Last Night in Montreal (3 page)

“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I didn’t mean to get so pedantic about it.”

“It’s all right. It’s interesting,” she said.

She had been listening for a very long time. They’d met early in the afternoon, and it was almost evening now. It had been weeks since he’d first noticed her here, sitting quietly in the Café Matisse when he walked by the window or came in for a coffee. She came here often, and when they were here at the same time he liked to try to sit as nearby as possible. On this particular day, when he’d left Thomas and Geneviève at the Third Cup Café across the intersection, there were no empty tables when he’d wandered in— thank you, God—and in a catastrophe of blind courage he’d walked across to her table, insinuated himself into the opposite seat, and introduced himself. By some small miracle she’d smiled back and said her name instead of telling him to leave her alone and wait for his own goddamn table, and that had been six or seven hours ago. The café was quiet now, and the morning waitress had left for the day. The afternoon waitress was leaning on the countertop, staring out at the uneventful street.

“But what about you?” he asked. “You know I like dead languages, but what do you like?”

“Live languages,” Lilia said. “Reading, taking photographs, a few other things. Do you work in the neighborhood?”

“Yeah, a few blocks from here. I stand in an art gallery staring at the wall four days a week. You?”

“The wall? Not the paintings?”

“There aren’t that many paintings there—actually, there aren’t
any—
I don’t want to talk about my job,” he said. “I don’t like my job very much, to be perfectly honest. What do
you
do for a living?”

“I wash dishes. Do you like to travel? I went to New Mexico recently; have you been?”

“Several times. And what’s interesting,” he said, “is that we’ve been talking for hours now, and I hardly know anything about you. Where are you from?”

She smiled. “This will sound very strange to you,” she said, “but I’ve lived in so many places that I’m not entirely sure.”

“I see. Well. How long have you lived in New York?”

“About six weeks,” she said.

“And where were you just before that?”

“You mean where was I living when I boarded a train to New York?”

“Exactly. Yes. You arrived here from somewhere.”

“From Chicago,” she said.

He felt that he was finally getting somewhere. “You lived there for a while?”

“Not really. A few months.”

“Before that?”

“St. Louis.”

“Before that?”

“Minneapolis. St. Paul. Indianapolis. Denver. Some other places in the Midwest, New Orleans, Savannah, Miami. A few cities in California. Portland.”

“Is there anywhere you
haven’t
lived?”

“Sometimes I think there isn’t.”

“You’re a traveler.”

“Yes. I try to be as up-front about it as possible now,” she said.

He wasn’t sure what she meant but let it pass. “You said you liked live languages,” he said.

“I like translating things.”

“What do you translate?”

“Random things that I come across. Newspaper articles. Books. It’s just something I like doing.”

Four and a half languages not including English, she said, when pressed for more details. Español, Italiano, Deutsch, Français. Her Russian, she admitted, was shaky at best. Her wrist was warm beneath his fingertips.

“I envy you. I don’t speak any living languages except English. What else do you like?”

“I like Greek mythology,” she said. “I like that Matisse print over the bar. It’s the reason why I come here, actually.” She gestured at the opposite wall, and he twisted around to look.
The Flight of Icarus,
1947: one of Matisse’s final works, from the time when he’d subsided from paint into paper cutouts and was moving closer and closer to the end of the line, unable to walk, his body slipping away from him. Icarus is a black silhouette falling through blue, his arms still outstretched with the memory of wings, bright starbursts exploding yellow around him in the deep blue air. He’s wingless, and already close above the surface of the water: Matisse would be dead in seven years. Icarus, plummeting fast into the Aegean Sea, and there’s a red spot on him, a symbol, to mark the last few heartbeats held in his chest.

“I like mythology too. When did you get interested in Greek legends?”

“Two days after I turned sixteen.”

“That’s very specific. You got a book for your birthday?”

“No, someone I knew was talking about the story, so I read it as soon as I could. I don’t really know Matisse, but I like that print. I like the story,” she said. “I think it’s the saddest of all the Greek legends.” She blinked; her voice seemed suddenly tired. “What time is it?”

“Late,” he said. “Probably eight o’clock or so. May I walk you home?”

HER HOME
was a rented room with a window that looked out on an airshaft, a brick wall three feet from the glass. Night fell at one-thirty in the afternoon. The times when he came to her in that room he had the feeling of stepping into a cave, or stepping outside time. She slept on a mattress on the floor. A suitcase, opened against the wall, held a jumble of clothes and a battered manila envelope. She had a Polaroid from her childhood pinned neatly to a wall: Lilia in a diner, twelve years old in the summertime in a faroff Southern state, leaning over the countertop with the waitress.

