Last Night in Montreal (4 page)

5.

In the morning Eli left her sleeping and went alone to the café where he’d met her. He bought a coffee and a newspaper and took a seat in the corner, trying to sink into the clatter of voices and coffee cups. He spent a few minutes staring at the date on his newspaper before he glanced at the headlines, hoping that reading today’s date in typeface might have a steadying effect. He reread the front page a few times but couldn’t concentrate on it well enough to open the first section. He turned to Arts and Leisure: certain musicals were sweeping Broadway and might stay there forever, certain others were failing and would soon disappear, some films were brilliant and others were not, and none of it seemed to matter much. He refolded the paper and looked for a while at the print of Icarus on the opposite wall, trying to decipher her by association, but Icarus persisted in falling through the clueless blue. Eli pulled his notebook out of his bag and then put it back in again. He abandoned his coffee and went back to the apartment.

She wasn’t there, and he wondered about her whereabouts through a torturous day. She came back in the evening and was vague about where she’d been, as always. She’d been at a bookstore, she said, and then a park, and then walking, and then another park, and before all that she’d seen Geneviève on the street. Lilia didn’t like Geneviève very much and suspected this was mutual, but when Geneviève was fired up about something she couldn’t restrain herself from discussing it with the first person she happened to come across, so she’d swept Lilia into the nearest café.

“It was almost malicious,” Lilia said. “I kept on having to order things because we were there for so long. She talked about string theory through two cups of coffee and a scone, and I still don’t really know what string theory is.”

“It involves strings,” he said tiredly. “I think they sort of waver.”

He sat on the couch and pulled her close to him, relieved and peaceful and restless in equal measure, while she asked about the wavering. He didn’t know, he just had an idea that they wavered. Metaphorically wavered? Were they metaphorical strings? He wasn’t sure. Maybe. He didn’t know much about physics. Actually, he didn’t know
anything
about—she didn’t even
like
scones, she said, interrupting him. They were just there, and she couldn’t bring herself to drink another cup of coffee. But it was a good afternoon, she said, despite Geneviève; she’d found a Russian edition of
Delirious Things.
He’d never heard of it. She repeated the title in Russian, taking obvious pleasure in what he could only assume was an impeccable pronunciation, and got up to show it to him. The Cyrillic alphabet spiked inscrutably at him from the cover above an artfully blurry black-and-white photograph that may or may not have depicted a girl in a nightgown walking over hot coals, or perhaps walking on water. It was Great Russian Literature, she said. In the absence of any knowledge of Russian, he was in no position to contest this.

“It’s late,” he said finally. He’d been holding her on the couch while she lapsed into quiet, flipping through the first few pages. He was half asleep, almost dreaming, her warmth against him; he was breathing the scent of her latest shampoo, like cinnamon and violets.

Later he lit a candle in the bedroom and she lay beside him staring up at the ceiling. Sleep was out of the question. He waited, and after a while she began to speak again. A trajectory of cities, of places, of names. He wondered if she was telling the truth. There was no reason to suspect that she wasn’t. Her voice was nearly expressionless.
I used to see mirages in the desert. Pools of water on the highway. We were driving in a small grey car . . .
She twisted onto her side, facing him, and her hand cupped the bone of his hip. A long stroke down the outside of his thigh.
It was shadowless. I think the sand was almost white. We’d been driving for so long, and there was another car behind us . . .
She trailed off midsentence, stopped the motion of her hand. He held her close and touched her hair, kissed her softly on the forehead,
Lilia, Lilia, it’s all right, shhh . . .
but she wasn’t upset, just absent, and he felt that she was slipping away from him. She smiled in the candlelight, but her eyes were unfocused.
We must have driven through a thousand towns that year, and then we came into Cincinnati at night . . .

He woke from a fitful dream of cars and deserts, a twilight kind of sleep. She was breathing beside him in the light of first morning, an arm extended over the tangle of sheets. Her lips were parted slightly, and he could see the movement of her eyes beneath her lids. Eli wondered what she was dreaming of and was shot through with sadness. He got up without waking her and went back to the café; the coffee was strong there, but the newspaper was failing him again, and he was still dazed and only half awake when he left. How could a story throw everything off so suddenly, so clearly? He felt the foundations breaking apart beneath them.

He found Thomas and Geneviève in the Third Cup Café and sat with them for a while trying to lose himself in complicated arguments, and then went to the gallery for an utterly uneventful four-hour shift. When he came home in the late afternoon she was in the bathroom. Judging by the razor blades on the edge of the bathtub, she’d long since finished shaving her legs; now she sat cross-legged in a foot of bathwater, removing her pubic hair with a pair of tweezers. This apparently required her complete attention; she barely glanced up at him when he entered the room. He’d seen her do this before, and it always unnerved him. He stood nearby for a second, watching her without comment, and then sat down on the toilet lid.

