Twilight

by Katherine Mosby

  His pale chest glowed against the white sheets, and Lavinia marveled at how young he looked, and innocent. Only his nipples, pursed in the cold air like a mouth expressing displeasure, suggested a secret, angry energy that pulsed beneath his becalmed exterior. She was glad her encounter with him was unencumbered by the complexities of love; even the gulf of language seemed a useful boundary and she had felt relief and not frustration in the limitations it imposed on their conversation, grateful his English was rudimentary.

  She could see how the temptation would be there otherwise to mouth the words of an ardor that was felt by neither of them, and she did not want to be confused or distracted by fictions she did not find necessary. Lavinia was much more interested in the deep pull that they had both felt when he had pushed her against the shuttered door of a newspaper kiosk and she let his hands translate the fundamentals of desire.

  Her lower back ached and when she stood to stretch, a thin string of fluid leaked down her leg, sticky as egg white, but cloudy and streaked with blood. The bedclothes were smeared with blood too, but not as much as she’d feared. Grace had described her own deflowering as an event that ruined a perfectly good mattress. “It looked like we’d sacrificed a goat. It was gruesome. Thank God it was at a hotel and not on my fine linens.” Lavinia wondered if she had bled so little because she had waited too long, like a fruit left to wither on the branch, desiccating with time.

  Sven had not used a prophylactic. By the time he had found the right key on the unfamiliar key ring and coaxed the lock open with a combination of jiggling and cursing, he had forgotten about all other considerations besides getting their undergarments off.

  It had made Lavinia laugh the way he had hopped around the small room, finally flopping on the bed, imprisoned by his pants and the shoes that obstructed his attempts to pull or kick them off. She imagined Shelby in contrast, proper, even dignified, bending to remove first his right sock and then his left. Thinking of Shelby sobered her and she left Sven thrashing his way to nakedness while she went into the bathroom.

  She had wanted to urinate ever since they left the dance hall; Lavinia had excused herself, but Sven had accompanied her to the lavatory and stood protectively outside the rickety door, waiting for her. “Too much riffraff,” he said, pleased to use a slang expression, rolling the r’s with slurry pride. She had worried that Sven would hear her and, despite her need, she was unable to pee while he stood on the other side of the door, so close to her she could hear him humming drunkenly to the accordion music. The air smelled foul in the tiny cabin housing the hole over which she was expected to perch, and the footpads where she had positioned her feet were slippery from the back splash of the sluice bucket. She had decided to wait, and had left without relieving herself.

  By the time she got to the WC in the apartment on the Rue Monge, it almost stung to release the scald of urine that stank of asparagus, and she no longer cared who heard. She didn’t even bother to close the flimsy door that wouldn’t have shut properly anyway. There was no point to being shy any longer—not once it became clear to her she was going to sleep with Sven.

  He was brave and he thought she was handsome and womanly. Before she left, Elsie had told Lavinia in a rushed whisper that he’d used those very words. Sven seemed kind, and she liked the feel of his lips on hers. He could be counted on. At thirty-six, she was past any more conventional considerations than that. Lavinia smiled as she pulled her slip overhead and fell into the sag in the center of the bed. There was something solemn and symbolic about the moment, as if she were on the threshold of a higher world she could only know by bodily initiation. But she could also see the humor in the whole mad rush of it, like a commedia buffa, bumping over the stool by the entry and knocking the lamp to the floor and rolling around the bed like puppies. It was silly, almost slapstick. “Go ahead and sleep with a man—whether or not you marry him,” Mavis had advised her. “At least satisfy your curiosity, if nothing else.”

  A week after Elsie left Paris, Lavinia moved into an apartment on the Rue Bonaparte with a view of chimney pots on slate roofs from one window and from the other, the small graveled courtyard around which the Beaux Arts building wrapped itself with the grace of a sleeping cat. The apartment was more expensive than she had planned but she was close enough to the Seine to be able to smell the river after a storm, and the sharp cries of seagulls she never actually saw amplified the pleasure she took from having her own apartment.

