I wondered if that was actually true. In the moment of my wondering, she intervened. “They don’t water it down here,” she said.
The grapes were probably too early. It had probably begun to turn. But I did not question her taste or her motives. I said, “Then I’ll join you.”
The waitress brought another glass.
I poured from Louise’s bottle and she raised her glass and I touched it with mine.
The grapes were immature. There was an undeniable suggestion of vinegar. Of course the New York Bar did not water this wine down. Neither would they have this wine on the shelf at all if it weren’t for the war.
She said, “You keep thinking about the wine.”
“You can tell?”
“Is it too awful for you?”
“I’m here for the company.”
She puffed a laugh, averting her face. When she came back to me, she said, “I wanted a clear head for that.” She put her glass down and nudged it slightly away.
I took a slug of the wine. It would do.
She said, “How did it go with Cyrus today?”
I gave her an account, starting with our arrival at La Chapelle. She listened, with what seemed to be her professional detachment, through an account of the suffering of the men from the front. When I spoke of their bravery, she stepped backstage and fell out of character. At least with her eyes, which widened and glowed and finally reflected the lights of the bar in nascent tears.
I hesitated at this.
She did not look away. We considered each other through the veil of her emotion for the men she saw every day as they suffered and died, or suffered and recovered, though often never fully.
“I can see why you came here,” I said.
“Can you?”
“I can see it in your eyes,” I said.
Even as I said it, I recognized my mixed motives. To acknowledge her tender feelings. Sure. But also to woo her. More that, perhaps. Not much to my credit. But even if my motives had been totally pure, the comment would probably have prompted the same reaction on her part: she snapped into awareness of her tears and she jerked her face to the side and lifted her hand to wipe them away.
I plunged my hand into a hip pocket for my handkerchief—brushing, as I did, the holster and the butt of the grip of my pistol—and I drew the cloth out. I was glad to notice that it was clean, which it easily might not have been, and I gave it to her. I was also glad that she took it readily. I was afraid she would be aggravated that I’d let her know I saw her tears. I liked strong women. I’d known a few pretty well. I knew their touchiness about this.
But she came back to me and handed me my handkerchief.
I felt another odd twist of tenderness at its dampness.
She said, “I’m glad you could see that for yourself,” letting me off the hook for my observation.
“I admire it,” I said.
She pulled her nudged glass of wine back toward her. She looked at it. It had barely two swallows left in it.
I lifted the bottle, began to pour the wine into her glass—ruing its cheapness anew—and she soon stopped me with a lift of her hand.
She took up the glass and sipped only a little and put it down again.
“Thank you,” she said, staring at the glass.
I watched her.
Her eyes lifted to me. Then they shifted ever so slightly downward, remaining, however, on my face. “I can’t see it from this angle,” she said.
“What?” I said.
“Your scar,” she said.
I understood. I was sitting to her left, at a right angle. We’d looked at each other to speak, but my left cheek had remained hidden.
My response was a small reflex that turned my face further away. Just a bit. Hide the thing from her even more.
“No,” she said. “It’s okay.”
She brought her right hand forward, crossing the distance between us, and her fingertips touched my left cheek, just past the corner of my mouth. With a gentle pressure she turned my face, exposing my scar to her sight. Then her fingertips stiffened where they lay. I was not to undo this gesture.
She followed my scar with her eyes, slowly, from near her fingertips, up my cheek, to the point where a German’s saber in the camp of a Mexican rebel had begun its slice.
“Are you sure you have no more of these?” she said.
“How can I convince you?” I said.
I didn’t myself fully understand what I was suggesting until she gave me that complex look a woman can sometimes give, when you faintly shock and offend her, even as you compliment her and intrigue her, even as you move her to the possibility of the ultimate suffrage, a woman’s right to elect to express love, or even simply desire, on her own terms.
Now I realized what I had asked. Of course I had.
And all through that look she gave me, she had not taken her fingertips from my cheek.
She removed them now, however.
She turned her gaze away, into the bar, which was growing crowded and noisy.
Then she leaned near to me, lowering her voice so that I could hear her through the gathering din but no one else could. She said, “I intend to marry.”
I no doubt gave her that complex look a man can sometimes give.
She smiled. “I’m not talking about you,” she said.
I erased the look. Smiled. Shrugged. “But I am a catch,” I said.
She ignored the banter.
Her smile was gone. Earnest, brow-furrowed focus had replaced it. “I say this so you understand the sort of woman I am, in spite of my independence.”
“Of course,” I said.
“Marriage is being spoiled for me,” she said.
I didn’t quite understand.
“I feel it so,” she said. She pulled back a bit and hesitated. I could see a decision playing out inside her. Then she leaned to me again. “Men’s bodies,” she said. “I see them. Daily. Fully. I am a nurse, after all. But I am a woman seeing these men naked, who are not my husband. Our world’s moral fastidiousness about these things is set aside for a nurse and the men she cares for.”
She paused.