“That can’t possibly be making you happy,” he said.

She smiled.

“It makes me wince to look at it. Are you all right?”

“Fine,” she said pleasantly. “I’m fine. Thank you.”

“That . . . that doesn’t . . .” he gestured toward her, but she didn’t look at him.

“What?”

“That, uh, that doesn’t hurt?”

“Oh,” she said. “No, not really.”

“It seems a bit obsessive, don’t you think?”

She didn’t reply.

He rested his elbows on his knees, clasped his hands in front of him, and stared between his wrists at the white tiled floor.

“I was just at work,” he said, “a little while ago. No one came into the gallery; it was just me standing there for four hours, staring at the walls.”

She was looking at him.

“And I was thinking about your story. And I couldn’t help but . . . I was thinking about your story,” Eli said, “and I would be lying if I said it didn’t frighten me a little.”

She didn’t speak. Her face betrayed nothing. The small movements of her hand continued, silver tweezers distorted by ripples. The water was a lucid green.

“More than a little. The fact that you were abducted would be something unusual in itself, but it’s just . . . it’s just,” he said, “that you always seem to leave. All of your stories are about you leaving.”

It gradually became clear that she wasn’t going to answer him.

“On the way home I bought you a pomegranate.” He leaned forward quickly to kiss her forehead and then sat back down on the toilet lid with her sweat on his lips.

“Thank you,” said Lilia. “That was nice of you.”

He watched her for a while in silence.

“Why do you like them so much?”

“Like what?”

“Pomegranates.”

“Oh.” There was a long pause, during which she became methodically more hairless. He was watching the point where the water touched her skin. Her limbs were slightly tanned, but the rest of her was a few shades paler. White stomach, green water, silver metal in her hand moving under the surface distorted by ripples, the meditative rhythm of her movements. She didn’t seem quite human; a pale clean-shaven creature, half mermaid, half girl.
My aquatic love.
The water, as always, was far too hot; a bead of sweat left a trail between her breasts. She looked slippery. “I don’t know,” she said, “I’ve just always liked them.”

“Are you evasive about everything?”

But she wouldn’t be drawn into an argument; she stopped tweezing, reached for the glass of water on the edge of the bathtub, sipped at it, held it to her forehead for a second, returned it to precisely the place where it had been before and took up the tweezers again, all without looking at him.

Eli couldn’t avoid the question anymore. He kept his voice as steady as possible and didn’t lift his gaze from the floor.

“I need to know if you’re going to leave me.”

She stopped then and set the tweezers beside the half-empty glass. She clasped her hands in the water and sat for a moment looking down at them.

“I might,” she said.

He stood up slowly and left the room. The apartment seemed foreign to him. He walked back and forth across the floor a few times, swiped his hand across his eyes, stood with his arms crossed in front of a window. He sat at his desk for a few minutes and then stood up again, opened a few books that he immediately closed, and finally settled on opening the window to the fire escape. Someone had left a book on the windowsill. He threw
Delirious Things
as far as he could into the empty air, realized what he was doing as the book left his hand and tried to catch it, too late; he swore softly and climbed out the window and spent some time looking for it from the fire-escape landing, peering down over the railing, but he couldn’t see it on the street below. He sat out there for a while longer, hoping someone below might pick it up and exclaim loudly enough for him to hear, at which point he could do something useful. People walked alone or in groups on the pavement, drove toward the Williamsburg Bridge or away from it, rode bicycles and carried on conversations; laughter carried up to the level of the fire escape. An airplane passed silently overhead. No one below seemed to pick up a book. Eli only went back inside when the sun began to drop below the level of the rooftops. A cold breeze was drifting off the river.

The apartment was silent. He found her in the bathtub, sitting cross-legged and staring down at her hands, the water grown cool around her. She was shivering, and it seemed she hadn’t moved since he left.

“I threw your book out the window,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

She murmured something inaudible.

“I didn’t mean to,” he said. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I did it. I just don’t want you to leave.”

“I know,” she whispered. “It’s not that I want to, Eli, it’s just that I’ve always . . .”

“You’ve always what?”

“Try to imagine what it’s like,” she said. “I don’t know how to stay.”

“Come here.” He pulled her up out of the bathtub, threw a towel over her shoulders, and held her close to him. He could feel her heartbeat against his chest. She let her head fall on his shoulder, and the cold water in her hair seeped through to his skin. She let herself be led to the bedroom by his hand around her wrist; her pulse didn’t register against his fingertips. She eased herself down onto the bed, still without looking at him, and he saw for the first time that there were tears on her face. She pulled the duvet over her head and curled away from him.

