Paris

A YOUNG MAN is dead and maybe we could have stopped it. That’s what I wake up with every morning. Until a month ago I was a completely happy person. Who knows, maybe I’ll be happy again.

Reality expands exponentially. It meets itself coming and going. It is a net, a web; touch one strand and the whole thing quivers. Get caught and you cannot get away. Sticky stuff, reality. Spiders understand this metaphor. It had nothing to do with me. I say this over and over again, like a mantra.

There was no reason why I shouldn’t go to Paris. My young friend, Tannin, was writing a book about me. He needed me to inspire him and give him material. I don’t think he knew he was writing about me. He thought he was writing a book about three girls in Paris living in an apartment and talking all the time about their lovers. Only all three sounded like me, my hysteria, how I make every utterance an oath or a promise. I can’t help it. I was poisoned in the womb. If you don’t buy first causes, don’t read on.

I’m a journalist and a writer of novels. My name is Rhoda Manning and I’m fifty-eight years old and you’d never believe that either. People who believe in fairies don’t age.

So on the fifth of May I climbed into the belly of the whale and crossed the Atlantic Ocean and arrived at Orly about seven in the morning. Tannin met me at the plane. His fifty-eight-year-old muse in a wrinkled white linen suit and two-inch spectator pumps getting bravely off a plane with her hair cut short for the mission. I used to have lovers his age. Now I only want the good part, the youthful energy, the sheer delight. Coming out to Orly at seven in the morning to squire me through customs. The ones I had for lovers might have done that. But none of them spoke flawless Parisian French.

There are many love affairs in the world, more ways to love, Horatio, than you dream of. I had been practicing all my life for this. Having brothers, raising sons, loving young men. And now, in my Senior Citizenship, Tannin had been delivered to me. To love, to understand, to nourish, to adore. He had written me a letter to say he liked a book I wrote. It was a book about a friend who died an early death. I will write about you, I had told the friend. I will not let you die. Do it, he had answered. If you write it from the heart, it will be good. I had and it was and I was as proud of it as anything I had ever written.

Also, it gave Tannin to me. The book had come to him from the Book-of-the-Month Club and he forgot to send it back. So he read it and then he wrote to me and told me he wanted to be a writer. I throw such letters away every day. This one was different. It had a lilt, a ring, it made me laugh. He asked my advice about writing schools and I told him to come up here. That Randolph was a genius and would not harm him. Randolph is the director of the writing program.

So Tannin came to Fayetteville and became my friend and the next thing I knew I was flying to Paris to “hang out with him” while he wrote his book.

He called me frantically two days before I left to say he had a visitor, a young man who had gone to Sewanee with him. “He’s driving me crazy,” he said. “He’s in a terrible mood. He hates everything in Paris. I took him to hear Ravel at the Sorbonne. He hated Ravel. I hope he’ll be gone by the time you get here, but he might not be. I’m really sorry. He just showed up. I invited him a year ago. I never dreamed he’d come.”

“Maybe he’s disoriented. That happened to me once, in Heidelberg. I just got completely disoriented. I had to go home.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with him. He quit his job a month ago. Maybe that’s it. He was working for his dad in Nashville.”

“Don’t worry about it. Nothing will stop us from having fun in Paris. Did you get tickets to the ballet?”

“Yes. They’re supposed to be good seats. They’d better be.”

“My cousin plays in the orchestra. We’ll meet her after the performance. I haven’t seen her since she was in high school.”

“Good. That’s fine. We’ll do anything you want to do. I’m so glad you’re coming.”

As soon as we collected my bags we went to my hotel and sat in the cafe drinking coffee and talking. We hadn’t seen each other in four weeks but it seemed a year. Our sagas engage us. His are as real to me as mine. “So what’s the friend’s name?” I asked. “And is he better?”

“His name is William and he’s worse. Now he has a cold. He’s asleep in my room. He’s going to the ballet with us tomorrow night.”

“That’s fine. I want to meet him. Don’t worry, Tannin. Nothing is wrong. I’m elated to be here. Look at this weather. This is paradise. My plan is to stay awake all afternoon and take a sleeping pill and crash about six and sleep till dawn. How does that sound to you?”

“Fantastic. Should you be drinking coffee?”

“It won’t matter. I have a Xanax. It will knock me out.” We giggled. We laughed as if that were the funniest thing in the world, as if it were deeply, wildly, madly, hysterically funny.

