Allan Stein (24 page)

     
"Hank," I shouted, grabbing his arm. He grinned, pumping my hand. "Hank, I can't tell you how it feels to see you here."

     
"You're a sight for sore eyes," he yelled back. "Where's Herbie?"

     
"Outside, Hank. He's a little nervous about the widow. You actually got to her before we did."

     
"Outside?"

     
"I'm supposed to go get him whenever you show up. He's anxious to find the drawings and head home."

     
"Well, I'll be happy to see him. Imagine the three of us and Mrs. Stein in Paris. I'm really enjoying this trip."

     
"Does she have the drawings with her?" I asked, rather stupidly.

     
"Roubina? She doesn't have the drawings at all. I thought you knew that by now. Some dealer bought them ages ago. Have any idea where she went to?"

     
I turned him around and pointed to the VIP door. "She's in there with George and Denis. You go introduce yourself. I'll go get Herbert."

     
The street was empty. I slumped against the wall of Boy and could feel it pounding away. It might have been dawn, or predawn. In any case, the sky was gray at one end of the boulevard where it opened onto the Place de la République. Above me, the sky was still black and some stars were visible. It would be smart to wake the boy early and go before the news of my unmasking made it home. He had his knapsack packed and ready. There must be trains in the early morning. I wanted to believe he would be sad if I just left now, flew home without seeing him, but really I had no clue. No cabs came by. There were taxi stands at the Place de la République, and I got up and walked there.

     
The morning air was fresh with a tang of diesel when a truck passed, lumbering along slowly as if it were lost or hobbled. The sky was light at the edge. The scope of the globe, its great curve and the fact that life was scattered across its face, all of us turning in one direction, became clear to me, viscerally clear, as it always does at dawn or dusk, when the sun slips over the lip of the earth, blossoming into day, or disappears, draining its light from the sky as night comes on. You could see how far we'd all traveled then; and that nothing was stopping, that nothing was ever going to stop. Louise was still pins stuck on a map, but, as I watched this particular dawn, the map became, at least for a short while, pleasingly big and real.

♦15
♦

I
got a cab and rode to the Dupaignes'. The boy was confused when I roused, him, but he had no problem with that. He didn't even wake up, really. We shuffled down the stairs and out the garden door and were driven to the train station.

Everything about our remaining time was singular, unified, like in a dream. They made us get off the train in Créteil. The station was hideous, and they did something to the train. Orange plastic chairs had been broken by hoodlums. The shallow fragments of them left bolted to the metal rail were shit on by birds. The birds still nested above the rail. Every life has its own necessities, and mine had delivered me to this empty platform. We waited most of the morning, then got back on. We had plush seats by a window. The boy slouched against me and I got drunk on good wine and slept too.

France flew by outside the window. A cow, clogs, kids in parkas exhaling clouds into the bright sun, a milkmaid out of Proust. Our train kept lumbering along without stopping. Brick houses encroached and mountains rose in the east. The boy woke up and looked at me. “l'm not Herbert," I tried, simply to feel what I felt saying it. He leaned forward to look past me at the view. "I said I'm not Herbert." The boy wrinkled his eyebrows and exhaled, then
pressed his face to the glass again. He asked me what time it was. It was afternoon, and we ate together in the dining car. Money was not a problem. We ate on fine china with linen napkins and were treated well. The boy drank a lot of wine, and we slept in our seats through the afternoon. We got off in Grenoble and found a hotel.

The next morning we didn't talk. The boy seemed happy. We watched cable TV in bed. Outside it snowed a little. I wanted to stay several days, but the boy objected. The TV had two dozen stations. They sped by in French, German, English, and the universally tedious language of pop music. The boy squeezed the remote, which made these channels supersede one another with such speed and ease they formed a kind of buddhistic nullity, a flickering gap that kept emptying itself in the millisecond before comprehension. I lay on the comforter smelling the boy's odor. He smelled like oranges, or rather a book that said boys smell like oranges flashed in my memory as I lay with my nose pressed to his ribs. The room was strewn with clothes and half-eaten minibar snacks. I thought of Miriam and Serge and Per. By now Hank and Denis had surely hacked through the underbrush of my deceptions and discovered who I was.

The boy lay undressed on the bed with his indigestion, suckling a bottled Coke while he stared at the busy maternal screen. His skin was beautiful, like polished silver or hard cheese, or a meadow from the air, or flat granite warmed in the sun. His skin was like a boy's warm skin in the flat gray light of day. The spooned contours of his back and hips invited my hands, and I ran them over his ribs to his spine, down into its shallow curve, then onto his butt and thighs. It was alarming that such an exquisite surface could contain all that flatulence. He paid no attention to me. Shrouded in mist, Grenoble looked like an old movie projected on the screen of our hotel windows. Fog blurred the buildings and hills into a pleasing stage set, so that my situation became more theatrical the longer
I stared out at it. The boy. The elegant hotel. The simplicity of the plot.

