Paris Twilight (2 page)

“No beepers?” I interrupted. “We're not to be on call?”

“Not yet,” Willem said. “Just be sure to phone. Every morning early, every evening late, without fail. Any other questions, direct them to Dr. Mahlev.”

“But Willem . . .”

“Thank you,” Willem said to the group, and then to me, “Drôlet will take you back to the hotel.”

So I didn't get to clarify anything with dear Willem on the ride home after all, and out of weariness, I didn't talk with Drôlet either, though I suspected somehow, as I watched his silhouette against the passing lights, that my driver knew a lot more than I did about what I had gotten myself into.

 

La Clairière was aglitter when we got there, and the pageant of early diners traipsing through the lobby in evening dress and formal wear confirmed my determination to hole up humble and eat in. Some poor lackey tricked out like an organ grinder's monkey in crimson tunic and braided pillbox hat and dragging a gilded luggage cart led me to my room. It was enormous. At any rate, I couldn't see a bed from the door when it opened, and that was always enormous enough for me. Then behind the first room came another, and then another, a whole grand suite, which I already felt at sea in long before I bumped into a bedroom.

As I fished in my purse for some change to tip the bellhop, my hand brushed against a soft, sharp-cornered object that my tactile memory recalled from only the briefest acquaintance. How long it seemed since the concierge had handed me the envelope! It gave me a jolt. I dug up some coins, but a voice in my head whispered,
Suite!
and even as another voice grumbled,
What does the room size have to do with the tip?
I dropped the coins and pulled out a twenty-franc note instead and pushed it into the waiting white glove, which folded it into instant invisibility with the practiced skill of an illusionist. We walked the long walk back to the door, and I locked it behind the departing train of minion and cart. Then, before doing what I knew I must do next, I put down my purse on the dining table and found the phone and ordered up a lovely-sounding
filet de poisson grillé
, not really because it would be so lovely, along with its lovely
tarte aux légumes
, but because it was the first thing on the menu. Along with the cheapest glass monsieur might recommend. Then I went into the kitchen and boiled some water and returned with a monogrammed napkin and some green tea steeping in a Spode cup.

What was I thinking while I did this? I wasn't very hungry, nor the least bit thirsty. As I look back, I imagine that I was setting the scene, commencing an order of service, adorning the altar with chalice and cloth, and I wonder: What did I sense? A portent? Of a sacrifice? Or was I merely heeding the conviction that any messenger who has waited so patiently deserves to be met with ceremony? I settled myself in a dining chair and settled my glasses on my nose and set out my napkin and my saucer and my cup and took a little breath of resolve or resignation, I'm not sure which, before reaching back into the purse.

The envelope was of expensive linen, one of those subtle sizes easy to the hand that you never find in American stationery, and to the touch as crisp and lush as taffeta, embossed with a company name that ended
et Associés
. So: A law firm? The flap was sealed with a dime-sized daub of bright red wax. Inside was a single sheet, folded once, its message in longhand, the same cursive hand that had penned my name and the words
par courrier
on the envelope's face and
novembre 1990
at the top of the page.

Ma très distinguée Madame
, the note began.
I wish to alert you to certain unhappy recent events, and to confer with you about subsequent matters which you may find of importance
. Without further elaboration, it requested me to contact, “with due regard for urgency,” a Monsieur E. Delacroix Rouchard, provided a telephone number and an address on rue Delembert in the seventeenth arrondissement, and closed with
Avec mes plus respecteux hommages, je vous prie, Madame, d'agréer l'expression de ma très haute considération
, one of those ornate cordialities (translation: “I'm in no rush, are you?”) that only the French, among the nations, remain silly enough to come up with and pompous enough to pull off. I called the number, but the phone kept ringing with that dreadful flat buzz that is the most awful sound in the daily life of any place on earth, and no one picked up, not even to yell
Ne quittez pas!
and put me on hold.

