The Same River Twice (7 page)

Here the soundtrack brought Rachel’s monologue to the acoustic foreground. She was talking about her childhood in California.

“So whenever my parents got, like, really confused? We’d all pack up and go to Disneyland. It was their holy city, you know? People make pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Mecca, Oz, whatever, but my folks would go to Disneyland. I still don’t know why. One thing, though: it definitely wasn’t for me, it was for them. Whenever they needed spiritual guidance or reaffirmation or just some kind of emotional boost, boom, Disneyland here we come. This happened so many times, and I was so young, that I thought Disneyland
was a real place, a city with extra-good zoning laws or something. Seriously impaired, right?”

As she spoke, the camera showed Rachel moving around the kitchenette, chopping vegetables, tending the stove, throwing a hand into the air for emphasis. The length of her limbs gave her movements an elastic, oddly centripetal grace that compelled the eye and engaged the mind. It was as if her physical presence in the frame reduced everything else to subtext.

Jacques was impressed. “I’ve never seen her like that before. Is she acting?”

“Hard to say,” Max admitted. “But I don’t think so. Watch this.”

Again the camera showed the TV screen in frame-filling close-up. The Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion were hiding outside the Wicked Witch’s castle, mustering their courage to rescue Dorothy, when a column of the Witch’s green-skinned sentinels, looking like Cossacks and singing their terrible dirge, marched into the scene. Here Max’s camera reversed angles to show the little girl reacting to these events: her jaw dropped, her face turned crimson, she covered her ears, staggered to her feet, and, gasping for breath, emitted a prolonged wail of fear and outrage.

Immediately Rachel scooped the child up in her arms, seizing the remote control from the floor to mute the sound. Max’s camera zoomed in until his subjects’ faces filled the screen. Light from the TV played over them kaleidoscopically, bouncing off the white wall behind, ringing Rachel and her sobbing charge in an unearthly phosphorescence. Rachel pressed her cheek against the top of the little girl’s head, and here Max froze the frame. After a short silence he said, “I could look at that for five seconds. Maybe more.”

Jacques nodded. “It’s good, Max. Verging on the numinous. How did you do it?”

“I don’t know.” He began to pace. “Maybe it’s her. Somehow she affects the look of things around her. I can’t put my finger on it.”

Since withdrawing from the Isabelle project, Max had videotaped Rachel on five occasions—informal, spontaneous shoots whose only common element was the woman herself: cleaning the
Nachtvlinder
’s bilge pumps, dancing solo in a nightclub in Oberkampf, being fitted by Odile for a birthday dress. And although Max had no plans for this footage and no investment in it, professional or otherwise, he was growing mildly possessive of her, as if she really were his project.

That afternoon, at a small Left Bank theater where
Der blaue Engel
had premiered almost seventy years ago, Max attended a screening of his own
first feature film, a tragicomic drama called
Fireflies
. It was being shown as part of a festival—a dozen debut films by independents who’d since made their names—and although Max disliked speaking in public about his work, he’d agreed to introduce the film and to take questions afterward. Sixteen years had passed since its release. He allowed himself to believe that there was something to be learned by revisiting it now, when he’d exhausted the vision that had made it possible.

Despite the rain, Max found the theater almost full when he arrived—the crowd a mix of film students, intellectuals, and others who he supposed just happened to be free at four o’clock in the afternoon. He’d sent Jacques ahead with the actual film cans, and when he spotted his assistant, waving to him from the balcony, he relaxed somewhat. Before him stood a short, bearded man in spectacles who had been addressing him continuously since his arrival.

“… less a film than a conflagration of images,” the man was saying. “What is seen is consumed, what is consumed is seen. In this way, one makes possible the new. A brilliant attack.”

“Thank you,” said Max. He stifled a sudden impulse to harm this man, who seemed to be the program director, and leave the theater, taking his film with him. Instead he said, “Let’s keep it informal today. No need to introduce. Just let me know when, I’ll say a few words, and we’ll roll the film. Okay?”

