I had arranged for us to meet my cousin after the performance. May Chatevin Debardeleben. Her name was almost whispered in my family. She's in Paris, they would say. She plays the violin for the Paris ballet.
She was just as I remembered her, a blithe young girl with long dusty blond hair and violet eyes. Even as a child she had carried herself with dignity and grace. It had not surprised me when I heard she had flown the coop, escaped the massive tentacles of our family.
We found her in the orchestra pit, holding her violin against her black taffeta dress. I introduced everyone, embraced her, and begged her to come to dinner with us. “All right,” she said. “Let me put this violin away. I won't bother to change to street clothes, if you don't mind.” She was so absolutely southern, the same young girl from Abbeville, Louisiana, where her mother played the organ at the Episcopal Church.
While she put the violin in the case I squeezed Tannin's hand. I was so proud of my lovely young cousin. All this time William had not spoken. Now, when May Chatevin snapped the clasps on the case, he reached out a hand and took it from her. “I played a violin when I was a kid,” he said. “But I had to stop.”
“Oh, why was that?” She was wearing large hornrimmed glasses. She reached up and took them off as she waited for his answer.
“Because it interfered with baseball practice. Then I broke a finger and it was in a cast for a year.”
“That's terrible.” She moved near him. “That's the worst thing I ever heard.”
“I used to love the way it fit into the case.”
“You could start again. It's not too late.”
“You think so?”
“Sure. There are wonderful teachers here. Do you speak French?”
“I won't be here long.”
“Let's start walking,” Tannin said. “You can't solve this on an empty stomach.”
We had dinner at a brasserie along the Seine. The lights from the barges going along the river climbed the trunks of the trees, then filled the crowns, then climbed back down. Afterward, an afterglow. A heavy metaphor for love, if anyone needed one in Paris.
May Chatevin and William were in love before we even got to the brasserie. They had paired up as soon as we left the opera house. They walked behind us, their heads bent toward one another. I had forgotten how fast it happens, had forgotten young men's bodies, the cold shaking power of desire, had been glad to forget it, as I now had other things to do, being in the universe on this clearer, older plane.
“My guardian angel must have finally made it across the ocean,” William was saying across the table. “Everyone who goes to Sewanee gets a guardian angel. When we go onto the campus we check him at the gates. When we leave we pick him up again. We don't need him at Sewanee, you see, as it's the closest place to heaven.” William laughed out loud. He was laughing at everything. And his cold had disappeared. It was the truth, what I told his parents later. He was the happiest young man I'd ever seen. In contrast to Tannin, who is as hysterical as I am. Searching, searching, dreaming, playing out the string. Philip Larkin has a metaphor for this. People sitting on the cliffs waiting for a white-sailed armada of hopes to come in. They arrive, Larkin says, but they never anchor. “Only one ship is seeking us,” the poem ends. “A black-sailed unfamiliar, towing at its back a huge and breathless silence. In its wake, no waters breed or break.”
The four of us became inseparable. We went to the Sorbonne to hear a string quartet play Brahms. We walked in the Tuileries and had lunch at Les Deux Magots. We strolled the boulevard St-Germain and went to Sulka to look at the ties. We walked along the Seine and saw the small blue asters in the flower shops and I told the story of V. K. Ratcliff's trip to New York City to the wedding of Eula Varner Snopes to the Jewish Communist and how V. K. bought a tie the color of asters and how the Russian woman kissed him on the mouth as she tied it around his neck.
We talked of writing and painting and music. We harvested the beauty of the city and fed it to each other. One day we rented a car and drove to Dieppe to see the coast. On the way home the skies were full of clouds and over a field of young corn we watched three parachuters playing with the wind. We talked of books we had read and artists we admired. We went to the Rodin museum and stood in line for fifty minutes. “Rilke came here every afternoon,” Tannin said. “He adored Rodin.
âRodin, c'est lui qui a inspiré le poete,'
Ran Rilke.”