I wasn't surprised. An office where an attorney addressed his own envelopes (Did he melt the wax too? I wondered. Was he himself the courier?) was not likely to be one where staff would still be working at this hour. So I finished my tea and dabbled at my dinner, and took a bath, and retired with a book whose secrets were guarded by my exhaustion, for almost immediately it lay open beside me on the duvet, and I woke after a while to turn off the light, and succumbed back into a dream that must have lasted most of the rest of the night, of swirling snow past a speeding train, a sensation of being unable to understand anything close by, of everything immediate flying past in a frenzy too fleet for me to grasp, while the trees and houses guarding the horizon stayed sharp and clear and precise to the eye, so that there were in the world only two things I was certain of: the feel of your hair beneath my palm, and the horizon, as patient and gradual and slow to pass as a thing remembered, even as it melted into distance and stillness and white.

T
HE WOMAN MANNING
the reception desk of Rouchard et Associés, Avocats, struck me instantly as a sort I'd met a thousand of and never once been inclined to like, maybe in small part because none of them has ever been the least inclined to like me either.
“Oui?”
she said by way of welcome, without looking up from a ledger, her tone tinged slightly with some odd extra quality—was it incredulity? Was she aghast at the sheer effrontery of my stepping through the door? I gave my name and she warmed up enough to chide me, or at least to chide (the implication was blatant) “those people who don't think to make an appointment.”

“Just happened to be in the neighborhood,” I rejoined, but to myself, for she'd already sped from the room to fetch her boss.

In the abrupt abeyance of hostilities, an oddly domestic commotion arrived at my ear—a buzzy little incantation, like the creak of a porch swing or a deck of cards being shuffled and reshuffled, that I identified, after a moment, as the quiet musings of a bird in a birdcage, though where the cage was, I couldn't tell. Looking down at the receptionist's abandoned desk, the too-many-times-polished veneer not worth polishing beneath the vase of fading Jour des Morts chrysanthemums, I saw that she hadn't been reading a ledger but making one, in the old French banker's style, scribing a grid of columns and rows onto the blank pages of a leather-and-clothbound accounts book, using a ruler and a ballpoint pen. Her desk held no computer monitor, no Minitel. The telephone—the very beast I'd been pestering from afar, for I had rung Rouchard's number again in the morning, fruitlessly, several times, before heading over to happen to be in the neighborhood—was an ancient black lump of Bakelite with a rotary dial. The newest object that I could spot that might have cost a penny was a twenty-year-old correctable Selectric set on a gray metal typewriter stand. The little bird chirped, and its voice was like the dry, careful setting down of cards in a convalescent wing that once was part of my rounds. The obsolescent wing, the other interns called it, a room where patients who'd worked so hard and paid so much to secure a few extra minutes of life ran out the clock with hearts and gin rummy, and time filtered in through the yellowed drapes and settled like dust on anything that stopped. I felt my certainties plummeting.

Daniel, when did my first impressions turn so traitorous? You remember how I relied on them, how whatever I sensed at the outset would always turn out to be true. By now my old clairvoyance has become a game of bait and switch, and the shine of bright promise turns out to be gilt in the long run, and my monsters do something human as often as not. Indeed, when the receptionist returned, I no longer saw a gorgon but a long-faithful lover fiercely defending her companion's final dignities, knowing her battle was lost.

The man who emerged with her had a hint of a shuffle in what was left of his stride, and an air that said he accepted his own fate genially. Monsieur Rouchard was stooped and impeccably mannered, his coat impeccably tailored to the bulge of a dromedary back, his yellow bow tie deliriously askew beneath an iodine goiter, his gray eyes clear amid the moles and liver spots of a face that was no longer handsome, though it had been. The tinge I'd heard in his secretary's voice was outrage.

“Docteur!”
he exclaimed, and his speech still had a deep, young timbre. “
Enchanté
. May I get you a
café
? A tea? Nothing? Please excuse our mysterious note. For someone so prominent, you are not so easy to track down,
non
? Not with what we had to start with, which was not even a name. Finally, we reached your university and learned our good fortune, that you are already on your way to us!”

