I stole a scarf from Father Perrin. I hadn’t wanted to. I had some money saved that I’d planned to spend on new clothes at a shop called Pingouin’s. The original building had been demolished during the battle and the owner had recently reopened in a new storefront along the river with only a fraction of the former space. The racks were stuffed with a fairy tale’s worth of gowns. Half-buttoned shirts piled in wooden boxes, mannequins wearing cocktail dresses and bowler hats.
The proprietor—a rather penguin-like man, as it happened—only glanced up from a desk covered in dinner crumbs. He seemed to think his store needed no explanation. I thumbed through trousers and misshapen jackets, giving him time to come over. I considered a few shirts, and played with the buckles on a pair of shoes, but still he didn’t come. I walked out without closing the door behind me. Why hadn’t he asked me how he could help, what I was looking for? Why hadn’t he given me the chance to say, Perhaps something a bit special. Tonight I need to dress for dinner.
* * *
Mrs. Lee Hagen seemed to have no shortage of clothes. She was waiting in the lobby in a green dress with bows at the shoulder and waist.
“We have time for a walk first,” she said, and we stepped out into the evening. It was a warm Saturday, and the tables along the river were full of the men who had come in droves to rebuild the city.
We passed a table of Italians, sipping little glasses of something strong. Beside them, a table of Poles sat sweating in the damp dusk. All were smoking. The river didn’t smell right, and cigarettes almost masked the odor.
I felt their eyes follow us as we passed, felt them wondering who I was and why I was walking with her. One of the Italians interlaced his fingers, then pulled them apart like an exploding bomb.
“Did you understand what he said?” I asked.
“Yes.” She didn’t say any more.
“Verdun will probably never be so cosmopolitan again,” I said.
“At least until another war comes,” she said. “Who are those women?”
At another table, six or seven women sat in long, loose dresses. They had dark eyes and hair, though the eldest of the group wore hers up in a twist that had gone white.
“Mediums,” I said. “Verdun is lousy with them now.”
“Perhaps someone should put a lighter to the street.”
“They tried that already.”
We cut inside the arc of the river on Rue Levalle, where much of the wreckage was still untouched. The skeletons of broken buildings played on the imagination. The remains of a mossy window looked like an animal gone bad in the teeth, or a stroke victim dragging a frozen eye up to meet your gaze. But there also could be a certain beauty to a smattering of plaster left on stone, to a slash of rose wallpaper on a gutted interior.
As I walked with Sarah, I thought mostly of her—the length of her step, the fall of the green silk over her narrow shoulders. I hadn’t noticed her shoulders before, I realized. I hadn’t noticed anything about her body. I wasn’t allowing myself to, but then suddenly I was.
It was growing dark as we crested the bluff and began to descend past crumbling garden walls and the zigzag of crippled shadows. Our steps didn’t sound as they should have on the empty street, the echo coming back only half-pronounced.
“What was Verdun like before?” Sarah asked. “Do you remember?”
“Not like Paris, not like Chicago. Small, I guess. Dreary, a lot of people say.”
“Do you think it will ever be the same again?”
“If they work very hard they might manage to make it small and dreary again someday,” I said, but she didn’t laugh, and the joke no longer seemed funny. “The restaurant is just up here,” I said.
We passed the old primary school. Inside its half-leveled walls nine or ten boys were kicking a football, some shirtless, their voices rising. They were losing the light and their game would be over any moment. One boy, who clearly didn’t understand the sport, yelled above the rest, “Pass it here. It’s my turn. It’s my turn.”
* * *
The restaurant was completely empty. Even so, Sarah was forced to insist that her concierge had made a reservation before the dark-eyed host finally offered to take her wrap. I would have been just as happy to leave. There were low electric lights on the moldings, and candles on the six or seven tables—far too few to fill the room. The host removed the silver plates. Sarah spread a scalloped napkin on her lap. I felt shabby.
“I’ve been looking forward to this aperitif for hours,” Sarah said. Her perfume smelled of violets. I felt my pulse like an insect at my neck.
“I think I need to know why you asked me to dinner,” I said.
“And why is that?”
“Because then I might know how to act.”
“Would you?” she asked, eyes amused.
“Probably not, but I’d still like to know.”
The host—also the waiter, it seemed—bent to present the menus, a thick wooden cross falling from his shirt. In his unbuttoned black vest and open collar he looked more like a village tailor than a sommelier. It occurred to me that he hadn’t been planning to work that night.
