THE DOUBLE:
EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL
Section 1-A Walking Eye
©Kristine Harley No part of this excerpt may be reproduced without written permission from the author.
Suddenly I realized that I was looking for a particular person in the bodies of the women who were passing me by on the bridge: a tall, ashen-blond woman, skinny, with a stiff-legged walk. Marianne. I turned away from the memory, leaned my elbows on the stone, and stood staring out over the water. My reflection was only a rippling shadow in the undulating mercurial city below me, but still the ghost of my wife floated before my eyes, a somber mermaid, a reproach. “She’s dead, you know,” said a voice in my ear. “They found her body.”
I started. Looking up, I saw a tall frame with blond hair, and my heart gave a wild flop even as I realized that it was a young man about my age who was standing beside me, and casually addressing me in French. “It will be in all the papers, I expect,” he went on with a shrug. “I just saw some policemen fish her out.” He tamped a cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. “Beautiful girl. A real shame.” He struck a match.
Before my eyes French phrases appeared in random and disjointed lines, like a letter cut to pieces and thrown to the wind, but I remembered enough of the language to choose the correct words. “What girl?” I asked, hoping that my voice wouldn’t tremble.
He blew out smoke and stared at me. “The one who killed herself! Threw herself into the Seine. You must know about it. No one will talk of anything else.”
I shook my head. “I’ve just arrived in Paris.”
“Ah, well,” he said, offering me a cigarette, which I declined. “Another little death. It’s not as if it touches one’s own life, is it?”
“No, it doesn’t affect me,” I muttered. Then I turned to him, surprised. He hadn’t said this in French. Es wirkt unserin Leben keine aus, nicht wahr?
The man grinned at me. “I knew you had to be German. The accent in your French—but you speak well. It’s been some time since I spoke German, and I couldn’t resist.”
“I’m actually Austrian—” I cast about for a polite way to extract myself from this conversation. A hand from the crowd had reached out to jostle me out of my brooding thoughts, and I was both grateful and annoyed.
“Guess where I’m from,” he insisted. He folded his arms. I examined him for a moment.
“You’re American,” I concluded.
His arms dropped to his sides and he gave an incredulous laugh, showing his straight, white teeth in a brilliant smile. “And I haven’t lived in America for years! So much for my French.”
The sun beat down on us and I removed my hat so I could fan myself with it. “Your French—and your German—are excellent. But you act like an American.”
“That’s a cliché.” He shrugged. “But then, Americans believe in clichés. They live out clichés. One can always recognize Americans when they are abroad.”
“Well, they want so much to buddy up with everyone, while at the same time pitying everyone who isn’t a citizen of the United States. No offense,” I added quickly.
He chuckled. “None taken. An accurate assessment, I’d say. Did you arrive in Paris today?”
I hesitated, but there could be no harm in talking to him. In fact, he was quite easy to talk to. “Yesterday. I’ve come to live with my father and my brother and his wife. My brother’s been living here for nearly four years, and he’s become very successful.”
“How do you like it here?”
The inevitable question. “His wife has a fungus,” I said instead.
“Excuse me?”
I turned to look out over the water again. “A parasite. It makes her ill. And it grows larger every day.” Cupping his cigarette, the blond man leaned forward against the stone in fascination. “She’s swelling up like a balloon. My brother’s pretty proud of it.”
For a moment, the man’s face was completely blank. Then he threw his head back and roared with laughter, while I nudged a stray rock over the railing and watched the sunlight splash in concentric circles below. “You’re not much for domestic bliss, eh?”
“It’s what I think of people in general,” I said. “Parasites. Feeding off each other.”
