The Same River Twice (13 page)

When the phone rang, he paused the film and took the call. It was Eddie Bouvier, who’d spoken with the video distributors of Max’s films and been assured that all was as it should be. Sales since the release of
White Room/Black Room
had risen substantially, and there was even talk of rereleasing the four earlier titles if the uptick continued. Max thanked him, bookmarked the DVD he’d been watching, and went downstairs.

“So?” asked Jacques. “Did you find any improvements?” He sat behind the editing console, wearing a backward-turned baseball hat and a T-shirt that had
Mal Vu, Mal Dit
—Badly Seen, Badly Said—printed across the chest.

“Nothing,” said Max. “There’s nothing to find. I’m crazy to look.”

“To look is never crazy. Someone told me that.”

“Right.” It irritated Max unreasonably to hear his own words tossed back at him. “Listen, stick around, okay? I may need you later.”

At the apartment, he washed his face and flushed his eyes with saline droplets. He felt sullied by the afternoon’s pursuits, with their overtones of spite and retrospection, and he cast about for how to redeem what was left of the day. Then, remembering Allegra’s e-mail, he booted up the computer, launched the telecom software, and, after sitting a few moments blankly before the screen, began to type.

Dear Allegra
, he wrote.
Thanks for your message, which I really appreciated. You’ve got your mother’s wit and preemptive good sense. Lucky girl
.

I was sorry to hear about your friend Alison’s troubles. You’re right, I really did like her: she’s smart and seemed to be a real friend to you. I won’t embarrass us both by giving you
the standard-issue drug lecture at this point. Let’s just say that she showed bad judgment in letting that guy stash his pills in her locker. Legally that makes her an accomplice, and juvenile court is no place anyone wants to be. Enough said. I hope things work out for her
.

About the summer
. Here Max hesitated, choosing his words carefully.
I understand your wanting to be with your friends, especially when you’re about to make the move to upper school. You’ve got big changes coming up and exciting times. But family is important too
. Again he paused. Just by using that word he was laying himself open to the whole arsenal of sighs, sulks, and ironic silences that Allegra deployed to remind him of his perfidy and to chastise herself, a girl so catastrophically wanting, as he knew she sometimes suspected, that she didn’t even deserve a father. But Max persisted.

Your mother and I love you very much, and you will always be our daughter. Nothing can change that, sweetness. So I’m thinking about you, and I’d like to find a plan for us to be together this summer. Maybe you could spend half of it in New York, half of it here. I’ll call later and we can talk about it, okay?
He added a paragraph of small news, a word of love from Odile, then signed the note and hit the send button.

CÉLESTE PULLED TWO PORTRAITS
of Turner from the storage rack and propped them up against the adjacent wall. The strains of a Shostakovich string quartet wafted in from the front room, and the scent of linseed oil hung in the air like ripe fruit.

Lighting a cigarette, Céleste contemplated her work. “You know, he’s not so easy to paint,” she told Odile. “The features are strong, and the hands. But one senses right away that this man—”

“I can hear every word you’re saying,” Turner called from the kitchen, where he was attempting to replace an electrical switch on the water heater.

“—that he isn’t comfortable in his skin. He has several methods of hiding this, all of them convincing enough to anyone but himself. The problem becomes, how to capture this richness? Because to be fallible to oneself is a kind of richness, no? It is human.”

Odile approached one of the portraits. Turner was depicted standing nude against a whitewashed brick wall, his arms folded across his chest, his brown-black eyes glistening with a mix of bravado and something that Odile didn’t rush to identify. “You must know him well,” she said.

Céleste gave her a sideways glance. “To me it’s like traveling. For the first twenty-four hours in an unfamiliar city, one can see and understand its
entirety. Afterward, one may live for many years in that same city before understanding it again.” She blew smoke toward the ceiling. “With people it is the same. I painted that one when Turner first arrived in Paris. I’m satisfied with it.”

Shifting her attention to the other portrait, Odile saw that it had been done some time after the first. Turner, again nude, was seated beside a green metal café table, against a cream-colored backdrop. He held a glass of pastis in one hand and was unshaven, studiously casual. About the eyes, a smudge of fatigue. He appeared disconsolate.

“That was two years later,” said Céleste, “right before he began working for the auction house.”