“Campari? Campari, two please,” Sarah said in French. “We’re going to have a grand meal.”
“That pleases me,” the waiter said, “but, I’m sorry, we don’t have Campari. I think you’ll prefer Suze anyway.” Then he withdrew to the kitchen as if he’d been whipped.
“One thing I can tell you,” Sarah said to me, “I asked for the most expensive restaurant so it would be impossible for you to pay.” She glanced around the empty room, the green walls flickering in the candlelight. “Apparently it’s impossible for everyone else too.”
Marshal Pétain had dined here—I’d driven him, in fact. He’d complimented the pork knuckle and decided the future of Europe with three tables of attendants. But now the room was so quiet I thought I heard someone calling for a coup de rouge at one of the cafés by the river.
“I understand why you’re asking,” she said. “You’re thinking that I’ve invited you here because I want to know about Lee. That I’m going to drink enough wine to have the courage to ask you about him. Well, I probably am going to drink enough wine. So perhaps I should just ask now.”
That’s her way of answering my question, I thought. And it was the best and kindest way she could. Any other ideas I’d invented I’d have to tap from my mind. That was all right. That was for the best.
“I wish there was more that I could say.”
“But everything there is, please say it now.”
In the previous five years, I’d rarely had to make anything up. I didn’t quite know how to go about it.
There was a man in Aix-les-Bains, I told her, with hair longer than was customary. He looked like he was inviting lice, I told her, yet there was a glow about him that suggested he couldn’t be touched by such things. All this was true. There really was such a man.
I was lying on the hotel terrace above Lake Bourget, I told her. My mind had decided that it was safe for my body to feel again, and I found that I was constructed of materials that didn’t work together. My legs were rubber. My neck wood, my arms tin, and so on.
The man strolled out into the sunlight and sat down beside me, smiling as if we knew each other. After a moment, he began to sing.
I fled to the sea, the sea was too small
But I still had a ball, I still had a ball
I drove into town, the girls cried in the hall
But I still had a ball, I still had a ball
I arrived in the summer, it was already fall
But I still had a ball, yes, I still had a ball
The melody was vaguely familiar, better suited to a smoke-dim room. His cadence changed and the notes slid minor.
I kissed my girl out in the park
There’s better light, now that it’s dark
I stumbled home at the end of the night
There’s better dark, now that it’s light
I left in the summer, and arrived in the fall
But I still had a ball, yes, I still had a ball
The snow covered the window and spread to the mirror
The perfect end to a perfect year
What are you supposed to do when a stranger sings for you? I was too tired to clap or whistle. “What’s that song?” I asked him.
He turned to me and smiled, shy and proud. This, too, was true.
“I wrote it. With a friend. We used to sing in the ambulance, you know.” He had the grating cheerfulness of an Englishman, but his accent was American.
“Time passes that way, doesn’t it?”
“Any interest in learning it?” he asked.
“Sing it again if you want,” I said, and he did. The second time through I could join him on the refrain. I liked the song, melancholy and hopeful. The lyrics seemed ironic, but something about the man suggested irony wasn’t his traffic.
“Any interest in cribbage?” I asked when he finished.
“Why not?” he said, and we began to play.
I described the entire scene to Sarah just as I recalled it, as we sat at the table, as the waiter brought the Suze in little stemmed glasses, quickly drained. But what else did the man say? There was something that had brought him to mind.
“I wrote it for my girl,” he said, returning to the song midway through our game. “She understands music better than I ever have. I’d like to surprise her with it when I see her again. Have you a girl?”
I shook my head. And then, in the dreamlike way that time passes on permission, we drifted to a meal and apart, and I don’t think I saw him again.
I imagined Lee to have the man’s easy style and purchase on the world. I thought that if I had met Lee, he would have said something like that about her. It didn’t feel completely like a lie.
She took the white linen from her lap and dabbed the corners of her eyes. I’d meant the words to comfort her. They clearly hadn’t.
“Thank you for telling me. Really. No one else mentioned that.”
“You’ve talked to many others?”
“Everyone I could find. His fellows. His lieutenant. His major. A woman he slept with in Padua. He seemed all right to you otherwise?”
“As all right as anyone.”
“He was already getting sick.”
“As I said.”
“And then I found out he went mad. They don’t write to tell you that. You have to go looking for it, if you want to know.”
“You don’t have to talk about that,” I said.
“And what if I want to?”
