Driving Blind (11 page)

“What’d you say?” asked Linda.

“I said I wish I were outside the window now, looking in,” he said. She looked at him. The music was ending. When he looked at the window again, the faces were gone.

I
t was while shuttling his eye down the menu posted in a nineteenth-century silver frame outside Le Restaurant Fondue that Andre Hall felt the merest touch at his elbow.

“Sir,” said a man’s voice, “you look to be hungry.”

Andre turned irritably.

“What makes you think—?” he began, but the older man interrupted, politely.

“It was the way you leaned in to read the menu. I am Monsieur Sault, the proprietor of this restaurant. I know the symptoms.”

“My God,” said Andre. “
That
made you come out?”

“Yes!” The older man examined Andre’s coat, the worn cuffs, the too-often-cleaned lapels and said, “
Are
you hungry?”

“Do I sing for my supper?”

“No, no!
Regardez
the window.”

Andrew turned and gasped, shot through the heart.

For in the window sat the most beautiful young woman, bent to ladle her soup to a most
delicious
mouth. Bent, as if in prayer, she seemed not to notice their tracing her profile, her mellow cheeks, her violet eyes, her ears as delicate as seashells.

Andre had never dined on a woman’s fingers, but now the urge overwhelmed him as he fought to breathe.

“All you must do,” whispered the proprietor, “is sit in that window with the lovely creature and eat and drink during the next hour. And return another night to dine with the same lovely vision.”

“Why?” said Andre.

“
Regardez
.” The old man turned Andre’s head so he might gaze at himself in the window’s reflection.

“What do you see?”

“A hungry art student. Myself! And … not bad-looking?”

“Ah hah! Good. Come!”

And the young man was pulled through the door to sit at the table while the beautiful young woman laughed.

“What?” he cried, as champagne was poured. “What’s so funny?”

“You,” the beauty smiled. “Hasn’t he said why we’re here? Behold, our audience.”

She pointed her champagne glass at the window where people now lingered outside.

“Who are they?” he protested. “And
what
do they see?”

“The actors.” She sipped her champagne. “The beautiful people. Us. My fine eyes, nose, fine mouth, and
look
at you. Eyes, nose, mouth,
all
fine. Drink!”

The proprietor’s shadow moved between them. “Do you know the magician’s theater where a volunteer who is the magician’s assistant
pretends
innocence to secretly help the sorcerer, eh? And the
name
of such assistants?
Shill
. So, seated with a proper wine and your audience beyond the window, I now dub thee …”

He paused.

“Shill. Madame
et
Monsieur … Shill.”

And indeed as the lovely creature across from Andre raised her glass, in the twilight hour beyond the window, passersby hesitated and were pleasured by the incredible beauty and a man as handsome as she was lovely.

With a murmuring and shadowing the couples, lured by more than menus, filled the tables and more candles were lit and more champagne poured as Andre and his love, fascinated with each other’s immortal faces, devoured their meal without seeing it.

So the last plates were cleared, the last wine tasted, the last candles extinguished. They sat, staring at one another, until the proprietor, in the shadows, raised his hands.

Applause.

“Tomorrow night,” he said. “
Encore?
”

Encore
and another after that and still another followed with their arrivals and departures, but always they met in silence to cause the room’s temperature to change. People entering from the cool night found summer on this hearth where he fed on her warmth.

And it was in the midst of the sixteenth night that Andre felt a ventriloquist’s ghost in his throat move his mouth to say:

“I love you.”

“Don’t!” she said. “People are watching!”

“They’ve been watching for weeks. They see two lovers.”

“Lovers? No. We’re not!”

“Yes! Come back to my room or let me come to
yours!
”

“That would spoil it! This is perfect
now
.”

“
Being
with you would be perfect.”

“Sit! Look at all the people we make happy. Consider Monsieur Sault, whose future we assure. Think: before you arrived last month, what were your plans for next year? Drink the wine. They say it’s excellent.”

