The Same River Twice (11 page)

“The blankets! Use the blankets!” said Odile, undraping hers from her shoulders as she ran. The others followed her and began slapping at the fire with their moth-eaten lap robes.

Rachel laid out the garden hose to starboard and called again for Groot to turn it on. She moved swiftly, resolutely, without panic.

Cursing himself for not having the vidcam to hand, Max pulled the pin on the extinguisher, squeezed the lever, and directed the chemical blast at the base of the burning wheelhouse. It had little effect. He squeezed harder. The flames fell back.

“Smother, don’t fan,” counseled the editor. He had rolled his blanket into a tight tube with which he flogged the foredeck fire. The others did likewise.

When at last the water came on, Rachel stood one step from the top of an aluminum stepladder and, half choking on the oily smoke, systematically hosed down the wheelhouse roof. The fire had not eaten far into the wooden superstructure—mostly it was the gasoline from the hurled bottle that burned—and gradually the flames began to yield. Groot reappeared with a bucket on a chain; he and Max worked in relay, filling the bucket from the river, pitching the water across the deck. The others continued to beat at small patches of resurgent flame with their blankets. And working together like this, vigilant and unspeaking, they were able finally to extinguish the fire.

La fluviale
arrived some minutes later. While the officers questioned Groot about what had happened—repeatedly referring to the bottle of gasoline as
“la bombe”-
—Odile and Rachel stood a little to one side, whispering. No, Groot said, he could think of no one who wished him or Rachel harm. No, he was not politically active, he avoided social causes. No, there had been no warnings, no threats, nothing at all out of the ordinary.

Odile and Rachel ceased their whispering and now looked on with an air of stoic hauteur, their faces expressionless.

Max thought,
I’ve been paying the wrong kind of attention
.

THAT WEEKEND, obeying an impulse that she dared not examine too closely, Odile took the train to Nantes to visit her father. He met her at the station in a distressed-looking Italian sports car she’d not seen before. Like most of the objects with which he surrounded himself, it suited him.

“So,” he said. “You’ve come.”

“You knew I would.” Embracing him, she wondered if he’d lost weight.

Sebastien lived some distance outside Nantes in a quiet town called Vertou, and as he drove them there, leaving behind the small bustle of the city, continuing past the shopping malls and suburban housing tracts that had sprung up on its outskirts, Odile saw the land open out into fields and vineyards and little towns with churches, and she began to feel something like relief.
Here
, she told herself,
I’ll be able to think
.

Her father had just returned from a three-week stint in Africa, and he told her about it as he drove. A geographer by training, he had been hired by the government of Mali to assess the environmental impact of a hydroelectric plant it proposed to build on the Niger. The undertaking was quixotic and grandiose in the sub-Saharan manner, almost certain to come to nothing, but it appealed to Sebastien’s sense of social betterment. He was an
engagé
and Trotskyist of the old school, a natural contrarian. This last trait Odile had inherited in full, but, without the politics to give it shape, it expressed itself unpredictably. She had learned to live with it.

“The case of Mali is special,” Bastien told her as he drove, “and it would seem that now, despite my best efforts, I am a specialist.” He had a toothy smoker’s smile that had always captivated her.

At the house, a small nineteenth-century stone structure two stories tall and roofed in blue slate, Odile retired to her bedroom to change clothes. Although this was not the house of her childhood—Sebastien had moved here only after her mother’s death, five years ago—she had come to feel unexpectedly at home in it. Nestled amid a tumult of magnolia trees, now in brick-red bloom, the house was for her a kind of refuge, a place to seek shelter, and she often came here when Sebastien was away. When he was in residence, things were sometimes less restful.

She emerged from the house to find Sebastien in the back property, leaning a ladder against the old oak that marked its limit. The tree had been struck by lightning while he was in Africa, and its upper half was now split and splintered with one massive limb hanging off the trunk, broken but not detached, reaching almost to the ground. Sebastien climbed the ladder, chain saw in hand. When he started up the saw and its howl obliterated thought, Odile went back into the house.