  Lavinia fell in love with its emptiness. When she moved in, there was only a dented metal bed frame and a wooden bookcase with badly warped shelves, but the high ceilings gave the two rooms a vastness beyond its actual size and the equally tall French windows lit the room with such brilliance in the afternoons that her rooms seemed more than full: they seemed sumptuous. She spent her first days in the apartment contemplating it from different points of view: crouching in a corner with her back to the wall, hugging her knees, or lying on the wood planked floor, looking up at the scarred beams that filled the uppermost space under the ceiling, like the rib cage of an ancient beast. Or she sat in the center of the room, cross-legged like a child or Indian chief, watching the smoke from her cigarettes twist and stretch into nothingness in the purifying shafts of light that pierced her room.

  Lavinia did not invite Sven to the Rue Bonaparte, although she continued to see him well after Elsie left for England. They met at cafés or museums or Métro stations, depending on their plans. If they concluded an evening together it was in a cramped apartment on the Rue Daumier Sven was subletting from month to month until he could raise enough money to return to Spain with supplies and medical equipment as basic as stethoscopes. She was grateful that his presence in Paris was temporary. It limited the expectations that could reasonably be imposed on their union and gave camouflage to her ambivalence. Impermanence required discretion; it created distance to anticipate distance. It was one thing to be a free spirit in the world. It was another to bring it home.

  She had been warned by Mrs. Beck, when she registered her new address with the Embassy, that her French neighbors might make her feel unwelcome; they were a nosy bunch, the French, scrutinizing every little thing, always ready with a criticism. Lavinia had no wish to court comment; indeed, she took refuge in the boundary propriety drew around her two rooms, making of her apartment a sanctuary only to be entered by someone worthy of sharing it. She was a Gibbs, after all, and believed in decorum.

  Her concierge, a ruddy woman named Madame Luberon, had already begun a campaign of unaccountable rudeness. Whenever Lavinia pressed the brass button to release the outer door of the building and she stepped into the dank arched passage that led to the courtyard, but before she could get to the staircase coiled elegantly in the corner like a delicate metal spring, Lavinia could hear “l’américaine” spat like a poisonous slur from somewhere in the mildew and shadows.

  By the time Lavinia’s eyes had adjusted and she could discern from the gloom of the unlit passage the bulk of Madame Luberon, busying herself with some task that precluded eye contact, spitting into a rag to polish a hinge or sorting mail or sweeping a bucket of water over the cobblestones, it was too late for Lavinia to say anything other than “Bonjour” or “Bonne nuit.” Lavinia was a private person by nature and she had no wish to parade even female visitors before the glass pane through which Madame Luberon guarded the building while boiling cabbage or tatting socks.

  Moreover, after the hollow feeling in her chest had left, and the dull ache between her legs was no longer a reminder of how disappointing the act was for which she had so hugely sacrificed, she was embarrassed by Sven’s gratitude, and the infatuation she did not return. Sven seemed, by comparison to the men she had known in the States, remarkably simple, which made it easy to be with him as long as he wasn’t talking.

  They went to inexpensive bistros, and there was a movie theatre near Montparnasse where they could get in for free because Sven knew the manager, and once he took her to an amateur production
of a Molière play. On several Sundays they had gone browsing at the flea market at Clignancourt, and he had introduced her to his friends as they passed through Paris, but she was not really interested in legitimizing their sexual activities with the veneer of romance. She was unable to rekindle the same desire she’d had the first time Sven kissed her, and sometimes she was more interested in the way his nostrils flared when he touched her breast than in the sensation of his touch.

  “Why won’t you let me get to know you?” he asked her, when she shook off one of his questions about her family as spontaneously as if he had splashed her with dirty water. They were sitting side by side at a crowded café, their knees touching under the small round table. Her flinch jostled the table and set the two espresso cups rattling in their miniature saucers. Only that morning she had been to the Thomas Cook office near the Bois de Boulogne to pick up the stipend her father had sent for the next quarter.