Lilia: she had ink stains on her fingers, and the most beautiful eyes. She wore a silver chain necklace but wouldn’t say where it was from. She was obsessed by the topography of language: she followed the maps of alphabets over obscure terrains, parted the shifting gauze curtains between
window, fenêtre, finestra, fenster
and peered outward, wrote out long charts of words and brought home books in five languages. She maintained a secretive, passionate life of study. She was without precedent; Eli had dedicated his life before her to not being alone, he had surrounded himself with other people for as long as he could remember, but he had never known anyone remotely like her.

She had a mind like a switchblade. She sometimes stayed up all night. She worked four or five nights a week washing dishes at a vast Thai restaurant near the river, where Manhattan shone across the dark water at night. She returned from the restaurant at midnight with an aura of dish soap and steam, peanut oil, kitchen grime, her face shiny with exertion and her eyes too bright. She stayed up reading till morning, her lips moving as she struggled with the Cyrillic alphabet, and crawled into bed beside Eli at dawn.

Her hair was dark and cut unevenly, in a way that he found secretly thrilling; he knew that when it got too long she cut it herself, fast and carelessly, not necessarily in the presence of a mirror. The effect was rough but she was pretty enough to pull it off. She had scars on her arms, a faint and complicated pattern of lines suggesting a long-ago accident involving a great deal of broken glass, visible only under certain lights; she never talked about them, and he could somehow never bring himself to ask. She had four or five unevenly spaced freckles on her nose, like Lolita. She gave the impression of harboring enormous secrets. She had been traveling alone from city to city, in his understanding, since she was no older than sixteen or seventeen years old. She alluded occasionally to her father in New Mexico and she talked to him on the phone sometimes; her father had a girlfriend, and they had two small children together, but Eli was never sure if there was anyone else. The existence of a mother, for example, was far from clear. When he asked, she said she’d never known her mother and then went quiet.

She moved in with him at the midpoint: three months after he walked her home from the Café Matisse and three months before she disappeared. Cohabitation held certain surprises. She had a specific way of living that seemed to him at once erratic and ritualistic and frequently caused him to wonder about her sanity—a faint unease came over him while sitting beside the bathtub, for example, chatting and watching her shave her legs, change razor blades, and then shave her legs again. She would pause occasionally to sip from a tall glass of water that sat on the edge of the bathtub next to four or five bottles of shampoo, which she used in rotation. She could disappear with her camera for hours, particularly in thunderstorms; her shift at the restaurant ended no later than midnight but on stormy nights she came home at three or four in the morning, hair plastered to her forehead, soaked to the skin. He would have suspected her of cheating in those times except that it was clear from the condition of her clothing that she hadn’t been indoors all night. She’d extract herself from layer upon sodden layer of clothing, happy and shivering and her skin cold to the touch, and then she’d spend an hour or so in a steaming-hot shower and sleep in until at least noon. She had no explanation for these evenings except that she liked walking in rainstorms and her camera was waterproof. He was desperately curious but never asked where she went. He tried not to press her for too many details, about her scars or her family or anything else; she’d come from nowhere and seemed to have no past, and it seemed possible, even in the beginning when everything was easy, that the tenuous logic of her existence in his life might collapse under close examination. He didn’t want to know.

“What I want,” she said quietly, on the third night he spent with her, “is to stop traveling and stay in the same place for a while. I’m starting to think I’ve been traveling too much.”

And for Eli—frustrated, aimless, working at a job he didn’t particularly like, failed scholar, unable to decide whether he was a writer or a latent genius or just an academic fraud—the idea of
traveling too much
was unimaginably exotic, and he pulled her close and fucked her again and imagined staying beside her forever. But that was only the third night she spent with him.

She was easily distracted. She had a photographer’s fascination with quality of light. An upside-down CD reflecting rainbows on the bedroom ceiling, a glass of red wine catching the light of a candle, the Empire State Building piercing white against the sky at night. She loved details, and the world, and inevitably became lost in both. Violently beautiful sunsets could reduce her to tears. She was virtually incapacitated by fireflies. She was sublimely abnormal, and very frequently unnerving, but she was his psalm; what a live-in lover offers you, ultimately, is the unprecedented revelation of not being alone. She slipped so easily into the folds of his life. Her few belongings vanished into his apartment.

It always seemed later on that he loved her, at least partially, because she rendered him fraudulent. He talked about traveling, but she had traveled. He talked about photography, but she took photographs. He talked about languages, but she translated them. He felt that if she were a screenwriter she’d write screenplays instead of talking about screenplays and sketching outlines of screenplays and analyzing screenplays the way Thomas did. If she were a dancer, he felt that she’d dance. What he liked best were the times when they went into the café and none of his friends were there, so they could sit together and read the paper in blissful silence. Or the afternoons when he sat at his desk and measured sentences, written and then deleted in equal measure, or did research while she sat in the armchair nearby and studied Russian texts, her lips moving soundlessly over the words. And life settled into a state not far from perfection, until he found the lists.