He was silent for a moment as I stood staring out over the water. Instantly I regretted my words, but I couldn’t think of a way to take them back. The late afternoon sun blazed and gave everything a super-bright, unreal look. The clothes of the people were colors I wasn’t used to, pinks and blues and purples one did not see on a peasant farm, or even in the towns of that hilly, wooded area known as the Waldviertel. I pictured myself as a dark blot standing in the midst of these frivolous people who milled about, and I felt an acute conflict within myself, wanting to be one of them, and wanting to slink back into my room and into my dark self, where I couldn’t be observed or trusted or judged. And I was afraid that even if I did step forward and reach out to these people, these vibrantly alive young people, they would pass me by without even seeing me, because I had been alone so long that my personality had become a vortex, sucking everything in but not letting me out. And as I tried to think of a way to start our conversation again, the young man on my left turned back to me. “Let me buy you a drink.”
I smiled at him over my shoulder. “I haven’t touched alcohol in ages. Though once I could drain the kegs and be the last man standing.”
“Have a drink, on me. Then you’ll be a parasite as well, and nothing cures cynicism like being corrupted.” His smile was disarming.
“It doesn’t make one cynical about oneself?” I persisted.
He laughed again. “Then there’s always self-deceit!” I couldn’t resist laughing with him. He stuck out his hand. “My name is Roger. Roger Thurmon.” He said it as the French did, Ro-jour, giving it an ironic tint.
“I’m Geoffrey Weidmann,” and there was no French way to pronounce that.
Falling into step beside him, I noticed how he attracted attention, especially from women, as we walked. He was handsome and well dressed yet unpolished, relaxed, and friendly. His unkempt blond hair constantly fell over his forehead and I noticed that his suit, though expensive, was rumpled and carelessly worn. “You are new to Paris,” he said, “and you need to be shown around, introduced to people.”
“I’m not much company,” I warned him. “For the past five years I’ve been buried alive in a crypt. Voluntarily.”
Roger shook his head. “You must enjoy being alone. I hate it. I prefer to be surrounded by people. But then—” and he grinned at me, “—I’m a parasite.”
“There are parasites in a crypt,” I replied.
“Oh, certainly!” he replied. We turned down a side street that was lined with small apartments and shabby iron balconies. A prostitute slouching beside a door straightened up and postured almost automatically, thrusting out a hip. She caught me looking too long at her and smiled; I turned quickly away. “Where were you, really?” Roger asked.
“Just in a small house, on some land my father owns in Austria. It was a sort of self-imposed exile, although I preferred to think I’d been thrown out by my father—and I was in a way, I suppose. My choice of wife caused a stir, to say the least.”
“Can’t blame you for wanting to get away from your parents,” Roger said, and I looked at him quickly, wondering what he meant by that. He didn’t elaborate, however. “What did you do there?”
I felt a sudden rush of embarrassment. “Farmed,” I said. “Wrote. Prayed.” Roger’s pale eyebrows arched. “After my wife died almost a year ago, I spent most of the time trying to make the place productive all by myself and spiritually, I thought of myself as a—well, forget it. That’s all done with.”
Roger nodded toward a tiny café nestled in amongst the doorways, and we made our way to an unoccupied table shaded by huge trees. “Well, now that you’re free you mustn’t go skulking around Paris by yourself,” he said as we sat. “A religious exile, eh? You need corruption, and fast.” He leaned his chair back to reach across to the next table, took the glass sitting there out from under the nose of its owner, and drank from it. The thin, dark-skinned man at the table whirled, then laughed, and shook Roger’s hand. “Geoff, this is Louis Landis,” Roger said to me over his shoulder as he clasped the man’s hand, “and you must watch him very carefully because he’s a thief.”
Louis watched Roger drain the glass, the furrows in his forehead deepening so that his hairline moved. He had hair I’d never seen before, except in photographs—black, short, and wiry. “I drank out of that, you know, and you’d better be buying!” he scolded. He looked African, although I was not quite sure. I didn’t mean to stare at him, but he was so small and so dark with such a lined face, but he also had a quick, youthful manner, so I couldn’t tell if he was my age, younger, or a lot older. He gave me a smile and extended his hand; before I took it, I noticed how light his palm was, and marked with many wavering brown lines.
