Paris Twilight (20 page)

Superseding all these was another motive, rooted in my profession, for if I'm not the world's best chemist, I'm yet a pretty good anesthesiologist (and, I want to say, not such a shoddy chemist either, pharmacology being, along with physiology and procedure, among the three Ps that Maasterlich drummed into us). Given my particular trade, I'm drawn to anyone whose vital signs hint of peril. Ultimately, that's how I explain it. Corie's signs screamed trouble. I recognized the blankness in those eyes, and though I didn't know its root, I knew the realm wherein she traveled, and knew that at its far frontier the precipice awaited, where sleep trips into profundity as suddenly as despair trips into violence.

It's the anesthesiologist's creed: in calm lurks danger. We are ever (forgive me; they're Maasterlich's words, not mine) alert to the inert. In the operating room, that alertness would have been partly, blessedly technological. I would have had a bank of blinking CRTs and beeping alarms to monitor her every hidden state, EKGs and pulse oximeters to keep me apprised of her condition, and I would have watched those signs like a hawk does a sparrow, the way a lover peers into a lover's face, with just that sharp a hunger. Here on rue Nin, there was none of that to help me, only her eyes. So I watched her eyes, and listened to her voice, and tried fanatically to figure out where, within Corie's calm, Corie's disaster lay.

“More tea?” she said. We declared an entr'acte and headed to the kitchen to heat some water. She'd relocated the electric kettle and the tea bags from the study (Had she tidied up the joint for my inspection? I wondered, and I derived some self-importance out of that). Our kitchen jaunts and my occasional trips to the water closet (it was, may I assure you, no closet) had allowed me my only furtive glances into the interior of the mysterious
palais
, so I was glad that this time, after the kettle had boiled and we'd poured our libation, we didn't plod back to our posts, per usual—kitchen to dining room (furnished with a Biedermeier banquet table, its both ends bristling with a silver candelabra) to marble-floored colonnade to study—but diverted to the library. Corie felt at home in the room, obviously, though guiltily so. She'd taken as gospel Saxe's instruction to inhabit without a trace.
She perched on her chair with a wren's timidity, poised for flight. Getting that deep into the premises was tantalizing for me, and I snatched at the chance to draw her further astray. My artifice was transparent (embarrassingly: I professed an interest in period wall coverings), but it brought the invite I'd hoped for. Corie's reservations—she was unsure if this was acceptable, though she accepted me as an authority—were in full blooming conflict with temptation. Temptation won by a nose.

I'd wondered if my memory had inflated the size and fineness of the rooms; now I found it hadn't. If anything, their grandeur had been emphasized by Corie's habitation here and the address on Alba's letters; they made the place more actual. This impossible hallucination, this architectural confection, had been and still was somebody's workaday residence, which rendered it all the more boggling. Cavernous room after cavernous room, I expressed my awe at everything we encountered. We came through the French doors into the conservatory, and, as Corie began effusing on the satin wallpaper, I reeled in sudden dread of the iceberg that lay just ahead. Damned idiot!

Oh, why hadn't I picked another pretext! Surely she would insist on showing me the hand-painted pastoral and the tempera summer sky that were the pièces de résistance, in wall-covering terms, of the entire flat. And of course we would then stumble on the evidence of recent forced entry. Would she alert the police? Would I then confess that I lived next door and end my infernal ruse? I had wanted so, so much to do exactly that, over recent days, had wanted to confirm our friendship with this central admission of who I actually was, but not right now, and certainly not like this. I hadn't figured out what context might best help me broach the matter. I was pretty sure trespass and vandalism weren't ideal ingredients.

We approached the piano, me trying, in defiance of all known optical principles, to cast an eye around the corner. How much devastation had I actually wrought in there? Visions of wholesale wrack and wreckage billowed like cumuli in my overbusy brain, and I made up my mind to stall.

“Oh, look,” I said innocently, nodding to the music on the floor, “someone's been playing! Is that you?”

Corie stared at the piano as though surprised that it was there, then shook her head, pursed-lipped. “No,” she said.

