FOR AN INSTANT after he fell and just prior to his loss of consciousness he had seen something extraordinary and comforting. The world is full of stories and reports about the brief impressions that flash before the eyes of the dying and those who have come close to death. It’s easy to say that these are nothing more than the creations of minds under extreme stress, dreams and desires coming forth in an instant as images of a life’s hopes and loves – no longer held in check – break their ways to the surface. But is it possible to create a new color, in new light?
Jules saw a horizon of three hundred and sixty degrees. Dark gray clouds circled like a low wall. But it gave way to a glow above it in a color that did not exist on earth. It was simultaneously all but none of the known colors of white, beige, and platinum. It had the texture of mother-of-pearl or alabaster, but no veins, imperfections, or spectra of interference. It glowed as if the source of illumination were behind it, and pulsed almost imperceptibly. Its light immediately banished all fear and pain, washed away all regret. As it seemed to exist independently of time, and though he saw it for only a second or two, he felt as if he had been bathed in its light for eternity.
When he awakened in the ICU at La Pitié-Salpêtrière he felt disappointment at having once again re-entered the world. No one else was in the room, only the beeping machines, illuminated numbers, and dancing lights that these days keep watch over the sick and the dying. How easy it would have been to fall back into the gentle off-white glow. He tried to summon it by closing his eyes, but he couldn’t. He’d been thrown back, and would have to see it through. Coming awake, he assessed what was left to him and prepared for the useless tests, questions, and examinations that he was sure would follow. Having had them in New York he knew more or less where he stood.
AFTER NEUROLOGICAL WORKUPS, consultations, and visits from Cathérine and David, he discovered to his great relief many hours of happiness and contentment in La Pitié-Salpêtrière, a place he had hated but now loved, because it was the gate to the road upon which he would follow Jacqueline. Even if he would never find her, following was enough.
Things leveled off, the doctors were done with him, and he would be going home the next day. He didn’t know how he was able to adjust happily, but he had gotten used to the food and the routine, and even watched a movie on television. It was about a dog who, to find a female dog he had seen in a crate on a train, crossed the Australian continent to ask for her paw. Jules liked it. He loved dogs. The only reason he hadn’t gotten a dog was that he knew that the central component of a dog’s emotions is loyalty, and he didn’t want to break its heart when he died. But even dogless he looked forward to going out once again into Paris at the end of April.
Lying quietly propped up in his bed, he heard the well practiced knock of nurses and doctors about to enter a patient’s room. What did they imagine? That he would be with a tart? In fact, imprisoned in the hospital, all he could think about was sex. He tried not to include Élodi but he did, often, imagining every part of her body and how he would be lost in his love of it. Now he realized that Dante had been playing a double game when he created the eternal kiss of Paolo and Francesca, because when Jules thought of touching, holding, and kissing Élodi, he wanted it to last forever, and in the way he perceived this it would not have been punishment but paradise.
After the knock, a nurse half-entered the room, her right hand holding the door. “You have a visitor,” she said.
His obsession having tricked him that it was Élodi, he started with pleasure and fear. “Send her in.”
The nurse was puzzled at first, then said, “A man, I assure you. A Monsieur Marteau. As big as an ox. It’s okay?” She saw Jules’ disappointment.
“Okay.”
Armand Marteau ducked slightly as he came through the doorway, although he didn’t have to.
“How did you know I was here?” Jules asked.
“You were responsible enough to carry the card I gave you. Still, it wasn’t so easy to find you. This is a big place. Neuropathologie, Bâtiment Paul Castaigne, Secteur Vincent Auriol, Hôpital Universitaire La Pitié-Salpêtrière, quarante-sept à quatre-vingt-dix e trois Boulevard de l’Hôpital, Treizième Arrondissement, sept cinq zero un trois, Paris. Geo graphical coordinates to the second would have been a fifth as long. But I found you.”
“Why would they, without my permission, contact you?”
