by Russ Rymer
The apartment itself was exactly as small and shabby as before. It was brighter, at least, and the odor had fled through the neglected window—had the poison cloud done a pirouette around the yard, I wondered, before winging off over the city? I found a sponge and mopped up the puddle of rainwater under the sill, and then I retrieved ammonia and a bucket from beneath the bathroom sink and a broom from behind the bathroom door and kept on going. The cleaning ritual mollified me, dispersed the remnants of my disturbing brunch. But if it was Willem I fled, I was drawn by something—by someone—else, and as I knelt on his floor and encountered his world inch by inch, I felt I was getting my first vague glimpse of the face of Byron Saxe.
The thing I saw there initially was desperation, a derangement that culminated in the grim silhouette, that ghastly snow angel carved in the floor wax by the excoriating kerosene. Its implication was confirmed to me some days later by the excoriating housekeeper, Céleste, who described with undisguised delectation how Saxe had passed out in the fumes from the overturned stove and then spent two days unconscious (due to either a concussion from his fall or sa marinage in gas fumes before he was found). His brain never really recovered.
Smaller signs gave me greater pause. Maybe the weather stripping that sealed the door tight against the hallway light could, along with the blackout curtains over the window, be explained by the bottles of film-developing chemicals stashed near the sink beside a Japanese camera—had this chamber also served Saxe as a darkroom? But how was one to explain the peephole hidden by a sliding cover positioned a meter off the floor in the corner of the room, which would afford anyone cringing there an excellent surveillance of the stairs? How, except with a diagnosis of extreme paranoia? And I began to suspect that the weather stripping was engineered not to keep the hall light out of the apartment, but to keep the apartment’s light and all signs of internal life invisible from the hall. What on earth had the poor man been afraid of?
Along with all this, though, I encountered a paupered dignity, a grace in the proportions of the room as he’d laid it out, in the bolster propped against the wall to make the divan comfortable, in the careful conceits of his day—that so spare an individual would bother to wax his floors at all. Can you read a man by Braille? My sweeping palm tried. The distressed floor wax smoothed away easily; the phantom all but vanished. In this way, even as I encountered Saxe, I erased him. I tossed out his toothbrush and his shaving kit, mapped with a moist sponge my own private kingdom cleansed of the dust of his life, directly in the center of his world, a beachhead of safety whose borders I dared extend only so far.
What on earth was I afraid of? The closet, for one thing—I couldn’t imagine invading so personal a precinct. It felt as though his shirts and shoes might rise up to defend their owner’s privacy. Even less could I bring myself to open the drawers of his dresser. So I mopped out my little ammonial empire, which enlarged satisfyingly with every pass of my arm and every backward shuffle down the floor, until I bumped into something and felt behind my denimed fanny the leg of the writing table.
Of the two varieties of fate—the one that seeks and the one that lurks—I’ve always feared the latter most, and the table leg gave me a start. Of course it had been there all along, and of course I had known where it was—how often in life are we surprised by the inevitable, the crease beside the eye, the spot on the skin, the lump in the breast that wasn’t there yesterday but must have been? So here’s where my search for safety had brought me: directly to the thing I feared. For the table was the prelude to the dresser that was prelude to the closet—atop the table was his mail.
The evening was waning by now, and it was getting too dark to read, but the gloaming also emboldened me, afforded me some cover, cast a welcome shadow over my surreptitious mission. The first envelope I opened was a bill from a neighborhood tailor, the second was another bill, and the third, forwarded from some establishment named Café Portbou, was an itemization, apparently, of toll calls racked up on its phone. The fourth was a statement of account from a hospital, which I scrupulously avoided inspecting, alarmed at what I might see, and the last two were utility bills I greeted with the same reflexive outrage that I lavish on all bills as a matter of policy before even reading the damage. The damage in this case was spelled out in print so faint that I had to carry the invoices over to the divan, in order to determine in the light through the window if the totals sounded reasonable. Two hundred and thirty francs, one said. Was that a lot?
My brain was still calculating when it struck me—quelle idiote!—exactly what I was doing: straining to read a utility bill in the dark. Hadn’t I just completed a microscopic survey of the premises? I had found, excluding the one radiator and the water out of the tap, not the least indication of any public infrastructure whatsoever. Could the gas charge be an assessment for a percentage of the heat, a hot-water tithe? Implausible, even in implausible France, and anyway, what of the electric? There was in the entire benighted joint no wall switch, no outlet, no place to plug in a TV or hair dryer or toaster oven or table lamp, no ceiling light or wall sconce, nothing in the category of artificial illumination beyond two old glass-flued hurricane lamps parked on a shelf, which is precisely why I was sitting by the window holding out a page to catch the last drops of daylight like a child catching snowflakes on her tongue. Considering that the apartment boasted the amenities of a cave dwelling, the bill, which was clearly someone’s error, seemed to have been mailed mistakenly not just to the wrong address, but to the wrong century.
