The Same River Twice (27 page)

By eight o’clock the center of the storm had passed. He prepared a supper of leftover fusilli putanesca and salad, washed down with a half bottle of chianti. Afterward he examined the gun closely, removing the clip and inspecting the firing mechanism until he understood it, then stowed both gun and cartridges in the bottom drawer of his dresser, with his socks, where he hoped never to see them again. So much for self-defense, he thought.

Still restless, he tried reading—he’d recently taken up Montaigne’s essays, as much for companionship as for mental stimulation—but the very naturalness of the prose seemed to rebuke him at every pass, and he couldn’t stay with it. Instead he poured himself another drink and began walking around his apartment like a stranger, inspecting his possessions for clues to what it was he was always looking for, as if knowing might help. The fragmentary Greek
kouros
, the African stool, the Japanese screen, the Egyptian heads. He was drawn to them because they were beautiful, though that did not, he couldn’t help but note, make them indispensable. Far from it. They were beautiful, and that was all.

He paused before an eighteenth-century Venetian mirror he’d acquired two years ago in a trade. It was narrow—the glass just five inches wide by thirteen high—and ornately framed in carved wood painted pink and gold. Beneath it hung a matching pendant, flush to the wall and shaped like half a pedestal, on which three votive-style candles stood clustered. He lit them and saw his face illuminated from below like a face by Caravaggio, melodramatic, violent, blood-smart. It spooked him but did not instruct. Maybe, he thought, he wasn’t in a learning frame of mind.

He went into the bedroom and turned on the television. The public-affairs channel was running a documentary about a guerrilla insurgency in Myanmar, a hundred and fifty men led by two nine-year-old twin boys their followers regarded as divinities. The boys were radical ascetics, wore fatigues many sizes too big for them, and smoked cigars with the lit ends in their mouths. Finding them hardly less taxing than Montaigne, if for opposite reasons, Turner was about to change channels when he heard, from the front of the apartment, a faint disturbance. He muted the TV to listen, but
could make out nothing further until three knocks sounded, somewhat tentatively, at his twice-locked front door.

He was on his feet before he knew it. Whoever wanted in knew the downstairs entry code and ought by rights to be a friend. But he was expecting no one, and his situation didn’t lend itself to spontaneous drop-ins.

“Just a moment, please!” he called.

Barefoot, he went to his dresser, opened the bottom drawer, took out the gun, and, giving it a wary once-over, racked the slide.
So
, he thought.
So so so so
.

His visitor knocked again, this time with more resolve.

“Coming!” he called, and walked to the front hallway, where he stopped to listen. “Who is it?” he asked. “Who’s there?”

There was a silence, followed by what could only be full-body blows to the door, someone throwing himself repeatedly against it in a rage of impatience. For a moment Turner considered shooting right through the door, never mind the consequences, but something persuaded him not to, and instead he undid the locks and cautiously opened it.

Odile stood framed there for an instant, then walked coolly past him into the apartment. “Hello,” she said.

She was soaking wet, her hair plastered to her cheeks and forehead, her blouse translucent, the hem of her skirt dripping water onto the floor. Turner could make no sense of what he saw until he remembered the rain. He closed the door still holding the gun, but it had been pointed at the floor the whole time. Odile ignored it completely.

“I thought you were someone else,” he explained feebly. And then: “Where’s your umbrella?”

She spoke abruptly, not bothering to hide her irritation. “Don’t ask stupid questions.” Putting her purse down on the floor, she scooped her hair away from her face with both hands, sending water droplets flying. “What time is it?”

He checked his watch. “Ten-ten.”

“We’d better hurry, then. I have to get back.” She stepped out of her heels and, leaving them where they were, walked down the hall as if she’d passed down it many times before.

“Back?” he repeated. Each word he spoke left him feeling stupider than the last.

“To my husband,” she said over her shoulder.

Mute, wreathed in unknowing, he followed slowly after her. By the time he reached the bedroom, her clothes lay in a small damp pile on the rug.

“Give me that,” she said, pointing at the gun. He gave it to her, and she tossed it across the room into the laundry basket. Then she lay down on his bed, drew the fingers of one hand up between her legs, and said, “So finish it, Turner. Finish what you started.”

