3
The rations came in the morning. Tins of sardines and pressed ham. Bricklike bread. Water and cigarettes. They ate with their filthy hands, allowed more per man today than they would have received the day before. The planes returned but there seemed to be a pause. No orders had been passed along, no command to get up and go. Though it could come any second.
Nick’s right hand shook uncontrollably. He sat on it. Held it folded under his arm. Talked to it. The shaking had started in the night and only stopped when he fell into a brief and fidgeting sleep. When his eyes opened, the shaking returned and it had not stopped. He ate with his left hand hoping that any type of nourishment might return some strength and settle his hand and his nerves.
He wanted desperately to take a walk. To climb up and out of the dugout and to walk across the countryside and touch the wildflowers and find a butterfly and lie down in the grass and feel the breeze. He wanted to be alone, to have to see no one and talk to no one. He wanted the constant pops of the shells and the hum of the planes overhead to go away. Silence. Only a simple silence and a walk and he felt like he could be human again. But that wasn’t going to happen. He ate and took slow and heavy breaths and finally the shaking slowed and then stopped.
The men ate and settled in. Still no suggestion of a fight today. Down to his left a trio with Texas accents played cards and to his right a dozen men gathered and paid cigarettes and pennies for the chance to see photographs of naked French women that the trench entrepreneur had brought back from leave. Those who paid got to hold the photograph and had to fight off freeloaders peeking over and around their shoulders. Those who paid were allowed to hold the photograph for maybe a minute and then were forced to give it back. Pay up if you want a second look, the entrepreneur said. Those girls ain’t cheap. The men with something to give happily bought a second look and those who didn’t moved up and down the trench trying to borrow or steal some currency.
Nick held a stick and drew shapes in the dirt. A triangle, a square, a rectangle, a circle. Like the worksheet of a little boy. Then he tried to draw the head of a dog and it looked more like a horse. He then drew a pig face with some success and he gave it the body of a giraffe. He wrote his name. He wrote her name. He drew two stick figures standing next to one another. And then he fought the schoolboy impulse of drawing a heart around the stick figures and instead he only drew a line that connected the two names. Then he picked up a pebble and dropped it on the connecting line and he made the sound of a tiny explosion almost at the exact instant that a heavy explosion shook the earth and the men reached for helmets and rifles but then a lieutenant called for them all to sit tight. It ain’t as close as it sounds. We’re not going anywhere.
He drew long hair on her stick figure and then made scissors with his fingers and pretended to cut it off and he left the trench and was standing at the gates of Parc Monceau where they had found one another. He was watching the pigeons dance around the bust of Maupassant and a carousel turned and played a mechanical song while children sat atop ornamented horses and went up and down. Women stood together with strollers. A man slept on his back on a bench with a newspaper covering his face. Nick flicked a pebble and scattered the birds from Maupassant’s shoulders and then across the pathway he had noticed her pushing a cart. She stopped at each bench and stopped people walking and she held picture frames toward them. Waved her hand across the frame and some nodded politely and kept going and some paused and touched or maybe held the frame but none bought. An older woman gave her a franc coin but didn’t take a frame and she tried to give it back but the old woman wouldn’t have it. She moved along with the cart and tried again and more rejection. Nick moved to keep watching her. She made a lap around the pond and behind the willows and sat down on the steps of a short bridge and nibbled at something she pulled from her pocket. Her hair was cut short and choppy and she wore no gloves and had a coat too big for her. Her skirt rose above her knees.
Nick had walked past as she sat on the steps and he looked into the cart. An assortment of handmade frames, decorated with red and black strips of lace and tulle and costume jewelry. A frame on top of the pile held the sepia photograph of a naked woman holding the neck of a bottle of absinthe in one hand and a short whip in the other.
“You like this one?”
“You speak English?”
“Of course. Do you?”
He lifted the frame that held the naked woman. He looked into the cart and the other frames were without the same allure.
“How much?” he asked.
“You do not want this one. It is only to make men look. And some women. It is not so easy to sell an empty frame.”
“Do you make these?”
“Yes.”
“I can buy one?”
“If you want.”
He reached into the cart and took out a frame. Rudimentary and uneven but a red ruby at each rough corner.
“This would be good for my mother.”
“Is your mother alive?”
He cut his eyes at her. “She would have to be.”
She stood from the steps. Brushed the flag on the shoulder of his uniform.
“Do you enjoy this war?”
He gave her a baffled look.
“I think some men find pleasure in a war,” she said. “I cannot think of another reason to have one.”
“Neither can I.”
“But you do not enjoy it.”
“The only men who find pleasure in a war are the ones who get to decide that we have one.”
Another shell exploded and Nick jerked and his helmet fell off. Again they were told to sit tight. Again he returned to the park.
“Where is your home?” she had asked.
“It’s getting difficult to remember,” he said. He then moved his eyes from hers and studied the frame. “How much for this one?”
“Whatever you like to pay.”
