North of Nowhere, South of Loss

by Janette Turner Hospital

  What comes before and after, we know not …

  Days and months later she spins theories. It is possible, for example, that random arrangements of certain objects constitute some kind of magnetic field. It is possible that currents pass through the poles of such a field. It is possible that shifts occur, earthquakes, upheavals of the magnetic poles, irreversible changes … Or it is possible, yes, it certainly could be possible, why not? as good an explanation as any, didn’t Leonardo himself, after all, believe in potent alignments and perfect symmetries and numer-ologies and arcane geometrical powers, so yes it is possible that spells are generated spontaneously from certain precise mathematical configurations, for example from the axis that begins with Cecily’s eyes and passes through the hovering bird to the eyes of the man.

  The man seems to be there by design. He seems to know her, and for a moment it seems to her that she knows him, that it is all happening again, that he is the passenger, that he was the man that she and Robert had brought with them, but no, no, actually he does not resemble the passenger in the least, she does not know why she thought that stupid thought.

  The man in Leonardo’s staircase continues to stare at her with a slightly stunned look, the look perhaps of a man who has loved a woman passionately, lost her, and is stupefied to see her again after many years. Cecily has the lunatic sensation that he must indeed know her. She has the impression that he comes here often, that he returns, just as she herself seems to return, for reasons private and dangerous, to places it would be wiser to forget.

  But she is sure she has never seen the man before. She has never been to Chambord, nor indeed to the valley of the Loire, before. Her mouth is dry. She swallows.

  Excusez-moi, excusez-moi, someone says, and she feels faint, gripping the limestone sill because there is shuffling, pushing, there are people behind him, behind her, there is a swarm of languages, cameras, flashbulbs, yes, and collisions occur between particles of light and bewilderment. He too has a camera in his hands. She blinks and sees white circles, lightning, the quick black spark of the bird.

  Oh, the bird! someone says, and talk ricochets off the walls. Got it, I think. Good shot … What shutter speed …? Do you think the light…?

  Distressed, Cecily brushes the voices off like flies.

  “Don’t move,” the man says softly, urgently, in French, no, in English, no, she feels the words as feathers against her skin. But she is pinned by a torrent of people and the rising tide of the tour groups on the opposite stair is lapping and pulling at the man.

  Don’t go, she pleads silently.

  He smiles very slightly, a half smile, the shadow of a smile, and points upwards. She nods. She begins to climb. He is on the other coil of the double stair. The two flights twist around and around each other, but never meet. At each turn of the twinned whorls, at each matched pair of openings, the man and the woman pause for ten seconds, twenty, sometimes thirty. At each turn of the stair, the air is heavier. Cecily can feel the drugged weight of it in her lungs, on her eyelids, between her legs. When we get to the top, she thinks, we will meet on the great balcony. It seems certain to her that afterwards nothing will be the same.

  Nothing, however, is certain except uncertainty and there is always interference in the lines of flight. A man and a woman may meet in Sydney or in Paris or wherever, signals may be exchanged, heat of various kinds given off, future possibilities intimated … but then … But then a bird and a car may meet without warning and throw all flight paths into drastic disarray. There are no guarantees that desired effect will follow the cause or the course of desire.

  Near the top of the double staircase, the congestion of the tour groups is extreme. Americans, Cecily thinks with exasperation, already breathing French attitudes and air. There should be certain hours for noisy American groups, and other hours for contem-platives, she thinks, then she sees the Australian flags on several backpacks. Once, before she became so flighty, she would have felt a leap of happiness. She would have tapped the traveller on the shoulder, G’day, mate, just to hear the dear diphthongs again, the muddy vowels. Now she makes herself invisible. Swimming against the current, slipping sleekly through hollows in the tide, she slithers through to the labyrinth of outdoor galleries and the pinnacle-forested roof.

  There is no further sign of the bird.

  The man has flown.

  Cecily leans against the outer wall of Leonardo’s lantern, breathing raggedly, and stares across parklands and parterres into the dark wood of François I. She feels weak with relief. I must run, she thinks. I must leave before I see that man again.