“It says so on the card. It says ‘death or disability,’ and you’re disabled.”
“I am not disabled.”
“Medically and legally, you are. Your diagnosis ….”
“How do you know my diagnosis?”
“Don’t forget, you signed waivers. Full transparency, and with a basilar aneurysm that is both on the edge and inoperable, you are technically and legally fully disabled.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It means that your disability benefits started as soon as we received official notification, and that you cannot any longer work. It means you must resign your post and refrain from any activity related to either ongoing or future compensation, or even without compensation, from any activity related to your previous career or careers.”
“I can’t teach?”
“No.”
“Not even privately, without compensation?”
“Perhaps you don’t remember, but we’ve been over this before.”
“I can’t write music, without compensation, for my own pleasure?”
“No. If you write it down or record it, it has the potential of being sold.”
“May I play the cello?” Jules asked, sarcastically.
“Yes, you can, as long as it is unrelated to compensation, performance, or teaching.”
“They might not,” Armand said patiently, “but if they do, the policy would be voided and you’d be sued for the costs of its implementation.”
“What if I give up the policy, or don’t take the disability payments? Can I refuse them?”
“You can give up the policy after two years if you’ve paid the premiums in full. If you refuse the disability payments, the policy is voided, with the consequences I described. Given your economic status, you have many options. For some people, the conditions might be a kind of trap, but if money is of little consequence you can more or less do what you wish. And how did you end up here? I would have thought you’d gone private immediately. Switzerland. England. The U.S.”
“That’s not important. What about you?” Jules asked.
“Me?”
“How would you fare with the various options that you relate?”
“Since you bought the policy, they’ve directed me to much more than my share of high-value business. They think I’m magic. I’ve purchased new equipment for our farm in Normandy, paid off its debts, and reacquired the land we had to sell to meet previous obligations. I’m going to go back there. You saved me. If there’s anything I can do ….”
“I’m happy that it’s been good for you.”
“I want things to work out, and I don’t want you in trouble,” Armand said. He moved closer so he could whisper. “Everything would be fine except for the fact that when you were brought to the emergency room, and were in and out of consciousness ….” Armand looked around to make sure that no one was there, “you diagnosed yourself. Correctly.”
“I did?”
“You did. You said, ‘inoperable basilar aneurysm.’ It took them an MRI, a radiologist, and two neurosurgeons to come to the same conclusion. This was noted in their report, the supposition being that you had received a previous diagnosis. When we got the report, all ears pointed up. Our chief has referred it along.”
“To whom?”
“Merde!” Armand said.
“What?”
“‘He’?”
“You will be scrutinized.”
“On everything?”
“Probably just the medical, although they can open up the whole case. I wanted to let you know,” he whispered. “That’s why I came.” Armand turned away, then back again, still whispering, and with urgency. “You’ll be getting a visit from our investigator. Terrible!”
“What do you mean, ‘terrible’?”
“His name fits him to a T. He hates everyone.”
The last thing Jules needed was a dogged investigator. “What’s his name, then?”
“Damien Nerval.”
“I guess it sounds satanic.”
“A little, yes. He likes to fight. We used to call him Flagellons, until someone did and he hit him with a stick.”
THEY WANTED TO bring him out in a wheelchair, the standard procedure, but he jumped up and ran down the hall, with the nurse calling after him in panic. What would they do, arrest him? For walking? Running? You are forbidden to run, because you’re not supposed to be able to walk. If he actually needed a wheelchair he would sit in one, but as long as he didn’t need one, he wouldn’t. In so many ways already outside the law, he didn’t care about rules.
