Michel, she said, and never knew what to say next. When he was inside her, there was no one else in the world who belonged there. When he took her, she was never sure whether she was his slave, or in fact he was hers. It felt like both to him. He determined, sometime between that late hour he kissed her on the stairs outside her apartment that night, when all the power had gone, and that afternoon he saw her in the hospital asleep, that he would win her. He realized, of course he was smart enough to realize, that his first glimpse of her before he woke that morning in Paris could have been anywhere, anytime: passing on the street, sighting her in a cruising car, envisioning her in a dream. It might have been the slightest, most apparently trivial of moments when he first saw her; but she was the one he remembered because she was the one he was meant to remember. And yet despite this, despite knowing she was meant to be his, he always approached her with a fear that nearly cast him into stasis: he wasn’t reassured by destiny. He saw himself, rather, as destiny’s outsider, the one destiny had no use for; he traveled outside the blueprint. Neither Michel nor fate had any faith in the other. And so when he came to the Pont-Neuf, after exchanging the film with Fletcher Grahame, and she wasn’t there to meet him, he was cold in a way that had nothing to do with ice or wind off the river. He waited, and angry after a while, turned to leave, walked to the boulevard Saint-Michel and stared blankly at the lights. Then he walked back and saw her returning from the bridge across the ice to the boat frozen midway. Then he followed her and, as he always did, claimed her.
He found out about the bottle later that night when the old man who called himself Bateau Billy returned. Billy didn’t seem alarmed or angry or even surprised to see the young man there; he shook Michel’s hand—once—with a French formality. Michel spoke in French and the old man responded. Lauren said little, standing off in the shadows of the cabin, still holding the bottle to her. “You found the eyes,” Billy noted, pointing at the bottle; and she only stared at him in silence. He looked at her, then at Michel; both men were watching her and then looking at each other. “Well,” said the old man, “it’s an amazing effect, isn’t it? I think it always means something different to each person.” There was a memory of another blonde holding the same bottle, once, but he’d given up on the placement of memories, realizing it wasn’t important. “If you would like, you may have the bottle,” he said. “I make a gift of it to you. But in return you must visit me as long as you’re here in Paris. It appears from the river that I’ll be here the winter.”
“I’ll be happy to visit you,” said Lauren.
“Will you come tomorrow?”
“I’ll come each day if you like.” They left, making their way across the river in the dark, and then walking the distance to their hotel, forsaking a cab so as to save a few francs for the heater. All the way Michel watched her hold the bottle. He didn’t ask any questions other than, “What’s in the bottle?” Had the old man said ice? You found the ice, he had said. Lauren said, “It’s just a bottle,” almost so inaudibly he didn’t hear it at all; he sensed something private, so pursued it no further. The days passed, and she went everywhere with the bottle whenever she left their room, carrying it against her breast.
He had, if anything, learned too well not to ask questions. He regretted, for instance, not asking the stranger with the film questions. That there lay, in the switch of films, answers to his past, seemed maddeningly obvious to the point of now making him feel stupid. And the similarity of the women in the films seemed rather too coincidental, though they could not have been the same—Michel dated the other film around the early twenties, and his film was made almost fifty years later: an age discrepancy, he calculated, of twenty or so years.
He put off making the call. He thought of many excuses for not making the call. When he did make the call, he asked for the gentleman who had placed the ad in Le Figaro.
“Monsieur Grahame is gone,” said the concierge.
“Gone?”
“Moved.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Moved. Both of them.”
“Both of whom.”
“Monsieur Grahame and Monsieur Sarre.”
He hung up. In fact, he slammed the phone down on the receiver as quickly as he could. He walked back to the hotel. He walked up the four flights of stairs and into the room; Lauren was there. He lay down on the bed beside her and stared at the ceiling; and as she lowered her head to the side of his, to study his profile, he understood what he had just done, and had been doing all along. What is it? she said.