One: a list of names, ten pages, beginning and ending with
Lilia
. Most names had arrows that trailed out into the margins, where the names of places were noted in small print: Mississippi, south Kansas, central Florida, Detroit. Two: a list of words in a number of languages, which could’ve meant anything at all. He recognized the Spanish word for butterfly and the German word for night—
mariposa, nacht—
but the rest were incomprehensible to him. Like the list of names, the paper looked old and the handwriting was evolutionary; the beginning parts of both lists were in awkward childish block letters, which became smaller and more refined as the lines progressed. Three: a list of words and phrases. This third list was longer and of a different genre; no evolutionary transformation was in evidence, and all the languages represented were ailing or dead. He only knew this because he recognized whole phrases from his notebooks. These pages were uncrumpled and new-looking. He went through this last list over and over again but could detect no pattern in the phrases she’d copied. There were words from five continents. Her suitcase also contained six or seven books and a weathered business card for a private investigator in Montreal, but it was the lists that interested him.

“I was just collecting the words,” she explained. “I didn’t meant to plagiarize, I just liked the way they looked. I wanted to save them on the page,” she said. “Like pressed flowers in a book.”

He found this perfectly understandable. He liked patterns too. But the rest of it, my love, these other pages . . .

“I make lists,” she said, stating the obvious. “I always did.” He’d brought the papers to her in a panic—
Lilia, what is this, tell me what this means—
but she refused to be anything but calm. He was pacing distractedly around the apartment; she sat in the armchair, regarding him quietly. She was interested to know why he’d gone through her suitcase in the first place.

He forced his voice to be steady. “I’m curious about the names.”

She began to tell him a story in bed that night, a long story about deserts and aliases and driving away, motel pay phones and a blue Ford Valiant in the mountains. She spoke in measured tones, her hands moving ceaselessly over his skin. He listened, at first incredulous and then shocked into belief, but he wasn’t too caught up in the words to notice that she was tracing the contours of wings over his shoulder blades.

4.

There is a word in the Dakota language, gender-specific and untranslatable, that expresses the specific loneliness of mothers whose children are absent. Eli told Lilia the word once when they were lying in bed together, and it was hard not to think of her mother when she heard it.

Lilia’s mother said once in an interview that she wished she could forget her daughter. (The interview aired on
Unsolved Cases
. It’s on record somewhere, although Lilia can’t quite bring herself to watch it again.) It was a cruel thing to say, but touchingly pragmatic. She had a daughter who disappeared: this is the kind of catastrophe that marks a person forever afterward, as indelibly as a missing limb.

On the night her daughter disappeared it was late November, and a heavy snowfall had blanketed the lawn. Just before Lilia left the house for the last time a sound startled her out of sleep, or perhaps she was lying awake already. When the sound came again she climbed out of bed and went to the window, the floorboards cold beneath her feet. She opened the window and the air outside was exquisitely cold, the lawn brilliant with snow and moonlight, and beyond the lawn the forest rose up like a wall. Her breath was pale in the frozen air. Her father was standing in the snow beneath the window; he waved to her and smiled and pressed a finger to his lips.
Shh.
She turned back into the room, clutching her bunny (it was blue, and its eyes were startled round buttons that gleamed dark in the half light), and she made her way out into the silent hall. A bare floorboard creaked softly as she passed her half-brother’s room. He lay still, but he wasn’t sleeping; he listened to her footsteps recede unsteadily on the stairs. Lilia skipped the ninth stair which sometimes creaked and tiptoed through moonlight on the landing, the banister railing at shoulder height. Down through the shadows of the living room, then the silent kitchen. She unlocked the front door and ran out barefoot into the snow.

Her father came forward to meet her; in an easy swooping movement he lifted her up into his arms, and she dropped the bunny as her feet left the ground.
My lily,
he kept saying,
Lilia, my dove . . .
He hadn’t seen her in almost a year and a half, but he remembered how to hold her so she wouldn’t fall. He kept saying her name as he took her away from there, Lilia’s bandaged arms around his neck and her heart beating fast against his shoulder, teeth chattering in the cold. She closed her eyes against his shoulder. He carried her quickly across the lawn and into the forest, where everything was silent and waiting and dark; the air was a little warmer here, and no snow penetrated the branches on the forest floor. The only snow here was on the driveway, a pale ribbon winding down between the trees. To her brother, watching from the window on the staircase landing, it was as though the forest closed behind them like a gate.

Far from the house, beyond the wall of the forest, a car started down by the road; Lilia’s mother stirred uneasily in her sleep as it receded. Her brother turned away from the window and returned to his bed.

This was her escape. It was recorded in newspapers.