“A thousand years ago.”
He looked at her from top to toe. She was not at all, as the other students had said, strange. She was rare, breathtaking. “I don’t see,” he said, “if indeed your ancestors were magnificently refined, that in those thousand years anything was lost. Did you grow up,” he asked, “as one of your fellow students speculated, a lonely girl in a house full of books?”
“I did. I did. From my room you could see the Alps – snow-covered – and we had enough land so that not a single work of man was visible around us. A swimming pool, horses, a tennis court, but neither my father nor my mother played tennis, so I would hit the ball against the backboard – and play the cello, another thing you can do alone, although of course,” she said pregnantly and a little archly, “you need a teacher.”
“What does your father do?” Jules asked, thinking that her father was probably young enough to be his son.
“Neither of my parents is living. My father tried to make money but lost it. He was never good at that.”
“The tennis court? The swimming pool? And the rest?”
“Inherited.”
“You’re here for the lessons I owe you?” He thought, what am I doing? And he felt a chill and something akin to falling.
“Only if you want to. I had a job in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and thought I would stop by, since you never showed up.”
“I’m so sorry. Would you mind if I changed? I don’t feel comfortable giving a lesson in running clothes. Maybe if it were summer and everyone else was in shorts.”
“I’ll set up. Is that yours?” She gestured to Jules’ cello leaning in a corner. “Obviously it’s yours, but I mean, it looks …. Like mine, it’s not just off the shelf, is it?”
“No. It was my father’s, and it’s very old, Venetian. I heard him play it only once.”
“Why?”
“Let me change. Did you bring music? Do you have anything specific in mind?”
“Neither.”
“Then I suppose it’s all up to me.”
WHEN JULES RE-ENTERED, fully dressed, he looked younger and more dignified than when he was in running clothes. Among other things, in near panic mode he had combed his hair, and the cut and collar of a polo shirt does wonders. élodi had taken a chair opposite the chair closest to Jules’ cello, her own instrument resting as casually against her as a sleeping child, the bow in her right hand pointing relaxedly at the floor.
Before Jules sat down he asked if she would like something to eat or drink. “Thank you. I spent the afternoon at a wedding reception, and the musicians ate for yesterday, today, and tomorrow.”
“I remember doing that,” Jules said. “Sometimes we drank so much Champagne that what we played sounded Chinese. We were terrified that we wouldn’t be paid, but they never seemed to notice, because they had had twice as much Champagne. And young people who have just been married never notice anything but themselves anyway. I remember that, too. It’s as if you’re in an opium dream.”
élodi seemed slightly hurt by this. He thought he understood, although if it were so it would be very hard to believe. He took both a paternal interest and the liberty to ask, “No boyfriend?” He wanted her to understand that he was too ancient to be exploring with his own interest in mind, but to his embarrassment he realized after he spoke that he was doing just that.
She understood perfectly. She shook her head in an almost imperceptible motion that meant no, and that she suffered.
“Inexplicable,” he said. She had brought forth every fatherly instinct in him, and he loved her in that way, too. “Absolutely inexplicable. Except that perhaps you scare them off because they think they can never come close to matching you.”
“I’d hardly say that. It’s just like everything else. I have refined expectations, a very slim pocketbook, and I don’t want to be rescued.”
“Someone will come along, someone with equally refined expectations and an equally slim pocketbook, and you’ll fall in love like crazy. My late wife and I – that’s her,” he said, pointing to a photo of Jacqueline that was on the piano: she was in her gray suit, and devastatingly beautiful – “had the best time of our lives when we had nothing. I know that’s a cliché, but you’ll see.”
élodi nodded and looked down. She thought after seeing the picture of Jacqueline that what she had assumed and felt about her attractiveness to Jules was both incorrect and presumptive. She was as beautiful as Jacqueline, but she knew that remembrance of things past is the preeminent anchor of the heart.
Jules understood from her expression what she might have been thinking, but rather than explaining to her, as he could not, that the pull of élodi in the present was no less than the power of Jacqueline in her absence, he changed the subject. They had already waded in too deeply, as they had the first instant they beheld one another, and the first time they touched. Even so, no water was too deep to exit. He’d done so before, and would do so now.
“I’ve been remiss,” he said, “and I apologize. The next lesson will be in the studio in the Cité de la Musique.”
“I hate it there,” she said. “I hate the architecture. I hate the commute. The Romans made the age of concrete, and it took a thousand years to come to this ….” She pointed at the warm, rich wood of her cello. “Look at the patina, like the skin of something that’s alive. And now our age is again the age of concrete.”
“We could meet in my office at the old faculty. They didn’t think about this when they built it, but the acoustics are better. Wood and stone.”
“Why not here? Isn’t it allowed?”
“It’s allowed, but it’s so far.”
“It reminds me of my house.”
This caused him to ask, “How is it that, for someone with a slim pocketbook, you dress as you do?” He meant beautifully. “The suit you were wearing when we recorded ….”
“Chanel.”
“Chanel. And this?” He gestured toward her sunburst of a dress.
“A young designer in Italy, young but expensive. The only friend I have in Paris is an apprentice – I can’t tell you for whom. I promised. They buy these clothes to reverse-engineer the cut, the fabric, the stitching, tailoring. They literally take them apart. She smuggles out the pieces and fits them to me and to herself.”
“That’s a great trick,” Jules said. “And,” to compliment her again, “it works.”