We left the hotel and walked up the rue de Montalembert to the boulevard St.-Germain and followed it to the Seine. We stood on the bridge and watched people and talked about the swimming pool that had sunk in the river the night before.

“A floating swimming pool that’s been here since the forties. Think what would have happened if it had been in the daytime. If people had been there. I wish I could have seen it sink.”

“So do I. What a phenomenon. A huge floating swimming pool sinking into the Seine. Mon dieu!” We laughed again. It was incredibly, divinely, hilariously funny. No one ever gets that tickled when they are alone. Only two people can know something is that funny.

“In sight of Notre Dame Cathedral. This may be a sign. Listen, I told William I’d meet him for lunch. I never thought you’d want to stay awake. We don’t have to go. I could go by there and tell him I’m not coming.”

“I want to. Come on. I want to go. I really do. Why are you so worried about my meeting William?”

“Because it’s your vacation. You shouldn’t have to baby-sit my friends.”

“I want to meet him.” I took his arm and we walked along the river to the Jardin des Tuileries and across the gardens to the Cafe du Palais Royale, a bright cafe with pots of orange flowers and brilliant paintings on the walls. We found a table and sat down and began to read the menu. A young man came hurrying toward us through the tables. He had curly blond hair and blue eyes and looked enough like Tannin to be his twin. “William Watkins Weckter,” Tannin said. “The fourth or fifth. My old roommate at Sewanee. He’s dying to meet you.”

“I read your books,” he said. “I used to talk about them all the time.”

“Oh, my. Sit down. Are you feeling better? Tannin said you had been sick.”

“It’s nothing. A summer cold. Well, I quit my job last month. I’m out on the street. That should give you a cold, don’t you think?” He laughed and took a handkerchief out of his pocket and stood up and went outside and blew his nose. When he came back in he picked up the conversation and went right on. He didn’t seem depressed to me. Just at loose ends, like half the young people I meet. No children, no responsibilities they can’t leave. They are free, in the deepest and most terrible sense of the word. Cut loose, dismounted, disengaged. Not Tannin though, he’s in love with the muse, the sight of his words upon the page. Artists are the same in any age, always lost and always found.

So here was William with a degree in history and a minor in biology and nothing to do. He had worked for his father in an office supply store in Nashville for a while, now he was wandering around the world. “I better see it while I can,” he said. “When I go back to work I won’t have a vacation for a year.”

“The age of commerce may be over,” I said. “I’ve been thinking of this. It’s time for live theater, beautiful buildings, parks. There must be things for young people to do that will engage them in their brightest minds. It’s this transition that is painful. Find out what you want to do and do it. What do you want to do, William? Do you have any idea?”

“Something worth keeping. Something I could talk about. When I was young I liked to keep records. I wrote down what I did each day.” He looked off into the gardens outside the cafe. We finished our coffee. William insisted on paying for our lunch. Nothing would dissuade him. Then he left us, and Tannin and I walked back to my hotel. There were young people dressed in costumes from the seventeenth century wandering around the Tuileries looking beautiful and mysterious. They weren’t selling anything. We couldn’t figure out why they were there.

“Gratuitous beauty,” Tannin declared. “France. I am happiest when I am here. It’s my mother’s fault. She did this to me.”

“I’m fading,” I answered. “Take me to my bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Tannin delivered me to my hotel and I went upstairs and unpacked and ordered some Evian and drank half a bottle of it with a Xanax and went to sleep with the windows open. I was on the seventh floor of the Hotel Montalembert, where Buckminster Fuller used to stay with his entourage. Outside my window I could see the Eiffel Tower and the streets leading to the river and les Champs Elysees. I slept. Like a lamb in a meadow I slept away the hours until dawn.

I woke in Paris. I stretched out my muscles in the bed. Pulled the beautiful pillows into my arms. Goose down, from some lovely flock of geese somewhere in the land of France. This elegant old culture. I lay in bed and looked around the room. It was black and white. White walls, black painted furniture, a soft design on the chairs. Another bolder print on the bedcover. White linen drapes pulled back from dormer windows. I won’t do a thing I don’t want to do, I decided. I will not hurry. I curled back into a ball and daydreamed for a while, imagining the ballet we would see that evening. The Paris Opera House with its ceiling painted by Chagall. Ballets by Balanchine and Robbins. I had not seen ballet in fourteen months. I was badly overdue for a ballet.

