The Architecture of Fear (9 page)

Almost every piece of clothing or furniture, each kitchen utensil, had its own special feel to it, as though it were faintly impregnated with the memory of the person who had brought it into the apartment or of those who had used it in their own individual ways there afterward. Tracy found herself trying to picture the previous tenants, inventing names and faces, life stories, to go with the hints they had left behind. The armchair could only be Isobel's, probably bought in a flea market, and Isobel would have enjoyed sitting in it with the window thrown open, watching the wind whip the locust tree's branches around while the strings of plastic beads she had hung from them flashed in the sun. Yet Tracy was sure that it had been not Isobel but some previous tenant (a woman Tracy pictured as a tall Germanic blonde in her late thirties with a name like Dagmar, slender but severe-looking, always dressed in sober grays and greens) who had put the stained glass in the window. The man who'd left the bearskin coat behind had been there in winter, when the tree was bare and before the blonde woman had put in the stained glass; he would have kept the window closed, with curtains over it.

Like Tracy, they had all had to fit the things they inherited into their own individual constellations and labyrinths. They must have all discovered, as Tracy had, that there was only one place to put each thing in the apartment where it would be necessary and correct, and bring them closer to the order hidden within the apparent chaos.

After she'd finish working on the apartment she'd use what remained of the afternoon to do all the things tourists were supposed to do in Paris—shopping on the Right Bank, away from the Latin Quarter and its violence, visiting parks and museums and flea markets, sitting in cafes writing post cards back home about how beautiful Paris was—but above all doing them
alone,
and more out of some obscure sense of duty than because she wanted to be doing them.

The building was totally silent at night. When she got home she would run herself a bubble bath so hot she could barely stand to get into it, then lie there in the immense tub for hours, just watching the light play over the surface of the water, floating through dreams and fantasies and memories all tangled together, so that she was no longer just Tracy but someone as new and unexpected as the life she was finding here, so that she neither knew nor cared whether she was dreaming or awake, and Dagmar and the man in the bearskin coat seemed as real as Liz or her parents, as real as the apartment itself. Lying there in the hot water, totally relaxed and at peace, she would drift off to sleep, to reawaken only when she slipped down and got water in her nose or when the water grew so chill that the cold woke her. Then she would towel herself off hurriedly and crawl into bed in the shadowed darkness of the nook, where the hundreds of tiny plastic mirrors in the fabric on the walls caught the slivers of moonlight slanting in through the bull's-eye windows and broke them into faint, almost imperceptible stars, so that she slept in the center of her own private universe, with the constellations wheeling around her. And the next morning she would awaken gradually, with nothing to force her to get out of bed immediately, so that she could slip imperceptibly from her dreams into a waking that was as fresh and new, as much a solitary pleasure to be hugged to herself and cherished in secret, as her sleep.

At the end of the week she was moving a heavy portfolio from one cupboard to another, trying to make room, when one of the watercolors in it slipped out. She tried not to look at it as she picked it up, out of the same sense she had had, when she first put the portfolios away, that looking at it would be invading Isobel's privacy, when suddenly she realized that the portfolios and all the drawings and paintings in them were
hers,
just as everything else in the apartment was hers for so long as she stayed there, and it didn't make any difference whether or not Isobel was going to be coming back. She felt an unexpected sense of relief, as if she had finally put down some enormous weight that she'd been carrying without even knowing it was there, as she took out all the portfolios and paintings that she had so carefully stacked away in places they didn't belong, and began sorting through them.

She almost immediately found a portfolio full of sketches and drawings of Isobel, occasionally clothed but mostly in the nude. They were all by the same hand, and the signature on the ones which were signed was Carlos Viegas—Isobel's brother, she supposed, the one Isobel and Liz were trying to deliver from a too-Christian burial.

The drawings were in chronological order, starting when Isobel was thirteen or so and continuing up through what must have been just before Carlos's death. Almost all the drawings showed a very sweet-looking, fresh-faced and pretty young girl with none of the tension or exhaustion that had so dominated Isobel when Tracy had met her.

