THIRTY-THREE

Victor

The flight from Porto to Paris was only two hours, but given the thinnest amount of upholstery, he fell asleep. He dreamed that he had arrived at the Château de Miromesnil in the dead of night, via a carriage that was outfitted with a jet propulsion engine and a tricked-out combustion chamber. Victor had never dreamed in steampunk before. The château was surrounded by a thickly wooded forest. The dark cloak of the night gave one the sense that the property was endless and full of ghosts. The only sounds were those of horses exhaling and brougham carriage wheels rolling over gravel.

“We’re here,” Kezia said, a bemused smile on her face.

She was driving the coach.

“You’d better take this with you.” She tossed him his duffel bag. “Just don’t get sand everywhere. It looks like someone smashed a board game timer in there.”

Victor nodded. When he got to the front door, it was locked. He jiggled it. There was a light rap on the other side and Victor looked up to see Matejo, wearing a beret.

“Where’s your key?”

“I don’t have it.”

“Oh, Vic-tour.” Matejo pulled a gold chain from beneath his shirt.

It was Victor’s own set of spare keys to his apartment. Except there was something slightly off about these keys, about the muted sound they made against the glass. Matejo explained that he had gone straight to the locksmith after Victor left and made thousands of sets. All out of paste.

“But why are they all made of paste?”

“Porque estas chaves são falsas e elas nunca foram reais, meu irmão. Porque o que você está procurando não pode ser encontrado em casa. Porque—”

“Come on.”

“You are the only one who is locked out. Everyone else is inside already.”

Over Matejo’s shoulder Victor could make out the shadows of everyone he had ever known. They were all preparing for a party, going back and forth across the foyer at a purposeful but unhurried clip, like stagehands sweeping across the set of a play, moving furniture between acts.

And then he was in Paris.

He flipped open his passport and appreciatively examined the stamp.

Victor had to ask about five separate people where he could purchase a train ticket. Not for the Eurostar, a name familiar to him because he recalled his classmates who studied abroad being given ten-country passes by their parents—but a northbound commuter train. This fruitless crowd sourcing made him uneasy, a clear indication that his plans were unusual. After all, if a foreign person had approached him at JFK and asked how to get to the subway, he wouldn’t have known.

The ticket kiosk was tucked at the end of a whitewashed corridor. He waited behind a young couple and their baby. The baby looked too old to be wiggling around in a plastic stroller meant for a large doll. The sling of its butt practically touched the ground. The mother crouched down and whispered at her with lots of sharp, cutting sounds in an Eastern European language Victor couldn’t identify.

“Une pour Dieppe, s’il vous plaît.” Victor spoke into the holes in the Plexiglas when it was his turn.

“Not Dieppe,” the uniformed woman said without looking up.

“Pour Dia-eep?”

Dieppe was the closest French hub to the château, close enough for him to bike or, if things got particularly bad, walk. The only information Victor knew about Dieppe was that it was located on the top of this corset-shaped country and the last stop he could take on public transportation from Paris.

“No service to Dieppe today, monsieur.”

There were €31.50 trains to Dieppe. He knew this. They left every hour, which struck him as frequent by American rail standards.

“But . . . I looked at the schedule.”

“Do you have a reservation?”

He had attempted to make a reservation before he left but this proved impossible—a poorly structured, confounding series of drop-down menus and month-long rail passes and “no trains found for your selected journey,” until the only trip the website would allow him to purchase was a one-way ticket to Hamburg.

“If I had a reservation there would be trains?”

“Non.” She shook her head, tearing her eyes away from her screen. “No trains to Dieppe.”

“Everywhere or just here?”

“I do not understand.”

More would-be passengers had formed a queue behind him, making the ticket lady uneasy.

“Do you have another destination?”

“This is my destination. Is there somewhere else I can go dans cet airport?”

Normally Victor had patience for this sort of thing. But the maneuvering around the airport beneath the blink of halogen, moving his bag to a dorsal position as he joined the rushing tributaries of people, their voices reminding him that this was also the gateway to Africa and Asia, it was overwhelming. Surely, even great men like Guy and his fellow nineteenth-century artists faced such logistical snafus—but they remained undocumented. Their biographies never read, “In 1883, Claude Monet moved to Giverny but he arrived a day later than planned and got in an epic screaming match with his landscape architect.”

“What if I lived in Dieppe?”

“Vous habitez Dieppe?”

The ticket lady had no way of knowing how vital it was that Victor forgo the city of lights for Dieppe—the Buffalo of France. He knew the French had a reputation for this, for withholding answers until the asker was either sufficiently tortured or exactly three minutes had passed. Whichever came first.

“There is a problem with the signal on the tracks today. You must go to Rouen first and then transfer to a new train. Follow the signs of RER—see?”

She pointed at a blue circle in the distance behind him, her fingernail hitting the glass in a way that reminded him of his dream.

“Take RER to Gare du Nord, transfer to Gare Saint-Lazare by Métro, take the train to Rouen and then transfer to Dieppe, d’accord?”

He nodded. Great. He needed to get into Paris so that he might get out of it.