The waiter brought a salad of bitter greens, lardons, and soft cheese. He presented a bottle of Riesling from before the war. We hadn’t ordered either. He placed the cork next to me on the table and splashed the first pale drops into my glass.
* * *
“Can you picture Boston, at all?” she asked. “Try.”
I had remnants from grammar school: the three-point hats of the minutemen, musket blasts at the massacre.
“I can picture John Adams,” I said.
“In that case, picture my family’s house.”
They lived outside of Boston, she explained, in a garrison-style colonial. Fireplaces in the bedrooms, claw-foot tubs in the baths, flowers on the wallpaper. There was a full-length mirror on the door to her mother’s bedroom and she remembered standing in the hall as a small child—perhaps two years old, perhaps three—looking at her reflection, listening to her mother coughing on the other side.
Sarah was six by the time her mother returned from the sanitarium. She remembered waiting in the foyer, jerking the chain on the electric lamp, off, on, off, on. But there was nothing of the moment of return and little of the months and even years that followed. Only her mother smiling weakly from across the living room, the fire snickering between them. Smiling from across the lawn, shaded by poplars. Smiling from across the dinner table, serving herself green beans and bacon from her private platter.
The doctors claimed she’d been cured of the tuberculosis, but she remained so afraid she was still contagious that she refused to touch Sarah, refused even to linger in the same room with her. Eventually, Sarah stopped believing the doctors too.
“What about your father?”
“He never argued.”
It was acknowledged by everyone, including him, that he’d married up. He had more or less cheerfully put aside any pleasures, including his own opinions, to practice law and earn the living that was expected of him. His only extravagance was an unshakable confidence in his memory of maps, in his unwavering sense of direction. Sometimes he would take Sarah to the Boston Common, where they would stroll with ice cream cones while he waited to present his services to tourists looking for Paul Revere’s house or Faneuil Hall.
“He was afraid to contradict my mother. Afraid that perhaps she was right. We were all afraid,” Sarah said.
“Why not send you away?” I asked.
“Because she loved me, all the more since she felt she couldn’t be near me. That seems strange, I know, but she came from the kind of family—a rich one—where there was no expectation of acting like other people. That was my aunt’s assessment, anyway.”
She said her aunt’s name as if I should know it.
“Well, when I was little I thought she was famous.”
The aunt lived in Paris, where she wrote music criticism for The Daily Telegraph. She was a fierce Wagnerian, an early champion of avant-garde Russians: Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and especially Scriabin.
“Do you know Scriabin?” Sarah asked. “His dream was to write a piece of music so powerful it would bring about the end of the world.”
“Finally I know who to blame.”
“He never finished that particular piece,” she said, smiling. “Or so my aunt told me. It was the kind of thing she’d go on about in her letters.”
When Sarah was a child she and her aunt exchanged many such letters. And, from the spring she turned fifteen, every letter came with an invitation to visit—on the condition of her mother’s permission, of course.
But Sarah never asked for her mother’s permission. Instead she wrote to Maud that her mother had refused to let her come. She described how angry she was, how disappointed. She would simply have to spend the summer in Paris in her mind, she wrote. Imagining the blooms in the Tuileries was the only thing that would get her through to fall, she wrote.
“You didn’t want to go?”
“It’s not that I didn’t want to. I was afraid.”
“Of what?”
She shrugged. “That the boat might sink. That a war might start, trapping me in Europe for years.”
“That actually sounds more like clairvoyance,” I said.
“Hardly. But I was right. Wasn’t I?”
* * *
The waiter returned with a platter of asparagus in cream sauce, sweat beaded on his brow. He replaced our half-full glasses, and poured a richer white.
“Listen,” I said. “Could we perhaps have some say in this?” The waiter made a perplexed face and thumbed his cross, as if it might answer my question.
“The lady asked for a grand meal,” he said, finally.
“The lady would still like a grand meal,” Sarah said. “Bring us everything.”
“I’ll certainly bring you everything we have,” he said.
“Tell me,” she said once he had returned to the kitchen. “Were you afraid when you first came to France?”
I thought for a moment, feeling I owed her an honest answer. “No. The fear came later. I didn’t know enough at the time. My father’s telegram completely changed my thinking. Did something change yours?”
“Not exactly. Around the time I was to graduate from high school my aunt, without telling me first, wrote directly to my mother, begging her to let me visit. As it turned out, my mother was actually quite excited about the idea.”
The waiter appeared to relight the candle, to refill our glasses and take our plates. He returned with a platter of rouget baked in breadcrumbs and parsley.
