I have thought there is nothing I wouldn’t give to have that chance again, to leave those eyes unmet, the chance to step out onto the Parisian street, out into any other future, any future other than this one. What, I have asked, would I not give?
Well, to that question, at least, I know the answer. I know what I would not give. I would not give my daughter.
* * *
—
I had been preparing my departure from Paris. I had my tickets, had communicated to my Romanian concierge—with the aid of a calendar, an approximate drawing of an airplane, and, finally, the advance payment of my last month’s rent—that the time had come for me to return to the States. My yearlong fellowship at the American Hospital was drawing to its close, and I had already packed up my scant possessions in boxes I’d saved from my arrival. I had bidden my farewells to the few colleagues I had come to know—all, that is, except for my friend Mathieu. I’d met him, also a young psychoanalyst, after a lecture at the Collège de France. Over many coffees and with impressive patience he had improved my French, and in return I had offered to translate an article he was hoping to submit to a prominent Anglo-American psychoanalytic review. That evening we had met to discuss the final draft, and he’d insisted on making a farewell dinner: a roast chicken with haricots verts and parsleyed new potatoes. For my contribution, I had brought a couple of bottles of a blackish Corsican wine chosen only because I could pronounce its name intelligibly to the wine merchant near my apartment.
We had set aside the writing when we moved to the second bottle of wine, discussing a journey he’d made to the States when a boy, how some stretch of coast in New England had reminded him of his native Brittany—did I know Brittany?—how a neighbor in his building, a graduate student in philosophy, was writing a thesis on certain English poets—would I be willing to help her too?—about my failure to visit more of France, more of Paris, during my stay. “And so you must come back, then, of course!” We agreed that I would, but only on the condition that I would put him up some August in New York. How often I have thought back over those bland exchanges, imagining a line of perforation between each, how easy it would have been to say, “Bon, voilà, I will go now.” How grateful we both would have been in the morning not to have uncorked a third bottle of wine, and I would have stepped over the threshold into the damp night that much earlier, would have followed the path of a different future: back to my rented room, back to the States to establish a practice, to resume my former life, all by saying ten or five or three minutes sooner, “Bon, voilà, I must let you sleep.”
But no, instead I left after the third bottle, found myself on the landing in front of the elevator, which had clacked open on its dim interior and sole occupant, Mathieu’s neighbor, the student of “philo,” her hand compact and strong shaking my own, her level gaze fixing me, the gaze from which I would never escape, her “Enchantée” both solemn and amused in response to my “Je suis nommé Daniel,” her saying then, as though answering a question I did not know how to ask, “Miriam. Moi, je m’appelle Miriam.”
Miriam. What did she look like? What could I say to my daughter? That Miriam was beautiful no doubt to others, the plane of her cheekbones, her nose high-bridged, brow level, the lips at rest slightly open, while to me the cheek, the nose, the mouth, were beautiful because they were Miriam’s alone? That in dreams even now that mouth presses itself against mine, as if starved for the air in my lungs?
And so I would lie, saying, “That’s just what she looked like, Clem, like you minus me.”
SIX
Mathieu had said she was a singer, une choriste, that she earned extra money during her studies by singing in choral ensembles. So I knew she was a graduate student in philosophy and a singer, that her name was Miriam Levaux, and that was all I had. It would have been easy enough to ask Mathieu her telephone number, but I did not. I could not, not because I was shy or ashamed, but because in some way I knew that the Miriam I would find with Mathieu’s assistance, or anyone else’s, would not be the Miriam I sought. The Miriam with friends, with acquaintances, at the center of her own history, would not be the Miriam I had seen in the caged interior of the elevator, not her body, knowledge of whose compact wholeness leapt like a spark from her palm to mine when she shook my hand. Miriam. Moi, je m’appelle Miriam, she had said, as though to say: “You will only find me if you find me alone.”
And so I set to my work. Newspapers from the corner kiosk yielded a bewilderment of choral listings: Eastern Orthodox choirs, American gospel, madrigal ensembles, a “Missa Flamenca,” a Palestrina festival. Attending events across the city, I slipped into back rows and pews, slipped out early when I’d determined she wasn’t there. I think now how slender the odds were that I would find her. How could I be sure she was even in the city? But I was sure. I knew it was only a matter of time and in the event not very much time at all, perhaps a week, perhaps ten days.
The concert where I found her was a program of music by Tallis and Allegri, the venue a church not more than half a kilometer from my apartment. The place was more crowded than I had anticipated, and the view from my pew was partially obscured by a pillar. It was only by leaning to the side that I could make out the faces of the singers in the choir.
Was that her, small and dark, in a plain dark dress, standing in the front row? Someone behind me hissed when I leaned over farther to see. I do not remember what the first pieces were; the music seemed to pass through my person unimpeded, like radio signals. The concert concluded, however, with Allegri’s Miserere, whose first stately notes seemed to restore to the church its extinguished purpose. I cannot describe or explain the feeling, but it was as though the music I heard was at once music no one had ever heard and music I had always loved. Was Miriam’s voice among those blent in that solemn current? I was certain it was, but I could not see her. Monsieur! my neighbor hissed again when I tried once more to see around the pillar. I closed my eyes and listened.