  Sven was staring at her, waiting. Neither of them touched the table to stop the vibration that filled the empty cups with white porcelain chatter. She looked down at his hands, which had tended the wounded in Seville and picked grapes in La Spezia. They were large and capable, scarred where he had knocked the tooth out of a sailor in a fight in Marseille, and where a fishing hook had gotten caught when he was a boy. All the kindness he had shown her was evident there, in his warm hands. For a moment, Lavinia imagined taking them in hers; she imagined accepting what he so earnestly offered, and letting it be enough.

  Across the street, a cluster of schoolboys in navy blazers and short pants tried to push each other off the narrow sidewalk into the street where pigeons darted fiercely at a soggy baguette in the gutter. Their laughter had the shrill edge of cruelty in it, heightening their hilarity, as though it were a necessary component in certain kinds of pleasure, swelling it like yeast.

  Lavinia looked back at Sven. He would never fascinate her. It was unthinkable to say: being with him was as easy as treading water but no more engaging.

  “How could you possibly know me?” she finally answered, her voice thick with finality and fatigue.

  As they rose to leave the café, she watched Sven count out the change he was leaving on the table, his lips moving ever so slightly as he added up the coins. He had always been generous with waiters, although it was not required, and with drunks, especially those who littered the Rue Monge, waiting to collect the fallen fruit left in the street when the open-air market closed for the day. It was a terrible thing, he said, for a grown man to have to live like a dog.

  A protectiveness welled in her as she imagined what her brothers would think of him. “Don’t you see,” she wanted to say, “it would never work. I was raised by wolves. It would only be a matter of time before I hurt you worse than this.”

  But Lavinia didn’t speak: it seemed hopeless to explain. Instead, she reached down behind Sven’s chair and picked his corduroy jacket up from the sawdust where it had fallen, and gently shook it clean.

  When they parted in front of the entrance to the Métro station, they stood for a long time without speaking before Lavinia released his hand. She was grateful he was not making it more difficult.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “My pleasure,” he replied, tousling her hair awkwardly in a gesture he had never used with her before. Then he descended the steep metal stairs into the station, taking them two at a time. The metal frame shuddered and rang with his tread like strikes on an anvil, and his departure echoed down the quiet street, amplifying his absence until somewhere overhead a voice shouted down from a window before banging it shut.

  In the months that followed, Lavinia was stung by a loneliness she thought at times might be fatal. With the approach of winter, she realized how stark her days had become, how solitary and aimless. The false friendship of travelers, she had discovered, was ultimately too fleeting to be fulfilling, predicated as it was on a temporary displacement, and rarely surviving it. Moreover, those ephemeral connections were based on happenstance, which was not the best way to select companions, especially not if Lavinia’s exacting standards were going to be applied. She had eschewed the lure of the expatriate community because she feared it would be familiar in all the wrong ways, replicating the limitations of the world she’d left without offering its salient compensations.

  Lavinia found herself avoiding the Jardin des Plantes and the corner parks, places where outcasts gathered. Even the silhouette of a solitary figure on a public bench could flood her with shame and sadness. Entire days passed without her having spoken and then when she did, buying a baguette or aubergine or a wedge of fresh butter from the blind woman who sat outside the pâtisserie, Lavinia’s voice would be unaccountably high and thin, as if her throat had ossified from lack of use. She pounced on even the briefest exchange with a hunger that she could no longer dismiss as an effort to polish her schoolgirl’s French.

  As it became increasingly cold, and the moist breath of the Seine carried with it a chill that seeped into her bones on the long walks with which she filled her empty hours, Lavinia began to alter her routes. She found herself increasingly drawn to the Right Bank, where grand hotels lined the avenue and the air was rich with perfume and privilege. On the Rue de Rivoli, the shop windows lining the sandstone arcade displayed the opulent accessories of the life for which Lavinia was bred and from which she still found comfort, taking pleasure in examining luxuries she could no longer afford.

  When she had first arrived, it had shocked Lavinia that in some neighborhoods the narrow streets twisting off the avenues in picturesque decay were rank with the astringent smell of urine. Twice in Sven’s arrondissement, she had walked by men standing up against a wall, relieving themselves in full daylight. Magnificent monuments rose from streets with litter wedged randomly between cobblestones, like crooked teeth with food caught in between. It was not the juxtaposition of medieval and modern that was confusing to her; it was the unexpected ways in which splendor and squalor were married that was disorienting.

