4

THE CLOCKS’ RACKET BEGAN to fade as Valerie strode up the steep hill and out toward the city limits of Saint-Pierre. As she walked, she could hear those mechanical noises melting into the shape of a voice. It was soft and urgent, almost a whisper in her ear.

As for me, I am about to change direction.

Before email, Matt Reilly’s letters came in pen and ink. By the time the first one arrived, Valerie had married Gerard. Matt’s notes were tucked into Christmas cards which he’d begun to send the Lefèvres after his stint in Vietnam. Each December for the past twenty-five years, he’d mailed them a holiday greeting from Boston, a card illustrated with an elegant Renaissance nativity or a gold-embossed Latin inscription or the square notes of Gregorian chant; each wishing her and her family the blessings of the season. The note would mention — and sometimes accompany — his latest book. A prayer card enclosed with his first mailing showed a host and chalice on one side, and the date of his ordination to the priesthood on the other.

“Merde,” said Gerard. “First he kills people, and now he’s a priest.”

“He was a lost soul,” said Valerie.

“A clever soul. He’d better not write about you.”

“Why would he?”

“Who knows? Like Saint Augustine with his mistress and child, and then he finds God and writes a bestseller.”

“That’s enough.”

Gerard apologized.

Matthew’s first note had been abject, assuring her that she’d been right to break up with him, that she’d married a man far better than himself. By then, five years of marriage and two kids had brought happiness. Matt must find it lonely at Christmas, she’d said to Gerard. He didn’t reply.

Valerie always waited until after New Year’s to answer his holiday letter. Over Christmas, she’d read just enough of his new book to respond to his gift with thanks. His titles suited the whims of each decade: Love: The Ultimate High or, in a recent, more reflective mode, The Wide Web of Grace. It was pastoral psychology, popular work that struck her as insipid, but he had a Ph.D. in the subject and there was an audience for what he wrote.

A few Christmases ago, an email address had come with Matthew’s card. I’ve found your gardening website, and it feels like Eden before sin, he wrote. Valerie went online and told Matt to pitch the holy water and talk like a normal human being.

I shut myself out of Eden once, he wrote. I’m not so sure that I’m a “normal human being.”

So you’re a Martian, she answered. Just don’t wallow in your lousy past.

She’d said a great deal more than that, and he wrote back. Thank you for your frankness, he said. It has been years since anyone has been so direct with me. You have done me a great kindness.

She continued to write to him when Gerard went to cover the war in Rwanda. Every evening she’d email Matt, choosing careful words to tell him that she’d married a man still troubled by the violence he’d witnessed as a youth in Quebec. When Gerard was home, his need to talk about politics was compulsive. Knowing he was suffering, she’d warm him with kindness, as if he were fevered and chilled from the lack of it. She’d put whisky in his tea. She’d light a fire.

She began to pick through his copies of Foreign Affairs; she’d read the news online in French and English. Although she could engage Gerard in conversation, it didn’t seem to matter to him. He travelled more often than not. She wondered if he’d been unfaithful on these trips. Sometimes in bed, he was as full of passion as a young man, but sometimes he turned his back to her. Yet with the passing of time, she desired him more, not less. She decided not to look further, to love him as he was.

In writing to Matthew, Valerie’s comments were spare. Domestic life was off-limits. She never talked about her children, never mentioned their names or ages or accomplishments. With equal discretion, he emailed his solace and encouragement, more a psychologist’s words than a friend’s. He raised the subject of male infidelity as a weariness of soul, and when she didn’t respond, he chose to address her suffering by telling her about his life as a priest, his struggles with loneliness, the comforts he’d found in philosophy and religion. They’d talk online, at a safe distance. It was, at least, a conversation.

Two weeks ago, he’d emailed to tell her that he wanted to leave the priesthood. He’d compared it to moving from a room to an apartment, from ascetic pleasures to aesthetic ones. After the trauma of Vietnam, the narrow confines of his vocation had given him time to mend a tattered life through prayer and work. He’d suffered unspeakable loss in the war. No, worse than that.