“Because they
say
it’s excellent?”

“Careful. The people outside might read lips and leave. Give me your hand.
Gently!
Eat. Smile. Nod your head. There. Better?”

“I love you.”

“Stop or I’ll go!”

“Where?”

“Somewhere!” She smiled her false smile for the
people beyond the window. “Where working conditions are better.”

“Am
I
a bad working condition?”

“You endanger us. See, Monsieur Sault glares! Be still. Pour the wine. Yes?”

“Yes,” he said at last.

And so it went for another week until he burst out and said, “Marry me!”

She snatched her hand from his. “No!” Then, because a couple had paused at their window, she laughed.

“Don’t you love me a little bit?” he pleaded.

“Why should I? There were no promises.”

“Marry me!”

“Monsieur Sault!” she cried. “The check!”

“But there has never
been
a check!”

“Tonight,” she said, “there
is
.”

The next night she vanished.

“You,” cried Monsieur Sault. “You fiend! Look what you’ve done!”

Inside the window there was no beautiful young woman: the last night of spring, the first night of summer.

“My business is ruined!” cried the old man. “Why couldn’t you have shut your mouth and eaten your pâté or drunk a second bottle and stuck the cork in your teeth?”

“I told the truth as I felt it. She’ll come back!”

“So? Read
this!
”

Andre took the note the old man gave him and read:

Farewell
.

“Farewell.” Tears leaked from Andre’s eyes. “Where’s she gone?”

“God knows. We never knew her real name or address. Come!”

Andre followed up through a labyrinth of stairs to the roof. There, swaying as if he might pitch headlong down, Monsieur Sault pointed across the twilight city.

“What do you see?”

“Paris. Thousands of buildings.”

“And?”

“Thousands of restaurants?”

“Do you truly know how many there are between here, the
Tour Eiffel
, and there, Notre-Dame? Twenty thousand restaurants. Twenty thousand hiding places for our nameless wonder. Would you find her? Search!”

“All twenty thousand restaurants?”

“Bring her and you’ll be my son and partner. Come without her and I will kill you. Escape!”

Andre escaped. He ran to climb the hill to the white splendor of Sacré-Coeur and looked out at the lights of Paris drowned in the blue and gold colors of a vanished sun.

“Twenty thousand hiding places,” he murmured.

And went down in search.

In the Latin Quarter across the Seine from Notre-Dame you could wander past forty restaurants in a single block, twenty on each side, some with windows
where beauties might sit by candlelight, some with tables and laughing people in the open.

“No, no,” Andre muttered. “Too much!” And veered off down an alley that ended at the Boulevard St. Michel where brasseries,
tabacs
, and restaurants swarmed with tourists; where Renoir women spoke wine as they drank, spoke food as they ate, and ignored this strange, haunted, searching young man as he passed.

My God, Andre thought. Must I cross and recross Paris from the Trocadero to Montmartre to Montparnasse, to find a single small theater-café window where candlelight reveals a woman so beautiful that all appetites bud, all joys, culinary and amorous, conjoin?

Madness!

What if I miss that one window, that illumination, that face?

Insane! What if in my confusion I revisit alleys already searched! A map! I must cross out where I’ve been.

So each night at sundown with the shades of violet and purple and magenta flooding the narrow alleys he set out with bright maps that darkened as he left. Once on the Boulevard de Grenelle he shouted his taxi to a halt and leaped out, furious. The taxi had gone too fast; a dozen cafés had flashed by unseen.

Then suddenly, in despair, he said:

“Honfleur? Deuville? Lyon?”

“What if,” he continued, “she is
not
in Paris but
has fled to Cannes or Bordeaux with their thousands of restaurants! My God!”

That night he woke at three a.m. as a list of names passed through his head. Elizabeth. Michelle. Arielle. Which name to speak if at last he found her? Celia? Helene? Diana? Beth?

Exhausted, he slept.

