Paris Twilight (40 page)

And so?

So your grand morality is really a matter of bettor's odds, is that what you're saying?

I don't think . . .

And your absolutes a matter of degree . . .

Because I . . .

—
and this distinction you draw between murderer and saint comes down to some secret gambler's balance of sacrifice and risk.

No
.

And if you had the chance to take the risk . . .

[Step]

. . . to save someone . . .

[Step]

Would you?

I might have
.

[Step] Silence.

And did you?

[No step]

[No step]

No
.

[Step]

No?

No
.

I see.

I didn't take the chance
.

I see.

And with the concluding of the questions, I gave up the struggle and let the current have me. I'm not sure how I'd even gotten home from the hospital, got myself to Saxe's place and up the stairs to shut myself in and set out the pills in their cheerful array on the table and draw the glass of water from the tap. I don't know how I got there and don't know why, considering what I had planned, I waited for the water to run so cold from the faucet before I filled my glass and pulled down the blackout curtain against any intrusion of light.

But then the twilight was breaking through everywhere around me, a Perseid of quick white sparks, spinning past like fireflies as I tumbled. I tumbled for days, pursuing him. Was I? I could taste him sometimes, ahead of me, a soft linger in the charred air, and my hurtle fled downward at terrific speed through a darkened plain, through an upended farm of shadows whose nearnesses eluded me, though distance still stood patient on the brink, a far gradual picket of tall trees. We were in the rolling cabin again, the snowflakes curled against the speeding glass, and you'd bent your legs up beside you on the seat to recline across my lap. I watched the snow through the window as you slept, thinking so slowly in the warm crust of your slumber of how everything were, and of how it was going to be. And it would have been, maybe, if the night had turned out differently, but now the train was another one, hauling along the wet plateau and the trees that stalked the horizon were a march of linked children, standing to stare as the lights flashed by on tall poles in black fields of blacker violets, and after some immediate curt great span we burst at last through a blinding jamb of doorway, and I hit landing. My hand that could still feel against itself your warmth was grasped in another's hand.

“Are we here?” I asked in the quiet, breathless.

“Do you promise?” came the voice. We stepped out from a room down steps, across a yard into a wood. Oblivion claimed the twilight and all shone clear and sharp along the length of a path where we wandered for hours dayless without rest, or needing such, with the shade drawn down against any chance of dawn, and I inquired, “Is he ahead?” And at one point: “Close?” And at another, “Is here where it happened?” And I was answered, again, “Do you promise?” And the word I heard was
patience
. The woods ended. The flash and shadow of the woods subsided and the clouds were behind us like a storm shore. We stepped out from the edge of the trees. We were in a garden lit by a clear dark stark as moonlight, the path flowing through it a twist of palest sand. I felt in his hand my wounded hand. We curved as the path did, a long swept beach through a ledger of midnight pansies, aligned in an order of orderly contemplation, and no sooner did we arrive there at the edge of those thoughts than I met the only thing in all our journey that cast its own shadow and moved of its own will.

It moved like an abstraction. The geometry extended itself as inexorably as a dream and so absent hurry or halt or acceleration that I couldn't tell really if it moved at all. It extended relentlessly across the path without ever extending all the way, or getting any farther, as though the source receded equal to the brilliant point's progressing, like a river contained in a pure and widthless line that never got longer or the least depleted as the river rolled past unpassing. Its brilliant point was a ball of tannish yarn, unspooling without diminishment. The hand that guided me stopped us there. I saw beside the path and beside the little blossomy hedge the mottled cat's face grin up at me, deranged, and the paw push out across the trail the resolute, tempting, and fascinating line.

The tail twitched. The voice said, “I only go this far.”

I stepped to the string and made to leap over it but couldn't. The voice had released me, but the hand had not.

