The Architecture of Fear (8 page)

She had never spent any real time alone before. She had always had her family, friends, people who wanted to be with her, know what she was doing, where she'd been. Especially Robbie, who could never understand that, just because she liked him fine, it didn't mean that she wanted to sleep with him.

It would be nice to have May in Paris all to herself. To find out what she wanted to do on her own, alone, instead of what other people wanted her to be doing. She'd be bound to meet some people when school started, if she got too lonely. When Liz got back she could decide what she wanted to do after that.

***

A few hours later someone honked in the street outside, and Isobel left, carrying an old, scarred leather suitcase. Tracy felt a flash of panic when she heard the car drive away and realized she was all alone, all her friends were thousands of miles away and she had no one to turn to if anything went wrong.

She looked around the apartment for a while, nervously straightening things and checking out the sleeping nook. Its arched walls were covered with a dark blue Indian print with hundreds of fingernail-sized round plastic mirrors sewn into the cloth, and it had six tiny bull's-eye windows arranged like the points of a six-pointed star, three on each side of the angle where the arched sides met. With its fresh sheets and neatly made bed it was an island of order in the apartment's utter chaos.

She climbed back down again, tried to straighten up a little, but whenever she opened a drawer or cabinet to put something away it seemed like something else fell out, and there was no way she could do more than make a sort of little clearing for herself in the middle of the confusion unless she went through everything and reorganized it from the beginning. She gave up and sat down at the drafting table, took some of the paper and a felt-tip pen Isobel had left uncapped there and started to write Robbie a letter, all about the riots and the burning car and how she already missed him and all their friends, but not about Liz or where she was going to be living. After a few moments her panic subsided, and she put the letter aside for later, suddenly too tired to continue.

The narrow, cheap-looking, full length mirror nailed to the bathroom wall opposite the sink showed her that she looked as exhausted as she felt. The tub seemed clean, but Tracy scrubbed it thoroughly again just in case, put the soaps and shampoos Isobel had left behind away in the medicine cabinet and got out her own, then climbed into the huge old tub and lay there soaking in the hot water, just staring at the bright reflections the little twenty-five-watt bulb over the mirror above the sink made on the water and the way the light glinting from the shiny silver faucets shimmered off the ripples and soap bubbles. She could feel all of the tension and exhaustion draining out of her, until finally, without realizing what she was doing, she nodded off to sleep.

To dream that Robbie was there, that he'd just walked into the bathroom and sat down on the edge of the tub as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She was glad to see him, though she'd never let him see her all the way naked before, but it didn't matter because the light glimmering off the water had intensified until the whole bathtub was a pool of liquid fire cloaking her in radiance. It was a giant burning eye, her eye, she was looking out of it at him, and there was no more reason to be embarrassed about not having any clothes on than there would have been if she hadn't been there at all.

Robbie reached out and stroked her cheek. For an instant he wasn't Robbie at all, he was a dark-skinned, exotically handsome man she'd never seen before. She could feel his eyes on her and there was a crowd of people all around her, examining her critically, laughing at her nakedness. Then they were gone, Robbie was just Robbie again, and he was melting into the light with her, into the cool, comforting fire.

She felt immensely refreshed when she awakened, as though she'd had a whole night's sleep in the tub, though she could only have been asleep a few moments, because the water was still hot. She'd been dreaming about someone—not Robbie, she remembered dreaming about him at first, but someone else, a stranger. The kind of man she had always wanted to meet and never had, and yet in her dream she had felt closer to him than she had ever felt to Robbie or to anyone else. Almost like a brother, if she'd had a brother she loved the way she loved Liz, the way Isobel must have loved her brother. Yet when she tried to recapture his face, remember anything about him, it was all gone, and there was only the fading memory of how she'd felt, the certainty that she'd touched something precious, irreplaceable, only to lose it again.

