The Flight Portfolio

by Julie Orringer

  Grant touched the keyboard cover and turned to Monsieur Thumin. “Does it work?”

  Thumin shrugged. “I don’t play.”

  Grant opened the keyboard and pulled out the green upholstered bench. He threw the hem of his jacket behind him, sat, and rested his hands on the keys.

  “Do you mind?” he asked Thumin.

  “I’m afraid it’ll be frightfully out of tune.”

  Grant put his hands to the keys. He traced a scale; the notes held in the air and dissipated. And then, suddenly, here was the Bach fugue nicknamed “Wedge,” with its intricate four-part contrapuntal line; as Varian listened, a cold cataract of memory poured through him. In the basement of Gore Hall was a series of little-used practice rooms, one of which housed a harpsichord painted with a pastoral scene. Varian hadn’t known of the instrument’s existence until Grant led him down the stairs one evening, and, by the light of a candle, revealed the instrument and sat to play. Varian knew by then about Grant’s abandoned musical aspirations; they had opened the books of their childhood histories to each other, page by shameful page. But Varian had never seen Grant touch an instrument. Here, suddenly, was a greater intimacy yet, one hidden in the basement and not meant, Varian understood, to be discussed after the fact. He had always felt at home in the logical precision of Bach, but as he listened he began to see farther into the music, the way a stereoscope’s twinned images resolved into three dimensions. It asked a series of painful, pointed questions about mortality, about the existence of God and the conundrum of Christ, the chthonic pull of the flesh and the poor trapped spirit jailed in the ribcage, in the four dark chambers of the heart. He understood, listening, how far he was from having any iota of control over his feelings for Grant; he was, as the phrase went, in thrall. He’d had lovers before, passionate connections with boys in dormitories and woods, frantic frictions in the mushroom-scented dark. At times he’d thought himself in love. But he had never belonged so unquestionably, so uncontrollably, to any other person.

  Now, twelve years later, he struggled to compose his expression, to mirror the surprised admiration on the women’s faces, or the vague impatience on Thumin’s. What did Grant mean, playing this piece in front of Varian’s colleagues and a perfect stranger? Was it possible he’d forgotten? Why should he remember, after all? At the time, all those years ago, Varian had taken care to affect dispassion. He had listened without comment, then suggested they get to dinner. He had fancied, he had feared, that Grant had glimpsed what lay beneath his calm; but perhaps that wasn’t true. In any case, they’d never talked about it, had never returned together to the room in the basement of Gore Hall.

  When Grant finished, he raised his eyes not to Varian but to the valley view, and let his hands fall to his lap. It must have been Gregor he was thinking of, not Varian; he might have been looking all the way across the Val d’Huveaune to the ocean, as if he could see over the curve of the earth to where Gregor now sat in an apartment near Columbia, a string of rooms Grant must know more intimately even than the Pile. Varian’s skin seemed to contract around him like a woven trap, the kind that pulled you in farther the more you struggled. Thumin had to ask his question twice before Varian answered.

  “Yes, it’s ideal,” he said. “We’ll take it.”

  15

  Villa

  Three days later he emptied his drawers and packed his bags at the Splendide, still marveling that, despite Fullerton’s dire warnings, he, Varian, had not yet been ejected from France. His suspicion must have been correct: the consul considered him too ineffectual to pose a real threat to the American diplomatic mission. Fullerton had ignored him entirely since his return from Arles. From Vichy there had been no action at all. And all that time he’d never stopped working on his clients’ behalf, had not stopped procuring false documents and visas, had not stopped seeking ways out, though the Spanish border was still officially closed.

  Recently he had almost cracked the sea route. Hirschman had drummed up a little yacht called the Bouline, whose captain had just sold her to a buyer in Gibraltar; the captain meant to deliver the boat himself, transporting a full load of passengers at top price. Varian had bought places for Hans Tittel, Franz Boegler, Fritz Lam, and Siegfried Pfeffer, four prominent Social Democrats who had been interned at Vernet. Mary Jayne herself had gone down to spring them from the camp; wearing a Lanvin suit besprinkled with Chanel No. 5, she’d gone to meet the commandant and had invited him to a rendezvous at her hotel. She wouldn’t say exactly what had transpired, but some time later he gave her what she wanted: the prisoners were allowed a day trip to Marseille, under heavy guard, to get their American visas. Hirschman bought off the guards, Bingham delivered the visas, and Varian himself put the Social Democrats on the boat and sent them off. Had it not been for a violent offshore storm, they would have gotten away. As it was, the captain had turned the boat around and brought it back to port, where the Sûreté Nationale waited to drag the prisoners back to Vernet.