“I want to buy the tickets,” I said. “Tell me what to say?”
“Quatre. S'il vous plaît.”
“Quatre. S'il vous plaît,”
I told the lady in the cage and counted out the money as if I were six years old.
The
billets
were beautiful, reproductions of the statue called
Le Bourgeois de Calais
, 1895. Musée Rodin, 77 rue de Vareene, Paris.
We had an audience with the brilliant translater, Barbara Bray, and took her to a concert with us at a cathedral. May Chatevin and I had our hair done at Julien et Claude, Haute Coiffure, St-Germain-des-Pres. We stood outside the Louvre and watched the tourists going in. We bought a disposable camera and took photographs of each other by the statues of the continents. We went to Chanel and saw Catherine Deneuve shopping for costumes for a movie. We pretended not to know who she was and looked the other way.
Often, in the afternoons, May Chatevin and William would disappear until suppertime. Tannin had sworn off women until his book was finished. And I had found out a wonderful thing. You do not have to be getting laid to be ecstatic in this city which worships love.
Often while they were gone we went somewhere and wrote in our notebooks. He needed a chateau for a love scene in his book and we found one in the country and went there several times to draw it in our minds.
“William's sister is calling him twice a day,” Tannin told me. “His family's furious. They want him to come home.”
“His sister?”
“She's visiting Rome with her husband. She wants him to come there and go home with them.”
“What does he tell them?”
“He tells them no. He says he's in love with a girl from the States.”
“What's going on?” I asked my cousin, when I had her alone one afternoon.
“I'm in love with him. I want him to stay here with me.”
“How could he work? An American can't get work in Paris.”
“It's a problem.” She looked right at me. That old fierceness, selfishness, call it what you will. In the last two generations our family has a divorce rate about twice the national-average. The reason is that look. This arrogance we breed or foster, here it was again, in Paris, in this twenty-nine-year-old girl with her perfect ear and talented hands. “I'm writing a symphony. The Saint Louis Symphony is going to perform it when it's done. I can't leave now. This city is my muse. I have to stay another year or two.”
“Then what will happen?”
“I don't know. I want him to stay. He can live with me. He knows that. He can get a visa.”
“What would he do for money?”
“I don't know. Maybe we have to live today and not think about it.” I had been wrong. She had stopped being southern. She stood beside the window in my room, looking out onto the roofs of Paris. She was where she had meant to go, she was where she meant to be.
I changed my plane reservation. I decided to stay another week. One morning Tannin met me in the hotel cafe for breakfast.
“He's leaving at noon,” Tannin said. “He's run out of money and his sister won't leave him alone. He's going to Rome and fly home with them in his brother-in-law's plane. His family has lots of money, but they won't give it to him.”
“They shouldn't. That's good. That's right.”
“He's in love with your cousin. That's our fault, Rhoda. We did that, you and I. He's really broken up about leaving. Do you think she loves him?”
“She loves her work. She's writing a symphony. She wrote one last year that was played by the New Orleans Symphony Orchestra. She has an agreement to write one for Saint Louis. She's going to be a star. Yes, I think she loves him. She wants to keep him here for a pet.”
“He came home early last night. I guess they had a fight.”
“It's not our fault, Tannin. That's nuts to think that.”
We left the café. We walked to the Champs Elysees and window-shopped. We went to the Luxembourg Gardens and rode the carousel. We bought beignets with powdered sugar and sat upon a bench and ate them with our fingers.
“I'd better call May Chatevin when I get home,” I said. “She has to play tonight. Maybe we can meet her later and get some supper.”
“It's not our fault, Rhoda, remember that.”
“I know. It isn't. By God, it has nothing to do with us. We didn't do it.”
Neither was it our fault that the Italian Mafia chose that day to load up a car with plastic explosives and drive it into the train station in Firenze just as William got off the train. For what? To turn around and come back to Paris? To buy a package of cigarettes? To call May Chatevin?
