Invisible

FALL

Walker arrives in Paris a month before his classes are scheduled to begin. He has already rejected the idea of living in a student dormitory and therefore must arrange for his own housing. On the first morning after crossing the Atlantic, he returns to the hotel he stayed in for several weeks during his first visit to Paris two years before. He plans to use it as a base while he searches for better lodgings elsewhere, but the half-drunk manager with the two-day stubble of beard remembers him from his earlier visit, and when Walker mentions that he will be staying for an entire year, the man offers him a monthly rate that averages out to less than two dollars a night. Nothing is expensive in the Paris of 1967, but even by the standards of that time this is an exceedingly low rent, almost an act of charity, and Walker impulsively decides to accept the man’s offer. They shake hands on it, and then the man ushers him into the back room for a glass of wine. It is ten o’clock in the morning. As Walker puts the glass to his mouth and takes his first sip of the acrid vin ordinaire, he says to himself: Good-bye, America. For better or worse, you are in Paris now. You must not allow yourself to fall apart.

The Hôtel du Sud is a decrepit, crumbling establishment on the rue Mazarine in the sixth arrondissement, not far from the Odéon metro station on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. In America, a building in such a state of disrepair would be condemned for demolition, but this is not America, and the broken-down eyesore Walker now inhabits is nevertheless a historic structure, erected in the seventeenth century, he thinks, perhaps even earlier, which means that in spite of its filthiness and dilapidation, in spite of the creaking, worn-out steps of the cramped circular staircase, his new digs are not entirely without charm. Granted, his room is a disaster area of brittle, peeling wallpaper and cracked wooden floor planks, the bed is an ancient spring contraption with a caved-in mattress and rock-hard pillows, the small desk wobbles, the desk chair is the least comfortable chair in all of Europe, and one door of the armoire is missing, but setting aside these disadvantages, the room is fairly spacious, light pours through the two sets of double windows, and no noise can be heard from the street. When the manager opens the door and lets him in for the first time, Walker instantly feels that this will be a good place for writing poems. In the long run, that is the only thing that counts. This is the kind of room poets are supposed to work in, the kind of room that threatens to break your spirit and forces you into constant battle with yourself, and as Walker deposits his suitcase and typewriter by the foot of the bed, he vows to spend no less than four hours a day on his writing, to bear down on his work with more diligence and concentration than ever before. It doesn’t matter that there is no telephone, that the toilet is a communal toilet at the end of the hall, that there is nowhere to shower or bathe, that everything around him is old. Walker is young, and this is the room where he means to reinvent himself.

There is university business to be taken care of, the tedium of consulting with the director of the Junior Year Abroad Program, selecting courses, filling out forms, attending an obligatory luncheon to meet the other students who will be in Paris for the year. There are just six of them (three Barnard girls and three Columbia boys), and while they all seem earnest and friendly, more than willing to accept him as a member of the gang, Walker makes up his mind to have as little to do with them as possible. He has no inclination to become part of a group, and he certainly doesn’t want to waste his time speaking English. The whole point in coming to Paris is to perfect his French. In order to do that, the shy and reticent Walker will have to embolden himself to make contact with the natives.

On an impulse, he decides to call Margot’s parents. He remembers that the Jouffroys live on the rue de l’Université in the seventh arrondissement, not terribly far from his hotel, and he hopes they will be able to tell him where he can find her. Why he should want to see Margot again is a difficult question to answer, but for now Walker doesn’t even bother to ask it. He has been in Paris for six days, and the truth is that he is beginning to feel somewhat lonely. Rather than renege on his plan not to fraternize with his fellow students, he has steadfastly stuck to himself, spending every morning in his room, parked at his wobbly desk writing and rewriting his newest poems, and then, after hunger drives him down into the street to search for food (most often at the student cafeteria around the corner on the rue Mazet, where he can buy a tasteless but filling lunch for one or two francs), he has consumed the rest of the daylight hours by walking aimlessly around the city, browsing in bookstores, reading on park benches, alive to the world around him but not yet immersed in it, still feeling his way, not unhappy, no, but wilting a little from the constant solitude. Except for Born, Margot is the one person in all of Paris with whom he has shared anything in the past. If she and Born are together again, then he must and will avoid her, but if it turns out that they are well and truly separated, that the breakup has indeed continued for these past three-plus months, then what possible harm can come from seeing her for an innocent cup of coffee? He doubts she will have any interest in renewing physical relations with him, but if she does, he would welcome the chance to sleep with her again. After all, it was the reckless, unbridled Margot who unleashed the erotic maelstrom in him that led to the furies of late summer. He is certain of the connection. Without Margot’s influence, without Margot’s body to instruct him in the intricate workings of his own heart, the story with Gwyn never would have been possible. Margot the fearless, Margot the silent, Margot the cipher. Yes, he very much wants to see her again, even if it is only for an innocent cup of coffee.

He walks to the café on the corner, buys a telephone jeton from the barman, and then goes downstairs to look up the Jouffroys’ number in the directory. He is heartened when the phone is answered on the first ring-then shocked when the person on the other end proves to be Margot herself.

Walker insists on conducting the conversation in French. Back in the spring, they spoke to each other in French a number of times, but mostly they communicated in English, and even if Margot is a person of few words, Walker knows she can express herself more comfortably in her own language. Now that he is in Paris, he aims to give Margot’s Frenchness back to her, wondering if she might not show herself to be a somewhat different person in her own country and her own tongue. The real Margot, as it were, at home in the city where she was born, and not some disaffected, hostile visitor stuck in an America she could barely tolerate.

They run through the common litany of questions and answers. What in the world is he doing in Paris? How are things? Was it pure luck that she picked up the phone or has she moved in with her parents? What is she doing now? Does she have time to join him for a cup of coffee? She hesitates for a moment and then surprises him by answering: Why not? They arrange to meet at La Palette in an hour.

It is four o’clock in the afternoon, and Walker arrives first, ten minutes in advance. He orders a cup of coffee and then sits there for half an hour, growing more and more convinced that she has stood him up, but just when he is about to leave, Margot wanders in. Moving in that slow, distracted way of hers, the flicker of a smile parting her lips, kissing him warmly on both cheeks, she settles into the chair across from him. She doesn’t apologize for her lateness. Margot is not a person who would do that kind of thing, and he doesn’t expect it from her, he would never dream of asking her to play by anyone’s rules but her own.

En français, alors? she says.

Yes, he answers, speaking to her in French. That’s why I’m here. To practice my French. Since you’re the only French person I know, I was hoping I could practice with you.

Ah, so that’s it. You want to use me to further your education.

In a manner of speaking, yes. But speaking is only part of it. That is, we don’t have to talk every minute if you don’t want to.

Margot smiles, then changes the subject by asking him for a cigarette. As he lights the Gauloise for her, Walker looks at Margot and suddenly understands that he will never be able to separate her in his mind from Born. It is a grotesque realization, and it utterly smashes the playful, seductive tone he was trying to initiate. He was foolish to call her, he tells himself, foolish to think he could talk her into bed again by acting as if the horrors of the spring had never happened. Even if Margot is no longer a part of Born’s life, she is tied to Born in Walker’s memory, and to look at her is no different from looking at Born himself. Unable to stop himself, he begins telling her about the stroll down Riverside Drive on that May evening after she left New York. He describes the stabbing to her. He tells her point-blank that Born is without question the murderer of Cedric Williams.

He watches Margot’s face carefully as he recounts the gruesome particulars of that night and the days that followed, and for once she looks like a normal human being to him, an undead fellow creature with a conscience and a capacity to feel pain, and in spite of his fondness for Margot, he discovers that he enjoys punching her like this, hurting her like this, destroying her faith in a man she lived with for two years, a man she supposedly loved. Margot is crying now. He wonders if he is doing this to her because of the way she treated him in New York. Is this his revenge for having been dumped without warning at the beginning of their affair? No, he doesn’t think so. He is talking to her because he understands that he can no longer look at her without seeing Born, and therefore this is the last time he will ever see her, and he wants her to know the truth before they go their separate ways. When he finishes telling the story, she stands up from the table and rushes off in the direction of the toilets.

He can’t be certain if she will be coming back. She has taken her purse with her to the women’s room, and since the weather outdoors is warm and mild, she was not wearing a coat or jacket when she entered the café, which means that no coat or jacket is slung over the back of her chair. Walker decides to give her a quarter of an hour, and if she hasn’t returned to the table by then, he will get up and leave. Meanwhile, he asks the waiter for another drink. No, not coffee this time, he says. Make it a beer.

Margot is gone for just under ten minutes. When she sits down in her chair again, Walker notices the puffiness around her lids, the glassy sheen in her eyes, but her makeup is intact, and her cheeks are no longer smudged with mascara. He thinks: Gwyn’s mascara on the night of Andy’s birthday; Margot’s mascara on a September afternoon in Paris; the weeping mascara of death.

Forgive me, she says to him in a subdued voice. These things you’ve told me… I don’t… I don’t know what to think anymore.

But you believe me, don’t you?

Yes, I believe you. No one would ever make up something like that.

I’m sorry. I didn’t want to upset you, but I thought you should know what happened-just in case you ever felt tempted to go back to him.

The strange thing is, I’m not surprised…

Did Born ever hit you?

Just once. A slap across the face. A hard, angry slap across the face.

Just once?

Just once. But there’s violence in him. Under all the charm and witty jokes, there’s real anger, real violence. I hate to admit it now, but I think it excited me. Never knowing if I could trust him or not, never knowing what he was going to do next. He only hit me that one time, but he got into a couple of fights while we were together, fights with other men. You’ve seen his temper. You know what he’s like when he’s drunk. I think it goes back to his days in the army, the war, the awful things he did during the war. Torturing prisoners. He once confessed to me that he tortured prisoners in Algeria. He denied it the next day, but I didn’t believe him, even though I pretended to. The first story was the truth, I know it.

What about the knife he carries in his pocket? Didn’t that ever scare you?

I take people as they are, Adam. I don’t ask a lot of questions. If he wanted to carry a knife, I figured that was his business. He said it was a dangerous world and a man had to protect himself. After what happened to you that night in New York, you can’t really argue with him, can you?

My sister has a theory. I don’t know if it’s a good theory, but she thinks Born started talking to me at the party because he felt a sexual attraction. A homoerotic attraction, as she put it. What do you think? Is she on to something or not?

It’s possible. Anything is possible.

Did he ever talk to you about being attracted to men?

No. But that’s neither here nor there. I can’t tell you what he did before I started living with him. I can’t even account for all the things he did while we were together. Who knows what a person’s secret desires are? Unless the person acts on them or talks about them, you don’t have a clue. The only thing I can talk about is what I saw with my own eyes-and what I saw was this. Very early in our relationship, Rudolf and I had a threesome with another man. It was my idea. Rudolf went along with it to please me, to prove that he was willing to do anything I asked him to do. The other man was an old friend of mine, someone I’d slept with before, an extremely good-looking guy. If Rudolf was attracted to this person, he would have kissed him, wouldn’t he? He would have gone for his cock and sucked him off. But he didn’t do those things. He liked watching me with François, I could see he was very hot when he saw François’s cock go into me, but he didn’t touch him in a sexual way. Does that prove anything? I don’t know. All I can tell you is that when we saw you at the party in New York, I told Rudolf you were one of the most beautiful boys I had ever seen. He agreed with me. He said you looked like a tormented Adonis, Lord Byron on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Does that mean he was attracted to you? Maybe yes, maybe no. You’re a special case, Adam, and what makes you special is that you have no idea of the effect you have on other people. It seems perfectly plausible to me that a straight man could get a crush on you. Maybe that’s what happened to Rudolf. But I can’t know for certain, because even if he did fall for you, he never said a word about it.

