In several photos of the artist, there seemed to be a presence in the background, someone who could have been Amelia but wasn’t. Amelia’s lodged within his skull, Paul thought as he studied the portraits of that unlucky rival, Amelia’s the wild gleam in his eyes. Was it Amelia he was trying to chase out of his head with his gunshot?
5
Well, if she wants a child, Paul thought, I’ll give her one. Why not? At no point did he ever doubt his, or their, ability to reproduce. A man knows these things, rightly or wrongly. But she did not seem to want one any more, or at least not one by him. She complained about having been shunted back and forth her entire life, this way then that, and if that had been the case when she was a child, was it still so today for her, an adult woman apparently unable to do something as simple as renting an apartment, putting her name on the door, establishing boundaries of some sort between inside and outside, between public and private. It’s up to you, said Paul, whose sole mission right then was to get her to eat, to watch her sleep. He was discovering a groundswell of words within himself, words he had never used: replenishing, revitalising. He thought them without saying them but it was enough to put a scowl on his face. At the heart of his love for her – a love that was less and less a matter of flesh and blood and sex – at the heart of the compassion he felt in watching her struggle like this against herself, there had been a bedrock of anger, of rage: as if she had been above it all, too good for him, for them, for the game they were all playing. The homes and lives that everybody, Paul included, struggled to build were undone by her. Whether by choice or fate – a compulsion she had to obey – no matter which, her refusal of work and family cast a pall over everyone else’s existence. Sometimes Paul hated her, especially early in the mornings, when he left for the Agency. He hated her because she alone could grant herself that insanity, he thought, that slow disruption of her health, of her mind; could grant herself that freedom not to be professional, not to make a living. But he would rather ignore those unfair, unrefined emotions. All Paul had (he believed) was what he had earned himself. He was taking such care to avoid all judgement, all unkind thought towards this woman, and yet he didn’t realise just how much this proved he was his father’s son. He set aside these feelings and tried. He really tried. He changed apartments. He had never liked furniture, furnishings, but he did love space, yes, a particular ceiling height, a particular brightness on the walls, of course not all whites were alike, he picked a dusty tone with the same care that others did their household appliances, their mattresses; what mattered to him was light. For this city, for Paul who had no inheritance to claim, it was an impressive place. He imagined Amelia crossing it barefoot, in one of his shirts. When she crossed it barefoot, a Wednesday, late afternoon, the light warm and slanting, his shirt pale, her hair red, short, ablaze, he got a glimpse of what would be a dream become reality, a fantasy that could have been his alone just as easily as it could have been emblematic of the city, the era: comfort, a sense of entitlement and belonging, security. Or what passed for such. He had rarely felt so proud, so satisfied, to have been able to give this to Amelia, an instant in space. Of course it was really for his own gratification, this trajectory of a few seconds that had cost him so much time, so much money, so many sacrifices, a loan, not only the decades gone past but also those yet to come, years devoted to repaying the interest that would accrue after the moment that had just taken place. She did not notice anything – for her, this moment in this place was all banal, ordinary, not worth any attention. He wasn’t upset with her. He was never upset with her for not wanting what could be wanted. All that, the apartment, the shirts, he did for himself, not for her. He was afraid of what she aspired to; at heart he knew that he didn’t have much time, that he would have to rush to experience, with her, a pale shadow of what they could have had, which did not interest her at all, not at all. He feared regret.
He took her to restaurants. He took her to London, to Cabourg, to all the natural history museums he could find, to the homes of imaginary detectives where they could nonetheless admire the lounges, the bookshelves, and try on the detective’s hat; it looked better on Amelia. In bed they had their routines, as they did on trains – straightforward, plain gestures, which made them seem like an old couple, although that was how they had already been acting when they were eighteen, at university. She taught him particular things, which cropped up again every so often and which she described, pensively, as if she were wondering why she knew what she knew – for example that people like to sleep with another person because the body is lulled by the heart of the other, by its beat, even when it can’t be heard. I’ve never met anyone whose heart beats as loudly as yours, she told him, anyone at all. It’s a strong heart, a swimmer’s heart. Powerful and at the same time just strong enough that I never forget that it’s just a muscle. At heart, your heart is just a muscle.
Of course, Paul said.
That decade he seemed to be a distant man, a cold man.