  “Excuse me,” he says, touching her shoulder, and Cecily startles violently and turns and their eyes meet.

  She cannot breathe for sheer panic.

  She runs toward the stairs and keeps running.

  In a farmhouse in the rural south of England, Cecily stares at the postcard on her wall. For some reason, she is shivering. She takes the quilt from the bed and wraps herself in it and huddles in a chair, but she still feels cold. Then she pulls open the drawer in the small oak desk. For a whole minute, maybe two, she sits there, indecisive, her hand in the drawer. Her fingers read the large brown envelope like braille – the grainy outside, the gummed flap, the smooth lining. It’s shock, that’s all, she hears Robert say. It wears off. She extracts the envelope, and for a long time sits with it unopened in her lap. Then she takes out the 8 x 10 inch black-and-white photograph, the one from the inquest, the one the lawyer had given her. She pins it to the wall beside Robert’s card.

  A tree is growing through the middle of a car, and the car has split open like a well-charred seed. The tree grows through the place where a front passenger might have sat. No photograph exists of the passenger, the man to whom they had offered a ride.

  It is dark, but Cecily lights a candle and stares at the two photographs all night.

  In the morning, she takes pen and paper.

  Dear Robert, she writes. You think I am running from misplaced guilt about the accident. You think that I think I caused it because of the birds, because I distracted you. I did cause it. But not in any way you could know …

  The sheer randomness of desire, its casual ruthlessness, is what frightens Cecily. She did not know the man. She heard that he came with the friend of a friend of someone, not that she would ask. He is in Political Science, she has overheard, or maybe it is the History Department, a new appointment freshly arrived in Sydney from somewhere else, Melbourne, Brisbane, nobody seems quite sure. There is such a crush at the party, such a thick fog of bodies and smoke, people flattened against walls, people falling over coats in the hall, people pressing up against one another (sometimes by design, sometimes not), people spilling champagne or good Australian beer.

  But no one has introduced Cecily and the man from Brisbane or wherever, and they have not yet brushed up against each other. In fact, she has been going to absurd lengths to avoid him, she has no idea why. There is something about the soft skin at the back of his neck, just above his jacket collar, and something about the way a curl falls across his forehead, which affects her breathing. With whom has he come to the party? With which woman? She cannot believe she is asking these ridiculous questions of herself.

  If she stands by the tub of ice from which bottles jut like porcupine quills, she can swap small talk with the bartender. Behind him is a wall of mirrored tiles. She waves to Robert’s reflection. Robert blows her a kiss. In the mirror, she sees a woman, laughing, lean in close to the man from somewhere else and brush invisible lint from his sleeve. Cecily turns away.

  People come and go. Into the brief spaces of monologues, Cecily makes sounds of approval. “It’s so refreshing,” a man tells her, slurring his words a little, “to talk to someone so interested in the kind of research I do.” Yes? she murmurs. Through the crook of the researcher’s drinking arm, she watches the man from Brisbane – she has decided it must be Brisbane because of the tan – she sees him move away from the woman who
touched his jacket. He is watching someone in the mirror, watching with an intense, demanding, look-at-me look. Out of simple curiosity, she turns.

  And who knows how long they stood like that, reflecting? His eyes, her eyes: how could movements so tiny throw so many lives off course? She concentrates on setting her champagne flute delicately down on the bookshelf beside her. Everything is in slow motion now, the way the man walks through the mirror and takes her glass from the bookshelf and tips his head back and drinks, watching her.