We settled ourselves at Louis’s table. Roger signaled the waiter to bring the same drink for each of us, without asking what I wanted—which didn’t matter, really. “So, I hear you’ve been invited to an evening with the Surrealists’ inner circle tonight?” he asked Louis. “Quite a privilege! I’m going tomorrow night. Too bad we can’t go together. It’s as if they want to keep all of us outsiders equally distributed among their evening sessions, so we don’t gang up on them and come up with too many revolutionary ideas. I think André Breton uses a slide rule.”
“Oh, that.” Louis pulled his chair over to our table and waved these Surrealists away with a swimming-stroke of his arm. His brown eyes widened with humor. “Yes, they summoned me as if I were some slobbering little puppy. I’m not going to go. A wasted evening listening to André Breton’s bullshit? No thanks.” The waiter brought our glasses and they clanked theirs against mine. The cognac warmed my stomach pleasantly.
“If you don’t take this chance, you may never get another one,” Roger warned Louis in mock alarm.
“Who are the Surrealists?” I asked. “Philosophers?”
“God, no!” Louis gasped. He laughed, and Roger grinned. “Don’t ever refer to the Surrealists as philosophers within their earshot. You don’t want to make mortal enemies your first day here.”
“Oh, I don’t know—that’s inevitable, isn’t it, considering how they’re making enemies of each other,” Roger chuckled. “So you don’t think Breton says anything worthwhile? The Surrealist Manifesto was good. I don’t agree with his ideas, but he writes better than he speaks.”
“Yes, he writes better than he speaks. So why go listen to him speak?” Louis, observing the mottled sunlight that glinted on the tabletop, pulled a piece of chalk and began to trace the pattern on the wood. “And another thing is, I’m not a poet. Breton prefers poets.” He brandished his chalk with a flourish as he emphasized the word. “And the people he excommunicates are much more interesting than the ones he deems appropriately orthodox. Except for Artaud—now he’s something. I’m surprised he’s risen as high as president, with Breton there.” His chalk busily squeaked against the wood. The tabletop began to resemble an odd-looking chessboard and I watched in fascination.
“Artaud, president; and Breton, dictator.” Roger removed his elbow to dust the chalk off his sleeve. “Breton recruited Artaud to inject a little life, and Artaud has rejuvenated that group, single-handedly. God knows they needed it. They were a dull lot before he showed up.”
“They weren’t always a dull lot, not at the beginning,” Louis replied.
Realizing that no one was going to answer my question, I shrugged and drained my glass.
“Artaud will get kicked out, though—just wait,” Louis sneered. “Breton’s becoming jealous of him. Breton’s such an ass. This is a man—” and Louis leaned forward, jabbing his chalk at me for emphasis, “—who calls himself a radical, and then imposes more rules on his followers than any mother could ever dream up. He starts a movement, then stifles it before it can go anywhere. He expels members if they try to earn money, which is bourgeois—”
“Of course, Breton has money, which doesn’t make him bourgeois,” Roger snickered.
“Paul Amado—a brilliant man!—not let in because he once accepted a prize! From a stupid writing contest! For twenty francs.” Louis made a final, contemptuous swipe with his chalk, blew away the dust, then sat back to inspect his work. “We mustn’t have contests and prizes, must we? We mustn’t call ourselves artists, or associate with anyone who calls himself one. We mustn’t accept monies from any sponsor or organization, ever, ever, at all! How principled.” Scowling, his humor gone, he took a swallow of his drink.
I must have looked lost, for Roger turned to me. “Sorry about the griping. You’ll run into these people eventually, so beware. Right now the Surrealists are the most obnoxious group of misfits in Paris. They’ve invited Louis to join them but he won’t, not even for the notoriety of being thrown out—and notoriety can only help an artist, especially in this city.”
Louis dusted his hands and lifted his glass again as if for a toast. “Eh, speak for yourself, Thurmon!” He clanked his glass against my empty one and drained it, then smiled at me.
