He is across the room pouring two glasses of wine. “What did you say? Where are the snows of yesteryear? What? Where did you get that?”
“A poem, Claude – a poem by François Villon.”
“Villon, the scoundrel?”
“Is he a scoundrel?”
“Yes, of course, he is. But how have you come to be reading his ballad?”
“It was on your desk, Claude. The title captured me – Ballad of the Ladies of Bygone Times. And then, of course, that line. That line that tells us life is short. It yells at us, Claude, that death will take away all of whatever we have of beauty or power.” She takes a long, slow sip of her wine.
He looks at his wife – the freckles on her face and shoulders, her dark hair, braided and pulled back behind one ear – the escaped strands across her face. Her eyes, a pale blue and always looking around the room – never missing anything. He is not surprised by her intelligence and insight, or her passion. He knows he is lucky to have this woman in his life – it was amazing luck to have been pushed together with Marie Isabelle – an arrangement between her grandmother and his parents, introductions and not-so-subtle encouragements. And in the end there were expectations that a marriage would take place. He does not make a great deal of money – but the prospects around printing and publishing is growing quickly, and his new fonts, which by necessity, are getting smaller and smaller because books are getting smaller, will sell across Europe. He knows the italics will sell, he tells himself. Well, he hopes the italics will sell. He sighs. He has no idea if the italics will sell. He wants to give her a better life than this remote and borrowed house. Better than feeding chickens and milking cows. Better than the linen smocks and wool dresses – she deserves silk and velvet, and better wine. They both deserved better wine.
Tomorrow, he decides, he will get Marie Isabelle up on horseback. He will teach her to ride because someday she may have to ride. Someday, there will be no time for carriages. Garamond has arranged for the vintner to warn them about strangers asking questions and they should be ready to flee at a moment’s notice. The vintner has given Garamond directions to a hut in the mountains where they can live should that day come.
Marie Isabelle notices Garamond looking at her. “Come and kiss me again,” she says. “And again, and again. Kiss me right now – not with tomorrow or yesterday in your head. Kiss me now.”
* * *
You know humans are eroded by life. Morals, principles and beliefs are mangled and contorted just by living. At least, these things are assaulted. But Ray and Tulah are relatively privileged. Do the privileged get bashed around by life too? Of course, they do. No matter if you are dirt poor or obscenely wealthy, it’s all going to end in death – it’s going to end badly. And what sort of journey has Nancy been on? How did she wind up threatening suicide on the balcony of the thirty-ninth floor of a high-rise?
You might begin to wonder about the certainty of this so-called Greek-Chorus section. Is there truth here? Is there anything resembling veracity here? Would you lie to yourself? Do people lie to themselves? Yes. People lie to themselves all the time. Maybe you are at work right now. It might be that you work in a tall office tower and you just went down for coffee and a walk around the block. You have been reading about sitting and how unhealthy it is to sit for long periods of time, so you’ve been trying to fight this with intermittent walks. On 102 Street, a woman waiting at a bus stop is dressed in a tiger suit – a cheap Halloween onesie – she has headphones on, and is singing Madonna’s Like a Virgin, loudly and out of tune. A woman in a niqab walks by, her body a mystery, the screen across her eyes revealing nothing human. You can’t imagine this is a choice. On the corner, there are two stiffly smiling people – a man and a woman – standing with a couple signs and a small table with a stack of Bibles. You acknowledge their dedication. But they might also be the poster children for the idea of lying to yourself. Surely there is an active delusion inside this faith, inside any faith. The Madonna-singing woman in the tiger suit tells herself she can sing. The woman in the niqab tells herself this cloistered prison is her choice, and that she is devout. The Christians pushing Bibles on the corner tell themselves they’re doing God’s work. It’s all nonsense, and yet, it comforts, and on some inexplicable level, it works.
