Allan Stein (7 page)

The wine became satisfying, plain and clean like the cafe. It tasted like a good paint job sometimes looks, even and unremarkable. It left a lot of room for the Gruyère and the bread. Water shook from the trees and startled me, and I put the boy out of mind. The door to the cafe opened and the noise became bright and leering. Rising laughter and conversation swarmed out with the brisk waiter when he brought more water and bread. The women through the glass were angry now, and one pushed the arm of her friend so sharply the coffee she drank spilled and her friend slapped her and there were tears. The air was heavy with electricity, or I was, and the birds suddenly seemed much louder. Fatigue, of course, so I
closed my eyes. The night smelled marvelous now, full of bus exhaust, but it was getting late. I found a taxi, picked my bags up at the hotel, and went, finally, to the Dupaignes'.

The taxi should have simply been a final compartment, the antechamber concluding my long corridor of travel. I had departed through the work-ravaged portal of my city and was about to be delivered back into the bosom of humanity. The airport, the plane, the car, my hotel room, even the pleasant cafe, were in between. Now I was on the verge of arriving. So that it's hard to explain why, sitting comfortably in the upholstered back seat of the taxi, coursing the crazy circuit of Paris boulevards, I had a little breakdown. It began when we merged onto the Boulevard Montparnasse and, looking to my right, down the broad nighttime avenue, through the streaming red taillights and stripped trees, west, I saw the last glimmer of evening getting sucked into the edge of the earth and I knew that that same light shone brightly on my home back home. Somewhere beyond the curving edge of France, beyond the cold Atlantic and the next crowded continent, that same light reached my apartment. Sitting nine thousand miles away in the comfortable taxi, straining my neck to look back through traffic, I could see it. I turned away to face front and felt my throat tighten. I wasn't homesick, just impressed with the enormity of my transport. Paris jumbled around us, spread out like an old idea. My eyes broadened so I could see it too, feel the whole city like a host for this taxi-borne virus that capsuled across its middle, and this awareness, my isolation, started the tears. Everything became dispersed and unlocatable. I cried, loosening something from the broad middle below my heart, while gasping for enough air to fill that space back up again. The driver held a tissue box on his open palm, elegant as a butler serving canapes, but otherwise he ignored me. By the time we got to the Dupaignes' I was fine. I suppose it was simply the sort of thing that hap
pens when one travels, this rupture, when something new or old is emerging. The same way a disappeared pair of socks or underwear is sometimes found when we unpack our luggage at the end of a long day's travel, settling for the night in some foreign place.

This time I got out of the car and rang the bell. The small house was bright with lights. Two stereos played, some sort of jazz and Nirvana. This second, the louder, diminished when I rang again, and that was promising. Maybe the boy I'd seen in the window would greet me. I felt sorry I had cried so hard. An inner door opened and closed, shoes shuffled, and the door in the garden wall opened.

"Hello." It was a skinny old man with long wet hair and a vast beard like frozen weeds, an arctic Neptune freshly risen, bare-chested and wet there too, with ratty torn shorts to cover his middle. He grasped my hand and pumped it vigorously.

"Bonsoir, Monsieur Dupaigne."
I recited what I had practiced.
"Je m'appelle
Herbert Widener,
et j'ai rendez-vous avec vous monsieur."

"I'm afraid my French isn't very good," he said. "But neither is yours, so it's better we try English." He took a bag and led me through the tiny garden. Its plot was triangular and crowded with three fruit trees plus long turned beds running beside high brick walls. A short path led to the porch.

"You don't speak French?"

"Well, I'm Danish, and I'm not Serge, I'm Per." Per moved like an eel, all sinewy and lithe.

"I'm sorry, I've never met the Dupaignes. I was supposed to fly here via Copenhagen, by the way, so that's odd. You're with the City University?"

"No." At the porch Per slipped his wooden sandals off, then bent down to undo my shoes, and we left them by the door. His
bright black eyes and smile broadcast a kind of bovine contentment that seemed to attach to nothing. "Serge," he yelled up the winding stairs, "Herbert Widener
arrive pour 'un rendezvous avec vous monseiur.' "

The narrow stair twisted up into darkness and down toward flickering candlelight from the cave. The jazz came from there. Per gave my hand a hearty last squeeze. "You will excuse me. I am in the middle of an important lesson." He bounded up the stairs, and Nirvana was turned on again at a tremendous volume. The jazz increased in reply and the stairway light shut off so that darkness swallowed the vestibule.

