The Flight Portfolio

by Julie Orringer

  The Dorade, de facto headquarters of Marseille’s black market, stood on a corner of the rue Fortia, crowded by crustacean sellers on either side of its canopied entryway. Charles Vinciléoni, the proprietor, often held court at a table in the back, as if daring the police to interrupt him. As far as Varian could tell, they did so only to congratulate him on the quality of his liquor. Vinciléoni always seemed to be conducting a louche version of academic office hours; his silver-shot hair and his small ovoid glasses gave him a professorial air. And he affected a style of dress that might almost have been called Oxonian: tweed jackets with patches at the elbows, faintly scuffed shoes that could only have come from a Savile Row cobbler, pants of a looser cut than the French favored. As Varian entered, Vinciléoni marked his arrival with a nod. Varian had made himself a regular at the Dorade in the hope of opening avenues of escape for his clients, but he’d never had the nerve to approach Vinciléoni himself: one of many small failures. He took a table for two and ordered whiskey and water, scanning the line of tilt-hatted men who leaned against the zinc bar. No familiar face came into view through the cigarette smoke. He’d made his way to the final millimeter of his drink before a man approached his table. Varian raised his eyes.

  Not Kirstein.

  Grant.

  There are moments when the filament of time bends, loops, blurs. The present becomes permeable; the past leaps forward and insists itself upon us without warning. The orderly progression of our days reveals itself to be a lie, and the sensemaking brain flounders. What was he supposed to call this impossibility that insisted itself before him as reality? A hallucination? Déjà vu, that cheap cinematic trick of the mind? Waiters passed with trays of bouillabaisse and mussels; glasses clinked at the bar, and a cocktail shaker played its Cuban rhythm. He got to his feet and removed his hat. He, Varian, who prided himself on always knowing what to say, how to act: wordless, frozen.

  Grant offered his hand and Varian took it. Twelve years since he’d disappeared from Harvard, from Cambridge, from Varian’s life. And now here he was at the Dorade, pulling out a chair and lowering himself into it with loose-limbed ease. There was the familiar crescent-shaped scar above the left eyebrow. The familiar eyes, their color more haze than hazel. His skin, pale amber. The only signs of time: a certain leanness to his cheek, a harder cast to his gaze. That and the sharper lines of his clothes, a gentleman’s tailoring.

  “I’m dreaming,” Varian managed to say at last.

  Grant lowered his eyes. “Sorry for all the cloak-and-dagger. I wasn’t sure you’d see me if I gave my name.”

  The sound of his voice: the soft terminal r, the elongated Philadelphian vowels, the low, intimate tone. Varian put his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. A metallic taste bloomed in his mouth. The hum of the room seemed to contract around him, and he blinked again. Grant was still there.

  “You’ll forgive me if I don’t quite believe this,” he said.

  Grant flagged a waiter. “What’ll you have?”

  Varian paused for a moment, then said, “Uncle Scorch, of course.” The signature drink of their Hound and Horn revels: the cheapest whiskey in the house.

  Grant ordered for both of them and sat back in his chair. He took out his cigarette case, but it was empty. “Can I trouble you for one?” he said.

  “I’ve given them up. You should too.”

  “I’ve got worse habits,” Grant said, with his low, familiar laugh.

  “How on earth did you find me?”

  “It seems we’ve been hanging around the same quarters here in Marseille. Hugh Fullerton at the consulate mentioned you in the most unflattering terms. Apparently your work is inconvenient to the American diplomatic mission in France.”

  “Right. Better to sacrifice the liberal democrats of Europe than offend the fascists.”

  Grant smiled. A complicated moment of reconnection passed between them, a jolt of electricity through a completed circuit. “My mission’s not so different from yours,” he said. “I thought perhaps we could be of use to each other.”

  “Of use!” Varian said, as if in a dream. Of use. And where had Grant been for the past decade, when it might have been of use to know he wasn’t dead?

  “I know how it sounds,” Grant said. “That’s not exactly what I mean.”

  “Then what do you mean?” Varian said. “What’s your ‘mission’? What am I supposed to do for you?”

  Grant let out a long breath, a smoker’s sigh without a smoke. “Long story,” he said. “Perhaps it’s not wise to get into it here.”

  “Let’s start with the official version, then. The one you’d give a gendarme if he asked.”

  Grant rearranged his long limbs and sighed again. “Okay,” he said. “I’m here on an academic sabbatical, finishing a book on the subject of nineteenth-century French verse. Staying at a colleague’s house in La Pomme.”

  “Literary research, while a war’s on? Original, if not convincing.”

  “And what about you?” Grant said, meeting his eye again. “What’s your official version? You and your journalist wife, handing out American aid to refugees?”

  “You knew I married Eileen.”

  “I saw the announcement in the Times.” Grant turned his gaze toward the bar, twisting the silver cufflink at his wrist.

  “Eileen’s not here in France,” Varian said. “Right now she’s at her dad’s place in Vermont, working on a book until she has to go back and start the semester at Brearley. That’s her job now. She teaches the English canon to straight-backed young ladies. But she’s been driving down to Westchester on weekends to look for a house for us there. A place big enough for a family.”

