“The swab is enough.”
“By all means,” Jules said, opening his mouth wide, and, they noted, suppressing a laugh, which they could see in his eyes and because he shook like someone who is laughing.
“WELL,” DUVALIER DECLARED when they were in the car, as he held up the plastic envelope that contained the cheek swab, “that takes care of him, one way or another.”
“Yes it does,” Arnaud answered.
“He fits the description, Arnaud.”
“Except that he’s forty-five years older, he has hair, and he’s not as fat as a hippopotamus.”
“You can’t have everything.”
“I know. God works in strange ways, doesn’t He? What do you think he’s doing now?”
“God or Lacour?”
“Lacour. It would be easier to figure out what God is doing.”
“I don’t know. If I were he I’d be sitting in a chair, eyes closed, breathing deeply, remembering again and again how I kissed that beautiful girl.”
élodi Alone
YEARS BEFORE HE DIED, élodi’s father, explaining that he no longer wanted to argue, left the practice of law. He preferred to trim the hedges, cut the lawn, and sit on the terrace in the sun – a terrace distinguished by its healthy geraniums in long-lasting, vivid red. In the summer season, from its balustraded expanse one could watch white clouds riding on the wind over snow-covered mountains high enough not to feel the heat of May or June.
He told her – after a while repetitively – that when he was young he loved the sight of things so much that he needed nothing else, and found extraordinary happiness in color, a graceful line, the sun on rippling water, a strong wind waving through the wheat. When by necessity he had had to make a living, pay taxes, pass exams, fight opponents, this had left, and he wanted it back.
Neither he nor her mother was able to convey to her the common quality of knowing how to get along in the world, to read what people said when they were saying something else, and to withhold the truth when it had to be told. This was fine in the lush park where she grew up. There, she had music, mountains, and even a rushing stream in the sound of which she heard melodies that she could later repeat as she played. But in the society of others she was at sea. She went to Paris to study music so she could work as a musician and have the ability to live, if not on a grand scale, for the music itself.
Music asked nothing, required nothing, needed nothing, betrayed nothing. It appeared instantly when called, even in memory. It was made of the ineffable magic in the empty spaces between – and the relation of – its otherwise unremarkable components. It arose ex nihilo to encompass and express everything. It fled into silence most modestly when it was done. It seemed to have a mind and a heart of its own. It teased with its perfection and led right up to the gates of heaven. Even at rest it was always ready to be called, it had existed forever, and it would last as long.
She practiced for many hours a day, but as she had to break them up she walked a great deal, and rested in parks, sitting still – as she had learned from her father – and harvesting strength and well-being from form, color, and light.
She knew it was sad that she was in love with a man who, although he was still strong and virile, was so ancient it was absurd. And unlike the love that would be appropriate to a woman her age, it ebbed more than it flowed. At times she was infilled by it, but it would always flee and leave her empty. Even at its strongest, it was dying.
PARIS IN JULY IS frenetic and hot, but unlike the heat of August, when everyone leaves anyway, the heat of July doesn’t slow the pace that builds to a frenzy in spring and early summer, and is still a great encourager of hopes, actions, and sex. Summer dresses, light clothing, bare arms and shoulders, the ease of a hot afternoon, open windows with warm breezes sweeping over white bed linen turned back, work done, the telephone not ringing …. But élodi was still alone.
Her infatuation with Jules was ending in nothing. That he would not take the lead, she knew, was in large part out of consideration for her. Had he slept with her, as he and she wanted, it would have been easy to end. Instead they had had weekly lessons that were tense and exciting for what they withheld, which was somehow poured into the musicianship.
“Because we perform,” he said, “we’ve become addicted to praise. At an early age we look not to the music but to a teacher’s approval, and later to the applause of the audience, the reviewer’s sentence or two, or perhaps, eventually, to the world tour, posters in front of the concert hall, the wide-eyes of hotel clerks and managers as fame knocks them back like a wave. The object seems to be to become so revered that you have to build a wall around your house – except where its lawns meet the Lake of Geneva or the sea off Antibes. And as you seek approval, praise, position, wealth, and fame, the music becomes the means rather than the end.”
“For me, music is the end,” she replied, “as I have and likely will have none of those other things.”
“You don’t have them, yet,” he insisted. “If you do have them, as I think you will, you’ll be pointed in the wrong direction whether or not you want to be. And when those things fail, as they must, you’ll have been diverted from the music after having betrayed it. Grocery clerks, railroad workers, farmers, private soldiers, and street cleaners expect neither praise nor fame. Their reward comes quietly as they pass through life unrecognized. Learn to live like them. The music is all you need. And if you stray from it, it won’t have you back.”
AT THE END OF July, when heat and diesel fumes had begun to push the city into the slough of August but there was still enough of the freshness of summer to sustain the excitement of the month’s last days, élodi had practiced all morning, had a picnic in the Place des Vosges, returned home to practice until three, and then walked to the Jardin du Luxembourg. She found a bench with an open prospect and took a seat next to two elderly women miraculously in coats and hats.