I rose from the bed and walked over to the window and stood leaning out the casement in my white silk nightgown. When I’m at home I sleep in flannel. See what this city does for me. I drank the rest of the Evian and dressed in a black pantsuit and went down to the cafe for petit dejeuner. A waiter brought me the Herald Tribune and I read Russell Baker’s column and drank the best coffee in the world and ate a brioche and raspberries from the Dordogne. I was getting more civilized every minute. I was almost urbane. The city and the day stretched out before me. I thought of Tannin, not ten blocks away in his room overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens. I thought of William, with his upper-respiratory infection and his pretty face. I thought of my young cousin playing her violin at the Paris Opera. I thought of Chagall and the light coming in the glass windows onto my table and the perfect weather and how lucky I was to live in such a world.

I went upstairs and changed into street shoes and left the hotel and walked for an hour, exploring side streets, stopping at a salon to make an appointment for my hair, windowshopping.

When I got back to the hotel there were messages. Tannin was coming to take me to lunch. My cousin was home and would I call her. It made me giddy, to be in a city this beautiful, in cool weather, with young people to talk to, and nothing, not a single thing going wrong, and no longer in boyfriend jail. I was not in love with anyone and I did not want to be. BOND NO MORE, it said on notes I had scattered around my house. I had written it and I meant it. I was free to let the whole world be my lover.

Free at last from the obsessive weight of love affairs. Free from waiting around a hotel room for a husband or a lover to decide what I could or could not do. Free from men turning on television sets.

I combed my hair, put on my two-inch heels, went down to the lobby and Tannin was there, smiling and embracing me, as excited as I was. We left the hotel and walked until we found a sidewalk cafe that we liked and sat in the shade of a plane tree giggling and talking and telling stories and watching everything. There is nothing on earth like friendship. It is God’s love, God’s ambrosia, the one thing we never have to pay for or regret.

“That man is looking at you.” Tannin laughed. “Men have been checking you out all morning.”

“It’s the damnedest thing. I mean, mon dieux, the minute you stop being available, men start wanting you. They can smell it a mile away. It has nothing to do with age or beauty.”

“It’s true. If we think we can’t have it, it becomes interesting to us.”

“You can’t manufacture it. You have to really be out of the game. I am. You can’t imagine how much I do not want to have another affair of any kind.”

“Look at that, Rhoda. Over in the corner.” I glanced at the couple kissing in the corner. A middle-aged man and a woman in a low-cut blouse. They looked like some inferior breed of human, the expression on their faces was completely infantile.

“Do you think they just did it or are they just about to go somewhere and do it?”

“Probably both.” A waiter approached the couple and set a huge glass of ice cream with whipped cream and cherries and chocolate sauce down in front of the woman. The man picked up a spoon and began to feed her. Tannin touched my arm. We shook with laughter. We almost fell off our chairs. We could not contain ourselves. We paid the bill and walked off down the street and found a building to lean against and laughed until we cried.

I slept in the late afternoon and dressed and met Tannin and William in the lobby and we set out for the opera house. “I’ve never seen a ballet,” William said. “Is it okay to admit that?”

“I was older than you before I saw one that was good,” I answered. “This is the World Series you’re going to see. Except for Maurice Béjart and the Ballet of the Twentieth Century. That’s the best to me, the nonpareil.”

Later, after the first ballet, which was the Balanchine, he said, “Don’t the ones in the chorus mind? They never get to be the star?”

“Prima ballerinas,” I told him. “Listen, these are great athletes. They don’t mind someone being the prima ballerina any more than a football team minds having a great running back. They have a wonderful life. They live to dance, to be up there on that stage, with that music, doing this for us. Dancers never grow old. I wish I could have been one.”

“Well,” I grudgingly admitted, later, in the lobby, at intermission, with a glass of wine. “They ruin their feet. They tear up their toes. What they’re doing is unnatural, but that’s why it’s so hard and why the excitement of it never dies.”

We went back to our seats, which were in a box to the left of the stage. Above our heads, the divine ceiling by Chagall. The curtains opened. Two dancers came on stage. Behind them were the flats which had also been painted by Chagall. Entree et pas-de-deux. Magic. Danse desgarçons with tables covered by umbrellas. More magic. Then the danse des filles, with small umbrellas everywhere. It was the dance of the day we had just spent in Paris, with the burden of weight dissolved in color. The human spirit turned loose to fly, transcend itself. This ballet alone would have been worth the trip across the ocean.

I had arranged for us to meet my cousin after the performance. May Chatevin Debardeleben. Her name was almost whispered in my family. She’s in Paris, they would say. She plays the violin for the Paris ballet.

