Wonderland (12 page)

We picked at the pizza. There was food around all the time, but we never seemed to gain weight. That was the magic, too. Gigi poured the wine. The other two looked haggard, as if they had spent the past five weeks walking from Paris to here. The darkness rose again, swishing, to my calves. I wanted another line, but there was no more, no more.

“Do you think we need to make another offering to Nakimba?” I asked Gigi.

She shook her head, looking grave. “Won’t work.”

Ethan harrumphed.

“We barely have three tracks down, and we only have a week left,” I said. “Four days, actually. Then Sparrow is coming in.”

“He owes money everywhere,” said Gigi, who hardly liked anyone, except us. “I’m amazed Elaine is letting him come back.” Elaine, was the owner of the chateau; she had been a lover of Jim Morrison’s when he recorded there, and was rumored to have some of his come in a little stoppered vial in a safe-deposit box in Paris. Elaine, who was seventy-two, was in Moscow, where she always summered.

“Listen,” said Ethan.

We tilted our heads. From far away, the deer were barking.

“It’s like they have amplifiers,” I said. “How do they do that?”

“They’re motivated,” Gigi said, eating her pizza with a fork and knife, like all the families in the restaurant.

“Are you saying we’re not? Don’t we work all the time? Goddamn, Gigi. And why can’t we try Nakimba? It worked before. You’re being really negative.”

Gigi narrowed her eyes. “
Ça suffit,
Anna.”

I drummed my fingers on the table. “I might be freaking out. I think I am freaking out. I’m freaking out. This pizza tastes weird. Is it cold in here? Since when does France do air-conditioning? My throat is seizing.”

Ethan folded his hands on top of his bald head and closed his eyes. “Shhhh,” he said. Jack Sprat’s wife frowned in our direction. Gigi and I waited. After several minutes, Ethan opened his eyes and blinked rapidly several times. “I just had a dream,” he said. He rubbed his cheekbones. “God, I really need to sleep. Or wake up.” He gave me a stern look. “Work tonight?”

“I’m not sure there’s a point to that.”

Gigi’s expression was grave as well. “
L’addition,
” she said brusquely to the teenage boy in the apron, who was pretending not to hover near our table, eavesdropping, trying to figure out what we were. “Let’s go,” she said, putting down her knife and fork. “We have to go.”

She barreled back over the dark, serpentine roads, tight-faced and silent, her hair fastened in a knot at her neck with a rubber band, Ethan bouncing in the seat next to her as if he had taken ill and we were driving him to the hospital. Maybe we
were
driving him to the hospital, or should be, I had no idea, as I ate a bit of bread I’d taken from our bread basket on the way out of the pizza place. I wasn’t hungry, but I knew that eating was important. The cheap little car jolted, jounced; towels and paperbacks and random sandals littered the dusty wells behind the front seat. It smelled like wet dog and chlorine and old, baked-in red wine. I lay down, my feet on the window opposite, wondering about Gigi, who her people were. The moon was up, chasing the car as it sped along. I eyed it between my feet, thinking that I really didn’t know anyone at the chateau, and how could it be that you could love so deeply without actually knowing who people were? Or was love
more
possible like this, was our love purer, cleaner? Meeting stripped of the familiar. Carrying the clothes we came with, our taste, not much more. I got so lost in the beauty of that thought, lying on my back, admiring the moon in my toes, that I didn’t notice when Gigi turned left instead of right, heading away from the chateau.

We came to a stop by the side of the road. “Get out of the car,” ordered Gigi, and for a moment I thought she was going to leave us there and speed away, because we had so obviously failed. And not only failed to make the record; we had all failed in some larger, more spiritual sense. I had failed to make the most important, the most beautiful thing in the world appear. If Gigi had pulled out a gun and shot me in the head right then, I wouldn’t have blamed her. I scurried out of the car.

Gigi got out, too, slamming the driver’s side door. Ethan lumbered up and out, looking like a bear reluctantly extricating himself from a clown car. Marching ahead of us along the side of the road, Gigi flipped open her cell phone and muttered something in a terse tone I couldn’t make out.

“Come,” she said to us. “I’m taking you somewhere I know. The others are meeting us there.”

We followed. Few cars passed. The moon was watching us like a wary white animal. Now I was really hungry, but there was nothing to eat, my pockets were empty. I craved cream, butter, sugar, and milk. Around us, on both sides of the road, were fields with bare stalks. Fallow, nothing to eat there. In the distance were the lights of the little village.