She toweled herself off in front of the narrow mirror, dried her hair. The air was chilly and even though the dusty bulb over the sink was tiny and dim, no bigger than one of the little bulbs around electric make-up mirrors and not nearly so bright, there was still something paradoxically harsh about its light that made her look ugly, almost deformed, when she studied herself in the mirror. Yet she'd always known she was conventionally pretty, and even if she wasn't striking enough to ever be really beautiful, she'd still never needed to worry about being unattractive.

It had to be the cheap mirror, not the light. Some sort of warped plastic with flaws in it that distorted the way she really looked. Like those fun-house mirrors that made you look like a dwarf or as if you weighed two hundred pounds.

She felt better when she left the bathroom and put on one of the new cotton nightshirts her mother had bought her. The light switch was by the ladder. She turned the light off, then climbed up to the loft and crawled in between the clean, slightly rough sheets, so sleepy she almost forgot to pull the guard rail shut behind her.

The nook seemed warmer than the rest of the apartment, the faint odor of the foam rubber mattress, impregnated with memories of all the people who must have slept on it, somehow only part of that comforting warmth. Tracy lay there a moment, content and at peace, staring up at the arch of the ceiling with its Star-of-David constellation of tiny bull's-eye windows just above her, like portholes opening on the sky. Through the glass she could see the stars; and on her bed the faint gleams where the mirrors sewn into the fabric around her caught the starlight and threw it back.

She reached up and touched a finger to the cool glass of one of the tiny windows, traced a circle around its inside edge. Everything I need is right here, she realized, not even surprised, just before she fell asleep.

***

Tracy was awakened the next morning by crisp sunlight shining on her face, winking off the little plastic mirrors on the nook's walls. Propping herself up on her elbow, she looked down at the apartment. The sunlight streaming in through the stained glass threw pools of shifting color on the furniture and floor, and she could see that she must have done a better job of straightening up the night before than her exhaustion had allowed her to realize. Or perhaps the apartment's unusual shape had confused her. But now, looking down on it from the nook and seeing how it widened out below her to the stained-glass window's bright colors at the far end, she could see how the way the apartment was set up
made sense,
despite the clutter—like the house itself, which she'd assumed would be so ugly when she was outside the gate, but which had turned out to be totally different once she got inside.

She sensed the future opening out in front of her, unpredictable and exciting, full of rooms that didn't all have to be just rectangular boxes but could be any shape at all, full of things she couldn't imagine yet and wouldn't recognize for what they were until they happened.

As she was getting dressed she saw the unfinished letter to Robbie on the table. She reread the first few lines, then crumpled it up and threw it away. Everything she'd had to say about how terrifying Paris was with the riots and so forth seemed silly, childish. She'd write him another letter some other time, when she had something worth talking about.

Besides, Robbie had always gotten along too well with her parents for her to tell him anything about the riots that he might pass on to them. She'd better write him when she wrote her mother, tell them both about how peaceful everything really was and how much the papers were exaggerating what was going on. Coming from him it would be more convincing than if she just put it in the letter to her mother.

A bird was singing in the tree outside. She opened the window carefully—though the stained glass seemed sturdy enough—but the bird flew away before she could get a look at it. With the window open she could see the tree was a locust tree, with a weathered wooden bench beneath it. The sun glinted off strings of multicolored plastic beads some previous tenant had hung from the branches nearest the window.

She finished dressing and went out to explore the yard. Off to the right she found an abandoned shed with the roof falling in. In a neglected flower bed behind the house was a concrete birdbath full of stagnant water and an overgrown chunk of yellowish limestone with a grotesque imp's face carved in it. Somehow the abandoned aspect of everything made it all that much more picturesque, more private. Her own secret garden.

***

She looked around the neighborhood and, from a little corner grocery, bought herself enough food to fill up Isobel's tiny refrigerator, then spent the rest of the day straightening up the apartment, repositioning chairs and tables, moving things out of cupboards and dressers to make room for her own stuff, carefully stacking the portfolios and loose drawings away exactly as she found them. She glanced inadvertently at one or two of them, but tried to put the rest away without looking at them, out of some obscure sense that if she examined them without permission she'd be invading Isobel's privacy.

