The Same River Twice (14 page)

“Now, the dress.” Céleste approached. “If one were to undo the front …”

Without hesitation Odile unhooked all the fasteners so it fell open like a dressing gown. Céleste came forward, slipped the fabric off one shoulder, then the other, letting the upper part of the dress slide down to gather in the crooks of Odile’s arms. Stepping back to survey the effect, she frowned. “The brassiere and panties. Please, it is better you take them off.”

Odile threw Turner a defiant look, then stood and did as she was told. When she sat back down and arranged the dress as before, bodice at her elbows, skirt open to frame her naked hips and thighs, she felt quite at ease.

“Perfect,” Céleste proclaimed. “That’s it exactly.” Retiring to the spot where she’d set up a blank canvas, with Turner beside her in his chair, she produced a stick of charcoal and began to sketch in the forms of what she saw.

For a time the only sound was the muted scratch of charcoal on canvas. The music had stopped. No one spoke.

And although Odile was aware of Céleste’s eyes on her, and secondarily of Turner’s, she let her own gaze bypass them and focus instead on the expanse of rooftop Paris framed by the windows beyond. Crisp sunlight illuminated chimney pots, dormers, petunias in flower boxes, bedspreads and throw rugs hung out to air. A man in a snap-brim hat drew a tape measure across a balcony ledge and squinted at the hatch marks. A cat pounced.

Odile thought:
It’s out of my hands
.

AFTER MAX HAD SEEN RACHEL
to the door and said goodbye, he went back to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee. Their conversation had left him in a reflective frame of mind, and as he sat by the upstairs window, waiting for his cup to cool, he looked out over the narrow courtyard and began to brood.

If he was serious about Rachel as a film subject, he would soon have to
find the narrative framework to support his scrutinies. How closely it might correspond to actual events was entirely up to him, at least at this point, but that didn’t mean, despite what the filmgoing public might believe, that there wasn’t a right way and a wrong way to go about it. Choosing what reality to be true to: everybody had to do it sooner or later. But it was recognizing when the moment of choice had arrived that counted.

He was pouring himself another cup of coffee when the phone rang, a single long note indicating the direct line from his studio. He took the call. “You absolutely must see this, Max,” Jacques said. “It’s just how that girl described it.”

“What is?”

“The other ending to
Fireflies
. I’ve found it.”

IT IS DUSK. The protagonist brings his battered sports car to a screeching halt on West Street, where a half-ruined pier juts nine hundred feet into the Hudson. At the end of the pier a woman stands silhouetted against the dying light, her back to him, her arms folded, her hair lifted in the wind. Tied up alongside her: a vintage motor yacht freshly painted white. In the distance: sirens. The man runs toward the woman at full speed while the camera, which has been pursuing him in a tracking shot, stops partway down the pier to follow the rest of the action from a distance.

The woman turns to face him. They begin to argue, though their words aren’t audible on the soundtrack, given over to ambient urban noise: traffic, the sirens, a passing boom box. The argument continues until she finally reaches out and covers the man’s mouth with her hand. She says a few measured words, and when she withdraws her hand the two appear to be at peace. He climbs aboard the boat, goes below, and emerges a moment later onto the pier with a large duffel bag, obviously quite heavy, slung over his shoulder. Without looking at him, the woman boards the boat and disappears below. The man heaves the duffel bag into the river, and the splash it makes, along with the watery sounds that follow, replaces everything else on the soundtrack. He follows the woman onto the boat. She is now heard in voice-over, very near to the ear, with only the gurgling river water also audible. “It isn’t really love, it’s the illusion of love … It ends badly … Well,
no. Finally, it ends well.” The boat starts up and pulls slowly away from the pier, headed for the bay and open sea. “Or”—the camera rises and, from a vantage point high in the air and still rising, observes the boat as it accelerates, the long drawn-out V of its wake phosphorescent in twilight—“it ends badly.” Roll credits.

Max ejected the DVD.

In the two days since Jacques discovered the sequence—it was on the last of the five disks, the only one Max himself hadn’t inspected—they had both viewed it repeatedly. Neither found any further alterations to the film, whose overall running time had been increased by only a minute and fifty-six seconds. Still, as Marie-Claire had so confidently announced at Studio des Ursulines, the revamped ending did substantially change the meaning of the film.

