The restaurant was packed with couples. A teenage girl sat quietly with her father. She was angry or disappointed with him. He knew it but pretended not to be bothered. I think all children are disappointed with their parents if they’re lucky enough to get so close.
I left an enormous tip. I shall never forget my waiter. He kept trying to speak Italian, even though he knew I was French. He kept mentioning his daughters. He wore glasses that made him look too old. He loved being a waiter. He said that each meal was a memory. He said that he was a part of something good that had not started with him and would not end with him. As I left the restaurant, I felt a stabbing sadness. I would never see him again.
I passed several cold shops. Everything was closed. Puppets in a shop window stared out into the street, pretending not to see me. I walked carefully across the icy cobbles. It was snowing now, but only lightly. The buildings were silent, their occupants asleep inside. It was after one and so quiet I could hear the buzzing of streetlights as I walked under them.
The city looked different. I stood in the middle of the square before Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, a small gray, crooked church. They once filmed a sad film there. It was about a boy whose father was a failure. Going back somewhere at night is almost like haunting the world after death.
I kept walking, making eyes at the statues, naming each one like a sentimental drunkard after lovers and friends.
And then I stopped walking. My eye was drawn by movement. I couldn’t quite see what it was—most likely a human figure passing before a dark window like a fish barely visible beneath the surface of a pond.
Each window held its very own candle. But they weren’t real candles, just electric lights shaped like candles. The long house was tucked into an alley that glowed with snow. The streetlights at the far end of the house cast a great shadow on the side of the crooked church. The house was almost a smaller version of the one in which I had grown up—the bourgeois manor my father had spent his life maintaining like a mute first-born child. There were other windows too, ones without candles, ones so dark it was almost as if there were no glass at all. An inscription above the door read, “Par le Coeur de Mon Fils,” and then a stone relief of a hand entering what appeared to be a human heart. Also, a large crucifix carved into the heavy wooden door. The order and cleanliness of the corridor that was visible through the only brightly lit window, on the ground floor, made me think this was a convent.
Then I saw the figure pass by the window again. It stopped. Whoever it was had seen me standing outside in the freezing air. It was past three in the morning. We were the only two inhabitants of an entire city; footprints on each other’s island.
The figure swiftly moved to another window, one with a candle, and I saw who it was.
I could distinguish her profile, but details remained a mystery. She stood with the poise of someone young. Her hand pressed up against the pane. Then, in the mist which had laid itself thinly upon the early morning glass—as if solely for the purpose of what was about to happen next—this woman whom I knew but would never know, this lost, sleepless figure who found herself wandering the corridors of an icy dawn, wrote something very slowly with her finger upon the pane. Then she lifted the candle against the letters she had drawn with her finger:
Allez
I took my hands out of my pockets. It began to rain and she disappeared. I turned and walked slowly away.
I said the word over and over again as I paced the city. And I felt suddenly warm, full of strength, full of life, and ready to give life. I suppose I need people to tell me what I already know.
My father and mother would be awake by now.
The kitchen sink full of vegetables freshly pulled from the earth.
My brother in Paris reading beside the window—his new girlfriend still asleep.
And Sandy, my agent—with her daughter in their hot bed, nestled in one another’s arms. Their breathing is soft and private; mouths open against hillsides of pillow.
I must have returned to my hotel room around breakfast time the next day. I was out all night in the cold and soaked through. I left a small pool in the elevator. The couple staying on my floor with the miniature poodle will probably be blamed. The staff here is very gracious, and the grand Chateau Frontenac hotel is like something from the mind of Chekhov.
I am now soaking in a hot bath.
My chest protrudes from the bubbles like an island upon which the carved head of some great deity has come to life. I must remember to write in my diary that I spent the early hours of the morning making eyes at all the statues in the city and then soaked in a tub.
My shoes were so wet they had ceased to make a sound on the cobbles. I have put them in the sink. The leather is impossibly tender now; I don’t think it will ever go back to normal. I think of the word. I can feel her finger moving across my back in the shape of letters.
Allez
When I get back to New York, I’m going to start getting up early. I’m going to invite my brother to come and see me. We will sit together in the park in heavy coats. We will watch the clouds pass. Sometimes I imagine that each cloud holds the weight of what will happen.
The water in my bath is cooling. I can see a version of myself in it. My eyes ascend to the window, then through it. They find the river and follow it. Quebec City was taken from its ancient people by the French when William Shakespeare was about my age. My hotel room overlooks the St. Lawrence River. Chunks of ice slip by with the current. Quebec women once set out hard rods of corn on planks of wood on the river’s bank. I can see their cotton-white breath and their gray teeth as glimmering fish are spread across barrels. Their aprons are wet. Frost has dusted white the rich brown earth. The ground is hard as stone. Cold has cracked their hands. They laugh and wave to children on small boats drifting. Clouds churn in the eyes of the fish.
