The Same River Twice (16 page)

Night, and once again I am lost in the powder-white sands of insomnia, my thoughts racing senselessly, my heartbeat numbering the minutes of my longing. How I
wish I could return to my previous ignorance, to the countless ways in which I misunderstood these intimations that rule me now as might a wicked clown, an emperor clown, a true lord of misrule. When I thought that what I longed for was fortune, I gambled, of course—what else if not gamble? A marvelous moment, that not-quite eternity between the bet and the outcome, when the ball rolls contrary to the wheel, spiraling down toward that larger rotation and the imperatives of physics, of red and black, odd and even, the number chosen and the ones that might have been. A man can live in that interval, and I did, between bet and outcome. The outcome was important, yes, but not because with it one lost or won; the outcome was essential because only then could one place another bet and so enter again into that whole marvelous process of suspension in which the moment, each moment, holds the promise of being unique. So it goes without saying that I lost more than I won and yet played on and on and on until I reached the state of indebtedness in which I now so comically exist, working like an indentured servant for S. An appropriate punishment, since what is it I do for S if not duplicate the duplicate, reiterate the reiterated, repeat and repeat what has already been completed and known and registered, so that the very possibility of singularity is mocked by my efforts and torn pitilessly into self-identical pieces? But what I longed for wasn’t
fortune, as it turns out. Nor love, nor any of the other things I mistook it for when I was so blessedly ignorant, that is to say young, not so many months ago
.

Odile drew the chair out from the desk and sat down. There was a pack of cigarettes beside the computer keyboard; she lit one up and went on to the next entry.

Yesterday I finally prevailed on S to upgrade his hardware. In principle it should now be possible for me to turn out twelve units every three minutes, twenty-four hundred on the average night. This is a considerable improvement, though S insists he could dispose of ten times that many daily through the existing network. No doubt he could, but I can only work with what he gives me. Why, I ask myself, doesn’t he invest enough in equipment to meet the demand? He must be paying more off the top than I thought. Protection money? Maybe. But it remains true that the less I know about the mechanics of his operation, the better
.

The next several entries consisted of little more than columns of figures set beside short strings of letters. Failing to make sense of them, Odile skipped impatiently ahead.

Or is it that my very longing for another life prevents me from seeing what is right in front of me, that every moment is a door through which I could pass, leaving behind the daily repetitions and redundancies of this world in which everything of consequence, really everything, is already known? Sometimes I almost think so. Surely this is what I secretly hope for when I send one of my projects out into the streams of commerce
and consciousness, and, however circuitously, into the minds and souls of strangers. What began as an exercise seems more and more an effective tactic with real-world applications, possibly a model for a different future. And so maybe instead of shielding myself from the details of S’s operation, I should immerse myself in them and make them my own. Last night, at Bar Flou, S was drinking heavily—in celebration, he said—and I let him ramble on, waiting for my opportunity. It was his usual monologue, more or less: the demands of business, his own “essentially artistic” temperament, the dark but unspecified interests from which he feels “duty-bound” to protect me. Finally, when I saw that he was prepared to go through it all yet again, I decided to—

A sound of metal on metal caused Odile to look up with a start, and she heard a key working the front-door lock. Jumping to her feet, she stuffed the notebook back into the briefcase, thrust it back under the desk, and stubbed out her cigarette. The tumbler of the deadbolt lock turned over with a heavy clink. Looking around wildly, she went first to the window and then to the closet, where she parted the clothes and wedged herself inside, pulling the louvered door shut behind her.

For some seconds she heard nothing. Then the door closed, a few footsteps sounded, and the tinny chatter of stereo headphones wafted faintly through the apartment. She adjusted the louvers to gain a view of the bedroom. The smell of tweed enveloped her like a musk.

When the girl came into the bedroom and flung her turquoise leather purse down on the bed, walking back and forth reading a letter and then tossing it, too, on the bed, Odile recognized her as Turner’s assistant without at first being able to recall her name. She had shoulder-length blond hair and a disapproving mouth, and now stopped before the mirror just as Odile had done minutes before. The stereo fell silent. Gabriella slipped the headphones off her ears and, approaching the mirror, took hold of it with both hands. For a moment she seemed to stare into her own gray-green eyes, then, bobbing her knees slightly, she lifted the mirror off the wall and laid it on the bed. Set into the plaster where the mirror had been was a safe with a combination lock.