Just before exiting the hospital he saw a young doctor in surgical scrubs, a stethoscope draped around his neck. “Excuse me,” Jules said. “The way the stethoscope hangs, it looks like mink heads.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“When I was a boy, women went around in furs with the heads attached and hanging from their shoulders. Minks, nutrias, baby foxes. They – the minks, nutrias, and baby foxes, although maybe some of the women, too – had whiskers and glass eyes. Sometimes they’d be three or four in a bunch, even five. That was only seventy years ago. You see how things change? But don’t get on your high horse. Now they go around with bare breasts, like the women of the Germanic tribes at the time of Caesar, or Cleopatra’s bath attendants, at least in Italian movies. ‘Oh, Hercules! Cleopatra enters the bath!’”
The young doctor was struck dumb.
“You don’t believe me about the minks, I can tell. Look it up. ‘Google’ it.”
“Okay.”
“But first, where can I buy medical books?”
“Where can you buy medical books?”
“I asked you.”
“For laypersons or physicians?”
“Physicians. I know how to read. I have an education. I know Latin and Greek. I once took chemistry, organic chemistry, even histology. But that’s immaterial. Where do you buy these books?”
“Try the Librairie Vigot Maloine. They have something like a hundred and thirty thousand books on medicine, thirty thousand in the store. They have everything.”
“Where is it?”
“On the Rue de l’École de Médecine, right off Saint-Germain, near Métro stop Odéon.”
Jules took out a ten-Euro note and pressed it into the young doctor’s hand. “I don’t … that’s not necessary,” the young man said.
“Yes it is,” Jules said. “Lunch.”
“You really don’t have to do that.”
“Why not? You just saved me ten-million Euros.”
The bookstore was bright and colorful. “I need a summary,” Jules told the clerk – a devastatingly attractive, thin, dark-haired girl wearing glasses, “a handbook that will cover all the diseases and conditions, not just internal medicine, or oncology, etcetera, but something comprehensive. More or less an outline of the whole thing, not for laymen.”
“What you need then,” she said, is Le Manuel Merck, Fifth French Edition, more than four thousand pages. It’s just what you want.”
“The cost?”
“Ninety-nine Euros.”
“That seems like a bargain,” Jules said, “for every disease in the world.”
He couldn’t resist looking into the book, so at the end of the alley he sat down on the steps near a statue of Vulpian, a great nineteenth-century French physician, the spitting image of Robert E. Lee. Jules, who had never heard of Vulpian, felt painfully ignorant.
AT HOME, THE QUIET and stillness were oppressive. He wanted to write a symphony, to sleep with Élodi, to be with Jacqueline. He so much wanted to live, and he so much wanted to die, but the conflict would resolve itself, because, without fail, he would do both.
The symphony, a full, over-spilling cadenza on the theme of the Bach Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren, had to be written, as a homage and in the face of the barbarism that neither for the first time nor the last assaulted the West. It had to be written, with need of neither name, nor credit, nor claim, to complete a song that was started in Reims at the Liberation. Jules had needed his entire life, event after event, test after test, failure after failure, finally to understand that he had been meant to do this from the time his father had played the last note, and that, if he did, somehow, without explanation, beyond reason, there would be enough justice and love in his life so that he could finally let go.
He could allow neither the necessity of obtaining the money for Cathérine and Luc to block the writing of the piece, nor the writing of the piece to block the necessity of obtaining the money. And he would be perfectly happy to write it not for audiences, the world, or posterity, but only and simply for Élodi. He was unsure that he could compose something worthy and vital enough to bear the weight intended to appeal to a beautiful young woman with most of her life ahead of her. And given Damien Nerval, if indeed that was his real name, it would have to be physically untraceable to Jules himself.
On the lowest level of the bookshelf was a neatly stacked half-meter pile of paper: odd groupings of bond, graph paper, letterhead, and musical notation pads. It had accumulated since the Lacours had moved to Saint-Germain-en-Laye. And near the bottom of the stack, wrapped in yellowed, partially disintegrating cellophane, were two hundred pages of music paper he had bought in the sixties. He pulled it out. It was slightly jaundiced but not disintegrating. He put it on the desk, from which he pulled the wide, shallow, center drawer. Several bottles of ink had been sitting there since he had stopped using fountain pens long before. He took out a bottle of navy blue, dated 1946, to see if it had dried. It hadn’t. Although almost seventy years old, it was perfectly liquid.