“You’re supposed to laugh at that,” Sarah said. “You realize, it’s supposed to be funny.”
“You told me that you hadn’t been to France,” I said.
“I lived in France for five years.”
“You implied it then, certainly.”
“I don’t recall that, but why should I have told you anything true?” she asked.
“Why should you now?”
* * *
In May of 1914 she left for Europe in wet weather. As the ship lurched into the Atlantic, Sarah was relieved to see her mother—blowing kisses with both hands from the safe distance of the pier—fade into the crowd. But she was too afraid of the liner’s listing to enjoy walks on deck. She was afraid of the card games and of the magician who pulled scarves from the mouths of debutantes and dowagers. She was afraid of the small crowd gathered at Le Havre, afraid of the single man playing trombone along the quai.
She was afraid of Maud’s apartment in Montmartre. The smells of pork fat and pipe smoke flooded her new bedroom; the thunder of footsteps on the stairs jolted her awake. Maud kept the windows open in the rain.
Sarah was afraid: a blue tinge to the streetlight gleaming on the greasy faces of maids and dishwashers coming home from shifts in the bowels of hotels. Stone staircases grouted with moss, dead-ending up Montmartre. The carts of rag pickers, piled with sheets and shirts washed gray. Waiters staring out from empty cafés, faces mangled by warped glass.
“What about your aunt?”
“I wasn’t afraid of her. But I didn’t like her nearly as much in person.”
Maud was thin, with hair that had gone white early, kept long and braided over one shoulder. She was prone to talk for hours, prone to touch you on the arm if she didn’t feel you were paying absolute attention.
“Now that you’re here it’s time to find yourself,” she said. “Obviously, it’s a cliché, this idea of finding oneself, isn’t it? That is, it’s cliché for a man. And tragically not so for a woman. I need only mention your mother.”
“What would you advise?” Sarah asked.
“Simply that you listen.”
Sarah tried. Sometimes they’d go to Chat Noir to watch the cabaret and sing along to the piano played by a friend of Maud’s. But more often, her aunt would usher her to a particular flat lined with Persian tapestries where a host in purple satin robes greeted them. Sarah would sit, propped on a cylindrical pillow, conscious of little more than her effort not to betray her own confusion, as someone—often her aunt—lectured on the secrets of the Rose Cross, or Schopenhauer’s influence on Wagner’s late work. Once, her aunt gestured at the full moon, glowing above the sooty rooftops. “That will is our will. It’s the same will,” she said.
And Sarah tried to listen, seated in a velvet box at the Opéra, as the third act of Parsifal began. She could feel her aunt turning her gaze toward her in the dark, willing Sarah to gasp, to shudder, to fall in love. Sarah felt nothing, but she didn’t want to disappoint Maud. As the holy knight held up the lance that had pierced Christ’s side, Sarah pressed her thumbnail into her palm and thought of her father, alone on the Boston Common, offering directions to strangers. Finally, just before the house lights came up, she was able to cry.
* * *
Father Perrin often said that a face looks different when you know its story. I’d pictured Sarah’s face at five and fifteen, transposing the green of her dress to the ocean she’d crossed. I could see traces of pink on her nose from when she’d cried as the curtain fell. Surely, Lee was in that face too. But I couldn’t see him. Perhaps that should have come as no surprise. Stories, after all, are told to conceal the truth just as often as they are told to reveal it. Father Perrin often said that too.
The waiter cleared the table, plucking the wineglass from my hand, changing out the dishes and flatware. “You’d like the Pommard with the duck, I think,” he said. “But we have other Burgundy.”
“Don’t dare ask my opinion now,” Sarah said.
He poured the wine into our glasses. It was like nothing I’d ever had.
“It’s leather,” I said.
“Yes.” The color of the wine was on her cheeks too. “Very good leather. We haven’t toasted.”
“To what, then? What should we drink to?”
“In my family, we don’t actually touch glasses. If my father is in a jovial mood he raises his to the founder of the feast, like the Cratchits in A Christmas Carol.”
“To begin with, Marley was dead,” I said. I only realized then that I was drunk.
“Deader than a doornail,” she said.
“My mother read it to me every December. I used to love ghost stories.”
“Do you?”
“I used to.”
* * *
The waiter presented the duck breast, sliced in dark sauce, ringed with juniper berries and sprigs of rosemary. Already my body felt like a thing only vaguely under my control, and I realized how alike pleasure and fear can feel in their extremes.
