Maybe, I said, we could meet before I left.
Would it be possible? It would only be brief, and in turn she could help me with my French pronunciation. I had, she said, a lazy American mouth.
And saying that, she reached across the table as though to touch my lips but stopped just short, so close that I could smell the nicotine on her fingertips.
Yes, then, it was settled, she said, withdrawing her hand. We would meet in the next few days.
—
That evening, we had spoken some of the music. I remember her describing it, how her explanation of the Miserere grew more animated with each sip of wine. But in truth what obliterated all other recollection was the music itself, in which her voice seemed both the extracted essence of all the other voices and yet wholly detached from anything or anybody, hanging in the airless reach of that high octave, stepping down at first with deliberation, then plunging through the abrupt, descending figure that concludes the line. That single upper note seemed the point, Archimedean, illuminated, where joy and anguish converge, if only for an instant, then the voice subsides at last into silence and the cry is taken up in the cantor’s stark baritone, the voice of one from whom fate has taken everything:
Ecce enim in iniquitatibus conceptus sum:
et in peccatis concepit me mater mea.
Behold, I was shapen in wickedness:
and in sin hath my mother conceived me.
Surely you know these words, Father, so often sung in Holy Week. It is through their darkness that the soprano line cuts like a beam of light. No, not like a beam: like a blade, like a torch cutting sheet iron, the cut releasing a molten shower as the figure descends, poured out, then pitched headlong into blackness. What I remember from that evening, a kind of mortal injury, a penetration not pain but deepest astonishment, a wound to instruct the wounded in one fact only: that his body can be opened, that it harbors no sanctum that cannot be breached. I do not know what I am saying, and yet I am certain that for Miriam the experience had been in its way the same—not, of course, the experience of meeting me, but of the music itself, that for her the upper reach of the Miserere was a clearing, an opening. No, I do not know what I am saying, but I am certain that she saw it, that opening within me, the passage the note had cut through me with the hard edge of its flame. She was in flight and saw in that opening a way out, an escape. She saw it and she took it.
So that night, after we left the café, it was inevitable that she would ask to come up to my apartment, now nearly empty, that she would accept a glass of black Corsican wine but leave it untouched beside mine, also untouched, on the floor beside the bed.
—
When I woke the next morning, alone, I didn’t know where I was or what had happened. I blinked at the wall. I thought that if I lay completely still, the taste and shadows of the previous night would reassemble themselves into a memory. Instead I heard a little shuffle, a scrape. She was there when I turned over, seated in my only chair, smoking a cigarette, her bare feet resting in a patch of sunlight on the threshold of the open porte-fenêtre. I remembered her bare foot on the floor of the café. I remembered, and I remember now, the odor of nicotine on her fingertips as they hovered just shy of my lips. I remembered then, and remember now, the pressure of her pubic bone against my upper lip.
She smiled and said, “Daniel.”
She said, “Remember me?”
—
I stayed in France.
The day of my departure, printed on the airline ticket I’d tacked to the jamb of the door, came and went. The ticket itself stayed tacked to the jamb. It became a kind of joke between Miriam and me. When I left the apartment, she would say, “Oublie pas tes billets, chéri!”—Don’t forget your tickets, sweetie!—as though I were departing on the 8:06 train to Clermont-Ferrand for an afternoon meeting. Or she would say, “Tickets, tickets!” in feigned annoyance when (for example) I had bought the wrong kind of toothpaste at the pharmacy or failed to pick up our clothes at the laundromat. “You forget, monsieur, that I have my tickets!”
I knew where mine were, I would say, tilting my head toward the doorjamb. But where were hers? “Ah, monsieur,” she would say. “On a tous ses billets.” We all have our tickets. And “Tickets” was our reply when one or the other would say, “Je t’aime…je t’adore.” “Mais tu as tes billets, quand même…” But you have your tickets, all the same…
SEVEN
And where were her tickets?
Shall I tell you? she asked, but told me nothing.
And where was she going?
Going? she said, as though we had been speaking of something else entirely.
Home? Mars? Senegal? America?
Not America! she had said. That huge Babylon.
And what was home, while we were at it? Paris?
What, Paris? I did not think she had a Parisian accent, did I?
I did not know there was a Parisian accent.
Surely I was not asking to meet her parents, to make an appearance in her hometown in the Nièvre….A silent American, accompanying Levaux’s daughter! What a homecoming! Could I imagine?
No, no, she said. Not where she comes from. That is not where she would take me. Not back to the past. Instead, she would take me to the place she was headed.
—
Or so I thought she said, though I didn’t or couldn’t understand what she meant. Speaking of past and future had felt suddenly wrong. I realized, in the silence that followed, how much I liked it, how much we both liked it, knowing nothing of each other’s future or past. In any event, I forgot about
