Forgetfulness (31 page)

I'll take your word for it.

No interest at all?

Not personally, she said with a smile. It's worth a visit, he said.

Not anymore, she said. There's a statute of limitations on everything. That's what Ed told me. Ed's good at putting things behind him. I can't fix what Granger did any more than I can change the course of the stars in their heavens. So I decided to let go. Does that make sense to you?

Yes, it does, he said.

I thought it would.

Say goodbye to Ed for me.

It's a good feeling, letting go.

Let me know if there's anything I can do for the Germans. Or if you need help with the notaire.

The notaire is out of my life, she said with a grimace. And good riddance.

We're off to Holland tomorrow, she added. He said, Holland?

The Hague. Ed has business in The Hague. Thomas shook his head. Holland seemed to enter his life at the strangest times.

Goodbye then, Thomas said. He opened the door to a frigid night. He pulled his coat shut and buttoned up. The mountain wind was like a knife. It seemed to him that the stars were not fixed in the heavens but in motion, wheeling this way and that, rising and falling on the gentle swell of a fathomless ocean. Orion had disappeared. The starlight was wan, the southern sky invisible. He thought of saying something to her about the stars but decided not to and closed the door firmly. Thomas stood for a moment on the front steps of Granger's house, wondering why it was that people felt themselves small when they looked at the stars in their orbits. People were not small. Stars were small.

Home, Thomas put a potato in the oven and stood for a long time in the kitchen looking across the field at Granger's house. He had the feeling he would never enter it again; the Germans would keep to themselves. They were lucky to have Ghislaine's portrait, and if they ever discovered its value it would be gone the next day. Thomas turned away to inspect the billiards table, the discolored surface where water had settled. It was damp to the touch but there was no depression that he could see. He rolled the cue ball from different angles and decided the line was true. Then he racked balls and played quickly, imagining Granger as his opponent. He realized with some satisfaction that he had become a decent player, good
with finesse. If he ever moved from St. Michel he would take the billiards table with him, along with his portraits and the Matisse sketch that lived in the bedroom. He would not take the furniture, which seemed to him to belong to the house; it would not translate elsewhere. The furniture would always have Florette's signature, her scent, and its arrangement was as fixed as the marks on a ruler. He did not like to think about moving, a chore at any age.

Six ball in the side pocket.

Ten ball in the corner.

Twelve in the corner.

Thomas kissed the eight ball into the side pocket and put the cue stick away. He covered the table and went into the kitchen to check the potato, wondering if it was worthwhile to cook the steak outside, cold as it was. Thomas debated the matter, deciding finally that charcoal was definitely required. He stepped out the door with some newspaper and a basket of briquets. Thomas set a match to the paper, shivering all the while. Wine was cold in the glass. The night was eerily still, as if the universe had paused to catch its breath, a moment that could never be caught on canvas, although Vermeer tried. At last the fire caught and he hurried back inside where he noticed the blinking red light on his answering machine.

The voice was Russ Conlon's, cracking here and there with laughter. Had Thomas seen the
Washington Post?
Well, no, of course he hadn't seen the
Washington Post.
On page one was a photograph of the secretary of defense, his assistants, and his generals gathered around a table in the Pentagon, battle maps in the background, a top-secret briefing from field commanders in Iraq. The war was going extremely well and improving every day and the question was whether there was time enough for the improvements to become definitive—that is to say, a time frame elastic enough to extirpate the insurgency in order to move the ball down the field. So it was a question of metrics. Russ said, Our secretary has invented a whole new war-language, the vernacular of mathematicians though it bore the stamp of the social sciences and the locker room also. Arranged along the wall behind the grandees was a row of about a dozen
seated civilians, identified only as aides. One of them had ducked his head at the moment the photographer shot, so all that could be seen of him was Labrador hair, big ears, a thick neck, and broad shoulders made broader by the padding of a bespoke blazer. Bernhard Sindelar, Thomas. And the word is that he's received a marvelous cost-plus-guaranteed contract from the Department of Defense, his warriors now among the well-paid outsourced armed militia providing security, so necessary for success in Baghdad and elsewhere in that tragic war-torn land. Bernhard, it seems, has a place at the table.