“Just a moment,” the waiter said. “Perhaps I could tell you about this duck?”
“Please,” we said, roughly at the same time.
“Because you are speaking English, I will try in English.” He held his palm in front of his face as if he might find the words there. “So, you know—maybe, perhaps!—it is difficult but special to grow ducks in Lorraine. The bad water, because of the bad dirt, you understand.” We nodded. There were few things I understood better than the bad dirt and water of Lorraine. “These ducks my wife and I raised. When we left in 1915 we brought them with us to Bordeaux. Bordeaux is a very different region for ducks, much easier, even before the war. These ducks taste, I don’t know how to say, they taste very particular, very good.”
“It’s the best I’ve ever had,” Sarah said. The waiter flushed pink.
“Perhaps no duck will taste like this one ever again,” he said. “I hope you like it. His name is Michaud.”
“That’s a bit unappetizing,” Sarah said, and the waiter began to laugh, embarrassed.
“No. So sorry. It is my poor English. The duck has no name. My name is Michaud.”
He had the kind of thick, round face you couldn’t help but call honest.
* * *
“There are days,” she said, “when I have to remind myself how I got here. So then I have to step back to the thing before that and the thing before that. I suppose that’s why the story’s taking so long. Is this all terrible for you?”
Her face had relaxed. Her soft expression suited her soft features. It seemed to me this was how she was supposed to look.
“If anything you’re going too fast,” I said.
* * *
Sarah began listening to Cleo Muller in May of that year. At least the plaque on the buzzer read Muller. Her husband called her Cleo, or when he was pleading with her, as was the case most nights, Clo, Sarah could hear them through her thin bedroom wall when they shouted. What was he pleading for? Sarah took an interest at first because she assumed it was sex.
Cleo had auburn hair, feline eyes, and two children, a girl and a boy. Sarah guessed Cleo to be about forty years old, though it was difficult to say because she glimpsed her in person only a handful of times. She could set her watch to the sound of the children’s steps echoing in the stairwell everyday at 13:00, to the view from the window as they filed toward Sacré-Cœur, the girl first, then the boy, then their governess. But never Cleo.
Why? Because most days, it seemed, Cleo would wake up completely paralyzed, unable to get out of bed, unable even to sit up. When René—that was her husband’s name—came home in the evenings he would explode in rage, then grief and shame. He promised to take Cleo to Cannes and buy her the best view of the ocean. He promised to take her to Cannes and drown her. He promised to kiss her feet if she would only walk across the room, if she would only agree to resume psychoanalysis.
“It was hysteria?” I asked.
Sarah’s smile was wry and amused. “You really think there is such a thing?”
Not in Cleo’s case, certainly. Often Sarah could hear her pacing her bedroom at night—like Sarah’s father, René seemed to have his own room. She could hear the strike of a match, perhaps the crumple of a newspaper. She could hear René’s heavy steps in the hallway, but never a knock at the door.
“You were planning to help her?” I asked.
“No. I was planning to find myself paralyzed. To wake up like that one morning.”
In the restaurant, Sarah pressed a bare forearm to her brow as she laughed. This time, I laughed too. But then, I couldn’t resist.
“What about Cleo’s little girl?” I asked. Sarah looked at me, annoyed.
“You do want me to skip to the end, I see. It is late, I suppose. You’re right, once I pictured her standing outside her mother’s closed door it wasn’t fun anymore. And, yes, I felt an unbearable disgust with myself. That summarizes it pretty well. I found an address in my suitcase, wrote a quick note, and went down the stairs to send it before I could lose my nerve.”
“To whom?” I asked, though I didn’t need to.
* * *
We finished the duck, leaving the rosemary sprigs on the plate like a trampled wreath. I tried the bottle, but there was only sediment. The candles on the empty tables had all gone out and a velvet darkness filled the room. Not a single customer had come in.
“Was there really a Cleo Muller?” I asked.
“Why do you ask that?”
“It’s not uncommon—there are so many reasons why the people who come here make up stories, or pieces of stories. You learn to tell when things fit together a little too well.”
“And do you usually try to embarrass them?” she asked.
The answer, of course, was no. But I wasn’t trying to embarrass her. I was trying to impress her.
“Don’t worry about the bottle,” she said. “He’ll bring Sauterne with dessert, I’d bet my life on it. No, it didn’t really all happen quite that way. There was a Cleo, though. There still is. And there was a René, but he died at the Marne. I suppose I should also say that my childhood wasn’t quite so gothic either. I just wanted to give you a sense of it all.”
