Not Safe After Dark: And Other Stories

by Peter Robinson

  On the other hand, people disappear all the time, don’t they? And people change. Harriet changed into Joyce, didn’t she? Sometimes you just have to give a little kick-start to get the process going, like the carrion in the septic tank, and then nature takes care of the rest.

  “Penny for them?”

  “What? Oh, I’m sorry, Sam. Miles away.”

  “That’s all right. I was just saying as how you’ll need some carrion for the septic tank. My old boss swore by it, he did.”

  At that moment, Evelyn passed by the open French windows in his shabby beige cardigan, secateurs in hand. Wisps of gray hair blew in the March wind like spider’s webs, and his glasses had slipped down his nose. Yes, people disappear all the time, don’t they? And if it can happen to wives, I thought, then it can bloody well happen to husbands, too.

  “Yes, Sam,” I said slowly. “Yes, I suppose we will. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

  April in Paris

  The girl sitting outside the café reminds me of April. She has the same long hennaed hair, which she winds around her index finger in the same abstracted way. She is waiting for someone clearly—a lover perhaps—and as she waits she smokes, holding her cigarette in the same way, taking the same short, hurried puffs, that April used to do. With her free hand, she alternates between taking sips of milky pastis and tapping her cigarette packet on the table. She is smoking Marlboro, as everyone in Paris seems to do these days. Back then it was all Gitanes, Gauloises, and Disque Bleus.

  Still, it wasn’t smoking that killed April; it was love.

  * * *

  It is late September, and though the weather is mild, it is still too cold outside for an old man like me, with blood as thin and as lacking in nutrients as workhouse gruel. Instead, I sit inside the little café on the Boulevard Saint-Germain over a pichet of red wine, just watching the people come and go. The young people. I have spent most of my life surrounded by the young, and though I grow inexorably older every year, they always seem to stay young. Immortal youth. Like Tithonus, I am “a white-haired shadow roaming like a dream.” But unlike Tennyson’s luckless narrator, who gained eternal life but not eternal youth, I am not immortal.

  Six months, perhaps less, the doctors say. Something is growing inside me; my cells are mutating. As yet I feel little pain, though my appetite has diminished and I often suffer from extreme weariness.

  Dying, I find, lends an edge to living, gives a clarity and a special, golden hue to the quotidian scenes parading before me: a swarthy man with a briefcase, glancing at his watch, speeding up, late for an important appointment; a woman chastising her little girl at the corner, wagging her finger, the girl crying and stamping her foot; a distracted priest stumbling briefly as he walks up the steps to the church across the boulevard.

  Dying accentuates the beauty of the young, sets their energy in relief, enhances the smooth glow of their unwrinkled skin. But dying does not make me bitter. I am resigned to my fate; I have come to the end of my threescore and ten; I have seen enough. If you wish to travel, my doctors told me, do it now while you’re still strong enough. So here I am, revisiting the scene of my one and only great amour.

  April. She always pronounced it Ap-reel. When I think of her, I still hear Thelonious Monk playing “April in Paris,” hesitantly at first, feeling his way into the song, reluctant to define the theme, then worrying away at it and, once finding it, altering it so much that the music becomes his own, only to be abandoned finally.

  Of course, April didn’t give a tinker’s for Thelonious Monk. She listened to him dutifully, as they all did, for they were the heirs of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs, to whom Monk, Bird, Trane, Miles, and Mingus were gods, sacred and cool. But April’s generation had its own gods—the Doors, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan—gods of words and images as well as of music, and it was they who provided the soundtrack to which I lived during my year as a visiting lecturer in American literature at the Sorbonne in 1968.

  This café hasn’t changed much. A lick of paint, perhaps, if that. It probably hasn’t changed much since Hemingway and Fitzgerald used to hang out around here. Even the waiters are probably the same. It was here I first met April, of course (why else would I come here?), one fine evening toward the end of March that year, when I was still young enough to bear the slight chill of a clear spring evening.

  * * *

  That April was beautiful almost goes without saying. I remember her high cheekbones, her smooth, olive complexion, dark, watchful eyes, and rich, moist lips, downturned at the edges, often making her look sulky or petulant when she was far from it. I remember also how she used to move with grace and confidence when she remembered, but how the gaucheness of late adolescence turned her movements into a country girl’s gait when she was at her most unselfconscious. She was tall, slim, and long-legged, and her breasts were small, round, and high. The breasts of a Cranach nude.

  We met, as I say, one late March evening in 1968 at this café, the Café de la Lune, where I was then sitting with the usual group: Henri, Nadine, Brad, Brigitte, Alain, and Paul. This was only days after Daniel Cohn-Bendit and seven other students had occupied the dean’s office at Nanterre to protest against the recent arrest of six members of the National Vietnam Committee, an event that was to have cataclysmic effects on us all not long afterward. Much of the time in those days we spoke of revolution, but that evening we were discussing, I remember quite clearly, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, when in she walked, wearing a woolly jumper and close-fitting, bell-bottomed jeans with flowers embroidered around the bells. She was carrying a bulky leather shoulder bag, looking radiant and slightly lost, glancing around for someone she knew.

