Paris Twilight (41 page)

“Well, they want you out of the country,” I said. “That sounds serious.” That was the other condition of Corie's parole, that she get herself out of France.

“Oh yeah, and gave me two weeks to do it,” she said. We were standing in Carlos's library, whose collection I'd set us to cataloging, because I desperately needed some utilitarian preoccupation. And, too, because Corie was leaving and I couldn't get it done without her help. Only half the volumes were in French. “I'm not, like, public enemy number one or anything,” she said.

The cataloging consumed a shocking stretch of hours (blessedly—we'd wrapped up the last of the letters. I no longer had Alba to distract me). The index cards stretched across the polished parquet, and the stacks of volumes, yanked from their shelves, ascended like the columns of a temple ruin. Céleste's compulsive cleaning (it now never ceased, and only of necessity paused) was avaricious of the dust we raised, but in the name of order I forbade her to enter the library.

I still lodged in Saxe's room. I couldn't muster the gall to move into Alba's bed. Anyway, secretly (secret from Céleste, that is), I preferred Saxe's humble, day-cot perspective. It fit my prison. It was easier, lying there, to turn my face to the wall. I preferred awake to the echoing caverns of sleep, and preferred the tangible, touchable wall to invisible doors that refused to budge or that slammed shut to seal off my every advance. All around me, that's what I sensed. Guilt slammed the door on grief, and anger slammed the door on guilt. Then I caught sight of my own two hands and horror shot the bolt.

Once or twice, I headed out to Portbou. Intentionally, I didn't get there. I couldn't bear the welcome, the prospect of a casual conversation. I diverted for the boulevard, on the pretext of stopping in at the ToujoursBonne! to pick up some supplies, then didn't go there either. The haste of the sidewalk, the glare of the street, made those places as dangerous as the silence of my dreams. Every passerby was an assassin, and every truck and every taxi a missile intent on leaping the curb and lunging directly at me, and every thought of Emil, especially, and of Willem and Saxe and Carlos and Alba and Corie—of all of them, and of you—a stone to trip my steps.

So instead I gave both sleep and glare the slip and made my rounds at night. My odd reaction to Corie's equanimity was to develop a resistance to her music. I couldn't help it; it deepened like a rash. I hardly noticed it during the day, but as the clock came round to evening and the hour of her practice, my unease became unbearable. To escape it I'd slip out onto the street. Once through the
cour
and beyond the gray doors, I'd stomp off purposefully for a block or so, a point of no return. I needed momentum to carry me that far, before I confessed I had nowhere to go. Then I'd begin to go there.

Some nights I headed east, some nights west. Toward the milling crowds of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, or away from them into the emptiest streets I could find. No flowing river appeared overhead to guide me. I never went to Île Saint-Louis, or to anywhere I'd visited with Emil. I wished to avoid encounters. Encounters with Corie's music, with the past, with anyone I knew, anyone at all, and most of all with him. Or, not really “him.” But to encounter Emil in any spot where we had gone together would be to encounter “us,” and “us” was far more than I could handle. The merest thought of a museum or restaurant or any place he'd brought me to or anything we'd experienced—a churchyard picnic, a soldier on a rainy night on a street behind a cathedral, a whistler rehearsing his life's central moment for friends and strangers in a bar named Le Chemin Vert—any such pierced me with pain. My walks were epic. Whatever hour I got home, the lights in the grand rooms were always dark and the music already over, and Corie, I supposed, back out with her protests, though I never asked. She never said.

Several nights into this habit, I was aware of being followed. My initial alarm dulled quickly past worry, into acquiescence. I could spot no one around me who seemed to show an interest. I'd round the corner and hear my pursuer, or catch a glimpse at the edge of my vision, and turn to find only the echo of my steps, my own face in a shop vitrine. Still, it was there, a spectral watching. I remembered Corie's conviction that a benevolent Alba haunted her. I recalled how I'd scoffed at the notion. Now I wondered if the same woman's tragic ghost had shifted its attentions to guard her daughter instead. The company enabled my solitude, allowed my longest and darkest routes. I'd loop around the Panthéon toward the Jardin des Plantes or up toward the Observatoire to cross behind the Cemetery Montparnasse, the hour quieting into ever greater stillness, my overseer nearing until I could sense its presence behind my ear, ready to perch on my shoulder, and was afraid to look around.