"What time is the train to Digne?" I asked.

The boy stared at the screen, even while the answer issued from his lips. "Nine-thirty. There is another at eleven."

"We could stay another day, then get an early start tomorrow morning."

"No, I would like to keep going." He turned to look at me.

"Isn't it a rather long trip?"

"Digne is only two hours. Colmars maybe two or three hours more." The boy turned over, and his cock was large and half hard. "Suck me," he said, leaning back on his elbows and pouting like a man whose dinner is late.

"The rails wound over high ground heavily laden with fruit trees," [one of my books] "quince and pears, looking in their rich gold very strange amongst the snows, immense valleys of rock with almost no sign of life between villages, rivers that were beginning to be torrents, snow-clad peaks, and through continual turnings so the compass would behave like a dervish."

The train to Digne was identical to the first train. We sat in the same seats by the same window drinking the same wine while the same country flew by outside. The mountains had grown and now surrounded us. The boy had his tape machine and was lost to the world. The slim earpiece broadcast a sibilant hiss as the boy stared out the window. I had my books. "Nothing could have been finer than the changing panorama of the mountains, silent and slumberous amid the gray cloud drift. Across their broad bases floated detached masses of vapor, sometimes in heavy billows, sometimes in formless mists that grew or dissolved . . ." ". . . As we proceeded the clouds lifted higher, the rain grew thinner, and there were patches of blue sky and faint gleams of sunshine. But still the mountains were
wrapped in uncertainty. How high they were you could not guess, though you had glimpses of their rocky buttresses so far skyward that you might fancy they were the pillars of heaven."

Digne, capital of the Lavender Alps, was bitterly cold, and the boy hurried us to a café on the Boulevard Gassendi. A strong wind blew along the river, so that my cheeks ached and then burned when we stepped from the bridge into the relative shelter of the town. We ate but did not stay long. The boulevard was thick with walkers mingling beneath the famous plane trees. The boy and I slept on the train to Colmars. I woke every now and then, jarred by some lurch or turn, and was alarmed by the nearness and severity of the chasms. The boy was pale and his hair was stringy from not being combed properly. For a long stretch the train had run beside a river. Sheer granite rose from the river's edge, forming canyon walls up which our train then climbed, switching back upon itself. As we turned, the view disappeared into low clouds and we came out onto another valley, thick with mist and more tranquil.

It was extremely cold. The train stopped at Thorame-Haute and we got off. There was no one in the station. It might have been the time of day, or the time of year, but the small town was empty, its windows shuttered against the day. The boy had a map and Per's guidebook, and we began walking. The cold air let us walk briskly without sweating or feeling hot. The valley was unnervingly beautiful. Steep granite rose into the clouds. The river and the rock and the clouds were gray, but different grays. The cold air was full and smelled of water and pine, though I couldn't see any pines. The boy was quiet and didn't wear his tape machine. I thought he must be awestruck or at least interested in the view. He held the map and pointed to vistas, which he named.

It began to snow a little. The roar of the river swelled or diminished, depending on our route. "I saw streaks of snow in the high mountain hollows. The snow did not look cold, and I could not help
fancying it was some colorless powder that had been lightly sifted over the heights. The sight of it gave me a rare thrill of pleasure— I was really among the Alps—and the clouded mystery of these lofty precipices with their deep clefts whitened by the eternal snows seemed to me superlatively beautiful." Snow gathered on the scrub trees in the clefts of the rock. The boy looked at me and smiled. The river was hidden from us, and its sound was muted by a spur of granite that diverted our path. In the cupped hollow between the spur and the canyon wall, we paused and ate my last breath mints. While the snow drifted lazily around us, sideways and up as much as down, like blown floral tufts filling a summer meadow's air, the clouds broke and opened onto blue sky. I watched the split seam, the ragged canyon made there, and pointed so the boy looked up.

A jet passed. It was tiny, so incredibly high it might have been a satellite. The glittering speck traced a straight line, a soft white trail unfolding in its wake. We heard nothing but watched the jet make its line, splitting the sky, slow as a surgeon's knife, before the clouds closed again and it was swallowed. And then it came, the sound of the jet, so thin and fragile it might have been the sound nerves make in a body before it dies or the rush of blood through a victim's wrists, thin and persistent, not at all like the sound of a jet that intends to land but like a satellite fixed in its orbit, permanently assigned to the sky and its custom of surveillance, marking a path to remind us that something is up there. I like the sound of jets and the feel of a good book, so distant, so unreachable.