  It turned out that she knew Brad, an American backpacker who had attached himself to our group. People like Brad had a sort of fringe, outlaw attraction for the students. They seemed, with their freedom to roam and their contempt for rules and authority, to embody the very principles that the students themselves, with their heavy workloads, exams, and future careers, could only imagine, or live vicariously. There were always one or two Brads around. Some dealt in drugs to make a living; Brad, though he spoke a good revolution, lived on a generous allowance wired regularly by his wealthy Boston parents via Western Union.

  April went up to Brad and kissed him on both cheeks, a formal French gesture he seemed to accept with thinly veiled amusement. In his turn, Brad introduced her to the rest of us. That done, we resumed our discussion over another bottle of wine, the tang of Gauloises and café noir infusing the chill night air, and April surprised me by demonstrating that she had not only read Tender Is the Night, but that she had thought about it, too, even though she was a student of history, not of literature.

  “Don’t you think those poor young girls are terribly used?” she said. “I mean, Nicole is Dick’s patient. He should be healing her, not sleeping with her. And the way Rosemary is manipulated by her mother . . . I’d go so far as to say that the mother seems to be pimping for her. Those films she made”—and here April gave her characteristic shrug, no more than a little shiver rippling across her shoulders—“they were no doubt made to appeal to older men.” She didn’t look at me as she said this, but my cheeks burned nonetheless.

  “Have you read Day of the Locust?” Henri, one of the other students, chimed in. “If you want to know about how Hollywood warps people, that’s your place to start. There’s a mother in there who makes Rosemary’s look like a saint.”

  “Huxley?” asked Nadine, not our brightest.

  “No,” said April. “That was After Many a Summer. Day of the Locust was Nathanael West, I think. Yes?”

  Here, she looked directly at me, the professor, for the first time, turned on me the full blaze of her beauty. She knew she was right, of course, but she still deferred to me out of politeness.

  “That’s right,” I said, smiling, feeling my heart lurch and my soul tingle inside its chains of flesh. “Nathanael West wrote Day of the Locust.”r />
  And from that moment on I was smitten.

  * * *

  I told myself not to be a fool, that April was far too young for me, and that a beautiful woman like her couldn’t possibly be interested in a portly, forty-year-old lecturer, even if he did wear faded denim jeans, had a goatee, and grew those wisps of hair that remained a little longer than some of his colleagues thought acceptable. But after that first meeting I found myself thinking about April a lot. In fact I couldn’t get her out of my mind. It wasn’t mere lust—though, Lord knows, it was that, too—but I loved the sound of her voice, loved the way she twisted strands of hair around her finger as she spoke, the way she smoked her cigarette, loved the passion of her arguments, the sparkle of her laughter, the subtle jasmine of her perfume.

  Love.

  That night, she had left the café after about an hour, arm in arm with Brad—young, handsome, rich, footloose, and fancy-free Brad—and I had lain awake tormented by images of their passionate lovemaking. I had never felt like that before, never felt so consumed by desire for someone and so racked by pain at the thought of someone else having her. It was as if an alien organism had invaded my body, my very soul, and wrought such changes there that I could hardly cope with more mundane matters, such as teaching and writing, eating and sleeping.

  The second time I met her it was raining. I was walking along the quai across from Notre Dame, staring distractedly at the rain pitting the river’s steely surface, thinking of her, when she suddenly ducked under my umbrella and took my arm.

  I must have gasped out loud.

  “Professor Dodgson,” she said. Not a question. She knew who I was. “Sorry I startled you.”

  But that wasn’t why I gasped, I wanted to tell her. It was the sudden apparition of this beautiful creature I had been dreaming about for days. I looked at her. The driving rain had soaked her hair and face. Like Dick in Tender Is the Night, I wanted to drink the rain that ran from her cheeks. “How did you recognize me under this?” I asked her.

  She gave that little shrug that was no more than a ripple and smiled up at me. “Easy. You’re carrying the same old briefcase you had last week. It’s got your initials on it.”

  “How sharp of you,” I said. “You should become a detective.”

  “Oh, I could never become a fascist pig.” She said this with a completely straight face. People said things like that back then.

  “Just a joke,” I said. “Where are you going?”

  “Nowhere special.”

  “Coffee?”

  She looked at me again, chewing on her lower lip for a moment as she weighed up my invitation. “All right,” she said finally. “I know a place.” And her gentle pressure on my arm caused me to change direction and enter the narrow alleys that spread like veins throughout the Latin Quarter. “Your French is very good,” she said as we walked. “Where did you learn?”

  “School, mostly. Then university. I seem to have a facility for it. We used to come here when I was a child, too, before the war. Brittany. My father fought in the first war, you see, and he developed this love for France. I think the fighting gave him a sort of stake in things.”

  “Do you, too, have this stake in France?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She found the café she was looking for on the Rue Saint-Séverin, and we ducked inside. “Can you feel what’s happening?” she asked me, once we were warm and dry, sitting at the zinc counter with hot, strong coffees before us. She lit a Gauloise and touched my arm. “Isn’t it exciting?”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. She thought something was happening between us. I could hardly disguise my joy. But I was also so tongue-tied that I couldn’t think of anything wise or witty to say. I probably sat there, my mouth opening and closing like a guppy’s before saying, “Yes. Yes, it is exciting.”

