The Invisible Bridge

by Julie Orringer

  Now another milestone was approaching: the first time Andras would celebrate a birthday in Paris. In late August he would turn twenty-three. As he packed his suitcase he imagined drinking champagne with Klara on the rue de Sevigne, the two of them sweetly alone, a reprise of their winter idyll. But when he arrived at her house that morning there was a black Renault parked at the curb, its top folded down. Two small suitcases stood beside the car; a scarf and goggles lay on the driver's seat. Klara stepped out of the house, shading her eyes against the sun; she wore a motoring duster, canvas boots, driving gloves. She had gathered her hair into two bunches at the back of her head.

  "What's this all about?" Andras said.

  "Put your things in the trunk," Klara said, throwing him the keys. "We're going to Nice."

  "To Nice? In this car? We're driving this car?"

  "Yes, in this car."

  He gave a shout, climbed over the car, and took her in his arms. "You can't have done this," he said.

  "I did. It's for your birthday. We have a cottage by the sea."

  Though he knew in theory that cars and cottages could be hired, it seemed almost impossible to believe that Klara had in actuality hired a car, and that, having the car in their possession, they could simply fill its tank with gas and drive to a cottage in Nice. No struggling with baggage in a train station, no crowded third-class rail carriage smelling of smoke and sandwiches and sweating passengers, no search for a cab or horse cart at the other end of the line. Just Andras and Klara in this tiny beetle-black car. And then a house where they would be alone together. What luxury; what freedom. They piled their suitcases into the car, and Klara put on her scarf and driving goggles.

  "How do you know how to drive?" he asked her as they pulled away toward the rue des Francs-Bourgeois. "Do you know everything?"

  "Nearly everything," she said. "I don't know Portuguese or Japanese, and I can't make brioche, and I'm a terrible singer. But I do know how to drive. My father taught me when I was a girl. We used to practice in the country, near my grandmother's house in Kaba."

  "I hope you've driven more recently than that."

  "Not often. Why? Are you afraid?"

  "I don't know," Andras said. "Should I be?"

  "You'll find out soon!"

  From the rue du Pas de la Mule she turned onto the boulevard Beaumarchais and merged effortlessly into the traffic encircling the Bastille. She picked up the boulevard Bourdon; they crossed the Seine at Pont d'Austerlitz and shot off toward the south.

  Andras's cap threatened to fly away, and he had to hold it to his head with one hand.

  They motored through the seemingly endless suburbs of Paris (Who lived in these distant neighborhoods, these balconied three-story buildings? Whose washing was that on the line?) and then out into the gold haze and the rolling green pastures of the countryside.

  Sturdy sheep and goats stood in bitten-down grass. Beside a farmhouse, children beat at the exoskeleton of a rusted Citroen with sticks and spades. A clutter of chickens crowded into the roadway and Klara had to blast them with a ga-zoo-bah! from the Renault's horn.

  Tall feathery lindens whipped by, each with its fleeting rush of sound. For lunch they stopped beside a meadow and ate cold chicken and an asparagas salad and a peach tart that attracted yellowjackets. At Valence a thunderstorm overtook them and threw a hard slant of rain into the car before they could raise the roof; as they drove on, the windshield became so clouded with steam that they had to stop and wait for the storm to pass. It was nearly sunset when, after passing through a thirty-mile stretch of olive groves, they crested a hill and began to descend toward the edge of the earth. That was how it looked to Andras, who had never before seen the sea. As they drew closer it became a vast plain of liquid metal, a superheated infinity of molten bronze. But the air grew cooler with their approach, and the grasses along the road bent their seed pods in a rising wind. They reached a stretch of sand just as the red lozenge of the sun dissolved into the horizon.

  Klara stopped the car at an empty beach and turned off the motor. At the margin of the water, a pounding roar and a cataclysm of foam. Without a word they got out of the car and walked toward that ragged white edge.

  Andras cuffed his pants and stepped into the water. When a wave rolled in, the ground slid away beneath his feet and he had to catch Klara's arm to keep from falling.

  He knew that feeling, that powerful and frightening tidal pull: It was Klara, her draw upon him, her inevitability in his life. She laughed and went to her knees in the waves, letting them wash over her body and render her blouse transparent; when she stood, her skirt was decorated with seaweed. He wanted to lay her down on the cooling stones and have her right there, but she ran back across the beach toward the car, calling for him to come.

  After they'd driven through the town with its white hotels, its glittering curvelet of sea, they turned onto a road so rutted and rocky it threatened to disembowel the Renault.

  At the top of the road, a crumbling stone cottage stood in a tiny garden surrounded by gorse. The key was in a bird's nest above the door. They dragged their suitcases inside and fell onto the bed, too exhausted now to consider lovemaking or dinner preparations or anything besides sleep. When they awoke it was velvet dark. They fumbled for kerosene lanterns, ate the cheese and bread that had been intended for breakfast the next morning. A slow-moving fog obscured the stars. Klara had forgotten her nightgown.

