On this side of the house, the architect had provided, as Shymanski was fond of saying, enough terraces to grow the rice for Taipei. The Lacour living room, behind an expansive wall of portes-fenêtres, opened onto a terrace almost as big as a tennis court, with a stone balustrade, a view toward Paris, chaises, potted pines, a dining table, an herb and flower garden, even a metal fireplace for chill evenings. Every Lacour that had ever lived loved the smell of wood smoke. Especially after Jacqueline died, Jules would sit by a fire there for hours. He had a fireplace inside as well, but a fire en plein air was best.
The wood was consumed, and in the morning would be ash, but its burning was a miracle of surprising and insistent animation in the creation of light and heat; in the ballet of rising smoke; in the sound of cracks and reports as in a battle. And before it died it became a glowing, red city pulsing at the end of life like a failing heart. A neighbor newly rich from doing something tiny and invisible with smartphones had complained about the smoke, but Shymanski had put off the authorities with a bribe. The neighbor then came to speak to Jules, who agreed to have fewer fires, but not to do without them.
“The smoke is carcinogenic,” the man had insisted.
“So is your telephone: brain cancer. And you don’t have to worry about the smoke unless you inhale,” Jules had replied.
“It’s not like smoking a cigarette. Just the remnants in the air are harmful.”
“That’s also true of cigarettes,” Jules told him, “but I’d give years of life just to have the company of a fire now and then.” It was almost true. At least he would have wanted it to be so.
Off the terrace was a room equal in size to the outdoor space. The Lacours had lived mostly in this room. One side was an enormous bookshelf. In the center were a grand piano and space for a string quartet. A dining area and kitchen were on the north side, and a hall led to tiny bedrooms to the south. Cathérine’s was now a playroom for Luc, the object being to lure him to his grandfather’s with a paradise of toys, just as Jules had wanted to make the house a paradise when his family was young and it seemed that nothing would ever change.
But it did change. Jacqueline was gone; Cathérine visited, but lived out to the northwest, in Cergy; Luc now slept when his mother brought him, and didn’t have the energy to play with the toys. Living alone, Jules, like most widows and widowers, talked to himself. But it wasn’t quite so. Never once, ever, did he speak to himself, but always to Jacqueline, to his mother, to his father, and to none other. His affectionate reports were even in tone and unemotional. He didn’t think that anyone would actually hear them, although he allowed that somehow, by hope and through mystery, they might. It wasn’t that he thought they were listening, but rather that, whether they were listening or not, he wanted to speak to them. His loyalty had not in passing time been diminished by the slightest fraction, and he loved to summarize for them all that had happened since they had left. Although he wanted their opinion, and never got it, he spoke as if expecting it. For in their complete silence and immobility, and with the patience of eternity, the compassionate dead looking on were infinitely wiser than the living, so many of whom never stopped for an instant as they thrashed through life like fish in a net.
BY THE TIME JULES returned from the George V, the rain had stopped. He pulled up to the garage, pressed a button in the car, and the door was swallowed by the ceiling as if the house were inhaling a scarf. He drove in as the door closed behind him, and left the car, not bothering to lock it. In the spacious garage were a Rolls-Royce, a Maybach, and two lizard-like Italian motorcycles as black and swept back as the hair of their atrocious owners. Those self-idolizing idiots loved the dreadful sound of their expensive engines. The whine, like that of a huge blade encountering exceedingly hard wood, was their music. When, encased in leather and helmeted like bugs, they rode these machines, they gunned them as they came out of the garage and roared up the drive. You could hear them a little later racing across the Seine at Le Vésinet-Le Pecq, the sound they made like that of Stukas subduing Poland. The lizard boys seemed not to care about waking a thousand babies from their afternoon naps, or, at night, whole populations formerly asleep in what they had thought were quiet villages.
In good weather, the Rolls and Maybach were taken out twice a week for exercise. The family chauffeur would arrive in uniform to spend eight hours attending to them, which is why they were as clean and polished as the day they were born. The smell of their wood-and-leather interiors was worth paying for, especially as it was accompanied, if faintly, by the lingering perfumes of the elegant women Shymanski would often have ferried to his house for business meetings. He was in a wheelchair, unable to dash around the way he did when constructing his empire, which had sprouted with electric vigor from a little pharmacy in Passy. Now the modest shop had become a multinational combine with factories all around the world, producing not only drugs but jet engines, perfume, elevators, telephones, naval vessels, and Champagne.
Jules could have placed a hundred photographs of Jacqueline in the house, but he knew that she would disapprove. So he had only five. It was a big apartment, and five photographs were not overwhelming. He could’ve had a thousand pictures of Cathérine, but she was alive and young, so he had only two, and there was one of his parents, their sole surviving image. These photographs had become as much his world as the world itself, perhaps more so, for in them he found comfort and invulnerability. Like certain music, were it done right, they could be a window beyond life.