He introduced her to his father. They took the regional train, he had nothing left to lose. He wanted to experience, with her, these moments that had, in his youth, been unthinkable; now he wanted to test her, to make the world he had come from collide with the world she was from, to show her what she had never known (but it was worse than that: she knew about it, she just didn’t care to think about it). Poverty, austerity, at best unsentimental pride – a pride that was a dead end, that came to nothing, and had no alternative, no possible way out. His heart was pounding when they entered his father’s place. His swimmer’s heart, that organ that allowed him to sense injustice, between these walls that despite repeated offers the man had never wanted to leave, these walls that unsettled Paul, spooked him. The smallest and tidiest place in the world (even now, it seemed to him, smaller and tidier than ever), he had no idea how it could hold all three of them, Amelia, his father, and him. Or all four of them: Amelia, his father, him, and the photograph of his dead mother on the wall, which his father introduced as though she were alive, there in flesh and bone, my wife, Majda, and genuine confusion passed across Amelia’s face because that day she had forgotten everything the two of them, Paul and her, had in common: loss, longing, the memories they couldn’t be sure were real or invented, pieced together from stories, from photographs, from secret wishes. Loneliness. But his past was different from hers. Where were the family legends, the grand stories, the political convictions? Where was the old money? Can one dead mother be equal to another, when one was an adventurer and the other a simple housewife – one who enjoyed being simple out of self-esteem, out of self-discipline, who was determined to love what she had, not to conquer what she didn’t. Ruthlessly cutting off dreams of elsewhere which others might fervently pursue. A feeling of calm responsibility and dignity; an open heart – and when that heart stops beating, who would be so cold as to call it just a muscle? A mere muscle?
If his father was surprised, of course he didn’t let on. He made some tea, and on the wall, Paul saw the traces from the sponge that it had been scrubbed with. Paul saw the grille on the window and beyond that the faded lawn and beyond even that a disassembled motorcycle, and secretly, he was happy to hear his father say to Amelia, I believe my son mentioned you, one time, a long while ago, at which he turned towards Paul, questioning and almost worried at having said too much, and for a moment he and she both looked at him, through the steam rising from the tea, in the tiny living room. He couldn’t tell what his father thought but he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, what Amelia was thinking: that she had never before wondered whether Paul spoke of her or not. She assumed he did. She now realised she had been wrong.
A long while ago, yes, my father has an excellent memory, said Paul.
*
They travelled. It was in Paul’s nature to worry, so he tended to overdo things, whereas Amelia, who wasn’t easily swayed, teased him a bit for what she called his urges. His nouveau-riche impulses. She turned down India and the palaces. She turned down Ma
laysia and the beaches. He picked up his coat and walked out the door. In the end, they simply went to Italy: she rented a practically bare room for them in Ischia, that island of gardens and springs. He had to concede she had been right.
During that stretch, time felt strange for them, an interminable present that seemed to include the past, their youth, but which the future was pushing, pressing into already. Ischia was a verdant island off Naples, famed for its thermal parks where soldiers and civilians had come to recuperate. Even today afflicted bodies could be seen – and Paul had already noticed them – convalescing: bodies that the modern era generally shunned, considered distasteful, timidly revealed themselves at Ischia. It was both a shock and a kind of relief. The pink of burn wounds. Eczema. Stumps. Evidence that the world damages each of us. And, amongst scars, shaky gaits, prostheses: Amelia. Radiant. Her forehead slightly red, her shoulders even more so. Seemingly intact.
They meandered between thermal pools, scalding water and icy water, and ended up, illicitly, on a private beach, slipping under the nose of a lifeguard probably fixated on something more pressing. They weren’t going to pay up just to bathe. The transgression made the moment all the more delicious; the mere premise that they weren’t supposed to be there made the surroundings all the more breathtaking. Of course, I never feel like I’m supposed to be wherever I am, Paul thought, and so the world never stops astonishing me. Amelia walked towards the sea with a self-assurance that could have been feigned or could have been real, he couldn’t be sure which, the self-assurance of someone who very much was supposed to be in the right. I swam, thinking that this green, clear water, this fine sandy beach, like the sun and the sky – that all this was due to subterfuge, and was, I confess, all the better for it.
When I came out of the water, she continued, when I’d got back to the beach chair and that silly straw umbrella – all those umbrellas arrayed in a line that, from the water, looked so pleasing – I stood a while in the sun. I was looking at Paul and thinking that he hadn’t changed in all these years, of course time and fatigue had lined his features, had accentuated his jaw a bit more as with some kinds of men, but ultimately it was still him; still Paul. Unchanged in appearance. As if time had no hold on him. That was when a drone flew over the beach. I remember it made almost no noise, which was astonishing given its size. The drone slowed down, turned around, it descended to the height of an average man or woman. Then the drone stopped in front of me, at eye level, and we looked at one another, the drone and I. At first, I folded my arms over my chest. I felt naked, which I actually was, more or less, but I felt far more naked in front of the machine than in front of, say, Paul. She isn’t lying, Paul thought as he toyed with a crumb from the loaf Albers had asked him to pick up before dinner. It was raining outside, and Albers had started a fire in the fireplace. He could remember that day clearly. Amelia kept going. I smiled, embarrassed, I shrugged, as if the drone was someone, and someone able to be appeased or just affected by a slightly ashamed look. Then I felt ashamed of myself. I wondered what this drone could be thinking. I took a step to my left and the drone followed. It didn’t seem to think it was ridiculous to pay up just to bathe in the sea.
The next day I came back and I waited, but it didn’t come again.