I don't buy group guilt. Or any of that politically correct bullshit. Most of the people in the world are doing the best they can with whatever knowledge they have managed to attain or been fed by whatever myths they were raised under. So, somewhere in the darkness of the underside of existence in the ancient land of Italy, someone, or two or three benighted souls, stuffed a Fiat full of explosives smuggled in from God knows where and with or without a driver ran it into the side of the old section of the Firenze train station where maybe William had just disembarked long enough to buy a sandwich or a drink or a newspaper. He was trying to learn Italian, he had said, one night when we were sitting beside the Seine using all our pidgin languages. Tannin is the only one of us who has mastered anything other than English, although May Chatevin's French is charming and she gets by.
Tannin and May Chatevin and I were together that night. We left my hotel about six and walked to the Jardin des Plantes to see the menagerie. It was cool that evening and May Chatevin was wearing pale yellow silk pants and a green silk jacket. Her hair was pulled back into a chignon. I thought she looked like her mother that night, as she was sad and trying to hide the sadness. “I couldn't leave now,” she said a dozen times. “I couldn't just leave all this and go back home. I think he understood that. Did he say anything to you, Tannin? What did he say?”
“That he is in love with you, of course. He doesn't know what he's going to do. Maybe go to work for his brother-in-law. Make some money and come back for you.”
“You could go and visit him,” I put in. “Surely you don't have to work incessantly.”
“Until I finish the symphony I can't take a day away from it. I've wasted two weeks as it is, but not entirely. I've been working in the mornings.” We were walking along the rue Claude Bernard, trying to find our way to the boulevard de Vaugirard, where there was a Brazilian restaurant Tannin knew about.
After dinner we decided to see the late showing of
Much Ado About Nothing
in English with French subtitles. It was over about eleven-fifteen and the two young people left me at my hotel and Tannin walked May Chatevin home. He is struggling with his novel and takes every opportunity to put off going home to write it, which he does in the middle of the night no matter how much I lecture him on the efficacy of the morning hours.
I went up to my room and turned on the television set for the first time since I'd been in Paris. I turned on CNN and settled back into the pillows with a glass of Evian. It was the first event on the news. The train station in flames, people running with their hands up in the air, firemen spraying the flames with chemicals, demolished automobiles parked outside the station.
I watched the full report. Then I called Tannin. He returned to my hotel and came up to my room and we began to call crazily around three countries trying to find something out.
“Let's go down there,” I said. “Rent a car.”
“We have to stay here. He might have my address with him if he was hurt. He might call.”
“What about May Chatevin?”
“Wait until morning. If she knew she would have called. What could she do this time of night?”
“It wouldn't be him. He wouldn't die. He's not the type.”
“Anyone can die, Rhoda. Anytime. Anywhere.”
“Thinking he was a failure?”
“He didn't think that. He just couldn't decide what to do.”
“We're overreacting. I shouldn't have called you. You should be at home doing your work.”
“Do you think he was in it?”
“I don't know.”
“Neither do I.”
Tannin slept on the sofa in my room. We woke up early and dressed and went to May Chatevin's apartment. She had read it in the paper. “If he wasn't hurt, he would have called us,” she kept saying. “He said he'd call when he got there.”
“We can't be sure.”
“Then why hasn't he called?”
“What's his sister's name?
“I don't know.”
“Should we call his parents in the States?”
“No. Oh, God, no. What if he's all right?”
In the end Tannin and May Chatevin had a car delivered and started driving. I stayed by the phone. They stopped and called every two hours. In between the second and third call the American embassy called to say his name was on the list of the dead.
THE LIST OF THE DEAD. In June, in a peaceful Europe, the summer he was twenty-five. Random, inexplicable.
I told her when she called at three that afternoon. They went on to Firenze to see if they could claim the body. I asked the embassy to get me his parents' phone number. I sat in zazen on the floor of my room and waited for the courage to make the call. I could have looked out the window and seen the Eiffel Tower if I wanted to.