I was surprised at this restraint, and irritated, and wished wonderfully to go, and made to step again, and again felt the grip. Angrily, I shook it off. I looked ahead, past the hedge of thoughts at the country beyond the string, and saw where the path led, over a high suspension bridge through a bower of gold vines to an island in an alabaster room, and I knew that here every splendid friend awaited me, that here you awaited me also, Daniel, you among the others. Then, out of this most cool radiance, a couple materialized, and a man and a woman ambled down the path to greet me. They liked each other, you could tell that they would. Tell better than they could what future lay before them. It was me they'd come to visit! They loved me, and their eyes met mine in welcome, the gentleman in his buttoned brown suit, the woman in not the very nicest pants, and he turned to say to her, “Then you'll never be alone.”

My foot lifted toward them into its step, and just as it did a thought swept my mind, came to mind in the very most visceral way, or, that is, maybe it came to my touch, for the vision was entirely in my hands. I didn't quite recognize it right away, it felt so distinctly like music. As though I could hear from another place the last notes of the Brahms again, the chord and then the silence, and as I awaited the arrival of the ultimate note, my step suspended, it was then I felt the spasm. I'd only just set my burden back into its chamber. The command hadn't come to release the cross clamp and let the flow engorge the atrium and summon this stranger's muscle back to life, but somehow the heart must have gotten a foretaste, some rumor of blood must have dripped its way in and sent out its funny current, for just as I laid it to rest in its den, the muscle grabbed and spasmed, and I waited, suspended, and another, stronger spasm came, and came again, and Emil's heart—hers—Odile's heart beating of her own twin's life-will took up its cadence in my hand.

All this swept through me with an onrush of greater grief and horror. And with something else that was greater by far than sorrow, and I set my foot back softly in the sand of the path. I reached behind me for my companion's hand. “I do,” I assented, more silence than whisper. “Take me back now, Byron. Please.”

I came around vomiting in a bucket.

 

“Enfin!”
Céleste exclaimed. She was holding me propped off the edge of the bed, one hand garroting my wrist, her strong grasp circling my shoulder. “That's right!
Et voilà!
Now she comes nicely!”

The world blazed. The shade had been lifted all the way up and the morning light pierced mercilessly in. I must have been out overnight, for the hour was earlier than when I'd made it home; it was the early hour when the sun probes all the way to the back of the room, but things were much brighter than they should have been even then. Brighter than that.

I heard another voice, mumbled by distance, and someone entered through the closet door, set something glinty by the sink. “This'll work,” she said, and ran some water, stooped to plug the object in—I recognized the drumming sound as the tap water filled the teakettle, the electric kettle from Landers's study. The girl came over and knelt down beside me, put her face in mine. I looked up and reclined back into my pillow, relieved to see her but my mouth aghast, embarrassed, my face an ache, my heart a scream. “Sorry you're sick,” Corie said. I covered my mouth as Céleste handed me a washcloth, saying, “There you are,” her triumph audible.

“Thank you,” I mumbled through the cloth.

“Your lamp's out of oil,” Corie explained, apologetic, but only for dispelling the pre-electric mood of the place. I saw they'd dragged in extension cords from Landers's rooms. That explained the brilliance. Two tall torchères glared into the ceiling.

“You came last night?” I asked feebly, and Corie said no, she'd just come in, but Céleste had been here. “You know how to scare an old woman,” Céleste said. “Too sick to move, you were!”

“We thought we might have to call a doctor,” Corie affirmed.

“Ach,” Céleste scoffed at her. “None of that!” and said that doctors brought only trouble, that she knew what to do.

And knew how to do it quietly, sweeping the evidence off the table before anyone, including me, could see it, a mess of pills no different than dust and splinters. Her wall of denial was so immaculate I could never broach it, even to ask her how many pills had remained.

And so commenced my welcome home, Céleste brewing teacup bouillon to spoon into me while Corie ran out for ginger ale, which for some reason was all I craved and which I downed in excess with my soup while she slipped next door to play something else on the Bösendorfer. The closet door stayed open, accommodating the music, though I think it was intended to accommodate only the extension cord. It was a unification, generally comprehended.

