The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel (20 page)

It’s my last night in Paris and I want to see as much as I can. When I come up the métro stairs at Châtelet the sky above is blue and black, beneath this a chandelier of yellow streetlamps. I cross the Seine on the Pont d’Arcole, the water riding fast below, and I sit on a bench in front of Notre Dame. For half an hour I stare at the cathedral, snapping photos and sipping wine from my water bottle, imagining the laborers and masons and bishops that pulled Notre Dame from the dirt of the Île de la Cité. They knew what they were doing. Even if it took a hundred years, they got it right in the end.

I take the Petit Pont to the Left Bank and pass into the Latin Quarter, skirting the periphery of the Sorbonne, then I climb the hill to the Pantheon, mausoleum of dead French heroes. On a nearby side street I pass a bar that looks interesting. I walk on half a block, then I turn back and go inside. The walls are layered with posters blackened from years of smoke. I sit on a stool and order a
pression
. The bartender pulls a small glass of lager from the tap and flips a beer mat before me and sets the foaming beer down.

On the way to Paris I’d bought a tin of cigarillos from a duty-free store in the airport. I’d seen them in pictures and always wanted to try them. I take the tin from my shoulder bag and light a cigarillo, smoking it until my throat begins to ache. A girl stands beside me, leaning on the counter as she waits to be served. She asks if I can spare a cigarillo. I pass her one.

—I can give you a cigarette in return, she says in French.

The girl has cropped hair and light gray eyes and there is a white flower pinned to her blouse. I thank her and tell her I don’t need a cigarette. We talk a little and when the girl learns I’m American she switches to English, which she speaks fluently with only a slight accent.

—That’s a beautiful camera. Can I see it?

I look at the girl. She wears a wool skirt and ballet flats, dressed up as though she expected to go somewhere nicer than this grimy bar. She asks the bartender for a whisky and soda. I unsling the camera from my shoulder and hand it to her. She turns it slowly in her hands.

—Where did you get this?

—It was my dad’s.

—He was kind to give it to you. You can’t buy such things these days.

The girl looks through the camera’s viewfinder toward the front door.

—How does it work? It’s different from my camera.

—See the two images in there? You have to line them up. It’s dark in here, you’d better open the aperture all the way. Probably won’t come out anyway. Maybe if you prop your elbows on the bar. And hold your breath—

She points the lens at me and turns the barrel to focus, sucking in a breath.

—Don’t move.

She pushes the shutter button gently. There is a faint click. The girl smiles and hands me back the camera.

—I don’t think I did it right.

—That’s OK. Half of my photos never turn out anyway.

—Are you in Paris to take pictures?

—No, I was doing research in some libraries. I got here on Sunday and I’m going to Amiens tomorrow—

The girl raises her eyebrows.

—Why would you go there?

—More research. Historical stuff about the Great War.

—That’s funny, she says. I grew up near there.

The girl explains she is from Noyelles-en-Chaussée, a
commune
in the Somme
département
not far from Amiens. Her name is Mireille and her friend farther down the bar is named Claire. They are both in their first year of art school. When she hears her name Claire smiles at me from down the bar, making a circular wave as though polishing an unseen window. Claire sits beside a studious-looking man in eyeglasses, the man speaking to her with intense concentration.

—A friend of hers? I ask.

Mireille leans in and smiles. —They just met.

—You’re out to make new friends in Paris?

—Claire wants to make new friends, Mireille says. She says I’m staying in my apartment too much, like an old lady. So we got dressed up and went out.

The bartender comes around again and I order another beer.

—You speak French well, Mireille says.

—It should be better. I studied it all through college, but my grammar’s still pretty bad.

—It was your subject?

—No. I studied history.

—American history?

—European.

—Really? Why Europe?

I shrug. —Look at this city. Miles of catacombs under the street. A palace full of stolen treasure from all over the world. Revolution after
revolution until nobody can remember which is which. They’d just pull out the same cobblestones to make barricades in the same places. Even the monuments here are crazy. A Roman-style victory arch made for Napoleon that Prussians march under in 1871, the French again in 1919, then Hitler in ’40, de Gaulle in ’44—

Embarrassed, I take a sip of beer. Mireille lights her cigarillo.

—But isn’t everywhere interesting? Where did you grow up?

—California.

—It must be very beautiful.

—It’s perfect. Everything you could ever need.

—Are you joking?

—I don’t know. Maybe I always liked things better that were far away.

Mireille looks toward the entrance. A group of people have come in and they are taking off their coats, glancing around the grotty interior as if surprised to find themselves here. Mireille turns back to me.

—You like things that are far away. But you’re here now, so you won’t like it for long.

—I’m leaving tomorrow, so I should be all right. But you said you’re from the north. What brought you to Paris?

—That’s a long story.

—I’ll tell you my story if you tell me yours.

—Do you have a good story?

—It’s not bad. But tell me yours first.

Mireille begins to roll a cigarette on the bar. She says that she moved to Paris three months ago from the south, where she had been living with her husband. She is twenty-three years old and she is divorced. Mireille sees that this surprises me and she laughs in embarrassment, looking down into her glass.

—I never tell people this. But you asked.

Three years ago Mireille and her boyfriend were at university in northeastern France. They were bored with college and wanted
anything but the life they had. They ran off to the Mediterranean coast and got married. In the south they wrote fiction and lived mostly off welfare. Mireille learned seventeen different ways to cook a sack of potatoes and she hated them all. Their writing was published, but the marriage failed. This past summer Mireille had moved to Paris to begin an art degree.

—What made you get married?

Mireille shakes her head.

—I don’t want to say. I knew it was stupid, I just didn’t care. Maybe I thought that made it romantic. For now I just try to forgive myself for the last three years. And start over, pretending I’m eighteen again.