He had, of course, come in pursuit of something; but there was another man, the one he didn’t know, who was running away from the object of pursuit. This other man was the one Michel had been before he woke that morning, here in this city, some years before. And each time Michel came close to what he was pursuing, the other man took off, taking Michel with him. Wrenched back and forth in this way, Michel could only become physically sick at the sight of his own past; given the choices, Michel didn’t ask the pertinent questions when he had the chance because he didn’t really want to know. And now, on the phone, face to face or, one might say, voice to voice with an answer, he had immediately severed that opportunity as well, and did so quickly, panicked that someone might tell him too much. “I’m a fraud,” he said to Lauren, while still watching the ceiling. She raised her fingers to his mouth but he moved her hand. “I’ve always been a fraud. I’m still wearing a patch, trying to appear as though I’m far above the things I don’t want to see.” He went back to the café and telephoned again. He apologized to the concierge for disconnecting the call so quickly, and asked if there was a forwarding number for either Monsieur Grahame or Monsieur Sarre. She warily replied that there was not. He asked if there was an address. There was no address, she said. He asked if he could leave a message for Monsieur Sarre with her. She didn’t expect to see him again, she answered. He asked if she could tell him about Monsieur Sarre—who he was, what he did, was he a Parisian or a visitor, had he lived at this number a long time, was he a young man or old, did he have any living relatives. The concierge told Michel she didn’t like these questions, she was uncomfortable with the conversation in general, and she wished to end it. She hung up, and when he dialed back he heard the phone ring many times; no one answered.
She held to that winter that everyone else wished would pass. She watched from the balcony of their hotel as November shifted to December and December to the next year. She watched the ice on the city thicken and the fires grow more frantic. When the sun appeared in the sky, usually about three-thirty in the afternoon, it was always a blue ball without glow; it changed the clouds to strange shades of magenta and silver. The streets would turn dark, slivers of light off the ice consumed by shadow, until the moon rose and the sky succumbed to deep blue; then the ice glimmered in the lunarcast of the night. All across the city, as seen from her balcony, structures jutted up before her like jagged canyon peaks, honeycombed with caverns where the fires burned. Fires burned in the streets; every once in a while she would catch the sight of flames flickering from around some corner or from beyond some rooftop. Primordial Paris: empty, frozen, infernal, undetermined inhabitants scurrying through its subterranean passages, the increasingly panicked sounds of more furniture broken to feed the fires, the crackling of more pages igniting, more incinerated mementos. From her balcony Lauren could see, in window after window, families huddled around their televisions—screens shattered, small fires flickering in the hollowed sets. Around Christmas there was a moan; she heard it begin at the river, the direction her balcony faced, and move toward her, until within three nights it had reached her. All the city moaned, at first like the cry of cats, then old and deathly, then overwhelming in unison and power. By the last night of the year, when there was no more the sound of the cars or the pedestrians in the street or, certainly, the river rushing by or, certainly, the radios or televisions, that moan was the only sound of the city; it was then she believed Paris belong
ed to them, her and Michel. She would give herself to him on the balcony, no longer cold at all; she would call to him to enter her as the panorama of their ice world, with its array of eruptions, stretched out before her. She would feel the gauzy pallor of the flames in her eyes, and tilt back her head to the stars through the clouds, while he held her breasts and her nipples became erect. She would reach back and hold him, pull him to her, and feel the gust from Brittany across her face as he exploded in her middle. Dropping his forehead to her shoulder, he seemed to drift: and she recognized in her own moans the cacophony from the skyline.
She had to decide. She had to decide by spring, and the winter seemed perfect for it. Michel continued to appear to her as he appeared in her apartment on Pauline Boulevard—the time his presence made itself known on the stairs in the dark, or when he carried her into the hospital, which she did not remember, and carried her out, which she did. She loved him for the fact that something had cut so deeply into him, something had so shaken his sense of himself, that the self vacated and he created himself anew. Jason had never been cut, not really ever; he had gone through his life and his crises blithely unaware that he was mortal, let alone vulnerable. Jason was a god of sorts, while Michel was inescapably knowing of his mortality, which made his manifestations all the more profound. For this reason, Jason took Lauren’s love as though he was entitled. Michel never assumed he was entitled to anything.
