and also, for a while, in each other), still awhirl with the meaning of it all, and from there we survived the whole long course of it, from the oak and slate, chalk and bromide of Professor Maasterlich's unpassable Introduction to Surgical Practices lectures on through our graduations and residencies and the commencement of our specialties.

And later we'd worked together, sporadically over the years, but often, and I'd watched him put on the assertive adult plumage of the Lifelong Purpose and grow into his identity. He became Dr. Madsen, for better or worse, with all his devotions and pomposities. Not a bad person, as far as I knew; just a surgeon, society's most ambitious and useful, and so most amply rewarded, sadist. And I was the anesthesiologist, his Tonto, his Panza, his abettor and antagonist, letting him work even deeper mischief by quelling the sting of it, never quite sure whose side I was on, his or the patient's, or mine. I still remembered him as I'd first seen him, the clumsy shy novice blustering his way toward confidence.

And then came the Singleton affair, that horror, Willem and I both accused of gross malpractice—negligent homicide, in effect, not to put too fine a point on it—in the case of a woman who had died during a routine valve replacement when it seemed she should have lived, according to the very fine medical expertise of the very fine lawyer her very wealthy family retained. We prevailed, though at some cost to our friendship, each of our lawyers preferring a strategy of every man for himself and to heck with solidarity. Willem and I were never sure if we were in it together or if one of us was about to be thrown beneath the other's bus, which I'm sure would have happened the instant one of our lawyers found it the least convenient to shift blame entirely to either
the cutting into
or
the putting under
—to Willem or to myself. Our long affiliation did not survive the victory.

It had been eleven years since the suit. My news of Willem during the interim had come through the journals and the OR gossip, how he'd branched out from surgery to charity, from heart to whole patient, and from there to the whole of society; was flying around the globe setting up public-health initiatives, keynoting conferences, and humbly accepting high honors; had established his own international foundation; was the fresh face of enlightened medicine; and in all those years I didn't see my old colleague at all. Nor hear from him, until the invitation arrived to collaborate again, in an unusual but exciting case. I'd been so glad to get the call. More than I'd missed Willem, I'd minded the breach between us, and the operation he described sounded like a healing within a healing, a mending of a rift.

And maybe I should have thought about it more before jumping to agree. And maybe that's why I didn't, my fondness for a long-missing friend whose faults and frailties I thought I knew to a T. Sitting at the Faux Henry, I sensed something new about my friend. Or at least, something I'd never noticed before—at the core of his sweetness, a hard, unyielding pit of privilege. That bumbling, boyish smile of his gleamed with new warning: Take a bite out of this bonhomie, and you could break a tooth.

Eleven years. I'm sure I'd changed too.

For the moment, he was eager to gab, as long as we gabbed about nothing: museums, plays, concerts, food. Where had I been amusing myself? Where indeed! At any rate, I had something else on my mind.