He’s getting married. Did you know that? At least he said he was the last time I saw him.

Yes, I know. I know all about it. That was my exit visa out of the affair. Good-bye to the double-crossing slut Margot, hello to the angelic Hélène Juin.

You sound bitter…

No, not bitter. Confused. I know her, you see, I’ve known her for a long time, and it just doesn’t make any sense to me. Hélène must be five or six years older than Rudolf, she has an eighteen-year-old daughter, and all I can say about her is that she’s very dull, very ordinary, very proper. A nice person, of course, a nice, hardworking bourgeois person with a tragic story, but I don’t understand what he sees in her. Crazy Rudolf will be bored out of his mind.

He said he loved her.

He probably does. But that doesn’t mean he should marry her.

Tragic story. Something to do with her first husband, right? I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about.

Juin is a close friend of Rudolf’s. Six or seven years ago, he was in a bad car accident. Crushed to pieces, fractured skull, all sorts of internal injuries, but somehow he managed to survive. Or nearly survive. He’s been in a coma ever since, more or less brain-dead, on life support in a hospital. For years, Hélène refused to give up hope, but his condition never improved, it never will improve, and finally her friends and family persuaded her to file for a divorce. When it goes through next spring, she’ll be free to marry again. Good for her, but the last person I thought she’d go for was Rudolf. I’ve sat through at least a dozen dinners with the two of them, and I never sensed any strong feeling on either side. Friendship, yes, but no… no… what’s the word I’m looking for?

Sparks.

That’s it. No sparks.

You still miss him, don’t you?

Not anymore. Not after what you’ve told me today.

But you did.

I did. I didn’t want to, but I did.

The man is a maniac, you know.

True. But what law says you can’t love a maniac?

They both fall silent after that, at a loss for more words, more thoughts. Margot looks at her watch, and Walker imagines she is about to tell him she’s late for another appointment, that she has to run. Instead, she asks him if he has plans for dinner tonight, and if he doesn’t, would he care to go to a restaurant with her? She knows a good place on the rue des Grands Augustins and will gladly treat him if he is low on money. Walker wants to tell her that it won’t be possible, that he doesn’t think he can see her anymore, that he believes they should put a stop to their friendship, but he can’t bring himself to say the words. He is too lonely to refuse her offer, too weak-minded to turn his back on the only person he knows in Paris. Yes, he says, he would love to have dinner with her, but it’s still early, not even six o’clock, and what will they do in the meantime? Anything you want, Margot says, meaning, quite literally, anything he wants, and because the thing he wants most is to crawl into bed with her, he suggests they walk over to his hotel on the rue Mazarine so he can show her his ridiculously ugly hellhole of a room. Since thoughts of sex are never far from Margot’s mind, she quickly understands Walker’s intentions, then goes on to demonstrate that understanding by giving him a little smile.

I wasn’t very nice to you in New York, was I? she says.

You were extremely nice to me. At least for a while. But then, no, not very nice.

I’m sorry I hurt you. It was a bad time for me. I didn’t know what I was doing, and then, all of a sudden, the only thing I wanted was to get out of New York. Try not to hold it against me.

I don’t. I admit that I felt angry for a few weeks, but it didn’t last longer than that. I stopped blaming you a long time ago.

We can be friends now, can’t we?

I hope so.

Nothing too intense, mind you. Not every minute, not every day. I’m not ready for that. I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready for that again. But we can take care of each other a little bit. It might be good for both of us.

As they make their way to the hotel, Walker senses that the woman beside him is no longer the same Margot he met in New York last spring. He was right to think she would be somewhat different in her own language, in her own city, in the wake of her split-up with Born, and after the conversation in the café, he can only conclude that she is more forthright, more articulate, more vulnerable than he previously imagined. Still, even as he anticipates their imminent arrival at the hotel-the mounting of the circular stairs, the key entering the lock of his door, the shedding of their clothes, the sight of Margot’s small, naked body, the feel of her body against his-he wonders if he hasn’t committed a colossal mistake.

At first, things do not go well. Margot says nothing about his room, because she is either too polite or too indifferent to bother mentioning it, but Walker can’t help seeing it through her eyes, and he is overcome with embarrassment, appalled at himself for having dragged her up to such a tawdry, dismal place. It puts him in a foul mood, and when the two of them sit down on the bed and begin to kiss, he feels absent, alarmingly disengaged. Margot pulls back and asks if anything is wrong. Don’t get weird on me, Adam, she says. This is supposed to be fun, remember?

He can’t tell her that he is thinking about Gwyn, that the moment their mouths touched he was seized by a memory of the last time his mouth touched the mouth of his sister, and as he struggles to kiss Margot now, the only thought in his mind is that he will never be able to hold his sister in this way again.

I don’t know what’s wrong with me, he says. I feel so sad… so bloody fucking sad.

Maybe I should go, Margot says, gently patting his back. Sex isn’t compulsory, after all. We can try again another day.

No, don’t leave. I don’t want you to leave. Just give me a little time. I’ll be all right, I promise.

Margot gives him the time, and eventually he begins to emerge from his melancholic funk, not fully perhaps, but enough to feel aroused when she slides out of her dress and he puts his arms around her bare skin, enough to make love to her, enough to make love to her twice, and in the pause between couplings, as they drink from the bottle of red wine he carried up to his room earlier that day, Margot further arouses him with graphic stories about her sexual encounters with other women, her passion for touching and kissing large breasts (because hers are so small), for licking and fondling women’s crotches, for thrusting her tongue deep into women’s assholes, and while Walker can’t tell if these are true stories or simply a ploy to get him hard again for their second go at it, he enjoys listening to this dirty talk, just as he enjoyed listening to Gwyn’s dirty talk in the apartment on West 107th Street. He wonders if words aren’t an essential element of sex, if talking isn’t finally a more subtle form of touching, and if the images dancing in our heads aren’t just as important as the bodies we hold in our arms. Margot tells him that sex is the one thing in life that counts for her, that if she couldn’t have sex she would probably kill herself to escape the boredom and monotony of being trapped inside her own skin. Walker doesn’t say anything, but as he comes into her for the second time, he realizes that he shares her opinion. He is mad for sex. Even in the grip of the most crushing despair, he is mad for sex. Sex is the lord and the redeemer, the only salvation on earth.

They never make it to the restaurant. After finishing off the bottle of wine, they both fall asleep and forget about dinner. Early the next morning, just before dawn, Walker opens his eyes and discovers that he is alone in bed. A piece of paper is lying on the pillow next to him, a note from Margot: Sorry. The bed was too uncomfortable. Call me next week.

He asks himself if he will have the courage to call. Then, more to the point, he asks himself if he will have the courage not to call, if he can resist seeing her again.

Two days later, he is sitting at an outdoor café on the place Saint-André des Arts, nursing a glass of beer and writing in a small notebook. It is six o’clock in the evening, the end of another workday, and now that Walker has begun to settle into the rhythms of Paris, he understands that this is probably the city’s most inspiriting hour, the transition from work to home, the streets thronged with men and women rushing back to their families, to their friends, to their solitary lives, and he enjoys being outside among them, encircled by the vast collective exhale filling the air. He has just written a brief letter to his parents and a longer letter to Gwyn, and now he is trying to write something cogent about the work of George Oppen, a contemporary American poet whom he greatly admires. He copies out these lines from Oppen’s most recent book, This In Which:

Impossible to doubt the world: it can be seen

And because it is irrevocable

It cannot be understood, and I believe that fact is lethal.

He is about to jot down some comments on this passage, but before he can proceed a shadow falls across the page of the notebook. He glances up, and there, standing directly in front of him, is Rudolf Born. Before Walker can say or do anything, the future husband of Hélène Juin sits down in the empty chair beside him. Walker’s pulse begins to race. He is breathless, speechless. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way, he tells himself. If and when they crossed paths, he was the one who was going to spot Born, not the other way around. He was going to be walking down a crowded street, in a position to avert his eyes and escape unnoticed. That was how he always saw it in his head, and now here he is out in the open, defenseless, sitting on his dumb, sorry ass, unable to pretend Born isn’t there, trapped.

The white suit is gone, replaced by a cream-colored jacket, and a silk foulard is hanging around his neck, a blue-and-green patterned affair no doubt worn to bounce off the light blue of his shirt-still and ever the rumpled dandy, Walker thinks, wearing the same sardonic smile as of old.

Well, well, Born says, with false good humor, pronouncing the words in such a way as to emphasize their falseness. We meet again, Walker. What a pleasant surprise.

Walker knows that he is going to have to talk to him, but for the time being he can’t get any words out of his mouth.

I was hoping I’d run into you, Born continues. Paris is such a small city, it was bound to happen sooner or later.

Who told you I was here? Walker finally asks. Margot?

Margot? I haven’t talked to Margot in months. I didn’t even know she was in town.

Who was it, then?

You forget that I taught at Columbia. I have Columbia connections, and the head of your program just happens to be a friend of mine. I had dinner with him the other night, and he was the one who told me. He said you were living in some fleabag on the rue Mazarine. Why didn’t you go to Reid Hall? The rooms might not be as big there, but at least they aren’t crawling with bugs.

Walker has no desire to discuss his living arrangements with Born, no interest in wasting his breath on small talk. Ignoring the question, he says: I haven’t forgotten, you know. I still think about it all the time.

Think about what?

What you did to that boy.

I didn’t do anything to him.

Please…

One thrust, that was all. You were there. You saw what happened. He was going to shoot us. If I hadn’t attacked first, we both would have been killed.

But the gun wasn’t loaded.

We didn’t know that, did we? He said he was going to shoot, and when someone points a gun at me and says he’s going to shoot, I take him at his word.

What about the park? Over twelve more stab wounds after the first one. Why on earth did you do that?

I didn’t. I know you don’t believe me, but I had nothing to do with that. Yes, I carried him into the park after you left, but by the time I got there he was already dead. Why would I go on stabbing someone after he was dead? All I wanted was to get out of there as quickly as I could.

Then who did it?

I have no idea. A sick person. A goblin of the night. New York is a sinister place, after all. It could have been anyone.

I talked to the police, you know. In spite of your not so subtle warning.

I figured you would. That’s why I left in such a hurry.

If you were innocent, why not stay and fight it out in court?

For what? They would have acquitted me in the end, and I couldn’t afford to lose all the time it would have taken to defend myself. The kid deserved to die. The kid died. That’s all there is to it.

No remorse, then.

No remorse. None whatsoever. I don’t even blame you for turning against me and going to the police. You did what you thought was right. Mistakenly, of course, but that’s your problem, not mine. I saved your life, Adam. Remember that. If the gun had been loaded, you’d still be thanking me for what I did. The fact that it wasn’t loaded doesn’t really change anything, does it? As long as we thought it was loaded, it was loaded.