Eli left her there. In the kitchen he found the pomegranate he’d bought for her and quartered it quickly on a pale blue plate. He thought the contrast between the shades of the pomegranate and the blue might please her. Any one of a number of details can prevent a ship from sinking. He carried the plate back to the bedroom and set it on the bedside table to grope for the flashlight under the bed. He took off his shoes, his belt, his jeans, left them in a heap on the floor, held the flashlight between his teeth and climbed under the duvet like a man entering a cave. He reached out for the blue plate and then turned to her, and her face was illuminated in the dimness.

“Don’t leave me,” he whispered. “Stay, I’ll buy you pomegranates. I won’t throw any more of your books out the window, I promise.”

She smiled faintly, still in tears.

“Here,” he said, “hold the flashlight.”

She sat up and took it from him, the duvet a tent between their heads. He sat cross-legged with the plate on his lap and tore the pomegranate apart, juice running down his hands and wrecking the sheets. He began to feed her pomegranate beads, two or three at a time, and she stopped weeping long before her lips were stained red.

6.

Lilia left her mother’s house a little after midnight. Her half-brother Simon was the first one downstairs in the morning; he woke up shivering just before dawn. A cold breeze filled the house; the front door, closed imperfectly, had blown open after she’d left, and also a kitchen window was broken. A glass of water was frozen solid on his bedside table.

He climbed out of bed and pulled his quilt over his shoulders like a cloak. It trailed heavily behind him down the stairs, gathering dust. The linoleum of the kitchen floor felt like ice on his bare feet; he almost immediately lost feeling in his toes. The kitchen door was wide open, and snow had drifted over the threshold. At that hour the air outside was suffused with the greyish light that comes over northern landscapes just before the sun rises, when everything seems tired and somewhat unreal. He stood just inside the door, clutching the quilt around his shoulders and staring out at the lawn, and even though the scene outside was exactly what he’d been expecting, he found at that moment that he needed his mother, and also that he couldn’t speak. He reached outside, around the doorframe, and began ringing the doorbell over and over again.

She was by his side almost instantly and then running back up the stairs. He stood still in the doorway, listening to her footsteps in the upstairs hall, the sound she made when she saw that Lilia’s bedroom was empty, her footsteps coming back down the stairs. She was on the phone a moment later, although it took the dispatcher at the police station a few minutes to understand what she was saying. She called the more recent of her two ex-husbands and screamed obscenities into his answering machine until the machine cut her off. She hung up, shaking, and stared at her son. Her face was white. He met her gaze and looked quickly away. He was briefly interested to notice that he could see his breath inside the house.

“She dropped her bunny,” he said. His voice was stunned. “And there’s still glass in the snow.”

The kitchen window had been broken the night before, and glass was still shining on the snow outside. She stared at the shattered window for a moment.

“Help me,” she whispered. “Put your shoes on. Bring me the broom.” He pulled his boots on over his pajamas and let the quilt fall on the kitchen floor, and they worked together for a while in feverish silence, scooping and sweeping the broken glass out of the snow, collecting it into a shoebox from the hall closet. When they were done the cuffs of his pajamas were cold and soaking wet against his wrists. In the kitchen doorway she turned to him suddenly—he flinched and raised an arm reflexively to protect his face—but she only placed the box of broken glass and snow in his arms. The cardboard was soggy.

“Hide this,” she said, in a tone of voice that he knew not to question, “and bring me a ball.”

“What ball?” He was too dazed to cry.

“Any kind of ball, Simon. Wait . . .”

She went to the cupboard and took out three bottles of Scotch, one almost empty. She laid these carefully on top of the snow and broken glass, and said, “Quickly, quickly.”

He took the box to the woodshed and put it under an upside-down moldering armchair. There was an old basketball on the woodshed floor, half deflated. When he brought it to her she was taping cardboard over the window, standing on the kitchen chair that had been Lilia’s only last night, weeping, talking to herself, taping fast. He went upstairs and dressed quietly, with a feeling of tremendous formality; he put on the pants he wore only on special occasions, a sweater that smelled of dust, and his good shoes. He combed his hair without being told to, although he wasn’t tall enough to see his whole head in the mirror. A short time later the police were there; they filled the kitchen with blue uniforms and tracked dirty snow into the house and fanned out to photograph what was there on the lawn. Not the lawn under the window, which had clearly been broken a day or two before; Simon, the mother explained through tears and hysterics, had been throwing a basketball in the house. The basketball was lying half buried in snow. She told them that she’d long since cleaned up the glass, that someone was coming to replace the window. They nodded, uninterested. They were photographing a spot beyond that, farther out toward the driveway and slightly to the right. It’s the perfect photograph: a child’s bare footprints emerge from the house, clearly visible in the snow, and meet after a few steps with the prints of a man’s winter boots. This is the point where the blue knitted bunny lies whitened by frost, and here there’s a scuff in the snow where she was swept off her feet. The bootprints turn here and recede into the forest and eventually coincide, some distance outside the frame of the photograph, with the tire marks down by the road.