Gigi turned and set off across the uneven surface of the fallow field, her long legs scissoring under her ankle-length skirt. The wavy field was so dark that she looked as if she were walking on a body of water. She kicked off her sandals and scooped them into one hand. Ethan took off his boots, left them in the dirt, and began taking umbrella steps behind Gigi, his meaty arms outstretched, his big broad face gleaming in the moonlight, humming. This was what he must have been like as a child, umbrella-stepping by himself through his family’s enormous house; they were rich, violent people. Lagging behind, I slipped off my sandals as well. The dirt under my feet was cool and dry, crumbly soft. I liked it, it felt right. I hiked up my shift, squatted, pushed my underwear aside, and peed in the dirt. My pee smelled strong. Ahead of me, determined Gigi and Ethan, with his looping umbrella steps, looked like gleaners scanning the field for windfalls, using some eccentric system of their own. The night around us was very quiet. I loved Gigi and Ethan so much. I was still terribly hungry.

I ran to catch up with them, grabbed one of Ethan’s hands in mine, and then stretched, stretched to reach Gigi, who was weeping. I kissed her wet face, held it in my hands. “What is it?” I asked her. “Oh, what is it? What’s wrong?” Her eyes were turned down, her mouth was turned down, like a mask of sadness.

“You will leave me here,” she said softly. “You will finish and leave. And I think it’s me. I think I’m the one stopping it, so you can never leave, but I have to fix it. I’m ruining everything with my clinging. I’m ruining your record. I am going to fix it.”

“No,” I said, kissing and kissing her long, brown face. “No, no. It’s me,
I’m
ruining it.” Ethan stood silently, his hand loose in mine, his head bent; I wondered if he had fallen asleep again, if he was dreaming standing up, like a horse. “It’s all my fault,” I said. Gigi’s tears were salty on my lips. I hugged her tightly until she stopped crying, and then the three of us resumed walking again, slowly, Ethan and I each holding one of Gigi’s hands.

She led us into a little wood. From within the wood, half-lit faces emerged, then bodies: Jean, David, Cleo, Hubert. Jean, barefoot and naked from the waist up, tilted out lines of cocaine onto the flat underside of his forearm, held it perfectly still as each of us in turn bent forward. When I bent to it, his forearm smelled of coke and lavender. Last, he tilted out a fat line for himself, bent his head to his own arm, as if inhaling intoxicating fragments of himself mixed with us. Fortified, we walked on, Gigi in the lead. Cleo walked next to me, breathing hard. It occurred to me that she might commit murder one day. David looked serious; he had brought a flashlight and was wearing a sturdy jacket and hiking boots. I wondered if he knew something we didn’t. Hubert, bringing up the rear, tripped, swore. Calmness, a greater calm than I had felt in days, enveloped me. It was as if all the darkness was outside now, leaving me light-filled, expectant. I was my own paper lantern. My hands tingled. I knew we could walk together forever like this, that our footsteps would make a music of their own, a songline.

“Stop,” said Gigi at the edge of a clearing.

We stopped.

“He is coming,” said Gigi. “Shhh.”

Hushed, we jostled one another in the shadows, shoulder to shoulder, in an almost imperceptible rhythm. Next to me, Cleo was so distinct, sharp as the smell of lemon. David, standing next to her on the other side, turned off his flashlight. Jean crouched in the dirt, the glorious wings of his back muscles expanding. Gigi, gatekeeper and prisoner of the chateau, stood very still. I felt, with a kind of ecstasy, the weight of the seven of us, a weight that simultaneously, paradoxically, pulled me under and buoyed me up.

“What are we doing?” said Cleo, not really whispering.

“We are waiting for the deer. He will bring his music to us.”

“Huh,” said Cleo, sitting down in the dirt. She looked like a woman who had turned into a tree stump, a gnarl of skepticism.

And then the deer, some deer, called out. Somewhere nearby, a deer let out his extraordinarily loud, unearthly, desperate sound—we called it barking, but it was nothing like a dog bark, it was more like a guttural, sandpapered lowing—his yodel, his deepest entreaty to . . . whom? Who was listening for him in the night? In agony, he made his noise. Pushing, pulling.
Come to me.
We could imagine the curve of his shoulder blades, strong as sickles. His hooves planted in the dirt as he made his noise of awful yearning. Gigi began to cry. Jean lowered his head. Cleo looked up. Silently, we were calling to the deer as he called aloud to his mate. (We were so high.) He lowed, entreated. I wished that I could get the contours of the deer’s emotion onto the album, hooves on the ground, the odor of the night. And blood. Blood, somewhere.

Ethan put his hands up, palms out, to the sound.

The clearing, however, remained empty. We waited. We waited longer.