  “There’ll be a revolution before spring’s over, you mark my words. We’ll be rid of de Gaulle and ready to start building a new France.”

  Ah, yes. The revolution. I should have known. It was the topic on everyone’s mind at the time. Except mine, that is. I tried not to show my disappointment. Not that I wasn’t interested—you couldn’t be in Paris in the spring of 1968 and not be interested in the revolution one way or another—but I had been distracted from politics by my thoughts of April. Besides, as radical as I might have appeared to some people, I was still a foreign national, and I had to do my best to keep a low political profile, difficult though it was. One false step and I’d not only be out of a job but out of the country, and far away from April, forever. And I had answered her question honestly; I didn’t know whether I had a stake in France or not.

  “What does Brad think?” I asked.

  “Brad?” She seemed surprised by my question. “Brad is an anarchist.”

  “And you?”

  She twisted her hair around her finger. “I’m not sure. I know I want change. I think I’m an anarchist, too, though I’m not sure I’d want to be completely without any sort of government at all. But we want the same things. Peace. A new, more equal society. He is an American, but they have had many demonstrations there, too, you know. Vietnam.”

  “Ah, yes. I remember some of them.”

  We passed awhile talking about my experiences in California, which seemed to fascinate April, though I must admit I was far more interested in tracing the contours of her face and drinking in the beauty of her eyes and skin than I was in discussing the war in Vietnam.

  In the end she looked at her watch and said she had to go to a lecture but would probably see me later at the café. I said I hoped so and watched her walk away.

  * * *

  You will have gathered that I loved April to distraction, but did she love me? I think not. She liked me well enough. I amused her, entertained her, and she was perhaps even flattered by my attentions, but ultimately brash youth wins out over suave age. It was Brad she loved. Brad, whose status in my mind quickly changed from that of a mildly entertaining, reasonably intelligent hanger-on to the bane of my existence.

  He always seemed to be around, and I could never get April to myself. Whether this was deliberate—whether he was aware of my interest and made jealous by it—I do not know. All I know is that I had very few chances to be alone with her. When we were together, usually at a café or walking in the street, we talked—talked of what was happening in France, of the future of the university, of literature, of the anarchists, Maoists, Trotskyists, and Communists, talked about all these, but not, alas, of love.

  Perhaps this was my fault. I never pushed myself on her, never tried to make advances, never tried to touch her, even though my cells ached to reach out and mingle with hers, and even though the most casual physical contact—a touch on the arm, for example—set me aflame with desire. After our first few meetings, she would greet me with kisses on each cheek, the way she greeted all her friends, and my cheeks would burn for hours afterward. One day she left a silk scarf at the café, and I took it home and held it to my face like a lovesick schoolboy, inhaling April’s subtle jasmine perfume as I tried to sleep that night.

  But I did not dare make a pass; I feared her rejection and her laughter far more than anything else. While we do not have the capacity to choose our feelings in the first place, we certainly have the ability to choose not to act on them, and that was what I was trying to do, admittedly more for my own sake than for hers.

  * * *

  When I did see April alone again it was late in the morning of May 3, and I was still in bed. I had been up late the night before, trying to concentrate on a Faulkner paper I had to present at a conference in Brussels that weekend, and as I had no actual classes on Fridays I had slept in.

  The soft but insistent tapping at my door woke me from a dream about my father in the trenches (why is it we never seem to dream at night about those we dream about all day?) and I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes.

  I must explain that at the time, like the poor French workers, I wasn’t paid very
much and consequently, as I didn’t need very much either, I lived in a small pension in a cobbled alley off the Boulevard Saint-Michel, between the university and the Luxembourg Gardens. As I could easily walk from the pension to my office at the Sorbonne, as I usually ate at the university or at a cheap local bistro, and as I spent most of my social hours in the various bars and cafés of the Latin Quarter, I didn’t really need much more than a place to lay my head at night.

  I stretched, threw on my dressing gown, and opened the door. I’m sure you can imagine my shock on finding April standing there. Alone. She had been to the room only once previously, along with Brad and a couple of others for a nightcap of cognac after a Nina Simone concert, but she clearly remembered where I lived.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Richard—” She had started calling me by my first name, at my insistence, though of course she pronounced it in the French manner, and it sounded absolutely delightful to me every time she spoke it. “I didn’t know . . .”

  “Come in,” I said, standing back. She paused a moment in the doorway, smiled shyly, then entered. I lay back on the bed, mostly because there was hardly enough room for two of us to sit together.

  “Shall I make coffee?” she asked.

  “There’s only instant.”

  She made a typical April moue at the idea of instant coffee, as any true French person would, but I directed her to the tiny kitchenette behind the curtain and she busied herself with the kettle, calling out over her shoulder as she filled it and turned on the gas.

  “There’s trouble at the university,” she said. “That’s what I came to tell you. It’s happening at last. Everything’s boiling over.”