  “That is a dangerous thing to do,” she says in a small voice, and now Robert is waving from the mirror, signalling, and the man says: “Ah, you belong to someone then,” and she says, “Well, uh, we’ve been together a while … ” and everything speeds up, everything goes to Fast Forward, Robert is explaining that it’s two in the morning and they really must, “… but I don’t belong to anyone,” she says, and then suddenly it’s flight she wants, yes, she agrees with Robert, we have to leave, but Robert is saying “You’re Joe’s friend. From Brisbane, right? Good to have you here, can we give you a lift, are we heading in the same direction?” and as a matter of fact, what do you know? they are indeed, but there’s absolutely no need, except that Robert of course is his always generous self and insists, he insists, no problem. And then Cecily says, well in that case the passenger should take the front seat, yes, this time it is she who puts her foot down. Absolutely. Because, because. So the two men can talk.

  “Oh look!” she says, as they leave the city behind and skim along the shore road north of Manly. To their right are the dunes, and beyond them the curl of Pacific surf. Cecily leans forward, pushing slightly between the bucket seats. She is pressed up against the passenger from the sway of the car. “Look at the nightbirds!”

  “Where?” Robert asks, and swerves, and the birds come at them like leaves. Instinctively Robert puts his hands in front of his face. “Cec!” he shouts, and she lunges forward between the seats and she tries, she tries, to reach the wheel.

  Dear Robert, she writes. Accidents are accidents, as the inquest ruled, and as you have said a thousand times. They are nobody’s fault. Nevertheless there is something I’ve never told you …

  She crushes the sheet of paper into a ball and takes another.

  Dear Robert, she writes. I have a confession to make. It is desire, that careless predator, that outlaw, I am running from …

  She tears the page neatly and precisely into shreds and begins again.

  Dear Robert, she writes. She leaves the sheet blank and signs her name at the bottom. PS, she writes. Thank you for the card. You are dear to me, and always will be. As you’ll see from the stamp, I’m in England at present, but please don’t try to write as I’m moving on. Love, Cecily.

  Yes, she has the right street. She takes the postcard from her pocket: the luminous staircase, the bird, the woman’s face. She checks the back of the card again: yes, right street, right number. And there is the place, Graphique de Paris. But perhaps she will come again another day. She turns back to the Métro entrance. Then again, maybe she should lay the matter to rest and have done with it. People are looking at her strangely. She leans against the stairwell and watches them pass up and down, whole flocks of them, like birds.

  What have I got to lose? she asks herself.

  And in fact it is all very brisk and businesslike in Graphique de Paris. An elegant young woman studies the postcard, turns it over to find the title of the photograph, and then types L’envolée on a keyboard. Her computer hums thoughtfully for several seconds. She looks from the screen to Cecily and back again. She swivels the monitor around so that Cecily can see the image, enlarged, in digital clarity. “Is it you?” the young woman asks curiously.

  “I think so,” Cecily says.

  The young woman swings the monitor back to herself and presses another key. “Hmm. The photographer’s one of our freelancers. Lives in the Marais. Here.” She swivels the monitor again. “You can copy down his address and phone number if you like.”

  Cecily sits in a coffee shop near the Place des Vosges in the Marais, watching the building across the street. If she were to push open its large wooden door, and cross its courtyard, and climb Staircase B, and ring the bell on the second floor, what would she say?

  She pays for her coffee. She crosses the street and pushes open the great wooden door. She walks through the courtyard, she climbs Staircase B, she rings the bell. But when he opens the door, she is unable to say a word.

  “Ah,” he says, nodding. Seconds pass. He is smiling slightly. He scarcely even seems surprised. “So you got my message,” he says. He says it in French and she has to play back the words inside her head and then translate.

  “Why did you look at me like that, at Chambord?” Her French is inordinately careful and slow.

  He shrugs. “I don’t know. You reminded me of someone.” He rakes a hand through his hair. “I don’t know why I say that. You don’t really look like her at all. It was just something … It was something fugitive about you.”

  They stand there staring at each other.

  “I’ll confess something,” he says. “I willed you to come back. I planned it. I’ve been waiting.”

  “That’s crazy,” she says shakily.

  “I know.”

  “The odds were overwhelmingly against you.”

  “Yes, they were, weren’t they? Just the same, I believed you would come.”

  “I have to warn you,” she says, and there is something the matter with her voice, she has to struggle to make herself heard. “I have a dangerous record. I’m a very bad risk.”

