The InvisibleBridge

by Julie Orringer

  He turned and left the little room, and went to Klara where she lay sleeping on the tumbled bed. She had curled herself around the pillow he’d been using. She was naked, her legs tangled in the eiderdown. In the silvery northern light of the winter afternoon, he could see the hairline creases at the corners of her eyes, the faint signs of her age. He loved her, wanted her, felt himself stirring again at the sight of her. He knew he would be willing to give his life to protect her. He wanted to take her to Budapest and heal whatever terrible hurt had occurred there, see her walk into the drawing room of that house on Benczúr utca and put her hands into her mother’s hands. His eyes burned at the thought that he was only twenty-two, a student, unable to do anything of substance for her. The lives they’d been leading those past ten days hadn’t been their real lives. They hadn’t worked, hadn’t taken care of anyone but themselves, hadn’t had much need for money. But money was an ever-present woe for him. It would be years before he’d have a steady income. If his studies went as planned, it would be another four and a half years before he became an architect. And he’d lived long enough already, and had faced enough difficulty, to know that things seldom went as planned.

  He touched her shoulder. She opened her gray eyes and looked at him. “What is it?” she said. She sat up and held the eiderdown against herself. “What’s happened?”

  “Nothing’s happened,” he said, sitting down beside her. “I’ve just been thinking about what’s to happen after.”

  “Oh, Andras,” she said, and smiled drowsily. “Not that. That’s my least favorite subject at the moment.”

  This was the way it had gone, anytime either of them had introduced the topic over the past week or so; they had turned it aside, allowed it to drift away as they drifted into another series of pleasures. It was easy enough to do; their real lives had come to seem far less real than the one they were leading together on the rue de Sévigné. But now their time was nearly finished. They couldn’t avoid the subject any longer.

  “We have six more hours,” he said. “Then our lives begin again.”

  She slipped her arms around him. “I know.”

  “I want to have everything with you,” he said. “A real life. God help me! I want you beside me at night, every night. I want to have a child with you.” He had not yet said these things aloud; he could feel the blood rushing to his skin as he spoke.

  Klara was silent for a long moment. She dropped her arms, sat back against the pillows, put her hand in his. “I have a child already,” she said.

  “Elisabet’s not a child.” But those vulnerable shoes at the bottom of the closet. The painted box on the dresser. The hidden cigarettes.

  “She’s my daughter,” Klara said. “She’s what I’ve lived for these sixteen years. I can’t just take up another life.”

  “I know. But I can’t not see you, either.”

  “Perhaps it would be best, though,” she said, and looked away from him. Her voice had fallen almost to a whisper. “Perhaps it would be best to stop with what we’ve had. Our lives may spoil it.”

  But what would his life be without her, now that he knew what it was to be with her? He wanted to weep, or to take her by the shoulders and shake her. “Is that what you’ve thought all along?” he said. “That this was a lark? That when our lives began again it would be over?”

  “I didn’t think about what would happen,” she said. “I didn’t want to. But we’ve got to think about it now.”

  He got out of bed and took his shirt and trousers from a chair. He couldn’t look at her. “What good will that do?” he said. “You’ve already decided it’s impossible.”

  “Please, Andras,” she said. “Don’t go.”

  “Why should I stay?”

  “Don’t be angry at me. Don’t leave like that.”

  “I’m not angry,” he said. But he finished dressing, then retrieved his suitcase from beneath the bed and began to pack the few articles of clothing he’d brought from the rue des Écoles.

  “There are things you don’t know about me,” she said. “Things that might frighten you, or change the way you felt.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “And there’s a great deal you don’t know about me. But what does that matter now?”

  “Don’t be cruel to me,” she said. “I’m as unhappy as you are.”