“What do you do?” I asked Roger. “For a living, I mean.”
“His parents kicked him out of the States because they couldn’t stand him,” Louis snickered.
“I was sent abroad to study music, and it was I who couldn’t stand them.” Roger rearranged our glasses on the table so that all three sat on the chalked shapes. “My parents finally agreed that if I didn’t want to be a lawyer, I could have the best music education possible and exalt the family as a professor in some prominent East Coast university.” He slid his hand toward Louis’s as if he were about to steal the other man’s glass like a chess piece, and Louis pulled his out of reach. “Now that they can’t get me to come home, I’ve been disowned, so to speak.” He said it very casually. I couldn’t hide my shock at this—no matter what I’d put my father through, he would never have disowned me—and Roger shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, really. I don’t care. You can’t miss parents you don’t know. Wild buffalo couldn’t drag me back to America.”
Louis quipped, “Now, wild women—” and Roger laughed. “Speaking of such, I was thinking of going to Artaud’s play tonight. Mostly to gaze at his better half, of course, and think about her, and sketch her, and dream of her. Want to tag along?”
“Genica is mine, Louis,” Roger said wickedly.
“Genica does not belong to either of us, my friend,” Louis sighed. “She only has eyes for the president of the Surrealist Research Bureau. And what eyes!”
“No, no,” Roger insisted, “she looks around. Trust me.”
“Under Artaud’s vigilance?”
Roger tossed back the rest of his drink and reached into his wallet. “How many women want to be pinned down like a mounted butterfly? The more he tightens his fingers, the quicker she’ll slip away. And I’ll be there to catch her!” Louis laughed, shaking his head, as Roger pantomimed swinging a butterfly net. He narrowly missed striking the waiter, who was standing very quietly beside us, and to cover the awkward moment Roger handed the waiter some bills. “What about you, Geoff? Come with us. I’ll bet you haven’t seen a play in awhile.”
“Not since the War,” I said slowly. I didn’t want to go. The truth was, I hated plays; they were boring. Both Marianne and I had preferred the cinema, which emphasized movement and gesture, to plays in which actors stood perfectly still and talked about how they were feeling. Roger leaned across the table and in a low voice explained my five-year adventure—that was what he called it—to Louis, who responded eagerly that now I had to come with them. This would be a modern play, “a real shocker,” as he put it. The café was quiet and picturesque and I wanted to sit here longer; but a play would not require me to talk about myself, and as I didn’t really want to go home, I stood up with them and we found our way back to the wide, crowded boulevard.
Had I ever been young? Covertly I observed Roger as we walked to the Metro stop, noting his confident gait, alert glance, and easy smile. I’d never been like him, untroubled and talkative, greeting people casually on the street and weaving friends into a knot of laughter around himself, and reaching out to sweep up loners and stragglers until they were a part of his circle as well. And I’d never had friends like his friends, the wayward sons and daughters of wealthy merchants and fading aristocrats, young people who had drifted away from their parents’ ambitions for them, who wandered the cafés and the nightclubs, discussing jazz and politics, dabbling in paint and poetry, watching their own reactions to each new, voraciously-sought experience. Although I’d certainly drifted away from my father’s ambitions for me, my childhood had been so permeated by my seriousness that I’d really been a little adult, standing apart from the careless pleasures of the other children—and of other adolescents, when they became adolescents.
However, as I stood hanging on to the strap in the careening underground train, I noticed that while Roger started the conversations, he just as easily left them hanging whenever a new person joined the group. It was Louis who gathered up the ends and kept people talking to each other, and to me. He seemed perfectly at ease in a group of white people, and I studied him as well. Like Roger, he liked to talk, but he was the better listener; his thin frame held itself very still whenever someone had something to tell him, and I could almost see him filing this information away to be taken out later, in another crowd, with another group of friends. Their gossip was as winding as the streets we now walked, with narrow exits and dead ends and an occasional fenced-off secret.
