Radiant Days (4 page)

“You’ve been released. Monsieur Izambard has very kindly agreed to pay for your ticket to Douai. A member of the constabulary will bring you to the station and accompany you there, so you will not forget to leave the train at your appointed destination.”

“Can I—do I have to leave now?”

The registrar raised his eyebrows slightly. “Why? Do you wish to extend your visit here?”

“No, just …” Arthur hesitated, thinking of Leo, how there would be no chance now to say good-bye, or thank you. “No,” he said at last, staring at the floor. “I’m ready.”

Georges met him at the station in Douai. “Ah, the peripatetic
Arthur Rimbaud,” he said drily. “Since my vacation here began, I have scarcely had the concentration to read an entire newspaper. Whereas in that same time, you have managed to steal an incunabulum from Monsieur DeVries’s shop, run away from home, fail to purchase a train ticket, get arrested, and throw the entire Charleville police force into a state of heightened anxiety by suggesting to your mother that their neglect somehow precipitated your own little vacation in Mazas Prison.” He glanced at the letter of release the registrar at Mazas had sent with Arthur. “‘Vagrancy’—is that the best they could do? Another depressing failure of imagination on the part of Parisian law enforcement. Have you anything to say for yourself, ‘Monsieur Raimbault’?”

“It was the
Collected Prophecies of Nostradamus
,” said Arthur, and shot his teacher an airy look. “Not an incunabulum.”

Georges snorted, and directed him toward the main street.

A
RTHUR STAYED IN DOUAI FOR THREE WEEKS, CONVENIENTLY FORGETTING
to inform his mother. Georges had three maiden aunts who feigned horror as Arthur displayed his shorn head and told them dramatically embellished accounts of his time in Mazas. They baked him plum tarts and beignets dusted with sugar; the youngest, who had poignant memories of a lost love who had joined the priesthood, shared her hidden stock of Armagnac. Some evenings the two of them would sit together in an alcove overlooking the garden. The youngest aunt would stroke the soft stubble on his scalp as they sipped the Armagnac and listened to thrushes singing in the plum trees.

After a few days, Georges introduced Arthur to his friend Paul Demeny, a bad poet but a published one, who owned a stake in a bookstore in Paris.

“I’ll let you publish my book when it’s done,” Arthur said as they shook hands.

Demeny regarded him, bemused. “Maybe when you’re old enough to write one.”

“I’ve just been released from prison. Mazas.”

“For loitering,” said Georges.

“With criminal intent,” added Arthur.

Georges sighed. “All of Paris sleeps soundly tonight, because Arthur Rimbaud is in Douai.”

The days passed in a luxurious dream of reading, sleeping, drinking. At lunch, the maiden aunts scolded him for belching at the table.

“I can’t help it.” Arthur smiled sweetly. “This goose is fantastic.”

Georges rolled his eyes, but the aunts laughed. “Flattery will get you everywhere,” the youngest said, and handed Arthur a full plate.

When he grew bored of reading, he composed complaining letters to the local newspaper and argued politics with Demeny and Izambard.

“What do you think of me becoming a war correspondent?” he asked one afternoon while they were drinking at the local café.

Demeny laughed. “What, you think Georges can bail you out of a combat zone?”

“It’s not a bad idea,” said Georges. “He’s a good writer.”

“Of course.” Demeny finished his beer. “He can read his
poems to the enemy. It’ll be a form of torture. They’ll surrender, and Arthur’ll be a hero. Hey!” He dodged as Arthur tossed his napkin at him.

Sadly, Arthur’s journalism career was cut short when, after several weeks, an envelope arrived, addressed to Georges Izambard in small, tight letters.

“From your mother.” With two fingers, Georges gingerly placed the sheet of paper on the floor, as though it might detonate. “She’s accusing me of ‘kidnapping, white slavery, contributing to the corruption of a minor.’ Also”—he squinted at the letter—“‘encouraging impiety and hylotheism.’ I don’t even know what that means.”

“Equating God with the world around us.” Arthur snatched up the page. “Did she really say that?”

“Yes. And she’s summoned the Paris police to Charleville, and she says she’s going to send them here unless I pack you back home.” Georges sighed. “I’m sorry, Arthur, but you’d better go. I could spring you from Mazas, but your mother?” He shuddered. “She says if you don’t come back, she’s coming here to get you. I think the shock would kill my aunts.”

“Shit.” Arthur stared at the page, then at Georges. “Will you come with me?”

“Is that the prisoner’s last wish?” Georges grasped his shoulder. “Come on. I’ll break it to the aunts. God knows why, but they’re going to miss you. Me, too.”

That night Arthur copied all his poems into a notebook. In the morning, he handed it to Demeny.

“Thank you.” Demeny flipped through the pages and shot Arthur a sideways grin. “These will come in handy for lighting the fire this winter.”

“Maybe they’ll light a fire under your ass.” Arthur gave him a mocking bow. “I’ll see you in Paris.”

“Not in a prison cell, I hope.”

Arthur and Georges took the midday train to Charle-ville. The teary-eyed aunts waved good-bye as Arthur leaned from the window, fighting tears himself. When they arrived in Charleville, a thin rain fell as Arthur and Georges walked from the station beneath rows of linden trees, leaves burnished by the early dusk.

“You look like you’re facing the guillotine at Mazas,” said Georges.

“That would be preferable.” Arthur stopped and stared up at Georges, his pale eyes desperate. “I can’t stand this. I mean it—I’ll kill her, or she’ll kill me, or—”

Georges shook his head. “It will be all right. You can write me. And Demeny has your poems, maybe something will happen with that. Just try to stay out of trouble, will you?”