His self-certainty, his aversion to small talk, this retreat into physical activity: all of it was deeply familiar to her. Opening the refrigerator, she found a bag of coffee beans, a quart of milk, some leeks, and three eggs. This, too, was familiar, and she decided to take the car into town for groceries.

The church bells struck four. Thin white clouds scudded overhead as she drove.

One summer afternoon when Odile was thirteen, she was with her best friend, an imaginative girl almost a year her senior, window-shopping amid the clothing boutiques,
parfumeries
, and leather-goods stores of downtown Nantes. At the time, Odile’s parents were professors at the university, and though their income met their expenses, not much money was left over for nonessentials, and compared with her contemporaries she felt poorly turned out, lacking even the smallest tokens of adolescent chic. Her friend was sympathetic, and together they set out to remedy the situation. They began with easily pocketable items—lipsticks, tortoiseshell combs, sunglasses—but as the summer wore on and they became more confident, their shoplifting grew more ambitious. On the afternoon in question, they hesitated outside a designer boutique, inspecting a red silk dress that Odile particularly coveted. When her friend judged the moment to be right, they entered the shop. The friend’s role was to distract the shopkeeper, a sharp-faced middle-aged woman with glasses, while Odile looked casually
through the racks. When, with four or five scarves laid out on the counter before her, the friend asked to see yet another, Odile quickly turned her back and stuffed the dress under her shirt. The friend chose a scarf and paid for it, and the two girls left the shop together. They’d gone scarcely half a block when the shopkeeper caught up with them, grabbed each girl by an ear, and dragged them back to the store. The police were called, then the girls’ parents. Sebastien arrived. After paying for the dress, he put the girls in his car and drove the friend home, all without uttering a word. When he and Odile were finally alone in the car, she in the backseat, he asked her why she stole. Odile shrugged. She didn’t know. Was it the thrill? he suggested. No, not that. Maybe she had some kind of grudge against the world and its injustices? Not that, either. No grudge. Was it the clothes? he persisted. It was the clothes, wasn’t it? Yes, she answered wretchedly, it was the clothes. Sebastien lit a cigarette and drove for awhile in silence. “Then,” he said at last, “you will learn to sew.” His eyes met hers in the rearview mirror. “Your mother will teach you,” he added. And Odile burst into tears.

Nobody, least of all herself, could have imagined that at that moment she had found her future vocation. It proved to be a turning point, and she wondered how many such moments a single life might afford.

Parking the car in front of the post office, Odile extracted a string bag from her purse and went shopping for dinner. She was by now a familiar figure in the local business establishments, and at each stop—the baker’s, the butcher’s, the greengrocer’s, the wine merchant’s—she lingered to exchange a few words with the proprietor. Sebastien was well liked in Vertou, and everyone with whom Odile spoke inquired after him respectfully. Before his first African sojourn, a year ago, there had even been talk of his running for mayor. He hadn’t discouraged the idea, but neither had he troubled himself over it, and in the end the incumbent had been reelected.

Odile got back to the house around half past six. The oak’s damaged limb had been cut up for firewood, now stacked neatly against the tool shed. When she took the groceries into the kitchen, Sebastien appeared. “And now,” he announced, grinning his satyr’s grin, “one will have an aperitif.”

They took their drinks in the living room, sitting side by side on a sofa facing the fireplace.

“You look very well,” he said once he’d studied her.

“So do you,” she answered.

He dismissed her words with a wave. “In Mali everyone is sick. It’s normal. I have a little bit of what they have, and as you can see I’ve lost some weight. But that’s all. It is not yet necessary to flatter me about my health.”

“Good,” she said, and sipped her pastis. “I’m happy to hear that.”

“What about Orson Welles? Going from one success to another, I suppose?”

“Max is fine. He sends his best.”

“Yes? Is he working?”

“Always. He’s like you in that respect, remember?”

Sebastien sniffed dismissively, as if at the very idea of such a comparison. “Your husband doesn’t know what work is. One thing I will say, though. I’d trade him a month of Mali for a day of filming Isabelle H. An extraordinary woman, truly. Tell me, what’s she like?”