He undressed, wordless, and went to her.

THAT WEEK Groot went as planned to Reims to inspect the defunct taxis Rachel had found on the Internet. After an hour of polite conversation with the owner’s widow, he was invited to acquire both vehicles for the sum of forty-two thousand francs, provided he remove them from her property by day’s end. Rachel persuaded her parents to wire her the money, then met Groot in Reims, where they loaded their purchases onto a flatbed truck he had rented for the return trip. At a junkyard just outside of town, they stopped to extract the engines and discard the remains. Then, three tons lighter, they drove straight through to Paris.

Max and Jacques met them in Bastille, at the Bassin de l’Arsenal. There the engines were to be transferred by winch to a small barge that would ferry them out of the marina and down the Seine a short distance to the
Nachtvlinder
. Worried he might miss the scene, Max had arrived almost two hours early, but waiting had only increased his anxiety. The sheer quantity of human detail seemed to conspire against him at every turn and put his work unconscionably at risk. Now he and Jacques, with the camera on a tripod between them, stood midway down the park side of the marina. They were watching Groot back the rental truck up to the loading dock while Rachel engaged the winch operator, flirting with him in pidgin French. The late-afternoon light gave everything a burnished look.

Max said, “I think it’s time we go on the offensive here.”

Jacques squinted at him, then returned his gaze to the scene spread out before them. “If it can be done, you may be sure we’ll find a way.”

“Better get the other camera, then. I’ll shoot this part from here, but once the engines are loaded I want you to go with Rachel to the
Nachtvlinder
so we can cover the delivery from that angle. I’ll stick with Groot on the barge. Something tells me he might be ready to share his thoughts with us on camera.”

“What about her?” Jacques asked.

“It’s hard to tell. On the one hand, she says she’s happy they got the engines. On the other …” Max peered briefly through the camera’s viewfinder. “I don’t know. Just try to get her talking. See if she’ll tell you her plans.”

Jacques left. The barge arrived at the mouth of the narrow waterway. As Max watched it edge toward the loading dock, he began preparing himself for the role he would shortly have to play in the proceedings if he really proposed to coax a film from this de facto cast. Actors, nonactors—he should’ve known that in the end it made no difference. The problem was the same. People wanted you to provoke them into becoming who they really were.

He shot the transfer in two takes. In the first, he kept the whole scene in the frame. Rachel climbed onto the truck bed, trussed one engine in a sleeve of chains, and stood back while the winch operator lifted his load, swiveled it out over the barge, and lowered it into Groot’s guiding arms. For the second take, Max stayed focused on Rachel, who secured the second engine as she had the first, gave a thumbs-up, and watched the cargo rise into the air. Max zoomed in until her face filled the frame. She followed the movement of the engine with her eyes—an arc of anxiety that ended, finally, with a tired smile. Then she took off her glasses and, though Max knew she was too nearsighted to see him at this distance, looked straight into the camera for a baleful second before turning away.

He waited until he saw Jacques appear at Rachel’s side with the second camera, then joined them.

“Max!” said Rachel. “I had no idea you were here. Did you film that?”

Ignoring her, he stepped onto the barge, camera and tripod in hand.

“Max?” she repeated uncertainly.

“Don’t worry about him,” Jacques advised, taking her by the elbow. “He’s really busy right now, but I’m still with you. We’re going to the
Nachtvlinder
, right?” Assuring her that everything would be fine, he shepherded her back toward the truck.

“Congratulations, Groot. You got them after all.” Max vigorously pumped the Dutchman’s plump hand. “You must be very happy.”

“It was a stroke of luck, for certain,” Groot agreed. He was wearing a
blue-and-white-striped fisherman’s jersey and a gray, flat-brimmed felt hat that made him look like a Netherlandish shaman.

Max’s mood improved a little. “I thought I’d ride along with you, if that’s okay,” he said. “Maybe get you to say a few words for the camera.”

“Yes, why not.” Groot smiled modestly. “Just let me coordinate with our captain over there”—he pointed to the barge’s pilot, who was loudly cursing everyone present—“and I’ll get back to you.”