He opened the leather box that was the sarcophagus of his Mont Blancs, seized what once was his favorite, a type from before the war and before he was born, and found that the point was encrusted with the ancient residue of the same ink that had survived in its heavy Mont Blanc glass bottle. At the hot water tap after ten minutes of filling and emptying the reservoir and wiping the nib with paper towels, Jules had given himself the means to find shelter many years back in time, there to fulfill a task that when he was young he had felt but could not identify. Paper, ink, and pen had been waiting. They knew nothing of what had happened in the years between.
SOMEONE WHO ALWAYS ate alone in restaurants, preferred rabbit in beer, dressed in shiny black silk, was as bony and tall as a chain-link fence, and took stairs with aggressive rapidity preceded by the stiff-legged hop that midgets have when they begin to ascend a ramp, would, perhaps not surprisingly, be named Damien Nerval. Who could tell if he had become the man he was because his name was Damien Nerval, or, because of the man he was, he had changed his name to Damien Nerval from something like “Mouton de Bonheur”. But, for whatever reason, he was the man he was: hostile, intimidating, hateful, tortured, and yet obsequious – his studied way of putting prey off guard. He was able to exist because most people want to avoid confrontation, and he always gave them a prescribed way to do so – a narrow exit they could take only if they left behind exactly what he had come to obtain. But he had never encountered someone quite as damaged and devoted as Jules Lacour.
Jules Lacour, whom Nerval assumed had neither much testosterone, time, nor muscle tone left. A music teacher. A hospital patient, barely alive, a man who collapses on the RER. He would be quick work. Nerval, at forty-five, the sweet spot between strength and experience, was backed by the great, indefatigable, trillion-dollar machine of Acorn, a dispositif with neither soul nor conscience but rather a thousand lawyers and a good many laws that over the years it had cooked up in legislatures all over the world. Jules Lacour could not make a credible stand against such combined powers. And yet professionals take nothing for granted, and Nerval was nothing if not professional.
Jules had thirty years of experience beyond Nerval’s, and much else, not least the spirit of the survivor who believes his duty is to die. He had lived his life in an alternate moral dimension: that is, where day in and day out love and loyalty forge the soul into a steel capable of resistance unto annihilation. More than a decade before Nerval’s birth, Jules had been, summer and winter, a soldier in the mountains of North Africa. He had been immune to the terror of death since the age of four. In his child and the life of his grandchild he had a devotion that drove him on. Since infancy, he had been fighting with God in an argument that surpassed the demands of prayer or interrogation. And though he loved much, he feared little, and had always met superior power, its arrogance, and its self-enjoyment, with a direct challenge and a rising within that fed upon and strengthened itself.
In the days before Nerval showed up, Jules studied medicine. It wasn’t hard, as the way he planned the encounter meant that he would decide how it would proceed, not Nerval, who would have no inkling of the advance preparation. So when Claude nervously announced Nerval, Jules was pleased even if it meant another twenty Euros gone.
Nerval was wiry, dark, and sharp-featured, with sparkling eyes and a half-jack-o’-lantern, bent mouth. The muscles of his face tensed when he met Jules, in an expression that said, ‘I’m looking through and into you, I accuse you, and won’t let go.’ This was intensified by a tic that, although neither Parkinson’s disease nor any other malady, involved the near-continual short oscillations, like the action of a fishing lure, of his head upon his neck. Left, right. Right, left. Ad infinitum. He impolitely refused the offer of something to eat or drink, instead sitting down opposite Jules in Shymanski’s study and, without the normal human curiosity that might have caused him to note or appreciate his surroundings, getting right to business.