“A sense of what?”
“Well,” she paused, as if embarrassed. “Of why I fell in love so fast, and so deep.”
* * *
“You enjoyed Michaud?” the waiter asked, still laughing as he cleared the final set of plates. We clamored to compliment him.
“Excellent, excellent. The crème brûlée is named Maurice.” He laughed and presented a bottle of Sauterne.
Sarah clapped, and said, “Sauterne, you see? I live.”
I felt myself drifting, less than aware of what I was saying, feeling somehow that I had already said the wrong thing, but unsure of when or how. The right thing to say in the moment seemed clear enough.
“Lee was in Paris?” I asked.
“Yes. He’d gone over around the same time I did—just before, actually. He was working at the Paris branch of a bank. His father’s bank. He was the only person I knew in Paris aside from my aunt. Fate or not-fate, you decide.”
“I’m not sure that’s my place.”
“It’s just something Lee and I used to say. That was the sort of thing we began to joke about almost immediately. Fate or not-fate that we came together as we did.”
“You knew him well before?”
“Not well, though I’d known him all of my life.”
He’d grown up one town over and in those days there were many Lees, many boys with mild, northern European faces, who sat politely at church, or spoke politely to her at picnics. Many boys she avoided.
In high school he played the Pauper to her Lady Jane Grey. He looked the part, all right. He was tall with silver-blond hair and the kind of round chin that looked like it could take a punch. He was almost supernaturally untalented, though, with a tendency to falsify even the most inconsequential moment with oddly placed pauses and cramped expressions.
Later, in Paris, he would claim he’d only auditioned because he wanted a chance to talk to her. It was true that at their chaperoned wrap party he brought over a plate of Linzer hearts and asked if she would like to sit outside. Of course the answer was no. She was sixteen by then and there were still many Lees.
“I can imagine,” I said, my tongue too loose from the wine. She rolled her eyes.
“What I think a man really wants from a woman above all else,” she told me, “is fear. So I was very desirable. Not because of the way I looked especially. They could sense my fear.”
“You don’t seem afraid now.”
“No. That’s changed.”
Maurice had arrived. Michaud poured more Sauterne.
“Would you like to do the honors?” she asked, pointing to the crème brûlée and offering me one of the spoons.
“No, you, please,” I said.
“Good. It’s my favorite part of the whole meal.” She crashed the spoon through the burnt sugar like a boy falling through ice on a lake.
* * *
Lee had plans, a trip to Chartres with the son of his boss, but he begged off when he received her note. And, as they walked through the blooms of the Tuileries, Lee told Sarah that her mother had written and asked him to look in on her, but that he’d known enough not to.
“Known what?” she asked.
“That if I did you’d never speak to me again.”
“It’s likely I never would have spoken to you anyway.”
“I know,” he said. “But you have.”
He touched her arm to signal that they might stop and sit on a bench. When he held the door to the café on Rue Custine he touched the small of her back as she stepped through. And yet there was no expectation in his touch, only warmth. And this difference surprised her—just the feel of his hand on her back, at her elbow.
When he invited her to dinner the following Friday, she asked that her aunt come as a chaperone. Maud agreed to meet them at the brasserie, but never showed up.
“I’d be happy to call someone,” Lee said. “I’m just trying to think who.” They were already seated at the pewter-topped table.
“No one else seems to mind,” Sarah said. “Perhaps I shouldn’t either.”
“It’s one of the nice things. No one seems to mind anything here. One night, I slept under an embankment.”
“Why would you do that?” Sarah asked.
“Adventure, I suppose. I guess adventure always seems more appealing when you’re lonely.”
Sarah had always felt the opposite to be true. Even so, she said yes when he asked her to marry him. In the month they’d been together she’d done everything wrong—did I understand? Everything. She’d had the intoxicated feeling that nothing could harm her. She had invited him in everywhere. And still he asked.
In June they glided across a grassy patch in the Tuileries, holding hands, pretending they were on Lake Waban in Wellesley. Just weeks before, she would have found such behavior maudlin and embarrassing. Now they ignored the Parisians who jeered because they assumed Lee and Sarah understood no French. Just as they ignored the cables from her parents asking that they at least wait to marry in the States. Just as they ignored the note from Lee’s mother wondering if he understood what an eccentric family he was marrying into.