“You don't play?”

“Not really.”

I took in her lie and set it beside my own, two candelabra on a table. They reflected each other, functional items of unexpected intricacy. Her denial disappointed me—I had fantasized adding a recital to our regular conversations, had anticipated listening to music unmuted by subterfuge. But her reluctance to play—to even admit that she could—placed in my path a denser obstacle than any closet door. Her insistence on secrecy reaffirmed my own, and on the spot I swore to myself that I wouldn't reveal my abode, absolutely not. The moment I confessed that I lived within earshot, I would lose Corie's music to Corie's shyness forever, the music that had sustained me through so much and that now I saw (I was recalling the pounding finale of the waltz) as another and necessary vital sign requiring my monitoring.

At least our encounter with the Bösendorfer succeeded brilliantly as diversion, for Corie, morosely focused on the instrument, didn't invite me farther, not at first. Not until I actually took a step back toward the study. Then she called out, “Oh, but you have to see this!”

“We should get back,” I said, trying to sound indisputably foregone.

“One more room!” she replied. “It's the best.” And she ran on without me, out of the chamber of her guilty secret and into the chamber of mine.

I waited for the horrified scream, the gasp of concern, and when at last I followed her, it was mostly to find out why nothing of the sort had come. She was standing directly under the chandelier, twirling like a dreidel, making the clouds spin. I approached her, my face turned up to feign observation of the handiwork while my lowered eyes scanned the floor and the wall panels for the incriminating mess.

“Isn't it lovely?” Corie asked, and, still peering skyward, she stepped to the wall and began tracing the room's circumference with her hand, her fingers ticking off the groins in the wainscoting like a playing card counting bicycle spokes.

“Lovely,” I said, and she caught my vagueness and stopped, stopped precisely where my fear had feared she'd stop.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said, and meant it. There, where I knew full well my eruption into this chamber had left its garish evidence, sugar swirls of gypsum dust and jagged splinters yellow as lightning, there was nothing to see, no indication at all. The floor shone so spotless and the transom I had split was so flawlessly intact that I had to guess which of several panels I had burst through. The one before which Corie stood? Or perhaps the one beside it? I
had
burst through, hadn't I? Where, though? I was left with two prospects: that I had dreamed the entire adventure, or (far less plausible) someone had come along with glue and wax and carefully scoured away my signature.

I'm not sure which possibility was more alarming to contemplate, but my alarm, such as it was, took the form of giddiness. I was reprieved! Who cared how! “Nothing at all,” I repeated in wonderment, and Corie, faced with such enigmatic gaiety, gave me a big silly smile. It was a smile completely outside her usual stormy nature, a shiny new facet of her character. Here: one more contradiction to mix into the carboy! On impulse, I grabbed her hand and bowed, formally, stretching one leg behind me. If I couldn't hear her music, I would imagine it for both of us.

“Mademoiselle?” I said, and straightened, and she picked up on my gambit and put a hand on my waist and took a step, and then another, and we waltzed a circle around the gleaming parquet, both of us laughing. We waltzed our way past fields and forests and picked up our pace past a flock of sheep and a flock of windows and began a second circuit of the room, and just as we reached again the entry into the conservatory our
cotillon à deux
collapsed as abruptly as if the plaster heaven above had fallen in shards around us. My tune—I'd begun humming our accompaniment—tailed off in tatters. She doubled over, clutching at her waist. I debated, startled, between comic and dire—a reciprocal curtsy? a burst appendix?—but my thoughts were severed by a low solid growl, gagging out of her like a tumor being born. With another spasm of contraction, she lurched upright and bolted from the room.

I raced after, slowly enough to be sure not to catch her, unsure what I'd done or ought to do. She halted, panting, inside the study door, and I could tell that her flight from far precincts had only compounded her pain. She'd ricocheted out of her unaccustomed cheer and into torment. Her aspect had darkened like a mire about her. Instead of plunking down in her chair as usual (armchairs called to Corie's inner skydiver), she stood with her back to me, erect and motionless.

