Days Between Stations

by Steve Erickson

  On his boat, he made the thick coffee in a pan over the small stove in his cabin. She huddled close to the fire, she did not visibly shiver. “Coldest winter ever,” he said, stirring the coffee with a large spoon. “I’ve been alive over eighty years.”

  “In Paris all that time?” These questions took a while to get out, since she had to grope for the words.

  “Here and there.” He wanted to put his hands by the fire but he couldn’t stop stirring the coffee or it would cool. “Got like this last winter.”

  “Is that when people started burning everything?”

  “That started this winter. Everything but the walls themselves and their beds and the food that could still be eaten.”

  “I’ve never been so cold,” she admitted.

  “It must get cold where you’re from. Aren’t you English?”

  “No.”

  “Dutch.”

  “No.” She laughed.

  He pondered. “American?”

  She laughed again.

  “American,” he reasserted.

  “Yes.”

  “Hollywood.”

  “Yes.”

  “Really?” His face lit up in the glow of the stove.

  “Do all French people believe all Americans are from Hollywood?”

  “Yes, they do,” he answered solemnly. “Or New York.” He took the coffee from the stove and poured it into cups. He had a small carton of milk sitting on the shelf. “The milk is cold. If you have milk in your coffee it won’t be as hot.”

  “I don’t want milk.”

  “But it never gets this cold in Hollywood, right?” he said, pouring himself some milk anyway. He watched the steam rise off the coffee. She drank hers, and blanched a bit. “Strong, right? Americans cannot drink really strong coffee. I thought you were all cowboys who could drink strong coffee.” She laughed.

  “No, it never gets this cold in Hollywood.” She added, “But it gets cold where I grew up, in Kansas.”

  “What is Kansas?”

  “Kansas,” she said. “The Wizard of Oz.”

  “What is the Wizard of Oz?”

  “The Wizard of Oz was a movie. Maybe it never got to France.”

  “I saw a movie once,” he burst out. “An American movie, with cowboys. Broncho Billy.”

  “That sounds like a very old movie,” she said, sipping her coffee.

  “Very old. I was…very young.” He shrugged.

  “That’s the only movie you’ve ever seen?”

  He announced, matter-of-factly, “I took my name from it.”

  “Broncho Billy?”

  “Bateau Billy. Know what bateau is?”

  “Boat,” she said.

  “That’s it. Boat Billy.”

  “Billyboat.” She laughed, and he laughed too, though he didn’t understand the joke. “But that,” she said a while later, “can’t be your actual name.”

  “No,” he only agreed, “it cannot.”

  Then they said nothing, and then talked a bit more about living on a houseboat. She asked if he always lived on the river, and he said no, sometimes he would sail down the coast of France and Spain and Portugal, had even sailed into the Mediterranean several times in his life; if one knew the currents and stayed close to land, the voyage wasn’t difficult. Fishing villages dotted the way south, and he had seen different lights all the way to Athens. Curiously, he’d never been moved to sail north of the Seine; and curiously, he’d come north the many winters, if only to be in Paris when the season was loneliest.

  He left after a while, to get some groceries: fewer and fewer of the markets were operating as the winter progressed, and it worried him that it was barely November and already so hard. January and February loomed deathlike. He told her she could wait in the boat, by the stove, if she chose to. She lay back on the small bed and watched the ceiling of the cabin; like him, though she hadn’t been conditioned by experience, she nonetheless missed the rocking of the boat. So lying there she closed her eyes, turned on her side, pulled the blanket up to her face; and after a bit, staring at the insides of her lids, she could feel the boat rocking and could feel herself sinking deeper. It was much like the sensation she’d always had in her room on Pauline Boulevard, sinking into the bed, that large gray fleshy rose closing its petals around her. Now she submerged into the boat, floating down through its stern, suspended in silver ice on the bottom of the river. Nothing moved, there was no sound, she was not cold.

  For once, her dream wasn’t torn between her husband and her lover. That was the form her dreams usually took. This time, she dreamed of her dead child. In her dream, she understood he was dead and accepted this without dread. As in the past when she dreamed of him, or thought she was dreaming of him, he never manifested himself fully; he never appeared to her completely embodied. As in the past, when she had only heard his stuttering voice, this time it was his eyes that appeared before her—intense, glistening blue eyes. The eyes registered no physical pain, but were heartbreakingly sad and lonely; embedded there with her in the frozen river, the ice seemed to melt in tears, trickling down the jagged bergs. Once more, she felt she’d let him down; and the sense was so overpowering—the sense of him being there, with her, so close—that it woke her.

  She emerged from this dream to see his eyes still watching her from some feet away.

  Her immediate reaction was to turn away, to lie with her head on the pillow staring at the wall by the bunk. She waited a bit and then looked back. The eyes were still there, perched on the shelf much like the carton of milk, caught in their glass vessel and continuing to watch her. She sat up with her hands in her lap, and then walked to the bottle and picked it up. She turned the eyes upward and looked down to see them; she tilted the bottle back and forth, expecting to see the lids of the eyes slip shut like pink doors—or perhaps a flurry of glitter, like those glass balls with small scenes inside. But the eyes seemed to blink when they wanted to, and if she held the bottle off to her side, they continued peering at her from their corners.