At the beginning, when they saw a drone, Paul and Amelia immediately thought of war. It was the first thing that came to mind and that day, on the beach, her body had reacted as if it were staring down a weapon. The machine had felt obscene to them, and they, Amelia especially, needed to sweep it away from their perception; it threatened them in a present that they still mistook for the future. Yes, this still felt like the future, Paul thought, but it was very much the present. Maybe he was getting old. After that the machines began to slip here and there into their daily life, all the way into their bedroom. On Amelia’s computer, they looked at an interactive planisphere where they could see images taken by other people’s drones. It was oddly addictive, even though they never saw anything especially interesting. It reminds me of the Elisse hotel, Paul said, except instead of the hallways and elevators in black and white they were looking at aerial views of fields, industrial zones, in-between spaces, neither public nor private, of uncertain status. And in colour.
*
Things happened that didn’t seem like much. They carefully picked out furniture they never bought. He properly met the father, this immense, hovering presence, about whom Amelia had always been reluctant to speak and whom Albers never mentioned, but it was obvious he had played an essential, pivotal role in the fortunes of the Dehr women. A relative presence, and an unnerving one: the textbook definition of a twentieth-century man. A white, rich, powerful twentieth-century man. So many people were determined to think like him. He didn’t think about them at all. The effort it inevitably took them to live with and beside him gave him the illusion of being universal. His relationship to the world was an overpowering one.
Paul remembered the one time he had met him; the man hadn’t bothered to shake his hand; he had looked at him as if he belonged to the Elisse hotel or to the globalisation that had allowed Elisse hotels to spring up like mushrooms everywhere. Your father looked at me like I was scum, he said to Amelia, like some kind of mongrel – something I could never call myself. You’re wrong, Amelia shot back, and I don’t remember my father ever coming to the Elisse, so he can’t have met you. Now, put on a tie. No, Paul said. Amelia laughed.
He was nothing like Paul had expected; the man he’d imagined was immensely lonely; coffined, almost. Amelia, moreover, had never mentioned her father remarrying, having other children or a wife barely older than her. Amelia had never mentioned that the woman he’d always believed was the most desirable one in the world had been an unwanted child, that his heroic love for Nadia Dehr had just been a lark, a fling, that at the time he was already married, just not to this woman who had scrubbed all trace of identity, all genealogical detail from her features, in favour of a narrow nose, prominent cheekbones, just in order to fit in. She had created for herself a face that seemed objectively, universally successful, and which in a few years would prove to be yet another relative code; by then, her features would already be sagging and slipping away.
So her father had turned into a patriarch, with sons likely conceived out of vanity, Paul thought. Lifeless, wordless teens as pale as if they hadn’t seen the sun in years. What a chilling family, what a horrid man. But when the man in question, having been made aware of Paul’s existence, pulled him close, into personal space generally reserved for those he knew well, for friends – he felt the heat of his ruddy neck – he was flattered. He couldn’t help but feel strangely seduced.
He ruled an empire, claimed to have pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, which was neither true nor false. His own father had given him a few thousand francs half a century earlier; he had bought a truck; then thirty; then these trucks had transported goods, merchandise, but the real money had been in sand – that, Paul hadn’t known. For buildings, for housing estates and hotels; but that’s nothing new, of course. The sand was used to make concrete. Amelia went oddly quiet and Paul wondered whether Nadia, too, had gone quiet in the same way, for how long, for what reason. When her head turned to her half-brothers, she appeared not to see them, and they seemed to avoid glancing up at her; any time she entered their field of vision, they lowered their heads, as if it was important not to believe they were seeing a ghost. A vague, undefined terror seemed to rule their lives, and they almost seemed relieved to be able to fear Amelia. To be able to put a name to it.
And the father was still talking. The father who was a patriarch, a universal man, universally envied, and, undoubtedly, universally hated – his success, the story of his success, seduced Paul who hadn’t expected to be seduced, who hadn’t wanted to be seduced, and who had come without a tie, ready to stand defiantly in solidarity with Amelia. He felt drawn, despite himself, into the orbit of this man. He couldn’t help but be spellbound, he felt himself turning mom
entarily away from the woman he loved, because he felt something in his blood, a desire to succeed, a form of individualism that, in other circumstances, could even have been healthy. Something was wrong in his relationship with Amelia, he knew it, in the way the limits between them blurred, but he refused to admit it. After the meal, he followed the man, as in a dream, into what he called his lair, his office, he wanted to hear about this project Paul was working on, about his desire to start up a business of his own and the reasons for this drive, he wanted to see if this guy had what it took, he was always interested in good deals, genuinely keen to hear other people’s ideas; for all his egocentrism he could still accept that other people – younger ones, maybe, or educated differently – might have more of a finger on the pulse. This sincere, if self-interested, curiosity must have been what drew him to Nadia Dehr forty years earlier; but the pulse Nadia Dehr had had her finger on couldn’t really be monetised, and as such couldn’t interest him for long.
Night as It Falls Page 13