Did I see, or could I only sense, her trembling? I reached a hand and gently pulled a distraught lock of hair from her shoulder. “It's okay,” I lied, quietly, stroking her hair and lying. “It's going to be okay.”

Then she turned, and the face that greeted me was in no need of consolation. With a forcible mobilization, she'd fought her way back to composure. I watched her cross the last yard, her defiance cresting in fear before settling back into the gaze. Her nostrils still flared with the exertion, but her voice was steady and empty. “Resume next time?” she asked me. It was not a question. In a flash her shape had shifted from wounded to hostile to impervious, and it was the last, the calm at the tail end of the storm, that chilled me. There was resolve in it, I just couldn't tell for what.

B
Y THE TIME OF
our resumption, two days later, her equipoise was immaculately repaired, its luster restored as miraculously as the woodwork in the oval room. All I could know, as I searched for a relic of the crisis, was that harm had sunk into oblivion, and the waters closed above it. We did our usual, amid the ordinary, no mention made.

“She's in trouble,” Corie informed me as soon as I stepped inside the door, with such a hustling in her voice that I took it we might yet effect a rescue, were we quick enough. She held a letter, which she read aloud as we hastened back to the study, skipping the salutation and whatever opening pleasantries and diving straight into the paragraph she'd been on when I rang the bell, translating it straight from the page to my ear, so that this letter remains one of only two, among Alba's many, of which I have no written English version.

 

I've told you I draw the others' envy, but what would they wish me to do? My comfort is for Magdalena's sake, she's the only child on the grounds. I would give up all my privileges, except for the one of being allowed to accompany Alena in hers. I'm not ashamed. The life she enjoys is far from the least she deserves. But haven't I earned a better opinion? In Ventas—

 

“Another prison,” Corie inserted.

 

. . . with the women given
la pepa—

 

“A seed, or, I think, a bullet: sentenced to die,” she said.

 

. . . as I was, didn't I use my status to save them from the firing squad? And not just a few! My status has attracted cruelties too, though I don't pretend to be special. They hung a woman here last week for laying a wreath of flowers on her son's grave. There's a teenager here with burst eardrums from electric shocks to her ears, an eighty-year-old who cannot leave the latrine for they destroyed her gut with liters of castor oil and sawdust, for the sport of it. All in the name of the God they wish to convert me to. I'd rather die! Why am I made so alone? The brand I bear should balance any pain of theirs, the scars—

 

and here Corie broke off to say that she couldn't make out what was written, and she indicated the place where water or some other liquid had dissolved the ink into a Rorschach cloud of blue pastels and dark linings and eaten the text like a fog bank. Her finger shook. I was as disturbed as she was. Far from deriding Corie's connection with the poor, afflicted Alba, I increasingly shared in it, though on my own terms. Didn't I know how this luckless woman felt! What it was like to be kept from a loved one by war. I admired her nurse's sentiment, between the lines of all her early letters, insisting on procedure and professionalism amid the mayhem. We could have shared a slow drink over that, she and I! Yet in other ways, I couldn't begin to conjure this Alba who, beset by every ravage and hardship, still found a way to love, to bear a child and raise her. In prison! Who could fathom such fortitude? I'd tried to imagine her giving birth in a killing zone, and was shaken by the horror. Little by legible bit, the handwriting worked its way free again.

 

. . . breast & my back, especially, that demon's logo, that five-armed, five-footed devil. How will you delight in me? Only with anger. I don't feel the burns anymore, but I cannot get rid of the face, she was always so in love when she attacked me, luxurious with her time, attentive, lingering over her art, it will take me a lifetime to live down the disgust. I tell you this wrongly, I am being cruel, but really only weak, my dear & I say I don't want to upset you but I do. I need you to hate her too, your help in hating them all.

 

There was an incursion of more fog.

 

. . . or to apologize. Must I tear my dress & say look at this, this catastrophe of what remains of a woman—now tell me to my face you resent my baby's room!