The Same River Twice (3 page)

Walking the length of the courtyard, he paused midway to retrieve two cobblestones from in front of a neighboring studio and replace them in the walkway. The anarchist collective housed there, students and ex-students, sometimes used the stones to prop their front door open on warm days, and it was understood that Max would put them back. He enjoyed the exchange and looked forward with interest to the day when the stones would, in someone’s moment of need, be used as projectiles. In Paris such things always came to pass, sooner or later.

He found the studio unlocked and his assistant, Jacques Bollinger, in the editing room, sitting in front of a computer screen. Hip-hop issued from a boom box at low volume. The air smelled of espresso and hot plastic.

“You’ll be really glad you came back early,” Jacques said, keeping his eyes on the screen while he worked the mouse. “Everybody and his dog have been asking for you.”

“Let them bark. I’m still in New York.”

“Ouah, ouah!” said Jacques absently. “Bow-wow. Woof.”

Max paused before a bulletin board onto which his protégé had tacked some inspirational images. A sequence of black-and-white stills depicted two monocled gentlemen in turn-of-the-century dress attempting to subdue an apparently hysterical female patient. Beneath the pictures Jacques had stapled two squares of yellow poster board; on one of them, written in block letters, was the word M
ISÈRE
, on the other M
YSTÈRE.
Max valued his
assistant highly and prided himself on having snatched him from the jaws of commercial TV. He was ten years younger, a true child of the image age.

Dragging a red plastic chair over to the editing deck, Max straddled it, facing him. “Now, in plain, low-impact language tell me where we stand.”

Jacques sighed and saved to disk. “Part of it you already know. Our backers are having a crisis of faith, okay? But with more emotion than usual. They want to see a revised script.”

“Fine, we’ll give them one. It’s not as if we’re planning to use it.”

“I think they’ve started to realize that, Max.”

“Fuck them. We’ll handle it just like we did with
White Room/Black Room.”

A short silence followed while they both reviewed the somewhat unorthodox means by which Max had kept the backers of his last film from withdrawing their support at a crucial moment. The truth had been bent quite far, and possibly the law as well, but in the end the film got made. It had been well received critically and even earned a small profit. For the most part, Max’s films tended to fall into the category of
succès d’estime
.

“Hopefully it won’t come to that,” Jacques said soberly.

“We’ll give them a revised script by next week,” Max assured him. “What else?”

His assistant shrugged and blew air from his cheeks in a pantomime of disavowal. “Isabelle is very upset. She says she won’t work in natural light—it’s too anonymous and unpredictable. Either you let her bring in her own lighting stylist for her scenes or it’s finished. She won’t do the part, end of discussion.”

“Think she’s serious?”

“One has to assume it, yes. She’s Isabelle.”

Max sprang to his feet and began pacing the room. “Actors—more trouble than they’re worth. Half the time you’d do better just picking out someone on the street.”

“Before you pursue that thought, Max, let me remind you that without Isabelle our distribution deal is null and void. And our investors—”

“I get it, okay? Christ!” Max kicked the red plastic chair across the room. “How can I work if my principals won’t trust me?”

They listened for awhile to the music: gunfire and police sirens spattered across bass and drum, voices syncopated in rhyme. It was masterfully mixed and suggested a place not unlike the real world, but much clearer.

“You could recast,” Jacques said finally.

“No, I don’t think so.” Max wandered back to the bulletin board and gloomily looked it over. “Maybe this one just wasn’t meant to be.”

He spent the rest of the afternoon upstairs in the screening room,
watching miscellaneous footage he’d shot at various times and places. Some of it he hadn’t seen in years: a foundering sailboat that he had planned to use in a memory sequence, twelve minutes of Odile strolling through a pear orchard, two old Marseillais staging a knife fight that had somehow turned into the real thing. Even unedited, these snippets might, to the discerning eye, be recognizable as his own. Any one of them held enough visual force to provide the kernel for a full-length film, yet viewing them left him strangely restive. They no longer offered what he needed.