  It was a relief, therefore, to sit on a brocade ottoman in an ornate lobby reading newspapers or just listening to English being spoken. She was particularly fond of the Hôtel Meurice, where the bellboys had the smartest uniforms, and the ashtrays were well distributed and frequently emptied. These outings became occasions for her to wear the couture of her class, the bias-cut silk dresses that flattered her lean frame, cashmere suits with fur trim at the collar and sleeves, gloves with pearl buttons at the wrist, finery she otherwise kept at the back of her recently acquired armoire.

  She had stopped going to museums: the religious art depressed her. There was too much pain in the paintings. She was looking for comfort not censure and she found it in the gilded tearooms where wealthy travelers rested among their own kind. At first, Lavinia only ordered a pot of tea, usually a scented variety, Oolong or Earl Gray. She was not partial to the pastries powdered with confectioners’ sugar or studded with candied violets, displayed in tiers on paper doilies like baubles in a jeweler’s showcase. They were sweet in a fussy, unsatisfying way that reminded Lavinia of her sister Grace.

  Even the pompous “Et voilà,” with which they were presented, the gloved hand of the waiter stirring the air with a flourish somewhere between a bow and a blessing, and the final, solemn “Bon appétit,” annoyed Lavinia. She was made uncomfortable, too, by the exaggerated deference with which her cigarettes were lit, or the chair pulled out from the table to seat her. It often seemed as if the assiduous politesse was thinly veiling a contempt only exacerbated by any effort to assuage it.

  Lavinia discovered she could extend her stay by almost an hour if she included tea sandwiches in her afternoon ritual. If she skipped lunch first, it became her afternoon meal and thus provided a legitimacy to her loitering by giving it a definable purpose. The first time the tea sandwiches arrived Lavinia felt such a rush of emotion she couldn’t eat. The delicate, crustless triangles, filled with watercress or smoked salmon or cucumber slices, reminded her of Su
ndays at Miss Dillwater’s Academy.

  She remembered how Virginia Hopkins used to pick out the cucumber slices, lick the mayonnaise off, and save them for later use on her eyes to make the dark circles disappear. Virginia never managed to banish her haunted look, but she later learned to used it to great advantage with college boys. Annie Ruggles, with whom Lavinia sang in the choir, would eat the sandwiches with tiny rabbit-like bites, starting first with the corners. Annie had died of influenza two months before they graduated, and her photograph had been hung in the chapel. Once, Lavinia and Eliza Hatch had tried to summon her ghost with the aid of a Ouija board until Dora Fell got spooked and threatened to get Mrs. Thayer if they didn’t stop.

  Those friendships, burnished now by regret and distance, seemed more precious than Lavinia had supposed when they were readily available. It was true that Dora couldn’t keep a secret, that she had a tendency to lie and an irritating laugh, and Eliza Hatch was competitive about even the most meaningless things, such as who finished brushing her teeth first or had longer hair or could hold her breath underwater for more laps. Even so, Lavinia found herself longing for their companionship whenever the plate of triangular sandwiches arrived.

  She had written of course, sending at first souvenir postcards of vistas about which the usual exclamations of appreciation were made. She commented too on the fashions, “Even the police wear capes!” and the cheeses, “It might be impossible to try them all; there are hundreds of different kinds, including a few that smell like dirty socks.” She did not mention the ways in which France seemed bitter, broken by a war from which, almost two decades later, it had yet to fully recover. It was not uncommon to see women who still wore black bands of mourning, reminders of how death had touched nearly every family, spawning a virulent pacifism and accentuating a national xenophobia, expressed in affiches posted on walls and kiosks, graffiti written in chalk across sidewalks. Madame Luberon had lost a son at Verdun and a brother at the Somme and Lavinia’s upstairs neighbor had lost her husband, and across the courtyard, Mademoiselle Breuille her fiancé and two brothers.