resented, occasionally admired. Now she was tired. Things weren’t getting better. It was time for it to stop. She boarded a plane to Paris, where she resolved to continue her studies in form and composition. She would learn but not paint, and then return to Miami and paint what she had learned. A friend of a friend had an apartment that needed watching for the summer, a small place off the rue Beauregard, and she unlocked the door and pushed hard with her foot, as she had been told to do. “I am home,” she said, trying not to make it sound like too much of a question.
Boatman, one of the few men who seemed to want nothing more from her than her friendship, was also in Paris, working in medical research. The first week she was there they met for coffee and he told her a story; it seemed incredible, yet he staked his word on it. A research department in a university had shown one thousand men a series of one hundred images. The images were broadly random: some were of trees, some of cars, some of animals, and some showed the faces of attractive women. At first, each image remained on screen for one second. Then the rate of projection was accelerated: each image was shown for only a half second, then a quarter second, then a tenth of a second. Finally the set of images was shown to the men in such rapid succession that each image was onscreen for only one twentieth of a second. At that point, the sequence was altered, the new sequence shown again at the fastest rate, and the men were asked which photograph was out of place. If they were unable to furnish an answer at that rate, the sequence was shown again at a slightly slower speed, and so on, until it was back to an image per second. The vast majority of the subjects showed no ability to answer correctly for the images of trees, cars, or animals, but nearly half the men were able to tell when images of women had been rearranged within the sequence, even at the fastest speeds.
Deborah had heard some fish stories in her day, and this ranked near the top.
“I’ll bring you the magazine with the article,” Boatman said. He pushed his cup of coffee forward as punctuation.
“You do that,” she said, coming to her feet.
While she waited for the magazine, she poured herself into the books about painting she had brought from home. She spent time going slowly through museums. She talked on the phone to her mother more than she had in months. There were no men—there was no man—and that left her time. “We can have lunch every week,” she told Boatman. “I’ll even pay if you bring that magazine you lied about.”
He presented it to her rolled up and rubber-banded. “Don’t read it here at the table,” he said. “It’s rude. Wait until you get home.” They ate. She went home. The magazine, thick and printed in an oversize format, was called
“Metabolic studies of stressed cells?”
“No. A piece about Marcus Hebert.”
“Who?”
“The French critic of accidental literature. Do you know him?”
“No,” Boatman said. “The only French critic of accidental literature I know is no one.” He waited a beat. “Jean-Marie No One.”
“Hebert is a genius. He became famous writing these short essays about texts he would find in the street. Initially, he thought they were the literary equivalents of ready-mades, but then he designed this inverted critical structure that privileged a letter you might write to a girlfriend over, say, Tolstoy.”
“Well, of course,” Boatman said. “Stupid Tolstoy.”
“It got to the point where Hebert felt that the only way he could make good on his theory was to stop publishing, and instead write his essays in the form of letters to other critics and authors, who occasionally published them as correspondence. He went on to write about the way that writing has changed: the death of handwriting and the birth of typing, the death of words as possessions and the birth of words as currency. Anyway, he has a new book.”
“A book? Hypocrite.”
“That’s addressed in this piece,” she said. “Anyway, for years he’s been at American universities, but he’s spending this whole month in Paris. And because he’s perverse to the end, he’s doing all kinds of things to alienate himself: staying in a different hotel every week, staging a series of readings at rock clubs, speaking only in English while he’s here. I can’t believe I didn’t know that. I can’t believe this magazine.”
“I told you.”
“Though come to think of it, I can’t find the article you mentioned, the one about the men studying images of women.”
“What? Wait.” She heard shuffling on the line. “Damn it. I brought you the wrong issue. You have November and that article is in December. I’ll bring it the next time I see you.”
“Or the time after that,” she said. “No hurry.” She had time. Time had been returned to her. And now she had something to fill it. When she hung up the phone with Boatman, she went immediately to the suitcase she had brought from Seattle, which was now serving as a kind of bookcase. She pushed through until she found the slim green volume of Hebert’s work. She knew it by heart, almost, from the first sentence of the first essay (“It is lost to history who made one of the truer observations regarding our perceptual abilities”) through the final sortie of those early years, “The Notepad and the Dictionary: Writing Down as a Form of Looking Up.” She reread his work on the couch. She took the book to bed. She read in the bath. Hebert was with her everywhere, more than a lover was.
ON THE AFTERNOON OF HEBERT’S FIRST READING, weather threatened and then made good on its threat in the evening. By eight the streets were drenched, but there was no way she would be dissuaded. She had thought about asking Boatman to go with her—he was responsible, in a sense—but that ran counter to her ultimate goal.
Hebert looked as he looked on the promotional poster, which was a surprise. Usually such figures submitted outdated pictures of themselves out of vanity, but this one seemed accurate to within a few years. His hairline had receded early, and his skin was not so fine as a young man’s. He held an unlit cigarette and waggled it around in a way that was comically French. He read a pair of short pieces, performed one longer one, and then read a new essay. “I have come back to my home country after a span of nearly a decade and found its character patently obvious from the first steps off the airplane,” he said. “There is a poverty of minor detail and a surfeit of broad strokes, which makes it perfect for philosophy but in some way unsuited to artwork.” Behind Deborah, a woman murmured and said, in nearly inaudible gospel,
Afterward there was a reception. Hebert stood in the corner of the lobby where the walls were covered with a growing collection of posters for all the artists who had played at the club. He was directly beneath the poster for a band named Lowest Lane, whose lead singer was a woman who had filed her teeth to fangs. His cigarette was lit now. He seemed to need it. Deborah approached him.
“Will you sign this?”
“This is an old edition,” he said. His tone was gentler than she had expected. “You don’t see them very frequently.”
“Well, I remember buying it in the bookstore in Seattle, during college.”
“Ah,” he said. “Seattle. A place I’ll never be.”
“You were there in spirit,” she said, “through your book.” She was laying it on thick, but that’s what you were supposed to do. “You are in the city now?”
“I am.”
She circled around. She showed leg when leg needed to be shown. She asked him where he was staying, and nodded approvingly. “Would you like to see it?” he said, and she did not answer right away, as if she was surprised,