I like my room here at the Chateau. It overlooks part of the river but is directly over a park. In the park there are trees stripped by winter and blackened by rain. I can’t stop thinking of the early settlers of the 1600s. The smell of wet leather. Stupid horses not doing what they’re told. Babies crying. Wet wood. Ice on everything, ice cutting through the body. The earth too frozen to bury the dead. And nothing will grow. A few frozen berries dot the woods like eyes. New foods are tried but result in sickness.
I must have fallen asleep in the tub. I awake to a light tapping on my door. I don’t answer and hope the person will go away. Tapping again. Perhaps my cello is ready to come up from the hotel vault they assured me exists. I find a towel, open the door, and thank the bellboy with some money. He asks if I want breakfast, then says it was an honor to carry my instrument. He walks away whistling. I think the staff like me. Two chambermaids think they heard me practicing in my room before my concert yesterday, but it wasn’t me. It was Pablo Casals. I was playing one of his old recordings, a Toccata in C Major by J. S. Bach. They were shuffling outside the door. I made it louder. When it finished, they clapped. I should write to Bose and tell them their speakers are a success.
Most people never get to hear this music. Music helps us understand where we have come from but, more importantly, what has happened to us. Bach wrote the Cello Suites for his young wife as an exercise to help her learn the cello. But inside each note is the love we are unable to express with words. I can feel her frustration and joy as my bow carves out the notes of the mild-mannered organist who saw composing as one of his daily chores. When Bach died, some of his children sold his scores to the butcher; they had decided the paper was more useful for wrapping meat. In a small village in Germany, a father brought home a limp goose wrapped in paper that was covered with strange and beautiful symbols.
I open my cello case and smell my grandfather. I pick up the instrument and run my fingers tenderly up and down the strings. In each note of music lives every tragedy of the world and every moment of its salvation. The cellist Pablo Casals knew this. Music is only a mystery to people who want it explained. Music and love
are the same.
I am staring at the fireplace in my room, holding my cello. I think of my parents again. My father doesn’t listen to the music I record, but he sometimes comes to my performances when I’m in Tours or Saumur.
In my cello case is a mitten that belonged to the baker’s daughter. I keep it in my pocket when I play. We sat next to each other in class. Her name was Anna. She had freckles and held her pencil with three fingers and a thumb.
Winter strips the village of my youth, but in spring the parks fill up again with children learning how to ride bicycles and not doing what they’re told.
II
TO SEE HIM IS a miracle. He stands at the fountain and gently raises a hand. Then birds swoop down from trees and perch on his shoulders. Some hover, then drop into his hands like soft stones. Children cry with joy. Parents want to know who he is. They call him the birdman of Beverly Hills and talk about him over dinners with friends who wonder what his story is. Some say his wife and child were killed. Others say he was in a war. Many people believe he’s an eccentric billionaire.
He wears a dusty dinner jacket, and his pants are short enough to clearly see white socks. His hair is overgrown, with streaks of silver. Worn chestnut loafers tell of a different life.
Sometimes the birdman will raise a hand to his mouth and whisper something to the plump bird cupped there. Moments later, the bird will fly out and land on someone in the crowd: a boy’s shoulder or the outstretched hand of a girl.
One Friday morning, not one but three birds landed on an old man’s knee. He was sad because no one had asked him out to lunch that day, nor had he received any letters. When the birds landed on him, his mouth trembled and the clouds in his eyes parted.
When the birds flew away, he said, “What a nice birthday present!” The birdman nodded. The old man immediately went home, put away the length of rope, and went downstairs to ask his young Mexican neighbor to be his guest for dinner. They talked about many things. And over dessert the old man made a promise that he would teach his neighbor to read. They were both drunk. Every idea felt original. The next day, the neighbor took the old man a present and a piñada purchased in an East L.A. bakery next to the old Cat & Dog Hospital.
By the time the Mexican boy could read, the two of them had found that they fit the way jigsaw pieces do. They celebrated holidays together. They created for each other a world within a world and cast each other as stars.
Hope is the greatest of all gifts.
Once, a black-haired woman and her child asked the birdman his name. He sighed slowly. He didn’t like questions. But the birds around him fluttered their wings. The tired woman and her young child peered up at the birdman.
“Please,” the child implored. “Won’t you tell us your name?”
The woman and child were holding hands. The afternoon sunshine warmed the tops of their heads. The woman tilted her left foot to the side as though pouring something out.
“Jonathan,” the birdman said. Then he turned and walked away.
The birds flew with Jonathan, as though pulling his slight frame to the edge of the park with thin ropes. The park returned to normal. A homeless woman fell asleep to the sound of passing cars. Squirrels chased each other around tree trunks with acorns in their mouths.
III
SIX MONTHS LATER, THE black-haired woman told her sister about the birdman over lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
“The birdman finally spoke and told us his name was Jonathan,” she said, laughing.
A woman sipping tea at the next table dropped her cup. It split neatly in two parts on the saucer. Tea escaped into the linens. A knot of waiters rushed out from behind a door. The stains would be hard to remove.