Then I realized who it must be, that this must be Emil. The spirit was his, equal parts elusive and insistent. My nightly mission shifted from push to pull, avoidance to assignation. I went into the street not to seek, really—more to be sought, attended. And to ask. All those questions I'd had for Corie that were thwarted by her silence were satisfied by his. His calm confirmed me. Especially in the bleaker streets, where only he and I were about, I took my every agonized question and asked it of him outright, and let it sit as still in my mind as though I'd laid it on the sidewalk for him to gather up later as he passed. One by one, I set them down and left them there behind me.

On the ninth or tenth night of this, I wandered down by the Esplanade and across the river to stalk the grounds of the Grand Palais, then angled up toward the Madeleine. The night was a drippy one. The rain was more of a mist, though. I didn't deploy my umbrella until I'd gratefully begun to tire and had turned back along a wide street through a placid, pretty neighborhood that felt close and intimate though its avenue was broad, the sidewalks lined with plane trees. I could smell the bark in the moist air. A slight breeze crossed the avenue and shook the raindrops from the branches above me, and I raised my umbrella against them, and maybe that's why I didn't see where I was at first, as I walked along, because the umbrella cut out the sky. The last time I'd been here, the sky was all there was of nature, though pierced by the beam and racketed by rotor blades. The ground had been buried beneath the crowd. My whereabouts didn't dawn on me until I was at the steps.

It was so very quiet, where I stopped. The night was so quiet, the raindrops and the wind's whisper were all I heard, as though my attention to these smallest sounds had drowned out the roar and the whistling. A marble plaque on the building entrance declared an institute, evidently eminent, apparently defunct. The glass doors had been painted black from inside, their iron grates chained and padlocked. The ceremonial steps ascending from the street were sodden with stray leaves. I set my foot on the bottom step and climbed.

When I reached the top, the portico was empty, except for a few empty wine bottles and the leaves. Whatever gas phantom had been chalked on its floor had been washed away by the rain. I turned and scanned the street as though I might find the multitude, but instead saw only the wide blank pavements, a picket of dark trees—or as though I might even discover myself amid the crowd, constrained by Drôlet's arm, on top of a truck mired in the chaos like a mastodon in pitch. Instead there was only the vast prospect and the solitary silhouette, waiting at the bottom of the stair.

It faced me like a penitent, forlorn, ancient, resolute, the coat hood raised around a faceless shadow. The hood was the vacant hood of the cloak of the messenger who is himself the message. It stood so motionless, this figure, I was teased by the thought it might be my own reflection, cast from an upright mirage. At the same time, I knew in an instant who it was. I walked down the steps. When I reached her I held the umbrella over both of us, and with my right hand pulled her hood back, off her auburn hair. Her gold eyes stared into mine, taking me in, expressionless. We stood that way, silent. It wasn't clear who wasn't speaking, me or Corie.

“You were here,” she said, finally.

“I was here,” I admitted.

“You saw it?” she asked.

“I did.” The news rippled across her brow, and her eyes glanced away. Once again, I hadn't told her something. Before I could finish with the “I'm so sorry,” she cut me off.

“It's okay,” she said. “I understand it.”

There was another awkwardness.

“I'm surprised you come back,” I offered, and she shook her head vehemently.

“I hate this place,” she said. “I followed you.”

“Really,” I said.

“Why do you go out at night?” she demanded. “It isn't safe, where you go.”

I told her I had some things I needed to think through.

She absorbed that, and guessed. “About him,” she said, and I nodded.

“You knew him,” she said.

I nodded again, and she considered, and then the wave washed through and her eyes seethed with that same sudden panic I'd seen in them before: panic for me.

“You know that he's dying,” she said, urgently. “Do you know that? That's what he said, that how was it I could want to die when he wanted so badly not to.”