Walker is willing to concede the point, but there is still the question of the park, the question of how and when the boy died, and he has no doubt that Born’s version of events is untrue-for the simple reason that it could not have happened so quickly. A single stab wound to the stomach can lead to death, but inevitably it is a slow and protracted death, which means that Williams must have been alive when Born reached the park, and therefore the additional wounds that ended up killing the boy were inflicted by Born himself. Nothing else makes sense. Why would another person go to the trouble of stabbing a dead teenager more than a dozen times? If Williams was still breathing when Born left the park, it might be possible to build an argument for a second attacker-far-fetched but possible-but only if the object was to steal the boy’s money, and the police told Walker back in the spring that no robbery had taken place. The kid’s wallet was found in his pocket, and sixteen untouched dollars were inside the wallet, which eliminates theft as a motive for the crime. Why would I go on stabbing someone after he was dead? Because he wasn’t dead, and you kept on plunging your knife into him until you made sure he was, and then, even after you finished the job, you continued stabbing him because you were engulfed by rage, because you were out of your mind and enjoyed what you were doing.

I don’t want to talk about it anymore, Walker says, reaching into his pocket and pulling out some coins to pay for his beer. I have to go.

Suit yourself, Born replies. I was hoping we could bury the hatchet and become friends again. It even occurred to me that you might enjoy meeting the daughter of my future wife. Cécile is a delightful, intelligent girl of eighteen-a literature student, an excellent pianist, just the kind of person who would interest you.

No thanks, Walker says, standing up from the table. I don’t need you to play matchmaker for me. You already did that once, remember?

Well, if you ever change your mind, give me a call. I’d be happy to introduce her to you.

At that point, just as Walker is turning to go, Born reaches into the breast pocket of his cream-colored blazer and withdraws a business card with his address and telephone number on it. Here, he says, handing the card to Walker. All my coordinates. Just in case.

For a brief moment, Walker is tempted to tear up the card and throw the pieces onto the ground-the same way he tore up the check in New York last spring-but then he decides against it, not wanting to disgrace himself with such a cheap and petty insult. He slips the card into his pocket and says good-bye. Born nods but says nothing. As Walker leaves, the sun shoots across the sky and explodes into a hundred thousand splinters of molten light. The Eiffel Tower falls down. Every building in Paris bursts into flame. End of Act I. Curtain.

He has put himself in an untenable position. As long as he was ignorant of Born’s whereabouts, he could live with the uncertainty of a potential encounter, all the while deluding himself into believing that luck would be with him and the dreaded moment would never come, or come late, so late that his time in Paris would not be destroyed by fears of another encounter, other encounters. Now that it has happened, and happened early, much earlier than he would have thought possible, he finds it unbearable to have Born’s address in his pocket and not be able to go to the police to demand that he be arrested. Nothing would make him happier than to see the murderer of Cedric Williams brought to justice. Even if they let him off, he would have to suffer through the expense and humiliation of a trial, and even if the case never went to court, he would have to endure the unpleasantness of being grilled by the police, the rigors of a drawn-out investigation. But short of abducting Born and hauling him back to New York, what can Walker do? He ponders the situation for the rest of the day and deep into the night, and then an idea occurs to him, a diabolical idea, an idea so cruel and underhanded that he is stunned by the mere fact that he is capable of imagining such a thing. It won’t put Born in prison, alas, but it will make his life extremely uncomfortable, and if Walker can pull off his plan successfully, it will deprive Hélène Juin’s future husband of the one object he covets most in the world. Walker is both thrilled and disgusted with himself. He has never been a vengeful person, has never actively sought to hurt anyone, but Born is in a different category, Born is a killer, Born deserves to be punished, and for the first time in his life Walker is out for blood.

The plan calls for a practiced liar, a social acrobat skilled in the fine art of duplicity, and since Walker is neither one of those things, he knows that he is the worst man for the job he has given himself. Right from the start, he will be forced to act against his own nature, again and again he will slip and fall as he struggles to gain a secure footing on the battleground he has mapped out in his mind, and yet in spite of his misgivings, he marches off to the Café Conti the next morning to drop another jeton into the pay telephone and put his scheme into operation. He is dumbfounded by his boldness, his resolve. When Born answers on the third ring, the surprise in the man’s voice is palpable.

Adam Walker, he says, doing his best to mask his astonishment. The last person on earth I was expecting to hear from.

Forgive the intrusion, Walker says. I just wanted you to know that I’ve done some serious thinking since we talked yesterday.

Interesting. And where have your thoughts led you?

I’ve decided I want to bury the hatchet.

Doubly interesting. Yesterday, you accuse me of murder, and today you’re willing to forgive and forget. Why the sudden turnaround?

Because you convinced me you were telling the truth.

Am I to take this as a sincere apology-or are you angling for some new favor from me? You wouldn’t be thinking of trying to resurrect your dead magazine, for example?

Of course not. That’s all in the past.

It was a hurtful thing you did, Walker. Tearing up the check into little pieces and sending it back to me without a word. I was deeply insulted.

If I offended you in any way, I’m truly sorry. I was more or less in shock after what happened. I didn’t know what I was doing.

And you know what you’re doing now?

I think so.

You think so. And tell me young man, what exactly do you want?

Nothing. I called because you asked me to call. In case I changed my mind.

You want to get together, then. Is that it? You’re telling me you’d like to resume our friendship.

That was the idea. You mentioned meeting your fiancée and her daughter. I thought that would be a nice way to begin.

Nice. Such an insipid word. You Americans have a real gift for banalities, don’t you?

No doubt. We’re also good at apologizing when we feel we’re in the wrong. If you don’t want to see me, just say so. I’ll understand.

Forgive me, Walker. I was being nasty again. I’m afraid it comes with the territory.

We all have our moments.

Indeed. And now you want to break bread with Hélène and Cécile. As per my invitation of yesterday. Consider it done. I’ll leave word at your hotel as soon as I’ve made the arrangements.

The dinner is set for the following night at Vagenende, a turn-of-the-century brasserie on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Walker arrives promptly at eight, the first member of the party to show up, and as he is led to Monsieur Born’s table, he is too nervous and distracted to pay much attention to his surroundings: the dark, oak-paneled walls, the brass fixtures, the stiff white tablecloths and napkins, the hushed conversations in other parts of the room, the sound of silver utensils clanking against china. Thirty-four hours after his demented, groveling conversation with Born, this is what his lies have earned him: unending fear, unmitigated self-contempt, and the priceless opportunity to meet Born’s future wife and stepdaughter. Everything hinges on what happens with Hélène and Cécile Juin. If he can manage to form a connection with them, with either one of them, a relation independent of any connection with Born, then sooner or later it will become possible for him to reveal the truth about Riverside Drive, and if Walker can persuade them to accept his story about the killing of Cedric Williams, then there is a chance, a better than even chance, that the wedding will be called off and Born will be forsaken by his bride-to-be. That is all Walker has set out to accomplish: to break up the marriage before it becomes a legal fact. Not such an onerous punishment for the crime of murder, perhaps, but, given the available options, harsh enough. Born rejected. Born humiliated. Born crumpled up in misery. Hateful as Walker finds it to be pandering to him with false apologies and insincere avowals of friendship, he understands that he has no other choice. If Hélène and Cécile prove to be intractable, then he will abandon the effort and quietly declare defeat. But only if, and only when, and until that moment comes, he is determined to go on playing cards with the devil.

His initial findings are inconclusive. By temperament or circumstance, both mother and daughter come across as modest and reserved, not easily approachable or given to lighthearted talk, and since Born dominates the early going with introductions, explanations, and various other comments, little is said by either one of them. When Walker gives a brief account of his first days in Paris, Hélène compliments him on his French; at another point, Cécile blandly inquires if he enjoys living in a hotel. The mother is tall, blond, and well dressed, by no means a beauty (her face is too long, Walker thinks, a bit on the horsey side), but like many middle-class Frenchwomen of a certain age, she carries herself with considerable poise and assurance-a question of style, perhaps, or else the product of some arcane Gallic wisdom concerning the nature of femininity. The daughter, who has just turned eighteen, is a student at the Lycée Fénelon on the rue de l’Éperon, which is less than a five-minute walk from the Hôtel du Sud. She is a smaller, less-imposing creature than her mother, with short brown hair, thin wrists and narrow shoulders, and alert, darting eyes. Walker notices that those eyes have a tendency to squint, and it occurs to him (correctly, as it turns out) that Cécile normally wears glasses and has decided to live without them for the duration of the dinner. No, not a pretty girl, almost mousy in fact, but nevertheless an interesting face to look at: tiny chin, long nose, round cheeks, an expressive mouth. Every now and then, that mouth tugs downward with a clandestine sort of amusement, not quite blossoming into a smile, but for all that showing a sharply developed sense of humor, someone awake to the comic possibilities of any given moment. There is no question that she is extremely intelligent (for the past four minutes Born has been bragging to Walker about her outstanding grades in literature and philosophy, her passion for the piano, her mastery of ancient Greek), but much as Cécile has working in her favor, Walker sadly acknowledges that he is not attracted to her, at least not in the way he would have hoped. She is not his type, he says to himself, falling back on that vague, overused term, which stands in for the infinite complexities of physical desire. But what is his type? he wonders. His own sister? The sex-hungry Margot, who is ten years older than he is? Whatever it is he wants, it is not Cécile Juin. He looks at her and sees a child, a work in progress, a not yet fully formed person, and at this point in her life she is too withdrawn and self-conscious to give off any of the erotic signals that would inspire a man to run after her. That isn’t to say he won’t do his best to cultivate a friendship with her, but there will be no kissing or touching, no romantic entanglements, no attempt to lure her into bed.

He despises himself for thinking such thoughts, for looking upon the innocent Cécile as if she were nothing more than a sex object, a potential victim of his seductive powers (assuming he has any), but at the same time he knows that he is fighting a war, an underground guerrilla war, and this dinner is the first battle of that war, and if he could win the battle by seducing his adversary’s future stepdaughter, he would not hesitate to do it. But the young Cécile is not a candidate for seduction, and therefore he will have to devise more subtle tactics to advance his purpose, shifting from an all-out assault on the daughter to a two-pronged offensive against mother and daughter both-in an attempt to ingratiate himself with them and eventually lure them over to his side. All this must be accomplished under Born’s watchful gaze, the intolerable, suffocating presence of a man he can barely bring himself to look at. The wily, skeptical Born is no doubt deeply suspicious of the two-faced Walker, and who knows if he hasn’t merely pretended to accept the latter’s pretend apology in order to find out what mischief the boy is up to? There is an edge to Born’s voice buried under the pleasant chatter and false bonhomie, an anxious, straining tone that seems to suggest he is on his guard. It will not be wise to see him again, Walker tells himself, which makes it all the more imperative to establish his separate peace with the Juins tonight, before the dinner comes to an end.