And so the weeks passed into months and in the fourth month he shouted at his mirror:

“Stop! If you haven’t found her special ‘theater’ this week, burn your maps! No more names or streets at midnight or dawn! Yes!”

His image, in silence, turned away.

On the ninety-seventh night of his search, Andre was moving along the Quai Voltaire when he was suddenly seized by a storm of emotion so powerful it shook his bones and knocked his heart. Voices that he heard but did not hear made him stagger toward an intersection, where he froze.

Across the narrow street under a bower of trembling leaves, there was a small audience staring at a brass-framed menu, and the window beyond. Andre stepped, as in a trance, to stand behind the people.

“Impossible,” whispered Andre.

For in the candlelit window sat the most beautiful woman, the most beautiful love of his life. And across from her sat an amazingly handsome man. They were lifting glasses and drinking champagne.

Am I outside or in? Andre wondered. Is that me in there, as before, and in love?
What?

He could only swallow his heart as, for an instant, the gaze of the beautiful young woman passed over him like a shadow and did not return. Instead she smiled at her friend across the candlelit table. Stunned, Andre found the entryway and stepped in to move and stand close by the couple who whispered and laughed quietly.

She was more beautiful than in all the nights he had imagined her multitudinous names. Her travels across Paris had colored her cheeks and brightened her incredible eyes. Even her laughter was made rich by a passage of time.

Outside the restaurant window, a new audience watched as Andre said:

“Excuse.”

The beautiful young woman and the handsome man looked up. There was no remembrance in her eyes, nor did her lips smile.

“Madame
et
Monsieur Shill?” Andre asked, numbly.

They held hands and nodded.

“Yes?” they said.

And finished the wine.

G
ood Lord, there must be a thousand ways to tell of these two ladies. When they were girls, in yellow dresses, they could stand and comb their hair looking at each other. If life was a great Swiss clock, then these were the sprightliest cuckoos that ever jumped out of two doors at once, announcing the exact same time, each of them, not a second lost between. They blinked as if one cord was pulled by a great magician hidden behind the scenes. They wore the same shoes, tilted their heads in the same direction, and trailed their hands like white ribbons on the air as they floated by. Two bottles of cool milk, two new Lincoln pennies were never more the same. Whenever they entered the school proms the dancers halted as if someone had suddenly removed all of the air from the ballroom; everyone gasped.

“The twins,” everyone said. Not a name was mentioned. What matter if their name was Wycherly; the
parts were interchangeable, you didn’t love one, you loved a corporative enterprise. The twins, the twins, how they floated down the great river of years, like two daisies tossed upon the waters.

“They’ll marry the kings of the world,” people said.

But they sat upon their porch for twenty years, they were as much a part of the park as the swans, you saw their faces uplifted and thrust forward like winter ghosts in the dark night of the film theater.

Oh, once there’d been men, or a man in their life. The word “life” is suggested because a plural noun would not do justice to their oneness. A man had tipped his hat to them here or there, only to have the hat returned to him as he was floated to the door. “Twins is what we’re looking for!” you could hear the older sister saying across the twilight lawns. “We’ve two of everything in the house, beds, shoes, sun-chairs, dark glasses; and now how wonderful if we could find twins like ourselves, for only twins would understand what it is to be an individual and a mirror reflection—”

The older sister. Born nine minutes before the younger, and the divine right of elegant queens in her veins. “Sister do this, sister do that, sister do the other thing!”

“I’m the mirror,” said Julia, the youngest, at the age of twenty-nine. “Oh, I’ve always known. Coral, everything went to her, the sense, the tongue, the mind, the coloring …”

“Alike as two vanilla cones, both of you.”

“No, you don’t see what I see. My pores are larger
and my skin redder and my elbows are rough. Coral says sandpaper is talcum by comparison. No, she’s the person, and I only stand here and act out what she is and what she does, like a mirror, but always knowing I’m not real, I’m only so many waves of light, an optical illusion. Anyone who hit me with a rock would have seven years bad luck.”