The woman at the next table stood up and quickly stepped toward the restrooms. She was wearing an old-fashioned sequin skirt and forest-green shoes. She had grown up in Wales. Her brother’s name was also Jonathan.
It was almost five o’clock. Outside, the afternoon—heavy with heat—listed like an old ship and people rolled from one side of the city to the other.
The Beverly Hills Hotel is opulent. It prides itself on many things. There is a salon and several places to eat. For anyone who likes pink, it’s paradise. In the bathroom, the woman who lost her teacup sat in the stall and sobbed. She could picture the waiters cleaning up; there would soon be fresh linens and shining silverware. Within a few minutes, all traces of her outburst would be erased.
The woman felt acorns in her pocket. She squeezed each one of them. Her Jonathan collected nuts. He kept them in small bowls around his bedroom. He wanted to feed the birds. He was obsessed with birds. And they built nests outside his bedroom in small dark places in the roof. He said he could see their eyes peering into his bedroom at night. Perhaps they knew all along what would happen to him. That was long ago in Wales, in a one-eyed village of sheep, mud, and stars.
Grief is a country where it rains and rains but nothing grows. The dead live somewhere else—wearing the clothes we remember them in.
IV
WHEN BABY JONATHAN CAME home from the hospital wrapped in white, I couldn’t stop looking at him. I would sit by him at night. His breaths were fast and small. When his arms were strong enough, he reached for me, his sister.
Our house was a cottage warmed by hot coals that burned slowly and deeply in the kitchen stove. In summer the fireplaces in the main rooms were dark and full of winter’s ashes. My mother would make salad sandwiches with lettuce from the garden. When Jonathan could walk, I took him into the fields behind our cottage and sat him down on a towel somewhere shady. I would build tiny huts from mud and straw as he held in his chubby fingers the brown plastic mice we both knew were our friends.
On Saturdays we would all go into the village. Outside the butcher’s shop whole animals hung from hooks of brushed steel. Jonathan would point but had yet to find words.
When it was hot, I would take off his clothes and bounce him on the bed. I like to think this was his first memory.
My dolls sat in the toy box until Jonathan was two and he found them. Then began the great age of dressing them up. The two dolls became our younger siblings. Once we wrapped them in aluminum foil and pretended they were robots. Our quiet father would send the dolls postcards from wherever he traveled on business. I would read them to the dolls, and Jonathan would nod and then put them to bed, saying, “Wasn’t that nice? A postcard from somewhere you’ll never go.”
When he began wearing underpants, he got in the habit of tying his unused diapers on the dolls. His underpants were small. When I came home from school, if I found them on the living room floor, soiled, I knew he would be crying on the bed waiting for me. I would take off my underwear and run it under the faucet and then show it to him. He would stop crying. All siblings have a secret life from their parents. Parents love their children, but children need each other to negotiate the strange forest they find themselves in.
It wasn’t long before I was caught in the act. Jonathan stood naked at the bathroom door as I doused my underwear with cold water. He approached and wrapped his little body around my legs. The bathroom window held the final square of daylight. It was very bright and also very still. Downstairs, we could hear the sounds of cartoons pouring from the television. Jonathan never cried again when he had an accident. I firmly believe that while lies and deception destroy love, they can also build and defend it. Love requires imagination more than experience.
Nobody knows when Jonathan died. My father saw something in the snow from the bathroom window one morning. I wasn’t allowed to go outside, so I sat in the bathroom and ripped out my hair. When my mother saw clumps of it on my bare legs, she decided to let me see Jonathan’s body. I screamed and screamed and never stopped screaming until I met a man named Bruno Bonnet.
V
ARRIVING IN THE DARK for my concert the next day, I find Los Angeles pulsating with traffic; pairs of red lights thread the valleys with their flat houses and clear pools. The oldest houses ha
ve round edges and crumble a little more whenever the ground shakes. In the suburbs, imagine all-night Laundromats heavy with the freshness of clean clothes; young mothers with plastic flowers in their hair. Babies peer up through black eyes from hot towels. Gangs of men turn their heads to eat tacos at a roadside cantina. Trash blows from one side of the highway to the other, then back again.
Farther north, approaching Hollywood—hot-dog stands with neon arrows and faded paint; tattooed women with chopped black hair buying lip gloss at Hollywood pharmacies; a homeless man pushes a shopping cart full of shoes but he is barefoot. He keeps looking behind. His stomach hangs out. Sometime in the 1960s he was delivered into the trembling hands of his mother. If only it could happen again. Los Angeles is a place where dreams balance forever on the edge of coming true. A city on a cliff held fast by its own weight.
I like performing here, especially at the Hollywood Bowl. There’s something about the movement of air. My music fills the thermals, and I imagine the notes flooding the city like birds. It’s hot here too; a real contrast to Quebec City two weeks ago, where my feet froze after walking the city at night and conversing with the statuary. When my shoes dried, they were very stiff. I put them in a clear plastic bag and labeled it “Le Flâneur de Quebec.” I think it’s important to keep items of clothing that have emotional significance.
Love Begins in Winter Page 2