The women are on the other side of the table. He is opposite Cécile, and Born is sitting to his left, face to face with Hélène. Walker studies Hélène’s eyes as she looks at her betrothed, and he becomes just as baffled as Margot was when he detects no spark emanating from them. Other feelings lurk in those eyes, perhaps-wistfulness, kindness, sadness-but love is not among them, much less happiness or a single trace of joy. But how can there be happiness for a woman in Hélène’s position, for someone who has spent the past six or seven years living in a state of grief and suspended animation as her half-dead husband languishes in a hospital? He imagines the comatose Juin stretched out in bed, his body hooked up to countless machines and a tangle of respiration tubes, the only patient in a large, deserted ward, living but not living, dying but not dying, and suddenly he remembers the film he saw with Gwyn two months ago, Ordet, the film by Carl Dreyer, sitting next to his sister in the balcony of the New Yorker theater, and the dead farmer’s wife laid out in her coffin, and his tears when she sat up and came to life again, but no, he says to himself, that was just a story, a make-believe story in a make-believe world, and this is not that world, and there will be no miraculous resurrections for Juin, Hélène’s husband will never sit up and come back to life. From Juin’s bed in the hospital Walker’s mind jumps to another bed, and before he can put a stop to it, he is revisiting the repugnant scene Margot described to him a few days ago: Margot in bed with the two men, Born and the other one, what was his name, François, Margot in bed with Born and François, the three of them naked, fucking, and now he sees Born watching François push his hardened cock into Margot, and there is Born, naked in his chunky, odious flesh, swept up in the throes of arousal, jerking off as he watches his girlfriend do it with another man…

Walker smiles at Cécile in an attempt to dissolve the image, and as she smiles back at him-a bit puzzled, but apparently pleased by the attention-he wonders if this kind of debauchery doesn’t explain why Born is so keen on marrying Hélène. He is struggling to turn his back on himself, to resist his sordid, malevolent urges, and she represents respectability to him, a wall against his own madness. Walker notes how decorously he behaves with Hélène, addressing her by the formal vous instead of the more intimate, familiar tu. It is the language of counts and countesses, the language of marriage in the highest reaches of the upper class, and it creates a distance from both self and world that serves as a form of protection. It is not love that Born is looking for but safety. The libidinous Margot brought out the worst in him. Will the calm and repressed Hélène turn him into a new man? Dream on, Walker says to himself. A person of your intelligence should know better than to think that.

By the time they place their orders, Walker has been told that Hélène works as a speech pathologist at a clinic in the fourteenth arrondissement. She has been in the profession since the early fifties-in other words, long before her husband’s accident-and although she now depends on this job to generate the income needed to support her small household, Walker quickly understands that she is a dedicated practitioner, that her career gives her immense satisfaction and is probably the single most important element of her life. Find yourself drowning in a sea of trouble, and hard work can become the raft that ends up keeping you afloat. Walker reads it in her eyes, is impressed by how noticeably they have brightened now that Born has mentioned the subject, and suddenly there is a possible opening, a chance to engage her in pertinent dialogue. The truth is that Walker is genuinely interested in what she does. He has read Jakobson and Merleau-Ponty on aphasia and language acquisition, has given serious thought to these matters because of his engagement with words, and therefore he does not feel like a fraud or a conniver when he starts pelting her with questions. At first, Hélène is taken aback by his enthusiasm, but once she realizes that he is in earnest, she begins to talk about articulation disorders in children, her methods of treating the lisping, garble-mouthed, stuttering youngsters who come to her clinic, but no, she doesn’t only work with children, there are the adults as well, the old people, the victims of stroke and various brain injuries, the aphasics, the ones who have lost the power of speech or can’t remember words or jumble words to such an extent that pen becomes paper and tree becomes house. There are several different forms of aphasia, Walker learns, depending on which part of the brain is affected-Broca’s aphasia, Wernicke’s aphasia, conduction aphasia, transcortical sensory aphasia, anomic aphasia, and so on-and isn’t it intriguing, Hélène says, smiling for the first time since she entered the restaurant, truly smiling at last, isn’t it intriguing that thought cannot exist without language, and since language is a function of the brain, we would have to say that language-the ability to experience the world through symbols-is in some sense a physical property of human beings, which proves that the old mind-body duality is so much nonsense, doesn’t it? Adieu, Descartes. The mind and the body are one.

He is discovering that the best way to get to know them is to leave himself out of it, to ask questions rather than give answers, to make them talk about themselves. But Walker is not adept at this kind of interpersonal manipulation, and he falls into an uncomfortable silence when Born barges in with some pointedly negative comments about the Israeli army’s refusal to withdraw from Sinai and the West Bank. Walker senses that he is trying to goad him into an argument, but the fact is that he agrees with Born’s stance on this issue, and rather than let him know that, he says nothing, waiting for the harangue to run its course by looking at Cécile’s mouth, which is again tugging downward in response to some secret inner mirth. He could be wrong, but it appears that she finds the intensity of Born’s opinions rather funny. A couple of minutes later, the rant is interrupted when the appetizers are set before them. Seizing his opportunity, Walker breaks the sudden silence by asking Cécile about her study of ancient Greek. Greek wasn’t offered at the high school he went to, he says, and he envies her for having the chance to learn it. He has only two years of college left, and by now it’s probably too late for him to start.

Not really, she says. Once you learn the alphabet, it’s not as hard as it looks.

They talk about Greek literature for a while, and before long Cécile is telling him about her summer project-a crazy, overly ambitious plan that has led to three months of constant frustration and regret. God knows what possessed her to try in the first place, she says, but she got it into her head to take on a book-length poem by the most difficult writer imaginable and translate it into French. When Walker asks who the writer is, she shrugs and says that he hasn’t heard of him, that no one has heard of him, and indeed, when she mentions the poet’s name, Lycophron, who lived around 300 B.C., Walker admits that she is right. The poem is about Cassandra, she goes on, the daughter of Priam, the last king of Troy-poor Cassandra, who had the misfortune to be loved by Apollo. He offered her the gift of prophecy, but only if she agreed to sacrifice her virginity to him in exchange. At first she said yes, then she said no, and the jilted Apollo took his revenge on her by poisoning his gift, making sure that none of Cassandra’s prophecies would ever be believed. Lycophron’s poem is set during the Trojan War, and Cassandra is in prison, already mad, about to be murdered with Agamemnon, spewing forth endless ravings and visions of the future in a language so complex, so crammed with metaphors and allusions, that it is almost unintelligible. It is a poem of shrieks and howls, Cécile tells him, a great poem in her opinion, a wild and utterly modern poem, but so daunting and elusive, so far beyond her powers of comprehension, that after hours and hours of work she has managed to translate only a hundred and fifty lines. If she keeps it up, she says, mouth tugging downward once again, it will take her only ten or twelve years to finish.

In spite of her self-deprecating manner, Walker can’t help admiring the girl’s courage for tackling such a formidable poem, a poem he himself would now like to read, and consequently he asks her if any translations exist in English. She doesn’t know, she says, but she would be happy to find out for him. Walker thanks her and then adds (out of simple curiosity, with no ulterior motive) that he would like to read her version of the opening lines in French. But Cécile demurs. It couldn’t possibly interest you, she says. It’s pure rubbish. At which point Hélène pats her daughter’s hand and tells her not to be so hard on herself. Born then pipes in and addresses Cécile as well: Adam is a translator, too, you know. A poet first, but also a translator of poems. From Provençal, no less. He once gave me a work by my would-be namesake, Bertran de Born. An impressive fellow, old Bertran. He tended to lose his head at times, but a good poet, and Adam did an excellent translation.

Oh? Cécile says, looking at Walker. I wasn’t aware of that.

I don’t know about excellent, he says, but I have done a little translating.

Well, she replies, in that case…

And just like that, with no forewarning, with no devious maneuvers on his part, Walker finds himself arranging to get together with Cécile tomorrow afternoon at four o’clock to have a look at her manuscript. A small victory, perhaps, but quite suddenly he has accomplished everything he set out to do this evening. There will be further contact with the Juins, and Born will be nowhere in sight.

The following morning, he is sitting at his wobbly desk with a pen in his hand, looking over a recent poem and becoming more and more disenchanted with it, wondering if he should forge on with his efforts, put the manuscript aside for later reflection, or simply chuck it into the wastebasket. He lifts his head for a peek out the windows: gray and overcast, a mountain of clouds bulking up to the west, yet another shift in the ever-shifting Paris sky. He finds the gloom indoors rather pleasant-a soothing gloom, as it were, a companionable gloom, a gloom one could converse with for hours. He puts down his pen, scratches his head, exhales. Unbidden, a forgotten verse from Ecclesiastes comes roaring into his consciousness. And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly… As he jots down the words in the right-hand margin of his poem, he wonders if this isn’t the truest thing he has written about himself in months. The words might not be his own, but he feels that they belong to him.

Ten-thirty, eleven o’clock. The yellowish glow of the electric bulb radiating from the wine-bottle lamp on the desk. The dripping faucet, the peeling wallpaper, the scratching of his pen. He hears the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Someone is approaching, slowly mounting the circular staircase toward his floor, the top floor, and at first he assumes it is Maurice, the semi-inebriated hotel manager, coming to deliver a telegram or the morning mail, affable Maurice Petillon, man of a thousand stories about nothing at all, but no, it can’t be Maurice, for now Walker detects the clicking sound of high heels, and therefore it must be a woman, and if it’s a woman, who else can it be but Margot? Walker is glad, inordinately glad, positively stupid with happiness at the prospect of seeing her again. He jumps out of his chair and rushes to open the door before she has time to knock.

She is holding a small, wax-coated patisserie bag filled with freshly baked croissants. Under normal circumstances, a person who shows up bearing gifts is a person in a happy frame of mind, but Margot looks peeved and out of sorts today, and she barely manages a smile as she plants a frosty, perfunctory kiss on Walker’s mouth. When Walker puts his arms around her, she wriggles out of his grasp and strides into the room, tossing the bag onto the desk and then sitting down on the unmade bed. Walker closes the door behind him, advances as far as the desk, and stops.

What’s wrong? he says.

There’s nothing wrong with me, Margot replies. I want to know what’s wrong with you.

With me? Why should anything be wrong with me? What are you talking about?

Last night, I happened to be walking with a friend down the Boulevard Saint-Germain. It was about eight-thirty or nine o’clock. We passed that restaurant, you know the one I’m talking about, the old brasserie, Vagenende, and for no particular reason, giant idiot that I am, or maybe because I used to go there with my parents when I was a little girl, I looked through the window. And who do you think I saw?

Ah, Walker says, feeling as if he has just been slapped across the face. You don’t have to tell me. I already know the answer.

What are you up to, Adam? What kind of warped game are you involved in now?

Walker lowers himself onto the chair behind the desk. There is no air left in his lungs; his head is about to detach itself from his body. He looks away from Margot, whose eyes never leave him, and begins fiddling with the bag of croissants.

Well? she says. Aren’t you going to talk?

I want to, he says at last. I want to tell you everything.

Then why don’t you?

Because I don’t know if I can trust you. You can’t breathe a word about this to anyone, do you understand? You have to promise me that.

Who do you think I am?

I don’t know. Someone who disappointed me. Someone I like very much. Someone I want to be friends with.

But you don’t think I can keep a secret.

Can you?

No one ever asked me before. How can I know unless I try?

Well, at least that’s honest.

You decide. I’m not going to force you to talk when you don’t want to talk. But if you don’t talk, Adam, I’m going to stand up and leave this room, and you’ll never see me again.

That’s blackmail.

No it’s not. It’s the simple truth, that’s all.