  “You’ve got kids, then?”

  “Not yet. What about you?”

  Grant gave him a level look, as if in reproach.

  “I don’t suppose I should ask if you’re married,” Varian said.

  “That’s not exactly what they call it.”

  “And what about your work? Sabbatical from where?”

  Grant pulled a card from a silver case, and Varian learned, with some surprise, that he was an assistant professor of literature at Columbia. So he’d finished school after all. More than finished. He’d done well enough to pursue the doctorate and secure a position uptown. And he’d been living in New York for—how long? They might have run into each other on the subway, at the grocer’s, in the park. The thought was enough to make the table seem to tilt, the bar lights swing on their cords.

  “You’re a lucky man,” Varian managed to say. “There’s no sabbatical at the Foreign Policy Association.”

  “What’s that? A government outfit?”

  “Publisher. International affairs.”

  “And you’re what? An editor?”

  “Director of an imprint,” Varian said, with some pride. “Headline Books.”

  Grant nodded, tilting the glass with its inch of amber drink. “You know, I used to pick up The Living Age now and then, those years when you were editor in chief. I read your pieces for the Times, too. I must have read everything you wrote about the rise of the Third Reich.” He shook his head. “So much incisive thought about our political moment. And all you cared about in college was what had happened a hundred or a thousand or two thousand years ago. You must have done your homework since then.”

  “The history was the homework,” Varian said, struggling to keep his tone even. So Grant had been reading him all that time. And wasn’t that what he’d secretly hoped when he’d written those pieces for The Living Age and The New Republic and the Times? That Grant might come across his name in print, might read a sentence he’d written, and feel—what? Envy? Regret?

  “It can’t have been all the homework,” Grant said.

  “I went to Germany in ’35,” Varian said. “Four months, June to September. You wouldn’t believe some of
the things I saw. My editors didn’t at first. But the Nazis aren’t shy about their methods. They practically advertised the worst of them.”

  “Nothing surprises me now,” Grant said. “Here we sit, drinking in fallen France.”

  “You’ve already seen, I’m sure, how bullheaded our own consulate can be. Try to get a visa for a European artist, particularly if he’s ever written for a communist paper or run afoul of his fascist government. It’s like trying to invade the Krak des Chevaliers.”

  Grant scrutinized Varian for a long moment, a look Varian knew from years before—as if his gaze could penetrate the surface, the carefully hung scrim of Varian’s manner, his speech and movement, the armor of his tailored suit. Then, as now, Varian felt it was what he deserved: both the implicit admiration, and the suggestion that Grant had glimpsed a thread of fraudulence. He was right, of course. Varian had never performed relief work of any kind, he knew nothing of contralegal immigration, he had few useful contacts here in France. He’d entered the field at the direst of moments, intending to take on as his clients the most elite of Europe’s cultural elite. Now he was in over his head, half-drowning; Grant had seen it at once. Nonsensically, the thought flushed him with indignation: Who was Grant to show up after all this time and accuse him of ignorance, of incompetence? Did Grant think he knew better?

  “What is it you want?” he said. “Why are you here, really?”

  Grant fingered his cufflink, a miniature silver nautilus rendered in detail so exact it seemed the animal itself had abandoned it on his wrist. “I must ask you a favor,” he said. “It’s for a friend of mine—the colleague I mentioned. The one with the house in La Pomme. I need you to see him in person. He can’t come here to town—or he’d rather not, to be more accurate.” He took a pen from his breast pocket and picked up the Columbia business card from where it lay on the table, just under Varian’s middle and index fingers. He wrote a few words on the back, then handed the card back to Varian. And there was the familiar handwriting, that mess of upright loops and points, like a child’s rendering of grass.

  “What’s this?” Varian said.

  “His address. I’d like you to speak to him, see if you might be able to help. I wanted him to come with me tonight, but he refused. He’s afraid of running into the police.”

  Varian turned the card over in his fingers. It occurred to him that he could leave it in the glass ashtray before him, that he could get up from this table and walk the length of the Dorade and exit through the doors flanked by the crustacean sellers, that he could go home to the Hôtel Splendide, climb the stairs, walk the long hall to his room, and close the door. Lock it behind him. Lie down on the bed, take a sleeping pill. If Grant called the next day, he could refuse to speak to him; if Grant showed up at the Splendide, he could refuse to see him. It was what he should do: Rise from his chair. Wish Grant luck. Tell him he was sorry, but that he couldn’t spare time or resources for anyone but his own clients. And then do just what he’d planned to do earlier that day: Write to Eileen. Tell her the truth. Get out of France as soon as possible.

  He ran his thumb over Grant’s writing, scarcely knowing what he was doing. The scotch he’d drunk had risen to his brain, and turned there now like a storm.

  “I’m afraid I,” he said, and faltered. “I’m afraid my—”

  Grant’s gaze narrowed, his eyes on Varian’s. Again there was the feeling of uncomfortable scrutiny, of being seen clearly for the first time in—God, how long? He wished he had a cloak to pull over himself, some way to protect himself.