“I’m not sure I would have recognized him,” Odile said.

From the kitchen came the sound of metal clattering to the floor. A string of curses followed, then another small crash.

Céleste smoked and studied the portrait. “It is not a success, this painting. Maybe I was distracted by the obvious. I don’t know.”

“But not at all,” said Odile, surprising herself. “Here the obvious is true. You caught him with his guard down. A rare moment.”

“Yes?” Céleste kept her eyes on the portrait. “Then you also must know him well.”

“No,” Odile replied. “We’re only acquaintances.”

Céleste was returning the paintings to the storage rack when Turner appeared, holding the faulty switch in one hand, a screwdriver in the other. “You know, Céleste, I’m really not the ideal electrician.” He paused, as though waiting to be relieved of his chore. “All right,” he said at last. “Fine. Is there a hardware shop nearby?”

“Go right out the gate, then right again,” Céleste told him.

He looked from one woman to the other, shook his head, and left.

“I tease him because he’s spoiled,” Céleste explained. “But also charming, and I enjoy being charmed. Don’t you?”

“Not so much, no. I don’t have the patience for it.”

Céleste’s deeply lined face expanded in a smile of pure delight. “What a pleasure to meet you, Odile.” Her blue eyes glistened. “May I offer you coffee?”

SEATED AT THE KITCHEN TABLE
with that afternoon’s
Le Monde
spread out before him, Max was startled by the repeated dull thump of someone dragging a plastic bin over the cobblestones below. It was Rachel, come to drop off their garbage. He cranked open a window and invited her up.

“Don’t you want some footage of me hauling trash?” she asked when she reached the top of the stairs. “It’s, like, so representative.”

Because the Seine was not legally part of Paris, refuse generated on the river could not be disposed of within city limits, and clandestine dumping was universal. “Maybe later,” Max replied. “What I need now is your company and sweet good nature.”

Miming a curtsy, Rachel smiled at him and crossed the room to install herself on the sofa. She wore white canvas sneakers, faded black jeans cut low on her hips, and a red jersey top that stopped well short of her navel. Her jet-black hair was up, carelessly gathered in a clip but parted at the scalp in a zigzag pattern Max hadn’t seen before. Her heavy black-framed glasses perched lopsidedly on her nose, slowly sliding down until she was obliged to push them back up again. Even sitting down, she looked taller than her actual six feet.

“How’s the
Nachtvlinder?”
Max asked. “Get her cleaned up?”

“Pretty much. One part of the wheelhouse roof is burned through, but we were really lucky. It could’ve been much worse.”

“Definitely. What if we hadn’t been there to put it out? There’d be nothing left, right?”

Rachel shuddered. “Let’s not visualize.”

“Very strange, though,” Max said, shaking his head. “I wonder who did it.”

“Groot thinks it was someone who wanted our berth,” Rachel replied. “All the legal places to dock in Paris are taken, and there’s a waiting list that goes on forever. Maybe this person got tired of waiting.”

“Maybe. But if somebody really wanted to burn you out, wouldn’t he pick a time when you weren’t there? The hose, the fire extinguisher, all of us sitting there in plain sight—it must have been obvious, even in the dark, that we could put out the fire before it did any serious damage. Whoever was responsible had to have known that.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying this was meant to intimidate you and your guests, not burn up your boat.”

She smiled wanly. “Well, whichever, it didn’t work. That’s all I care about.”

“You’re a pragmatist. An outcome-type person.”

“That’s right,” she said. “I’m an American like you, remember?”

They laughed together. It was an unspoken imperative of expatriate life in Paris not to cluster with fellow countrymen. Doing so suggested a lack of moral resources or, worse, of wit, and Max sometimes felt that flouting this
rule lent an extra edge to his interest in Rachel. They were each the only American that the other saw with any regularity.

“At least I’m married to a French girl,” Max said. “What kind of credibility do you get from Groot? People here think the Dutch are all pornographers and pot smokers.”

Rachel laughed. “Poor Groot. But really, to be fair, I’ve never understood why the French have this reputation for rudeness. They’re so nice to me, always offering their help. I sit down in a café, open a menu, and right away somebody’s translating for me and telling me not to order the pig’s feet.”