  He wanted to believe that it was true, but it couldn’t have been; he’d laid himself open before her and she’d withdrawn from him. He put his last few things in the suitcase and snapped the latches, then went into the hallway and took his coat from the rack. She followed him to the top of the stairs, where she stood barefoot and bare-shouldered, the sheet wrapped around her as though she were a Greek sculpture. He buttoned his coat. He couldn’t believe he was going to walk down the stairs and through the door, not knowing when he’d see her again. He put a hand to her arm. Touched her shoulder. Tugged a corner of the sheet so that it fell from her body. In the dim hallway she stood naked before him. He couldn’t bear to look at her, couldn’t bear to touch or kiss her. And so he did what a moment before had seemed unimaginable: He descended the stairs, past the eyes of all those child dancers in their ethereal costumes, opened the door, and left her.

  PART TWO. Broken Glass

  CHAPTER TWELVE. What Happened at the Studio

  CLASSES BEGAN the first Monday of January with a two-day charrette. Within a span of forty-eight hours they had to design a freestanding living space of fifty meters square, with a movable wall, two windows, a bath, a galley kitchen. They would submit a front elevation of the building, a floor plan, and a model. Forty-eight hours, during which anyone who cared about the project wouldn’t eat a meal or sleep or leave the studio. Andras took the project like an oblivion drug, felt the crush of time in his veins, willed it to make him forget his ten days with Klara. He bent over the plane of his worktable and made it the landscape of his mind. The Gare d’Orsay critique had left its imprint; he vowed that he would not be humiliated before the rest of the class, before that smug Lemarque and the ranks of the upperclassmen. Toward the end of his thirtieth waking hour he looked at his design and found that what he’d drawn was his parents’ house in Konyár, with a few details changed. One bedroom, not two. An indoor bath instead of the tin tub and outhouse. A modern indoor kitchen. One external wall had become a movable wall; it could be opened in summer to let the house communicate with the garden. The façade was plain and white with a many-paned window. On his second sleepless night he drew the movable wall as a curve; when it was open it would make a shady niche. He drew a stone bench in the garden, a circular reflecting pool. His parents’ house made over into a country retreat. He feared it was absurd, that everyone would see it for what it was: a Hajdú boy’s design, rude and primitive. He turned it in at the last minute and received, to his surprise, an appreciative nod and a paragraph of closely written praise from Vago, and the grudging approval of even the harshest fifth-year students.

  At the Bernhardt they struck the set of The Mother and held auditions for Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna. Though Zoltán Novak pleaded, Madame Gérard would not take a role in the new play; she’d already been offered the role of Lady Macbeth at the Thêátre des Ambassadeurs, and Novak couldn’t pay her what they would. Andras was grateful for her impending departure. He couldn’t look at her without thinking of Klara, without wondering whether Madame Gérard knew what had happened between them. The day before she departed for the Ambassadeurs he helped her box up her dressing room: her Chinese robe, her tea things, her makeup, a thousand fan letters and postcards and little presents. As they worked she told him about the members of the new company she would join, two of whom had been featured in American films, and one of whom had appeared with Helen Hayes in The Sin of Madelon Claudet. He found it difficult to pay attention. He wanted to tell her what had happened. He had told no one; even to have told his friends at school would have reduced it somehow, made it seem a superficial and fleeting liaison. But Madame Gérard knew Klara;
she would know what it meant. She might even be able to offer some hope. So he closed the dressing-room door and confessed it all, omitting only the revelation about the letter.

  Madame Gérard listened gravely. When he’d finished, she got to her feet and paced the green rug in front of the dressing-room mirror as if bringing a monologue to mind. At last she turned and put her hands on the backrest of her makeup chair. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew, and I ought to have said something. When I saw you at the Bois de Vincennes, I knew. You didn’t care at all for the girl. You looked only at Klara. I’ll admit,” and she turned her eyes from him, laughing ruefully to herself, “old as I am, I was a little jealous. But I never thought you’d act upon your feelings.”

  Andras rubbed his palms against his thighs. “I shouldn’t have,” he said.

  “It’s well she ended it,” Madame Gérard said. “She knew it wasn’t right. She invited you into her house thinking you might be a friend to her daughter. You should have stopped going once you knew you didn’t care for Elisabet.”