He loved to catch people. Some hunters hunt for food and regret that they must kill. Others enjoy and take pride in it, the ones who become elated after a day in the uplands in which they’ve left two thousand birds dead on the ground. Nerval believed that he was doing justice as long as he followed the rules, and he gave not a moment’s thought to the fate or motives of perpetrators of fraud against the company. No one could fault him for doing his duty according to the law, but as he did so he never tempered his view of what he did by taking into account that Acorn itself was a perpetrator of fraud – in bribing legislators and bureaucrats to allow premiums far in excess of covering costs and reasonable profits; in fighting savagely to deny claims, especially to anyone with neither much education nor a lawyer; in greasing judges; in accomplishing illegal trades and rigging markets with the vast capital it controlled; in false accounting; paying off auditors; and stiffing independent contractors; not to mention false advertising, impenetrable contracts, monopolistic control of certain sectors, and billing statements as easy to comprehend as hieroglyphics. In short, Nerval was so heavily un-nuanced he would have made a happy executioner.
He opened Jules’ file and laid it out on his lap. Reading for a moment, he said, both contemptuously and with the enjoyment of a fisherman who sees a fat trout about to swallow the hook, “We know exactly what you’re up to.”
Absolutely still, without a blink or a twitch, as if he were made of stone, Jules waited and waited and waited, unnerving Nerval. “Who’s we?” he then asked quietly.
“Acorn,” Nerval answered. “Our agents, officers, and investigators – like a sock around the ball of the world.”
“Oh,” said Jules, amazed at the metaphor – it was too strange to be just a simile – “I see.”
“What do you see?” Nerval pressed.
“What do you think I see?”
“I think perhaps you see, or you should see, that we know what you’re up to.”
“You tell me.”
“No,” Jules said firmly. “You brought it up. You tell me.”
“I don’t have to tell you anything,” Nerval said aggressively.
“Yes you do.”
“Why?”
“Because you came out of the blue. You have to initiate. All I have to do is sit here.”
“What other than guilt would prevent you from answering my question?”
“What question?”
“What you’re up to.”
“You didn’t ask me what I’m up to. You told me that you know. That’s not a question.”
“All right then, what are you up to?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s not true.”
“How do you know?” Jules asked.
“Because we know exactly what you’re doing.” Frustrated, Nerval then assumed the position not of the interrogator but the interrogated. “You have a ten-million-Euro policy. Weeks after the start of coverage, you suffered a cerebral aneurysm. Upon admission to the hospital, semi-conscious, you made an accurate diagnosis – inoperable basilar aneurysm. The attending emergency physician, a radiologist, and two neurosurgeons were able to reach that conclusion only after imaging and consultation. How, exactly, were you able to do that?”
“Did I do that?”
“Yes, you did.”
“That’s remarkable.”
“It is remarkable, in that it has fraud written all over it. Are you a physician?”
“No.”
“Were you trained as such, or in any related field?”
“I’m a cellist, although in University I ranged widely, including in the sciences, and now I read widely, including in the sciences. I resent when scientists assume that because I’m a cellist I know nothing of their subject matter. I read scientific journals and have done so for … let me see … fifty-seven years.”
This unnerved Nerval. “Do you have them?”
“The journals?”
“Yes.”
“I discard them. I found that I never reread magazine articles. I don’t think I’ve ever done so more than once or twice in my life. I used to save them, but then I realized it was unnecessary.”
“Can you prove that you’ve read these?”
Jules let seconds go by, long enough to see satisfaction, a slight reddening, and relaxation in the face of his tormentor, whom Jules allowed to rise a little before slapping him down. “Yes.”
“How?”
“Just enquire of the two or three journals I’ve read over the years as to whether I’ve subscribed. And, to protect myself in an examination of the tax authorities, I’ve kept my financial records, including my checks, which will document my subscriptions.”
“Beginning when?”
“Beginning after I got back from the war in Algeria.”
“You have your records since then?”
“Yes, don’t you?”