I leaned back into the bolster as I mulled over this mystery, my eye idly straying from the paper in my hand to take in the evening sky, the stalagmite landscape of chimney pipes and rooftops. The evening was of the sort in which night doesn’t fall so much as day ascends, lifting from the ground mist-like through a palette of finely hued heavens, from frost to orange to indigo, and above it all a single bright planet chased a newish moon across a china-bright dome that had become, when I awoke from sleep sometime later, richly black and densely peppered with stars.
It had gotten quite cold in the room. I stood up to close the window sashes before I’d really surfaced into consciousness, before I realized that I didn’t know where I was. Haven’t you done this, woken up in a strange room in a foreign locale and felt yourself adrift without handholds in the silence of the place that is not the silence of any place you know? At the window, in the darkness, sight mingled with slumber, and it was as though I were floating above a city, moored by the least substantial coordinates, sounds, glimpses, impressions as precise as the individual stars: a lit window across the cour, a puddle of lamplight on cobblestones, someone talking in a room somewhere, and from somewhere else, the thump and clink of a table being set, and each of these things spilling into the air out of different lives (the lives being lived in this building) reached my perception from far and farther places, from different times in my own life, so that the scene below me became this intricate collage, a heritage quilt of misplaced moments. I surveyed the yard with great satisfaction. Could it be? Could they really all be here, all these prodigal memories finally summoned home again, as though my past had gathered to greet me beneath my tower, under the glistening sky?
These benign bewilderings collided with wakefulness as I pulled the sashes to before at last collapsing into ordinary addlement. Then something happened that riveted my attention and drew all my reminiscences into one. Somewhere, in some unseen room, someone began playing a piano. I didn’t recognize the piece right away. The player stopped and started, practicing a passage over and over. What struck me first was the persistence of the music: alone among the night sounds, it didn’t dim when I closed the sashes and latched them. It still magically saturated the room and the darkness as though broadcast out of my own spinning mind. I think, in fact, that I located the melody in memory before I identified it musically, pinpointed it on a particular night before a particular doorway in Lower Manhattan where you and I stood listening on another cold hour
full of comfort and wonder. Do you remember? Would you? Though the piece we overheard through the window that night was the whole thing, the full adagio, two pianos, four hands, an overwhelming culmination of sound and thought, and the playing infusing the darkness of Saxe’s apartment was only one side of the duet. Hearing it was like straining to recognize in profile someone I’d met only face to face, and it took me a while to comprehend the thing I was confronting, that this was our Brahms, or half of it anyway.
You would remember, don’t you? Daniel, who could have thought we would make of that sidewalk, that marble stoop so sweetly hummocked with snow, our embarkation point? We were trussed up like Eskimo and alone in that bubble of brittle stillness that cold and snow imposes. We’d only just paused to say goodbye when someone pulled the drapes aside to crack open a window of the recital salon—that they inside could be enjoying such heat that they had to let some of it go!—and a keystone of light spilled toward us. A slab of amber dropped across the blue-white snow.
We looked up into the chamber—isn’t it one of those delicious things, to glimpse the crimson beating heart of within from the icy exclusion of without, to view our intimate life, usually so fuzzy and indistinct, from a clear and frozen remove? It’s like floating in the cold of the cosmos and knowing all of Earth, its every hearth and campfire, furnace and candle. I can count the times I’ve experienced that duality, can count them on two hands, no fingers raised: once on a starry, motionless night in the December of my seventh year, or was it my eighth? It was near Christmas. I’d paused in the yard with the sled reins clutched in my mitten, home later than I’d promised, my urgency to arrive arrested by the stolen vision through the kitchen window of Roy and Alice walking out of and into the light, busily being my parents, busy getting our dinners ready, and knowing without regret that these belonged to me, these alive, these busy people, but that somehow I wasn’t theirs, that their faces, framed in the window side by side, were impossibly far away.
So: that moment and this one, on the sidewalk in front of the conservatory, you, your violin case slung on its strap across your shoulder, eager to get to your teaching and to get inside and out of the chill before it wrecked your fiddle’s tuning, and then the curtain parted and the window opened, and out slipped the adagio on a carpet of light. Who could separate sound and warmth? The two arrived entangled. We stood bundled in each other’s breath, listening to the music as though the music were a way—as though it were intended as a way—of listening to each other’s listening. We were engrossed in a deep, keen unison when the last chord hit. Do you remember the last note of that movement? A brief suspended silence as deep as a cleaver’s chop, and then four hands find their tone exactly as one, landing so gently on a chord that fades to nothing. Systole, diastole: sound, silence, sound . . . silence.
Come in, you encouraged, and we’ll hear the rest. But I shook my head, preferring my prospect of the golden room to the experience of the room itself, and then you climbed the steps and went inside and I watched until the door closed before I walked off, and I suppose as I think of it that our idiot Willem, in all his snottiness, may not have been so wrong after all.