  Andras discovered that he was allergic to some plant in the garden; his eyes burned, and he sneezed and sneezed. They spent a restless night listening to the door rattling against its jamb, the wind soughing between the window frame and the sill, the endless gripe and creak of nighttime insects. When Andras woke in the gray haze of early morning, his first thought was that they could simply get into the car and return to Paris if they wanted. But here was Klara beside him, a scattering of sand grains in the fine hair at her temple; they were at Nice and he had seen the Mediterranean. He went outside to shoot a long arc of asparagus-scented urine out over the back garden. Inside again, he curled against Klara and fell into his deepest sleep of the night, and when he awoke for the second time there was a block of hot sunlight in bed with him where she had been. God, he was hungry; he felt as if he hadn't eaten in days. From outside he heard the snick of gardening shears.

  Without bothering to don a shirt or trousers or even a pair of undershorts, he went out to find Klara removing a cluster of tall flowers that looked like close-crocheted doilies.

  "Wild carrot," she said. "That's what made you sneeze last night." She was wearing a sleeveless red cotton dress and a straw hat; her arms glowed gold in the sunlight. She wiped her brow with a handkerchief and stood to look at Andras in the doorway. "Au naturel," she observed.

  Andras made a fig leaf of his hand.

  "I think I'm finished gardening," she said, and smiled.

  He went back to the bed, which lay in a windowed alcove from which he could see a slice of Mediterranean. Eons passed before she came in and washed her hands. He had forgotten how hungry he'd been when he first awakened. He had forgotten everything else in the world. She removed her shoes and climbed onto the bed, leaning over him.

  Her dark hair burned with absorbed sunlight, and her breath was sweet: She'd been eating strawberries in the garden. The red veil of her dress fell over his eyes.

  Outside, three pygmy goats stepped out of the gorse and ate all the clipped flowers and a good many half-grown lettuces and an empty cardboard matchbook and Klara's forgotten handkerchief. They liked to visit this cottage; intriguing and unfamiliar things often appeared in the yard. As they sniffed the tires of the Renault, a burst of human noise from the cottage made them raise their ears: two voices calling out and calling out inside the house.

  Far below the cottage, silent from that high vantage point, lay the town of Nice with its blinding white beaches. In Nice you could swim in the rolling sea. You could eat at a cafe by the beach. You could sleep in a rented lounge chair on the pebb
led strand or stroll through the colonnade of a hotel. For five francs you could watch a film projected onto the blank wall of a warehouse. You could buy armloads of roses and carnations at a covered flower market. You could tour the ruins of Roman baths at Cemenelum and eat a picnic lunch on a hill overlooking the port. You could buy art supplies for half what they cost in Paris. Andras bought a sketchbook and twelve good pencils with leads of varying density. In the afternoons, while Klara practiced ballet, he practiced drawing. First he drew their cottage until he knew every stone and every roof angle. Then he razed the cottage in his mind and began to plan the house they could build on that land. The land had a gentle slope; the house would have two stories, one of them invisible from the front. Its roofline would lie close to the hillside and be covered with sod; they would grow lavender thick and sweet in that layer of earth. He would build the house of rough-cut limestone. He would abandon the hard geometry of his professors' designs and allow the house to lie against the hillside like a shoulder of rock revealed by wind. On the sea-facing side, he would set sliding glass doors into the limestone. There would be a practice room for Klara. There would be a studio for himself. There would be sitting rooms and guest rooms, rooms for the children they might have. There would be a stone-paved area behind the house, large enough for a dining table and chairs. There would be a terraced garden where they would grow cucumbers and tomatoes and herbs, squashes and melons; there would be a pergola for grapes. He didn't dare to guess how much it might cost to buy a piece of land like that or to build the house he'd designed, or whether the building council of Nice would let him do it. The house didn't exist in a reality that included money or seaside zoning laws. It was a perfect phantom that became more clearly visible the longer they stayed. By day, as he walked the scrubby perimeter of the garden, he laid out those sea-lit rooms; by night, lying awake at Klara's side, he paved the patio and terraced the hillside for the garden. But he didn't show his drawings to Klara, or tell her what he was doing while she practiced. Something about the project made him cautious, self-protective; perhaps it was the vast gulf between the harmonious permanence the house suggested and the complicated uncertainty of their lives.

  At the stone cottage they lived for the first time like husband and wife. Klara bought food in the village and they cooked together; Andras spoke to her about his plans for the next year, how he might work as an intern at the architecture firm that employed Pierre Vago. She told him of her own plans to hire an assistant teacher from the ranks of young dancers from abroad. She wanted to do for someone what Novak and Forestier had done for Andras. They talked as they dawdled along the road that led to town; they talked after sunset in the dark garden, sitting on wooden chairs they'd dragged out of the house.

  They bathed each other in a tin tub in the middle of the cottage floor. They set out vegetables and bread for the pygmy goats, and one of the goats gave them milk. They discussed the names of their children: the girl would be Adele, the boy Tamas. They swam in the sea and ate lemon ices and made love. And on the flat dirt roads that ran along the beaches, Klara taught Andras to drive.

  On his first day out he stalled and stalled the Renault until he was blind with rage.