In the face of such a massive set of denials, Lauren had no choice but to choose her affirmations carefully; she couldn’t make mistakes, she couldn’t afford to fool herself. When spring arrived she would go to Venice to meet Jason, and then she would be enveloped by nothing but affirmations, which only would confuse the issue. As for Michel, he didn’t ask questions, or demand the resolution of choices. What disturbed her most deeply was that she loved him limitlessly, without reason, the way she had loved Jason. She distrusted the feeling altogether.
Now she watched him try to piece his past together in little celluloid boxes. She saw that he could hardly bear to watch the film himself, but the two of them watched it together, the old woman in the house who spoke, according to the subtitles, of living in the window. What does she mean, living in the window, said Lauren. Michel shook his head. They watched the film over and over, trying to figure it out. This went on for a number of days, until one afternoon a woman with a child clinging to her leg stood on the balcony across the street screaming at them; through their open window she had seen Michel and Lauren running the projector. She called to the people in the streets below and told them that two people were using electricity to watch a movie while her child was freezing. People in the street were actually stopping to listen to the woman, and somebody shouted that perhaps a pleasant bonfire could be made of the hotel. The concierge was banging on the door desperately, and Michel shut the projector off. After a while, the power was allotted to each room in more miserly quantities. Then Lauren and Michel used their electricity like everyone else, to keep working the small heater which at least served to warm their hands and feet. At night they walked to the Luxembourg Gardens, where every evening a huge fire was built in the empty fountain, and hundreds of people would gather to try and keep warm.
Michel took to looking at the film frame by frame, sitting in the room by the balcony and holding the strips up to the gray light of the sky. She wondered what he was looking for; she supposed he wondered the same. All she knew was that when she found Jules again, there on the houseboat, it suddenly made her decisions easier; and she hoped relocating this movie would do the same for Michel. She wasn’t exactly sure what decisions Michel had to make, but she was certain he had to make at least one or two; it was unbearable to her to think she was the only one with momentous choices confronting her. She was always a bit afraid he would find something, in one of those frames he scrutinized so carefully, that would take him away from her; she watched his expression anxiously, waiting for him to stumble upon some lost love huddled in a back corner who had slipped by unnoticed on previous examination. But she assumed the best. She assumed that, just as rediscovering Jules had somehow eliminated a responsibility she had to Jason, just as finding again the child Jason had all but abandoned convinced her she no longer owed Jason anything or needed him, just as the dissipation of guilt in this discovery lessened her sense of a price to pay, then too the illumination of Michel’s past would unknot the obsession that drove and split him; he would be something unified again; she knew of the two people within him, and how they were running opposite ways. When his own past once again belonged to him, all of him would be going the same way, and in that way she and Jules could go with him.
By late January the cold was at its zenith. That week several whole buildings were set afire; there had been general mutterings of this sort of action since before Christmas. Then one night the Odéon Théatre was ablaze, and the next morning Lauren and Michel found the streets filled with cops and soldiers, with barricades from Saint-Germain-des-Prés all the way past the boulevard Saint-Michel. This did not stop the arson (it seemed unreasonable, given the cold, to call it arson). Certain structures were deemed expendable and unnecessary, including theaters, monuments, museums, certain very fashionable shops, synagogues and, for some, the homes of the rich. There were even a couple of army tanks stationed by the Louvre, off the rue de Rivoli; the trees were scorched black and flocked with snow. Several people were arrested three nights after the Odéon incident when they tried to burn the cathedral of Sacré-Coeur. To many people in Paris, the vision of Sacré-Coeur burning above the city like a torch sounded exquisite—a pyre that could keep them warm a long time, perhaps even into the hours of the following morning.