I let the silence sit between us and then thought this might be all there was. “Of course,” I said. “Everyone understands.”
She lifted her palm to me, but only slightly, as if intending to wave me off but not wanting to make the gesture a rebuke.
I nodded and kept quiet.
She took another moment to reconsider how to say what she’d moments ago paused to consider. Then she said, “And they are all wrecked. I am afraid these months and months of wrecked men, wrecked male bodies, the memory of them, the image of them, will forever spoil any intimacy having to do with a man’s body, even a healthy one. Particularly the ultimate intimacy. Especially when I have known men’s bodies only as I have.”
She seemed to falter. She turned away, saying, “I did not anticipate this about my work.”
But then at once she returned to me, her voice steeling itself as she spoke, “I need alternate memories. As a woman of this new century I will not be disenfranchised from my passion.”
Somewhere along the way my hand had come up to the tabletop and had landed there in sympathy. Now, as the only sound between and around us was the boistering of an American-style bar in a city at war, she laid her hand gently on top of mine.
In the fiacre, Louise and I held hands. We said nothing. The carriage was enclosed and all we heard was the ring of the horse’s shod hooves on the cobbles.
In my bed at the Hôtel de Seine, we said nothing, from our entering my room, to the locking of the door, to our disrobing, with her eyes avoiding my body from the beginning and through the slow touching and through the fullness of things and in the lying down beside each other afterwards, though the electric light at the bedside remained lit during all of this.
We held hands as we lay there afterwards. The sound of our breathing filled the room, and then it subsided, and we were quiet. Onl
y then did she rise up and, with a lift of her hand, stop me from also rising.
She pulled back the sheet.
Now she used her fingertips and her eyes to trace my body, the unscarred, uninjured parts that she most often saw torn and broken and putrefying: my feet and my legs, my abdomen and my chest, my face. Every curve and plane of my face, all but my left cheek, which she assiduously avoided. Then at last she gently turned my head to the right and she traced my scar with the forefinger of her right hand. And she bent to it and kissed it, and she kissed me on the mouth once more.
With a soft exhalation of breath she then lay back beside me, and she let me lift the covers and pull them over us, for it was cold in the room and we had not noticed, but now she was beginning to quake. I tried to assume it was from the cold, but in fact I knew it was from feelings that were too complicated for her to name or speak of. So I covered us and put my arm around her and she drew near.
We lay like that for a time.
Gradually a question began to agitate in me. I felt I knew the answer, but I also knew I might have been self-absorbed and oblivious since we entered my room and was, therefore, wrong. So when enough stillness gathered between us, I asked, “Because of what you’ve seen, were we spoiled for you?”
She shifted against me, drew closer, her leg sliding up mine. “At the beginning,” she said. “But you made me forget.”
I’d been with women. More often than most men. I could not remember feeling anything like the impulse that now moved my arm to press her closely against me. Because of her words.
And we slept.
And I woke to the distant thump of a bomb.
11
There was light coming through the slightly lifted wooden slats of the outer casement shutters. The sound that had woken me was muted, and my mind thrashed now to replay it, to assess it, even as my eyes went to Louise and my hands moved toward her, vaguely, to take her up, to shield her. She’d slept through the sound. I stopped my hands. For a moment I watched her sleeping face in the gray glow from the window.
She was safe.
I had more important things to do now.
I took up my Waltham from the nightstand, angled it to the light. The time was a little past eight.
I rose, went to the window, opened the left-hand casement and its shutter.
Not that I expected to see anything. But I’d come to an impression that the sound was from the north, toward the river. I must already have been in the process of waking when it had gone off. The sound was starting to clarify in me. The sky beyond the roofline across the street was gray and empty. No blast-spewed plume of smoke. But from the bomb’s seeming distance, I was not surprised.
“What is it?” Louise asked, her voice thick.
“I don’t know,” I said. “A sound.”
This seemed to satisfy her. She said no more. She stirred as if turning to go back to sleep.
I stared at the empty sky.
The claw-scrabble of guilt began in my chest.
I should have found a doorway last night across from the cellar bar and watched for Staub.
“Kit,” she said.
I turned to her.
She had not gone back to sleep. She was sitting up in the bed, clutching the sheet against her, covering her naked chest.
I’d left Staub for her.
If I’d simply remained the reporter that I’d long been, if I’d told Trask to beat it as we’d agreed upon, I could have been looking at her now with nothing but afterglow.
Instead, she caused the claws to dig deeper and faster. But I refused to regret what we’d done.
Her eyes slowly descended me now. I realized I was facing her naked.
Her gaze ended with a nod to the foot of the bed.
“Come sit,” she said.
I closed the shutter and the window.
I sat.
We looked at each other.
I could feel her mind working, trying to shape words. She broke with my eyes, averted her face. “I despise the question I want to ask,” she said.
I waited.
“Despise myself for even wanting to ask it,” she said. “I already know how I feel about this. Which is fine.”
I hated seeing her so uneasy with me. I said, “Then it’s my answer that might be despicable. Not the question.”