I watch Mireille as she talks about her art school. At times she seems shy or even embarrassed, looking away when I ask questions about her, but at other moments she seems comfortable, even playful. She makes a few good-natured jokes as if to test the waters. The way the bartender bounces his head in time with the music. The way I keep my camera slung over my shoulder even when I’m sitting down.

—Are you about to leave? It looks like you’re ready to go—

—It’s just safer this way.

Mireille lights her cigarette and begins to roll another one as she smokes.

—You seem like a careful person.

—I wish. If I were careful, I wouldn’t have come to Paris at all.

—Why are you here? You never told me your story.

—You won’t believe me.

—I’ll believe you if it’s true.

I tell Mireille about my week in Paris, about the libraries I visited and all the mistakes I made. Soon I’m telling her about the painting and the estate, and just as I realize I’m breaking the confidentiality agreement I also realize that I don’t care. Because I can’t see how telling a person with no connection to any of this could make any difference,
and how Prichard could ever find out. And even if I am drunk, I’m tired of having no one to confide in, no one to tell about everything that’s happened in the last three weeks. Mireille listens without interrupting. When I’m done she gives me the cigarette she has rolled.

She smiles. —It’s not much, but it’s all I have.

The bartender turns up the stereo very loud. He switches on the overhead lights.

—I think they’re closing, Mireille says.

—Do you believe my story?

Mireille looks toward the door. She stands and puts on her coat.

—No, she says. But I liked it anyway. Come on, we’d better go outside.

We leave the bar and stand uncertainly in the narrow street, looking at our shoes, at the shiny paving stones below us. Finally Claire comes out, pulling on a bright red overcoat.

—What happened with your friend? Mireille asks.

—He was strange, Claire says. Very strange.

The métro is closed for the night, but Mireille invites us to her apartment in the Eleventh Arrondissement to have hot chocolate until the trains begin running again.

—Besides, she whispers, I have something I want to ask you.

—What’s that?

Mireille puts a finger to her lips as Claire walks on ahead.

—
Attends
. Wait till we’re alone.

The three of us follow the riverbank to the Pont Sully. We pass over the Seine and the Île Saint Louis, walking toward the place de la Bastille. I pull the plastic bottle from my bag and take a sip. Claire watches me.

—What’s that?

—Wine. I can’t afford to get drunk in bars.

Claire looks at my bottle dubiously. —So American.

—You don’t want any?

The girls both take a drink. It’s a long walk down the rue du
Faubourg Saint Antoine, the green street-sweeping machines rumbling past us into the darkness. Finally we reach Mireille’s building on a backstreet off the boulevard Voltaire. Mireille types a code into a keypad and we walk through a foyer with a large mirrored panel and a door.

—Madame Fuentes’s apartment, Mireille says. The concierge. I don’t think she likes me, she never gives me my packages—

We go upstairs to Mireille’s small studio apartment, furnished only with a desk and a foldout couch. Claire sits cross-legged on the carpet rolling a cigarette. In the closet-size kitchen Mireille warms milk on a two-ring electric burner and breaks squares of dark chocolate into a saucepan. She pours the steaming chocolate into mugs.

—When is your train to Amiens?

—One o’clock.

Mireille nods, pouring the third serving into a bowl.

—I don’t have enough cups, she says. But I like drinking from a bowl.

We drink the chocolate sitting on the carpet. Claire changes the CD in the stereo and we talk about music for a while.

—I want to visit the States, Claire says. Have you been to New York?

—Once. I took the bus there last summer.

Mireille raises her eyebrows.

—From California? Isn’t that far?

—It took a couple weeks each way. With a lot of stops.

—What was you favorite? Claire asks. New York?

—Not New York. Probably someplace in Montana. Or New Mexico. The middle of nowhere, that’s my favorite.

Mireille smiles. —That’s because you didn’t grow up in the middle of nowhere. Where are you going to visit in Picardie?

—Everywhere I can. I want to see this battlefield near Eaucourt.

I have a photocopied map of the Somme battlefields in my shoulder
bag and I show this to Mireille. She points out her town and a few nearby landmarks. Claire spreads out on the couch and shuts her eyes. Mireille goes to the kitchen and gets a small bottle of whisky, pouring a little for each of us. She smiles.

—Aren’t you glad you came to Paris now?

I shake my head. —I just feel stupid. It’s not just that I wasted time. It’s the way I made the mistake. Looking for a picture because I liked the idea of it, because I thought I knew something about paintings.

I lie back on the carpet, resting my head against the side of the couch. I take a sip of whisky.

—All I need is one good piece of evidence, and I keep getting sidetracked. It’s hard because when I was doing my senior thesis, every time I got sidetracked I found the best stuff. I was reading all these diaries and letters in French—

—You wrote about France?

—Sort of. I wrote on the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. But I got interested in the French and Belgians. There was one guy in Toulouse who was still alive, he’d been at the Siege of Madrid. I was supposed to interview him, but his daughter canceled three times. He was always too tired to talk. By the fourth time my paper was already done.

—So you never talked?

I shake my head. —I should’ve done it anyway.

—You should have. Maybe he could have told you something.

—Maybe.

—I don’t mean something for your paper.

—I know.

There is a long pause. Mireille looks up at the clock. It is after six and the trains have started running again. I excuse myself to go, but Mireille says she will walk me to the métro. We leave Claire sleeping on the couch and start down the rue de Montreuil, the morning sky dim and murky. I put my hands in my pockets to keep warm.

—What was it you wanted to ask me?

Mireille shrugs. —It doesn’t matter. Claire was always there, I didn’t want her to hear—

—We can talk now.

—On the street?

We walk up to the green cast-iron entrance of the métro. I look at Mireille.

—It’s your city. Take me somewhere. You must know a place.