Even when I was driving (she had insisted I drive), she did not tell me where we were going. Eventually, after the boulevards, traffic circles, and segments of ring-road, we merged onto a highway. The plain of the Île-de-France spread out like a stilled sea, endless fields of grain, haze-hung, touching every horizon, a tundra of uninflected green.
It was not so hard to drive in Europe after all, was it? she said. I had demonstrated a basic competence, she said. Maybe I was ready to take the next step.
She kicked her sandals off, slid her seat all the way forward, and in a single, neat maneuver pivoted so that her back was pressed against the dashboard, her feet against the seatback.
Et voilà the next challenge, she said, working her skirt up above her hips and cupping her hand between her legs, drumming her fingers once or twice, as though in impatience or boredom. T’es sûr ça te derange pas? You’re sure this won’t bother you? she asked as her fingertips began to describe a slow circle.
—
When the drive was at last over—lengthened as it had been by Miriam’s peremptory instructions, by the hunt for a shaded byway—we had switched off the ignition in the courtyard of what appeared to be some sort of monastery.
She said: So now you can see why I needed to get you out of my system.
In the office an old monk she knew by name greeted her, beaming, with a double kiss: Miriam, ma fille, tu vas bien? You must be exhausted from the journey. Monsieur, enchanté, he said, and shook my hand, beaming at me as well. Turning back toward us from time to time, as though to confirm that we were following him, he led us to our rooms.
The men’s dormitory was a part of the monastic enclosure, though much newer in construction than the other buildings that comprised the cloister. Women slept in a guesthouse separated from the monastery by a narrow lane and an iron gate, long off its hinges, leaning against the gatepost in a tangle of nettles and bindweed.
After a chaste pair of kisses, Miriam disappeared into the guesthouse. The monk gestured me through the gate and said, “So Monsieur and Madame Levaux are here for a silent retreat?”
Was I supposed to say something? I said nothing.
“I wish you,” he went on, “a prayerful visit.”
I am certain, prior to that exchange, I had never been wished a prayerful anything, nor did I know what a silent retreat was supposed to be, but in the sheer dislocated oddness that the day had become, nothing seemed stranger than anything else. Sitting on the edge of my narrow bed, I stared out at the vast sky. The idea occurred to me that I might simply leave, even that Miriam expected me to. I could find my way back to the car without the aid of the monk, turn the key in the ignition, and vanish. Even as I formulated the thought, however, I knew I could not. What prevented me was not the desire to remain, but the sudden sense that Paris was a million miles away. What home I had had dissolved in that distance. What home I had I would never see again.
EIGHT
At the monastery, Miriam and I spent our days together and also, in spite of her sequestration, our nights, but we never spoke to each other. What was a “silent retreat”? How often had Miriam been here? And what did she believe of all this? During the daily round of services in the chapel, she sat with the monks in a chair they positioned by the choir, and she joined them in the chanting of the psalms and collects. (I, meanwhile, sat as far back in the chapel as I could, alone beneath the wooden gaze of a saint’s effigy.) Was her relationship to them a musical affiliation? Perhaps she came here as some sort of choral scholar. During the offices and the daily Mass, however, in addition to singing the psalms and antiphons, she would kneel or cross herself as the monks did, and she said with them the many spoken Amens and Alleluias that punctuated the prayers. She had never suggested that she was religious, though of course I knew that as a choral singer she and her fellow musicians spent many hours rehearsing and performing in church. I imagine I would have assumed—whether from her complexion or name—that she was Jewish, or partly so, had I given it any thought at all.
Who was this person who had masturbated in the front seat of the car, her right foot jammed under my rib cage, and yet crossed herself before and after each meal? Had I been assigned a role in a fetish play? Or had I been scheduled for conversion? The silence seemed almost to amuse her, as though it protected not a holiness but a depth of irony. Her greeting for me, should I encounter her under the cloister or in the library, was a bug-eyed dumb-show Shushhhh, index finger pressed to her lips, as though I had just unleashed a cavernous belch. I took to returning the salute: Shushhhh, we would gesture noiselessly at each other, especially if a sound from somewhere else—a crow’s caw, a backfiring tractor—broke through the stillness. As far as I could tell, I was the sole occupant of the men’s dormitory, and nothing seemed to prevent Miriam from padding through the rusted gate, across the gravel courtyard, and up to my Spartan room. There she would peel off her clothes and slip beneath the blanket, pressing her finger not to her lips this time but to mine.
When I try to assemble my memories of that week in the monastery, it is as though all voices, indeed all human sounds, have in tacit agreement withdrawn. What