Aristotle said the Greek Chorus ought to be regarded as one of the actors. You might find this to be an interesting notion. If you were an actor in this narrative, where would you occur? Where would you be? Could you see yourself as a waitress or a waiter in the Café Americana, watching a man, sitting in his car, having a long conversation with someone – only attempting to read his expressions and body language to guess at what’s going on. Maybe you happen to glance out your window and see Nancy standing on her balcony on the thirty-ninth floor of the building across the Avenue, and you watch as she is embroiled in a long phone conversation. Perhaps you’re a monk living in the sixteenth century, in the south of France because Claude Garamond is the most likeable character in this book and that’s where you want to live.
* * *
You should probably know this about Ray – he soared through law school and landed a job articling with Brice, Jones & Farnsworth, where he learned about zealously defending his clients first hand. No matter how repugnant the client, no matter how guilty, no matter how unrepentant, Ray was in there – defending zealously. The drug dealer who recruited underage kids from high schools with incentives of the latest electronic gadgets because they could not yet be charged as adults. The slum landlords. Ray put his blinders on and defended them as best he could. He pushed justice hard – made it stand up on its hind legs and jump through hoops. If he got a sleazy drug dealer freed, it was because the wheels of justice were working and justice had prevailed. He looked for loopholes. He sped up proceedings, or slowed them down, if it helped his client. He leveraged time and information to his client’s advantage. His ethics were front and centre always – and it seemed they were bruised and redefined every day. Despite the daily assault on his principles, Ray was an associate in a growing firm, with a clear path toward becoming partner.
But the Basa case tipped him over. It was the case that caused him to question everything about the law.
Brice, Jones & Farnsworth were defending a man named Abdul momit Basa, who was driving home from a party around 5 a.m. one Saturday morning and lost control on a corner – hit and killed a woman named Caroline Franks, who jogged along that street every morning at about the same time. Basa didn’t even know he’d run into Caroline Franks. He said he didn’t see her. He crawled out of his Mercedes-Benz E-Class, which had eventually banged into a large oak, called for a taxi and went home to sleep. In the boardroom of the law firm of Brice, Jones & Farnsworth, with the doors closed, Basa admitted he’d been drinking and doing cocaine with about twenty people at a house party, right up until the time he crawled into his car. He also told his lawyers that he’d been with a woman who was not his wife.
The firm played the race card. Basa was Muslim and devout Muslims do not drink. They would keep him off the stand – he would never have to answer that question. They revealed that he was with his mistress and that his marriage was in tatters but that he and his wife were working on it. The prosecution brought witness after witness to say Basa had been drinking but not one witness could say they’d seen the pour – they just saw him drinking, something. The cocaine was ingested in the bathroom. So only the mistress could testify to that and she was unreliable, showed up for her deposition drunk, or stoned, or both. Ray was told to dig around in her past, to find something they could use, and he did. He found a drug conviction, an abandoned kid, a year-long stay in a mental institution, and two tries at rehab. The mistress was a mess and the firm of Brice, Jones & Farnsworth made sure everyone in the courtroom knew about her mess. At the end of her testimony, she was unsure about the cocaine and everyone in the courtroom was unsure about her.
It wasn’t the descripti
on of Caroline Franks that ruined Ray, it was the look on her husband’s face. It was not hatred, and it was not anger – it was devastation, disbelief and anguish. It was as if all of what was going on around him – the courthouse, the judge, the lawyers – all these things were part of an awful dream. He was withdrawn, and dispossessed, and yet, some part of him had to be there. Some part of him had to know the details of his own loss. Ray could not shake away the image of this man’s face, his slumped posture, his eyes that saw but also did not see. Abdul momit Basa’s wife was also in the courtroom. She sat behind the bench and never spoke. When Ray looked at her he saw her hopeless resignation. As if she understood the outcome of the trial would not affect her life in the least. Ray was attracted to Abdul momit Basa’s wife. Her hijab, her silence and her desperate sorrow were all captivating to Ray. He has always been attracted to sad women. When he met Tulah, she was sad. Something about the snow and her grandmother.