“You fulfill a national fantasy,” he said. “The American ingénue. Jeanie Seberg in
Breathless.”

“Right. I’m so innocent.”

“But you’re not, of course. What people respond to lies much deeper. It’s just that they need an excuse to succumb to their own good intentions.”

“Unlike the average California girl,” Rachel added, “who needs an excuse not to.”

Max went to the kitchen and poured two glasses of mineral water. He could hear the widow from the building immediately behind the mews remonstrating with the couple next door, a jeweler and a contractor who were raising their roof by half a story. The widow claimed that the heightened chimney would send smoke directly into her kitchen window. The couple argued that the prevailing winds blew in the other direction. Hundreds of bitter words, spread out over days, had been expended on the subject.

Returning with the drinks, Max found Rachel polishing her glasses with a lavender tissue. He sat down opposite her and when she finished, said, “I’ve been trying to think of just how to ask you this. It’s a bit awkward, and I don’t want to overstep.” He looked carefully into her deep blue eyes.

“Go ahead, Max.”

“I guess it boils down to this: if Odile were in some kind of trouble—a tight spot that for one reason or another she didn’t want me to know about—would you tell me if I asked?”

Rachel didn’t blink. “Probably not, no. Not if she didn’t want me to.”

“Right. That’s the only decent answer, isn’t it?”

“Sure, a friend’s a friend.”

“But if the situation got out of hand, and she couldn’t deal with it herself?”

Shifting in her seat, Rachel began to look uncomfortable. “Max, I’m sure that if she were in real trouble, she’d tell you, okay?”

“It’s been on my mind.”

“Just stop worrying. I mean it.”

They drank their water and talked of other things. Someone they both knew had recently been arrested for identity theft—credit card and telecom fraud in three time zones. A sous-chef with a wife and two children, he wasn’t at all the type, but neither Max or Rachel could think of much to do for him.

“IT IS NOT SO OFTEN
that I have a visitor who would appreciate these,” Céleste said, “but when you mentioned you were a designer …”

Odile nodded. “They’re beautiful.”

The two stood side by side in Céleste’s bedroom with the closet open and several items of antique couture laid out on the bed. A gown of golden silk, pleated in a twist. Another of black lace, embroidered with hundreds of tiny seed pearls. A scoop neck burgundy dress, a midnight-blue suit, a bustier in brocade, a backless dress in emerald taffeta. Odile studied them all, lingering over the details. Here was a treasure trove of design ideas, and even as she admired these clothes, each item custom-made, she saw how to adapt them, simplify them, take them in different directions. She reached out to touch a dress of jade-green silk, wrapped at the front and secured with a dozen hidden fasteners.

“Would you like to try it on?” Céleste asked.

Odile kicked off her shoes, stripped to her underwear, and slipped into the dress. She and Céleste were still struggling with the fasteners when Turner, his duty now discharged, stuck his head into the room.

“Lovely,” he said, looking Odile over. Then to Céleste, “Are we going to paint today, because if not …”

Céleste stopped what she was doing and went over to inspect Turner, drawing him into the room, circling him as she looked. “You didn’t lose the kilo,” she concluded.

“There was no kilo.”

She shook her head grimly. “Something is not right. I’m going to set that painting aside for awhile and let it breathe.” Turning back to Odile, she seemed to assess the situation and, after a moment’s thought, announced, “This afternoon, with her permission, I would like to paint Odile.”

Odile pushed the closet door shut and regarded herself in the mirror bolted to its front. Not infrequently she felt her true self to be obscured by her appearance—Max understood this well—and she’d been intrigued by the claims Turner had made for Céleste’s insight. Meeting the older woman’s eyes in the mirror, she said, “Yes, why not. I’ll wear the dress.”

Céleste set her up on the sofa, helping her to find the most natural pose, and after several tries Odile positioned herself upright in the middle. The green dress was bright against the maroon upholstery, her pale skin luminous.

“It is more relaxed to lean back,” Céleste suggested. “Yes, like that. Good.”

Turner sat astride a folding chair, watching the choreography unfold. Odile was keenly aware of his gaze but refused to let him spoil the moment. For whatever reason, she found sustenance in Céleste’s attention. It seemed to be something she’d been waiting for.