  Mary Jayne and Hirschman had seen it as an abject failure, but still it gave Varian hope: the prisoners had been reinterned but not shipped east, and the sea route once again seemed possible. The Bouline hadn’t worked, but they would try again.

  Slowly and quietly, the reach of the Centre Américain was growing. Miriam had recruited a few useful friends as staff: Danny Bénédite, who had worked at the visa desk at the Préfecture de Police in Paris, where he had doled out too many sortie stamps to aspiring immigrants; his British wife, Theo, who had been employed by IBM and was a mechanical genius, a tinkerer, a breaker of codes; and Jean Gemähling, a Strasbourg boy in his twenties, who spoke perfect English and nursed a deep hatred for Vichy. It could almost have been considered a stroke of luck that Madame Balansard had gotten the Centre Américain evicted from the rue Grignan. They had since moved to a new office on the boulevard Garibaldi, two large rooms above a stationer’s shop. The place reeked of printer’s ink, but it was big enough for all of them.

  Now he was leaving the Splendide too, his home for the past twelve weeks. It occurred to him as he filled his suitcase that he would miss these anonymous green curtains, the scrolled carpet, the window overlooking the girls’ school, the French note in the schoolgirls’ laughter. He would miss the bathroom where he’d conducted his secret conferences with Hirschman. The bed that had once served as conference table for his committee. The tapped phone lines. The patch of cracked plaster in the likeness of Jimmy Cagney. Here was a place all his own, the first he’d had since college. In this room he had invented a new self who could save artists’ lives, one who could backtalk to the likes of Fullerton and Villand, who could direct the staff of an international lifesaving mission. And it was here that he’d received Grant’s first message, here that he’d lain awake after their meeting at the Dorade, turning that nautilus cufflink over and over in his fingers.

  Yesterday there had been another cable from Eileen. The ERC had set its sights on someone who could be trained as his replacement, she said; there were some visa difficulties, but she thought they would soon be resolved. PLEASE TELL ME VARIAN HOW YOU ARE, she had concluded; impossible to miss her plaintive tone. And part of him wanted to tell her everything; he thought she’d prefer the truth. But she herself hadn’t mentioned Grant in any of her letters, despite the fact that Varian had written his name with such careful nonchalance in his own; the omission had to be deliberate. Impossible to think she could have forgotten what Grant had been to Varian. And soon he must write to tell her that he had moved to Air Bel, ten minutes’ walk from the Medieval Pile. TELL ME VARIAN HOW YOU ARE: he wished he knew the answer. He took her cable from the desk and folded it into a polite oblong, then stowed it in his suitcase alongside all the others.

  * * *

  ________

  Lev Zilberman waited in the lobby, a roll of drawings tucked under his arm. He had tamed his strands of black-silver hair with a wet comb; his tortoiseshell spectacles glinted
. Knotted at his throat was the same blue neckerchief he’d worn at Arles. He looked as though he hadn’t had a proper sleep in weeks. He and Mehring kept opposite hours, and the strain had made itself known between them.

  “Here you are, Lev,” Varian said. “Glad you decided to join us.”

  Zilberman nodded. “Herr Mehring is a fine writer, a good person,” he said. “It was good of him to have me, but…”

  “Say no more. I understand. I’m glad you’re coming, that’s all.”

  At the front desk Varian paid their bills, and then they walked the three blocks to the tram and boarded a near-empty train. Zilberman held his long tube of drawings and looked out the open window, watching the soot-streaked buildings slip past. The knotted ends of his blue kerchief lifted and fell with the breeze; there was a chill edge to the air, the approach of winter.

  “It was kind of you to invite me,” he said, in a low, constrained voice. “I fear my presence endangers your operation.”

  “You’re worth it,” Varian said, simply. “And you’ll be in good company out there.” He dealt the names like cards: Mary Jayne and Miriam, the Bénédites, Jean Gemähling, Victor Serge and son, and finally his trump card, the Bretons.

  Zilberman smiled. “I won’t have a moment’s peace.”

  “There’s a greenhouse where you can set up shop if you’d like. I can see to it that you aren’t disturbed.”