While the contents of the discarded duffel bag remained ambiguous—the story structure allowed for two possibilities, conceivably three—its existence had been firmly established by Max himself in a lingering shot halfway through the film. He’d shown the bag open, completely unzipped, on the floor of the woman’s apartment, while she and the male protagonist walked back and forth across the frame, talking to each other over their shoulders. In post-production he’d considered cutting the scene—for carrying more tone than meaning—but in the end found he liked the effect. So, apparently, had his phantom revisionist.

Between them, Max and Jacques had worked up a hypothetical model for how the add-on footage might have been synthesized. Using wire-frame imaging, micro-slice sound technology, and a high-speed computer, any reasonably proficient video editor could have created it in the studio over a short weekend. Even the aerial shot, which would seem to present the most difficulties, could’ve been done on the computer, assuming the maker had access to stock images of New York seen from above, images readily available, Max happened to know, on technical DVDs. From a mechanical standpoint, the whole process was almost laughably simple. It was the human element, the who and why, that eluded him and aroused his creative appetites.

“Max? Can I come up?” Odile’s newly solicitous tone cheered him. Over the past two days she’d seemed happier, less distracted, more relaxed than he’d seen her in weeks. She had even sketched out a few new design ideas—always a good sign.

“Hurry!” he called down to her. “Duplicity! Copyright infringement! Fraud!”

She arrived, wearing a green sundress that he liked and smiling her
slightly snaggled smile. “Theft,” she added, and plumped herself down in his lap.

They had been through this cycle of tension and relief countless times, the breath of marriage as they understood it: lengthy tethers, mutual regard, a limit reached, a rush to reconcile. Max brought his nose close to his wife’s temple and inhaled her scent.

“So,” she said, drawing back to see his face, “do you think we’ll find this person, this … what to call him? This vandal of your film?”

“Vandal. I like that. No, I don’t think we’ll find him. The standard procedure in a case like this, what everyone always tells you, is to follow the money. Who benefits from the crime? But here there’s no money to follow; I didn’t make all that much on
Fireflies
myself. So what’s to be gained sixteen years later from tampering with the end?”

“Max.” She nuzzled his neck.

“What is it?”

“
Fireflies
is brilliant, just as you made it.”

“Thanks, Odile. I’m glad you think so.”

“It’s not an opinion. It’s a fact.”

“All the better.”

She kissed him pensively—at the collarbone, the neck, behind the ear—then fell still, as if she’d just asked a question.

“Lately I have this sense,” said Max, “that everything I’ve already done keeps changing, while whatever future I have is fixed. A regressive thought, I know, primitive, sub-scientific, ignorant. And yet I have it. What does it mean, I wonder?”

“It means you’re trying to avoid thinking about death,” she said.

“Death?”

“Yes. You give the past the qualities of the future because when you consider the future you see fixity. Fixity is death.”

“Touché.” He tucked a hand between her left arm and breast as he held her. “And you? What’s your topic? You seem happier lately.”

She shrugged. “I told you, I’ve decided to stop worrying. We’ve had our share of criminal events—bad luck, maybe, but even bad luck runs out. Now I want to concentrate on work and ordinary pleasure.”

“Happiness,” he suggested.

“Sure. Why not?” She pressed her forehead to his. “Although, as Bastien likes to say,
Le bonheur n’est jamais gai
.”

“‘Happiness is never cheerful,’ yes. How totally French.”

“But also true,” she said matter-of-factly. Gently disengaging herself, she stood up and walked over to a long worktable set against the east wall.
With a cross-armed gesture she reached down, pulled her dress off over her head, and, boosting herself up onto the edge of the table, sat there naked, swinging her legs, waiting for him.

Max undressed without hurry. When he came to her, she leaned back on her palms and opened her thighs to him. “Anyway,” she said, quivering as he kissed the corner of her mouth, her throat, her breast, “to be cheerful is not at all natural.”