“I would like to pay for that one,” he said and he pointed at the naked woman.
“That is not for your mother.”
“You are right.”
She took the frame from his hand and set it into the cart and said we can talk of this later. Right now I would like a coffee. If you would like a coffee also then come with me. He had noticed her eyes being somewhere between green and blue and her small mouth and nose set between sharp and drawn cheeks.
“Can we also eat?” he asked. “I’m hungry.”
“Yes,” she answered. “We will have a coffee and we will eat and we will walk if we like one another after everything.”
After everything they liked one another and stood to leave the café. She asked Nick to wait outside as she had to go to the toilet. He stood on the sidewalk with her cart and smoked but when he looked back through the café window he saw her not in the toilet but sliding from table to table and snatching fragments of bread and halfeaten pieces of meat and cheese and stuffing them into her coat pockets. She swiped cigarette butts from ashtrays and dropped them into another pocket. Nick turned away when she made for the door and hoped she hadn’t caught him watching.
They walked and she pulled the cart and she sold two frames along the busy Boulevard des Batignolles. Nick noticed her careful tone when showing the frames. Her dirty fingernails gently handling her work. The artisan pride when she delivered. He thought she seemed like something out of a story and that their meeting and then eating and now walking felt like the product of someone’s imagination but then as they moved along Boulevard de Clichy and up into Montmartre she seemed to merge into the physical world. He found himself bumping into her just to make contact or touching her arm or hand when helping her move the cart up the tall stairs that lifted them to the top of the city. She was a voice. A real voice on a moving body with eyes that gave him attention and kept his thoughts on right now instead of what lay ahead or behind.
“Do you want to know where we are going?” she asked when they reached the top of the steps.
“Not really,” he
answered.
“I would like a drink and it is cheaper in Montmartre.”
“I would hope so as many stairs as we’ve climbed.”
“Have you been here?”
“No.”
“Then look.”
She took him by the shoulders and turned and faced him toward the city that fell below. Their steady ascension had taken them to the edge of Place du Tertre and Paris stretched out and sat quietly as if without engines or voices.
“If you stand here for a long time it is possible to believe that nothing is bad,” she had said.
“Nothing?”
“Rien.”
He turned to her. Her eyes across the Parisian sky but the life quickly drained from them and then her melancholy bled into him and he felt her solitude. He stared across the city and sensed not only her loneliness but the eternal loneliness that resides in us all and for the first time since he had felt the anxiousness of youth he realized that he wasn’t alone. There are others like me, he thought. And she is one.
She sat down on the top step.
“Wait here,” he said.
He walked into a bar at the corner of the plaza. Two men stood at the doorway and argued in Spanish and he stepped between them. One called Americano but Nick kept his head down and moved to the bar. He bought a tall carafe of wine and he took two glasses and when he slid back between the two men they clinked their beer glasses to the wine glasses squeezed between his fingers.
He returned to her and she sat with her knees drawn against her chest and Nick poured. When the wine was gone the day began to fade and they walked back down the stairs. She asked him to help with the cart to where she stayed and they moved into Pigalle, a gritty series of streets scattered with dance halls and red lights. She walked more quickly through Pigalle and Nick hustled with the cart to keep pace. He was about to ask why she was racing when she pushed open the door of an empty building and they stepped inside. Nick paused and looked at the dustcovered windows and then back and forth along the street and she reached out and took him by the arm and pulled him inside. She closed the door and slid a cinderblock behind it to hold the door shut and told him to follow. They stepped through the remains of a job begun and then abandoned. Scraps of plywood and lumber and large chunks of plaster wall lay scattered across the floor and a giant coil of wire nestled in the corner like a copper tumbleweed.
Nick followed her to the back of the building and then she opened a door that led to the alley behind. She stuck her head out and looked both ways and then she motioned to him. They stepped across the alley and went into a door that was wedged open with a folded magazine and inside the door was a staircase. Once Nick had cleared the doorway she closed the door gently and the light of day disappeared.
The stairway was enclosed and windowless, the only way in or out the single door. She took out a matchbox and a halfsmoked cigarette. She stuck the butt in the corner of her mouth, struck a match, sucked hard to relight the butt. Then she held the match toward the staircase and nodded as if the gesture itself were some additional secret he should recognize.
She went up first. The match burned away and she tossed it and Nick followed her closely in the darkness, a steep and narrow rise. She didn’t speak and he didn’t ask and they kept going up and up until they reached the top floor. She asked if he was still there and he whispered yes. You don’t have to whisper she told him and then she opened the door to the attic.
She dropped the butt from her mouth and squashed it with the toe of her boot and walked in first. The attic reached high above them and loose arms of plywood lay across the beams. Clothes racks filled with old costumes covered the attic floor space and she moved through the tight rows, turning her thin frame sideways. Nick trailed her, the costumes brushing against him and the evening light coming in the windows and shading everything in blue. He stopped in the middle and gazed at the cluster of dresses and suits and coats and the stacked boxes of hats and shoes.