She turned her face back to me. “You’ve been swell. I wouldn’t blame you.”
“For what?”
“All right,” she said, though it sounded as if that part was addressed to herself. “Do you think me a wanton? For what we did?”
“Certainly not,” I said.
“I’m no free lover,” she said. “No Emma Goldman.”
The notion that I would in any way mistake Louise Pickering for Emma Goldman, the high priestess of anarchy and free love who had the face of a Bowery cop, struck me speechless for a split second. Unfortunately, the second was not split so fine as to prevent Louise from going stiff in the shoulders and looking at me with stricken eyes.
She’d needed an instant answer.
As soon as that fact registered, I said, “God no.” Sharply. And I repeated it, gently this time. “God no.”
The second invocation of God loosened her body.
But her eyes still cried out for convincing.
“There is nothing of Emma Goldman in you,” I said.
To which she replied, “Not that a woman shouldn’t be as free to express those feelings as a man.”
I’d overcorrected my course. “I agree,” I said, even as Staub’s second bomb thumped again in my head, asking me to think about that instead of Louise.
But I managed, “Of course a woman is free.”
“And I have freely rejected advances,” she said. “Many of them.”
“I’m sure,” I said, thinking how my sleep or half-sleep, along with the distance, had muted the sound of the explosion.
“They were all just foolish boys,” she said.
“Of course,” I said, concluding that the thump of it could certainly have been dynamite like the first one.
But having concluded that, my mind luckily shifted to the foolish boys part of her declaration that I’d just endorsed.
I figured I knew enough women to understand I was getting into a different kind of trouble. I said, “A boy wouldn’t have to be foolish to try to woo you.”
“They just read too much,” she said.
Her mind was drifting a little, it seemed.
I had work to do.
I needed to put her in a fiacre.
But her eyes had softened upon me now.
She let go of the sheet, which fell from her nakedness, and she reached her hand toward me.
I took her hand in mine.
For now I kept my eyes on hers.
“You were the first,” she said.
I’d already assumed that.
I brought her hand to my lips and kissed it. I said, “Yesterday I lifted and carried the same bodies you’ve dealt with for months. I know how you earned whatever pleasure we had.”
It seemed the right thing to say.
Twenty minutes later, I rose from the bed and dressed and left Louise. She intended to sleep a while longer. She had the late shift today and would take a fiacre back to the hospital. I told her I was working on other stories and we would see each other again as soon as possible.
Neither of us knew when that might be.
I went out.
The day Trask had taken me to Fortier’s office, we’d first driven west along the Left Bank of the Seine as he persuaded me to cooperate, after which we’d crossed to the Right Bank and doubled back. In fact, the Pont Neuf was barely a five-minute walk northeast from my hotel.
I turned from the narrow Rue Guénégaud onto the Quai de Conti and saw the entrance to the Pont Neuf a short distance ahead. It was blocked by a hasty police barricade of gendarmes and saw-horses. No vehicles were allowed to cross the bridge.
I approached.
A gendarme broke off and confronted me as I tried to enter the sidewalk over the bridge. I presented the letter from Fortier signed by the gendarme’s prefect. He waved me on. I walked the hundred yards to the Place Dauphine and turned in.
A couple more gendarmes flanked Fortier’s door. They read the letter and rang the bell for me. Upstairs three of his boys were filing out of his office as I came in and the man himself was at the end of the room, standing beneath his Chassepot. He motioned me to approach.
“Have you heard?” he said, as he waved me to the chair before his desk.
We both sat.
“I heard the explosion,” I said.
“Another satchel of dynamite. This one at the Pont Neuf Metro station.”
Thus the closing of the bridge, and the gendarmes downstairs. The station was no more than two hundred yards from where we sat, on the Right Bank. “Close to home,” I said.
“Very close to home,” he said.
I began to relate my encounters with Staub.
Lang was right. The cellar bar was new information. It furrowed Fortier’s brow.
When I got to Staub’s behavior on Lang’s street, Fortier said, “He knows something about our man but not yet enough.”
“When I spoke with Lang, he clearly feared Staub. Perhaps he doesn’t fully trust his own sources to keep his identity to themselves.”
Fortier nodded.
I went on to the thing I didn’t like to tell. There was no ducking it. I said, “From Lang’s street Staub strolled back to his room in the cellar, stopping to buy tobacco along the way. I regret not watching for him through the night.”
Though Fortier clearly had the rhetorical guile to let me sit with that in guilty silence for a time, he instantly said, “We did not expect him to be living there. We will find a window across the street from where you can watch.”
“I was misled by one thing.”
“Which allowed you to put him to bed?”
“Yes.”
Fortier smiled. “Perhaps I know.”
Be that as it may have been, I said it first. “That he went looking for Lang when he did.”
Fortier finished the thought. “When he was but a few hours from placing a bomb.”
We both paused.
Then he said, “Lang may be dirty.”
Paris in the Dark Page 9