Walker lets out a prolonged sigh of defeat, then stands up from the chair and begins pacing back and forth in front of Margot, who watches him in silence from the bed. Ten minutes go by, and in those minutes he tells her the story of the past several days: the accidental meeting with Born, which he now suspects was not an accident, Born’s spurious denials about the murder of Cedric Williams, the invitation to meet Hélène and Cécile, the business card he almost tore up, hatching the plan to block Born’s marriage to Hélène, the contrite telephone call to set the plan in motion, the dinner at Vagenende, his upcoming date with Cécile at four o’clock this afternoon. When Margot has heard him out, she pats the bed with her left hand and asks Walker to sit down beside her. Walker sits, and the moment his body touches the mattress, Margot grabs hold of his two shoulders with her two hands, turns him toward her, brings her face to within inches of his, and says in a low voice filled with determination: Give it up, Adam. You don’t have a chance. He’ll slice you into little pieces.

It’s too late, Walker says. I’ve already started now, and I’m not going to stop until I’ve seen it through to the end.

You talk about trust. What makes you think you can trust Hélène Juin? You’ve only just met her.

I know. It’s going to take a while before I’m sure. But my first impression of her is a good one. She strikes me as a solid, honest person, and I don’t think she really cares that much about Born. She’s grateful to him, he’s been kind to her, but she’s not in love with him.

The minute you tell her about what happened in New York, she’ll turn around and go straight to Rudolf. I promise you.

Maybe. But even if she does, what can happen to me?

All kinds of things.

Born might try to punch me in the face, but he’s not going to come after me with his knife.

I’m not talking about the knife. Rudolf has connections, a hundred powerful connections, and before you start to mess with him, you should know who you’re dealing with. He’s not just anyone.

Connections?

With the police, with the military, with the government. I can’t prove anything, but I’ve always felt he’s something more than just a university professor.

Such as?

I don’t know. Secret intelligence, espionage, dirty work of some kind or another.

And why on earth do you suspect that?

Telephone calls in the middle of the night… mysterious, unexplained absences… the people he knows. Cabinet ministers, army generals. How many young professors go out to dinner with top government officials? Rudolf is on the inside, and that makes him a dangerous person for you to know. Especially here in Paris.

It sounds rather flimsy to me.

Do you remember the dinner at our apartment in New York last spring?

Vividly. How could I forget it?

He was on the phone when I let you into the apartment. Then he came out-furious, breathing fire, hysterical. How many yearshave I given them? What did he mean by that? Principles! Battles! The ship is going down! There was a problem in Paris, and I can tell you now that it had nothing to do with academic business or his father’s estate. It was connected to the government, to his secret life in whatever agency he works for. That’s why he got so worked up when you started talking about the CIA. Don’t you remember? He told you all those things about your family, and you were shocked, you couldn’t believe how much information he’d managed to dig up about you. You said he must be an agent of some kind. You were right, Adam. You sniffed out something about him, and he started laughing at you, he tried to turn it into a joke. That’s when I knew I was right.

Maybe. But it’s still just a guess.

Then why wouldn’t he tell me what the problem was? He didn’t even bother to make up an excuse. It doesn’t concern you, he said, don’t ask so many questions. So off he flies to Paris, and when he comes back, he’s engaged to Hélène Juin and I’m thrown out the door.

They go on talking for another fifteen or twenty minutes, and the more vehement Margot becomes about her suspicions concerning undercover operations, government conspiracies, and the psychological pressures of leading a double life, the less Walker seems to care. Margot is puzzled by his indifference. She calls it curious, unhealthy, irrational, but Walker explains that Born’s activities are of no interest to him. The only thing that counts is the murder of Cedric Williams, and even if Born turned out to be the head of the entire French intelligence system, it wouldn’t matter to him. There is just one moment when his attention seems fully engaged, and that follows a tossed-off comment from Margot about Born’s past-something to do with spending his childhood in a large house outside Paris, which was where she first met him when she was three years old. What about Guatemala? Walker asks, remembering that Born said to him that he had grown up in Guatemala.

He was pulling your leg, Margot replies. Rudolf has never been anywhere near the place.

I thought as much. But why Guatemala?

Why not Guatemala? He enjoys making up stories about himself. Fooling people, telling little lies-they’re grand entertainment for Rudolf.

Although little of concrete value emerges from this conversation (too many assumptions, not enough facts), it nevertheless seems to mark a turning point in his relations with Margot. She is worried about him, worried for him, and the anxiety and concern he sees in her eyes is both comforting (the issue of trust is no longer in doubt) and somewhat troubling. She is drawing closer to him, her affection has become more manifest, more sincere, and yet there is something maternal about that anxiety, a sense of wisdom frowning down on the errors of youth, and for the first time in the months he has known her, he can feel the difference in their ages, the gap of ten years that stands between them. He hopes this will not become a problem. He needs Margot now. She is his only ally in Paris, and being with her is the only medicine that can prevent him from brooding about Gwyn, from longing for Gwyn. No, he is not unhappy that she spotted him in the restaurant last night with Born and the Juins. Nor is he unhappy that he has just bared his soul to her. Her reaction has proved that he means something to her, that he represents more than just another body to climb into bed with, but he knows that he mustn’t abuse her friendship, for Margot is not entirely there, and she has only just so much of herself to give. Ask for too much, and she is liable to resent it, perhaps even abscond.

Leaving the untouched croissants on the desk, they go out into the dank, sunless weather to look for a place to eat. Margot holds his hand as they walk along in silence, and ten minutes later they are sitting across from each other at a corner table in the Restaurant des Beaux-Arts. Margot buys him a copious three-course lunch (refusing to let him pay, insisting that he order dessert and a second cup of coffee), and then they move on to the rue de l’Université. The Jouffroy apartment is on the fifth floor of a six-story building, and as they squeeze into the cramped birdcage of an elevator to begin their ascent, Walker puts his arms around Margot and covers her face with a barrage of short, intense kisses. Margot bursts out laughing, and she is still laughing as she extracts a key from her purse and unlocks the door of the apartment. It turns out to be a sumptuous place, far more lavish than anything Walker could have imagined, an immense palace of comfort expressing wealth on a scale he has not encountered before. Margot once told him that her father worked in banking, but she neglected to add that he was the president of the bank, and now that she is giving Walker a brief tour of the rooms, with their thick Persian rugs and gilt-edged mirrors, with their crystal chandeliers and antique furnishings, he feels he is gaining new insight into the disaffected, elusive Margot. She is a person at odds with the environment she was born into, at odds with it but not in outright rebellion (for here she is, temporarily back with her parents as she searches for a place of her own), yet what a disappointment it must be to them that she is still unmarried at thirty, nor can her halfhearted attempts to become a painter sit terribly well in this dominion of bourgeois respectability. Ambiguous Margot, with her love of cooking and her love of sex, still struggling to find a place for herself, still not entirely free.

Or so Walker muses as he follows her into the kitchen, but a minute later he learns that the portrait is somewhat more complex than the one he has been fashioning in his mind. Margot does not live in the apartment with her parents. She has a room upstairs, a tiny maid’s room that her grandmother bought for her as a twenty-first-birthday present, and the only reason she entered the apartment this afternoon was to look for a pack of cigarettes (which she now finds in a drawer next to the sink). The tour was a little bonus, she adds, so Walker would have an idea of how and where she grew up. When he asks her why she prefers camping out in a minute chambre de bonne to sleeping in comfort down here, Margot smiles and says: Figure it out for yourself.

It is a spartan room, less than a third the size of his room at the hotel. Space for a small desk and chair, a small sink, and a small bed with storage drawers under the mattress. Pristine in its cleanliness, no adornments anywhere-as if they have stepped into the cell of a novitiate nun. Just one book in sight, lying on the floor beside the bed: a collection of poems by Paul Éluard, Capitale de la douleur. A few sketchbooks piled up on the desk along with a drinking glass filled with pencils and pens; some canvases on the floor, leaning against the wall with their backs facing out. Walker would love to turn them around, would love to open the sketchbooks, but Margot doesn’t offer to show them to him, and he doesn’t dare touch anything without her permission. He is awed by the simplicity of the room, awed by this unearthly glimpse into Margot’s inner world. How many people has she allowed to come in here? he wonders.

He would like to think he is the first.

They spend two hours together in Margot’s narrow bed, and when Walker finally leaves, he is running late for his appointment with Cécile Juin. It is entirely his fault, but the truth is that he forgot all about the meeting. From the moment he started kissing Margot, the four o’clock rendezvous vanished from his mind, and if not for Margot herself, who glanced over at the alarm clock and said to him: Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere in fifteen minutes?, he would still be lying next to her-rather than bounding from the bed, jumping into his clothes, and scrambling to get out of there.

He is mystified by this gesture of help. Just hours earlier, she was adamantly opposed to his plan, and now she seems to be acting as his accomplice. Has she rethought her position, he asks himself, or is she subtly mocking him in some way, testing him to find out if he is actually stupid enough to walk into the trap she feels he has set for himself? He suspects the latter interpretation is the correct one, but even so, he thanks her for reminding him of the date, and then, just as he is about to open the door and leave the tiny room, he rashly tells Margot that he loves her.

No you don’t, she says, shaking her head and smiling. But I’m glad you think you do. You’re a crazy boy, Adam, and every time I see you, you’re crazier than you were the last time. Before long, you’ll be just as crazy as I am.

He walks into La Palette at twenty-five past four, almost half an hour late. He would not be surprised if Cécile has already left, storming out in a huff and vowing to rain down a thousand curses on him if he should ever cross her path again. But no, she is still there, sitting calmly at a table in the back room, reading a book, a half-finished bottle of Orangina in front of her, wearing glasses this time, and a fetching little dark blue hat that resembles a beret. Embarrassed, out of breath from running, his clothes disheveled, his body no doubt reeking of sex, and with the word crazy still resounding in his head, Walker approaches the table, already stammering a multitude of apologies as Cécile glances up at him and smiles-a wholly undeserved smile of forgiveness.

Still, even as he sits down in the chair across from her, Walker goes on apologizing, inventing some far-fetched excuse about standing in line at the post office for more than an hour to make a long-distance call to New York, but Cécile shrugs it off, telling him not to worry, there’s no problem, he doesn’t have to explain anything. Then, holding up her left wrist, she taps her watch with her right index finger and says: We have a rule in Paris. Whenever people arrange to get together, the first one to arrive gives the other person an extra half hour to show up-no questions asked. It’s four twenty-five now. By my reckoning, that makes you five minutes early.

Well, Walker says, impressed by the daffiness of this logic, then I’m rattling on for nothing, aren’t I?

That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.

Walker orders a coffee, his sixth or seventh of the day, and then, with a characteristic downward tug of her mouth, Cécile points to the book she was reading when he came in-a small green hardcover volume with no dust jacket, apparently quite old, a frayed and battered object that looks like something rescued from a trash bin.

I found it, she says, unable to control her mouth anymore as it breaks into a full-fledged smile. Lycophron in English. The Loeb Classical Library, published by Harvard University Press. Nineteen twenty-one. With a translation by-(she opens the book to the title page)-A. W. Mair, professor of Greek, Edinburgh University.

That was fast, Walker says. How in the world did you manage to find it?

Sorry. I can’t tell you.