After a long climb up the spiraling steps from the underground passage we were still going steadily uphill, and the pavement had again given way to uneven cobblestone. The sidewalks were narrow, choked with vegetable displays and café tables, and automobiles ground impatiently in the street. Above us towered the alabaster white dome of Sacre-Coeur. I knew this area; I had read about it. Toulouse-Latrec had lived here, and had captured the neighboring Moulin Rouge in his famous paintings.
Louis caught me staring at him, and it was too late for me to pretend that I wasn’t, but he just grinned tolerantly. I felt the soft weight of a hand touch my arm. “What are you studying in Paris, Geoff?” asked Bernice, a loquacious blond with huge green eyes who hung over Roger’s shoulder as long as he was around. She slowed down to walk beside me, looking up at me curiously. “I hear you’re a student, or you were, or something.”
Roger overheard this and saved me from answering. “Geoff spent five years in a monastery,” he announced, and everyone turned to me in sudden interest. Initially overlooked, my new, stiff clothes covering newcomer, stiff me immediately took on a deeper significance next to their collars sloppily unbuttoned, and their crinkled blouses tucked into tumbled skirts. “It was a painful experience that he’d like to forget,” Roger added, and grinned a secret smile my way as several people gawked at me in undisguised pity. Louis smothered his guffaws.
“A monk? Really?” Bernice’s eyes got even bigger. “Were you really a monk, Geoff?”
“Not a monk,” I murmured, uncomfortable with the lie. “Just a sort of mindless apostle.” Bernice smiled at this, while I glanced at Roger; he was talking with someone else now and did not meet my eyes. What had he meant by painful? Mentally I reviewed our conversation, but in fact he had shown little interest in those five years of my life, so I hadn’t given out many details. Likely he had meant nothing; he just tended to exaggerate for dramatic effect.
At last we arrived at a small, attractive square lining the theatre, a small building with white marbled busts guarding three arched doorways. We were a boisterous crowd that swarmed the ticket box of the Atelier, buying our tickets, running down the aisle to invade the middle of three rows, jabbering and laughing, and twisting around in the seats to swipe at each other. I felt like a tall, forbidding chaperone surrounded by schoolchildren. Bernice made a great show of clutching my arm for protection, then sat in the seat beside mine and leaned her platinum head on my shoulder. “You’re a gentleman, Geoff,” she sighed, “unlike these brutes.” And she stuck her tongue out at Roger, who had turned around in his seat to leer at her. The next moment she climbed over Roger’s seat and was in his lap, shrieking with laughter. Louis muttered, “Slut,” under his breath just loud enough for me to hear, and he raised his eyebrows with a nod when I turned to look at him. The lights began to dim, along with the patience of the other audience members, whose annoyed glances made everyone shush each other and giggle, and Roger slipped into the empty seat beside mine.
“I said what I did because I assumed that you didn’t want to talk about those years,” he whispered. “Now they think they know all about you and won’t ask any more questions. Nobody thinks a monk does anything interesting. It’s novel, of course, but not interesting.”
The unusual play was punctuated by Roger pointing out everyone he knew, and offering tidbits about their lives. He seemed to know a lot of people, or else he thought he did, and liked me to know it. He especially pointed out this woman he was infatuated with, Genica Athanasiou, and her lover, the president of those mysterious Surrealists, Antonin Artaud.
Artaud was riveting. He had a chiseled, angular face, piercing blue eyes, thick chestnut hair that grew deep into his forehead and hung chin-length, and a taut body like a flame, like that of some wandering prophet. His acting was disdainful of the props, of the stage, of acting itself. There was no pretense of creating a character. His voice was deep but he made no effort to modulate it for the sake of inflection or to fit the acoustics of the theatre, and he was obviously much older than the rest of the cast. He was so out of place, yet he succeeded somehow; each time he emitted his evil laugh and cracked his whip with merely a flick of his wrist, the audience gasped.
