The lady in the nearest doorway must have noticed I’d been watching because she said something to me in French as I passed. “I’m sorry?” I said, then wished I hadn’t; the lady clearly assumed I was after the same thing as the man in the overcoat. “No, no,” I said. “No, thank you.” Her hand was on my sleeve. I was close enough to see the state of her teeth, the soft puckering of skin between her breasts, a red welt on her arm. She’d covered her arm with makeup, but the skin around her wrist was swollen and shiny, the makeup wouldn’t stick. She said something else to me and I could hear laughter coming from the next doorway and the one I had just passed. My face was hot, and feeling like an albino under a full moon in those white pants, I hurried on.
But I couldn’t quite shake the sight of the mark on the woman’s arm, angry red under flakes of concealer. The tone of whatever it was she’d said to me had been light, an easy joke at the expense of a foreigner. Still, it wasn’t hard to imagine the kind of things that might happen to a woman like her in those deep-set doorways. I reminded myself that it was none of my business. For all I knew she might have scalded herself making tea.
It was the way she’d painted her arm with makeup, the trouble she’d gone to—I’d seen that sort of thing before. I walked as quickly as I could, but the memory caught me anyhow: a deep bruise on the inside of a young person’s thigh, the way she’d covered it with layers of her mother’s foundation, taking such care. I’d tried to help her hide it, one of many mistakes.
I turned off that street, thinking I’d take a quieter route back to my hotel, even at the risk of getting lost. I tried to bring my mind back around to my project, telling myself that my brief encounter with the demimonde had been useful after all. It had reminded me of some research I’d been wanting to do, and I made a plan to go to the Bibliothèque nationale to have a look at the microfilm.
Noir novels were all the rage in France when Inga Beart arrived in Paris in the early 1950s. It was a trend that baffled literary critics, who saw the genre itself as a chalk line drawn around the corpse of French intellectual preeminence. Ghastly crimes were committed on the dark streets of Paris, then solved by cunning detectives with a weakness for unredeemable women; various iterations of the formula came in color-coded series and could be purchased for a franc or two on the platforms of railway stations.
It was this popular preoccupation with macabre plot twists that I hoped might have prompted an ambitious French editor to put more reporters on the Inga Beart story than, say, his counterparts at the Paris bureau of the Herald Tribune. Each of the major papers would have surely sent someone to the H?tel-Dieu hospital on August 10, 1954, to try to get a look at her, but it was possible that Le Monde or Le Figaro put a second reporter on the job, sending him to Inga Beart’s apartment to get some color, as they say. Perhaps a newspaper photographer came along. Knowing his audience’s appreciation for the banality of a crime scene, he might have duplicated the shots the police photographer would have taken before him: a coffee cup standing half-full, a slip left hanging on the back of a chair, dark drops like a scattering of buttons across the floor.
And then, perhaps, the photographer would take out a second camera, loaded with color film. The film was expensive, so he’d frame the shot with special care, appreciating with an artist’s eye the way a pair of red high-heeled shoes that had been left in a jumble on the mat matched the glossy red of the drops on the floor.
Of course, all this was quite unlikely, and I had a sense that in 1954 the use of color photography in newspapers was still some years off. But I woke up the next morning with the idea still in my head. The Bibliothèque nationale was clearly marked on my map, though it was some distance away, and it was after lunchtime when I finally arrived.
I found myself a little cubby with a microfilm machine that the librarian had to show me twice how to switch on. It was only then that I realized, of course, that the newspapers were all going to be in French. It was more out of embarrassment than anything else that I went ahead and looked through all the articles from that week until I found the ones with her name in them. To my disappointment, only one of them had a picture, the same publicity shot I’ve seen a thousand times before. The librarian was watching me, so I bent in close to read the story, which is to say I looked at all the words. I didn’t understand them, but I already knew what they said.
On the tenth of August 1954, a woman was taken to the H?tel-Dieu hospital in the center of Paris with severe knife wounds to her eyes. It turned out that this woman was an American author who, despite having lived in one of the more fashionably intellectual quarters of Paris for several years, seemed unable or unwilling to speak a word of French to the authorities to tell them how it had happened, except to insist in English that, really, everything was all right. It was quickly established that the wounds had been self-inflicted and fears of an eye-gouging maniac loose in Montmartre subsided, replaced by horrified gossip when it turned out that the woman was Inga Beart, acclaimed novelist and iconic beauty—although now that her eyes were out the papers tended to put those facts in the opposite order. Why had she done it? Some said it was plain craziness, and there may be some truth to that, for her behavior had become more and more erratic during her time in France, and she’d stopped writing altogether toward the end. The cynics said she’d done it to sell more books, and if so, it worked. Inga Beart novels became popular again, and upon second reading everyone agreed that, after all, they were terribly dark—and wasn’t there something that each of her characters was trying so desperately not to see?
I, of course, knew nothing about my mother’s eyes. I would have been five when it happened, and even if I’d been old enough to read about it in the newspapers, I would have missed those headlines altogether, because it was in the late summer of 1954 that I came down with my case of scarlet fever. Inga Beart returned to the States in October 1954 and died soon after in a New York hospital. The cause was complications of an infection of the sinuses—apparently quite common in cases in which the eye socket is punctured through. I was only informed, rather tersely as I remember it, by Aunt Cat that my mother had died, and if any reporters came around I was to holler for her and to keep my mouth shut, instructions I found contradictory even then.
I don’t remember wondering why the cause of that sinus infection was never discussed in front of me, or why, when my mother’s last days were mentioned at all, it was behind a folded palm or in such low tones that I couldn’t catch all the words. It wasn’t until I was a freshman in college, trying to impress a girl at a party by telling her that I was Inga Beart’s son, that I learned of the circumstances that led to my mother’s death.