The last three drawings were totally different. Even the style had changed, so that if they hadn't been signed and dated she would never have believed they had been done by the same artist: the delicacy and grace were gone, replaced with an obsessive, leering precision.

All three drawings showed Isobel naked. In two of them she was depicted as ancient and shriveled, with the calculating eyes and mouth of a rapacious old woman, while in the third the same grotesque and leering crone was shown bloated and hideous, monstrously pregnant.

The drawings were sickening. No, not sickening, sick—literally sick, the work of someone insane. Tracy had never thought to ask what Isobel's brother had died of, but she was suddenly certain he had killed himself. There was so much insane hatred in those last drawings.

No wonder Isobel had looked so drawn, so worn.

Tracy tied the portfolio shut and put it away. She hesitated an instant, uncertain, then took out another. It held more drawings and sketches, but with Isobel's signature on them this time. The first one showed a fine-featured, startlingly handsome nude boy who resembled the Isobel in the pictures she'd just been looking at so much that Tracy knew he could only be her brother Carlos. She looked at the next picture—another drawing of Carlos, perhaps a few years younger.

She flipped back to the end, to see if there was a sketch showing Carlos as tortured and ugly as he must have looked when he'd done those hideous final drawings of Isobel, but the last drawing showed him sitting on the green chair with the stained-glass window half-open behind him, as handsome and insouciant as ever.

They must have spent their adolescence posing nude for each other. She felt that should have bothered her and yet, somehow, the grace and beauty of the drawings justified it, made it seem only natural.

She went back to the beginning, carefully studied the drawings one by one. Carlos reminded her of someone. Isobel? No. The resemblance was obvious, but that wasn't whom he reminded her of. And not Marcelo, either: neither Isobel nor Carlos looked at all like him.

Robbie? She frowned, irritated. What had made her think of Robbie? They didn't look at all alike. She couldn't even call up Robbie's face with much precision: he'd been athletic, good-looking in the same way as everyone else good-looking at their high school had been. Never striking like Carlos. She couldn't imagine anyone spending years drawing him over and over again.

She realized then that she'd been expecting to start missing Robbie and her friends, waiting for it, like right after she'd had her wisdom teeth pulled and she'd known that the anesthetic was wearing off, that the pain was going to be there even though she couldn't feel it yet. But there wasn't any pain. She didn't miss Robbie or her friends at all.

She couldn't imagine anyone caring enough to spend years drawing anyone she'd known back in high school.

In one of the cupboards she found a small glass-fronted case containing six beautiful iridescent blue-green scarab beetles mounted on black velvet, looking so much like jewels that for an instant she thought they were carved out of semiprecious stones. There were five other specimen cases in the same cupboard, full of other insects—more beetles, some butterflies, dragonflies, even one case full of three-inch tropical hornets, all mounted with the same meticulous care—but after glancing at them she put back all but the case with the scarabs in it.

She'd known the moment she saw the case that she needed it on her wall. She stored the acrylic mountainscape Isobel had had there away in a closet and put the scarabs up. Everything in the room seemed to rearrange itself around the specimen case, bringing the underlying order that much closer to manifesting itself—as though she were living in a Rorschach test like the ones she'd taken in school, and slowly learning to understand what its seemingly random blots and spirals told her about herself.

***

The morning of her first class she stuck her head out the window to see what the weather was like, only to discover a gray, football-shaped papier-mache wasps' nest that she was certain hadn't been there before hanging from a drainpipe less than a yard from the window. Ugly black and yellow wasps, like overgrown yellow jackets, were crawling over the nest, and in and out of the opening in its bottom. Wasps terrified her—had always terrified her, ever since she was six and had kicked over a rusty tomato juice can in the backyard with a nest of yellow jackets in it. They'd come swarming out to attack her, and she'd been rushed to the hospital to be treated for more than forty stings.

Don't panic, she told herself. Forcing herself to move as slowly and deliberately as she could, so as not to anger them, she pulled the two halves of the window shut and latched it tight, locking the wasps outside, where they couldn't get at her to hurt her.