Lauren was getting one telegram after another from Jason; in fact, her trips across the river to the American Express, limited to once a week because of the long freezing walk and the curtailment of office hours, usually found two or three wires waiting for her. Each one seemed more urgent than the one preceding; they reminded her a bit of the letters she used to write him in the early days of their marriage, though of course these were more terse, economical. He’d never sounded like this before, and she remembered the strange uncharacteristic concern he’d shown on Pauline Boulevard before he left for Europe. She was astounded by the immediately recognizable truth: that Jason was afraid; and when she confirmed to him that Michel was with her—“I know,” she wrote him, with an unconsciously malicious irony, “that you’ll be relieved I am not living in a strange city alone”—the telegrams stopped for a while, then began arriving in droves. She answered that she couldn’t leave Paris, all the rails and airlines were shut down; this wasn’t completely true, as Jason himself confirmed with a little checking. There was, in fact, one train a day out of Paris, from the Gare de l’Est, on the only railway the bulldozers and steam shovels had managed to keep clear; it was long and circuitous, making its way to Tours and then south along the French coast to La Rochelle, Wyndeaux, Bordeaux, Biarritz, then inland to Toulouse, edging along the Pyrenees to the Côte d’Azur, Marseilles, Nice, Monaco, across the Italian border to Genoa, Milan, finally Venice. A three-day journey at best, longer given unforeseen weather conditions; but it did get to Venice, Jason pointed out, and he saw no reason why Lauren couldn’t have come to him long ago. He saw no reason. Finally she telephoned him from the post office on the Ile de la Cité, as he had so often requested, and over the kilometers he said to her, “You like Michel.”
“Yes,” she said.
“You’re involved.”
“Yes.”
She could almost hear him over the telephone nodding his head the way he did, that way that never conceded panic, that intended a perseverant cool at all costs. “May I,” he said, “see you once, before you come to any decisions?”
“I think you’re entitled to that.” She regretted that it sounded officious. “I have to go to Venice,” she told Michel the following day, in their room, when they were in bed, afterward.
“I know.”
“I have to see him.”
“I know, I know.” He didn’t look at her.
“Are you angry?” she finally asked.
“No. I’m afraid,” he said matter-of-factly.
Afraid, he went on. She watched him poring over the film day after day; and after they’d talked of her departure his search became more intense, as if to rescue himself from his fear. One day he called her to come look at something. Peering through a magnifying glass, she studied the frame. “I don’t see.”
“There, on the wall by the bed.”
The frame showed his mother walking through a room, toward another doorway.
“There’s a date.”
“I see now. A.D. nineteen-something.”
“You can make out a nine? I wasn’t sure.”
“Well, I’m assuming it’s a nine. That seems likely, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Nineteen fifty-seven.”
“You’re sure?” he said. “I couldn’t see that.”
“I’m guessing. Is that an important date?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “Maybe I came to the States about then.”
Finally one day he put down the film and came and sat by her. He could see she was reluctant to say it, so he said it for her. “You’ll need to get to the station early. Trains are packed these says. They’re not taking reservations and everyone wants to get out of Paris.”
“It’s almost spring,” she said. “Maybe it won’t be so crowded.”
“Maybe not.”
She waited.
“Well,” he said. “Then I’ll leave a message for you at American Express in Venice, and you can let me know when you’re ready.”
“Adrien-Michel…”
“I know.”
“Venice, then,” she said.
He looked at the film in his hands, absently; he wrapped the film around his hand the way a fighter tapes his knuckles before a bout. She touched his leg and wanted to make him a promise. He realized she was about to make him a promise so he spoke first. This isn’t important anymore, he said of the film. No? she said. No, he said, shaking his head. He strung out the film to show his disdain for it. What is the importance of placing a memory? he said. Why spend that much time trying to find the exact geographic and temporal latitudes and longitudes of the things we remember, when what’s urgent about a memory is its essence? Are you giving up on the past? she said. I gave up on it long ago, he answered. I cast it away one night and was rid of it the following dawn, but never accepted the fact. I gave up on the here-and-now, thinking the here-and-now couldn’t be any good without the past. But the past has determined the here-and-now, hasn’t it? she said. Sure it has, he said. Sure it has.
Days Between Stations Page 18