Watching Gabriella take up the letter again and return to the safe, Odile became aware of the absurdity of her position. It mortified her to be hiding like the maid in a French bedroom farce, yet to be discovered would be worse still. She stepped farther back into the closet and continued to watch.

Gabriella spun the combination lock several times, then, consulting the letter, turned the knob left, right, left, and pulled down on the latch. It didn’t budge. With a sigh, she spun the lock a few times to clear it and tried
again. This time the safe swung open. Reaching inside, she withdrew a small, squarish package and a sealed business envelope. She closed the safe, went back to the bed, and slipped the package into her purse. Leaving the envelope on the bed, she gingerly returned the mirror to its place on the wall, stepped back to gauge whether it was straight, went forward to adjust it, and then, apparently satisfied, scooped the envelope up again.

At that moment the phone began to ring. Gabriella stared down at the bedside extension, letting it ring two, three, four times before she lifted the handset from its cradle.

“Hello?”

There followed a brief silence, then a sigh.

“No, Monsieur Colin isn’t home at the moment, I’m afraid. With whom am I speaking?” Gabriella’s eyes narrowed. “Sir, I’m only the housekeeper … Yes … That I can’t say, but if you’d like to leave a message I’ll be sure he … Hello? … Hello?” Frowning, she lowered the phone, hung up, and sat down on the edge of the bed, looking at nothing. Then, discovering the envelope in her hand, she opened it and scanned its contents.

Immediately she was on her feet again, headed straight for the closet. Odile ducked and burrowed in deeper behind the clothes. Flinging the door open, Gabriella reached in and, not a foot from Odile, grabbed a plastic shopping bag off the floor. Then the door swung shut again, and Odile, her knees buckling, sank into a crouch. Through the slats she watched Gabriella extract from the bag a black gift box tied with pink ribbon.

Until this moment Odile had assumed, without really thinking about it, that Gabriella had come here on Turner’s behalf, sent to perform some professional errand, however dubious, but now, as she watched her open the box, part the black tissue paper, and remove, with a small gasp of pleasure, a brassiere and matching panties of dark rose lace, finely cut and worked, she was forced to think again. Laying the lingerie out on the bed, Gabriella quickly undressed, peeled off the underwear she had on, and stuffed it into her turquoise bag. Naked, she possessed a beauty that the harsh set of her mouth otherwise obscured. She was young, her body fresh and unspoiled, and Odile had a momentary vision of her own physical decline, a vertiginous failing of the flesh she knew had already begun. Gabriella wriggled into the panties, put on the bra, and, reaching back to fasten it, gazed haughtily at herself in the mirror. She walked back and forth, her eyes on her reflection. Odile felt a flash of hatred that was followed immediately by shame at her own pettiness, and, a moment later, by detachment.

When Gabriella went into the bathroom and closed the door and the
faucet began to run, Odile emerged without haste from her hiding place. A shaft of sunlight slanted across the turned-down bed and the toilet flushed. Odile slipped through the apartment, out into the hall, and down the stairs.

On the street she thought:
Turner’s in serious trouble
.

THAT WEEK the unseasonably mild and sunny weather broke, and a steady rain settled over Paris. Water gushed from the gargoyle spouts of churches and cathedrals, streamed off mansard roofs and marble statuary, flowed down cobblestone streets and curbside gutters, across esplanades and plazas, down métro station steps and escalators, through every channel and crevice in this city without storm drains to spill at last into the swollen river that ran westward through its heart.

By Thursday afternoon the Seine had risen nearly three meters—up to the shoulders of the Zouave, the statue beneath the Pont de l’Alma by which Parisians reckon their floods—and Max, who had been watching the TV reports and brooding, decided it was time to shoot some video. He and Jacques loaded their gear into the rusted-out Citröen that Max kept for such purposes and drove with belated urgency to the quai de la Tournelle, where, it soon became apparent, a crisis was in progress.