Miriam, I learned later, was not one of the robed figures visible at the front of the church. Hers had been a solitary voice, separate from the choir, sequestered with two or three other singers up in a loft or gallery. Hers was the single soprano voice set apart for the ravishing upper flights of the Miserere’s refrain, the voice that detached itself, every other verse, to hang for a harrowing instant in the ether before swooping to a lower octave.
She did not recognize me after the performance when I approached her on the street. I repeated my name twice before she remembered where we had met. “Ah, Daniel! Excusez-moi!” she said, and it was perhaps still in a spirit of apology that she agreed to join me for a glass of wine and to humor my hobbling French. Nevertheless, she accepted a second glass, and those were followed by two more glasses, until it grew late and the café waiter began to bang chairs onto tabletops and sweep around the base of our table.
Standing by the cash register to pay (the waiter now assiduously ignoring me), I watched her smoke her cigarette, watched her reach out to stub it in the ashtray but then hesitate, lifting the cigarette again to her lips to take a final drag before stabbing it out. She had kicked off a shoe, and her foot, resting flat on the tile, looked small and sure, as though accustomed to nakedness.
Would I be in Paris a little longer? she asked, lighting another cigarette, when I returned to the table.
Not long, I said. My flight to the States would leave in a few days.
Ah, dommage, because maybe I could have helped her with some translations, as I had helped Mathieu. A friend of hers had composed a series of songs, settings of Irish poems that Miriam was scheduled to record. She wanted there to be good translations in the liner notes, better than the French translations she had found. Did I know much Irish poetry?
I did not.
A shame, because it was very beautiful, or so it seemed to her.
Maybe, I said, we could meet before I left.
Would it be
possible? It would only be brief, and in turn she could help me with my French pronunciation. I had, she said, a lazy American mouth.
And saying that, she reached across the table as though to touch my lips but stopped just short, so close that I could smell the nicotine on her fingertips.
Yes, then, it was settled, she said, withdrawing her hand. We would meet in the next few days.
* * *
—
That evening, we had spoken some of the music. I remember her describing it, how her explanation of the Miserere grew more animated with each sip of wine. But in truth what obliterated all other recollection was the music itself, in which her voice seemed both the extracted essence of all the other voices and yet wholly detached from anything or anybody, hanging in the airless reach of that high octave, stepping down at first with deliberation, then plunging through the abrupt, descending figure that concludes the line. That single upper note seemed the point, Archimedean, illuminated, where joy and anguish converge, if only for an instant, then the voice subsides at last into silence and the cry is taken up in the cantor’s stark baritone, the voice of one from whom fate has taken everything:
Ecce enim in iniquitatibus conceptus sum:
et in peccatis concepit me mater mea.
Behold, I was shapen in wickedness:
and in sin hath my mother conceived me.
Surely you know these words, Father, so often sung in Holy Week. It is through their darkness that the soprano line cuts like a beam of light. No, not like a beam: like a blade, like a torch cutting sheet iron, the cut releasing a molten shower as the figure descends, poured out, then pitched headlong into blackness. What I remember from that evening, a kind of mortal injury, a penetration not pain but deepest astonishment, a wound to instruct the wounded in one fact only: that his body can be opened, that it harbors no sanctum that cannot be breached. I do not know what I am saying, and yet I am certain that for Miriam the experience had been in its way the same—not, of course, the experience of meeting me, but of the music itself, that for her the upper reach of the Miserere was a clearing, an opening. No, I do not know what I am saying, but I am certain that she saw it, that opening within me, the passage the note had cut through me with the hard edge of its flame. She was in flight and saw in that opening a way out, an escape. She saw it and she took it.
So that night, after we left the café, it was inevitable that she would ask to come up to my apartment, now nearly empty, that she would accept a glass of black Corsican wine but leave it untouched beside mine, also untouched, on the floor beside the bed.
* * *
—
When I woke the next morning, alone, I didn’t know where I was or what had happened. I blinked at the wall. I thought that if I lay completely still, the taste and shadows of the previous night would reassemble themselves into a memory. Instead I heard a little shuffle, a scrape. She was there when I turned over, seated in my only chair, smoking a cigarette, her bare feet resting in a patch of sunlight on the threshold of the open porte-fenêtre. I remembered her bare foot on the floor of the café. I remembered, and I remember now, the odor of nicotine on her fingertips as they hovered just shy of my lips. I remembered then, and remember now, the pressure of her pubic bone against my upper lip.
She smiled and said, “Daniel.”
She said, “Remember me?”
* * *
—
I stayed in France.
The day of my departure, printed on the airline ticket I’d tacked to the jamb of the door, came and went. The ticket itself stayed tacked to the jamb. It became a kind of joke between Miriam and me. When I left the apartment, she would say, “Oublie pas tes billets, chéri!”—Don’t forget your tickets, sweetie!—as though I were departing on the 8:06 train to Clermont-Ferrand for an afternoon meeting. Or she would say, “Tickets, tickets!” in feigned annoyance when (for example) I had bought the wrong kind of toothpaste at the pharmacy or failed to pick up our clothes at the laundromat. “You forget, monsieur, that I have my tickets!”