“Actually,” Odile said, “Max put that project on hold for the time being. He wants to work out some new lighting ideas. He’s shooting video.”

“Ah yes, of course. Lighting ideas.” Sebastien took a swallow of port and grimaced. “I should have known.”

“What is it with you?” Odile demanded. “Max is everything you believe in: independent, idealistic, driven. He never does the easy thing or follows the conventional wisdom. Money means nothing to him except what he needs to make his films. He thinks for himself, and he’s uncompromising. Why can’t you accept that?”

Sebastien shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s irrational, isn’t it?”

“You don’t like him because he’s American.”

“But I do like him. I just don’t respect him.”

“Well, believe me,” she said, getting up to check on dinner, “sooner or later you’ll learn to.”

By the time they sat down to eat, they were laughing over a bit of village gossip she’d picked up at the wine merchant’s, and it was as if a crisis had passed.

Her father went to bed at ten. Later, she put on one of his sweaters and sat out back beneath the stars, letting her mind run free. Flashes of herself as a little girl were interspersed with other, less familiar images that at times seemed to have nothing to do with her. Two men playing chess, one of them laying his king on its side in wordless defeat. Some Italians and a German model named Nico in an American car, a white convertible, deliberately crashing it into the gate of a villa to get to a party that was all but over. Another woman, much older, contemplating a painting on an easel until the painting burst into flames.

Whatever had led Odile to lie to the Russians about Thierry—and she knew so little about him or his motives, hardly enough to conceal—the firebombing of the
Nachtvlinder
had rendered moot. Now she would be obliged to confront what she had unleashed, determine its nature, and, with
little but her native stubbornness to go on, extract from it what vindication she could. The prospect made her uneasy. Yet mixed with this anxiety was a deeper response that she couldn’t quite put out of her mind. She felt as though she had been given an opportunity, as inexplicable as it was rare, to help break the impasse at which Max found himself, both as a filmmaker and as a man. He thrived on adversity, his occupation required no less, and as long as she’d known him he had done what was necessary, whether for her or his work. Viewed from this perspective, the troubles she’d brought upon herself in Moscow, however tawdry and destructive in themselves, might yet be turned to advantage, if one kept an open mind. The prospect filled her with dark surmise.

Max was the only man she’d ever come across who seemed to know, instinctively and without deliberation, how to anticipate her needs, needs she often didn’t recognize herself and would have disavowed on principle even if she had. From the very outset—that night in SoHo when she’d sought his help and he’d provided it, no questions asked, then or later—he’d seen and understood her whole. A trust had been established, fierce, wordless, almost arrogant in its certainty. Now, in her love for him, Odile wanted a chance to reveal to Max a part of his character that he himself might have overlooked, an untended capacity that might offer him—and them—something new in their life together, another level of existence. That an element of pride underlay this desire could not be doubted. And while she knew her pride to be a dangerous thing, perverse and not fully under her control, there were times when she had no choice but to trust it. This, too, had to be lived with.

She grew drowsy, allowing her thoughts to scatter until they were no longer thoughts but mere traces, then not even that.

A shooting star passed across the sky. She waited for another, and when it came she went gratefully back into the house, up the stairs to bed and sleep.

WITH ODILE STILL
at her father’s, Max took his Sunday-afternoon meal in the company of Eddie Bouvier and his fourteen-year-old daughter, Dominique, at their apartment in the Marais. The building, an eighteenth-century stone town house, stood on a narrow, twisting street that channeled the sounds of foot traffic and conversation up to where they sat. A shaft of pale sunlight crept across the dining table. Dominique held out her hand for Max’s inspection.

“It’s a bluebird,” she said. “Papa hates it.” Neatly positioned between her thumb and forefinger was a small tattoo of a bird taking flight. Max thought it surprisingly well rendered.

“Cool,” he said, spearing the last of his veal cutlet. “Did it hurt?”

She shook her head serenely.

“In point of fact,” Eddie explained, “this is a prison tattoo, recognized wherever there are convicts. It signifies that the bearer is a thief.”