1 #3
I nodded. I didn’t want to talk about loss.
If the conversation were more boring, might it end sooner?
I steered us into one of those tedious expat discussions of paperwork and visa requirements, in the course of which I remembered that I’d never found Gloria to be a particularly interesting person.
The boy in the armchair—Sebastian—finally took off his headphones.
“I’m hungry,” he said. “I didn’t have lunch.
” I glanced at my watch. It was four p.m. For the first time, I noticed the blanket and pillow crumpled around him.
“Does he sleep out here?” I asked. “On the couch?”
“Well,” Gloria said, suddenly unable to meet my gaze, “we should probably settle up.”
“What do you think would be a reasonable price?”
She hesitated. “I don’t really know what it’s worth.”
“What do you know about it?”
“Just what Kareem told me. It belonged to his uncle, who I guess was a painter in New York in the 1950s, and it was painted by his uncle’s friend.”
I nodded. “Would five thousand euros seem fair to you?”
“Yes,” she said, and the relief that washed over her face was almost enough to make me feel guilty, almost. “Thank you.”
When I left the apartment a few minutes later, I found that my driver had fallen asleep.
I knocked on the window and he woke with an accusatory look, like I wasn’t paying him by the hour for his nap.
The two of us rode back to my apartment in stony silence.
I remember that ride, that feeling of watching the streets of my beloved city slip past with the painting wrapped like a beautiful secret beside me on the seat.
You buy art to own a piece of history, or to own a piece of beauty, or just for love.
The painting beside me in the car was worth around a hundred thousand euros, but that isn’t why I wanted it.
I wanted it because it was my only link to an unimaginably distant life.
“You were the boy in Vincennes,” I say now, in the apartment in Paris, over a dozen years later. “Of course you were.”
But Sebastian hasn’t returned from the restroom, and I realize my mistake: my calculus had been that Pilar would see him if he ventured through the kitchen, which is to say beyond the restroom and back in the direction of Swan Dive, but Pilar is cooking and listening to a podcast, her back to the room, which means Sebastian could easily have passed by without her noticing.
I make my way to the kitchen—past the open restroom door—and find her stirring the soup.
“Did Sebastian come through here?” I ask. But she’s hopelessly distracted, listening to a rapid-fire conversation about European unity, and I have to repeat the question.
“Your young guest, madame? You’ve misplaced him?”
“I’m afraid I have. He had to have come through here.”
She comes to me and takes my elbow, which provides additional safety but not additional speed, and then at a pace that makes me want to jump out the window we make our way across the kitchen, to the living room—no Sebastian—and then to the dining room, where there’s also no Sebastian.
I know what I’m going to see before I look at the wall. Swan Dive is gone.
I would like to speed through the city in an open-top car.
When I first arrived in Paris, the taxi that picked me and Felix up from the airport had a glass roof, and the sun was rising as we entered the city.
It was late spring, leaves flashing overhead against the morning sky, buildings so beautiful that I wanted to weep.
I’d been living a ghostly kind of life in the former United States, the Republic of Ohio and then the Ex-Phoenix Protectorate, a life of guns and motels and large quantities of cash.
Even if I hadn’t been fleeing for my life, I would’ve wanted to come to Paris in search of solidity, if nothing else.
I wanted buildings constructed with an eye toward permanence.
I wanted a place that wasn’t overrun with warring militias. I wanted—
“Ari,” Pilar says softly, summoning me back.
I nod briskly, to show her I’ve returned.
In a previous iteration I might have apologized for absent-mindedness, but I became much less apologetic after the explosion.
Thinking of my arrival in Paris and open-top cars is preferable to thinking about the lost painting.
I can’t bear to look at the naked white rectangle of wall where it hung.
“Where did you find him?” she asks.
“He found me.” At the usual café, where I like to eat chocolate croissants and watch the fashions of passersby, the ballet of the delivery drones floating through the air outside, the way light glints off the inside surface of the Paris dome.
An impeccably dressed young man came to my table, and said, “Forgive me the intrusion, but are you Ari Soriano?” in such perfect English that I’d thought he was a tourist.
“I think it was personal,” I say to Pilar. “It belonged to his mother.”
She nods, and we sit together in the quiet, in the lamplight. It’s still raining. “Then we start with his mother,” she says.