VI
AT FIRST GLANCE, after I stepped inside, I found it hard to differentiate Café Portbou from any of its pestiferous brethren: an array of Cinzano ashtrays on a battered zinc, a bottle of pickled eggs and a basket of croissants, racks of cigarettes and phone cards and Métro tickets over the cash register, linoleum floor and mirrored columns and a handful of little round tables surrounded by pressboard-bottomed chairs, the whole smelling strongly of espresso and tobacco and mildly of disinfectant. Black-and-white photos from another era lined one wall, inevitably of celebrities long since forgotten who had stumbled in, the frames jostled slightly out of alignment and never set back straight. Near them, in the nether regions by the restrooms, a short bank of video games blinked through the shadows, erupting at intervals into blaring come-ons, in English, lamentably, desperate for some bored customer to pay attention and drop a coin. One console featured a lurid image of a fighter jet zooming straight toward me, wing guns ablaze, pilot grimacing hatefully through the cockpit glass. Air War, it was called, which seemed appropriate, or at least ironic. You could say the war had led me there.
I’d spent the week—the week that followed my chez Saxe cleaning frenzy—like any good salaryman, commuting crosstown twice a day. A very un-good salaryman, actually, I confess, for although my starting point and destination were unvarying, my journey was lackadaisical, and I wandered and lingered at will, gawking through the precipitation, coveting through shop windows (most obsessively admired: in a window on rue du Four, amid a bristle of stiletto heels and sexy flats, a pair of fleece-lined gum boots), stopping in at Shakespeare and Company to peruse the books, making sure to be in Saxe’s room at the time each night when the music started. I bought a pretty, down-filled quilt to spread over Saxe’s counterpane, and also three bottles of lamp oil—enough to last me several years, I realized later—to fill his glass lanterns, which emitted, after I’d wiped the soot from the chimneys and knocked the ash off the cotton wicks, a glow that was sufficient to read by yet still vague enough that the music was not outshone, and what could be seen never obstructed that which could be heard, and the softness of the room, its lack of edge and corners, complemented the strange indeterminate sourcelessness of the playing. Debussy joined Brahms on the program, and Mendelssohn and bits of Fauré and bits of other things I didn’t recognize, all of it bits, fragments lingered over, repeated and repeated, around and around and around, yet the whole of it strangely beautiful, the playing accomplished, searching. At some point, I would lock up and wander home to my hotel, and make my call to the hospital.
One day early I rang Rouchard. His secretary explained that he was out of town on business and would be in touch upon his return. Was there something I needed? Not a thing, I said, and I headed out to begin my commute, descending in the elevator, striding through the lobby to the street, where no Drôlet awaited me. We’d struck a bargain: on the occasion that I needed a lift to the hospital, I’d contact him the night before. Otherwise, sayonara. His absence as I stepped through la Clairière’s doors always gave me a little burst of happiness. I’d overthrown my jailer! I was practically a modern-day Marianne, wasn’t I, bearing high the Revolution’s standard! So, okay, it was a demitasse revolution; nevertheless, my first morning gulp of Paris sidewalk air always gave me a caffeine jolt, and each day started victorious.
The snow of my arrival didn’t repeat, but the cold resumed and deepened, and the gray of the season set in with evident obstinacy, another reliable certainty. Half of the days, it rained, but never hard, and the scene I surveyed from under the hem of the hotel umbrella entranced me. The daylight hours grew more and more wan and sordid, but they diminished in number. The gay shop lights, illumined earlier and earlier, the slow glow through drizzle and music from somewhere else gave the impression of a world in night flower, a neon reveille to announce a nocturnal dawn. I stopped in, finally, and bought myself the boots.
On one of my longer and wilder excursions I ended up on a path through an emerald park, not realizing, until a soldier made the long march down the lawn to tell me so, snapping to attention directly in front of me with a click of polished heels and a spring-loaded salute, that I had managed to breach the grounds of the Élysée Palace. He was as inorganic as a lamppost and as splendid as a cockatiel, done up as Napoleon might have done him up, buttons bright in a tricolor swallow-tailed coat, a dress cap with a patent leather visor, but his barked “Bonjour, madame!” was clearly a request not a nicety, and an order not a request, and meant that I should go, now, and quickly. I was entertained by this, really—“Bonjour!” I trilled back, silly old thing—thrilled that my dowdy American cluelessness would elicit the same formality this centurion accorded his emperor.
But it wasn’t entertaining, not really. Out in the larger world, a war was on the way, and the carbine slung across his cer
emonious chest was straightforward, ugly business, and every day the protests chewed another grim bite out of the city. I could feel tension’s grip tightening, even in the apostasy of my distraction, even in my luxurious isolation, even in my sumptuous hotel suite or in pretty neighborhood bistros, when the news came over the television. The news was of arrests and injuries as the street manifestations multiplied, and I never heard bulletins of these encounters without thinking of a spinning, tumbling body and red hair lank with rain. The brown bandanna was still in my purse.
On another day my favored route to Sèvres-Babylone was obstructed by barricades and sentries, and I detoured around to an alternate route and was scanning the corner for street signs when I encountered a familiar name scrawled across a window in chipped black and gilt. It hadn’t been on my mind to seek Café Portbou out, but here it was, and I thought, Why not, and went in.
The only people in evidence inside were two customers standing at the zinc. I set my purse on a table by the window and eased into a chair. A waiter materialized in good time, a gaunt, middle-aged man who struck me as being almost as rigid, but not nearly as polite, as my Élysée soldier. His tunic was a black apron.