“It was very interesting,” Sarah said. “Suddenly it was so, so easy to shut everything else out. I didn’t expect that.”
I nodded, thinking of my room in the Episcopal palace, the creak of the bed slats, the steam on the windows, the clink of the lamp chain—often the loudest sound in the hour before I tried to sleep.
* * *
“I must confess something. We do have Campari,” Michaud said. “But I don’t like it. Fernet-Branca, though, is better than anything in France. I don’t often admit that.” He set the bottle on the table beside two small glasses. We asked him to join us, and he set out a third glass and pulled up a chair. He asked after Father Gaillard in a sleepy voice. I only realized then that he’d recognized me when we’d come in, that he must have been wondering who Sarah was and why we were together.
As he refilled the small glasses we spoke of his childhood in a village outside Strasbourg—his family had moved west after Alsace was annexed by the Germans in 1871. He’d always planned to return, but now it felt like a duty to stay and help rebuild Verdun, even if he was going bankrupt in the process.
“You must excuse me for interrupting you so much,” he said. “I’m supposed to be invisible, but I’m not used to cooking for such happy people.”
* * *
By the time we left the restaurant I half-expected daylight. I could smell the roasting almonds and hear the din from the cafés on the river. It was still before midnight.
“Verdun was famous for its almonds before the war,” I said.
“Mmhmmm,” she said, as we turned back toward the hotel.
“What are you thinking about?” I asked.
“How happy we looked,” she said.
* * *
Without the detour it was only a few minutes back to the de Guise. She stumbled on uneven stone. I steadied her with my arm and she shrunk away. As we turned the corner on Rue Margot, the hotel awning, ringed with electric bulbs, blistered the darkness. As I opened the door for her she said she could do with another drink.
A barman in a red jacket was polishing glasses with a white cloth. I ordered. He poured two red wines and shook out his aching fingers. She’d put powder on her face unevenly, and I could see the perspiration just above her lip.
“Do you want to go on?” I asked.
“I don’t know. The fight may have left me.”
It was the time of night when glasses are left half-full. I didn’t want her to ask me to leave.
“You stayed on in Paris after you married,” I said.
“Indeed, yes. In July. In the Luxembourg. The same day Jean Jaurès was killed. Do you remember that day?”
“Vaguely,” I said. “Maybe not at all.”
“Well, you were somewhere in Chicago, weren’t you? It probably couldn’t have mattered to you less. They say he was the only man who could have kept France out of the war, so it was quite a scene. What do you think you were doing on that day? Late July. How old were you?”
“I was fifteen. In late July, I was probably at the Indiana Dunes with my mother.”
“Perfect. I have no idea what you mean.”
“They’re sand dunes around Lake Michigan. That was where we vacationed if we had enough saved. As it happened, that year we did.”
“And what would you do on these vacations?”
“Swim in the lake. Climb the dunes. Eat ice cream.”
She smiled, and finished her glass. She stood up.
“Now,” she said. “Have another drink at the bar. You know the stairs, don’t you? When the clerk isn’t looking come up. Number seven.”
I felt my chest begin to dissolve. I wanted to say the absolute right thing before it did. “What if he sees me?” I asked.
“Kill him,” she said.
* * *
The first woman I slept with claimed her name was Destin. I’d been the last in a line of three or four of my friends from the Field Service. When my turn came I promised myself I wouldn’t close my eyes.
There had been other women after that. Sometimes we’d take the ambulances to farmhouses: strange, sad places lit by candles set on staircases and drooping sideboards. No one cared if these places burned down. Red wax was the cheapest, so there was often an occult feeling to the rooms, like something out of “The Masque of the Red Death.”
Once, in the garret bedroom of one of these places, I looked out the window to find the ravaged field beyond the house—a black barn, a husk of tree, brittle wheat—covered with heavy green gas.
We were well past the German artillery range, but I jumped from the bed and grabbed the woman by the wrist and swam blindly through the house. I had masks in the back of the ambulance and my only thought was that I might reach them before we both inhaled too much. Outside, the frozen grass crumbled under my bare feet. I smelled nothing, could breathe normally. I thought I was hallucinating—you heard about that from time to time—but she pointed at the moon glowing green and looked to me as if I might explain. We were both naked and I was still holding her by the wrist. It was just green fog. I never saw anything else like it again.
* * *
Fortunately for him, the clerk wasn’t at the desk when I finished my second drink.