  He jumped out of the car and accused Klara of teaching him improperly, of trying to make an ass of him. Without surrendering her own calm, she climbed into the driver's seat, gave him a wink, and drove off, leaving him fuming in the dust. By the time he'd walked the two miles back to the cottage, he was sunburned and contrite. The next day he stalled only twice; the day after that he drove without a stall. They followed the hillside road down to the Promenade des Anglais and drove along the sea all the way to Cannes.

  He loved the press of the curves, loved the vision of Klara with her white scarf flying. On their way back he drove more slowly, and they watched the sailboats drifting over the water like kites. He navigated the tricky hill up to the cottage without a stall. When they reached the garden, Klara got out and cheered. That night, the eve of his birthday, he drove her into town for drinks at the Hotel Taureau d'Or. She wore a sea-green dress that revealed her shoulders, and a glittering hairpin in the shape of a starfish. Her skin had deepened to a dusky gold on the beach. Most beautiful of all were her feet in their Spanish sandals, her toes revealed in their shy brown beauty, her nails like chips of pink nacre. On the deck of the Taureau d'Or he told her he loved seeing her feet bare in public.

  "It's so risque," he said. "You seem thrillingly naked."

  She gave him a sad smile. "You should have seen them when I was en pointe every day. They were atrocious. You can't imagine what ballet does to the feet." She turned her glass in careful rings on the wooden table. "I wouldn't have worn sandals for a million pengo."

  "I would have paid two million to see you wear them."

  "You didn't have two million. You were a schoolboy at the time."

  "I'd have found a way to earn it."

  She laughed and slipped a finger under the cuff of his shirt, smoothed the skin of his wrist. It was torture to be beside her all day like this. The more he had of her, the more he wanted. Worst of all were the times on the beach, where she wore a black maillot and a bathing cap with white racing stripes. She'd turn over on her rattan beach mat and there would be silvery grains of sand dusting her breasts, the soft rise of her pubis, the smooth skin of her thighs. He had spent most of their time on the beach shielding his erection from public view with the aid of a book or towel. The previous afternoon he'd watched her execute neat dives from a wooden tower at this very beach; he could see the tower now, ghostly in the moonlight, a skeleton standing in the sea.

  "I think we ought to stay here always," he said. "You can teach ballet in Nice. I can finish my studies by correspondence."

  A veil of melancholy seemed to fall over her features. She took a sip of her drink.

  "You're turning twenty-three," she said. "That means I'll be thirty-two soon. Thirty-two.

  The more I think about it, the more it begins to seem like an old woman's age."

  "That's nonsense," Andras said. "The last Hungarian women's swimming champion was thirty-three when she won her gold medal in Munich. My mother was thirty-five when Matyas was born."

  "I feel as if I've lived such a long time already," she said. "Those days when I wouldn't have worn sandals for a million pengo--" She paused and smiled, but her eyes were sad and faraway. "So many years ago! Seventeen years!"

  This wasn't about him, he understood. It was about her own life, about how everything had changed when she'd become pregnant with her daughter. That was what had caused the veil to fall. When the waiter came she ordered absinthe for both of them, a drink she chose only when she was sad and wanted to be lifted away from the world.

  But absinthe didn't have the same effect on him; it tended to play dirty tricks on his mind. He told himself it might be different here at Nice, at this dreamlike hotel bar overlooking the beach, but it wasn't long before the wormwood began to do its poisonous work. A gate swung open and paranoia elbowed through. If Klara was melancholy now, it wasn't because she'd lost her life in ballet; it was because she'd lost Elisabet's father.

  Her one great love. The single monumental secret she'd never told him. Her feelings for Andras were chaff by comparison. Even her eleven-year relationship with Novak hadn't been able to break the spell. Madame Gerard knew it; Elisabet herself knew it; even Tibor had guessed it in the space of an hour, while Andras had failed to recognize it for months and months. How absurd of him to have spent the summer worrying about Novak when the real threat was this phantom, the only man who would ever have Klara's heart. The fact that she could sit here in a sea-green dress and those sandals, calmly drinking absinthe, pretending she might someday be Andras's wife, and then allow herself to be pulled back to wherever she'd been pulled--by him, no doubt, that nameless faceless man she'd loved--made him want to take her by the shoulders and shake her until she cried.

  "God, Andras," she said finally. "Don't look at me that way."


  "What

  way?"

  "You look as if you want to kill me."

  Her limpid gray eyes. The glitter of the starfish in her hair. Her child-sized hands on the table. He was more afraid of her, of what she could do to him, than anyone he'd known in his life. He pushed back his chair and went to the bar, where he bought a pack of Gauloises, and then walked down to the beach. There was some comfort in picking up shells at the water's edge and skipping them into the surf. He sat down on the wooden slats of a deck chair and smoked three cigarettes, one after the other. He thought he might like to sleep on the beach that night, with the waves pounding the shore in the dark and the sound of the hotel band drifting down from the plein air ballroom. But soon his head began to clear and he realized he'd left Klara sitting alone at their table. The absinthe gate was closing. His paranoia retreated. He looked back over his shoulder, and there was the sea-green brushmark of Klara's dress disappearing into the saffron light of the hotel.