  “Breton will see to it that I am. He is a master of disturbances.”

  “He does have that reputation, yes.”

  “But he was very kind to me in Paris,” Zilberman said. “He and Jacqueline hosted a show of my work at their home and invited some powerful friends. He is a generous person, you know, as long as you’re on his good side. And Jacqueline is a force, a presence. She is known, among other things, for her memorable soirées. We shall all have something to carry out of France with us, if we live.” He looked out the window, his gaze traveling along the sunstruck streets.

  “Don’t speak that way,” Varian said.

  “You know, Monsieur Fry, that our survival is far from guaranteed. You may not have a say in the matter. The war progresses. How long do you think it will be before the rest of the country is occupied? Everyone is at risk. You have no idea what the Nazis are capable of.”

  “I do, unfortunately. I witnessed the riots in Berlin in ’35.”

  Zilberman glanced away. Ordered rows of olive trees made a small orchard beside the light rail tracks; between the rows, girls in dusty skirts performed a meticulous task of maintenance with long-toothed wooden rakes.

  “It’s better that you did,” Zilberman said. “Better for you not to have illusions.”

  “Most Americans don’t want to believe there’s a war on,” Varian said. “They just want it all to go quietly away, or for it never to have existed. Even the sympathetic ones don’t really understand.”

  “Well,” Zilberman said, reflectively. “You are a writer, Mr. Fry. A writer and an editor. Perhaps you can make them understand.”

  * * *

  ________

  The move-in continued all week. Wave after wave of residents appeared at the gates of Air Bel. After Varian came Miriam and Mary Jayne, the former with a single red leather suitcase, the latter with her entourage of well-traveled Louis Vuitton trunks. Next came the Bénédites: Danny, tall and thin, with his pencil mustache and his bottle-glass spectacles; dovelike Theo, holding their dark-eyed little boy by the hand. The next morning brought the Bretons and the Serges; Varian spied them from an upstairs window and watched as they traversed the avenue of plane trees. Breton, his features boldly drawn, his hair swept back from his high forehead, engaged the Russian novelist with an air of pleased outrage, his hands describing emphatic arcs like a conductor urging an orchestra onward. Serge seemed to glide along beside him, his limbs long and spiderlike, his gestures a dancer’s. Despite the pitch of their argument, Breton and Serge were not, in fact, political enemies; Serge had built his reputation around carefully argued Marxism, and Breton had flirted with communism: two years earlier he had penned a manifesto with Trotsky, arguing against government oversight of the creative arts. But Trotsky and Serge had had a number of famous fallings-out, public and private, and now Trotsky’s name flew like a dart between Breton and Serge as they descended into the garden. Behind them came Aube Breton, seven years old, walking the drive dispassionately with her mother, Jacqueline Lamba, who had once been a nude aquatic dancer at L’Onde Bleue in Paris and retained a certain mermaidlike quality, a fluidity of motion that projected sex and danger. Her hair and skin were made of burnished gold, her clothing, ivory-colored and loose-fitting, an obvious superfluity. Varian fancied that she might slip her silk pants and caftan almost incidentally and dive into the irrigation pool. What drama was he assembling, he wondered, what scene was he setting, here at the house in La Pomme? He relished the idea that necessity had led him to take up residence with surrealists in a villa in the South of France, just down the road from Grant; such a turn of events, inconceivable in peacetime, had become not just possible but arguably altruistic on his part. Below, in the garden, Aube Breton speculated aloud that now they’d reached the country, there would be lots of good things to eat. A sharp correction came from Victor Serge’s son, Vlady, twenty years old and the owner of a fine drooping mustache and a knowing air. Likely as not, Vlady told her, they would starve.

  “Nonsense,” said Jacqueline. “We shall live by our wits. We shall have feasts and parties.”

  “Let us hope you are right, Madame Lamba.”

  “Maman is always right,” said Aube, with an air of incontrovertible authority.

  * * *

  ________

  There was a great and tumultuous moving-about those first few days. The Bretons complained of noise from the Bénédites’ room above; Peterkin, as everyone called him, rode a cock horse to Banbury Cross each morning before dawn. Victor Serge was allergic to whatever lay below him in the garden, and had to remove to a higher room. Vlady could not sleep in the mornings in a room with an eastern exposure. Zilberman was repeatedly awakened by the comings and goings of Killer, whose professional activities led him to keep unusual hours. And Aube Breton, true to Vlady Serge’s prediction, could not get enough to eat and lay awake at night crying for cake, for milk, for anything.