“As you like,” the man said. He looked unhappily at the speech he had prepared, then folded the pages lengthwise and put them in his jacket pocket. “You will take questions afterward? The audience—”

“Yes. I’ll take questions.”

“Thank you.” He nodded his head in relief. “Please begin whenever you’re ready.”

A podium and microphone had been set up at the front of the theater, and as Max took up position behind them the audience fell silent. He hadn’t prepared any remarks, thinking instead to take his inspiration from the moment. Apparently he would have to do without inspiration.

“Mesdames, messieurs,”
he began, leaning over the microphone.
“Bonjour. Je vous remercie d’avoir bravé la pluie pour venir voir ce film, mon premier.”

A woman in the front row stood up, aiming a camera at him. The flash went off and she sat down again.

“When I made this film,” Max continued, “I was twenty-six years old, working on a budget of nothing, more or less. We shot it in New York in thirteen days, averaging thirty-two setups—complete changes of camera and lighting—per day. The conditions were not ideal, but I can tell you
that I have never again worked as freely and easily as I did making
Fireflies
. Maybe that’s what first films are for.”

Pausing to drink from the glass of water that had been set out for him, he recalled that at the time of
Fireflies’s
release he was still married to Diana, Allegra had yet to be conceived, and he spoke no French at all. His real life, in any sense that mattered, had barely begun.

“Well,” he said, “it’s easy to sentimentalize one’s youth. So let me not waste more of your time. We’ll see the film, and afterward, if you have questions, I’ll try to answer them.”

An usher with a flashlight hurried two last ticket holders to their seats. The lights went down.

Movies
, Max thought,
are just another kind of lie
.

RAIN FELL IN SHEETS
against the facades of buildings and rebounded off the pavement in bull’s-eye splashes. Odile shook out her umbrella. She’d spent the morning inspecting the clothing boutiques of the first and second arrondissements to see what was selling and to catch up with the trade. Now she stood just outside the glass vestibule of a music-and-electronics emporium on the Champs-Élysées, waiting for the rain to let up. She stared into the downpour, half mesmerized by its fall and force.

Her run-in with the Russians had prompted her to make her own inquiries about Thierry. At the Sorbonne she was told that he was on emergency leave, attending to a family problem. His home phone was answered by a machine. His apartment intercom—twice she had tried it, once at night—brought no response. Even the friend of a friend who’d first put them in touch professed to know nothing of his whereabouts and seemed surprised to hear about his leave. Whatever the reason for Thierry’s disappearance, Odile began to doubt that he would return anytime soon.

She checked her watch, then turned her back to the weather and passed through a set of glass doors into the megastore’s tri-level atrium. Part of an international chain, the establishment had opened barely a year ago to uniformly hostile press. Since then it had become a sensation, as much a social draw as a retail outlet, and Odile now paused to take in the spectacle. The ground floor was packed with students, office workers on lunch break, and others, like herself, just waiting out the rain. They sorted impatiently through CD bins or stood at listening stations, pressing headphones to their ears while their eyes went wary. A marble staircase, centrally placed, ran to the upper floors, and Odile took it to the top.

Twice since returning to Paris, she had dreamed she was back at the
Brest train station, pushing through the crowd of people waiting to buy tickets, people she now understood to be desperate. All was as it had been—the dimness, the silence, the guards, the ruin—but now she, too, was desperate, no longer a traveler on an errand but another refugee, someone whose world had been erased by catastrophe and fate. Panic gripped her as she fought through the crowd, pushing and pleading and kicking until at last she reached the ticket window. But there, in place of the gray-haired matron, she found Thierry filling out the forms, and though he recognized her and spoke to her teasingly, in good humor, he wouldn’t sell her a ticket. “Because you can’t pay for it,” he said when she demanded an explanation. “What’s more, your seat has been given away.” In the distance were sirens, growing louder as they approached.

She wandered among the floor samples, televisions, DVD players, personal stereos, cell phones. A salesman showed her a palm-sized computer that could download and display electronic books. “This,” he confided, “is the quintessential Anglo-Saxon invention. I myself would never own one.”