Later, when Odile had dressed and gone, he brought a chair over to the worktable and examined the packaging of the rogue DVD under a magnifying glass, using a legitimate copy for comparison. He’d never liked the cover design, which featured a color photograph, not his own, of a five-gallon glass jug full of real fireflies, a swirl of them passing up through its narrow mouth into a midnight-blue sky. No actual fireflies figured in his film, and Max had objected strenuously to this misrepresentation. Marketing had been unimpressed by his arguments.

Now, with the real and counterfeit DVD boxes laid out before him, Max noticed that in the latter the cover image had picked up a distinctly greenish tinge; otherwise the front sides of the two were identical. Opening the boxes, Max removed the booklets that accompanied the disks. The same stills from the film, along with a short critical essay, appeared in both editions; he vetted the text line by line and found nothing amiss.

Flipping the boxes over, he inspected the copy on the back. It was oddly punishing work to examine one’s own product for signs that it was actually someone else’s. Yet he persevered, reading the reviewers’ blurbs, the plot summary, the credits, the warnings and advisories, each layer of text printed in smaller type than the one above it, so that finally, even with the magnifying glass, he began to have difficulty making out the words. It occurred to him that he was probably the first person ever to try.

Just as he was about to give up, Max noticed a small asymmetry in the two editions’ last line of type. Bringing the desk light closer, squinting through the magnifying glass, he willed his eyes to focus. He tilted the light, trying to eliminate the glare of the plastic jacket. It was the copyright line: the copyright symbol and date followed, in the authentic version, by the name of his production company. In the other version, though, his company wasn’t mentioned. In its place appeared the words “La Peau de l’Ours,” followed by an address in the twelfth arrondissement.

“La Peau de l’Ours,” said Max aloud. The Skin of the Bear. He knew of nothing by that name.

Twenty minutes later, the address in hand, he emerged from the métro at Ledru-Rollin. This part of Bastille, south of rue Faubourg-Saint-Antoine
and north of the river, had yet to be fully gentrified, and the mix of ancient commercial concerns, recently converted loft spaces, and cafés both old and new made the area agreeably unpredictable, block by narrow block. A few light-industrial enterprises—metalworks, spinning mills, printers—still clung to life, but they were obviously clearing out, with artists, designers, and young professionals rushing in. The upper floors of many buildings had plants or curtains in the windows.

Pedestrian traffic was heavy—it was lunch hour—and several times Max had to abandon the sidewalk for the street. There seemed to be an inordinate number of Koreans around, clumped in tour groups and taking photographs. He walked past them. He looked for shop signs, street names, and numbers. A tremendously fat woman waiting at a bus stop farted loudly as he passed, then began humming to herself.

When he found the address given on the DVD box—an eighteenth-century limestone building with the standard six stories—he saw nothing that might conceivably call itself La Peau de l’Ours. The ground floor was mostly taken up by a real-estate agency, with photos of desirable local properties displayed in its vitrines. Also on the ground floor, squeezed in at the north end, were a Judaica bookstore and a tobacconist. Max double-checked the address, then peered through the window of the agency. The place was deserted. At the door a cardboard clock face with metal hands invited him to suppose that the proprietors would return in thirty-five minutes. Spotting a café across the street, he decided to wait.

Taking an outdoor table, Max ordered a draft beer. He was halfway through it when a woman he didn’t know—blond, thin, tattooed on one shoulder with a wheel of many spokes—stopped at his table and addressed him in French.

“Are you alone?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you want company?”

“No,” he answered truthfully.

“Good,” she said. “Neither do I.” And with that, though several other tables were available, she sank into the seat opposite him. Rummaging through her backpack, paying him no further attention, she appeared at once utterly preoccupied and obscurely resentful. He watched her produce a notebook and fountain pen, which she placed before her on the marble tabletop. When the waiter arrived, she ordered a grenadine. Then, seemingly oblivious to Max’s presence, she opened the notebook to where she’d left off and began writing furiously in green-black ink.

Ignoring her, Max kept his eye on the building across the street. He had
not until now considered how to approach La Peau de l’Ours, should such a thing actually present itself, but it did occur to him that litigious posturing was probably not the smartest tactic. His curiosity had been piqued, and if he expected to satisfy it to any appreciable degree, a bit of flair would likely be necessary. Maybe, he thought, he should introduce himself as a furrier.