Oh? And why not?

It’s a secret. Maybe I’ll tell you when you give it back to me, but not before then.

You mean I can borrow it?

Of course. You can keep it for as long as you like.

And what about the translation? Have you looked at it?

My English isn’t very good, but it strikes me as stuffy and pedantic, rather old-school, I’m afraid. Worse yet, it’s a literal prose translation, so all the poetry is missing. But at least it gives you a sense of the thing-and why it’s given me so much trouble.

Cécile opens the book to the second page of the poem and points to line thirty-one, where Cassandra’s monologue begins. She says to Walker: Why not read some of it out loud to me? Then you can judge for yourself.

Walker takes the book from her and immediately plunges in: Alas! hapless nurse of mine burnt even aforetime by the warlike pineships of the lion that was begotten in three evenings, whom of old Triton’s hound of jagged teeth devoured with his jaws. But he, a living carver of the monster’s liver, seething in steam of cauldron on a flameless hearth, shed to ground the bristles of his head; he the slayer of his children, the destroyer of my fatherland; who smote his second mother invulnerable with grievous shaft upon the breast; who, too, in the midst of the racecourse seized in his arms the body of his wrestler sire beside the steep hill of Cronus, where is the horse-affrighting tomb of earth-born Ischenus; who also slew the fierce hound that watched the narrow straits of the Ausonian sea, fishing over her cave, the bull-slaying lioness whom her father restored again to life, burning her flesh with brands; she who feared not Leptynis, the goddess of the underworld…

Walker puts down the book and smiles. This is insane, he says. I’m absolutely lost.

Yes, it’s a terrible translation, Cécile says. Even I can hear that.

It’s not just the translation. I have no idea what’s going on.

That’s because Lycophron is so indirect. Lycophron the obscure. There’s a reason why they called him that.

Still…

You have to know the references. The nurse is a woman named Ilios, for example, and the lion is Heracles. Laomedon promised to pay Poseidon and Apollo for building the walls of Troy, but after he reneged, a sea monster appeared-Triton’s hound-to devour his daughter, Hesione. Heracles climbed into the monster’s belly and cut it to bits. Laomedon said he would reward Heracles for killing the monster by giving him the horses of Tros, but again he broke his word, and the angry Heracles punished him by burning down the city of Troy. That’s the background of the first few lines. If you don’t know the references, you’re bound to be lost.

It’s like trying to translate Finnegans Wake into Mandarin.

I know. That’s why I’m so sick of it. Summer vacation ends next week, but my summer project is already kaput.

You’re giving up?

When I came home from dinner last night, I read over my translation again and dumped it in the garbage. It was dreadful, positively dreadful.

You shouldn’t have done that. I was looking forward to reading it.

Too embarrassing.

But you promised. That’s why we’re sitting here now-because you were going to show me your translation.

That was the original idea, but then I changed the plan.

Changed it to what?

To giving you this book. At least I’ve accomplished something today.

I don’t think I want it anymore. The book belongs to you. You should hold on to it, as a keepsake from your summer of struggle.

But I don’t want it either. Just looking at it makes me ill.

What should we do with it, then?

I don’t know. Give it to someone else.

We’re in France, remember? What French person in his right mind would be interested in a bad English translation of an impenetrable Greek poem?

Good point. Why don’t we just throw it away?

Too harsh. Books should be treated with respect, even the ones that make us ill.

Then we’ll leave it behind. Right here on this bench. An anonymous gift to an unknown stranger.

Perfect. And once we pay the bill and walk out of this café, we’ll never talk about Lycophron again.

So begins Walker’s friendship with Cécile Juin. In many ways, he finds her a thoroughly impossible creature. She fidgets and trembles, she bites her nails, she doesn’t smoke or drink, she is a militant vegetarian, she puts too many demands on herself (e.g., the destroyed translation), and at times she is shockingly immature (e.g., the silly business about not telling him where she found the book, her girlish fixation on secrets). On the other hand, she is without question one of the most brilliant people he has ever met. Her mind is a wondrous instrument, and she can think circles around him on any topic imaginable, dazzling him with her knowledge of literature and art, music and history, politics and science. Nor is she simply a memory machine, one of those prototypical top students with a capacity for ingesting vast amounts of unfiltered information. She is sensitive and acute, her opinions are unfailingly original, and, shy and nervous as she is, she stubbornly holds her ground in any argument. For six straight days, Walker meets her for lunch at the student cafeteria on the rue Mazet. They spend the afternoons together wandering in and out of bookstores, going to movies, visiting art galleries, sitting on benches along the Seine. He is relieved that he is not physically attracted to her, that he can confine his thoughts about sex to Margot (who spends one night with him in his hotel during this period) and to the absent Gwyn, who is never far from him. In a word, despite Cécile’s maddening idiosyncrasies, he enjoys the company of her mind more than enough to forgo any thoughts about her body, and he gladly keeps his hands to himself.

Proceeding cautiously, he does not ask her any direct questions about Born. He wants to know what she thinks of him, wants to know how she feels about her mother’s impending marriage to this old family friend, but there is ample time in front of him, the divorce will not go through until the spring, and he prefers to wait until their friendship has firmly taken root before delving into such private matters. Nevertheless, her silence is instructive, he believes, for if she were especially fond of Born, or if she were enthusiastic about the marriage, she would inevitably talk about those things every now and then, but Cécile says nothing, and therefore he concludes that she has misgivings about her mother’s decision. Perhaps she looks on it as a betrayal of her father, he thinks, but that is far too delicate a subject for him to bring up with her, and until Cécile mentions it herself, he will continue to pretend he knows nothing about the man in the hospital, the all but dead father who will never wake again.

On the fifth day of their daily rambles, Cécile tells him that her mother would like to know if he is free to come to their apartment for dinner the following night, the last night before the new term at the lycée begins. Walker’s first impulse is to decline the invitation, since he fears Born will be included in the company, but it turns out that Born is in London on family business (family business?) and that it will just be the three of them, Hélène, Cécile, and himself. Of course, he says, he will be happy to go to such a small dinner. Large gatherings make him uncomfortable, but a quiet evening with mother and daughter Juin sounds terrific. When he says the word terrific (formidable), Cécile’s face lights up with an expression of blazing, untempered joy. In that instant, Walker suddenly understands that the invitation has not come from Hélène but from Cécile, that she has put her mother up to asking him to their apartment and in all likelihood has been badgering her about it for days. Until now, Cécile has been rather guarded in his presence, holding back from any spontaneous outbursts of emotion, and this look of joy spreading across her face is a deeply worrying sign. The last thing he wants is for her to start developing a crush on him.

They live on the rue de Verneuil in the seventh arrondissement, a street that runs parallel to the rue de l’Université, but unlike the palatial residence of Margot’s family, the Juins’ apartment is small and simply furnished, no doubt a reflection of Hélène’s reduced financial circumstances following her husband’s accident. But the place is extremely well cared for, Walker notices, everything is where it should be, immaculate, tidy, trim, from the spotless glass coffee table to the waxed and gleaming parquet floors, as if this will for order is an attempt to keep the chaos and unpredictability of the world at arm’s length. Who can blame Hélène for such fanatical diligence? Walker thinks. She is trying to hold herself together. She is trying to hold both herself and Cécile together, and with the heavy burden she has to bear, who knows if this isn’t why she is planning to divorce her husband and marry Born: to get out from under, to be able to breathe again?

With Born missing from the equation, Walker finds Hélène to be somewhat softer and more congenial than the woman he met at the restaurant several days ago. She is still reserved, still enveloped in an air of rectitude and propriety, but when she greets him at the door and shakes his hand, he is startled by how warmly she looks into his eyes, as if she is genuinely glad that he has turned up. Maybe he was wrong about Cécile having to twist her arm to get him invited to the house. When all is said and done, maybe it was Hélène who proposed the idea herself: What about this odd American boy you’ve been palling around with, Cécile? Why don’t you ask him to dinner so I can learn something more about him?

Again, Cécile has chosen to dispense with her glasses for the evening, but contrary to what happened at the dinner in the restaurant, she is not squinting. Walker assumes that she has started wearing contact lenses, but he refrains from asking her about it on the off chance that such a question will embarrass her. She seems more quiet than usual, he thinks, more poised and in control of herself, but he can’t tell if it’s because she is making a conscious effort to act in a certain way or because she feels more inhibited with him in front of her mother. Course by course, the food is brought to the table: pâté with cornichons to start with, a pot-au-feu, an endive salad, three different cheeses, and crème caramel for dessert. Walker compliments Hélène on each dish, and while he honestly enjoys every morsel that enters his mouth, he knows that her cooking is not in the same league as Margot’s. Innumerable matters of no importance are discussed. School and work, the weather, the differences between the subway systems in Paris and New York. The conversation brightens considerably when he and Cécile begin to talk about music, and when the meal is over he finally persuades her (after how many truculent refusals?) to play something for him, something for him and her mother. There is a small upright piano in the room-which serves as a combination living room-dining room-and as Cécile stands up from the table and begins walking toward the instrument, she asks: Anything in particular? Bach, he says, without hesitation. A two-part invention by Bach.

She plays well, she hits all the notes of the piece with dogged precision, her dynamics are steady, and if her phrasing is a bit mechanical, if she doesn’t quite attain the fluency of a seasoned professional, who can fault her for being anything other than what she is? She is not a professional. She is an eighteen-year-old high school student who plays the piano for her own pleasure, and she renders the Bach efficiently, dexterously, and with much feeling. Walker remembers his own fumbling attempts to learn the piano when he was a boy and how disappointed he was to discover that he had no aptitude for it whatsoever. He therefore applauds Cécile’s performance with great enthusiasm, praising her efforts and telling her how good he thinks she is. Not really good, she says, with that annoying modesty of hers. So-so. But even as she denigrates herself, Walker can see her mouth tugging downward, see her struggling to suppress a smile, and he understands how much his compliments have meant to her.

A moment later, she excuses herself and marches off down the hall (no doubt to visit the bathroom), and for the first time all evening, Walker is alone with her mother. Since Hélène knows it will not be long before Cécile returns, she gets right to the point, not wanting to waste a second.

Be careful with her, Mr. Walker, she says. She’s a complex, fragile person, and she has no experience with men.

I like Cécile very much, he says, but not in the way you seem to be suggesting. I enjoy being with her, that’s all. As a friend.

Yes, I’m sure you like her. But you don’t love her, and the problem is that she’s fallen in love with you.

Has she told you that?

She doesn’t have to tell me. All I have to do is look.

She can’t be in love with me. I’ve only known her for a week.

A year, a week, what difference does it make? These things happen, and I don’t want her to get hurt. Please be careful. I beg of you.

Dread has become fact. Innocence has turned into guilt, and hope is a word that rhymes with despair. In every part of Paris, people are jumping out of windows. The metro is flooded with human excrement. The dead are crawling from their graves. End of Act II. Curtain.