Sarah answered the door as if she had just whispered a secret. Her eyes looked glassy in the electric lights. Her lipstick was fresh; she’d caught her teeth. I didn’t know how much time had passed since she’d left the bar, but one needs only a moment to doubt.
“I wonder if we’ve drunk too much,” I said.
“Have you?” she asked.
“Not like that. Too much to decide.”
She shrugged, the way I could picture her shrugging onstage, so the balcony could see it. “How else are these things decided? Just know that I want to. Do you?”
I wanted to. I wanted to. So often, desire and reality are so far apart that, on the rare occasions they intersect, it can feel as if desire itself has pounded reality into shape. That’s why I allowed myself to do it. I believed that neither of us would be hurt later, because I didn’t want us to be hurt. That neither of us would be angry later, because I didn’t want us to be angry. That I wasn’t betraying Father Perrin, or Sarah, or, for that matter, myself, because I didn’t want betrayal to be defined in such terms. Such is the power, for a moment, anyway, of getting exactly what one wants.
The walls were done up in whites and icy blues. There was an electric fan on the ceiling and a balcony hidden by white drapes. The window was open, but there was no wind. I kissed her neck. She grabbed my hair, and pulled my lips to her collarbone. Her eyes were open. Her eyes were closed. As I touched her I expected her to ask me to stop and I tried to stay near enough to the surface that I could. And then when I knew that she wouldn’t ask me to stop I expected her to disappear. The dress slid from her shoulders. She’d taken everything off underneath.
* * *
“How long will you stay?” I asked.
“In Verdun? How long do you want me to stay?”
“It can’t be up to me,” I said.
“No, it isn’t.” She’d risen from the bed and opened the curtains, but there was nothing to see, only an unlit city on a dirty river. “But it just so happens that at the moment I’m at a loss.” She returned to the bed and lay down on her stomach.
“Won’t you go back to Udine?”
“I might. I don’t know what else to do. I used to think I knew, but then it leads me here.”
“Is that so bad?” I tried to ask the question with a lilt in my voice, to joke, but I really did wonder. I got up and went to the sink. The carpet felt exquisite under my bare feet.
“I didn’t know he was a singer,” she said to my back. “I didn’t know he wrote a song.”
I splashed my face over the basin, once, twice, trying to decide what to say. I felt no guilt whatsoever—how was that possible? I suppose because what I’d told her about Lee, what I’d told her about the man who sang to me in Aix-les-Bains, had led me to this room, to her, and that felt like the truth.
“Is that so surprising?”
“No. It’s just that it’s reminded me of something, something I’ve been trying not to think about. But then I remember that I came here to learn things like that, and to be reminded, and to think. The thing is, when he came back to Paris on permission around Christmas in 1916, he’d lost so much weight. And he had a terrible stammer. I told him that he needed to have himself declared, to at least be examined. He claimed that he had been examined.
“There was a cartoon in the Telegraph. It was a picture of the grim reaper and the devil, or maybe Mars, looking at an endless field of crosses. And that was what the caption said. An end of a perfect year. Or the end to a perfect year. Something like that.”
“Like the last line of the song,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “He kept bringing it up, he kept saying that they shouldn’t print things like that. I asked him why. He tried to explain, but the stammer. He kept trying, but he couldn’t get past the P, and then he walked into the other room, and by then I’d learned not to follow him.”
“It’s awful,” I said. In the darkness she kissed me again.
“Yes. But, in the end . . . That’s the kind of thing one wants to know.”
“I shouldn’t be here when the light comes,” I said.
“I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“It’s not that,” I said. “You can’t want a scandal.”
“Perhaps you’ve noticed I’ve stopped caring. I understand if you don’t want one.”
I probably did want a scandal. I already could have said, honestly, that I loved her, but the choice to act on my feelings likely had as much to do with hatred. Hatred for the solemnity of my work, for its stifling honor. Hatred for a fate—no, not a fate, I chose it, after all—that had turned the simple arrival of a woman from my own country, near my own age, into an extraordinary occasion.
“I was wondering,” I said. “If you were in Paris, why did he go to Aix the next year? Why didn’t he come home to you? That’s what I would have done.” She made a sound, not quite a laugh.
“You do actually listen.”
“Shouldn’t I?”
“I’m just not used to it. Had I known, I wouldn’t have said so much. I only found out later he had lied. He was afraid to see me by then. Or afraid for me to see him. He told me that his leave had been canceled. Which did happen all the time, you know.”
“That’s true.” It was a disappointment I remembered well.