The two diesel engines lay side by side on the deck, bleeding oil into a thin, rainbow-hued slick that seemed to be swirling in on itself. Max set up the camera and filmed the engines at repose for fifty seconds. Later he would find the right audio to run behind the image, preferably a bit of pithy dialogue between Rachel and Groot, something oblique but not entirely inapposite. Not that anything, in his films, ever really was.

Stalking the deck of the little barge, he began to construct the impending shot in his mind. They’d pass through a lock at the south end of the marina to get to the Seine and then drop some seven feet to reach river level. Anything facing west would start out bathed in golden light and move gradually into shadow as the barge entered the iron-gated lock and descended, before emerging into light again once on the river. Visually, the shot explained itself, but getting something useful out of Groot was another matter entirely. It would take ingenuity and, Max suspected, force.

He picked out a spot on the port side of the barge and set up his camera as the pilot prepared to cast off. Max was about to reclaim Groot and bring him to his mark when his cell phone began to vibrate. It was Odile.

“I’m working,” he told her. “They got the engines. So I’m shooting.”

“Good. That’s great. Will you be home for dinner?”

Max caught Groot’s eye and beckoned urgently to him. “I don’t know. Maybe. Can’t promise.”

The barge started to move away from the dock.

“I see. Okay. And are you going to let me know later or do I just guess?”

Her tone of voice, disproportionately angry, brought Max up short. Dinner hour was not something either of them worried much about. “I’ll try, all right?” Then, before he lost his temper, he ended the call and pocketed the phone. “Groot, I want you over here, by the railing. Closer. Good. Not facing me, though. Look toward the river. That’s perfect.”

Through the viewfinder, Groot appeared to belong to another era, his features timeless beneath the flat-brimmed hat, the declining light imbuing him with a kind of elemental grace, part Vermeer, part Dutch comedy.

“What will we talk about?” he asked Max.

“I want to try a few things. But you can start by telling us about the engines, how you plan to use them, that kind of stuff. Don’t be afraid to look at me if it feels right, but mainly we want to see you looking forward—you know, to the river, the future, whatever. Okay? Here we go. Three, two, one, rolling.”

Max filmed, Groot talked. In the background, the hulls of the various pleasure craft tied up there slipped by, lending the shot an agreeable intermittence. The words Groot spoke barely registered on Max; he was too absorbed to notice more than their overall tenor and pace. He was waiting for the lull, the break, the moment when the face turned soft. Whatever would give him a way in.

“… so it’s like finding an organ donor,” Groot went on. “Both engines run surprisingly well. They’re probably the last two in the country. Maybe the world. So, now we’ll match up the best parts from all four to make two ideal engines, and, well, that’s it. We’ll have done it.” He glanced at the camera and looked back out toward the river. “Restored her to life. A kind of miracle.”

Max kept filming. “And Rachel’s parents? What’s their role in this?”

“They gave her the money to buy the engines, yes. Wired it to her.”

“And she gave the money to you. Do you think Rachel told them what it was for?”

Groot hesitated. “I don’t actually know what she told them.” Max waited and filmed. The barge was halfway to the lock. “Does Rachel love you?”

Nodding minutely to himself, as if he’d expected this question, Groot said, “Rachel loves me, yes.”

“And do you two ever talk about getting married?”

A faint smile flickered over the Dutchman’s features. He took a pack of cigarettes from the pushed-up sleeve of his jersey, shook one out, and lit it. After a couple of drags he said, “I proposed to her, yes. Just recently. She was … taken by surprise. You can say it? Taken by surprise? She said, well, that she needed time to think about it.”

Plane trees flanked the lock, and the shadows of the leaves of their outermost branches now began to run softly over Groot and dim the boats docked behind him. “I agreed to this, of course. A woman making up her mind: it is normal, ordinary, but at the same time … worth waiting for. True, she is much younger than me, but this has never been a problem between us. We live our lives, day to day, and that’s how it is. Neither of us likes a drama, but we know how to be happy. It’s … not so hard.”

The barge slipped into the lock, and his face passed into deeper shadow. Behind him, the view of the marina was replaced by the timber, sodden and marvelously dark, that the lock was made of. Its iron gates ground slowly shut.