This was the man who, according to Roger, had appeared at dress rehearsal for a comedy made-up like a Japanese Kabuki actor, and who had tried to portray the emperor Charlemagne as a man who crawled on all fours. “He’s eccentric,” Roger confided, “to say the least.”
Few women would have been able to fulfill the build-up Roger had given Genica, but she surpassed it. Not only was she very beautiful, she was hauntingly so. There was an eccentricity in her as well that made her even more appealing—she was ethereal, yet very worldly with her jet eyes and cascading bronze hair and rosy skin. Roger rasped that she was Rumanian. “I don’t know how Artaud captured her, but he did.” They were quite a pair: he hard and sparse, she soft and rounded; her presence a gentle incandescence, and his, a crack of lightning. Her movements, so fluid, seemed to mold the empty air around her as if it were clay; she had only to cross the stage to make it seem that she had changed the positions of everything on stage without touching a prop. And around this lovely girl, his hands waving about his body as he raggedly surpentined, his thin spine bent like a bow, Artaud hovered like some bizarre bird, unable to separate his own strange energy from his character, to ritualize and repeat, to act.
It angered me suddenly, the thought of her tolerating his hands on her, handsome though he was, and intriguing. “How long have they been together?” I asked Roger in a whisper. When he didn’t answer I turned to look at him and saw his grin. He continued to grin at me in a way that I found annoying. We didn’t say anything more for the rest of the performance.
* * *
When the performance was over, we took the Metro again. After we ascended the stairs to the Boulevard Saint-Germain, our group began to thin, with individuals and couples meandering off into the night until I was left with Roger and Louis once more. I looked around for Bernice but she too had slipped away, and anyway I knew better than to act too friendly toward chatty city girls with low-slung smiles, and bleached hair, and a swayback stance that they mistook as provocative. Her presence was definitely not missed by Roger, even though I’d already observed that those two were more than just casual friends.
The three of us walked in silence for a bit and I didn’t mind; I wanted to think about the play. My French was rusty and so I had not been able to grasp all the dialogue even when Roger wasn’t yakking at me, but much of it had captivated me nonetheless, especially Genica’s performance. She reminded me of a film actress in her clarity, the instant transport of her gestures that one usually saw only in cinematic performers. She and Artaud were entirely different than the cavern-throated strutting of most thespians in traditional plays. Genica herself had not spoken one word of dialogue, nor in my opinion had she needed to. I wondered if she indeed acted in films as well, but when I asked Roger and Louis this, those two gave each other that knowing look and didn’t answer me.
We just walked for quite a long time, Louis and Roger stopping to point out landmarks to me, and patiently standing by so I could look in the windows of the shops and cafés that we passed. Memories of Vienna came back to me despite my lifelong hankering for nature—it occurred to me that human culture was just another form of nature. That was a new thought; and furthermore I found it pleasant to be able to walk at night, for my farm had always been too dark after the sun went down, surrounded as it was by woods. Only during a full moon had Marianne and I attempted evening walks, but that was only at the beginning of our marriage, before the backbreaking work ruled them out, when we still enjoyed each other’s company, when we still spoke to each other about our dreams and our love.
Here, flashing neon banished the danger of darkness and beckoned to the traveler. Come to the window, enter the doorway, pay your coin and dance with the lady, hold the earphones up to listen to recorded music, or enjoy the live music, jazz music played by nodding Negroes who were swinging trumpets and trombones over the heads of the jittering crowd. In the jostling on the sidewalks the windows were islands of peace, places to loiter, to talk, to gaze longingly at the display of cakes or cheeses in a darkened shop. Unleashed dogs trotted along at the heels of their owners. Automobiles scraped the pavement behind us, wheezing their impatience, and smashing bright pools of light against the glass.
Leaving the crowd behind, we eventually arrived at the Seine and watched the last pink clouds in the west blacken and burn out. Here the river opened its jaws and stuck out the Isle de la Cité like a tongue. The specter of Notre Dame, its yellowish stone and green copper roofs glowing from all the lights trained on it, dragged its reflection in the water like a tattered veil. “Pont au Double” said a sign beside the bridge that crossed the black water to the island.