He took my arm and steered me toward an alcove off the lobby, a space just big enough to accommodate a half-couch, a couple of chairs, and a diminutive coffee table, and also the phantom birdcage, inside of which a trio of orange-faced finches busied themselves flitting from peg to perch. “Now, tell me,” Rouchard was saying, “do you have a late aunt from Ohio who then moved to Fort Worth?” I did indeed, though I had to give this a moment's thought, for I couldn't possibly picture her. She was storied in our family, but the only time she and I had met, I'd been too young to remember.

“She was not actually my—”

“Blood relation, just so,” he said. “But do you recall her name? . . . Yes, Bettina, of course. And her sister, Alice, is your mother,
legal
mother, deceased also, can you remind me when? . . . A decade ago. Well, you see, we are like the surgeon, we must be sure we have the right patient.” He glinted with the pleasure of it. “Now, my last question. What do you know of a gentleman named Byron Manifort Saxe? Nothing? Nothing at all. I see. Sit down, please, and let me tell you why we are searching for you so eagerly.”

Byron Saxe, he explained, was a Parisian pensioner who had recently suffered a medical catastrophe that put him first in a hospital and soon thereafter in a cemetery, prior to which transition he had composed a will leaving an estate that Rouchard's firm was still engaged in assessing, not having checked all possible channels, but that seemed to consist primarily of a single item of property, an apartment his parents had purchased for him fee simple in the spring of 1933 and in which he had resided without interruption, except for one notable sojourn, ever since, and that he had bequeathed, along with its contents and whatever else in the way of assets the lawyers might be able to find, to me.

“To whom?” I asked.

“To you, madame,” he repeated.

“Then there's clearly been a mistake.”

“
Non,
madame.”

“But I told you, I don't know this man.”

Among the finches, a scuffle broke out, with a flurry of wings and a spatter of scattered seed, but no sooner had it commenced than it resolved itself, and the satisfied chiding took up where it left off.

“Unimportant,” Rouchard said, “since evidently he knew you.”

The first reaction to bubble up through my disbelief was anger. I'm not sure where my hostility rose from (though I can say that in this one instance, my shopworn clairvoyance was still spot on). Partly, it annoyed me that the attorney addressed this final sentence not to me, but to my left hand, a common indiscretion. You remember my disfigurement, my compass-rose scar with its talent for fascinating children. All children and some few adults, though the adults were generally of a ruder sort than this one. At any rate, my answer retrieved his gaze. “I'm sorry,” I said to him. “I must decline to accept this, this . . .”

“Gift,” Rouchard said, finishing my protest, and the light in his clear eyes steeled into something less amenable. “But let me assure you, Doctor, this is no gift. You have been appointed sole executor of the estate of one Byron Saxe, who may not have had much in the way of possessions or, let us conjecture, family, but who was nevertheless a legal person and who has conferred on you a legal obligation, which we will help you adjudicate. We have gone ahead with a necessary step and publicized his death in the proper journals so that any other claimants may have their chance to come forward. Due diligence will require some interlude, and then we will have documents for you to sign—there is quite an amount of paperwork involved, his instructions being elaborate, if I may say. I am glad, in the meantime, that coincidence has placed you here in Paris, so you can begin to put affairs in order. The first thing you need to do is visit the apartment, which I understand may be in less than commendable shape, owing to the nature of his disaster, but which has a number of his things in it, such as they are.”

And with that he placed, in my left hand, a key.

 

Getting from rue Delembert across the river to the address Rouchard supplied me with was not so difficult a task, except for the condition I imposed on myself of giving the slip to the man who could most easily get me there. Drôlet was waiting outside. I hadn't intended to employ him that morning; hadn't even imagined, as I ate my room-service egg and toast and made my call to the hospital and my calls (in vain) to the Bakelite lump on the secretary's desk, that the driver would be around. But hardly had I exited the Clairière's elevator and begun my trek across the lobby than he materialized in front of me. “You wish us to go, madame?” he inquired.