Arthur’s mother waited at the door, a vengeful raven in black, mouth tight and eyes aflame. Without a word she slapped him, pushed him inside, then whirled to face Georges.

“How dare you show up here? I’m filing a complaint with the police, also with the school. If they even
think
of hiring you back there I’m going to—”

She slammed the door in Izambard’s face. Inside, she tried to
grab a lock of Arthur’s unruly hair. But the hair, of course, was gone.

“You and your father!” She slapped him again. Arthur turned and raced upstairs to his room. “You think this is some kind of joke, running away? Do you?
Do you?
”

“Why the hell do you think he left?” Arthur shouted back at her. “He hated you! Frédéric joined the army because he hates you!
Everybody
hates you!”

The entire house shook as she stormed outside. Arthur dived onto his bed and covered his head with a pillow. Moments later, someone knocked furtively at Arthur’s door.

“What?” he demanded.

The door cracked open and his younger sisters came in.

“I thought she was going to kill you,” said Vitalie as she settled on the bed. “What was Paris like?”

“A lot of dead people. A lot of soldiers. Everything was all bombed out.”

Isabelle stood near him and sucked her hair ribbon. She was ten, but acted younger because she was the baby. “What happened to your head?”

“Don’t touch,” he warned. “They shaved it. I got lice.”

Vitalie shrieked, but Isabelle only nodded solemnly. “Did you see Frédéric with the soldiers?”

“No.” He hated his older brother. “Frédéric’s hiding under a log somewhere. Go away, I need to sleep. Wait, here”—he pulled two lumpy packages from his pocket, each wrapped in a linen tea towel—“apple tarts, from Georges’s aunts. I saved
them for you. Don’t let the Mouth of Darkness see them.”

“We won’t.” Vitalie handed one to Isabelle, turned to pat her brother on the forehead. “I’ll bring you supper later.”

When his sisters left, he pulled out the wad of pages he’d been carrying since he first left Charleville, almost a month ago. Notes, some antiwar cartoons he had tried to sell to the newspaper in Douai, the poems he’d copied into the notebook he’d given to Demeny. After a few minutes he shoved them under the bed. He shouted a curse and punched the wall, leaving a dent in the plaster.

Prison would have been better.

Two weeks later, he ran away again. Before leaving, he tracked down his friend Ernest, telling him outrageous lies about a girl who was waiting for him in Douai.

“Beautiful. She has a friend, too; I’ll get her to introduce you. I said I’d go back and meet her for dinner, only I need the train fare. Maybe you can set me up, and I’ll pay you back when we all get together, how’s that?”

Ernest gave him a few francs. Not enough for the train to Douai, but Arthur wasn’t headed to Douai—he was on his way to Belgium.

He left shortly after breakfast. That afternoon he stopped for supper at a place called the Green Tavern, where he had a rush of pure happiness: a beer on the table before him, sun slanting through the windows, a buxom blond waitress who flirted with him and laughed when he asked if she had a friend.

“What, I’m not enough for you?” she said, tweaking his ear.

After she brought his food, he sat and wrote, and it was as if
the words on the page and the words in his head and the room around him all became one thing, a dazzling light that spilled from his eyes onto the creased notepaper.

Remembering it long afterward, he could have kicked himself for not getting her name.

Washington, D.C.

APRIL 1978

THE FALL SEMESTER
ended. I went home for a few days, then returned to D.C. to wait out the weeks until the January term began. Winter melted into an early spring. Clea and I would meet in the afternoons, after my life-drawing class; sometimes in the evening, if her husband was studying late. We never returned to the Blue Mirror or anywhere else near the Corcoran; not to eat, anyway. Instead she took me to rib joints, an Ethiopian place in a storefront out on Georgia Avenue, a Japanese place where I ate sushi for the first time. Occasionally I’d hang out with people from school: another painter named David Fletcher; Tiny, a heavyset red-haired girl a year older than me who partied with a local band called the Bad Brains.

“So you got some kind of thing going with Clea Anersson, or what?” Tiny asked me once in the Corcoran’s lobby. “I thought she was married.”

“We just hang out,” I said. “I like to draw her.”

Tiny squatted on the floor beside me. She poked her hand into my bag and withdrew my makeshift portfolio, two pieces of cardboard tied together with a typewriter ribbon I’d found on the street. She undid the grimy ribbon and began to examine the scraps of paper and brown paper bags inside.

“These are all yours?” Her brow furrowed as she gazed at a portrait of Clea, naked, her body striated like a zebra’s. “They’re really good. They’re like—I don’t know what they’re like. This thing you always do—”

She pointed from one torn sheet of paper to the next. On each I’d superimposed a blurred charcoal image over the original pastel drawing, so it looked like a double exposure, or as though the page had gotten wet. “That’s really cool. Like a broken mirror or something.”

“When I was little I had a bad astigmatism. Seeing double. I had my eyes operated on but I can still see things that way. Like this—”

I let my eyes go out of focus so that the world shimmered and split, Tiny’s face superimposed upon the wall behind her even as she laughed and raised her hands.

“Stop, stop! You’re crossing your eyes!”

“I know.” I grinned and let my vision snap back into focus. “I used to think I could do magic like that. Like curse people. The evil eye.”

Tiny laughed again, then looked over at me, puzzled. “Why aren’t you ever in class? I thought maybe you just didn’t have the chops for what we’re doing, but…”

Her voice trailed off. She stared at the sketches in her hand, finally slid them back between the cardboard covers, returned the bundle to me, and stood. “You should be teaching that life class. Not her.”

Week after week, Clea and I looked at paintings, not just at the National Gallery but also the Washington Project for the Arts and d.c. space. Divey places where we could drink and where I ate more stuff I’d never heard of: hummus and spring rolls, mussels in garlic and white wine.