He's moving to Geneva, Russ said, to a fine villa outside of town with a splendid view of the lake and a little dock in case he wants to provide himself a yacht. Switzerland's anonymous, Bernhard says. And he wants to be close to his money.

He asked me to tell you he's on top of things.

I hate to wonder what that means.

Call me, Thomas.

What are your plans?

Russ's voice trailed away and the recording stopped. Thomas stood watching the machine, deep in thought. Then he remembered about the steak on the grill and hurried outside. He turned the steak and watched the flames leap, thinking about Bernhard living large in anonymous Switzerland. He wished he had seen the newspaper photograph, the battle maps, and Bernhard's big head and ax-handle shoulders, recognizable anywhere if you knew him well. It was hard imagining him in a Genevese villa with a boat dock; and then it was not only imaginable but logical. Bernhard Sindelar could find a place for himself in any city in the world with the exception of little LaBarre, Wisconsin. Thomas speared the steak and went back inside, forgetting Bernhard. He was thinking now about his evening music.

Thomas laid out flatware and a cloth napkin, lit two candles, placed the salt and pepper within reach, poured a glass of wine. He sat at his usual place while he ate his steak and potato. Billie Holiday's ruined voice filled the room so he could not hear the rafters creak. She was singing about a sailboat in the moonlight, though
there didn't seem to be anything nautical about the song. It was an ordinary love song except for the way she sang it, the sailboat standing in for a hundred dreary hotel rooms in a score of cities. Thomas wondered if Billie Holiday had ever been on a sailboat in the moonlight, on Long Island Sound perhaps, or the Hudson River. Probably she had. She'd done everything else. A sailboat in the moonlight would be the normal thing for Lady Day, her many friendships and her fierce imagination. At the helm would be Prez Young, trying to figure out the compass and how the sails worked and what the tide was doing, struggling to keep his mind focused on navigation because all the while Billie Holiday was singing blues. At a certain point, weary of maritime chores, he'd drop anchor and heft his sax and soon be off on a signature riff and there they'd be, making music on the deep. Teddy Wilson was below decks playing a bone-white cabaret piano. Tide in, tide out, no difference because they were lost in music of their own making, moonlight dancing on the surface of the water. Now Billie Holiday was singing about getting some fun out of life, definitely not a normal thing for her or for Prez Young either, except when they were playing blues or recreating in other ways. Fun was always at the top of the agenda but the agenda was often mislaid, forgotten in the general turbulence of living. How could you keep an agenda in your head with so many competing desires, and always fear and unspeakable grief. She was putting her heart into the song, though. She was giving it everything she had and then some, her voice so worn out at the top of the register that it was more whisper than voice, yet a whisper with the force of a tornado, hushed at the eye of the melody, violent on the margins. Billie Holiday always gave full value, nothing less than everything she had and if what she had diminished day by day what remained was as hard-earned as any labor anywhere. Thomas had stopped eating and was listening to the music only. You could never know what transpired beneath another's skin. He knew the singer from the songs and that seemed evidence enough of what she chose to disclose of herself. He supposed what kept her alive was her knowledge of the world and her place inside the world, hoping for a reconciliation, an
equilibrium, meaning a way to get from today to tomorrow. What she remembered was in balance with what she had forgotten, either deliberately or inadvertently; if she remembered everything, she could not possibly survive. She would be unable to sing. She died at forty-four and it seemed a miracle that she had lived that long. Probably it was a miracle even to her. Thomas was listening now to the sax, playing to the rhythm of a heartbeat. When Prez Young backed her up he often had tears in his eyes, especially the jam sessions toward the end of her life and his, too; they died but four months apart. He was at his most tender when she was singing. He was not normally tender, either as a musician or as a man. Tender would not be the word for Lester Young except when Billie Holiday was nearby.