  She put the bottle on a table, and sat beside it in a chair. Now that she had found him again she wasn’t sure what to do. The eyes blinked at her almost inquisitively; it occurred to her that his eyes had always looked this forlorn. She thought of how best she should apologize. Somehow it seemed unnecessary; it was clear he understood she was sorry, it was clear that didn’t matter so much. Of course she wondered how this had happened, of course she was aware how unusual it was; but that it was him was irrefutable to her, and all she could do was ask herself, over and over, what to do now. The only thing of which she was certain was she wouldn’t leave him again.

  Not again. Minutes ticked by until her rendezvous at the Pont-Neuf drew near. Darkness had fallen. When the hour struck, she picked the bottle up in her hands, wrapped it in the blanket from the bed and stood out on the deck of the boat. It was cold to her beyond comprehension or experience. The wind was ripping down the river; and from the deck, in the light of a streetlamp on the bridge, she could see him waiting. She looked at the bottle and then at the bridge; she called to him, but her voice was sent scattering back to her by the wind. She didn’t feel she could just walk off the boat with the bottle without telling the old man first, and she wouldn’t leave the child for a moment. She had done that before, she knew; and she somehow understood that she had lived with it the rest of her life, that somehow it had changed everything. So she clung to the bottle as though it was her life; and then, when she saw him turn in the light of the streetlamp as though he would leave, she gingerly skittered across the ice from the boat stationed mid-Seine, to the quay, from which she ran to the steps and up to the bridge, only for her heart to fall when she reached the light and he was gone.

  Still clutching the bottle to her chest, she stood waiting for him to return; she started back when he did not. Above her the deep blue night separated to form a perfect white lunar hole, and the light glittered across the Seine and over the houseboat that was frozen in the river like
an island. When she got to the cabin, she collapsed on its bed and opened the porthole at eye level to look out on the ice in the moon. She was so thoroughly cold she no longer felt it. Almost immediately she drifted into another dream, hypnotized in part by the moon shining off the bottle she held before her, and the eyes that glistened as they watched her. I must be a fool, she said to the bottle, to believe it’s you; and then she wasn’t watching anymore. Her lids fell heavily and she looked up from time to time to the night sky outside the window—it was almost bright and gleaming. She bit her lower lip, when she drifted awhile: she saw him coming for her, walking naked on the ice; he was erect and huge. She opened her eyes and the terrain was blank and blue. She bit her lower lip again, clutching the bottle, when she heard the footsteps outside the door.

  The quays were studded with bonfires; one by one the bridges before her seemed to float off and sink. Some people walked along the riverside. Occasionally someone, not wanting to go all the way to the next bridge, would try to traverse the river by foot; she could see their forms move in and out of the smoke. At first she thought the footsteps would be the old man’s but they weren’t an old man’s footsteps—too authoritative and belligerent. She could barely open her eyes at all in the cold and she wondered if she was freezing; she was quite comfortable. The bottle kept watching her. When she heard the door open, she understood it wasn’t the old man but an intruder. She heard him approach behind her and she felt him standing over her. The bottle continued to watch her, and she let her hand drop to the floor and the bottle slipped away. Inside the cabin was no light at all but for the moon. She spoke, in a dream. There was no answer.

  She shifted a bit, still lying on her front, her face to the window.

  She remembered something like this before. She was in the sand, then. The one behind her dropped to his knees on the bed. That had happened before too. She was drowsy now, drugged by the moon, when his hands reached in front of her and unbuttoned everything, from her breasts to her thighs, every seam ripped away; and in the stark cold she knew—she could see by the light of her arms through the haze—that she glimmered like the ice on the river.

  She moaned in the window when she felt him come into her. She reached up lazily to the edge of the window and gripped it. She felt his fingers brush the distance of her hips and pull her closer till he was far up inside. The cabin was now filled with the smoke from the ice and the fires; in the extraordinary cold she was hot and sleek. She held fast to the window while he took her. She watched his hands on her wrists, the deep rendered lines and blue veins and long white fingers like maps. I want to swim in this river, she said, and touched a vein, I want to be your blue Moorish slave. She writhed a little this way, a little that. He raised his long white fingers to her lips and took her hair in his hand. The moon filled her eyes, and when he touched her a bit more deeply with each thrust, the orb’s placement seemed threatened, as though it would rush past its own edges.

  Michel, she said. He did not answer. If it wasn’t Michel, it didn’t matter; she now had nowhere to go. She could hear him breathing. When she turned just enough to look up, she couldn’t see his face in the smoke, or his chest; she could only see his forearms coming out of the fog to hold her and his waist rolling up out of the fog toward the center of her. She only saw his fingers emerge to touch her face. He caressed her and held her immobile while he finished. Her hair caught on the wood of the cabin, she heard the sounds of the river beneath the ice while his sounds grew louder, hushed in the same sort of flow until she couldn’t tell one from the other. One last time she stared at the moon, and it turned to a blaze the wet of her body and the ravishing subjugation of the moment; and she felt herself go: she felt him go: she thought she was falling, the yolk of the moon breaking and a long line of white light running to the horizon beyond the farthest bridge.