It was pleasant in the dark. The house smelled of heating gas and sweet dust. The dust was books. Cold air clung to my coat and smelled of the day's rain. I saw ghosts emerge from the dark, coats on pegs in a line and two bicycles, plus the white frame of a doorway that I could only see if I looked sideways past it. Garlic and mushrooms fried in butter somewhere. The jazz got switched off and the basement candles snuffed so now I could see nothing, only hear the rush of sock-padded feet ascend the stairs, fly past me (did everyone bound upward in this household?), and bang through the door on the next landing. The stairway light came on.

"Herbert," a man yelled over the noise, pronouncing the name "air-bair," with a kind of soft growl at the end, which was a charming way to say it, "I will come down the stairway in a moment, but your room is right in front of you."

"Merci," I called back cheerfully.

"You're very welcome, and I'm sorry for this moment's delay but it is unavoidable. You see the doorway?"

"Yes, I do."

"The light is made with little switches. You will see them in the dark." A tiny switch glowed and I pressed it.

My suite was several rooms strung together like a many-chambered cave. Its few windows were covered by metal shutters, which put me in mind of the world wars. Crazy uneven shelves of books, blandly colored—white, tan, or yellowed—so that I thought they must be statistical records (they were French literature), covered the walls. A toilet with no bath, just a thin closet really, featured posters of trees, a small head-high window with a view of the garden, and, by some accident of poor remodeling, a letter slot through which the day's mail came. I scooped the mail from the floor and took it to the bed (wedged into an alcove), then lay down. Despite the chill the room felt heavy with sleep and I enjoyed the gravity of it. I would simply need to find the heater.

Nirvana was dimmed by a thick ceiling and walls, so that now it murmured like a soft, persistent heart. The walls must have been made of stone. A desk opposite the bed was supplied with paper and pens, plus delicate blue airmail envelopes. I arranged the lights so the room was dark except where two small lamps pooled buttery light on the bed and the dresser, and then I took my time unpacking shirts and laying them neatly in the deep wooden drawers. Herbert would have complained about the noise, but I liked hearing a little music. It reminded me of my childhood, when Louise would play Ella Fitzgerald records in one room while I went to sleep in the next, sometimes on Sunday nights (that supremely melancholy bruise at the tail of a weekend). I was always sad on Sundays. My best friend, Tony, would have stayed overnight and we'd sleep in and spend the long gray day together, sprawled on the bedroom floor with my cards and crushed foam weapons. The hours would drift out of reach and drain all initiative from our bodies, so that we could only lie there through the dusk, not speaking, just toying with the cards, until my mother finally finished her book and announced, passing by my door on the way to check the laundry, that Tony ought to be going home now it
was dinnertime and Sunday and what did I have for homework tonight? After dinner, after the wine, she'd put me to bed, drop the Ellas on the spindle, and I'd fall asleep listening. Walking through neighborhoods now that I am a man alone on these same empty days that don't begin or end so much as they go on all day ending, when I hear a knot of children in an unfenced yard, drained by their weekend of play walking dutifully through familiar games to fill the last hours, I feel a strange sadness, as painful and pressing as a heartbeat, rush through my body, so that tears form and I can hardly keep from sighing.

Someone knocked at my door, a woman, a beautiful blond woman my age, square-jawed and ruddy, with her hair pulled back into a barrette, and she came in carrying a bottle and two tiny glasses.

"Bonsoir,"
I tried, not knowing which language was correct.

"Hello." She sat down on the bed, easy as an old friend, and handed me a small ice-cold glass. "A 'welcome' drink." We clinked and swallowed, and the chilled liquor warmed me all the way to my stomach.

"I found your mail by the toilet."

She flipped through the bundle and then put it in the trash. "So much of it is junk."

"Are you Danish? " I asked, happy with the drink and her good English.

"No." (Someone yelled from the top of the stairs— "Miriam," her name, I guessed—but she didn't answer.) "You look exhausted."

"Thank you. Your English is very good."

"I'm Dutch, French by my marriage. It's always worse flying east, I don't know why."

"I'm Herbert, by the way."

"Yes. Miriam." We shook hands, and Miriam settled back onto the bed. "You've met Per. Serge is upstairs." The bedroom door was pushed open. "And here is my boy."

Miriam's boy, the boy from the window. This long day had at last delivered me. "Stéphane ," Miriam said, "I'd like you to meet Herbert." A little wet from a shower, long hair in his eyes, and with damp, chaste arms folded across his chest, Stéphane watched me, smiling. I smiled back and said nothing, still unclear about the language.