  The nights were no more restful for Varian. Grant had returned, unsuccessful, from his trip to Avignon, Tobias’s trail having grown cold; he’d persisted for days, knocking on doors at all hours, following the slimmest of leads, and had succeeded only at arousing the suspicion of the police. Finally he’d been hauled down to the sous-préfecture, where he’d had to make a late-night call to Harry Bingham, who sent his official car to bring him home. He’d returned in shame and frustration, and seemed for the first time to be depressed. All Varian wanted was to lie with him in Katznelson’s bed, or on Katznelson’s sofa, from dusk till morning, devising new plans of action. But, ironically enough, living at Air Bel made it harder at times to get to the Medieval Pile. Varian’s room at Air Bel was on the second floor, and any movement on the front or back stairs meant possibly awakening friends and clients, or, worse, their hungry and light-sleeping children. There was no gutter to slide down, no merciful tree limb to bridge a descent; his fantasies ran to the knotting of bedsheets or the construction of a ladder made of silken rope. Neither the Pile nor Air Bel had a phone, so there was no quick way to communicate whether or not he could come. Nor was it easy for Grant to stay on at Air Bel after the others had gone to bed. Someone was always up late, playing cards at the dining table or arguing politics on the stairs or preparing chamomile tea for a child with a cough. Grant and Varian could walk in the garden, but it offered no privacy; every word spoken there traveled directly toward the house. Via that route, Varian had learned that Jacqueline Lamba had recently had a miscarriage, that Victor Serge felt ashamed of his son
’s two-dimensional politics, and that Breton regretted exiling Max Ernst from among the favored surrealists, particularly now that Ernst was a refugee here in Marseille. Even if the acoustics had been better, the garden was occupied: Zilberman had in fact set up his studio in the greenhouse, and worked at all hours. Varian felt as if he’d moved in with a large inquisitive family of the kind he’d never actually had. He said as much to Hirschman one night when he was visiting for drinks.

  “And you’re the papa of the family, are you not?” Hirschman said, executing the particular German laugh that followed one’s own joke.

  “I’m hardly the paternal type,” Varian said, though the characterization struck him as strangely apt; the next morning as he boarded the tram, he thought about his own father commuting into the city every morning for decades. And wouldn’t he do the same once he was back in the States? Wouldn’t he live in the house Eileen had found for them in Westchester or Greenwich, and take a gray train to and from his job in the city while she hosted literary luncheons or drove around in a long gleaming car to drop off the children or pick up a roast for dinner? Would Eileen be happy under those circumstances, the same Eileen who had always lived in cities and hated cooking and resented even the small changes her body underwent over the course of a month? Would they really have children? Would they assemble an establishment, as it was called in Victorian novels? A housemaid, a gardener, a driveway-clearer? Could he give up Central Park, dinner at 21, the throb and push of the subway, and everything that could be had downtown?

  Of course he found ways to get to Grant’s. He went directly from the office, or after dinner at Air Bel, on the claim that he wanted a long and solitary walk. He did it with some frequency. Sometimes he and Grant returned from town together, after the others left the office; other times, when Grant preferred to stay at home, Varian met him at the Pile. Those days he would get off the train at La Pomme and stop in at the little station washroom to tidy his shirt and comb his hair. He wore a fresh carnation in his lapel, no matter how long or disheartening the day. Then, pulling his overcoat around him against the wind, he walked the dark kilometer from the station to Katznelson’s house. Grant said he need not bother knocking; the massive oak door was never locked. Varian would pause at the entry to smooth his hair again. Then he’d open the heavy door and stand in the tiled foyer, just listening. Sometimes he would catch Grant singing to himself in the kitchen while he prepared a bachelor’s supper of sardines and day-old bread. Other times he came upon him at the writing desk in the solarium, hunched over a missive to Katznelson or some other correspondent back home. Often he felt sheer wonder at the mundanity of it: Grant himself, the disappeared Grant, now as quotidian as the daily paper. He could almost imagine, as they sat together on the kilim-covered sofa with Le Temps open on a low table between them, that they’d slipped through the fabric of reality; that they might live as they wished, with no ill consequences for anyone, not even for themselves.