Their tears are impossible to separate. Rain from the same sky, making the flames of her terror sizzle and hiss and steam, until they are nothing but grey ash.
Chapter Ten
It is Saturday and Matthew lies on his bed, staring up at the midday ceiling. The dull dishwater light shows up the cracks in the paint. Last night he dreamed about women. Ghost women with long fingers and pale, bruised legs. Friendly. He dreamed of Kate, and now he aches for her, knowing it is irrational. Something about holding each other. Forgiving each other. Tears. He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and searches for an argument compelling enough to make him get out of bed. Here he is, come to the City of Light and what does he do? Skulks in the shadows of basement bars with ex-mercenaries, with broken down ex-cops, with hookers. Well, at least tonight he’ll be going to dinner at Anthony’s house. A change of scene from the Bok-Bok, right? Only sort of.
He moans. Sits up. Enough. Get out of bed. He smells sour. The bed smells sour. Take a shower. Do a wash. The idea of lugging his laundry to the launderette on rue de Clichy is enough to make him roll over and go back to sleep. Agreed, then. No laundry. But there must be something. There must be a reason to get out of bed.
You could write something. He moans again, louder this time. Brent leaves messages every second day. He should write something. Why not write anything and send it to him? Shut him up at least?
He drags himself to the bathroom, pisses loudly. Brushes his teeth and talks himself into taking a shower. The small shower is built into one of those fantastic French jokes, the sitz bath: a thigh-high square tub just large enough for one dainty Frenchmen to squat in, with a shelf for sitting, if one could figure out where to put one’s legs. For Matthew, at his height, it is impossible. From the ceiling hangs a chrome ring with a white plastic curtain around it and a jerry-rigged plastic hose attached to the faucet below. At least there’s lots of hot water. He strips off his underpants and steps in. The water pricks at his skin and the steam softens the air. He looks down at his hard-on. Soaps up his hand. He begins to believe there may yet be hope for the day.
Half an hour later, coffee in hand, he sits as his desk. He picks up a pen. Begin where today? Try Srebrenica. Try Herzegovina. But his mind is on women. Ghost women. And as he tries to write they haunt him . . .
There was a girl in Herzegovina. No more than sixteen or seventeen. She had a small wound on the side of her temple. So small it was astonishing to think it had killed her. By then I’d seen bodies ripped up so many times it felt as though that was the way death should be. But this small spot, so little blood, seemed impossible. Her mother or grandmother (ages were hard to guess) knelt beside her, doubled-over with arthritis, her thin grey strings of hair pulled up in an untidy knot, wearing a man’s jacket and several layers of skirts. The old woman touched the girl’s arm over and over again, as though trying to wake her. That girl was so beautiful. Death had made her beautiful. Pale and peaceful, completely lovely. Drained of all tension, all fear. So unspeakably frail and still and undefended. I wanted to touch her but when I put my hand out, the old woman grabbed me and bit the fleshy part beneath my thumb until she drew blood and I hit her on the back of her head, hard enough to make her let go. I walked away, nursing my hand, weeping for this girl, whom I had never seen alive, whom I loved and was dead. For days I dreamed of her and for weeks could not get her image out of my mind. I think she lives there still.
Later, when I came back to Kate from that time away, there was a moment when she lay sleeping on the couch. We had gone for a walk that afternoon, to see the cherry blossoms, pink and white, like a young girl’s skin, the colour of a nipple, of a lip, of an earlobe. A man bumped into Kate on the sidewalk, and I was instantly enraged, pushing the man, challenging him, stupefied by the look of astonishment on his face as he apologized and said it was an accident. Kate stepped in front of me and made me look at her, her hands on the sides of my face, smiling as though smiles were a charm against bullies. “I’m fine,” she said. “Look, no harm, no harm.” And I saw that this was true and held out my hand to the man to shake, to say I was sorry, but the man scuttled away, muttering. We went home, Kate and I, and made love and I lost myself for a moment in her butterscotch skin. Then she’d dozed off with a book on her stomach, and her head tilted toward the sun coming in the window. It made her face look pale, too pale, pale as a phantom in the afternoon light. It was sudden, the way I couldn’t stand to look at her and how I had to get out of the apartment right then, immediately, or I would choke. When I returned, drunk as Davy’s sow, in the wee smalls, Kate was mad as hell and how could I explain?
Sack of skulls.
Matthew sits back, his fingers cramped around the plastic shaft of the ballpoint pen. Don’t read it back; don’t read it back. He opens the drawer, grabs an envelope, scribbles a note to Brent and stuffs it, and the pages he’s just written, inside. Licks the seal. Flattens it with a pound of his fist. Let’s see what you make of that. Matthew laughs out loud, addresses the envelope, and then sticks a stamp on the letter and grabs his jacket. He will mail the damn thing. He will. Still laughing, he heads for the door.
After mailing his pages to Brent, Matthew strolls back to his apartment, but realizes he does not want to go in. He stands at the heavy wooden door with his hands in his pockets. He has nowhere else to go, at least not until tonight and dinner at Anthony’s. He wonders how this can be. How can a person live in Paris and have nowhere to go?
On previous visits to Paris over the years he had always been contemptuous of a certain type of expatriate and how the city supported their illusions. All the beachcombers, and soon-to-be novelists, painters, dancers, jazz musicians. They teach English or work as babysitters or moving men or at some other bad-paying job, or else they live off their trust funds or savings or, yes, disability checks, and don’t actually do any writing, painting, dancing, whatever. They sit in cafés and smoke Gitanes and they bolster up each other’s lies and they tell each other they are all Hemingways, or Josephine Bakers, or Picassos. Back in some place like New York, say, they would have to make it quick or be chewed up and spat out in record time and back to a bus to Minnesota and the Mama’s lutefisk. But not here. Here they slink along café to café. Now, he fears he is becoming one of them.
“Mr. Matthew!” The teenager from Chez Elias, stands in the doorway of the café. He is dressed like any American teenager: baggy black track pants slung low on his hips, oversized jean jacket hanging almost to his knees. Trainers. He fills up the doorway. Matthew considers that if it were not for the ear-to-ear grin he would be a pretty intimidating kid, the kind old French ladies move away from in the metro, clutching their pocketbooks. That lower lip is strange. When Matthew first met Joseph he thought someone had given him a swollen lip, but it is clearly some sort of birth defect, as though someone has pulled down that side of flesh, turning it slightly inside out.
“Hello! My uncle says hello,” he calls.
“Hello. It’s Joseph, right?”
“Yes. Joseph. You busy?”
“Nope.”
“Then you come. Have coffee.”
Another café, another coffee. Matthew shrugs. “Sure,” he says.
Ramzi greets him warmly and pulls out a chair at a table where the old man already sits.
“Sit with us. Joseph, you get the coffee.”
Saida is behind the counter. She looks tired, with hollows under her eyes. Smiling at Matthew, she adjusts the scarf around her neck, and Matthew senses that this hiding of her scars is an automatic gesture. He has noticed that when she is not using her right hand, which is also badly scarred, she keeps it behind her back. When Saida smiles, the brightness