At dusk he closed up shop and walked back across the courtyard. Rachel had decamped, and there was no sign of Odile. He unpacked and showered. When at last he checked the answering machine, he found fourteen new messages waiting, the earliest of them delivered nearly a week ago, none of them from Odile.

After dining alone on asparagus and broiled chicken, he poured himself a Calvados and took it into the living room. He had met Odile six years ago in New York, some months after his divorce. At the time, his ambitions for the films he intended to make absorbed him completely, and, though he hadn’t realized it, he was in retreat from the world. The only people he saw were those he needed in order to work—his actors, crew, producers, backers. When not with them, he looked at film. Sometimes, when he couldn’t sleep, he took long walks through the half-night of Manhattan.

Late one such evening, as the downtown clubs were starting to disgorge their patrons, Max heard the quickened staccato of a woman’s high heels coming up behind him in the street. A female voice, lightly accented, seemed to greet him delightedly with a name not his own. Before he could turn around to correct the error, the speaker caught up with him and slipped an arm through his. “Please,” she said, “there is a man following me. I will walk with you.”

Without looking back, Max took her to a nearby bar and bought her a drink. The night was warm, they sat outside. After they’d chatted for fifteen or twenty minutes, just as Max was deciding that there had been no man, no pursuer, the woman leaned forward and said, “I’m sorry about this, okay? But that man coming toward us is the one who followed me. He is a very bad person. You will have to hit him.” And an altercation had in fact ensued, though the man was quite drunk and the violence mostly pro forma. Afterward, once he staggered off into the night, the woman wept a little. Max used a napkin dipped in ice water to clean up and ordered another round of drinks. When it arrived, Odile lit a cigarette and introduced herself. She was twenty-eight. So from this encounter, of which they
did not speak again, Max and Odile had fallen by degrees into a relationship. Trust had preceded intimacy, it had preceded knowing anything at all about each other, yet neither of them wished to question that trust, preferring to treat it more like an appointment than an accident. Instead they had slowly built upon it, revealing themselves bit by bit over the course of that spring and summer.

A few hurried footsteps, a rejected lover, the instinct to protect: in that first night lay the seeds of all that was to follow. Max and Odile married a year later, and a year after that they moved to Paris. He had never felt especially at home in his native land, and she, from the first, had intended to return eventually to France. It seemed to him now, sitting by the window, looking out at the dark, that they had made the right decisions.

Around ten thirty he got up and poured another Calvados. After reviewing his options, he decided to call Odile’s father, Sebastien, whose house in Brittany had long been her retreat of first resort. The line was busy. Max relaxed. Since Sebastien spent much of his time away on business and famously hated the phone, it was almost certainly Odile tying up the other end.

Taking his drink with him, Max retired to the bedroom and lay down without undressing. The problem, as he saw it, was this: that while he had, at forty-two, accomplished much of what he’d set out to do, had made the films he wanted to make and done so mostly on his own terms, he lately had begun looking for something more, from both himself and the world. His dissatisfaction wasn’t with film, whose capacities he had never doubted, nor even with the subsidiary pursuits, demeaning and distasteful though they were, that filmmaking inevitably entailed—the endless whoring after money, the petty despotism and psychologizing, the deceptions large and small. What disquieted him, rather, was the suspicion, shading more and more toward certainty, that he had come unexpectedly to the end of something—a part of his life, a habit of thinking, he didn’t know.

Five feature films in theatrical release on both sides of the Atlantic; seven shorter ones screened at festivals, universities, and museum programs; videos, a handful of them aired on European TV. Considering them together, half a lifetime’s work, Max felt a mix of pride, consternation, melancholy, and the beginnings of detachment.

His work to date, it seemed to him, cohered to a degree that ought to be apparent to the attentive viewer. He had tried to make light yield up a few human secrets before darkness snatched them back again, and the visible world, in his films, danced deceitfully close to sense.

But just a step beyond coherence completion lay, and he knew better than to hold on to what was finished; he’d already let it go. The intuitions he’d had about the world, intuitions he’d spent his youth putting to the test, had brought him this far and no farther. He hadn’t foreseen their exhaustion, he hadn’t made provisions. So now, having reached the horizon of his ambitions and longing for something more, he found himself separated from past achievements, lacking momentum and even clear direction. He was adrift in the world, floating with the tide, at the mercy of the passing breeze.