“I wasn’t born then. It’s ridiculous.”
“That you weren’t born then?” Jules asked.
“No, that you keep such records.”
“They will prove what you asked to be proved, if you wish to look.”
“You claim that on the basis of having read scientific journals you were able to make an accurate diagnosis, without imagery, that four physicians required a day to make, in consultation, only after test results?”
“I don’t claim that. It was you who did. You may think whatever you wish.”
Nerval now wanted to kill Jules, or at least beat him physically. “You know that we’re carefully checking your medical records. Nothing will pass.”
“And you’ll find nothing you seek. I’m not quite sure what that is.”
“In all of France?”
“In all of France and in all the world.”
“We have a very wide net.”
“How nice to have a wide net.”
“Have you traveled abroad in the last ten years?”
“I was in America in the fall.”
“We can’t look there without a judicial determination, both French and American, which, eventually, we can and will get.”
“You don’t have to do that. I’ll sign any release,” Jules said, pivoting from resistance to overwhelming cooperation. It amazed Nerval.
“You will?”
“Of course, to speed your investigation. What else can I do for you?”
“You can explain how you did what you did.”
“The diagnosis?”
Nerval nodded. Now he was the sheep, and Jules the shearer.
“That’s easy,” said Jules, enjoying, without showing any sign of it, that the medical question distracted Nerval from the trust account Jules had used as a bank reference. He needed only to last until the first of August, baiting Nerval with the bullfighter’s cape of the complex medical situation, which had the irresistible air of a scheme, because that’s what it was.
“Okay. How?”
“Winston Churchill.”
“Winston Churchill?”
“Exact. Like most geniuses, he was indifferent to what didn’t interest him. ‘Good’ students are like good dogs. They can fetch what their teachers want them to fetch. Churchill was not made to fetch. He was, as he once said, ‘Bloody Winston Churchill’.”
“How does that possibly …?”
“It does. The entrance examination for Sandhurst had a geography component. He wasn’t interested in geography and hadn’t prepared. A list of all the countries in the world was given to the candidates, and most spent months studying them as intended. Having neglected to do this, Churchill began the night before. His eye was drawn to New Zealand. Realizing that in five or six hours he couldn’t master the geography of the entire world, he stayed with New Zealand and arrived the next morning an expert on the geography of that country and no other. By the grace of God and for the salvation of England, the West, and France, the sole topic on the exam was … New Zealand.”
“So what you’re saying is that by the grace of God you studied basilar aneurysms?”
“Not exactly, but I do have time to read. I’m pretty old and my body is failing. How long does it take to train in medicine, including preparation for medical school and the professional training afterwards? Ten years, fifteen? One must tackle an enormous body of knowledge. And yet I’m interested in the subject. So, like Churchill, I threw a dart. I chose one topic each from a number of areas – esophageal diverticula, insulinoma, spasmodic torticollis, idiopathic pulmonary hemosclerosis, autosomal recessive Von Wellebrand’s disease, Ehrlichiosis, dystonia, orthostatic hypotension ….”
“Enough!”
“And, for the brain, only one thing – inoperable basilar aneurysms. The point is not that I know a lot, or that I’m accurate. I know just a little. If it had been something entirely different I still would have said inoperable basilar aneurysm, I would have been wrong, and you would not be sitting in that chair.”
“Nonetheless, we’ve not finished with you,” Nerval told him.
Jules sat back and said, “Ah! But you are for today.”
This did not sit well with his guest, but, then again, seldom did anything.
JULES RETURNED TO his own quarters where for half an hour he stared across the terrace and over the Seine toward Paris. Claude had moved the potted trees and bushes from the greenhouse back to their warm-weather stations, and there they stood guard in a light drizzle. It felt like a summer morning when the day should be bright and hot but is gray and warm, and the lights in stores are gleaming through the rain as if on a winter evening. He loved such summer mornings, with the sound of water dripping peacefully from lush foliage, and the special noise, a swoosh, that cars and buses make as they push across wet pavement.
