1 #2
“Would you like to hear something extraordinary?” Sebastian offers an elbow, and we walk, very slowly, into the adjoining room, which is also a sort of parlour.
My apartment was formerly four separate apartments, which I bought one at a time from my neighbours or their heirs.
The first time I brought Eddie here, she wandered from room to room and made a joke about a labyrinth.
“I would.”
“We’ve actually met before.”
“Really? When?”
“When I was a boy,” he says, with a smile, “you knew my mother.”
“I’ve met too many people. I don’t mean to be rude.”
“Not at all. You knew my mother in Los Angeles,” he says.
This room, too, is filled with paintings, but he doesn’t stop; he’s leading me through to the gallery that follows.
This gallery is also a kitchen, and the air is heavy with the fragrance of Pilar’s signature chicken/lemon/artichoke soup.
She’s at the stove, stirring a very large pot and listening to a podcast, a low murmur of voices.
The memory still isn’t coming to me. Who did I know in Los Angeles who had a child?
“I’m trying to remember a friend in Los Angeles with a child,” I say finally.
“We didn’t meet there,” he says. “We met in France.”
We’ve passed through the kitchen now, into the room on the other side.
It’s a corridor lined with books. There’s a figure at the far end, in the shadows, but I know not to comment on this.
It’s the ghost of my first husband, Felix.
He comes here sometimes in the evenings. I sink into a pink velvet armchair.
“Is there a restroom I could use?” Sebastian asks.
“Of course. Just off the kitchen.”
“I’ll be right back,” he says, and vanishes.
“We met in France,” I say softly, to myself, trying to summon the memory. “And I knew your mother in Los Angeles.”
And then it comes back to me, and I close my eyes to inhabit the memory more fully.
It was back in the late ’30s. I had been in Paris for no more than two or three years, and felt that I was doing fairly well in the city, all things considered, with “all things” being shorthand for the death of my first husband, the condition of having lost a country, generalized societal collapse, etc.
In the spring of 2039 I was married to my second husband, Bill; I was studying French six days per week and accumulating a collection of interesting friends, mostly refugees.
Bill was wealthy and I had some money of my own, ill-gotten means from the sale of weapons in the former United States.
I was trying to be a new person on a new continent and aware of the absurdity of this, because moving through a different language in a different city with a different person in no way negated the reality that Bill was absolutely as sketchy as Felix had been, possibly more so.
The exact parameters of Bill’s business were never clear to me, and I took pains to keep it that way, but I wasn’t an idiot.
I knew I’d chosen criminality, yet again.
I was thinking a lot about corruption. And then one morning I was out for a walk, and my phone rang, and it was Gloria, my former roommate from Los Angeles.
She spoke all in a rush. She’d heard in some roundabout fashion that I was here in Paris and that I sometimes bought paintings from New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, and she happened to own one she wanted to sell.
She didn’t tell me she needed money, or that she knew I had somehow acquired money, but those facts were deep in the wiring of the conversation.
Anyway, would I like to come see the painting sometime soon?
We set a time for the following Saturday.
Gloria’s apartment building was unremarkable, one of those newer structures scattered here and there throughout Vincennes.
The interior was a little shabby, last remodelled in the previous century.
But when she opened the door, I was struck by her elegance.
I don’t know what I’d expected: a harried single mother, a screaming child, squalor and disarray.
But Gloria was impeccable. Dark jeans, an oversized white shirt, good lipstick, hair pulled back in an appealingly messy chignon.
Parisian, in other words, according to the style of that particular moment.
She had acquired an ageless quality that I didn’t appreciate.
“Ari,” she said. She was doing the same thing I was doing, her eyes flickering over my face, hair, clothing, shoes, making a thousand tiny appraisals.
I saw the way I confused her. The last time we’d seen one another, I’d been a restaurant dishwasher with secondhand clothes and a bad haircut.
Now everything I wore was more expensive than everything she wore, and my hair had cost more than I’d used to spend on rent.