When she spotted Turner—he was at the computer-peripherals counter, trying to return a pocket scanner—her first thought was to slip downstairs and out to the street. But it was too late for that; she’d already taken a step in his direction, and with it committed herself to the whole encounter and whatever might follow.

She walked straight up to him, assuming nothing. “Remember me?” she said.

Turner looked at her in surprise, but not just surprise. “I do, Odile. Most definitely.” His face struggled for a suitable expression.

“Because that job I did for you recently? There are problems.”

“Excuse me?”

“Problems that don’t belong to me, problems I don’t want.” She shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe they’re your problems. Shall I tell you about them?”

“No,” he said. “I’d really rather you didn’t.”

She tilted her head thoughtfully. “The police, then?”

“Wait.” He cast an unhappy eye over the sales floor and the customers wandering across it. “There’s a café next door.”

Ten minutes later, when they were ensconced at a corner table amid dark wood, tourists, and immaculate linen, Odile began to be alarmed at what she’d set in motion. She had not planned for this meeting, didn’t even know where to begin, and her earlier confidence threatened to desert her.

Their waiter deposited two espressos on the table in passing.

“So, Odile. You were saying?”

She let a small silence go by. “I am very curious to ask you, did the other courier, my partner, ever show up to collect his fee?”

“He didn’t, now that you mention it. Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” she said quickly. “I just wondered.”

Turner leaned back in his chair and considered her, frankly and at length. She fidgeted with her coffee spoon, turning it over and over on the tabletop: concave, convex, concave again, convex. “Problems,” he said finally. “The subject was problems, yes?”

“Okay.” She forced herself to look at him. “I’m being threatened by two Russian guys—thugs, gangsters, I don’t know. They pretended to be police at first, but it’s not true. They know about the flags, and my part in getting them out of the country. I think they also wrecked my apartment, but to prove this would be difficult.”

He was nodding slowly, as if to suggest a distant familiarity with unrelated but similar events. “And what is it that they want from you?”

She hesitated. “I don’t know. They’re not entirely rational.”

“Did my name come up?”

“No. They know about the flags, but your name as such didn’t come up.”

“Then, in all candor, Odile, what do you expect me to do about it?”

She held the espresso cup a little away from her lips, steadying it with her left hand, and looked into his eyes. Dark as they were—brown almost to black, the pupils a darkness within darkness—she found herself quite able to negotiate their depths. He had told a lie to match hers, a lie of omission. It didn’t matter what he thought he was concealing, or if he’d succeeded. What counted now, the only important thing, was what the two of them had recognized, each in the other.

“I was hoping we could talk about that,” she said.

MAX STOOD
at the back of the theater watching his film’s final scenes.

It is dusk. The protagonist brings his battered sports car to a screeching halt on West Street, where a half-ruined pier juts nine hundred feet into the Hudson. At the end of the pier a woman stands silhouetted against the dying light, her back to him, her arms folded, her hair lifted in the wind. The man runs toward her at full speed. Here the camera reverses angles so he’s seen from her point of view—she has turned to face him—and no longer in full motion but in a succession of stills, each held for two seconds, as he gets closer and closer to her, breathing hard, grimacing. The woman is
now heard in voice-over, very near to the ear, with all else silent. “It isn’t really love, it’s the illusion of love … It ends badly … Well, no. Finally, it ends well … Or”—the last image of the man appears, he has yet to reach the woman—“it ends badly.” Freeze frame and credits.

The applause was more than polite. As the lights came up, Max went back down the aisle to the podium, nodding his thanks and then speaking them into the microphone.

When
Fireflies
had premiered, in New York, at Lincoln Center, he’d sat rapt through the screening, as though he were watching someone else’s film. By the time the credits rolled, he knew he’d succeeded in making, if not the film he’d set out to make, then another that was at least as good. There had been a podium on that occasion too, and when he stood behind it facing the audience, he had felt his whole life stretching out before him. Nothing had seemed beyond his reach.

The applause died away. He lit a small black cigar, then opened his hands to the audience, inviting questions.