He turned his attention to the food. He always ate lightly and suspiciously when in the air. There before him on the plate was a square of some kind of fish, which looked like a piece of yellow pastry. He hardly drank alcohol at all and never when flying, but now made an exception of a split of Pol Roget, studying the bottle as he ate, rather than staring at the partition. The label was admirably modest: some graceful penmanship set against a plain white background. Unlike other brands, Pol Roget was bereft of shining foil at the neck. Champagne was made to go with sparkling and reflected light, and there was no gleam from the bottle itself. But the reading lamp illuminated the bubbles as they rose in undulating silver lines through a sea of gold.
In this little thing and things like it – the perfect and complex ascent of the tiny orbs, all exactly the same size and flawlessly spherical; the uncountable molecules of air that with unvarying obedience to fluid mechanics kept the plane aloft across thousands of miles of ocean; the fuel that burned without a hiccup; the turbines that spun without flying apart – life’s secrets were beyond calculation or understanding. Not merely the three-body problem, not merely physics, but rather the faithful consistency of nature. The light was invariably precise as it shone upon the tiny, reflective spheres in the Champagne, moving exactly according to universal laws. Just as the plane was held miles high by air that even in the light was invisible, so the most discrete effects betrayed the most fundamental truths.
After the Champagne and before he knew it, the tray had been removed and the cabin lights dimmed. Somewhere over the sea, ignorant of how many hundred kilometers they were off Halifax or in how many hundred Iceland would be directly north in the darkness, Jules Lacour put his seat back a quarter of the way, checked his watch, and looked out the window. The cabin had grown quiet and the stewardesses had retreated. Standing in an alcove, illuminated from above and framed in black, they spoke softly and sometimes laughed. Most of their work was done until morning. Perhaps the one he liked was thinking of him.
Of the seven hours and twenty minutes of flight, almost six hours remained – six hours in which to think of how to plan revenge, save a life, and give his own. With stars all around, the plane split a path through the night, rising and falling more smoothly than a boat on a gently rolling sea.
Paris in Recollection
ROWING ON THE SEINE is difficult and can sometimes be dangerous. The current is strong, especially after heavy rains when the water is high and the river can run so fast a good oarsman fighting the flow as best he can stays in place or finds himself moving backward. Barges that are anything but nimble, bateaux-mouches, motorboats driven too fast by men who have had too much wine, and semi–submerged tree-trunks, pallets, or winter ice threaten the narrow and delicate single shells. Add to that the whirlpools, bends, abutments, and unforgiving walls past which the water is inflexibly channeled, and it isn’t a rower’s paradise, especially if you’re old.
But having rowed on the Seine for the sixty years since he was fourteen, Jules hadn’t lost his touch. Long experience gave him an almost perfect knowledge of the eddies, ricochets, and fast water of the course as it wound past bridges and islands, and barges tied to the embankments. Nonetheless, he was a little afraid each time he went out, because although everyone flipped over now and then, his balance was uncanny, and never once having gone in the water he didn’t want to mar a perfect record of more than half a century. But more than that, he felt stalked by probabilities. If he did lose his balance, without having done so ever in his life, would he know what to do? That he was an excellent swimmer was irrelevant. He might panic if the water were cold, his heart might stop, he might be crushed by a speeding barge.
Not this day in August, a few months before he knew he was going to go to New York, when he glided in on the current to a perfect landing at the dock. Had anyone seen him on the river, glistening with sweat in the August heat, he could have been mistaken for a muscular athlete in his late forties or early fifties. It took work, a lifetime of discipline, showing up when miserably cold and rowing or running through snow and sleet, never eating quite as he might like, and losing precious hours he might have spent in furthering his career. But Jules had resolved from early on, even before he knew it, that until the day he died he would be strong enough so as never to be unable to defend himself.
The shower in the rickety boathouse, a barge illegally moored to the embankment, had a floor of eucalyptus planks so saturated with fragrant oil that it neither rotted nor grew slippery. Though the stream of water was thin and the austerity of the boathouse difficult to exaggerate, he didn’t need luxury. He wanted neither an elegant locker room nor a stand piled with thick newly washed towels, nor a Mercedes waiting for him outside, but only to know that, refreshed and clean, he could sprint up the stone stairs to the street and be not even slightly out of breath.
After Jacqueline died he had clung to routine: rising; breakfast; the walk to the RER A; transfer at Chatelet Les Halles (rough and dangerous); the RER B to Luxembourg/Boul-Miche; passing through the portals of the old Sorbonne and noting with appreciation their ancient form; then, later, in the hideous new facilities at Clignancourt in the northeast of Paris; the start of class; music in the presence of young people animated by energy, vigor, and struggle; lessons and critiques in which he was carried away by the mystical reach of sound; then punishing exercise on the river; wonderful relief as he walked through the city; the train back; shopping; dinner; reading; practice; reflection; memory; prayer; and sleep.
Taken together, these were the metronome of his life, and he was comforted by their steady procession, like the ticking of a clock, that eventually without fail would bring him to the woman he had loved for most of his life. But today would be different. Because the rhythm of the days that would see him along and bring him to her was imperfect, marred by his weakness and his will to live, today he would arrive later than usual in Saint-Germain-en-Laye because he was going to seek solace not in music or in memory or in a synagogue or church, but in something quite different. He was going to do the impossible. He was going to see a psychiatrist, in Paris, in August.
THERE WAS ONE left, anyway, in the Villa Mozart, three flights up in a building so quiet that to walk into it was like becoming deaf. His waiting room had sea green walls and Empire furniture of mahogany and cherry. Jules had hardly had time to sit down when the doctor appeared. A short, bearded man with glasses – the fashion after Freud – he stood at the soundproofed door to his office and looked at his prospective patient, who was older than he was, though not by much. Despite the fact that he was one of the few psychiatrists present in the city in August, Dunaif’s prestige in the profession was legendary. Ignorant of that, Jules had found him in the telephone book, his fourteenth call.