élodi placed a bottle of mineral water between herself and the adjacent old lady, and put a folded newspaper on her lap. She tried to read it, but instead her eyes fixed on a ridge of palaces and domes beneath a sky in full and turbulent motion. She was in the yellow dress. It was hot enough that her skin glistened, and parts of the dress that pressed at her sides and beneath her breasts were wet enough that the silk clung to her body. In the direct sun, strong in July even at four, her hair shone blindingly gold.
Perhaps she was the first one in all of Paris to see the beginnings of a black-and-purple thunderstorm coming in from the east. The clouds were as massive as alps and would bring cooling rain and wind. She knew and was sure that they would rescue her from the heat even though she hadn’t hoped for their aid. She thought back to the mountains she could see from her room when she was a girl. Snow pouring down like a torrent over a fall, with musical rhythm, filling the world: furious, joyous, suicidal, glorious. Stop the trains, stop the cars, cloak the trees and telephone wires in white, clear the paths of cracks and imperfections, silence footfalls, quiet the world, and amplify light until day lasts into night.
She almost forgot where she was and that it was summer, but then the wind picked up. It fluttered dresses, and it ruffled newspapers, making them hard to read. But because it offered relief in evaporation no one seemed to understand that it was the emissary of an approaching storm.
Though she was far from her apartment and knew it would rain, she held her place, remembering distant thunder rumbling through the mountains, in hairpin echoes twisting along the valleys, like replicas of the jagged lightning that made it. Weak but long-lasting at a distance, the sound left no doubt that in the mountains themselves the crash of thunder was deafening. She used to hear it as it emerged in the night from a crucible of distant flashes, and she could track it in the crackling static on the radio. There was nothing quite like a Beethoven symphony from Bern or Berlin cast over the mountains in the darkness of a storm and landing in her room, wounded by lightning but playing on. The glowing plastic obelisk on the radio dial was yellowed and warm as it locked on to music riding on the rain.
With clouds north and east of Paris rising to take up more and more of the sky, the wind picked up and distant thunder could be heard as little curls of lightning jumped from cloud to cloud. People fled. The wind gusted, and took a hat or two. Knowing that the storm wouldn’t arrive for ten or fifteen minutes, élodi remained seated. She would have time to get to a café and watch the downpour scouring the streets and sidewalks until it passed as quickly as it had come, leaving in its wake ten minutes of humid air that would dry in the sun.
The old ladies struggled up, gathered their things, and waddled off. As she watched them go she discovered that a young man was sitting as close to the other end of the bench as he could get, deeply absorbed in sketching on a newspaper-sized pad. Because of the angle at which he held the paper so as to fight the wind, she couldn’t see what he was drawing, but she lifted herself a little higher and craned her neck. He glanced to his left, and after their eyes met he was slow in turning away, but he did, and reddened so much it looked like apoplexy. He was tall, he had a sensitive face with fine features, he was as young as she was, and so shy that, though he tried, he couldn’t unredden. To her, this meant that he was good. It meant as well that he would probably not approach her.
So she moved next to him to look at what he was doing. The effect was extraordinary. He reacted so strongly to her presence that his pulse beat in his neck as if he were running a hard race. She herself was stunned by what she saw. “That’s beautiful,” she said. “It’s so beautiful. It looks like a Leonardo. It’s magnificent.”
“It’s derivative,” was his modest answer, “and there’s no demand for such things now.”
“Don’t worry about that,” élodi told him. “We’re in barbaric times. What is supposed to be and is no longer art has fused with publicity like a dead tree wrapped in ivy, and anyway, you don’t find your own voice ‘til you’re older.” (Jules had said these very words to her.) “If you do find it early, it will likely be insufficient – unless you’re Mozart.”
“Are you a musician?”
She nodded. “Cellist. Just a student.”
“I’m a student. Given your appearance, I would think you were a lawyer, or a banker. Maybe you were ENA, and are high in a ministry.”
“Really? Why?”
“Your elegance.”
“Oh no, I’m not like that. My apartment is the size of a broom closet.”
“My apartment,” he said, remembering what it was like. “Let’s see, the bathtub is in the living room, as is the kitchen, as is the bedroom and the hall. But really, you look like you live in Passy in a penthouse of a thousand square meters.”
“No,” she said. “No penthouse, no bank, no ministry, no money. This is my best dress.”
“Why did you wear your best dress to the park on a day when it’s likely to rain? If I may ask. Sorry.”
“You may ask, and you needn’t be sorry. Although I don’t know why, I wanted to look my best. And I don’t have many others.”
The air was full of electricity, light, and shadow. She felt an excitement she had never felt. Unlike what she had experienced with Jules, it was divorced entirely from sadness and obligation. The whole world seemed to be opening before her with a benevolence, excitement, and ease – as in the most beautiful music. She had waited too long, and now it started to rain in huge drops, almost the size of grapes, spread few and far between, but that was all right. The wind picked up, and lightning echoed north of Paris. élodi and the art student left together to find shelter. And they would stay together, for the rest of their lives.
August