Basa was found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide. It was raining that morning – not a heavy rain, but enough to make the roads slick. And while it appeared Basa’s car did not even start to try to stop, this was inconclusive because it was raining. It was ruled an accident, and accidents do happen. Abdul momit Basa walked out of the courtroom a free man. He walked past Caroline Franks’s broken husband without glancing in his direction. He walked out of the courthouse, smiling and relieved – his wife ten paces behind. He crawled into a new black Mercedes without looking back. His wife joined him in the car with all of her sadness in tow and she silently pulled the door shut. Ray wondered if Basa would have behaved differently if he’d killed a man with his automobile.
Standing in the doorway of the courtroom, Ray thought about Tulah. He could imagine her going for an early morning run – which she occasionally did. He did not have to imagine Abdul momit Basa – he had a clear picture of this man’s indifference, his money, and his amoral privilege. Ray’s first impulse was violence. He wanted to do something to make sure the gargantuan asshole, Abdul momit Basa, would never hurt anyone again. It pleased him to think about hurting Basa but he was fundamentally not a violent man. Caroline Franks’s husband ought to know the truth. Instead of violence, Ray opted for truth. At some point in the future, he would deliver that truth to the husband. It would likely be sooner than later. Ray was not naïve. He knew justice was slippery. There were lawyers in his firm who could easily rationalize Basa’s vigorous defence as a fully functioning legal system, as an example of an ill-prepared, inept, and inexperienced prosecution. The prosecuting attorneys did not ask themselves why Basa didn’t testify. There were a thousand rationalizations but the Basa case, for Ray, was so far from the idea of decency, it made his decision easy. Ray would turn his back on the law. He would work with trees. Trees don’t lie. They hold secrets but they don’t lie.
* * *
Antoine Augereau was working on a book when the Roman Catholic Church came knocking on his door. It was, as far as Garamond could tell, a love letter to the elms of Paris. The book, titled Ulmus, was delivered to Garamond by Antoine’s solicitor ten days after his execution. There was no note, just the unbound pages, printed on high-quality paper, rolled into a tube and wrapped in leather. The letterforms were very close to Robert Estienne’s typefaces and Garamond was intrigued by the weightless fluidity of the letters.
“I was to deliver this to you.” The solicitor paused and looked hard at Garamond, who was studying the letterforms and noticing the generous margins. “He said you’d know what to do with it.”
Garamond had no idea what to do with it, except read it, so this is what he did. Half way through, he realized the book was more about light than elms. The way elms held light. The light through the elms. The light under the elms. Sometimes, Augereau would revisit the same tree a dozen times, at various times of the day, and during different seasons. Often, he would study the same tree for a day, and report the nuances of light. These unbound pages remained a treasured secret for Garamond. He took possession of the manuscript – both physically and spiritually – and kept it private. Its typography was eloquent and surrounded by space – its words filled with longing and melancholy. There was magic in the meshing of eloquence and story and he wanted desperately to understand it.
Chapter 13
Strangled
“Not everyone who has a cowl on is a monk”
– Zhanna Petya
Sometimes Nancy imagines one of her mother’s angels is leaning in and listening to the rolling chaos in her mind. She and the angel will be standing in the middle of a vast, tawny meadow. The cold nights of fall will have begun to work their magic and the trees will be turning. The breeze through the dull brown grasses is the sound of the ocean. It is the sound of a mother hushing a baby, and it is the muffled sound of wings.
This imagined angel is always wearing a fur coat with a high, folded-over collar. The fur will brush Nancy’s face and it will tickle. She won’t see it at first. She will reach up and scratch the side of her face and then she will know. She imagines the angel’s forehead against hers and the angel is breathing slow, focused and receptive. The angel takes every thought and feeling Nancy can muster. It eavesdrops on her desires and regrets, and every shallow impulse, but it never gives anything back. It is a one-way relationship. It is unrequited.
Nancy steps back and the angel lifts its head. Its wings are massive. Its face is soft and feminine. It is at least a foot taller than her and there is a sword hanging from its belt.
