“I am. I hope to. Do you live here?”
“For most of my life – that is, in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Tomorrow I’m leaving.”
“Where?”
Instead of answering, he took a sip of his chocolate, and softened his non-reply with the kind of expression – a concentration, a quarter smile, a slight narrowing of the eyes – that compliments the person upon whom it is focused.
“I think I told you that I’ve just returned from America,” she said. “I want to live here because of the gardens, the forest, the quiet, the amenities. I can feel my blood pressure drop when I get off the train. I want to find a quiet place that I can make beautiful, preferably one with a view. I suppose the estate agent sent me here because if there is in fact anything available in this little square it would have a view onto it, and it is quiet. But I’d rather see out toward Paris. My experience has been, in real estate and other things, that if you look hard you can eventually come up with something good.”
“The change is unexpected?”
“Yes. Six months ago my husband and I were at Stanford. We were somewhat isolated, but we had friends, and we were always busy. In retrospect, I suppose that was not good, but at least I thought I was happy for the first fourteen years, even though it was like living in what they call virtual reality. They use the word incorrectly. Virtual means it’s real but doesn’t seem so, but they apply it to what isn’t real and does seem so.”
“Then what?”
“My husband, who, unlike you, has lost most of his hair and is quite fat … decided to write a book. With one of his graduate students.”
“In what?”
“Sociology. I’m a historian. There’s a conflict right there. Purely by happenstance, his graduate student is six feet tall, the top of her legs are at about my shoulder height, she has blazing, naturally blond hair, balloonsized breasts that – like a paint shaker in a hardware store – jiggle before her at high speed as she walks, and ridiculously white teeth.”
“Your teeth are white.”
“Of course. I’ve been in California for fifteen years. But not like hers. When she opens her mouth the beam picks you up and slams you against a wall. She’s a human lighthouse.”
“Is she a Muslim?” Jules asked.
“From North Dakota? I should go there to get my teeth whitened and my breasts jiggled.”
“Is your husband a Muslim?”
“Oh yes, especially now that he’s discovered his polygamous side.”
“So you’re separated.”
“Divorced. In Nevada, just across the line, it takes a minute and a half.”
“Children?”
“He was infertile. I stuck with him. Now, of course, I’m too old.”
“I have a daughter, and a grandchild,” Jules said. “They’re probably going to leave France.”
“Why?”
“We’re Jews. That’s one thing.”
“I understand. We left France, too.”
“And the little boy is sick, desperately so. When you’re that sick, sometimes the only hope is another country, whether that’s true or not.”
The way she looked at him, and he knew it, it was clear that she was seeking someone she could love, someone who would love her as if she were once again a girl and the world was young. There was no question that he was capable of such a thing. She could see it in his face and read it in his every expression.
On the Grand Terrace at Saint-Germain-en-Laye
THINGS GO FASTER toward the end, and at the very end as fast as light. Not only because of the relation of time passed to time left, but because life, like a wide, deep river flowing into narrow shallows, is compelled by natural law to accelerate. And accelerate it did.
Empty of all but the most devoted runners, the white path shimmered in the morning heat. Even the fanatics, breathing hard, had finished up. At home they would shower in relief, bathroom windows open, fragrant steam rushing out and up, and, except for the flow of water, silence almost ringing in their ears.
The long terrace high above the Seine stretches for two and a half kilometers as straight as a rule, forests and gardens flanking it to the west, Paris floating dreamlike in the east, and, descending toward the Seine, vineyards, pastures, Guernsey cows, trees, roads, and bridges across the river over which tooting trains rush to and from Paris.
Cathérine grew up here. At evening the family would walk on the long roads and the wide avenues through the trees. Louis XIV had been born on this hill with its view east, but had turned with the rest of Europe to look west, the westward-oriented canals at Versailles symbolizing the maritime routes to the New World. In that sense, Saint-Germain-en-Laye was part of the age that made the French Revolution necessary, and still held magically encapsulated in its topography the peace and languid pace of the centuries in which clocks and machines had not ruled.
Almost since sunrise, Jules had been sitting on a bench near the circle that divides the Allée Henri IV from the Chemin du Long du Terrace. Decades before, shortly after they had moved into the Shymanski house, he had paused before the door and reflected that one day, after what he hoped would be many long years of going in and out without thinking about it, he would close it behind him, or it would be closed behind him, for the last time. And even then, in the beginning, he knew that when that happened, the time from the first to last crossing of the threshold would be compressed into absolutely nothing, all gone.
He was tired of life, but full of love. Though he had long believed that only God was capable of infinite love, the love he had for so many people and so many things seemed nonetheless to have no limit. Ashamed and surprised, only on his last day and in his last hours had he discovered that one can love infinitely not as an attribute of one’s capacities but rather as an attribute of love itself.
Such thoughts ended suddenly when he heard a loud crunching of gravel behind and to his left. An ice-cream vendor on a bicycle attached to a white freezer chest had peddled from the park. He was deeply disappointed that the Long Terrace was empty. You could see on his face that his gambit had not paid off. “Oh goddam,” he said to himself as he stopped. Then he saw Jules on the bench. Pedaling over, he looked hopeful.
“How about an ice cream?” he proposed, smiling like a child or a salesman.
“It’s eight o’clock in the morning,” Jules told him.
“Get an early start.”
“I, I don’t ….”
“Don’t be ridiculous. In summer everyone eats ice cream in the morning. People have it for breakfast.”
“I’m just about to run. I don’t want to have a full stomach and un-brushed teeth.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” the ice cream vendor insisted. “It melts and goes right into your cells to give you energy. And there’s water all over the place. You can rinse.”