She was just as I remembered her, a blithe young girl with long dusty blond hair and violet eyes. Even as a child she had carried herself with dignity and grace. It had not surprised me when I heard she had flown the coop, escaped the massive tentacles of our family.

We found her in the orchestra pit, holding her violin against her black taffeta dress. I introduced everyone, embraced her, and begged her to come to dinner with us. “All right,” she said. “Let me put this violin away. I won’t bother to change to street clothes, if you don’t mind.” She was so absolutely southern, the same young girl from Abbeville, Louisiana, where her mother played the organ at the Episcopal Church.

While she put the violin in the case I squeezed Tannin’s hand. I was so proud of my lovely young cousin. All this time William had not spoken. Now, when May Chatevin snapped the clasps on the case, he reached out a hand and took it from her. “I played a violin when I was a kid,” he said. “But I had to stop.”

“Oh, why was that?” She was wearing large hornrimmed glasses. She reached up and took them off as she waited for his answer.

“Because it interfered with baseball practice. Then I broke a finger and it was in a cast for a year.”

“That’s terrible.” She moved near him. “That’s the worst thing I ever heard.”

“I used to love the way it fit into the case.”

“You could start again. It’s not too late.”

“You think so?”

“Sure. There are wonderful teachers here. Do you speak French?”

“I won’t be here long.”

“Let’s start walking,” Tannin said. “You can’t solve this on an empty stomach.”

We had dinner at a brasserie along the Seine. The lights from the barges going along the river climbed the trunks of the trees, then filled the crowns, then climbed back down. Afterward, an afterglow. A heavy metaphor for love, if anyone needed one in Paris.

May Chatevin and William were in love before we even got to the brasserie. They had paired up as soon as we left the opera house. They walked behind us, their heads bent toward one another. I had forgotten how fast it happens, had forgotten young men’s bodies, the cold shaking power of desire, had been glad to forget it, as I now had other things to do, being in the universe on this clearer, older plane.

“My guardian angel must have finally made it across the ocean,” William was saying across the table. “Everyone who goes to Sewanee gets a guardian angel. When we go onto the campus we check him at the gates. When we leave we pick him up again. We don’t need him at Sewanee, you see, as it’s the closest place to heaven.” William laughed out loud. He was laughing at everything. And his cold had disappeared. It was the truth, what I told his parents later. He was the happiest young man I’d ever seen. In contrast to Tannin, who is as hysterical as I am. Searching, searching, dreaming, playing out the string. Philip Larkin has a metaphor for this. People sitting on the cliffs waiting for a white-sailed armada of hopes to come in. They arrive, Larkin says, but they never anchor. “Only one ship is seeking us,” the poem ends. “A black-sailed unfamiliar, towing at its back a huge and breathless silence. In its wake, no waters breed or break.”

The four of us became inseparable. We went to the Sorbonne to hear a string quartet play Brahms. We walked in the Tuileries and had lunch at Les Deux Magots. We strolled the boulevard St-Germain and went to Sulka to look at the ties. We walked along the Seine and saw the small blue asters in the flower shops and I told the story of V. K. Ratcliff’s trip to New York City to the wedding of Eula Varner Snopes to the Jewish Communist and how V. K. bought a tie the color of asters and how the Russian woman kissed him on the mouth as she tied it around his neck.

We talked of writing and painting and music. We harvested the beauty of the city and fed it to each other. One day we rented a car and drove to Dieppe to see the coast. On the way home the skies were full of clouds and over a field of young corn we watched three parachuters playing with the wind. We talked of books we had read and artists we admired. We went to the Rodin museum and stood in line for fifty minutes. “Rilke came here every afternoon,” Tannin said. “He adored Rodin. ‘Rodin, c’est lui qui a inspiré le poete,’ Ran Rilke.”

“I want to buy the tickets,” I said. “Tell me what to say?”

“Quatre. S’il vous plaît.”

“Quatre. S’il vous plaît,” I told the lady in the cage and counted out the money as if I were six years old.

The billets were beautiful, reproductions of the statue called Le Bourgeois de Calais, 1895. Musée Rodin, 77 rue de Vareene, Paris.

We had an audience with the brilliant translater, Barbara Bray, and took her to a concert with us at a cathedral. May Chatevin and I had our hair done at Julien et Claude, Haute Coiffure, St-Germain-des-Pres. We stood outside the Louvre and watched the tourists going in. We bought a disposable camera and took photographs of each other by the statues of the continents. We went to Chanel and saw Catherine Deneuve shopping for costumes for a movie. We pretended not to know who she was and looked the other way.