  And then when he was still, his face buried in her neck, she raised his eyes to her and kissed them. He was unconscious, his black hair was wet. She ran her fingers across his brow, and cupped his face in her palm. She kissed him again. She pulled him to her and buried her profile in his hair. The moon was in the cabin; she inhaled the languid smoke. She listened to the sounds of the river through the wood. She wrapped her legs around him, and wondered what she was going to do. “I love you, Adrien-Michel,” she whispered, and supposed he never heard her. “But I don’t want to. I don’t want to.”

  He heard the river when she heard the river. He pressed his ear against her breast, listening, and through her body heard the sound of ice and water below them. By the same token, he had come to see the visions she saw: having discarded the patch, he could now look into the gold tempest of hair around her face and see whatever it was she was watching. On the plane, flying into Paris, circling over the city, he stared at her as she sat watching out the window and he saw, on her brow, the fires in the streets, in the shops, on the river, before the Métro gates. There streamed across her temple a hundred billows of black smoke rising over the ice: the spires of the city were in the shadows of her eyes, and the bridges on the Seine lay on her lips. He could lower his eyes to her breasts, and place his hands around them and catch in the slope of her curves the glimpse of a particular alley in Montparnasse, or the Quartier Latin, or the garment district east of Châtelet; he could hear the bells of cathedrals.

  They had been in love in Paris less than an hour when he had her on the hotel stairs; the key had slipped from his fingers and he pulled apart the buttons of her skirt, slipped her panties down to her ankles as she clutched the railing alongside her. That night they did it in the brush outside the Orangery Museum, when he looked in the small of her back and saw the lights of the Place de la Concorde coming through the smoke, indistinct and diaphanous. Across Paris he ravaged her: in a private courtyard near Pigalle, when he saw in her thighs the translucent form of a face behind a stained-glass window; in the Bois de Boulogne, when he caught in the corner of his eye the dark black foliage of the trees rustling across the back of her neck. On her shoulders he saw the cafés, and he took her in the farthest and deepest corner just before an underground grotto closed and lapsed into black completely; as a jazz band played to one side, she felt the heat of the stone walls through her sweater and against her face as he was inside her. In her hands he saw the headlights of a taxi dim and die, and he entered her as the glass of the shop window behind her turned slick from the heat of her legs; when they came to a halt, the taxi turned its lights on for them again, and they got in.

  It was months later, on a train moving through France when he was without her, that he realized he had expected they would one day stumble on one of those places in Paris and both remember where and how they had met before. Having come to Paris in pursuit of the past, it seemed logical to him that their pasts would coincide somewhere on a street corner or a bridge: he would suddenly regain everything, all of it would come back to him; and she would just as suddenly, in the same rush, give up what was waiting for her in Venice, understanding she no longer wanted or could use it. This did not happen. Waiting for her at American Express was a telegram from her husband saying the Venice bicycle rally was postponed till early spring; and nothing came back to Michel at all other than the memories he had of that morning he woke in his room, his life a blank. So they decided to stay in Paris until he could relocate something, which was the film he had expected to play across the wall of his apartment that afternoon on Pauline Boulevard, only to find instead some silent historic artifact depicting murder.

  He understood and accepted that she would have to see Jason again. As much as he wanted her, he understood that coercion on his part was out of the question—that she had to decide to leave Jason fully on her own, and that she had to resolve her own doubts. He couldn’t understand the doubts, actually. He couldn’t understand why there was any question in her mind at all; he resented that he had to compete with Jason, who both Michel and Lauren understood did not deserve another chance. But somehow, understanding that was not enough. It
wasn’t enough for Lauren that Jason didn’t deserve the chance: the situation still required that Lauren actively deny Jason that chance.

  She thought she was ready to do it. She could sit and count the ways he had wronged her. She could add up his love affairs on the fingers of both hands, but the women he had merely fucked required more digits than she possessed. She could forget those women, she could accept that he’d only placed his penis inside them and left nothing more than a white discharged puddle. But the phone calls were something else, the women who had called begging her, his wife, for only a moment to speak to him again. And so in her head were all the words, the ones she said on her wedding day—that damned oath—and the ones she heard on the telephone; and she was just sick of them. She was sick of hearing them. She wondered if she loved Michel for how few words he spoke.

  Why? she said to herself when she looked at him. Why you? When he made love to her the first time, she cried for him because she was afraid: still more words then—the doctors telling her to be careful; and she figured the long thin line of sutures in her belly would burst and out something would fall. But she did not burst, and nothing fell out, and soon she was only ravenous for him to be inside her; she found herself clawing at his backside, and pulling at his hair. The idea of giving him up was abominable to her. She forgot Jason altogether; she felt not a shred of guilt when she took Michel into her. Why you? she said to herself again, and bit his ear; and she supposed it was his eyes, and she noted how he looked so young but for his eyes, which were sad and touched by the wounds even he could no longer remember.