“What good are you?” Nancy will want to ask.
The angel hesitates, turns around, looks for someone else in the meadow. It turns back to face her. Its wings create a bit of a breeze. “I am watching over you,” the angel will say. “I am guarding you.”
“Guarding me? All you do is listen? You stand around with your sympathy and sadness vibrating on high, and you listen? What good is your compassion if there is no action attached to it?”
“I am guarding you.”
“What are you guarding me from?”
“From every malevolence. From all the things you know nothing about. From the details of lunacy. From the disorder of darkness.”
“Oh, I know the darkness,” Nancy will say. “Where are you when I hear the wings? Where are you when I am deep in the darkness?”
The angel will smile, as if to say, you’re too stupid to understand, but I love you anyway. It will lean down toward Nancy as if to kiss her on the side of her face but Nancy reaches up with her hand and guides the angel’s lips toward her own. She kisses and holds the angel in that kiss. The angel’s wings flutter and pull at the air. They fluster the grasses in the meadow. And still, Nancy continues to kiss. She is holding the angel’s head with both her hands now. She wants this useless creature to know her pain, to feel it, to comprehend the idea of want and need and desire. She is offering the tangible, everything she knows of corporal and tactile pleasure. The angel lifts ever-so-slightly from the ground and Nancy is pulled upward. Her right arm reaches around the angel’s neck and shoulder. Her feet slip from her shoes and they fall askew into the grassy meadow. Nancy smells cinnamon and nutmeg. She smells clean sheets. She smells sickly sweet and cold and bitter. Her feet kick at the air and still she kisses. She kisses with her tongue and her lips, and in her mind she is touching this angel. She is moving her fingers and hands in and out of delight. She is teasing with her tongue in a thousand folds. She is tasting the fetid and the sweet and everything in between, and she is not judging. She is grinding herself into this angel’s pelvis, pushing through nothing, and sensuality, and pleasure, and directly through pain and back to pleasure. She is ecstatic and naked on top of the angel, thrusting her sex, or inviting the thrust of sex, she can’t tell anymore. She has moved beyond her tipping point, she has lost control and she is devoured by her own pleasure.
When Nancy stops kissing the angel, she can feel the grass tickling her bare feet. They land back in the gr
assy meadow. The angel steps back, its eyes wide and frightened. It positions itself sideways and reaches for its sword.
“What was that?” it asks.
Nancy is bent over and she is pushing her toes into one of her pumps. “That was proof that you don’t know anything,” she says. “You may listen but you know nothing.”
* * *
The disorder of darkness? This idea didn’t stop you? It didn’t make you wonder? How in the hell can darkness be disordered? Darkness is a blank wall. Darkness is nothingness. Darkness is the absence of light. Unless there is something in the darkness that can fall out of order. But how would you know this?
* * *
“Are you hungry?” Nancy says. “I’m hungry.”
“No,” Ray says. “I’m not hungry.” He looks up the street at the businesses across from her building. He never noticed the café on the corner before – it has an angled entrance like Les Deux Magots in Paris, with the sweeping awning across the front. It’s Café Americana, and it has a patio on both sides of its main door and the patio is pulled in tight against the building. Next to the Café Americana is a place called the Salad Shoppe – a chain of some kind. Then a dry cleaner, a cellphone store, and something that looks like a massage parlour called Classy Business. At the end of the row there is a small Thai restaurant called Numchok Wilai Thai Cuisine.
“Ever been to that Thai restaurant at the end of the block?”
“My ex-husband tried to kill me in that restaurant.” Her voice is level and matter-of-fact.
“You mean he wanted to kill you. You mean you had an argument. Right?”
“No, I mean he tried to kill me. It was the best Thai food I’d ever tasted. It was so good. And then I was sprawled on top of it and couldn’t breathe. He was strangling me and there was food everywhere. I think I blacked out. I must have blacked out. There are bits I don’t remember.”
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