As she was closing the gate behind her on her way out she stopped and stared back up at the window, but the wasp's nest was invisible against the house's peeling gray paint.

***

By her third day at the school she had already met a man she was interested in.

She'd been sitting alone in the Alliance's cafeteria, trying to eat some weird sticky brown dessert that she'd thought at first was some sort of chocolate pudding, but which had turned out to be something else—though she had no idea what—when he sat down across from her. He was in his late twenties, slim and elegant looking, almost as strikingly handsome as Isobel's brother Carlos, but in a very French way. He was wearing a light green tweed sports coat with a belt and a tighter, more rakish, cut than you saw on anything in the States, yet somehow it looked right on him, not ridiculous the way it would have looked on anyone back home.

He smiled at her as he sat down and asked her something in French, which of course she didn't understand. When she told him that she didn't speak French yet, he asked her in English, speaking very slowly, as though testing each word, "Are you Liz's sister?"

"Yes."

"I recognized you because you have red hairs like her. And because you don't have the same face but you have the same air."

"The same air?" She liked his voice. It was soft and melodious, gentle without sounding weak or effeminate.

"The same way of looking. Like you are sisters."

She nodded. "How do you know Liz?"

"I am a friend of a friend of Liz. Marcelo Ruiz." Tracy nodded. "You are as student here?"

"Yes. I'm Tracy."

"My name is Francois. I am a professeur here."

They talked for a few minutes—she asked him what the brown stuff was and he told her it was chestnut puree, which was enough to make her sure she didn't like it—then he excused himself because he had a class to teach. After that he sometimes joined her at lunch or when she went to the Alliance's basement cafe across the street with people from her class... which she soon discovered gave her a certain prestige with the other American girls, not only because he was charming and good-looking and a teacher, but just because he was French. They were here because they were in love with the idea of Paris and the French, but all any of them were meeting was other foreigners like themselves—Arabs, Africans, Eastern Europeans, South Americans and South-East Asians, every sort of people except French people.

She spent that Saturday sitting on the bench under the locust tree doing what little homework she'd been assigned—the Alliance catered mainly to foreigners just trying to pick up enough French to get by, either because they were in France to work or because they were spending a few months in Paris as tourists—and, when she'd finished with that, sketching.

Her courses were easy, and she'd been picking up French faster than she'd expected, so much so that she'd found herself spending as much time in class just daydreaming or filling the dead time with doodling and making little sketches of her teacher and classmates as she actually did improving her French—and her drawings, like her French, were much better than she would have expected. She'd always liked art back in school, even though she'd never been any good at it and had had to give it up because she kept getting terrible grades in art class. But somehow here, living in Paris in what could only be an artist's studio, with no one around to tell her that she didn't have any talent, things were different, and she could enjoy pretending she actually could draw.

Though maybe the problem had never really been that she didn't have any talent, maybe the problem had been that she'd never had anything interesting to draw. When she tried to sketch people she remembered from the States—Robbie and her friends back in Downer's Grove, or even Liz—the pictures came out as lifeless and insipid as ever, but when she tried to draw Isobel, other students from her class, even people she'd just glimpsed for an instant in the streets, she found that she could do much better.

Maybe it was only because they weren't Americans. There was something about Americans that made them all look the same, as though they were all wearing the same bland expressions over whatever underlying differences there might have been in their faces But there had to be something more involved: even the previous tenants she'd imagined to people the apartment—Carlos, of course, but also Dagmar, who'd put in the stained-glass window, and Jean-Luc, who'd had the bearskin coat, and Raoul and all the others—came alive when she drew them. Though that was probably because she had invented them—no, not invented them, but made them her own, taking their attributes, the clues that had told her who they had to be—the drawings and paintings, the stained-glass window, the scarabs in their display case—and rearranging them into meaningful constellations: a part of herself she'd projected on the outside world, a sort of mirror-image she was slowly constructing that would show her her true and secret self, like the apartment itself, part of the apartment, so that she was living
inside
the meaning, somehow, inside of who she was.