  “It was too late by then,” he said. “I couldn’t stop.”

  “You don’t know Klara,” Madame Gérard said. “You can’t, not after a few Sunday lunches and a week-long affair. She’s never made any man happy. She’s had ample chance to fall in love-and, if you’ll pardon me, with grown men, not first-year architecture students. Don’t imagine she hasn’t had plenty of suitors. If she ever does take a man seriously, it’ll be because she wants to get married-that is to say, because she wants someone to ease her life, to take care of her. Which you, my dear, are in no position to do.”

  “You don’t have to remind me of that.”

  “Well, someone must, apparently!”

  “But what now?” he demanded. “I can’t pretend it didn’t happen.”

  “Why not? It’s over between the two of you. You said as much yourself.”

  “It’s not over for me. I can’t put her out of my mind.”

  “I’d advise you to try,” Madame Gérard said. “She can’t be any good to you.”

  “That’s all, then? I’m supposed to forget her?”

  “That would be best.”

  “Impossible,” he said.

  “Poor darling,” Madame Gérard said. “I’m sorry. But you’ll get over it. Young men do.” She turned again to her packing, loading her gold and silver makeup sticks into a box with dozens of little drawers. A private smile came to her mouth; she rolled a tube of rouge between her fingers and turned to him. “You’ve joined an illustrious club, you know, now that Klara’s thrown you over. Most men never make it that far.”

  “Please,” he said. “I can’t bear to hear you speak of her that way.”

  “It’s the girl’s father, you know. I think she must still be in love with him.”

  “Elisabet’s father,” he said. “Is he here in Paris? Does she still see him?”

  “Oh, no. He died many years ago, as I understand it. But death isn’t a bar to love, as you may learn someday.”

  “Who was he?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know. Klara keeps her history close.”

  “So it’s hopeless, then. I’m supposed to let it go because she’s in love with a dead man.”

  “Allow it to be what it was: a pretty episode. The satisfaction of a mutual curiosity.”

  “That wasn’t what it was to me.”

  She tilted her head at him and smiled again, that terrible all-knowing smile. “I’m afraid I’m the wrong person to dispense advice about love. Unless you’d like to be disabused of your romantic notions.”

  “You’ll excuse me, then, if I leave you to your packing.”

  “My dear boy, no excuse needed.” She rose, kissed him on both cheeks, and turned him out into the hall. There was no choice for him but to go back to his work; he did it in mute consternation, wishing he had never confided in her.

  There was one great source of relief, one astonishing piece of news that had arrived in a telegram from Budapest: Tibor was coming to visit. His classes in Modena would start at the end of January, but before he went to Italy he would come to Paris for a week. When the telegram arrived, Andras had shouted the news aloud into the stairwell of the building, at a volume that had brought the concierge out into the hall to reprimand him for disturbing the other tenants. He silenced her by kissing her on the brow and showing her the telegram: Tibor was coming! Tibor, his older brother. The concierge voiced the hope that this older brother would beat some manners into Andras, and left him in the hall to experience his delight alone. Andras hadn’t mentioned Klara in his letters to Tibor, but he felt as if Tibor knew-as if Tibor had sensed that Andras was in distress and had decided to come for that reason.