“Both of you will be married come spring, no doubt, no doubt
of
it!”

“Coral maybe, not me. I’ll just go along to talk evenings when Coral has a headache and make the tea, that’s a natural-born gift I have, making tea.”

In 1934 there was a man, the town remembers, and not with Coral at all, but with the younger Julia.

“It was like a siren, the night Julia brought her young man home. I thought the tannery had gone down in flames. Came out on my front porch half-dressed with shock. And there was Coral on the front porch making a spell on the young man across half the lawn, and asking the earth to swallow her, and Julia hidden inside the screen door, and the young man just standing there with his hat on the wet grass. The next morning I saw Julia sneak out and grab it and run in. After that, didn’t see the twins for, well, a week, and after that, there they were, sailing like boats again, down the sidewalk, the two of them, but after that I always knew which was Julia—yes, you could tell every year after that which was Julia by looking in her face.”

Only last week they turned forty, the old and the young Wycherly. There must have been something
about that day which broke a harp-thread so quick and so loud you could hear the clear sound of it across town.

On that morning, Julia Wycherly awoke and did not comb her hair. At breakfast the oldest one looked in her faithful mirror and said, “What’s the matter with your comb?”

“Comb?”

“Your hair, your hair, it’s a bird’s nest.” The older put her delicate porcelain hands to her own coiffure which was like gold spun and molded to her regal head, not a plait ajar, not a strand afloat, not so much as a fleck of lint or a fragment of microscopic flesh in sight. She was so clean she smelled of alcohol burning in a brass bowl. “Here, let me fix it.” But Julia rose and left the room.

That afternoon another thread broke.

Julia went downtown alone.

People on the street did not recognize her. After all, you do not recognize one of a pair when for forty years you’ve seen only the two, like a couple of dainty shoes promenading in the downtown store-window reflections. People everywhere gave that little move of the head which meant they expected to shift their gaze from one image to its painstaking duplicate.

“Who’s there?” asked the druggist, as if he’d been wakened at midnight and was peering out the door. “I mean, is that you, Coral, or Julia? Is Julia or Coral sick, Julia? I mean—damn it!” He talked in a loud voice as if a phone connection was giving him trouble. “Well?”

“This is—” The younger twin had to stop and feel herself, and see herself in the gleaming side of the apothecary vat which held green mint-colored juice in it. “This is Julia,” she said, as if returning the call. “And I want, I want—”

“Is Coral dead, my God, how horrible, how terrible!” cried the druggist. “You poor child!”

“Oh, no, she’s home. I want, I want—” She moistened her lips and put out a hand like vapor on the air. “I want some red tint for my hair, the color of carrots or tomatoes, I guess, the color of wine, yes, wine; I think I’d like that better. Wine.”

“Two packages, of course.”

“What, what?”

“Two packages of tint. One for each of you?”

Julia looked as if she might fly off, so much milkweed, and then she said, “No. Only one package. It’s for me. It’s for Julia. It’s for Julia all by herself.”

“Julia!” screamed Coral at the front door as Julia came up the walk. “Where’ve you been? Running off, I thought you’d been killed by a car, or kidnapped or some horrible thing! Good God!” The older sister stopped and fell back against the side of the porch rail. “Your hair, your lovely golden hair, thirty-nine inches it was, one for every year almost, one for every year.” She stared at the woman who waltzed and curtsied and turned on the front lawn sidewalk, her eyes closed. “Julia, Julia, Julia!” she shrieked.

“It’s the color of wine,” said Julia. “And oh my it
has
gone to my head!”

“Julia, the sun, you went without your hat, and no lunch, you ate no lunch, it stands to reason. Here, let me help you in. We’ll go to the bathroom and wash out that terrible color. A clown for the circus, that’s what you are!”

“I’m Julia,” said the younger sister. “I’m Julia, and look—” She snatched open a parcel she carried beneath her arm. She held up a dress as bright as the grass of summer, green to complement her hair, green like the trees and green like the eyes of every cat on back to the pharaohs.