He picked up the telephone, conscious that he would be calling Élodi on his landline and she would answer, like those of her generation, wherever she was, on her cell. With a landline, holding the phone to your ear as you dialed, you would not have to race to get it before someone hung up. You didn’t have to position the instrument so it faced you, like the mirror mirror on the wall. And the buttons on a landline – no hope anymore of a dial – were a lot bigger, although thanks to his profession Jules had no lack of manual dexterity. Landlines did not double as television sets, pedometers, encyclopedias, atlases, travel agents, or teletype machines, not to mention several types of cameras, alarm clocks, blood pressure monitors, and a thousand other things that he had spent his life quite happily not carrying in his pocket. But, still, as Élodi’s phone rang, he felt old and wrong.
When she answered, she had read on the screen that it was he. “Where are you?” he asked.
There was a silence. It sounded as if he were checking up on her. “Why do you ask?” she asked in return.
“I always ask when I call people on the cell phone. They could be on a boat in the Mediterranean, riding a horse in Australia, or at Buckingham Palace. That’s the best thing about cell phones, I think.”
“I was in a bakery on the Rue des Rosiers, and now I’m just about to sit down in the Place des Vosges.” Somehow, he took comfort from the fact that she had been in the Jewish Quarter. “I live on the Boulevard Bourdon.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yes, I was lucky. Maid’s quarters, with a separate entrance.” She sat down, happy that he was, in a sense, with her, but wishing that he were actually beside her.
“Isn’t it raining?” he asked.
“It was, but it’s fine now. The sun is out.”
“Maid’s quarters.”
“One tiny room in which I can, and have, stretched out to touch two opposing walls at the same time – with the tips of my fingers and my toes. But it has a minute kitchen, a bathroom, and the best part is the view, and that I can see water, which is wonderfully calming. The house is almost at the north end of the canal, not far from the Place de la Bastille. I’m nine storeys up and almost level with the top of the column. The gilded statue on top blazes like a chemical fire when it’s struck by the sun. My father told me that when old British warships left port some of the sailors would stand on the knob at the top of the fifty-meter masts, with no support. Every time I see the statue, I think of that.
“And he would be happy, because although he would think Paris is now very dangerous, I live just up the street from the Hôtel de Police, Quatriême Arrondissement. Almost every parking space on this block is taken up by a police car, a dozen or more at a time.”
She didn’t tell Jules that the young police officers would flirt with her, and that though she found them attractive in their smart uniforms she would blush and hurry on.
“My two dormer windows are very small. From the street they look like tank periscopes. The canal is always full of yachts and barges, many of them Dutch. On the east side there’s a park with lawns and trees, and one luxuriant willow close to the water. In summer, the Place des Vosges is my garden.
“Chambres des bonnes are all over Paris, and no one knows what to do with them. The rich don’t want strangers in their buildings, and regulations and architecture often prevent conversions. The wonderful part is that when you get one it’s usually on the top floor. Under the roof it’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter, but I can see a hundred square kilometers and a huge sky. I was lucky. The people from whom I rent are classical music patrons. They like it when they hear the cello from upstairs.”
What she described, and the way she described it – in her language, in her voice – was so lovely and seductive that he despaired that he was not half a century or even just thirty years younger. He would have liked to have spent another lifetime with her, starting out in a room so small he could touch opposing walls, with a view of the water, and the Place des Vosges as their garden. But the energy, anonymity, and hope of youth were not his to have again.
“Do you still want to resume the lessons,” he asked.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“At your convenience.”
“Tomorrow.”
“What time?”
“Late in the afternoon? Around four? I have ballet until two. I started when I was little. There’s no future in it for me, but I’ve kept it up because I like it and it keeps me fit.”
“Don’t bring your instrument.”
“No? Why not?”
“We’ll use the one here.”