1 #4
Of the two, Eddie seemed to me to be the more approachable figure.
I went to some effort to secure a seat next to Eddie’s at the opera.
Usually, but not always, Ari was there for the first half.
I was careful not to look at her or otherwise draw attention to myself.
I sat on Eddie’s other side. If Ari came, she left at intermission.
I suffered through three productions, being careful to look engaged and moved and not bored out of my mind, with the whole ordeal leading up to the moment where I nodded casually to Eddie and wished her a good evening at the end, until after the third opera I finally judged the moment right to drop some pre-rehearsed opinion about the second act of Caravage, which made Eddie’s face light up.
I sat through two more operas and two more similar exchanges before she asked if I might like to join her for a quick drink.
Eddie was born in Rwanda but grew up in Marseilles, she told me. The city was run by a cartel at the time, but could have been worse. She started playing piano at seven but didn’t excel until her late teens.
“What changed?” I asked. We were at one of the sidewalk tables of a forgettable café in the 15th arrondissement. It was a beautiful night in early April.
“Well, Sebastian, my mother died.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It happens. Parents don’t stick around forever. You’re young, aren’t you?” She leaned forward to pick up a dropped napkin. I liked her cologne. She carried a fragrance of cedar and cigar smoke.
“Twenty-one,” I lied.
“Parents still alive?”
“That’s a surprisingly complicated question.”
“Well,” she said, “we live in complicated times.”
The thing I didn’t say aloud was You have no idea.
“Tell me about yours first,” I said, “then I’ll tell you about mine.”
“Deal.” She took a slow sip of wine. “I was in high school when my mother got sick, and she was gone a month later. On her deathbed, she said, ‘For fuck’s sake, Edeline, take your foot off the brake.’”
“She was talking about piano?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I started working harder, and started winning competitions.” It was a complicated life after that.
She married a woman who died in a car accident, she told me, then married another woman.
They’d had a child together, a daughter, Esme, after which an extraordinary percentage of Eddie’s income went to childcare.
Her second wife left her for someone else.
Eddie rose in prominence until the chaos of the 2030s put an end to her touring career.
She first saw Ari on an armoured night train in the south of France sometime in that era.
Eddie was on her way home from one of her last concerts.
Ari was travelling with her second husband.
“What was your first impression of Ari?”
“She was pretty,” Eddie said, “and tired, but we were all tired in those years. Societal breakdown is exhausting.”
The reason she remembered her was that at a certain point in the evening, Ari and her husband disappeared.
They didn’t emerge from the train in Paris, which made no sense, because Paris was the only stop.
Eddie remembered that the train had stopped for just a moment at some point in the night, “but there was nothing around,” she said, “just pine forest. It was sinister, actually.” She thought for a long time that they might have been killed on the train, the two of them, their bodies shoved out into the dark.
Later, when they met again at a dinner party, Ari told Eddie the story, a confused tale about travelling on foot and then by car and then by boat and then another car to Paris, where she lived with Soriano for a year or two, until the explosion that killed Soriano and ruined her leg.
“But here I’ve been talking endlessly about me and my wife,” Eddie said, “and I know almost nothing about you.”
“Well. I’m twenty-one, as I said.” Eighteen, but repeat a lie often enough and it starts to feel true. “Born and raised in Paris.” (Technically Vincennes, but close enough.)
“You’ve lived here all your life?”
“I spent a few years away at a boarding school in Normandy. Otherwise yes. I’m studying art history. I love opera and paintings.” I shrugged. “It’s hard to sum up your life, isn’t it?”
“That’s why I stopped doing interviews,” Eddie said. “I was always trying to sum up my life, and it always sounded like a series of cocktail party anecdotes. Or like a tabloid story, depending on the era. Are your parents here, in Paris?”
“My father disappeared before I was born,” I said. “That was back in California. I was raised by my mother and a . . . well, she was a sort of guardian, I suppose. She came to me when I was seven.”
“I see,” Eddie said. “Was she a good guardian?”
“Mostly.” She was a haunted guardian, Eddie, if we can be honest here. She left two children behind in another world, and if that sounds insane, well, you’d be surprised at what you can get used to in this life. “No, you know what? I don’t want to sell her short. She saved me, a little.”