We continued along the road. When the clouds shut they lowered and the snow fell steadily now. We'd walked more than an hour and had seen no one. I was glad I'd eaten heavily in Digne and worried that the boy might be hungry. He kept pace ahead of me and showed no sign of slowing. Birds, I don't know what kind, sang from the rocks where they picked at the grasses and brush. A dozen flew from their place and crossed the river to a stand of
larches and this was an odd sight for me, these rather small gray birds flying in the snow. The boy named them in French. His cheeks were red from the cold. He looked around us and then dropped into step beside me.

"If this were rain," he asked, "would it be pouring?"

I was so impressed by the sound of his question and the muted silence that swallowed it, I quickly forgot the question. "What?" I asked back.

"If we were some place warmer."

"Would this be rain?" The way my head rattled and itched when I spoke made me realize I was becoming delirious. "Of course it would."

"Would it be pouring?" He gestured broadly at the snow.

"Where exactly do you mean?"

"Anywhere warmer. It's snowing so much now."

"It can't be far. Are you very tired?"

"No." He looked at me like a hurt dog, sheepish and determined. "I'm very cold and also very hot. I will sleep good when we are there."

"In the wide gorge down below was the frozen flood from the mountains, streaked with dust and dotted here and there with great stones. Seen from where we stood the ruder features of the stream were subdued so as to make it seem an exceedingly simple matter to walk across its gentle folds to the opposite side, the high walls of which, with a serrated fringe of trees along the top, was now in plain sight. But when I clambered down the slope of loose grit and stones to the bottom, things had a different aspect..." "... The river rushes and rushes; it is almost like Niagara after the jump of the cataract. There are dreadful little booths beside the bank, for the sale of photographs and
immortelles
—I don't know what one is to do with the
immortelles
—where you are offered a brush dipped in tar
to write your name withal on the rocks. Thousands of persons of both sexes, and exclusively, it appeared, of the French nationality, had availed themselves of this implement . . ." ". . . The river, beneath me, reaching the plain, flung itself crookedly across the meadows like an unrolled blue ribbon. I tried to think of the
amant de Laure
, for literature's sake, but I had no great success, and the most I could do was to say to myself that I must try again."

The valley became picturesque. Snow covered the rocks and grasses. Pines, now visible, were outlined in it. Dusk had come and turned the gray sky grayer. What light there was suffused the wet air and seemed to issue from nowhere. A sign that said COLMARS appeared by a bend, and we scaled the path it pointed to. I could hardly imagine Serge young and thin, brown as a squirrel, sweating his way up this incline. The boy was delirious. He bounded up the path, laughing out loud and turning at every bend to look at me through the snow. However miserable he had been along the way, he was now that glad.

We stood at the Porte de Savoie, looking back through snow and darkness. The swift river, hidden below, could be heard rushing along the rocks. The paving was slick, and ice had formed in the archway. Snow covered the Place Gireud and the small church that faced it. The town was shuttered. There was no light except across the square, where one bright bulb burned in a store, casting shadows through its latticed windows onto a stand of tired fruits and vegetables. With snow in his lashes and bright red from the cold, the boy traversed the square to this sad little grocery where Per kept the key between summers. Uncle Armand's place was just a few doors away. The grocer gave us the key, together with some curt instructions and a canister of gas.

I carried the heavy canister. We found the right number, and the boy maneuvered the oversized key until the door fell open. It
was a stone cave, really, with no light or warmth. Stéphane found the right switches, and a bare overhead light revealed a small room with its various appliances arrayed beside a counter, three shuttered windows, and a great stone hearth. It took up most of the back wall. A wicker couch and chairs plus twin beds made up the decor.

"There is also the toilet," he added, sensing my disappointment. "And a tub if we are to bath."

"There's a bathtub?"

"No, a tub for the bathing." (This rendered "bath-ing.") "A metal tub. It fills with the hot water, and it is big enough for sitting."

A low door beside the hearth opened on a dry chamber full of wood, and I struggled with a hatchet to make kindling and get a fire started. The boy went back to the grocer's and brought home chocolate, a chicken, vegetables, bread, milk, and a box of Cap'n Crunch cereal. We ate some chocolate immediately. I complained that he forgot the wine, but there was good wine in a second chamber, near the door. The fire defeated me, several times. I couldn't make the kindling small enough. I crouched over the stone hearth, breaking splinters from the wood, and made a small tepee from them. The flame caught where the splinters leaned together, and I put a broader piece on that.

The boy was feverish. We hung his wet clothes from the mantel, and I wrapped him in a comforter. He took more chocolate and bread, and I set up the gas water heater according to his instructions. The boy huddled in hot water in the tub and said he felt better. I put the chicken in a pot with vegetables and a lot of wine and hung this pot off a hook in the fire. The hook swiveled. The boy's clothes were dry. The room became hot from the fire, and I found candles and a small lamp to put on the floor so the light would be pretty, which it was. He dressed and sat with me.