She didn’t want to remember what he’d told her.

God knows I had it on my conscience, he’d written earlier.

So did everyone, she thought. Meaning the war.

Matt, she suspected, meant more than that.

He now felt that remaining a priest would only encourage a fear of life in its richness. Exhausted from too many obligations, he was about to take a rest, to visit his sister in Los Angeles. In a month I’ll be in Toronto, he wrote. Would you like to join me for dinner?

She’d declined. She was afraid she’d end up in bed with the loneliest man on the planet.

In truth she still loved Gerard, in the same deep, inexplicable way that the soil loves light. It was in the hope of pondering all of this that she’d come alone to so barren a place.

***

Gerard had held her in tenderness, walked with her in trouble and worry, and she could feel him as an amputee might feel a ghost limb in its absence. Striding upwards, into the hills above Saint-Pierre, she imagined walking with her husband in Manhattan, navigating the narrow, downtown streets running east off Lower Broadway — Pearl, Water, Beekman, Maiden Lane. Streets rolling down the eastward slope of the island, snagged on bedrock and unravelling like a ball of wool in a cat’s paws, all the crooked charm of the old Dutch town tumbling into the South Street Seaport and the East River. Gerard was with his cameraman, checking out shoots of the Brooklyn Bridge for later in the day when the sun would be behind them, a nice backgrounder for the opening of the Quebec fête at the waterfront pavilion. Less than two kilometres west of him, Andre was asleep in his loft in Soho, exhausted after a workaholic’s twelve-hour day with a handful of corporate clients. James, off for job training at a rooftop restaurant, would have tiptoed out by now, eager to master the details of cooking breakfast en haut. He would have closed the door with practiced silence, his hand on the doorknob turned clockwise, the door shut with care, the latch engaged by the slow counter-clockwise turn of his hand. Valerie had seen him do this once, and the studied gestures intrigued her. His silent and careful hand on the door seemed to show a thoughtfulness that was also a fear of being observed.

As James walked his early morning block to the E train at Spring Street, heading down the stairs, swiping his card in the turnstile, the subway doors were opening on her daughter Chantal, stepping out at the Métro Franklin Roosevelt in Paris. The Canadian Embassy was a few metres away from her stop — a nice job in the cultural office that let her out at mid-afternoon to lunch with artists visiting from Montreal and Toronto. That evening Chantal would have dinner with Valerie’s sister, her Aunt Karen, who’d been in London for a scientific meeting, and who’d fly into Paris this afternoon.

Morning and evening of the third day in Saint Pierre — one simultaneous moment stretched like plastic wrap across six time zones, the world too elusive for something as flimsy as time to seal in place. Matthew was in Boston, setting his watch three hours back to Pacific Daylight Time, on his way to visit his sister on the coast. He was headed for Logan to catch his flight, his cab stuck in rush hour traffic.

Don’t bet on it, she thought. In his holiday letters, Matt had joked about ruining book tours by missing his flights. Something would come up, some church thing. Now and again he’d leave earlier than planned, before anyone figured out excuses to detain him.

***

Valerie was beginning to feel dizzy. Thinking like this had done it, distorting the world into one continuous moment, bending the fabric of space out of shape so that she was here and not here, too. Across the road was a park square, benches, and a fluttering tricolour. Valerie paused to watch four older gentlemen in berets playing pétanque on the other side of the square, tossing the silvery balls around. She drank some water. The dizziness passed.

It was damp for late summer, the island muffled in fog. Something felt amiss, as if she’d imagined not only the moment that held her family, but also the apparition of an horlogerie and its racket of clocks, the sight of the old men playing their game, the scraps of cloud enveloping her. Imagination was continuous and unfolding, like a bolt of cloth — and just as real. The truth was that everything you looked at had to pass through the lens of what you imagined you saw. It was up to you to decide what was real.