“Look,” said Gigi, wet-faced, her long skirt flat against her legs. “The sky.” It was lightening, but the light was new, diffuse, evenly distributed, so that the wood was incandescent, as if the silver luminosity was emanating from within the earth, the trees, the leaves, rather than coming from above. A cool, early-morning wind was picking up. Still, the clearing remained empty.

We sat down in the dirt, one by one, all becoming tree stumps, except for Ethan, who remained standing, his head bent, palms up. Gigi, Cleo, and I sat back to back to back, the crowns of our heads touching. In the thinning dark, we shivered. Jean and David stood up, gathered some loose leaves and twigs, dug a shallow hole in the dirt, and, with a lighter Hubert pulled from his pocket, tried to light the leaves and twigs on fire. The little heap lit, smoldered, went out.

The absent deer called out. And then I knew it, I saw it, I heard it, I knew that we had all heard it: the right notes, the place where
Bang Bang
needed to go. It was so obvious, how had we missed it? That call of the absent deer, some absent deer—that’s why we were here, why we had ended up at this place, at this moment, in this way. It was what the deer we couldn’t see had gathered us together to show us, what all the deer had been trying to tell us for weeks, calling and calling until we heard them. Gratitude warmed me to my fingertips.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, right. That’s it. Ethan, that’s it. Isn’t it?”

“It is, Anna,” he said.

“Cleo, David—that’s it. He’s not here. You know?”

They nodded.

“Yes,” said Gigi. “He’s not here.”

“I love you,” I said. “I love you all so much.”

Jean poured more coke on his forearm and snorted it off. Ethan traced a figure eight in the dirt with his fat, bare toe. Cleo had moved to sit on a rock, sketching with a stub of pencil on a small, torn piece of paper. David smiled beatifically. “We love you, too, Anna.” The skin on my arms, my chest, goose-pimpled. We remained there for a while, but the deer didn’t call out again. The clearing remained empty.

But in that emptiness, it was now obvious, was the answer. We had had it upside down, or inside out.
Bang Bang
wouldn’t be the deer, but the
absence
of the mighty deer, the displaced air where the virile, lonely deer hovered just beneath the surface, just out of sight, just beyond the shadow line of the clearing. I grabbed Gigi’s hand and squeezed it. I blessed the deer for luring us here to show us the reflection of its absence playing across our exhausted faces, like a half-erased cave painting. And now that deer was quiet, gone. He had departed when we weren’t listening, leaving us humans, us mortals, alone as the forest silvered into day. We walked out in single file, our minds stilled, empty and full at once, infused with desire for the absent deer who was himself infused with desire for yet another absent deer. An infinite line of longed-for, absent deer, receding into the horizon. That was what
Bang Bang
had to be. Not the awkward half-note of
Whale,
but this echo of desire that was also a love call, a shout into the night. We needed a tuba.

“Ethan.” Breathless, I caught up to him. “Ethan, can we get a brass band out here? Today. We need it today.”

“Of course,” he said.

The chateau’s gates closed behind me a few days later. I have never been back or seen any of them again. The label dropped me after
Bang Bang
tanked. I sat on my wheeled suitcase with the precious tape inside, waiting for the car that was going to take me to the train station. I turned around to look, but I didn’t see much—long windows, stone front steps; it was as if the chateau were sinking beneath the waves again. Everyone else was inside eating breakfast and smoking, they were leaving later that day, at different times, but I didn’t miss them yet. Jam kisses streaked my cheek. I hummed the last track, which we had finished at four that morning. The brass band from Toulouse was phenomenal. The absent deer had left its hoofprints all over the tracks. I couldn’t wait to play them for Simon in Paris, although, as it turned out, he couldn’t meet me. Complications. But I didn’t know that yet. All I knew was that the record was good. It was so good.

“D
AMN, I HATE
Monet,” said my father, bathed in the Orangerie’s delicate gray and silver light. “Isn’t that terrible? Aren’t I a savage?” Inside the museum there are two oval rooms, making it seem as if you’ve walked into an enormous egg. Wrapped around the curved walls of these rooms is Monet’s encompassing
Water Lilies.
The blurry, dimensional layers of green and deep pink and turquoise curve as well, yielding to what seems to be a deeper weight beneath the surface, pulling it backward into time. Skylights, capped by milky-white glass, shed a beneficent, unearthly light. The Louvre rules the Tuileries, but here, tucked into a corner of that pebble-filled garden, is this small reverie of water, flowers, and opaque, luminous sky. If the Louvre is History, this is a far more personal structure—a dream, an elegy, a temple of obsession. The Orangerie has only one, insistent, exquisite thought that never changes.