Act III. As Walker leaves the Juin apartment and staggers out into the chilly September night, there is no doubt in his mind that Hélène has told him the truth. He already suspected it himself, and now that these suspicions have been confirmed, he understands that he will have to come up with a new strategy. To begin with, there will be no more daily jaunts with Cécile. Fond as he has become of her, he must be careful (yes, Hélène was right), he must be very careful not to do anything that will hurt her. But what does careful mean? Cutting off relations with her strikes him as unnecessarily cruel, and yet if he goes on seeing her, would she not then interpret his continued interest in her as a sign of encouragement? There is no simple solution to this dilemma. For the fact is that he must see her, perhaps not as often as before, perhaps not for so many hours at a stretch, but he must see her because she is the person he has decided to unburden himself to, the one who is going to be told about the killing of Cedric Williams. Cécile will believe the story. If he goes to her mother instead, there is a good chance that Hélène will not. But if Cécile believes the story, then his chances with Hélène will improve, since it is more than likely that she will believe what her daughter tells her.

He calls Margot the next morning, hoping to distract himself from this muddle of uncertainties by spending some time with her-depending on her mood, of course, and depending on whether she is free.

That’s funny, Margot says. I was just about to pick up the phone and call your hotel.

I’m glad, Walker replies. That means we were thinking about each other at the same moment. Mental telepathy is the best indication of a strong bond between people.

You say the strangest things…

Do you want to tell me why you were going to call, or should I tell you why I called?

You first.

Very simple. I’m dying to see you.

I would love to get together, but I can’t. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.

Is something wrong?

No, not at all. I’m going away for a week and I wanted to let you know.

Away?

Yes, to London.

London?

Why do you keep repeating what I say?

I’m sorry. But someone else is in London, too.

Along with about ten million other people. Are you thinking of anyone in particular?

I thought maybe you knew.

What are you talking about?

Born. He went to London three days ago.

And why should I care about that?

You’re not going to see him, are you?

Don’t be ridiculous.

Because if you are going to see him, I don’t think I could take it.

What’s gotten into you? Of course I’m not going to see him.

Then why are you going?

Don’t do this, Adam. You have no right to ask that question.

I thought I did.

I don’t have to account for myself to anyone-least of all to you.

Sorry. I’m acting like an idiot, aren’t I? The question is withdrawn.

If you must know, I’m going to see my sister. She’s married to an Englishman and lives in Hampstead. Her little boy is turning three, and I’m invited to the birthday party. Also-just to complete the picture-my mother is traveling with me.

Can I see you before you go?

We’re leaving for the airport in an hour.

Too bad. I’m going to miss you. Really, really miss you.

It’s only eight days. Get a grip on yourself, little man. I’ll be back before you know it.

After this dispiriting talk with Margot, he returns to his room at the hotel and mopes around for a few hours, unable to summon the energy to begin working at his desk, unable to concentrate on the book he is trying to read (Georges Perec’s Les Choses: Une Histoire des années soixante), and before long he is thinking about Cécile again, remembering that today is her first day of school and that not far from where he is sitting she is in a classroom at the Lycée Fénelon, listening to one of her teachers expound on Molière’s prosody as she fiddles with her bag of newly sharpened pencils. He will avoid her for the time being, he says to himself, and when his own classes begin in eight days (the exact day of Margot’s return), he will have a legitimate excuse for seeing her less often, and as the time they spend together diminishes, perhaps her infatuation with him will diminish as well.

For the next three days, he steadfastly adheres to this regimen of silence. He sees no one, talks to no one, and bit by bit he begins to feel somewhat stronger in his loneliness, as if the stringencies he has forced upon himself have ennobled him in some way, reacquainting him with the person he once imagined himself to be. He writes two short poems that might actually have something to them (never nothing but the dream of nothing / never anything but the dream of all), spends an entire afternoon setting down his thoughts about the resurrection scene in Dreyer’s film, and composes a long, lushly rhapsodic letter to Gwyn about the vagaries of the Paris sky as seen through the windows of his room: To live here is to become a connoisseur of clouds, a meteorologist of whims. Then, early on the fourth day, just after he has woken up, as he is taking his first sips of the bitter instant coffee he prepares each morning with water boiled on the electric hot plate beside his bed, there is a knock on the door.

Still blurred, still dopey from the warmth of the bed, the tousled, undressed Walker slips into a pair of pants and heads for the door, tiptoeing gingerly on his bare feet, not wanting to pick up any splinters from the crumbling planks. Again he assumes it is Maurice, and again his assumption is wrong, but thinking that it must be Maurice, he doesn’t bother to ask who is there.

Cécile is standing in front of him. She is tense, she is biting her lower lip, and she is trembling, as if small electric currents were passing through her body, as if she were about to rise up into the air and levitate.

Walker says: Aren’t you supposed to be in school?

Don’t worry about school, she answers, stepping across the threshold before he can invite her in. This is more important than school.

All right, it’s more important than school. In what way?

You haven’t called me since the night of the dinner. What’s happened to you?

Nothing. I’ve been busy, that’s all. And I figured you were busy, too. You just started your classes this week, and you must be drowning in homework. I wanted to give you a few days to settle in.

That’s not it. That’s not it at all. My mother talked to you, that’s what happened. My stupid mother talked to you and scared you off. Well, just for your information, my mother doesn’t know anything about me. I can take care of myself just fine, thank you.

Slow down, Cécile, Walker says, raising his right arm and thrusting it toward her with an open palm-the pose of a cop directing traffic. I woke up about three minutes ago, he continues, and I’m still trying to shake the cobwebs out of my head. Coffee. That’s what I was doing. I was drinking coffee. You wouldn’t want some, would you?

I don’t like coffee. You know that.

Tea?

No thank you.

All right. No coffee, no tea. But please sit down. You’re making me nervous.

He gestures to the chair behind the desk, then approaches the desk to pull out the chair for her, and as Cécile walks toward it, he retrieves his bowl of coffee and carries it over to the bed. He sits down on the sagging, U-shaped mattress at the same instant she sits down on the creaking chair. For some reason, he finds the effect comical. He takes a sip of the no longer hot coffee and smiles at her, hoping their simultaneous touchdown was as funny to her as it was to him, but nothing is funny to Cécile just now, and she does not smile back.

Your mother, he says. Yes, she talked to me. It happened when you left the room after playing the piano, and the conversation lasted for all of fifteen or twenty seconds. She talked and I listened, but she didn’t scare me off.

No?

Of course not.

Are you sure?

Positively.

Then why have you disappeared?

I haven’t disappeared. I was planning to call you on Saturday or Sunday.

For real?

Yes, for real. Stop it now. No more questions, all right? No more doubts. I’m your friend, and I want to stay your friend.

It’s just-

Enough. I want to stay your friend, Cécile, but I can’t do that unless you begin to trust me.

Trust you? What are you talking about? Of course I trust you.

Not really. We’ve spent a lot of time together lately, and in that time we’ve talked about all sorts of things-books and philosophers, art and music, films, politics, even shoes and hats-but you’ve never once opened up to me about yourself. You don’t have to hide. I know what trouble is. I know what happens to families when things go wrong. The other day, when I told you about what happened to my brother, Andy, I thought that might get you talking, but you never said a word. I know about your father’s accident, Cécile, I know about the hell you and your mother have been living in, I know about the divorce, I know about your mother’s marriage plans. Why don’t you ever mention these things to me? That’s what friends are for. To share each other’s pains, to help each other out.

It’s too hard, she says, lowering her eyes and looking at her hands as she speaks. That’s why I’m so happy when I’m with you. Because I don’t have to think about those things, because I can forget how rotten and terrible the world is…

She is still talking, but he is no longer listening to her, no longer paying close attention because a sudden thought has taken hold of him, and he is wondering if this might not be the moment to tell her the story, the story of Born and Cedric Williams, the killing of Cedric Williams, the right moment because of the reassurances he has just given her, his declarations of friendship, which might make her receptive enough to listen to him in a state of relative calm, to absorb the brutal account of what Born did to that boy without causing irreparable damage to her, this fragile person, as her mother put it, this trembling, nail-biting person, the vulnerable Cécile who nevertheless spent the summer translating a poem of such excessive violence, such nightmarish horror, that he himself was shocked by Cassandra’s howling monologue about ripping apart she-dog monsters and burning down cities and slaughtering one’s own children, and yet all that is in the realm of myth, imaginary violence from long ago, whereas Born is a real person, a living, breathing person whom she has known all her life, the man who intends to marry her mother, and whether she is for or against that marriage, what will it do to her when she learns what this man is capable of, when he tells her about the murderous attack he witnessed with his own eyes, and even as he thinks that now is the time to talk to her about that night in New York last spring, he hesitates, he cannot bring himself to do it, he mustn’t do it, he will not do it, and come what may he will not enlist Cécile as an intermediary to carry the news to her mother, he will go directly to Hélène himself, that is the proper solution, the only decent solution, and even if he fails to win her over, he must not and will not involve Cécile in this ugly business.

Is everything all right, Adam?

The spell is finally broken. Walker looks up, nods his head, and gives her a brief, apologetic smile. I’m sorry, he says. I was thinking about something.

Something important?

No, not at all. I was remembering the dream I had last night. You know how it is when you wake up. Your body springs into action, but your mind is still in bed.

You’re not angry with me for coming here, are you?

Not in the least. I’m glad you came.

You do like me a little bit, don’t you?

What kind of question is that?

Do you think I’m ugly or repulsive?

Don’t be absurd.

I know I’m not pretty, but I’m not too disgusting to look at, am I?

You have a lovely face, Cécile. A delicate face with beautiful, intelligent eyes.

Then why don’t you ever touch me or try to kiss me?

What?

You heard what I said.

Why? I don’t know. Because I haven’t wanted to take advantage of you, I suppose.

You think I’m a virgin, don’t you?

To tell you the truth, I haven’t thought about it one way or the other.

Well, I’m not. Just so you know. I’m not a virgin anymore, and I never will be again.

Congratulations.

It happened last month in Brittany. The boy’s name was Jean-Marc, and we did it three times. He’s a good person, Jean-Marc, but I’m not in love with him. Do you understand what I’m saying?

I think so.

And?

You have to give me time.

What does that mean?

It means that I’m deeply in love with someone in New York. She broke up with me just before I left for Paris, and I’m still suffering, still trying to regain my balance. I’m not ready for anything new right now.

I understand.

Good. That makes things a lot simpler.

Not simpler-more complicated. But that won’t change anything in the end.

Oh?

Once you get to know me better, you’ll see that I have one very special quality, something that sets me apart from everyone else.

And what quality is that?

Patience, Adam. I’m the most patient person in the world.

It has to be a Saturday, he decides. Hélène is off from work, Cécile has a half day of school, and therefore Saturday is the only day of the week when he can go to the Juin apartment with the certainty that he will be alone with Hélène. And he wants to act now, to talk to her while Born is still in London, since that is the only way he can eliminate the risk of having Born walk in on them in the middle of their conversation. He calls Hélène at the clinic. He says he has something important to discuss with her about Cécile. No, nothing catastrophic, he replies, in fact quite the opposite, but he needs to talk to her, and it would be best for all concerned if they can meet at a time when Cécile will not be present. It is Hélène herself who suggests that he come to the apartment on Saturday morning. Cécile will be at the lycée then, and if he shows up at around nine o’clock, they will be able to finish their talk before Cécile comes home. What does he prefer? she asks. Coffee or tea? Croissants, brioches, or tartines beurrées? Coffee and tartines, he says. Yogurt? Yes, yogurt would be very nice. It’s settled, then. He will come for breakfast on Saturday morning. Hélène’s voice on the phone is so accommodating, so full of kindness and playful complicity that Walker has no choice but to revise his opinion of her after they hang up. She is awkward with strangers, perhaps, but once she gets to know someone a little bit, she relaxes her guard and begins to show her true colors. Those colors have become more and more attractive to him. Hélène clearly likes him, and the fact of the matter is, he likes her too. All the more motivation to remove Born from the premises as quickly as possible. If it can be done. If he has the wherewithal to make her believe him.