  The anticipation of the visit-three weeks away, then two, then one-got him from home to school, and from school to work. Now that The Mother was finished and Madame Gérard gone, afternoons at the Sarah-Bernhardt passed at a maddening crawl. He had arranged everything so well backstage that there was little to do while the actors rehearsed; he paced behind the curtain, subject to an increasing fear that Monsieur Novak would discover his superfluity. One afternoon, after he’d overseen the delivery of a load of lumber for the set of Fuente Ovejuna, he approached the head carpenter and offered his services as a set builder. The head carpenter put him to work. During the afternoon hours Andras banged flats together; after hours he studied the design of the new sets. This was a different kind of architecture, all about illusion and impression: perspective flattened to make spaces look deeper, hidden doors through which actors might materialize or disappear, pieces that could be turned backward or inside out to create new tableaux. He began to mull over the design in bed at night, trying to distract himself from thoughts of Klara. The false fronts that represented the Spanish town might be put on wheels and rotated, he thought; their opposite sides could be painted to represent the building interiors. He made a set of sketches showing how it might be done, and later he redrew the sketches as plans. His second week as assistant set builder he went to the head carpenter and showed him the work. The carpenter asked him if he thought he had a budget of a million francs. Andras told him it would cost less than building the two sets of flats that would be required to make separate exteriors and interiors. The head carpenter scratched his head and said he’d consult the set designer. The set designer, a tall round-shouldered man with an ill-trimmed moustache and a monocle, scrutinized the plans and asked Andras why he was still working as a gofer. Did he want a job that would pay three times what he was making now? The set designer had an independent shop on the rue des Lombards and generally employed an assistant, but his most recent one had just finished his coursework at the Beaux-Arts and had taken a position outside the capital.

  Andras did want the job. But Zoltán Novak had saved his life; he couldn’t very well walk out on the Sarah-Bernhardt. He accepted the man’s business card and stared at it all that night, wondering what to do.

  The next afternoon he went to Novak’s office to lay the situation before him. There was a long silence after he knocked, then the sound of male voices in argument; the door flew open to reveal a pair of men in pinstriped suits, briefcases in hand, their faces flushed as though Novak had been insulting them in the vilest terms. The men clapped hats onto their heads and walked out past Andras without a nod or glance. Inside the office Novak stood at his desk with his hands on the blotter, watching the men recede down the hallway. When they’d disappeared, he came out from behind the desk and poured himself a tumbler of whiskey from the decanter on the sideboard. He looked over his shoulder at Andras and pointed to a glass. Andras raised a hand and shook his head.

  “Please,” Novak said. “I insist.” He poured whiskey and added water.

  Andras had never seen Novak drinking before dusk. He accepted the tumbler and sat down in one of the ancient leather chairs.

  “Egészségedre,” Novak said. He lifted his glass, drained it, set it down on the blotter. “Can you guess who that was, l
eaving?”

  “No,” Andras said. “But they looked rather grim.”

  “They’re our money men. The people who’ve always managed to persuade the city to let us keep our doors open.”

  “And?”

  Novak sat back in his chair and laced his hands into a mountain. “Fifty-seven people,” he said. “That’s how many I have to fire today, according to those men. Including myself, and you.”

  “But that’s everyone,” Andras said.

  “Precisely,” he said. “They’re closing us down. We’re finished until next season, at least. They can’t support us any longer, even though we’ve posted profits all fall. The Mother did better than any other show in Paris, you know. But it wasn’t enough. This place is a money-sink. Do you know what it costs to heat five stories of open space?”

  Andras took a swallow of whiskey and felt the false warmth of it move through his chest. “What will you do?” he said.

  “What will you do?” Novak said. “And what will the actors do? And Madame Courbet? And Claudel, and Pély, and all the others? It’s a disaster. We’re not the only ones, either. They’re closing four theaters.” He sat back in his chair and stroked his moustache with one finger, his eyes moving over the bookshelves. “The fact is, I’m not sure what I’ll do. Madame Novak is in a delicate condition, as they say. She’s been pining for her parents in Budapest. I’m sure she’ll take this as a sign that we should return home.”

  “But you’d rather stay,” Andras said.

  Novak released a sigh from the broad bellows of his chest. “I understand how Edith feels. This isn’t our home. We’ve scratched out our little corner here, but none of it belongs to us. We’re Hungarians, in the end, not French.”

  “When I met you in Vienna, I thought no man could look more Parisian.”

  “Now you see how green you were,” Novak said, and smiled sadly. “But what about you? I know you’ve got your school fees to pay.”

  Andras told him about the offer of an assistantship with the set designer, Monsieur Forestier, and how he’d just been coming to ask Novak’s advice on the matter.