The CD ended with "I'll Get By" and Thomas heard the rafters creak once again—in protest, he believed.

He pushed his plate away, the steak uneaten. Thomas thought of putting something else on the player, then decided not to. He was content at the table in the silence of evening, candles guttering. He absently rubbed his foot, still sore from the misadventure in the storm. His good fortune could not be said to be hard-earned, more a winning lottery ticket, a stroke of luck similar to Bernhard Sindelar's discovery of outsourced mercenaries. Bernhard always had good luck. Russ didn't. Florette had had good luck until the very end of her life. Thomas thought he had always been very lucky until recently. Billie Holiday had terrible luck, though sometimes you had to suspend the rules when appraising artists luck. The jazz business did not encourage fair weather. Self-consciousness was part of the routine and luck was not the residue of design or anything else. The job took a terrible physical toll with the usual consequences. Jazz musicians were night creatures, natural prey.

Thomas regretted never hearing Billie Holiday in person. He had heard Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae many times and Mabel Mercer once. Mabel Mercer sang at a club on Third Avenue and one night, flush from the sale of a portrait, he had taken Karen to see her. The club was dark, each table with its own candle and
vase with a single rose. They decided to have dinner because the club was nearly empty and it would seem as if they were being granted a private performance. When she finished her set, Miss Mercer made one bow to the house and one bow to her pianist and stepped off the platform. She passed their table, her bearing as composed as a queen's. She strolled on to the rear of the club, where a much older man was waiting in a banquette. He was very tall and slender, immaculate in black tie. When she approached he rose to kiss her on both cheeks. They held each other's elbows a moment, so happy to be together again. When they were seated he lifted a bottle of champagne from its bucket and slowly poured two glasses. They saluted each other and fell into an animated conversation punctuated by soft laughter. They were telling private stories, narratives that would be meaningless to strangers. Thomas tried to pay attention to Karen but his eyes kept straying to the banquette tête-à-tête. Their poise and good humor suggested to him that age would have superb rewards, though when he proposed that thought to Karen she rolled her eyes. While he and Karen talked, Thomas made a pencil sketch of Mabel Mercer and her black-tied gentleman, both of them looking—he supposed the word was continental, in any case an atmosphere of the fading old world, characters from a novel by Schnitzler or Fontane, people imprisoned by history and glad of it. They were their own jailers and their own judge and jury. When he retailed that thought to Karen she did not roll her eyes but laughed and laughed and at last leaned across the table and kissed him.

Thomas remembered now that it was not too long after that night that he began to think about Europe as a destination, and he wondered even then if he was in pursuit of something that had been lost or something he had never known. Was the attraction the old or the new? Alone in the stillness of his house, surrounded by memories, he recalled Mabel Mercer and her gentleman friend with absolute clarity. He remembered Karen, too, moving her chair close to his and looking over his shoulder, watching him sketch on a cocktail napkin.

She said, Can I have it?

He said, Of course.

A souvenir, she said. I want to remember this evening, she added with a wisp of a smile, tucking the napkin into her purse. Why is that?

I don't think we'll have many more like it, she said.

We'll come again, he said.

But it won't be the same, she said.

Why not?

She laughed and said, History doesn't repeat itself.

He ordered a bottle of champagne, both of them silent while the waiter popped the cork, poured, and with great deliberation settled the bottle in an ice-filled bucket. And a few minutes after that, Mabel Mercer mounted the stage again, nodded at her accompanist, and waited for the lights to dim. Then she closed her eyes and flew into "Mountain Greenery."

Karen's instincts were sound. They never again went to the jazz club on Third Avenue, and not long after that Thomas was on the boat to France. He recalled with a start that he had disembarked at Le Havre. He had no memory of the city then and no memory of whether he had stayed the night or pressed on to Paris. Nothing about his most recent visit had reminded him of his earlier journey. It was as if he were seeing it for the first time. Antoine had asked him if he knew Le Havre, and he had said no without hesitation. How strange was that? How encouraging.