“Madeleine, wake up,” Frances whispered.
“What?”
“Wake up.”
Madeleine opened her eyes. It was after four o’clock in the morning and Frances was richly, vividly green. She explained that she wanted to speak with Franklin again. Madeleine was feeling ill from the gin and asked if they could contact him in the morning, but Frances was insistent, and she pulled Madeleine up and led her to the bathroom. She had a candle prepared, the lights already dimmed. Madeleine splashed water on her face. Sitting cross-legged on the tile countertop, she communicated with the candle flame, which presently began its flickering.
“Hello, what?” said Franklin.
“Hello, Frank,” said Frances. “I’m sorry to bother you again. Were you sleeping?”
“No.”
“What were you doing?”
“Just sitting here, under this bench.”
“I see. Well, I was just thinking of you, you know. So I thought I’d give you a ring.”
Franklin said nothing.
“Don’t you want to know what I was thinking about?” asked Frances.
“All right,” Franklin said.
“It’s three things, actually. Number one is: do you remember our first date?”
“I don’t, no.”
“Yes, you do. You took me to Tavern on the Green.”
“I don’t remember, Frances.”
“You do, Frank. You ate your cupcake with a fork and knife. No?”
“No.”
“You surely did do it.” Frances was amused at the memory. “Why did you do that?” she asked. “With the fork and knife, I mean. What were you trying to pass yourself off as?”
“I don’t know, Frances,” he said peevishly. “Who knows?”
Frances took a deep breath. “The second thing I want to talk to you about is that I feel badly about our last conversation, and I wanted you to know I don’t hate you anymore.” When Franklin failed to respond, Frances asked him, “Perhaps you have a reaction to that news, that you’d care to share?”
Franklin said, “It’s late to be telling me this.”
“Late in the night, or late in life?”
“Both, but mainly late in life.”
“I can’t understand that as an attitude,” Frances admitted. “Your wife of long years, who only days earlier wanted to murder you, has experienced a sudden and mysterious shift in feeling for the good. Is that not noteworthy?”
“I guess so, but Frances?”
“Yes?”
“I’m a cat.”
“I know that.”
“I’m a cat living under a bench, and it’s raining, and I’ve got fleas, and, you know, I’m not much concerned about anything else besides the unhappy facts of my horrible—my truly horrible, miserable fucking existence.”
“I see,” said Frances. “Well, whether or not you care to know it, I felt compelled to tell you, and now I’ve done that. Are you ready for the third thing?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve just been talking about Paris with your son’s steady, and something occurred to me, which I wanted to share with you.”
“All right.”
“When I came to Paris for the first time, do you remember what I told you about it? About how it felt to be here?”
“I remember you telling me.”
“Oh, you remember something? How nice that is for you. And me. It’s nice for both of us. Hail, hail.”
Franklin cleared his throat but didn’t speak.
“Well,” Frances said. “I’ve figured out what I was startled by.”
“What’s that?”
“I recognized Paris as the eventual location of my death.”
Franklin paused. “And what does that mean?”
“Just what I said. Something in the sight of this city sent up an alert. Now I understand what startled me was a presentiment of what was to come, do you see? Of what’s coming now.”
“You’re planning on dying soon, is that what you’re telling me?”
Frances said, “We’re both going to be dead quite soon, Frank, yes.”
The sentence hung there. “Frances,” Franklin said. She reached over and blinked the light shut between her forefinger and thumb.
She thanked Madeleine for her assistance and instructed her to go back to sleep. Madeleine returned to her foam pad but Frances remained in the bathroom. She began running a bath, while Madeleine lay on the pad, staring at the ceiling and wondering what she should do. She knew by the fact of her greenness that Frances could not be helped, and yet, she felt an obligation to act in some way. Her head was pounding, and an ill-defined nausea lingered at the edge of her every breath. She stood and returned to the bathroom, knocking softly. The door opened a crack.
“I’m going to wake up Malcolm,” she said.
“Then I’ll lock the door. I only need a moment, you know.”
Madeleine said, “You can’t expect me to sit by like this.”
Frances thought about it, and it seemed she agreed with what Madeleine was saying. “Why don’t you leave?” she said. “I’ll wait until after you go, all right?”
Frances shut the door and Madeleine went back to her pad. She was thinking of something that had happened years before in a park in downtown Los Angeles.
She’d been sitting on a bench eating her lunch when a young man walked past and sat on the bench beside hers. He looked troubled, and she spied on him, looking sideways at his stern profile. There came into his face the green coloring; it would rise and retreat, vanish, then reappear. He sat suddenly upright and the greenness flared, bright and constant, now. He stood and walked from the park and Madeleine watched as he crossed Wilshire, disappearing into the mouth of a beige stucco apartment building. A long moment passed before Madeleine heard the muffled clap of a gunshot from deep within the building. A woman shrieked; Madeleine went away.
Frances turned off the bath. Madeleine packed her bag and left the apartment.