“We should start with him,” I say.
“I already did. I couldn’t find anything.” Pilar produces a tablet—discreetly producing objects that I hadn’t previously noticed is among her subspecialties—and shows me the results. There are several people named Sebastian Li on the internet, but none are exactly him.
“The good news,” she says, “is that his mother’s apparently still in Vincennes.”
“Do you have a phone number?” I ask, and then think better of it. “No,” I say, “perhaps a visit would be better.”
There’s more space in Vincennes than in Paris, which depending on my mood I either appreciate or dislike.
The first time I came here I found it indistinguishable from Paris, but after all these years the distinctions are obvious to me.
The buildings are lower, the streets wider; on the edge of town there’s a massive keep, and beyond that a forest park, surprisingly wild given its proximity to the Paris metro.
I’m certain that the address Pilar found is the place I visited all those years ago, and there’s a sense of closing a loop here—the painting came into my life and then left via Vincennes, I find myself thinking, as if Vincennes were some kind of trapdoor in a stage set.
In the back of a taxi, I watch the passing streets and try to imagine how the conversation will go.
Hi, Gloria, your boy stole my painting. Does she know the degree to which I underpaid her for the painting?
Does she think of me kindly? Gare de Lyon slips past in the twilight and I’m remembering past voyages.
My first few years here, I travelled all over the country.
In those days France was dangerous because everywhere was dangerous, but I loved moving through it, all the ancient towns.
I want to fall asleep aboard a southbound train, green fields slipping past the window.
“Madame,” the driver says. Apparently I’ve fallen asleep aboard an eastbound car.
“Oh,” I say. “Thank you.”
He jumps out quickly, opens the door for me, and offers his arm. I emerge very carefully onto the wet pavement with my ugliest, most stable cane. Night is falling, and when my driver leaves, the street holds an air of abandonment.
Gloria’s building hasn’t changed at all since I was here last, or perhaps my memories are shifting to accommodate present conditions.
I’ve been thinking a great deal about memory lately, because I have too much time on my hands.
The doorbell system has changed, though, that’s one thing.
I press a button and a light shines in my eyes, illuminating my face for the camera.
“Who is it?” Her voice is surprisingly clear through the little speaker. I gaze into the camera lens and try to look as harmless as possible.
“Hello,” I say, in English. “It’s me. Ari Soriano. Your old roommate.” She says nothing, so I add more detail: “From that apartment in Echo Park? In LA?”
There are a few beats of quiet, during which I feel her staring at me through the camera.
Then the door buzzes, and I’m in. There’s an elevator, thank god.
I think the hallway has been repainted since I was here.
It’s a dreamy blue that dulls the senses.
A short time later I’m once again before that apartment door.
When it opens, Gloria is standing there, and I have a sense of collapsing time: we’ve been in this moment before, but at an interval of thirteen years.
“Ari,” she says. “Please. Come in.”
Her face is softer now, her hair streaked elegantly with grey, but her style hasn’t changed: the white shirt, the jeans, the red lipstick, the carefully unkempt hair pulled back with strands escaping.
She’s put considerable effort into the appearance of not trying too hard, and I respect that. The lipstick is perfect.
“Good evening.” I can go months at a time without speaking English, except for greeting passing dogs, and then the language sounds discordant to me. “I’m sorry to drop in on you like this.”
“Not at all.” She’s slipped into French.
Gloria steps aside, and I walk into one of the stranger apartments I’ve ever seen.
In memory it’s bland and standard-issue—white walls, wood floors, unremarkable detailing—but now the walls are entirely taken over by a mural.
It’s a garden at night, almost photorealistic.
Deep sky, wide dark leaves, white flowers, a white birdbath glowing softly in the dark.
“My sister commissioned that,” Gloria says, almost apologetically. “She lived with me for a while when she first came to Paris. She has . . . interesting tastes.”
“You have a sister?”
She looks away immediately. “May I take your coat?”
“I—” There’s no easy way to say it. “Gloria, this is somewhat unpleasant, but I’m trying to find your son.”
Something in Gloria falters. I can see that Sebastian is a person she worries about.
“Oh,” she says softly. And then, “Did he . . . did he do something wrong?”