The Sorbonne was closed when she went to register the next morning, surrounded by the uniformed soldiers with their Roman centurion helmets and plastic shields that had been chasing the rioters the night before. Two girls she heard speaking English told her the students had shut the school down and were occupying the Theatre de l'Odeon, a few blocks away. She went there to look, but one glance inside at the chaos and all the people making incomprehensible speeches was enough to tell her that there was no one there she would have wanted to meet, nothing there for her.

She didn't really care if the Sorbonne was closed or not, but if her parents learned she wasn't going to school they'd yank her back to Downer's Grove and family dinners and Saturday nights parking with Robbie because there wasn't anything better to do. She had to find some other school before her parents found out. Anything, just so that she could convince them to let her stay in Paris until the Sorbonne started again.

Maybe Marcelo could help.

She disliked him as soon as he opened the door: emaciated, with long greasy black hair, skin-tight black jeans and some sort of pointy gray suede boots with buckles, the top buttons of his tight black silk shirt open to display a hairy chest and the fine gold chain he wore around his neck, heavy tasteless rings on his fingers. An ageing hippie gigolo, probably closer to forty than to Liz's twenty-two.

But when he realized who she was his smile transfigured his face and made him suddenly seem almost boyish, and when he invited her in, in his broken, heavily accented English, so much worse than Isobel's, his voice was warm, with only a trace of petulance to remind her of her first impression.

The apartment was small but neat. Marcelo apologized for not having been able to meet her when she'd arrived. He seemed so genuinely pleased to see her that, even though she still found him as physically repulsive as ever, she began to see a little of what must have made Liz like him.

When she explained her problem with the Sorbonne he told her about the Alliance francaise, which wasn't part of the university system and so hadn't been affected by the strike, then walked her over to it and helped her register. By the time he'd put her on the metro to take her home, she was enrolled for a one-month beginner's course, starting the next Monday. Yet she knew that no matter how helpful he'd been, she didn't really want to see him any more than she had to.

The gate was open—she must have forgotten to lock it—and the stench from the ground-floor bathroom hit her as soon as she opened the door to the house. It was far worse than the night before, almost as if something had died there and was rotting. Maybe something
had
died in there—a mouse or a rat or something—but more likely some bum had been using it, like the three winos she'd seen sharing a bottle in the metro. She checked to make sure the gate was securely locked behind her.

She held her breath as she locked the front door, then managed to keep from taking a new breath until she was halfway up the spiral staircase. The lights went out just as she was reaching the third floor, but there was a small skylight over the stairwell and enough light filtered in for her to find the door.

She could still catch a hint of the stench even on the top floor, but the door to her apartment sealed it out. In any case, the downstairs bathroom was a problem for the woman Isobel had said came in to clean once a week, not for Tracy. And in a way the stench even helped Tracy keep her apartment that much more private: it was another barrier keeping people she didn't want to know from ever learning just how marvelous the house was upstairs, in the same way that the dull gray wall outside sheltered the house and garden from prying eyes.

As she locked the door to the hall she realized just how much the apartment was
hers,
in a way that nothing had ever been hers before—certainly not her room at home, with her mother going through her things whenever she cleaned it, her father's sneak inspections. She surprised herself hoping that something would happen to keep Liz and Isobel in Portugal longer so she wouldn't ever have to leave.

***

She spent her mornings putting the apartment in order. As she moved furniture around and went through everything in the various heaps and piles or hidden away in drawers and cabinets and closets, her original impression of the apartment as a sort of hippie magpie's nest cluttered with a random mixture of salvaged junk and art changed. Since new tenants could never throw out anything their predecessors had left behind, but only add to the accumulation, the seeming chaos was really a multitude of individual tastes and histories mingled together in overlapping layers, like the archaeological strata she'd seen scientists trying to disentangle in that documentary on excavations in the Holy Land she'd been shown in Sunday School when she was fourteen, but with each of the strata preserving something of one of the sixteen tenants who'd lived there before her.