Of course, time was not our birthright. What we had been given was the illusion of stillness, a false reprieve. That is the way they do it, children, the way they detain time. Our apartment still smelled of new paint, its interior hermetic, a satellite’s self-sustaining atmosphere. That atmosphere was our own, that rarefied air of new paint, of the moth-breath in her sleeping mouth, of the fish-liver pungency of diaper cream. Yes, that is what it was like: a minute, habitable bubble, a satellite affixed in geosynchronous orbit as bright as a star and seemingly as still, though in reality traveling at incomprehensible speed.
All the years of her childhood we spent in that capsule, all those long spring afternoons, summer afternoons, whiled away on the carpet or in the park. As I sat on a playground bench, Clementine would lie, it seemed, for hours, belly down over the seat of a swing, walking her feet around in a circle, twisting together the chains of the swing until she could twist them no further. Then she would lift her feet and begin to spin, slowly at first, then faster and faster until—thunk—the chains would release each other, stand separate for an instant until—clink—the swing’s momentum would bend the chains around each other again but in the opposite direction, and Clementine would walk her circle once more. All the long afternoon it went—thunk, clink—thunk, clink—the pendulum of Clementine’s chain clock.
NINE
Several days had passed since I had seen or heard from her, and I had begun to suspect that I would not see her again. Perhaps she had succeeded—as she said she would—in getting me out of her system. Perhaps the fact that I had stayed in Paris, had simply failed to get on my flight back to the States, had spooked her. Perhaps I had violated some statute in the unwritten code for affairs with foreigners, the requirement that one must be, above all, a body in motion, passing through.
Shame was what I felt, shame to have been so brusquely unhorsed by my own intoxication. I would set about shipping my things. I would find a new flight home. What I felt I did not register as grief, or longing, but as stunned disorientation. Something had happened, something to do with her voice in the upper reaches of the Miserere, something to do with her teeth in my shoulder as she came—something that had passed over and through me, leaving me dazed, lost, altered.
—
But then, abruptly, there it was again, her voice on the phone: Could we meet? Had I forgotten? I had said I would help her with some translating.
No…no, I had not forgotten.
I made out her face in the crowd as she approached the café on the rue de Vaugirard. She had not been late, but by then I was finishing my third pastis. “I was afraid you had left,” she said.
“Maybe I ought to have.”
I realized then what I had hoped for. I had hoped that the sensation of aftermath would stay with me. That she would, in appearing, reveal herself to be merely someone, anyone, a face in the crowd, a face already sinking into the past. But she was there, each gesture intensely her own even to the trembling of the match flame at the tip of her cigarette. Her proximity was something I could taste, could breathe, just as she seemed to breathe it in with the first drag of smoke. Her level gaze settled on my face as though it could rest there.
“You look well,” she said.
“You are beautiful.”
She said nothing, then said, “No.”
“No what?”
“Not beautiful. You say so because you think you do not want to go back to New York. But you have your tickets.”
“We each have our tickets,” I said, “mine to New York, yours to a monastery.”
“You want to escape,” she said. “That’s why you took me in the first place.”
“You want to escape too,” I said, “to become a religieuse.”
“For me escape would be not to become one. For you, escape is Paris.”
Now the persistence of her gaze seemed part of a laborious preparation, a laying up of stores for a long journey. She would take it alone. The pastis now tasted dreggy and acrid, like panic.
“You are telling me that you have gotten me out of your system,” I said.
“You speak as though you will not leave before I leave,” she said.
“Haven’t I given you what you wanted?”
“And what was that?”
“A temporary American. A disposable one.”
The gleam brimming in her eye accused me.
“You said you would help me with translation, as you did for Mathieu,” she said, and unfolded a photocopied sheet on the small tabletop. The waiter, having placed my fourth pastis and her first at the table’s edge, set the water carafe right on the paper with an aggrieved thump.
Was I acquainted with someone named Ronsard?
A friend of hers?
Everyone knew Ronsard; every student in France was required to memorize a Ronsard poem at one point or another. She recited a few lines in an ironic singsong cadence, like a student repeating an assigned text. In a couple of weeks, she would perform a concert of Ronsard song settings.
Some of the settings were of Ronsard’s poems translated into other languages. Had I really never read him, not even translated into English? This Mr. “Yeets,” one of Ronsard’s translators, he was a famous English poet, no? Did I not know him either?
Yeats, I had heard of Yeats, the Irish poet.
“Yeats,” she said, cautiously drawing out the
