Because Jules had turned cold to her, élodi stopped the lessons. She thought that, angry because of her forwardness, he had pulled away. In the painful and embarrassing position of having opened herself warmly and courageously only to be rejected, she quickly came to resent him, but she didn’t understand that it was only with the most agonizing discipline that he was able to resist her attraction. She felt as if he were punishing her, so she transferred to another teacher – to Levin, his rival – and broke off all contact. Though it was what he wanted, he found it impossibly difficult. He tried not to think of her, but thought of her all the time. She tried to put him out of mind, but she thought of him sometimes with overpowering love.
Now he had no individual students, and only one class every week, sparsely attended. His reputation among the up-and-coming and those in mid-career was that of someone who was used up and on the way out, as most certainly he was, even though he retained every quality, skill, and talent for which students once had sought him. But he was suddenly older, and it seemed useless for him to focus on and repeat things he had known and practiced for most of his life. That which to the public had formerly been exciting was now forgotten.
Many years before, as he struggled to support his young family, he had had a job in a quartet playing at a Swedish Embassy reception. During a break in the music he rested quietly on his gilded chair, unnoticed by the British and American ambassadors in conversation nearby. The American asked the Englishman if he had seen an editorial in Le Monde the day before. “I don’t read the papers,” the Englishman replied. “They’re not worthwhile.”
“Cables are enough?”
“Cables are too much, and I read them only when I must. We have a low-level person who stands on the cliffs at Dover and barks across the Channel.” Understating while overstating, he was perfectly in character, and, still holding his bow, Jules cocked his head to listen.
“But really,” the American said. “You have to know what’s going on. I spend hours and hours each day keeping up.”
“I don’t.”
“How is that? How can you not?”
“There are only so many plots of action,” the British ambassador said, “and they repeat themselves. If not exactly, still closely. I’ve been in the diplomatic service for almost fifty years, and when something comes up, as it does every day, I need know only the one or two details that depart from the same thing I’ve seen a hundred times before. My young aides are surprised as each situation unfurls. That’s how they learn. But I know what’s coming already and can save a lot of effort. They look to us not because we’re smarter – we aren’t – but simply because we’ve been there. It’s all very neat, and given that when you get to be my age you have to conserve your energy, it dovetails.”
“I’ll try it,” the American ambassador promised. But he was thirty years younger.
“You can’t. Not yet. It wouldn’t work. Eventually, however, it just comes to you. You slide into it without even knowing, and it’s a wonderful way to end up, because it’s like looking back at the world as if it were a play. You see things as a whole.”
Upon hearing this, Jules had looked forward to when he might have calm, clear vision, and equanimity. But he’d had no choice other than to plunge back into getting and spending, striving, struggling, and all the things appropriate to his age at the time.
Perhaps because of something in her early life, the way she was raised, her loneliness, or a quality inherent to her, élodi had passed those things by and was already in the state of those whose appetites have largely disappeared and their lifelong desires become just a flicker or a dim memory. At an inappropriately young age, combined with the resilience, strength, and sexual heat of youth, she had the outlook of a woman who had lived a long and full life. In that way, Jules was appropriate for her, though cruelly appended was that it could only have been for a very short and perhaps unhealthy few years.
Having passed by and passed up just about everything, and now, in a sense, actually rich, because he knew he would make only one more quarterly insurance payment and had therefore more than a hundred thousand Euros left to spend before August – more than one thousand a day – Jules decided that he would try to let down his guard. The insurance proceeds were set to go where they were needed. He had thinned out his possessions and organized those that remained for Cathérine to keep. He paid no rent, owed nothing to anyone, and had dissolved his friendships not out of anger but because it was time for them to end. He would not even have remained friends with Fran?ois Ehrenshtamm would that have been possible. Unlike the British ambassador, Fran?ois was still enmeshed in the details of life. He was ambitious and craved reward. Jules didn’t know whether Fran?ois’ youthful energy upwelled to fulfill the needs of his continuing appetites, or if his continuing appetites were the result of upwelling youthful energy. But it didn’t matter, because, like Jules, Fran?ois was in a boat with no oars.
That boat was rapidly approaching falls within a stone’s throw. The mist from torrents of water had already sparkled down on them as it arced back and rose from the edge. Beyond the edge the world was blue, the drop infinite, and no one had ever seen beyond it. Now that it was so close, Jules was fixed on what was ahead, but Fran?ois was still blindly concerned with his position in the boat, fighting with anyone who would fight with him about definitions, words, economics, justice, and ideas, all so that he might continue to accumulate that which he soon would not at all need.
Jules taught his one remaining class just out of habit, like making his bed when he got up in the morning. Some people, because no private person must make his bed, don’t. He did, always and always meticulously. Apart from continuing certain lifelong routines and bringing expensive gifts to Cathérine and David – they thought he had robbed a bank, which fit intriguingly with his insistence that they plan for Switzerland or America – he spent his days walking through Paris and Saint-Germainen-Laye, in the forest there, and the gardens, where he would sit in the spring sun for hours, resting, still, and listening to the wind.