When William and I traveled, it was every which way: by express and local train, on buses that had televisions and buses without windows, on elephants and in carts, in tuk-tuks and on the backs of motorcycles. We came upon accidents, bad ones, sometimes before a blanket could be produced and draped over the victim.
“Don’t look,” William would say. “It’s bad.”
I looked. Always the shoes are thrown clear, nobody going near them.
We looked, the living, at the dead, dumbly, unable to say anything.
Rene is all nervous energy. He is feeling flush; it is the height of tourist season. On Saturdays, he plays on a bridge over the Seine, the one near Notre Dame. I have never been inside it. Nor the Louvre, the Bastille, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Eiffel Tower.
There’s no need. Isn’t that the whole point of Paris? One doesn’t need to set foot in a museum. The whole city is stately, charming, in good proportion. I feel beautifully outside of it.
I don’t go see Rene and his band, though I listen to the CDhe gives me. I can’t go to the places where he plays because inevitably in the crowd are two slightly worn people in dusty sandals, unfashionably, practically dressed, who will sometimes be moved to do a little dance just at the edge of the crowd.
After a week of intense heat comes a week of rain and cold. I am drinking hot chocolate at the café across the street. I have become friendly with the proprietor. He has a nose you could hang a hat on, kind eyes. “Nothing can mar the beauty of Paris,” he says today, looking out at the wet street, the golden light slanting down between the gray buildings. Pigeons testing their feet in puddles.
“Thank God,” he says, “that I was born in Paris. There are so many things one can’t choose in life.”
I meet Rene for dinner at a café on the Left Bank. He thinks the music might be too loud, the interior too dark, the jingly-jangly belly dancers too much.
I say, “C’est parfait.” It is.
He is too careful with me. At this rate, I will never sleep with him.
“It’s all right,” I say. “I will tell you what happened. We were driving home from dinner. It was snowing and we hit an embankment. We had each had one glass of wine at dinner, and William was not a small man.
“The crash that killed William broke two of my fingers,” I tell Rene. “That was all it did to me. Look, now they won’t bend properly.”
I had grown used to telling this story in just this same way. It didn’t mean anything to me anymore. Then a giant rock fell on top of me and the realization slammed me down again: William was gone. I could never—no matter what I did or didn’t do—see him again. My heart was pounding so fast, I had to hold it down with my hand. I felt seized up, both numband tingly, my mind filled with everything all at once, until it passed. I let out a deep breath.
“Are you all right?” Rene asked. He put his hand on mine.
“Oh,” I say after some time has passed. “These kinds of things happen all the time. Death. Destruction.”
He stares at me.
“It is really very ordinary.”
I said all that when what I really meant to say was, “Oh, no.”
When William and I were traveling, when we came across something special, something we couldn’t have imagined seeing or doing before—climbing a glacier, riding wild camels, swimming in the Andaman Sea among seals—we would share a look, amazed: This will never happen again.
Once, we shared a cigarette with an orange-robed monk who told us that after one more year of monkhood, he was going to become an accountant. “I like business,” he said, his face serene. “Money.” They’re not allowed to touch women, these monks, making an issue of sex, but there was something very gentle in his eyes.
We were sitting across from him on planks that only resembled seats. Long ago, my body had grown numb. But it was pleasant. We slid along the brown Mekong; it would take us twenty hours to go from Laos to Thailand.
The slow boat. The fast boat got there in three hours but wasn’t recommended by the guidebooks or Gary, our hotelkeeper. At that speed, he said, accidents were catastrophic. Bodies flew apart.
We could have flown or taken a bus to the border. But we were too full of dust already. I read a photocopied copy of The Lover to William. We had started it in Vietnam. There is nothing so soothing as being read to. All children know it.
Near a small village, naked boys played in the water nearthe shore, their bodies the same color as the river. Their shining black hair, their wide-open mouths as they waved at us. I am glad to have seen that.
Rene’s place is out in the twelfth arrondissement. It takes us nearly an hour on the metro. Most of his neighbors are from Senegal. There is thumping music coming from an upstairs apartment, shouts, wild laughter, singing. The smell of food cooking.
Rene says the place is nothing but he loves living there among the transplanted Senegalese. “They’re not afraid to laugh,” he says.
Rene’s studio is small and spare, temporary. I recognize it. Before he steps aside into his tiny kitchen to open a bottle of wine, he puts a CD into the player—Billie Holiday. It sounds scratchy and old, but still her voice is right in the room with us, alive.
There is no place to sit except on