The rue de Verneuil, Saturday morning. For the first half hour, Walker concentrates on Cécile, doing what he can to put Hélène’s mind at rest about her daughter’s feelings for him and prove that the situation is not as dire as she thought it was. He tells her about his conversation with Cécile on Thursday (neglecting to mention that it took place in the morning, when she was supposed to have been at school) and says that everything is out in the open now. Cécile knows that he is unavailable to her, that he has just been through a shattering breakup with someone in New York and is in no condition to begin a romance with her or anyone else.

Is that true, Hélène asks, or were you just making it up to protect her?

I wasn’t making it up, Walker says.

Poor boy. You must be having a hard time of it.

I am. But that doesn’t mean I don’t deserve to.

Ignoring this cryptic remark, Hélène pushes on: And what did she say when you told her about your… situation?

She said she understood.

That’s all? She didn’t make a scene?

No scene. She was very calm.

I’m surprised. That isn’t like her.

I know she’s high-strung, Madame Juin, I know she isn’t terribly stable, but she’s also a remarkable person, and my feeling is that she’s a lot stronger than you think she is.

That’s a matter of opinion, of course, but let’s hope you’re right.

Also, and this will interest you, you were wrong when you told me she has no experience with men.

Well, well. And where did she acquire this experience?

I’ve already said enough. If you want to know, you’ll have to ask Cécile herself. I’m not a spy, after all.

How tactless of me. You’re absolutely right. Forgive me for asking the question.

My only point is that Cécile is growing up, and maybe it’s time to let her go. You don’t have to worry about her so much anymore.

It’s impossible not to worry about that girl. That’s my job, Adam. I worry about Cécile. I’ve been worrying about her all her life.

[After the word life, there is a break in Walker’s manuscript, and the conversation abruptly comes to an end. Until this point, the notes have been continuous, an uninterrupted march of densely packed, single-spaced paragraphs, but now there is a blank that covers approximately a quarter of a page, and when the text resumes below this white rectangle, the tone of the writing is different. There isn’t much left to tell (we are on page 28 by now, which means there are just three pages to go), but Walker abandons the meticulous, step-by-step approach he has taken so far and rapidly summarizes the final events of the narrative. I can only assume that he was in the middle of the conversation with Hélène when he stopped writing for the day, and when he woke up the next morning (if he slept at all), his condition had taken a turn for the worse. These were the last days of his life, remember, and he must have felt too ravaged, too depleted, too frail to go on as before. Even earlier, over the course of the first twenty-eight pages, I had noticed a slow but ineluctable dwindling of strength, a loss of attention to detail, but now he is too incapacitated to put in anything but the bedrock essentials. He begins Fall with a fairly elaborate description of the Hôtel du Sud, he mentions what Born is wearing during their first encounter at the café, but little by little his descriptions begin to have less to do with the physical world than with inner states. He stops talking about clothes (Margot, Cécile, Hélène-not one word about how they are dressed), and only when it seems crucial to his purpose does he bother to depict his surroundings (a few sentences about the atmosphere in Vagenende, a few sentences about the Juin apartment), but mostly the story consists of thought and dialogue, what people are thinking and what people are saying. By the last three pages, the collapse is nearly total. Walker is vanishing from the world, he can feel the life ebbing out of his body, and yet he forges on as best he can, sitting down at his computer one last time to bring the story to an end.]

H. and W. at the kitchen table. Coffee, bread and butter, a pot of yogurt. There is little left to talk about concerning C. Before it is too late, he must push H. in a new direction, get her to start talking about her husband, about Born. Must confirm that facts are correct before diving in. Born mentioned the marriage to him last spring, M. has echoed this with added information about the divorce, C. has not contradicted this, but H. has yet to broach the subject with him. How to proceed? He begins by mentioning Rudolf, describes their meeting in New York back in April, never hints they are anything to each other but warm friends, then tells about Born’s return from Paris in May and how excited he was when he announced that he was marrying her. Is it true? H. nods. Yes, it’s true. Then she says it is the most wrenching decision she has ever made. In a flood, she begins to talk about her husband, to tell him about the car accident in the Pyrenees, the hairpin turn and the crash down the side of the mountain, the hospital, the anguish of the past six and a half years, the devastation wrought on C.-a flood of words, and then a flood of tears. W. barely has the heart to go on. The tears abate. She is embarrassed, apologetic. How strange that she should be confiding in him, she says, a young boy from New York scarcely older than her daughter, a person she scarcely knows. But Rudolf thinks the world of you, and you’ve been so kind to C.-maybe that’s the reason.

He is ready to abandon the whole business. Keep your mouth shut, he says to himself, leave the poor woman alone. But he can’t. His anger is simply too great, and so he jumps off the cliff and begins talking about Cedric Williams and Riverside Drive-regretting it, hating himself with every word he speaks, but unable to stop. H. listens in stunned silence. His words are a sharpened axe, and he is chopping off her head, he is killing her.

There is no question that she believes him. He can see from the way she looks at him that she knows he is telling the truth. But it makes no difference. He is demolishing her life, and she has no alternative but to defend herself. How dare you make these hideous accusations-with no proof, with nothing to support what you’re saying?

I was there, he says. The proof is in my eyes, in what I saw.

But she will not accept this. Rudolf is a distinguished professor, an intellectual, a man from one of the finest families, etc. He is her friend, he has rescued her from years of misery, he is like no other man in the world.

Hard face. No more tears, no more self-pity. Furious in her self-righteousness.

W. stands up to go. There is nothing more to say to her. Only this, which he delivers just before he walks out of the apartment: I thought it was my duty to tell you. Step back from it for a moment, and you’ll understand that I have no possible reason to lie to you. I want you and Cécile to be happy-that’s all-and I think you’re about to make a terrible mistake. If you don’t believe me, then do yourself a favor and ask Rudolf why he carries around a switchblade in his pocket.

Sunday morning. A knock on the door. The bleary-eyed, unshaven Maurice, still recovering from his Saturday night binge. A telephone call for you, jeune homme.

W. walks downstairs to the reception desk and picks up the phone. Born’s voice says to him: I hear you’ve been saying bad things about me, Walker. I thought we had an understanding, and now you turn around and stab me in the back. Just like a Jew. Just like the stinking Jew you are, with your bogus Anglo-Saxon name and your filthy little mouth. There are laws against this kind of thing, you know. Slander, defamation of character, spreading lies about people. Why don’t you go home? Pack up and leave Paris. Quit the program and get out of here. If you stay around, you’ll regret it, Walker, I promise you. Your ass will be so cooked, you won’t be able to sit down again for the rest of your life.

Monday afternoon. He parks himself in front of the Lycée Fénelon, waiting for Cécile to emerge from the building. When she finally comes out, encircled by a throng of other students, she looks him in the eye and turns her head away. She begins walking toward the rue Saint-André des Arts. W. runs to catch up with her. He grabs her by the elbow, but she shrugs him off. He grabs her again, forcing her to stop. What’s wrong? he says. Why won’t you talk to me?

How could you? she answers, barking at him in a loud, strident voice. Saying all those monstrous things to my mother. You’re sick, Adam. You’re no good. Your tongue should be ripped out of your mouth.

He tries to calm her down, to make her listen to him.

I never want to see you again.

He makes one last effort to reason with her.

She begins to cry. Then she spits in his face and walks off. Monday night. The voluminous, gum-chewing whore on the rue Saint-Denis. It is his first experience with a prostitute. The room smells of insecticide, sweat, and traces of vomit.

Tuesday. He spends the entire day walking through Paris. He sees a priest playing cricket with a gang of schoolboys in the Luxembourg Gardens. He gives ten francs to a clochard on the rue Monge. The late-September sky darkens around him, turning from metallic blue to the deepest shade of indigo. He has run out of ideas.

Tuesday night. At 3 A.M., a loud noise just outside his room. He is fast asleep, exhausted from his marathon trek through the city. Someone is knocking. No, not someone, several someones. An army of fists is pounding on his door.

Two policemen in uniform, young French gendarmes with guns in their holsters and sticks in their hands. An older man in a business suit. Befuddled Maurice lurking at the door. They ask if his name is Adam Walker-Valk-air. They ask for his papers, meaning his American passport, and when he gives it to one of the gendarmes, it is not returned to him. Then the older man instructs the other gendarme to search the armoire. The bottom drawer is opened, and out comes a large brick wrapped in aluminum foil. The younger man gives it to the older man, who begins peeling back the foil. Hashish, he says. A good two and a half kilos, maybe three.

The exquisite irony of Born’s retaliation. The boy who never took drugs is charged with possession of drugs.

They take him away. In the backseat of the car, W. tells the older man that he is innocent, that someone planted the drugs in his room while he was out walking. The man tells him to shut up.

They lead him into a building, put him in a room, and lock the door. He has no idea where he is. All he knows is that he is sitting in a small, empty room somewhere in Paris and that handcuffs have been placed around his wrists. Has he been arrested? He isn’t sure. No one said a word to him, but he finds it odd that he hasn’t been photographed and fingerprinted, that he is sitting in this small, empty room and not in the lockup cell of some prison.

He sits there for close to seven hours. At ten-thirty, he is taken from the building and driven to the Palais de Justice. The handcuffs are removed from his wrists. He goes into an office and talks to a man who claims to be the juge d’instruction. It could be that the man is who he says he is, but W. suspects not. He is growing more and more convinced that he is in a farce directed by Rudolf Born, and all the men and women are merely players.

The examining magistrate, assuming he is the examining magistrate, tells W. that he is a lucky young man. Possession of such a large quantity of illicit drugs is a serious crime in France, punishable by X many years in prison. Fortunately for W., a man with considerable influence in government circles has interceded on his behalf, arguing for clemency in light of the accused’s heretofore unblemished record. The Ministry of Justice is therefore prepared to strike a bargain with W. They will drop the charges if he agrees to deportation. He will never be allowed to enter France again, but he will be a free man in his own country.

The juge d’instruction opens the top drawer of his desk and takes out W.’s passport (which he holds up in his right hand) and an airline ticket (which he holds up in his left). This is a one-time offer, he says. Take it or leave it.

W. will take it.

Good, the man says. A wise decision. The plane leaves this afternoon at three. That will give you just enough time to return to your hotel and pack. An officer will accompany you, of course, but once the plane takes off and leaves French soil, the affair will be closed. We earnestly hope that this is the last we’ll ever see of you. Have a pleasant journey, Mr. Walker.

And so ends W.’s brief sojourn in the land of Gaul-expelled, humiliated, banned for life.

He will never go back there, and he will never see any of them again.

Good-bye, Margot. Good-bye, Cécile. Good-bye, Hélène.

Forty years later, they are no more substantial than ghosts.

They are all ghosts now, and W. will soon be walking among them.