“You know I can’t wear green,” said Coral. “Wasting our heritage money, buying dresses like that.”

“One dress.”

“One dress?”

“One, one, one,” said Julia quietly, smiling. “One.” She went in to put it on, standing in the hall. “And one pair of new shoes.”

“With open toes! How ridiculous!”

“You can buy a pair just like them if you want.”

“I will
not!
”

“And a dress like this.”

“Ha!”

“And now,” said Julia, “it’s time for tea, we’re due at the Applemans’, remember? Come along.”

“You’re not serious!”

“Tea is so nice, and it’s a lovely day.”

“Not until you rinse your hair!”

“No, no, and I might even let it grow out, in the next six months, all gray.”

“Shh, the neighbors,” cried Coral, then, lower: “Your hair’s not gray.”

“Yes, gray as a mouse, and I’ll let it grow out, we’ve been coloring it for years.”

“Only to bring out the natural highlights, the highlights!”

They went off to tea together.

Things went quickly after that: after one explosion, another, another, another, a string, a bunch of ladyfinger firecracker explosions. Julia bought floppy flowered hats, Julia wore perfume, Julia got fat, Julia turned gray, Julia went out alone nights, pulling on her gloves like a workman approaching a fascinating job at the foundry.

And Coral?

“I’m nervous,” said Coral. “Nervous, nervous, nervous. Look at her stockings, all runs. Look at her smeared lipstick, and us always neat as pins, look at her cheeks, no powder over the freckles, and her hair all dirty snow; nervous, nervous, nervous, oh, I’m nervous.

“Julia,” she said at last, “the time’s come. I won’t be seen with you anymore.

“Julia,” she said, a month later, “I’ve got my bags packed. I’ve taken room and board at Mrs. Appleman’s, where you can call me if you need me. Oh, you’ll call, you’ll come sniveling, alone, and it’ll be a long night of talking to get me home.”

And Coral sailed away like a great white skiff across the sea of summer afternoon.

There was a thundershower next week. The largest single bolt of green-bolt lightning jumped around in the sky, picked its spot, and rammed itself feet-first into the center of the town, shaking birds from their nests in insane confettis, launching three children into the world two weeks ahead of time, and short-circuiting a hundred conversations by women in storm-darkened homes in mid-gallop on their way through sin and torment and domestic melodrama. This thunderbolt which jumped back up at the sky in a billion fragments was nothing to the following morning’s item in the paper which said that Henry Crummitt (the man with his arm around the shoulder of the cigar-store wooden Indian) was marrying one Julia Wycherly on that self-same day.

“Someone marry Julia!”

And Coral sat down to gasp and laugh and then gasp again at the incredible lie.

“What? With her ragged seams and her dirty linens, and her awful white hair and her unplucked brows and her shoes run over? Julia? Someone take Julia to the license bureau? Oh, oh!”

But just to satisfy her humor which veered wildly between comedy and sheer slapstick which was not funny at all, she went round to the little church that afternoon and was startled to see the rice in the air and the handful of people all shouting and laughing, and there, coming out of the church, was Henry Crummitt and linked to his arm …

A woman with a trim figure, a woman dressed in taste, with golden hair beautifully combed, not a fleck
of lint or a scrap of dandruff visible, a woman with neat stocking seams and well-delineated lipstick and powder on her cheeks like the first cool fall of snow at the beginning of a lovely winter.

And as they passed, the younger sister glanced over and saw her older sister there. She stopped. Everyone stopped. Everyone waited. Everyone held their breaths.

The younger sister took one step, took two steps forward and peered into the face of this other woman in the crowd. Then, as if she were making up in a mirror, she adjusted her veil, smoothed her lipstick, and refurbished her powder, delicately, carefully, and with no trace of hurry. Then, to this mirror she said, or it was reliably passed on she said:

“I’m Julia; who are
you?
”

And after that there was so much rice nobody saw anything until the cars had driven off.