  “Le seul risque est de ne pas en prendre,” he says gravely.

  And she feels like a bird that has accidentally, miraculously, been blown into a radiant hall on a rush of air. What comes before and after we know not … Oh, almost certainly there will be another door, she knows that, and some future current of air will push her, or suck her, into darkness again. But she doesn’t care.

  FRAMES AND WONDERS

  1. Frame of Reference

  “No" the man says, “we’re not interested.”

  “We might be,” the woman demurs. “Let me see.”

  “Don’t indulge him. He’ll expect to be paid.” The man catches his reflection in plate glass and looks away. Though he thinks he is aging well, he does not like growing old. He does not like to have a record kept. “They are parasites,” he says irritably. “Public nuisances. As bad as the beggars, and such amateur work.”

  “Look,” she says. “Double exposure.” She leans across the bistro table, the Polaroid snapshot in her hand. In the photograph, a man and a woman are drinking wine at a sidewalk café. They could be lovers.

  Reluctantly, the man looks and then smiles. “Les yeux dans les yeux,” he says.

  “Mm. And look.” She points. Behind the figures in the photograph, ghostly beneath the window-painted lettering of Brasserie Bastille, their reflections mimic and float. “It’s us, exactly. Don’t you think that’s perfect? Multiple selves, anchored nowhere. After all these years, same café, same regrets, same high-voltage gaze, same old impossible shadow dance. Except that we’ve never both been in the same frame before. And except that we’re old.”

  “Non,” he says. “Mûr. Nous sommes mûrs, Odette.”

  “Sounds much better,” she agrees. “Ripeness is all.”

  “Tu es encore belle”’

  She smiles and touches the smudge of birthmark beneath his eye. “I am a sucker for perfect imperfections.”

  “Excusez-moi, madame.” The street photographer coughs deferentially and eases a second snapshot between one glass and the bottle of wine. This photograph shows a man and a woman leaning close to look at a photograph which shows a man and a woman leaning close.

  “Here we go round the mulberry bush,” she says.

  He closes his eyes. “Do you remember the summer we found the lost village?”

  “I remember we went in search of a place for one whole su
mmer. We never found it.”

  “What?” He stares at her. “How can you say that?”

  “Because it’s true. You know the place doesn’t exist.”

  “We spent a whole day there, and a night. Why don’t you want to remember? We had wine and apples.”

  “And we picnicked beside the pond?”

  “Yes, yes, exactly.”

  “But we never did sleep in the king’s hunting lodge.”

  “Si, si. We made love in the royal bed. You cannot have forgotten. You must remember that.”

  “I remember your fantasy. You embellished it every night.”

  He is agitated. He tears a Pastis coaster in half. “ C’est incroyable. It is because my English was so poor then, and your French was not yet good.” He puts his head in his hands. “So much I explained to you, so much you never understood.”

  “Swann,” she says. “Dear Swann.” She takes his hands and kisses his fingertips. “Half the time, we were lost in mistranslation, that’s true, but I did understand your obsession with that place. We found no trace of it. It did not exist.”

  “I took photographs,” he insists. “When you left, so brutally, I sent you copies.”

  “You took photographs of wishes and birds in flight. You sent a postcard of an empty cage.”

  “It is very revealing,” he says bitterly, “this repression. This need to deny. It is very Puritan, very Australian. Very damned Anglo-Saxon. You are all terrified of desire.”

  “Are we going to fight again? It’s the way you confuse passion with possession that scares me. It’s that insane French jealousy, that need to control. I felt caged. ”

  “Love is a cage, yes, and the Anglo-Saxons lock themselves outside it.” He is angry. He sweeps the importunate street photographer aside. “And so you wipe passion from your memory. The past, you erase.”

  “Swann,” she says wearily. “You invent the past.”

  “In the king’s hunting lodge,” he says, “in the photograph, you look as you should always look. The face of a woman well-loved is like the face of a biche, how do you say?”