All this he would have to address. Opportunity would present itself, and he would have to be ready. Yet for the first time in a long while he was unsure of his resources, uncertain even of what resources he might be asked to draw upon. It was like starting over, and he began to feel he’d put himself at risk. He had never worried about his age before. He recognized the warning signal. And though the feeling that now flickered over him, insinuating and perverse, seemed only distantly familiar, he knew quite well what it must be.

Max lay a little longer with the feeling, then undressed and took a tranquilizer and drank a beer and waited, stretched out in the dark again, for sleep to smear his thoughts away.

THE AMERICAN NAMED Turner lived in an airy fourth-floor apartment in the quartier Bastille, and when Odile arrived the next morning with the suitcases she found him in the hall, very close to losing his temper. Two Corsicans, sweaty and unshaven, were maneuvering a large boulle-work cabinet through his doorway, banging it against the jamb at every opportunity and showering it with cigarette ash. Finally, when they succeeded in wrestling the intricately inlaid piece out to the elevator, Turner sighed and looked round to discover Odile and her bags.

“You are who, please?” he said in brisk French.

“The other Moscow courier. You talked before with my partner.”

“Ah.” He eyed the suitcases appraisingly. “Yes, of course. Come in.”

His living room was high ceilinged and sunny, painted linen white and furnished sparely with objects from other times and places: the marble buttocks of a Greek
kouros
, a leather stool from Africa, a Régence chair set against a Japanese screen, a Cibachrome image of brightly colored toothbrushes tumbled together. Odile took a slow circuit of the room, leaving Turner to bring in the bags.

“Everything go all right?” he said over his shoulder.

But his tone wasn’t interrogative; he didn’t even seem to be addressing her, and she ignored the question. Instead she said, “The train was filthy. I’d like to use your bathroom, please.”

“Down the hall and to the left,” he told her.

As she went, she heard him unzip the first of the suitcases.

The trip’s last leg, Warsaw to Paris via Prague, had left her wary and on edge. Although she had cleared Belorussian customs as promised, without anyone so much as mentioning baggage inspection, she afterward could find no trace at all of Thierry Colin. He had, as far as she could tell, simply disappeared. She looked for him everywhere, even venturing, as their train’s departure grew imminent, to ask a security officer for directions to the station’s lockup. But the man spoke only Russian, and in the end she had had no choice but to leave Thierry to his own devices.

Inspecting her image in the mirror, Odile now began to feel the strangeness of her situation. The events of the past week, which she’d half imagined casually recounting for Max over dinner, were already receding, breaking up, and she felt as if she were emerging from a fever dream to which she’d momentarily surrendered. Thierry’s disappearance, whether scripted or not, continued to alarm her, but now her concern carried an element of resentment.
I can’t involve myself in this
, she thought.

She removed her sweater and blouse, washed her face, neck, and arms, then dried herself with a guest towel and tossed it into the hamper. Fresh lipstick, a little perfume. She’d never had to work much on her looks. After surveying herself in the mirror, she put her blouse and sweater back on, flushed the toilet, and returned to complete her business.

“There are how many all told?” Turner asked, still in French. He had opened all the suitcases, and three or four of the banners lay spread out on the floor.

“Thirty in all. The most expensive was three thousand, and the cheapest was four hundred something, I think. You said not to bargain.”

“So I did.” He circled the flags, lingering over one from whose crimson field Brezhnev glowered, the famous eyebrows rendered in astrakhan. “Extraordinary. Better than I could have hoped.”

She sniffed. “What will you do with them now?”

Catching her tone, he looked up and for the first time seemed fully aware of her presence.

Turner was a man of medium build, erect in carriage but also agile, his movements light and understated. He had a slightly elongated face, black hair cropped close, and large rawboned hands that were strikingly at odds with the rest of him. Odile guessed he was about fifty.