I knew where mine were, I would say, tilting my head toward the doorjamb. But where were hers? “Ah, monsieur,” she would say. “On a tous ses billets.” We all have our tickets. And “Tickets” was our reply when one or the other would say, “Je t’aime…je t’adore.” “Mais tu as tes billets, quand même…” But you have your tickets, all the same…
SEVEN
And where were her tickets?
Shall I tell you? she asked, but told me nothing.
And where was she going?
Going? she said, as though we had been speaking of something else entirely.
Home? Mars? Senegal? America?
Not America! she had said. That huge Babylon.
And what was home, while we were at it? Paris?
What, Paris? I did not think she had a Parisian accent, did I?
I did not know there was a Parisian accent.
Surely I was not asking to meet her parents, to make an appearance in her hometown in the Nièvre….A silent American, accompanying Levaux’s daughter! What a homecoming! Could I imagine?
No, no, she said. Not where she comes from. That is not where she would take me. Not back to the past. Instead, she would take me to the place she was headed.
* * *
—
Or so I thought she said, though I didn’t or couldn’t understand what she meant. Speaking of past and future had felt suddenly wrong. I realized, in the silence that followed, how much I liked it, how much we both liked it, knowing nothing of each other’s future or past. In any event, I forgot about our plan and blinked at her in confusion when she showed up one morning with a borrowed car and instructed me to pack for a week.
Even when I was driving (she had insisted I drive), she did not tell me where we were going. Eventually, after the boulevards, traffic circles, and segments of ring-road, we merged onto a highway. The plain of the Île-de-France spread out like a stilled sea, endless fields of grain, haze-hung, touching every horizon, a tundra of uninflected green.
It was not so hard to drive in Europe after all, was it? she said. I had demonstrated a basic competence, she said. Maybe I was ready to take the next step.
She kicked her sandals off, slid her seat all the way forward, and in a single, neat maneuver pivoted so that her back was pressed against the dashboard, her feet against the seatback.
Et voilà the next challenge, she said, working her skirt up above her hips and cupping her hand between her legs, drumming her fingers once or twice, as though in impatience or boredom. T’es sûr ça te derange pas? You’re sure this won’t bother you? she asked as her fingertips began to describe a slow circle.
* * *
—
When the drive was at last over—lengthened as it had been by Miriam’s peremptory instructions, by the hunt for a shaded byway—we had switched off the ignition in the courtyard of what appeared to be some sort of monastery.
She said: So now you can see why I needed to get you out of my system.
In the office an old monk she knew by name greeted her, beaming, with a double kiss: Miriam, ma fille, tu vas bien? You must be exhausted from the journey. Monsieur, enchanté, he said, and shook my hand, beaming at me as well. Turning back toward us from time to time, as though to confirm that we were following him, he led us to our rooms.
The men’s dormitory was a part of the monastic enclosure, though much newer in construction than the other buildings that comprised the cloister. Women slept in a guesthouse separated from the monastery by a narrow lane and an iron gate, long off its hinges, leaning against the gatepost in a tangle of nettles and bindweed.
After a chaste pair of kisses, Miriam disappeared into the guesthouse. The monk gestured me through the gate and said, “So Monsieur and Madame Levaux are here for a silent retreat?”
Was I supposed t
o say something? I said nothing.
“I wish you,” he went on, “a prayerful visit.”
I am certain, prior to that exchange, I had never been wished a prayerful anything, nor did I know what a silent retreat was supposed to be, but in the sheer dislocated oddness that the day had become, nothing seemed stranger than anything else. Sitting on the edge of my narrow bed, I stared out at the vast sky. The idea occurred to me that I might simply leave, even that Miriam expected me to. I could find my way back to the car without the aid of the monk, turn the key in the ignition, and vanish. Even as I formulated the thought, however, I knew I could not. What prevented me was not the desire to remain, but the sudden sense that Paris was a million miles away. What home I had had dissolved in that distance. What home I had I would never see again.
EIGHT
At the monastery, Miriam and I spent our days together and also, in spite of her sequestration, our nights, but we never spoke to each other. What was a “silent retreat”? How often had Miriam been here? And what did she believe of all this? During the daily round of services in the chapel, she sat with the monks in a chair they positioned by the choir, and she joined them in the chanting of the psalms and collects. (I, meanwhile, sat as far back in the chapel as I could, alone beneath the wooden gaze of a saint’s effigy.) Was her relationship to them a musical affiliation? Perhaps she came here as some sort of choral scholar. During the offices and the daily Mass, however, in addition to singing the psalms and antiphons, she would kneel or cross herself as the monks did, and she said with them the many spoken Amens and Alleluias that punctuated the prayers. She had never suggested that she was religious, though of course I knew that as a choral singer she and her fellow musicians spent many hours rehearsing and performing in church. I imagine I would have assumed—whether from her complexion or name—that she was Jewish, or partly so, had I given it any thought at all.
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