“What is this place?” he asked.
But he saw on the other side of the costumes a chair and a thin mattress on the floor and an open suitcase. She crossed the attic floor and stopped at the windows. Evening lights had begun to shine and she emptied the cigarette butts and scraps of food from her pockets onto the windowsill.
Nick moved out of the costumes and noticed a shadeless lamp on the floor next to the mattress. He bent to turn it on and she said not yet. Scattered on the floor were newspapers and old magazines. Costume dresses lay piled on top of the mattress for warmth and comfort and in the windowsill with the butts and food lay stockings and a hairbrush and handheld mirror. On the floor beneath the window was her cut hair and a pair of scissors. Long and curvy locks of brown like cut strips of ribbon.
She opened the window. From the end of the block came the rhythm of a bass and a snare drum and an energetic clarinet twisted through the thumping beat like a tenor-toned snake. Solitary lights glowed across the rooftops. A horse and buggy clopped past underneath and the shrill laugh of a woman came from somewhere close. The Parisian sky was clear, the stars visible and the stovetop smoke from homes pushed in the breeze like earthfallen clouds.
She picked up the brush but set it back down and she ran her fingers through her choppy hair. She threw her head back and shook it in habit of having the length. Then she turned to him and said mine is more short than yours.
“It looks good,” he said.
“Men like long hair, I think.”
“Then why did you cut yours this way?”
“Maybe I do not want men to like me.”
“Do many men like you?”
“You must look around Paris. There is no such thing as many men. They are all somewhere else.”
“It’s possible I have stood beside some of them. But they will come back.”
“And so my hair will come back.”
“I like it this way.”
“Then maybe you are not a man. Maybe you are something different,” she had said.
A litter of shellfire snapped him from the attic and he fell facedown in the dirt. Grabbed his helmet and he and the others hugged the earth and felt it coming. He told himself to think of her think of her think of her.
She had pulled the windows closed and turned around and looked across the makeshift room. They stood together in the attic above Théâtre du Rêve, a small theater below that once thrived with dance and song but had stopped trying during the war. The attic was a place to store the production costumes, racks of discolored highnecked dresses and floorlength overcoats and mismatched suits and evening gowns. The clothes were bunched tightly on the racks and the racks filled the floor and wall space but for a slither of a pathway that led from the door to the window. Coming and going her shoulders brushed the forgotten costumes and she told him the touches seemed to her like a friendly welcome or the loving sadness of goodbye and there was a comfort in not being alone in the attic room but surrounded by the costumes that once had life. She had found the attic by accident, she told him. Wandering with all she owned in her suitcase and looking for any open door or any empty building to get into for a night or two or three. She had looked into the windows of the building under renovation and turned the knob and it opened and she sat there the first night. Waited for the morning and for the workers to return. But they hadn’t. And so she had stayed another night and another and she realized no one was coming back. She had gone into the alley to piss and she had seen the back door of the theater and then found the staircase and then found the costumes. She felt safer up high. Warm among the costumes. Eyes across the city. She had a window to look out and wonder what was going to happen to her.
“You live here?”
“Until someone asks me to leave.”
“I don’t think you need to worry about that. It looks like a costume graveyard.”
“What is this word? Graveyard.”
“It is the same thing as cemetery. Do you know the word cemetery?”
“I know this
word. So you believe the costumes are dead. I believe they are alive.”
He nodded and picked up a wedding gown from a pile of dresses on the bed and he held it up as if to examine its craftsmanship. He touched the sequins around the waist and along the neck and then he folded it and laid it back on the pile.
“It does not matter. I will not be here long. Someone will come.”
“Where will you go?”
“I do not know.”
With me, he wanted to say. But he had nowhere to take her and no promise he could make.
“I am afraid most nights,” she said.
“So am I,” he answered. And as soon as it was out of his mouth he wanted to take it back. To hide this part of himself. But it was honest and quick like a heartbeat, nothing to be controlled. He folded his arms. Rolled his eyes to the ceiling. Tried to think of anything else.
“How do you make the frames?” he asked.
She opened the windows again and said come over here. They leaned out and she pointed. A scrap pile of wood lay in the alley several buildings away.
“A person who makes things out of wood leaves this,” she said.
“A carpenter,” Nick said.
“A carpenter,” she repeated. “And then I take the pieces of cloth and the lace and buttons and many other things from the costumes. The glue I steal. I put them together like a child with a puzzle.”
“Tomorrow I will buy you a big bottle of glue.”
“Tomorrow you will no longer want to see me. Or tomorrow you will no longer want to leave me.”
“I think there is something in between that.”
“No. I think it is one or the other.”
She was blunt and beautiful and scratching and clawing and free and bound and she seeped inside of him. She is so different and I am scared of her and I keep finding new ways to be scared but not right now. Don’t let it show right now.
Nick Page 2