The bunny was briefly famous, in a localized way; a couple of regional newspapers showed pictures of it staring up at the sky. Simon was the one who retrieved it that afternoon, when the photographers were done taking pictures. He put it in the bathtub for a while and sat on the bathtub’s edge to watch the pool of bluish water oozing out around it, then put it through the dryer. He sat in front of the dryer on an upturned milk crate, watching it spinning around and around. It came out hot but still wet, so he put it back in the dryer and watched it blurring around again until he got dizzy and had to look away. His mother was sobbing and sobbing in the kitchen, talking about Lilia and Lilia’s father and how she always just knew he was going to do something like this and that was why she had gotten the restraining order in the first place, and there were police officers everywhere. Some wanted to speak to him. He answered questions in a polite monotone, lying mostly, and when they were finished with him he took the bunny upstairs to his room and set it up on a folded towel on the corner of the bed. It still wasn’t completely dry, but he didn’t want to be downstairs anymore.

His mother came to him in the evening, when almost everyone had gone. There was a social worker in the kitchen and someone from the police station rigging something to the telephone, and there was a car down by the road with two police officers in it. She sat on the edge of his bed and stared tearfully at him. He wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“Thank you for helping me with the glass,” she said.

IN A MOTEL ROOM
three hundred miles to the south, Lilia’s father was cutting off her hair. In the very beginning her arms had gauze bandages on them, for reasons that were almost immediately unclear; she sat on a chair in the bathroom and watched dark curls falling past her face and landing on the bandages, on the floor, on her legs, while her father moved around her with the scissors.

“Hold still, now,” he said gently, although she hadn’t been moving. She didn’t answer, but she did wrinkle her nose at the smell of bleach. It hurt much more than she had thought it would. She winced and tried to ignore the smell and the tingling while he stood close beside her and kept up a soothing, uninterrupted monologue: “Did I ever tell you, my dove, about the time I was working as a magician in Vegas? This was at a place called La Carnivale, one of the big old casinos, and . . .” And she didn’t say anything, but he didn’t expect her to. She never could remember why they’d left in the first place, but she did remember that in the first year of traveling she didn’t say very much. She was unmoored and her memories were eroding in the sunlight, and she was rendered shy by the strangeness of this fast new life. He was driving south.

He would talk to her whether she’d talk to him or not, and it was his voice that gradually put her at ease. He could talk about types of stone, about Goya’s black paintings or the magnificent staircase in Rembrandt’s
Philosopher in Meditation,
about genetics: the specific signatures of persistent genes, replicating themselves endlessly through the diluting generations. When she grew quiet and despondent, which was often in the beginning, he liked to save her with a fact. Did you know that my favorite composer went deaf at the height of his career? Did I ever tell you about the moons of Jupiter? There’s this one in particular that’s covered in ice . . . She didn’t know him well in the very beginning, but she was profoundly soothed by the sound of his voice. On this particular night, twenty hours after he’d lifted her from the snow, he was talking about the arcing bridge in Monet’s garden, the way it changed, over the passage of the painter’s career, from sharpness into an almost abstract vagueness. “Think of that,” he was saying. “An object changing in the manner of a memory.” He rubbed her burning head with a towel.
“Et voilà!”
he said. “Brace yourself, my dove, this will be startling . . .” and he held Lilia up to the motel bathroom mirror.

The effect was shocking. She remembered that moment as the first time she ever looked in a mirror and didn’t recognize herself. A strange child with short disheveled blond hair stared back at her, and she felt suddenly, inexplicably safe. Not only safe but elated; the first time true happiness ever coursed through her chest, like the breaking open of a gate.

“You like it?”

She smiled.

“I’m glad you approve. Now you just need a new name,” he said.

The first false name was Gabriel, chosen because with short hair she looked very much like a boy, and he figured a little ambiguity couldn’t hurt. Still, the name didn’t seem fraudulent; she couldn’t help but feel that Gabriel was just as real as Lilia, and as real as the dense parade of phantoms that followed: after Gabriel she was Anna, and she was Michelle, Laura, Melissa, and Ruth by spring. In retrospect her childhood was all false names and lost memories; the more time passed, the harder it was to say what was real and what wasn’t. There were scars on her arms for which she had no explanation.