Often, in the afternoons, May Chatevin and William would disappear until suppertime. Tannin had sworn off women until his book was finished. And I had found out a wonderful thing. You do not have to be getting laid to be ecstatic in this city which worships love.

Often while they were gone we went somewhere and wrote in our notebooks. He needed a chateau for a love scene in his book and we found one in the country and went there several times to draw it in our minds.

“William’s sister is calling him twice a day,” Tannin told me. “His family’s furious. They want him to come home.”

“His sister?”

“She’s visiting Rome with her husband. She wants him to come there and go home with them.”

“What does he tell them?”

“He tells them no. He says he’s in love with a girl from the States.”

“What’s going on?” I asked my cousin, when I had her alone one afternoon.

“I’m in love with him. I want him to stay here with me.”

“How could he work? An American can’t get work in Paris.”

“It’s a problem.” She looked right at me. That old fierceness, selfishness, call it what you will. In the last two generations our family has a divorce rate about twice the national-average. The reason is that look. This arrogance we breed or foster, here it was again, in Paris, in this twenty-nine-year-old girl with her perfect ear and talented hands. “I’m writing a symphony. The Saint Louis Symphony is going to perform it when it’s done. I can’t leave now. This city is my muse. I have to stay another year or two.”

“Then what will happen?”

“I don’t know. I want him to stay. He can live with me. He knows that. He can get a visa.”

“What would he do for money?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we have to live today and not think about it.” I had been wrong. She had stopped being southern. She stood beside the window in my room, looking out onto the roofs of Paris. She was where she had meant to go, she was where she meant to be.

I changed my plane reservation. I decided to stay another week. One morning Tannin met me in the hotel cafe for breakfast.

“He’s leaving at noon,” Tannin said. “He’s run out of money and his sister won’t leave him alone. He’s going to Rome and fly home with them in his brother-in-law’s plane. His family has lots of money, but they won’t give it to him.”

“They shouldn’t. That’s good. That’s right.”

“He’s in love with your cousin. That’s our fault, Rhoda. We did that, you and I. He’s really broken up about leaving. Do you think she loves him?”

“She loves her work. She’s writing a symphony. She wrote one last year that was played by the New Orleans Symphony Orchestra. She has an agreement to write one for Saint Louis. She’s going to be a star. Yes, I think she loves him. She wants to keep him here for a pet.”

“He came home early last night. I guess they had a fight.”

“It’s not our fault, Tannin. That’s nuts to think that.”

We left the café. We walked to the Champs Elysees and window-shopped. We went to the Luxembourg Gardens and rode the carousel. We bought beignets with powdered sugar and sat upon a bench and ate them with our fingers.

“I’d better call May Chatevin when I get home,” I said. “She has to play tonight. Maybe we can meet her later and get some supper.”

“It’s not our fault, Rhoda, remember that.”

“I know. It isn’t. By God, it has nothing to do with us. We didn’t do it.”

Neither was it our fault that the Italian Mafia chose that day to load up a car with plastic explosives and drive it into the train station in Firenze just as William got off the train. For what? To turn around and come back to Paris? To buy a package of cigarettes? To call May Chatevin?

I don’t buy group guilt. Or any of that politically correct bullshit. Most of the people in the world are doing the best they can with whatever knowledge they have managed to attain or been fed by whatever myths they were raised under. So, somewhere in the darkness of the underside of existence in the ancient land of Italy, someone, or two or three benighted souls, stuffed a Fiat full of explosives smuggled in from God knows where and with or without a driver ran it into the side of the old section of the Firenze train station where maybe William had just disembarked long enough to buy a sandwich or a drink or a newspaper. He was trying to learn Italian, he had said, one night when we were sitting beside the Seine using all our pidgin languages. Tannin is the only one of us who has mastered anything other than English, although May Chatevin’s French is charming and she gets by.

Tannin and May Chatevin and I were together that night. We left my hotel about six and walked to the Jardin des Plantes to see the menagerie. It was cool that evening and May Chatevin was wearing pale yellow silk pants and a green silk jacket. Her hair was pulled back into a chignon. I thought she looked like her mother that night, as she was sad and trying to hide the sadness. “I couldn’t leave now,” she said a dozen times. “I couldn’t just leave all this and go back home. I think he understood that. Did he say anything to you, Tannin? What did he say?”

“That he is in love with you, of course. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do. Maybe go to work for his brother-in-law. Make some money and come back for you.”

