—
“Reggie!” she called out after me, when with a jangle of harness bells I opened the door to leave the store.
Turning, I said, “Reggie? I’m Daniel. My name is Daniel.”
“Good to know,” she said, “but Reggie’s my name. Reggie Short. As in Reggie-short-for-Regina. Impossible to forget, right? Like me.”
She had somehow inserted herself between me and the door and was holding it open with her back.
“Reggie,” I said. “Enchanté.”
“Well, on-shan-tay, Professor,” she said, again in her camp drawl, clasping her hand over the top of mine and dipping in a mock curtsy.
“Until next time,” I said, not knowing what to say.
“Remember, Professor. Tall and cold.”
The harness bells jangled again as the door shut behind me.
TWENTY-SIX
Miriam had said she would return the following evening. Walking back to her apartment from the bookstore with my new copy of Herbert, I decided I would prepare a dinner to celebrate her return and the completion of my notes on the Herbert poems. First thing in the morning I set out to gather provisions. A roast chicken I could manage, I decided, though the one the butcher wrapped up for me still had its lower legs and feet attached, the shanks black-scaled and reptilian. The feet were folded up like squash flowers, and a tuft of feathers made a garter on one of the legs. In a boulangerie-pâtisserie I purchased two baguettes and a tart of apricots and raspberries shellacked with glaze. At the épicerie I decided we would have green beans steamed with tiny carrots. From the cheesemonger I requested a Saint-Félicien because I recognized the name. He presented me with one so ripe, it appeared to have deflated in its little box. Resting on the counter under a towel, the cheese filled the apartment with a funk partly of silage and partly of fresh manure. I laid down two bottles of champagne on the floor of the refrigerator and girded my resolve to amputate the bird’s squash-flower feet.
After the chicken was safely in the oven, I attempted to wrap the notebook of my commentaries. I wanted to set it out on the little table as a present for her, but I botched the job, tearing the improvised paper wrapping as I tried to tape it. I decided instead to inscribe the cover. I wrote, “For his Nightingale, Miriam, from Daniel, her Friend and Admirer, with Respect and Love,” but when I read over my inscription, I tore off the cover and threw it away.
I considered meeting her at the train, but not knowing what train she would arrive on, I decided just to wait in the apartment for the crunch of her key in the door. An hour passed and I decided to open a bottle of wine. A second hour passed; the chicken had collapsed, the apartment fogged with the oven’s meaty breath, the wine bottle empty. By the time I had finished the second bottle, I knew she would not arrive. In the morning, I woke in the little bed, greased with sweat; the visitor bird, whose howling had disrupted my shallow sleep, eyed me from the sill. I must have dozed again because now the phone was ringing. Miriam’s voice came through metallic and fractured, as though relayed by radio on a stray frequency.
I told her I had made dinner for her.
She was very sorry and should have called.
Was she on her way home now?
That was why she had called.
What was why had she called?
To ask if we could change our plans.
Seemed we’d already changed our plans.
Could I come and meet her?
Where? At the monastery in Leuvray?
She was not at the monastery. A place nearby. I could come and meet her there?
Was everything all right?
Take the train to Auxerre, she said. Someone will pick you up there. I don’t know who yet, but they’ll find you.
I said again, Was everything all right?
No, of course, everything was all right. I was sure I did not mind?
Was she well?
No, she was very well. Please, Daniel.
—
In Auxerre, outside the train station, I waited on a bench by a telephone booth, for whom I didn’t know. Someone would find me, Miriam had said. Something would happen. How strange to be a stranger in a strange city, waiting to be recognized by another stranger. I had arrived in Paris a stranger. Over the year of my fellowship, I had continued a stranger, making few friends, even up to the day of my departure. But something had happened. Just as I was preparing to leave, a young woman, for reasons of her own, had taken me for her friend and lover. A girl from a provincial town. A singer, her voice bodiless, weightless, her body for my body less a thing than a force, whether smiling at me over her coffee cup or astride my hips or arched beneath me, her upper lip beaded with sweat, her mouth tasting of salt and cigarettes, her cunt of seawater.
She had fixed me in the steady level of her gaze. She had called me her friend, as though mon ami were the name by which I am known to the angels. She had guided my tongue, my lips, toward rudimentary competence in her language. And through this, word by word, she came into focus, as though her level gaze had somehow steadied mine as well, imbued it with a clarity that in turn flowed