“Oh,” Eddie said, startled. She was looking at me differently, interested in a way she hadn’t been before.
“She was the only adult in my life who cared about me,” I said.
“Before she came, it was just me and my mother, and my mother didn’t make an effort.
” I’d made the moment fantastically awkward.
Eddie nodded in a tactful way. It was a cool evening, perhaps the way April had been in Paris in the past, and I wasn’t sweating for once.
“It must be ten degrees cooler inside the dome than out,” I said.
“Ah,” Eddie said, clearly grateful for the change of topic. When all else fails, discuss the weather. “I believe the weather inside the dome is modelled on a previous version of Paris.”
This was obvious now that she said it, but I’d never thought it through. “Which version?” I asked.
“Sometime in the nineties, I believe? I can’t remember the exact year. But where there’s a deadly heat wave outside the dome, it’s still the summer of 1997 inside it. Maybe ’96? I can’t remember.”
“Do you like the dome?” I asked. In those days the dome was still so new that no one took it for granted, which made it a reliably interesting topic of conversation, but I could already feel the moment slipping away.
Soon, very soon, we’d be in a time when the dome would be so much a part of everyday life that no one would notice it anymore.
Eddie sipped her wine. “I believe in the dome,” she said. “It’ll save us in the next heat wave or killer storm. But the problem is, it only keeps out the weather.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was in a flood once,” she said. “A very long time ago, in Valencia. I was being driven to a concert, so I was wearing this ridiculous suit, and it had been raining. I remember realizing that the driver was nervous, then looking out and seeing a sheen of water over the road. Then a moment later the water was halfway up the door. Have you ever seen floodwater?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know what I’m talking about. It’s not like bathwater, you know?
It’s muddy and dark. I climbed out the window onto the roof, even though the driver shouted at me.
He didn’t want me to get that water on the upholstery.
Then very quickly the water reached the roof, and I had to jump into it, because another car came washing toward us and shifted on top of the car I’d just been travelling in.
I swam to safety. It was all very quick. ”
“So what happened?”
“A lot of people died,” she said, “including the driver. I wake up here, in my beautiful apartment, and sometimes before I’m fully awake I hear the noises of the flood, the cars clanking together, the driver screaming.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That sounds horrible.”
“It was a long time ago. I do like the dome, that’s the short answer to your question. What happened to your father?” Eddie asked.
“It’s a mystery,” I said. “He went to a party with my mother, when she was pregnant with me, and then at some point in the evening he was gone and she never saw him again.”
“Was this during the collapse years?”
“Yes.”
Eddie nodded, as though that explained everything. “Still,” she said, after a moment. “What an awful thing.”
“Is your wife a musician as well?” I asked, with a nod to Eddie’s wedding ring.
“Ah,” she said. “No. She appreciates music, but she’s not a musician.
” I liked the way Eddie’s face brightened when she talked about Ari.
At eighteen I was always on the lookout for evidence that true love might exist in the world, although I would literally have died before admitting that to anyone.
“She travels. She collects art and friendships.”
“She sounds like an interesting person. What kind of art does she collect?”
“Abstract stuff from the late 2030s,” she said, “also works from New York City in the mid-twentieth century.”
“So Cecile Gray Bazelon, Richard Pousette-Dart, all those characters?” I’d done my research.
She smiled. “Possibly? Those names ring a bell. She walks me through the apartment, she names names, she points out details, but I’m afraid it’s in one ear and out the other. I just get lost in all the images.”
“What an extraordinary thing,” I said, “getting to live with those works. I’ve never even seen most of them.” I was fishing desperately. I was trying to sound much older than I was.
“It really is extraordinary,” she said. “I’m a lucky woman.” The conversation moved on. No dinner party invitation presented itself.
5
Eddie wasn’t at the opera the next week, or the week after, and then I read her obituary: the noted pianist Eddie Kalisa had died unexpectedly in a Paris hospital, following complications from surgery.
She was survived by her wife, Ari Soriano of Paris, and her grown daughter, Esme Léon-Kalisa of Lisbon. I would need another angle of approach.
6