Marianne had once begged me, in all naiveté, to take her to live here after Franz married Catherine, and my father had also tried to persuade me to come to Paris, which only made me dig my heels in. The hard-working girl I had known since I was nine changed after she married me. She became a nagger and a whiner, saying she was tired of wasting her life scrubbing pans, and picking through chestnuts, and pulling a cow’s udder. Her complaints soon stopped, for I told her sternly that in marrying me she had agreed to whatever life I chose, and as she was by nature an obedient girl she did not defy me—not, that is, until the end. It wasn’t that she was after my money. I knew that she loved me, but her hankering for respectability was something I hadn’t counted on. It wasn’t conniving, just pathetic. There was nothing that my social class had given me besides expectations I couldn’t fulfill and goals I didn’t want, but this she refused to see. She, having been poor all her life, never understood me, why I wasn’t grateful for my wealth or thrilled to be taught how to read. Marianne and I were alike in so many ways, but the more she recoiled from the simple life I offered the more I hounded her, and the more she withdrew... And now, here I was in Paris after all. If I hadn’t been so stubborn back then, Marianne would still be alive.
“Geoff, on your left,” said Louis gently, “in that park over there, is the oldest tree in Paris. It was planted over three hundred years ago.” It was dark now, and I had to squint to make out the feathery leaves dotted with white flowers on its massive, gnarled branches. Cement had been poured into the long wounds that scarred its trunk, and a cement pedestal helped hold it up, but it was alive. I had the distinct impression that Louis sensed my brooding, and was trying to distract me. “Getting hungry?” he prodded.
“No,” I replied, hoping my stomach wouldn’t rumble. I was starving.
“Oh, don’t be so polite with us,” Roger scolded. “We’ll treat you if you have no money. I saw how—”
“We will treat?” Louis demanded, turning to the other man with raised eyebrows.
“—You were drooling over those cakes.”
Self-consciously I felt for the wallet in my breast pocket. “Only because I haven’t seen cakes for quite some time, unless they were made from turnips. And you don’t have to treat me. I have money. I’m just leery of spending it.” I had no idea how much a train ticket out of France would cost. But even if I had the heart to run out on Franz and my father, where could I go?
“Well, good luck to you,” Roger chuckled, “although this is not a bad city in which to find oneself penniless.” His eyebrows arched at me again. “Geoff has to live with his family,” he explained to Louis.
Louis took the cigarette out of his mouth and smiled. “Oh, I get it. Well, just remember, Geoff: there is the family that you are born into, and there is the family that you create.”
My smile wobbled on my face, and I didn’t know how to reply. “Christ, Landis! That’s a statement to spook any man!” Roger hissed through his laughter.
“I mean invent, not procreate,” Louis corrected himself sheepishly. “Friends can be family, is what I meant to say.”
Chucking, we left the river. If Paris was the City of Lights it was also the city of shadows, for we were soon walking in darkness along shiny, narrow streets with darkened windows like lifeless eyes. Water ran in the gutters, catching the litter and whirling it down into the sewers, and the faint glint of light on wet pavement made illusions flash in the corner of one’s eye. Somewhere traffic was still buzzing, but for all the life I saw we could be walking through an ancient ruin. Then a woman’s face emerged from the darkness and I turned to face it; then I stared, and finally reached out to trace my finger down its marble nose. “Scare you?” Roger asked and I shook my head, but I couldn’t figure out why a life-sized Greek statue should be here, wedged like an abandoned toy in the narrow space between two buildings. “Say, you do want to stick around with us, don’t you?” he added. “You aren’t anxious to get home soon?”
“The later I get home, the better,” I replied gruffly, and they chuckled again. “I’m having a good time.”
And as suddenly as illusions appeared before me so did the crowded boulevard, pulsating with lights and with people squeezing fearlessly between the cars jammed together on the street.
|
|
|
|