She was tense with the necessity of having to ask if I knew. “He told me I mustn't tell anyone,” she said, “that I was not to tell what we talked about.” I answered her question—“I know”—to ease her, but she wasn't eased, just rigid as she let it all occur to her. It seemed to occur in stages. I watched her march through the logic step by step. As much as she couldn't comprehend me, this child, she knew more about me than I'd ever know of her, already knew about Alba, and knew what happened to you, Daniel, and what that would mean to me now, under the circumstances, and knew that I'd been sick, suddenly, then suddenly well, and what that might mean too. It took her a minute, but she put it all together. When her eyes found mine again, they were filled with moisture and intense with anger, and she seemed about to speak. Then she seemed not to, and instead, almost as though to catch her balance, she reached up her hand and clasped it over mine, my hand on the hasp of the umbrella.

I smiled at her. “What do you say we get in out of this rain?” I said. She nodded, grateful. She recognized the offer—to set us both down gently. She accepted it, and we turned. A little ways down toward the end of the block, I said, “You really shouldn't follow people around like that, you know.”

She glanced to see if I was really okay. I was. “You always worry me,” she said. “Ever since we met.”

“Why on earth?” I asked. She dismissed me instantly with an “I don't know!” but then gave the question its thought. “Because you kept the bandanna?” she offered, sure but not quite, and then, more surely, “Because you didn't even know what hurt you.” I thought to myself to ask her, Was she so confident she'd always know what hurt her? But I kept it for a future conversation.

 

I awoke the next morning to see that the rain had ended, and the lovely sky was a wash of lightest Dutchman's blue. A fleet of gray clouds was scudding through, on its way to some other overcast. I was halfway to the kitchen when a thought stopped my steps, and I turned and went back for my purse. In the galley, Corie was already up and making tea. She asked did I want breakfast and plopped a second egg into the pot to boil beside her own. “I brought you something,” I told her. I fished Rouchard's envelope out of my purse, the one he'd given me in l'Urquidi, and spilled its inventory onto the countertop. Big inventory: two items. I pulled Corie's hair back and clipped in the little lyre barrette.

“Oh!” she said, appraising it with her fingertips, and then she walked out of the kitchen to the dining room, to the gilded convex mirror that hung on the dining-room wall. “It's beautiful!” she yelled back. I watched the vapor rise from the copper pot, listened to the clacking of the eggs jostling each other contentedly. “Is it . . . ?”

“Tortoiseshell,” I yelled, and yelled, “It's old!,” thinking,
Old as me
. Then I realized that Corie had already returned to the kitchen, and I lowered my voice. “It's one of those materials you don't get anymore.” The barrette, in her hair, did in fact look beautiful.

“So what's that?” Corie asked, nodding toward the counter. Beside the envelope lay the rest of Rouchard's bric-a-brac.

“Mystery key,” I told her. “Mystery keys to forgotten doors. Life's full of them.”

The eight minutes were up and the timer went off and I ran some cold water and cracked the eggs against the side of the sink and rolled the shells between my palms and peeled them. Corie stirred some pepper and salt together in a plate, and we carried our feast to the dining room and consumed it at the corner of the Biedermeier, dipping our eggs in the communal spice plate, sure the candelabra disapproved. We ate without talking much, lost to morning thoughts. I'd just stood up to gather the plates and bring some more tea when it struck me. It struck me like someone had cuffed my ears. I looked at Corie and saw from her gaze that the thing that had struck me had struck her too. Our thoughts had run convergent. “You don't think . . .” I said, and her head bobbed.

I palmed the key. We left the china unwashed in the sink and went off through the rooms to Saxe's closet. Corie went ahead to fetch a light, and I kicked some shoes aside. She was back right away, with the torchère already turned to its highest wattage, grasping it in both hands like a vaulting pole, tossing wild shadows around the ceiling. The closet squinted in the unaccustomed glare. Splinters still lay in the corners from my brief day job in demolition; plaster dust frosted the top of the little safe. The steel slid into the key slot with a stutter of tumblers, and with the first turn of my wrist, the heavy square door sprang eagerly off its moorings.

We sat there in front of it, Corie and I, blinking at each other. As though we weren't quite sure what safecrackers did once they got the safe cracked. I reached and swung the door full wide. The crypt contained one item, a large wood letterbox. I dragged it out but didn't open it right away, not squatting there on my haunches in the dust. If, as I supposed, its contents had not seen the light of day in years, they deserved the best daylight they could get. Corie moved the table to the window as I lugged the box into Saxe's room, and I set it in the sun and pried open the lid.