“You could go and visit him,” I put in. “Surely you don’t have to work incessantly.”

“Until I finish the symphony I can’t take a day away from it. I’ve wasted two weeks as it is, but not entirely. I’ve been working in the mornings.” We were walking along the rue Claude Bernard, trying to find our way to the boulevard de Vaugirard, where there was a Brazilian restaurant Tannin knew about.

After dinner we decided to see the late showing of Much Ado About Nothing in English with French subtitles. It was over about eleven-fifteen and the two young people left me at my hotel and Tannin walked May Chatevin home. He is struggling with his novel and takes every opportunity to put off going home to write it, which he does in the middle of the night no matter how much I lecture him on the efficacy of the morning hours.

I went up to my room and turned on the television set for the first time since I’d been in Paris. I turned on CNN and settled back into the pillows with a glass of Evian. It was the first event on the news. The train station in flames, people running with their hands up in the air, firemen spraying the flames with chemicals, demolished automobiles parked outside the station.

I watched the full report. Then I called Tannin. He returned to my hotel and came up to my room and we began to call crazily around three countries trying to find something out.

“Let’s go down there,” I said. “Rent a car.”

“We have to stay here. He might have my address with him if he was hurt. He might call.”

“What about May Chatevin?”

“Wait until morning. If she knew she would have called. What could she do this time of night?”

“It wouldn’t be him. He wouldn’t die. He’s not the type.”

“Anyone can die, Rhoda. Anytime. Anywhere.”

“Thinking he was a failure?”

“He didn’t think that. He just couldn’t decide what to do.”

“We’re overreacting. I shouldn’t have called you. You should be at home doing your work.”

“Do you think he was in it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I.”

Tannin slept on the sofa in my room. We woke up early and dressed and went to May Chatevin’s apartment. She had read it in the paper. “If he wasn’t hurt, he would have called us,” she kept saying. “He said he’d call when he got there.”

“We can’t be sure.”

“Then why hasn’t he called?”

“What’s his sister’s name?

“I don’t know.”

“Should we call his parents in the States?”

“No. Oh, God, no. What if he’s all right?”

In the end Tannin and May Chatevin had a car delivered and started driving. I stayed by the phone. They stopped and called every two hours. In between the second and third call the American embassy called to say his name was on the list of the dead.

THE LIST OF THE DEAD. In June, in a peaceful Europe, the summer he was twenty-five. Random, inexplicable.

I told her when she called at three that afternoon. They went on to Firenze to see if they could claim the body. I asked the embassy to get me his parents’ phone number. I sat in zazen on the floor of my room and waited for the courage to make the call. I could have looked out the window and seen the Eiffel Tower if I wanted to.

I got his father on the phone. I told him his son had been completely happy when he left for Rome. I told him his son had been the happiest man I had ever known. I asked if I could meet the daughter in Firenze. If I could do anything at all for them. I gave them my phone number in the United States. I said they could come to visit me and I would tell them about every minute of the weeks gone by. “He was the happiest young man I’ve ever known,” I told them. “What fine parents you must have been. What a delightful son you had.” Had. Here in the maya of space and time. On the planet Earth, in nineteen hundred and ninety-three A.D., in the only world there is.

 

Two days later Tannin and May Chatevin got back to Paris. They had met the sister. Tannin had helped identify the body. May Chatevin had lost ten pounds. I put her to bed in her apartment with one of my three remaining Xanax tablets. I sat in her living room while she slept and tried to read Le Monde. Tannin had gone home to rest.

“Get up tomorrow morning and write,” I told him. “Now will you believe? Now will you go on and write your hero’s death?”

“No,” he answered. “I’m going to skip over to the part that takes place in the United States. After the child is born.”

“Requiem. Yes, go on.”

“We got a dog the last year we were at Sewanee. This brown dog we found at the pound. We had to hide it from the landlord.”

“What happened to it?”

“He took it to Nashville and gave it to his mother. I guess she’s still got it. He used to let it ride in the car with him everywhere he went. That dog loved to ride in automobiles. He’d put his paws up on the window and stick his head out. Everyone knew our dog. We called it Vain for a girlfriend he once had.”

“I told his father he was the happiest man I had ever known.”

“He might have been. Now he is. Now he doesn’t care.” We had been whispering. Now we embraced. He left me there. I opened French Vogue and began to read an article about how to dye the hair on my legs. We don’t really need hair on our bodies anymore. But nature keeps it there in case things change.