He had not expected to be so instantaneously infatuated with Paris, quite literally, from the ground up. He knew the Métro did not inspire enthusiasm in the people who rode it daily, but he could feel the pull of the city each time the train stopped to admit a new flock: blue-haired French ladies with cheekbones parallel to their temples, smartly dressed gay men in wire glasses, bald black men with sweatshirts he couldn’t read, men in turbans and suits, housewives and businessmen, private school students, elderly Algerian ladies, impossibly beautiful girls in drawstring tops, middle-aged ladies wearing black as if it were bright red. One of the impossibly beautiful girls smiled at him. Victor nearly looked over his shoulder, bewildered that her gaze would stop at his face. She got off at the next stop, turning her head back as she walked along the platform.

In one bolt, he thought, he could undo everything, forgo his mission, follow the signs to sortie, catch up with the girl, mail the sketch to Felix with an explanation, and forget all about Guy de Maupassant. But he was determined to stay focused. He could almost guess Guy’s reaction. No need to go following the first girl on the Métro. “Women are like pigeons,” Guy wrote. “It’s never just the one that comes pecking.”

So Victor boarded the train at Saint-Lazare.

He didn’t realize he was sitting backward until the train began to move. He saw people smoking in the open spaces between cars. So far France was making good on its promise of public smoking. Victor pulled down his duffel from the overhead racks and shoved his passport and Johanna’s sketch in his back pocket.

He whacked a big green button and the door slid open. It was mostly men and one woman. The woman muttered something the moment Victor pulled up, glaring at him and heading back to her seat.

“She thinks it’s too crowded,” explained her companion, lighting a new cigarette with the butt of the old.

FUMER TUE, shouted his cigarette pack. It had to shout here, in France, where Victor had clearly landed among his compatriots in vice.

“How did you know I was English?”

“You are American, no?”

“How did you know I spoke English, I meant.”

“Do you not?” the man said, not unkindly.

“You live in Rouen?” Victor asked just as the man inhaled.

“Ouais.” He turned his head to push smoke into the whipping air. “On Place des Carmes, west of République. You know it?”

“No, sorry.”

“Our apartment looks down into a little waxing spa. It is wonderful. I see all of the legs and hear none of the screaming.”

He gave Victor a friendly smack on the arm, lurching across the shifting metal plates at their feet.

“She does not like when I look.” He nodded in his girlfriend’s direction.

Victor looked out on the blur of flat-roofed row houses, highways with little cars and soundproof barriers that gave way to cordoned rectangles of farmland, bound at the edges with rows of spindly trees. Occasionally the legitimate countryside encroached in waves of green that lasted for seconds.

“I’ve never been to Rouen, actually.”

He had not yet said the name of the city aloud, but he knew he was putting too much guttural muscle into the “R.” He sounded like a talking cartoon baguette.

“Ah! You must see the whole thing. There is a church Monet painted three hundred times.”

“That’s a lot of times. But I’m going to Dieppe.”

“Dieppe is a shithole. You cannot go to Dieppe from Rouen.”

“I’m sure it’ll be a letdown, but maybe”—Victor brightened at the truth of his suggestion—“I can come to Rouen on the way back.”

The two other smokers hovering in the wings, two men in pinstripe suits, tossed their butts overboard and went back inside. The sliding door freed a wall of stale train air.

“No, I mean to say you cannot go. It is Thursday today. No trains to Dieppe on Thursdays, I do not think. I have not been in years. Because it is a shithole.”

“No, no.” Victor could feel the glitter of panic. “The schedule . . .”

He patted his pockets for the train schedule he had grabbed at Saint-Lazare but it was back at his seat. He knew he might bump up against logistical problems but he thought he had already paid his dues. Even when he first sat on the train, an irate teenager had done a nice job of harshing his treasure-hunting high and emasculating him by kicking him out of his seat.

“Is it orange?”

“What?”

“Is the paper for which you are looking orange?”

“Maybe.”

“That is the holiday schedule. You will take a bus. But I will be surprised if more of the buses are leaving today. Compris?”

All it took was one guy who sounded like he knew what he was talking about to override the entire French rail service.

“Do you know where the bus station is?”

“Maybe ask the conductor—you say this too, conducteur?— when you exit?”

“Thanks. Thank you.”

The guy said his goodbyes, pointing for a moment at Victor to ask if he had his lighter, only to feel the lump in his own shirt pocket.

“Do not worry.” He smiled warmly. “’Twill be okay.”

Victor shook his pack of cigarettes to see how many he had left. He supposed he didn’t have to keep such close count now. Where there were bus terminals, there were alcohol and nicotine vendors. He held the door, watching the long strips of grass zoom beneath the train. Had he been in Portugal this morning? He had barely slept since the day before yesterday and not particularly well in the decade prior to that. He inhaled deeply, visualizing the oxygen hitting his red blood cells. ’Twill be okay. The thought of spending the night in Rouen, paying for a hotel he couldn’t afford when he could have just paid for a hotel he couldn’t afford in Paris, made his head spin. What would Guy do? he thought. Probably find a prostitute to sleep with in Rouen and not worry about it.

Victor watched the countryside sweep by, worried that he might involuntarily remove the drawing of the necklace from his pocket and throw it onto the tracks. It was the same feeling he got when he stood too close to the subway platform edge as a train arrived. Not because he was suicidal, not really, but because of the clear potential for doom.