Money is disorienting. Finally she regained some semblance of decorum and said, “It’s good to see you again. ”
“You too, Gloria. It’s been a long time.”
The apartment wasn’t immaculate, but almost. The trick to this order, I saw, was that she didn’t have very many things.
Two identical sofas and a rocking chair, and on one of the sofas, a boy of maybe seven or nine—determining the ages of children has never been among my strengths—watching something on a tablet, blue light flickering over his face.
He was wearing enormous red headphones. He didn’t look up.
“You were pregnant when you left LA,” I said.
She smiled. “Can you see his father in him?”
But all these years later, I couldn’t quite picture Kareem’s face. What I remembered was more the fact of Kareem than the man himself. I remembered charisma, kindness, a green silk shirt.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “It’s been so long.”
“Hasn’t it,” she said, in a dry tone that wasn’t easy to parse. “Here, let me show you the painting . . .”
The painting was propped against the wall, halfway wrapped in what looked like an old tablecloth. I went to kneel before it, and carefully pulled down the cloth.
“It’s called Swan Dive,” she said.
“I’ve seen this before.” I have a better memory for art than for people, which concerns me sometimes if I allow myself to dwell on it.
“Good memory. You were there when I took it from Kareem’s apartment.”
“Of course.” I remembered the moment now, so distant that it was like remembering a scene from a play: Gloria standing before the painting at the end of the party, Gloria lifting the painting down from the wall.
And then another moment just after, one I’d tried not to think about because its strangeness unsettled me, when just for a second I’d seen that painting lying in the middle of Kareem’s kitchen floor.
“He told me I could have the painting because he knew I loved it, and I had this idea that I’d hold on to it, but, well, can I be honest here?”
“Of course.”
“I had an unexpected expense this year, and I need money more than I need to look at that painting,” she said. “If you don’t need a painting, I don’t think you should devote the wall space to it.”
“I’ve never thought of it in those terms,” I said, “but I don’t disagree.” Did she have any idea of the painting’s worth?
“Would you—” Gloria glanced at the boy, still gazing blank-faced at his screen. “I so rarely get to speak with another adult in English. Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“That sounds nice,” I said. “Thank you.” Nice was a strong word under the circumstances—I had other appointments—but Gloria seemed lonely and I wanted the painting.
We sat for a while, drinking ghastly American-style drip coffee from cups half the size of my head, while the boy sat in his corner and was entirely absent.
The last weeks with Gloria in Los Angeles were coming back to me.
I’d been working such long hours that I usually felt delirious.
Gloria had spent a lot of time weeping and messing around with tarot cards, pregnant and scared, her child’s father having vanished, before she’d pulled herself together and by some Herculean effort transported herself out of the apartment and across the Atlantic.
“Would you like to hear something sinister?” she asked.
“Always,” I said.
“Okay, so Kareem,” she said. “His father.” She nodded in the direction of the boy. “You remember how he disappeared at that party.”
“Do you think there was foul play? Or you think he just walked out of his life?” The coffee was acidic. My stomach was beginning to hurt.
“His phone and his credit cards haven’t been used since he vanished.”
“Eight years, isn’t it? That seems . . .”
“You can say it,” she said. “That seems like he’s dead, right? But on the other hand, he had this fantasy. He was obsessed with this thing he saw on the internet once. There was a website where you could send in secrets.”
“For what purpose?” (Maybe I could create a distraction and pour the coffee down the sink?)
“Well, just to tell someone, I guess. Some people just want to confess.” Gloria paused for a moment, took a sip of her coffee.
She seemed actually to be enjoying it. “Anyway, there was this one secret he really liked. Someone sent in a postcard that said, ‘Everyone who knew me before 9/11 thinks I’m dead.’ Words to that effect. I might be getting the wording wrong.”
“Well, I suppose if you were going to fake your own death, that would’ve been the moment,” I said.
“He brought it up a few times. It would just come up in conversation every so often, over the years.”
“You think he had it in him? Disappearing like that?”
“I don’t know. I think I just don’t want to think he’s dead.”