Thank God for their busyness. Whatever had roused me—and I'm sure I did owe some large grain of gratitude to Céleste's home-remedy purgatives—I wouldn't have wanted to come around all alone with just my thoughts, and the bouillon tasted good.

She was sure, Céleste said the next morning, that my recuperation and Corie's safety had finally broken the fifty-year spell that “that Saxe” had placed on this household. In commemoration, she and Corie drew open all the heavy drapes in all the rooms and let sunlight sweep the ghostly chill from the mausoleum. The rooms seemed resurrected. Then, immediately, day-shy and ambushed by splendor, they just seemed faded and worn. I asked Céleste if she wouldn't bring some flowers up, and she loaded the elevator thrice with violets and set them in every window.

“Were you not safe?” I asked Corie.

“Oh, it was nothing, I'll tell you about it,” she answered, but she didn't tell me while Céleste was there. Céleste, I took notice, didn't let on that I was playing dumb, and I let it all rest until later.

All, everything, later. For days I lay about recuperating from my “illness,” wrapped in a blanket on a couch in Alba's living room, listening to Corie practice, and piecing my mind back together. I felt well physically quickly enough. Within my darkened mind, the drapes stayed drawn. I had survived my attempt to escape. There was left to me now no recourse from what I understood, no safety. I was afraid to move before I could handle it. Afraid to attempt the empty world.

I sent Corie out to Portbou to phone Rouchard, to relay my apologies for missing our office appointment. The following morning he made a house call, ringing the buzzer from the street for the first time in decades and peeking through the premises timidly with a face of anguished astonishment. At the door of each room, he'd poke his head in and peer about with his clear gray eyes before his body would allow itself to follow. I could tell he verged on tears. “They stole the art!” he muttered, but it wasn't the missing paintings that moved him. Feeling with his cane through his friends' home, he seemed halfway summoned by his own old youth, tempted by an already trampled optimism. Promise blossomed directly into wilt. When he left, he looked older than I'd ever seen him.

His visit altered things, of course, altered everything. It announced my ascension. Céleste encountered the news most directly when she came around a corner and met the gentleman face to face, and she stood trembling in place until his greeting made him real, then collapsed into him sobbing when he leaned to give her a kiss.

Her demeanor toward me never recovered. I had to instruct her firmly (firm instruction was all she now desired from me) that the arrival of a long-lost Landers did not quite constitute a second coming and that I would not tolerate adulation and obsequy, an order she complied with obsequiously, and I realized too late my mistake, for now independence and subservience were rendered inextricable, and even her returning to her harridan self (a person I missed remarkably) would bear the taint of compliance. I was forced to concede that a wall of good feeling had sundered our relationship beyond repair.

Corie, for her part, seemed benignly and bizarrely pleased with everything, me included. Had her evening on the steps really settled her soul, removed some long-dangling sword of threat? The police had treated her gently on the condition that they never see her again, but that alone didn't explain her gaze, which was bright as a crayon and impenetrably, synthetically happy.

It fell to me to broach the issue of her unsafety and on several occasions I tried, dashing myself against the coasts of cheer, swimming against the tide of disengagement. I couldn't admit my motive, that I just needed to talk about him, talk about him any way I could. “Why do you assume he wasn't a cop?” I asked, and she said, typically, “Who?”

“Who do you think?” I said.

“He just didn't look like one, I guess,” she answered. “More like a waiter. With shiny shoes.”

I managed to get some tidbits out of her, odd fragments that dropped out willy-nilly like puzzle pieces spilled across a table. That's how I judged them, by color and shape, and tried to fit the jigsaw back together. Without much success. I pressed her only as hard as I could without confessing my cause. “When?” she said, when I asked what they'd talked about.

“On the steps. What was the first thing he said to you?”

“Nothing!” she said. “Not at first.” And so it went. She maintained resolutely that the whole big event had been a mere caper, a bagatelle, a stupid prank with no lethal intent, and when I noted that the cops didn't seem to see it like that, she responded, “What do they know?”