The
Nachtvlinder’s
stern mooring had torn loose, and she now trailed treacherously out into the river’s near branch, restrained only by her bow line from being carried off by the seething cocoa-brown torrent, either to crash against her houseboat neighbors or to have her wheelhouse sheared off by the next bridge downstream. The water had risen over the quai and partway up the steps that led to the street. Gathered there were Groot, Rachel, and a handful of their fellow houseboaters, all talking at once, a gray wooden dinghy tossing skittishly in the river at their feet.

“A moment of truth,” Jacques said, as he and Max surveyed the scene from the sidewalk above. “Too bad we didn’t get here earlier.”

“What do you mean, earlier?” Max replied. “I’ve spent the whole day working out the timing on this. We’re here now.”

Jacques brightened. “Obviously. So how do we handle it?”

“Let’s just get down there. I’ll shoot, you take sound. And if Rachel and her boyfriend split up, you stick with her. Keep her talking. We might want to run her in voice-over.”

They got their equipment out of the car and hurried down to join their subjects, where the roar of the river made it necessary to shout in order to be heard. Groot was listening to a grizzled Frenchman in oilskins who kept pointing to the
Nachtvlinder
with an accusatory finger that then traced a short arc to the houseboats immediately downstream, which, though riding perilously high, remained secure at their moorings. Groot nodded, then, noticing Max filming, spoke directly into the camera.

“He says that to haul her in by the one line would be very dangerous. The current would drive her into the other boats. Since I am the incompetent one, he says, I should cut the
Nachtvlinder
loose and not endanger innocent people. But of course I cannot do that.” He shrugged and turned toward Rachel, who had grabbed his shoulder from behind and was speaking into his ear. Max motioned Jacques to bring the sound boom in as close as possible.

“We have to move soon,” she was saying, “or we’re going to start losing votes here.”

“Yes, Rachel. I’m thinking.”

“I know you are, I know. But what I want to say is, Boudu has gone to get his grappling hook. He’ll expect us to give it a try.”

Groot looked out over the river. “I can’t use the hook. The risk of damage is too great.”

“No, Groot, listen. Damage to the boat we can repair. It’s the damage to community relations that we should worry about. There’s no point in saving the boat if we can’t live here afterward.”

Declining to reply, he instead went to where a pair of oars had been propped against the stone retaining wall, took one in either hand, and walked down the steps to the dinghy. Max tracked him with the camera.

“Wait!” A squat man in his forties with a full mustache and beard hurried after him and, coming abreast, held up an entreating hand. “Don’t be foolish! You can do nothing with this boat in such a current. Believe me, you’d be lost before you begin.”

Groot placed the oars in the dinghy and turned to face him. “Suppose you’re right. What would you suggest I do?”

“You must wait for
la fluviale,
” the man said. “They alone have the equipment to save your boat. And eventually you’ll have to report to them anyway. This is the law.”

Shaking his head, Groot went to where Rachel stood shivering on the steps, her long hair drenched and her thick glasses rain spattered. Jacques, as instructed, hovered nearby with the sound boom.

“In the end,” Groot said, “it’s up to us alone. Only we can decide what to do. Agreed?”

Rachel swallowed. “Yes.”

“Good. I’m going to swim out there with a line that I’ll tie to the stern. You can organize the neighbors to haul her about on that line until she’s again facing downstream. Then we’ll use both the bow and stern lines to bring her in. With two points of control, no damage is possible.”

Max zoomed in slowly. The shot composed itself: the finely wrought Dutchman and the tall American taking counsel together.

“But Groot, that current! Do you really think you can make it?”

“Yes, I do. Anyway, I’ll swim with the line tied around my waist.”

Rachel pursed her lips. “I don’t like it.”

“No? Well, liking it is optional. Doing it is what matters.”

Behind the camera, Max exulted. The shot continued to flow, accommodating all the little hesitations and human flutters that on the screen would translate into something larger, something that might, if all went well, make visible what performance more often than not obscured or, as he was coming to think, quite possibly replaced.