  A long moment passed in silence. Then Grant said, “Do you remember the day you made me buy a hat?”

  “A hat, Skiff?” And there was the old nickname, buried in his mind for years.

  “You remember. It must have been about ten below, mid-February. We were walking along Brattle Street past the shops, I was bareheaded and cold, and you made me go in and try on that extravagant Borsalino. I hardly recognized myself. It wasn’t just the hat, of course. It was my position at the Hound and Horn, our friends at Gore Hall, all of it. And do you remember what you said?”

  “I have no memory of any of this,” Varian said, which was a lie; he remembered every detail—the terrible weather, the shop, the hat, and twenty-year-old Grant, that lucid-eyed, smooth-skinned boy, who stood before the glass and marveled.

  “You quoted Seneca at me,” Grant said. “Vivamus, moriendum est.”

  “ ‘Let us live, since we must die’? That’s rather pretentious, even for a sophomore classicist.”

  “You’re the one who said it, Tom.”

  And there was his own alter-name, the one Varian had tried and failed to pin on himself in seventh grade, when he’d most hated his given name. He’d told Grant the story a lifetime ago. How like him, Varian thought, to show up out of nowhere after an eon, still in possession of Varian’s inmost self. And what now? Was he supposed to pack it all away, pretend it hadn’t happened, this contortionist’s backbend of time? Tom. Good God. Without thinking, almost without sensation, he produced a black diary from his pocket and opened it on the table. Drink-induced tinnitus, a kind of auditory hallucination, drowned the warning klaxon in his head.

  “All right,” he said. “When?”

  “How about Wednesday morning at ten?”

  He was doing nothing more than arranging a time to meet Grant’s friend; he was promising nothing. He might still change his mind. He inscribed the appointment in his datebook. Grant wrote it in his own, then pulled out a slim pocketwatch.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said. “Lost track of time. I’m late to meet my friend.”

  “Of course,” Varian said, coolly. “Don’t let me keep you.”

  Grant raised an eyebrow. “What’s that look for?”

  “After twelve years, Skiff, you might have cleared more than an hour.”

  “I’m sorry,” Grant said. “I wasn’t sure you’d speak to me.”

  “Perhaps I shouldn’t have,” Varian said, but it was beyond his will to incite an argument; the reality of Grant’s absence was still rewriting itself, still transmuting itself into the unbelievable fact of his presence. And now Grant was leaving. He stood and shook Varian’s hand like the old college friend he was, and went as quietly as he’d come.

  A few minutes later Varian found himself back on the street in the chill August fog. He leaned against the damp brick wall of the building and let it all come over him: Elliott Schiffman Grant. Skiff Grant. To whom could he report this incredible news? Eileen? He thought of cabling Kirstein, but couldn’t imagine the words. GUESS WHO CRAWLED OUT OF MARSEILLE FOG STOP. He knew what Kirstein would say: leave it alone. It was what he needed to hear. He spoke Grant’s name aloud now into the fog of the Vieux Port as if testing its solidity, as if speculating that the meeting had been nothing more than a flight of his own imagination. But there was the business card in his pocket, the address inscribed on its reverse; and here, in his head, the fine hot buzz of Uncle Scorch, a drink he hadn’t drunk in twelve years. As he turned to go, he saw a glint of silver on the sidewalk: Grant’s cufflink, the perfect nautilus shell. With a thrill that felt like theft, he bent and took it into his hand.

  * * *

  ________

  The way home was dark, the night wet enough to make him regret his linen jacket. He worked the cufflink in his pocket, thumbing the sectioned whorl of the nautilus and the loose T-bar. Elliott Grant. Skiff. He found his mind returning to an October evening in the tiny room at Gore Hall where Grant had invited them all over for drinks. They sat on the floor, four or five of them, drinking Grant’s port and smoking the loose cigarettes Kirstein assembled in the firelight. It was meant to be a housewarming; Grant had fled his previous quarters, which had been overrun by mice, and he’d invited each of them to bring something to throw into the fire for luck. Their managing editor, Nat Marlow, had brought the business card of the es
tablishment where he’d been relieved of his virginity; Edwin Tewkes, poetry editor, had brought a single rose-colored silk stocking. Varian himself had brought a pocket copy of a Latin dictionary so riddled with errors it seemed to have been intended as a prank by one generation of classics students upon another. And Kirstein brought a copy of the Ezra Pound poem from which their magazine drew its name:

  THE WHITE STAG

  I ha’ seen them ’mid the clouds on the heather.

  Lo! They pause not for love nor for sorrow,

  Yet their eyes are as the eyes of a maid to her lover,

  When the white hart breaks his cover

  And the white wind breaks the morn.

  “Tis the white stag, Fame, we’re a-hunting,

  Bid the world’s hounds come to horn!”

  They threw those talismans on the fire and finished the port, then went down to the sitting room on the ground floor, where Grant played Broadway standards on the piano while the others shouted approximate lyrics. Grant couldn’t seem to keep himself from catching Varian’s eye, as if to be sure Varian had noticed that all of this was his doing, that these men were caught up in an energy he had created and that he controlled.