This moment made a tear in the fabric of my day. The boy's wrists, his silence and proximity, held my full attention. I stood in the warmth of his regard. As I said, I said nothing. I felt only the hollowness of my throat, robbed of its pleasantries, and an uncertain drop when I shifted my posture at the hips. How flighty dear reader must think me, birdied back and forth by the day, undone by strangers and taxi cabs alike, driven to revery by the merest profile, a delicate wrist, the nape of a neck. It helped that this particular boy's head was full of a language I could not understand. Paris was the correct frame. Herbert tells me that fate is made by our own choosing, that character is etched into the surface of the days, when in fact fate billows like a combustible cloud of gas, a cataclysmic crystal of arrangements, delicate and temporary. I would like to understand myself—choice by choice as Herbert would have it— and arrive at some peace or resolution, but how is it that everything can be erased and remade all at once? In that slim instant I saw the vast territory of my own disappearance open up. You must understand, it was simply the boy—the boy was sufficient. This moment was nothing more than the boy's feet, aristocratic and long, his high arch, the gentle laxness in his joints, his ankle, bared for scratching, delicate and pronounced, with soft golden hair ceasing abruptly along a stirrup-shaped border just above the knob, the french curve of his calves leading to simple knees whose greatest features were the hollows behind them—soft, deep as eggs, warm and bordered by the firm stretch of twin tendons from above—the great haunches of meat he stored in his long thighs (soccer, I supposed, so that
his butt, too, was firm and rounded and kept the baggy blue jeans perched at a tilt), his loosely belted pants, over-sized enough to fit two hands snugly down the front, resting and carressing, riding the back upper-mid butt serenely, bordered all around by a brilliant billow of flannel boxers, his fly, with its battered, dented buttons half-loosened from their nooks, puckering where his languorous organ pushed and nudged so that I could fairly see it, breathing and sighing behind the folds of distressed fabric, and the pleasure I could feel in my flattened palm (if pressed against the fly, which press would be returned from within, amplified). Am I only to the waist? Surely everyone has seen the boy shirtless, and in the grand array of life's exertions: half stripped and sweating at work in the shop stacking boxes; speeding down the left wing in his wind-torn shorts chasing World Cup dreams; emerging from the pool all arms and gangly legs, dewdropped and shivering; or asleep in the shade of a summer tree, shorts askew, drooling on the pried-open pages of his required reading; the dizzying vertigo, running your eyes along his tattered waistband, riding so low and loose off twin-ridged hips it seemed whole religions could be founded in the space between that drifting lip of cotton and the boy's trim, shallow belly button. I'd stroll along the rim there, tasting the rounded flat of belly, stretching out from its spiral origin, driving hands across the broad flat plain, dusky horizons distant on either side, then up along his slim torso (alarming how thin he is where the hips gave in, so small I imagine wrapping two hands around him, twin thumbs pressed into his belly button, fingertips touching on the other side) over the knobby-ridged ribs, moving visibly as he breathes. The boy ran his mindless hands over his ribs, up to fold the soft nipple, then back down to his hips, as he stood shirtless, regarding me. His shoulder blades were delicate and pronounced. They moved like angel's wings when he moved. Face front, where his ribs converged, a sin
gular divet, pulsing with the exertions of his heart, invited my tongue to rest. He smelled like sweet milk and dust where my hard stare then pressed, flat against the plate of bone his taut skin hid. Shifting my eyes to either side, the slightest rise of muscle defined all horizons and led to nipples that put me in mind, for a sad millisecond, of Dogan (supple and thin as rose petals when warm, and taut if pulled on, cold, or agitated, I think it was). Above the shadowed hollows of his collarbones, his shoulders, as slim as they were rounded took drops of water from the boy's long, wet hair. A delicate necklace of flat, linked gold lay along his throat like sleep. I could easily wrap my hands around his little throat and squeeze. The veins and striations, everything vital, was pressed to the surface there. His arms dangled, angular and elegant, when he fiddled with his belt loops. A filthy braided twine was tied loosely around one wrist, which it never left. No one can capture the weak beauty of his wrists. I imagine them crushed in the jaws of an industrial menace, or motionless amongst the ferns of a brook in the springtime woods where the boy has drowned. In either case the wrists beg to be touched, their knobs caressed as the last pulse of blood plunges through the soft underside where the veins are. I read in the newspaper about a man who murdered boys, and on the eve of his execution he said "everyone thinks this is the end, that it's all over now. But where do you think
I
came from? " And all of this blossomed in that instant, that glance, so that you can imagine how it formed a pivot and the days, my life, everything, now turned, as flimsy and compelling as a dream. That is what I thought, in any case. Who knows what the boy thought?