“The first instant I saw you I fell in love. It’s not right that I did. I don’t deserve it, and nothing can or should come of it. I’m three times your age. My own child is much older than you. I’ve always had contempt for men who reach for life through the agency of a young woman. It’s understandable that they would as their lives are rapidly vanishing. But it’s unmanly, I’d even say cowardly. Better to tie yourself to the mast of your convictions and loyalties and receive your death without trying to escape in the arms of someone as fresh and beautiful as you, because there is no escape.
“But I wanted you to know, just so that you would know, that when we shook hands when we first met, I didn’t want to let go. I saw you extend your hand – do you remember? You were wearing this dress – I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything as beautiful. That I wanted it to last forever is not just my own lunacy, but a testament to you.”
“But it happens all the time,” she said.
“People falling in love with you when they touch your hand?”
“Love between people of vastly different ages.”
“It’s a mistake and it doesn’t work.”
“You could have twenty-five years.”
“Really? Have you ever seen a hundred-year-old man, naked?” She laughed, sadly, but she laughed. “Taking it to an even further extreme, my father’s great grandfather lived to a hundred and six. That was deep in the nineteenth century. So, if I were a hundred and six, you’d be fifty-six. You’d still have a beautiful, lithe body, and could run and leap, and make love for hours. Besides, I’m not going to live to the year twenty forty-six. Hardly.”
“Maybe ten good years?” she asked.
“Unfortunately, it’s not a negotiation. I’m not even going to see September.”
“You’re ill?”
For fear of statements that might be subpoenaed and prejudice the insurance payments, he could say only, “No.”
“Then how do you know? At first I thought you were fifty.”
“Very kind of you.”
“Really.”
“Even so. I know because … How can I explain it?” He sought something to say other than the truth, but what he did say turned out to be truth that he had felt but not recognized. “It hangs over me. Certain things I’ve done.”
“In the war? Have you killed anyone?”
What he said was, by necessity, veiled. “I think that one would only kill another man if it were to protect the innocent from evil. And that God would forgive saving lives by taking others, if the lives taken were those of the aggressors. And if one doesn’t believe in God, then it must seem strange that conscience acts just like Him. But no matter how morally correct or urgent killing may be, you can’t escape having done it. The way the world is may have forced you to it, but although you may try, you can’t wash away the sin. Good deeds afterward don’t compensate. You’ve ended a life that God has given, extinguished it. You’ve put paid to a soul that by definition is far beyond anything you can comprehend, and nothing you can do or think can make up for it. If something like this were so, if it were with me all the time, how could I ever bring someone as lovely as you into it?”
“What if you were loved back? Couldn’t that hold it in abeyance?”
He thought, she’s young. Any feeling she might have for me can vanish in a day or two, which is as it should be.
“What if you’re loved in such a way that it doesn’t matter how old you are, or if and when you die?” she persisted. Her generosity was beautiful in itself, but he had to answer the question honestly.
“It would be the same,” he said, expecting her to dissolve in hurt or anger, especially when he went on to say, “There’s a tradition in this faculty of young, magnificent girls who get involved with decrepit old musicians like me. It’s not right.” Now he was sure he had been cruel, and he expected anger.
But élodi was most unusual. Without either giving way or showing signs of confusion – emotion, yes, you could see it in her face – she said, “I see. I switched over to Levin when I felt you didn’t want me to come. Frankly, I play better than he does, because he has no feeling. He’s great for pure, technical musicianship, and I do have to finish up with him.”
Jules was taken aback by her calm. “After how I just said what I just said, I expected something else, maybe an explosion.”
“From me?”
He nodded.
“Not from me. I don’t explode. But I want to resume with you, privately. At your house, through the middle of July, when I leave Paris for Lyon. You may remember that I came to you. That I wanted you to teach me. I still do. I can pay, but I won’t offer to, because I know you wouldn’t accept.”
“I was surprised that you came to me.”
“And why do you think that was?”
“I don’t know. Scheduling? Someone said I was a good teacher?”
She shook her head to indicate that it was something else. “I heard you play. Then I saw you one time as you left the building in the Cité de la Musique. I was on the corner, ten meters away. You stopped to stare at a tree as the wind was shaking its leaves in the sunlight. I was amazed to see that because of this you missed the bus. It was then. I understand what you’ve told me. You’re right. Nothing will happen between us except the music. But some people fall in love with a touch while shaking hands, and others, just as inexplicably, in other ways.”
If, at Its End, Your Life Takes on the Attributes of Art
AS IF SHE WERE talking not to her father but to a splinter she was digging out of her flesh, and with a bitterness such as he had never directed toward her in all her life, Cathérine lashed out at Jules. “It’s spring,” she said, “it’s not close to Christmas, and we’re Jewish.”
“I know that,” he answered, slightly afraid, because he knew the danger when a woman with red hair is angry. “In fact, I knew it decades before you were born, and, believe it or not, I had something to do with it.”
“So why this? He can’t even do puzzles.”
“Yes he can. He’s doing it. Okay, it says ‘three and up, twenty-four giant pieces’. But look, he’s got half of it done already.”
Oblivious of his mother and grandfather, Luc removed puzzle pieces from the box one at a time and, as slowly and carefully as someone assembling a hydrogen bomb, fitted them – though not always at first – into the right place.
“‘Babar et le Père No?l’,” Cathérine said resentfully as the charming, gentle elephant, airborne in the blue and costumed in the red suit of Père No?l, took shape.
“I also got the fishing game. It’s not specifically Christian,” Jules said.
“Fish?”
“Well, not ‘loaves and fishes’ anyway, and look at that elephant’s face. It’s what every child needs – so kind, unthreatening, and colorful. Another world, and a good one. So what if he’s Père No?l?”
“It’s not appropriate,” Cathérine said, weakening as she saw Luc warmly entranced by the gravity-less Babar.