13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [35]
[NB: This letter is not part of the documentation; it is just a page spread from a book.]
THAT NIGHT, LOUISE HAS a dream that she is lost in the metro. She walks through an endless series of interconnected tunnels, the familiar white-tile maze of a station change. She can hear the trains pulling in and out of stations below her, but she cannot get to any of them, nor can she can get back up above ground. There are no signs. Only stairs that lead to more tunnels—yes, she can hear the metal screeching of rails—where is she and what is happening?
Then there is another sound, a fizz at first like static. This sound intensifies until it becomes a roar. Slowly it overwhelms the regular ins and outs of the trains. This roar—it fills her head—she can hear some sort of spiraled swirling, so fluid—
At this moment she knows that this is the sound of water, the sound of water rushing into the passages. She knows that the river Seine has somehow breached this tight and nonsensical network of tunnels she is lost in, and that the dark green roil of it is coming for her. Soon it will turn the corner with a fantastic blast of unclean foam, and she will feel the cold, and the pain of her gasp will be immense from the shock of it, from the shock of inhaling this water, this wicked and sentient water that clearly means to have her and her alone—
So afraid, she stands utterly frozen, listening. She can feel the tears gather in her at her inevitable death, at the inevitable suffering of that death. The moment she is about to be broken open by her first sob, she wakes up, smarting, eyes wide with terror.
THE NEXT MORNING (THURSDAY), Louise is on a constitutional at the Jardin du Palais Royal when she runs into Mrs. Langlais sitting on a bench, looking over her youngest boy playing by himself in the sandbox. The pale skin on the woman’s round face is pinkened by the briskness of the morning. Louise likes her distracted expression; the woman looks almost like a child, sitting there erect with her coat open and her legs crossed at the ankles, slowly eating small cookies out of a white paper bag without looking at them.
Louise waves hello to the woman, who looks startled for a moment, but not unfriendly as she waves back. Louise walks to her.
“Hello,” she says, “I’m your neighbor Louise Brunet? I’ve already met your husband.”
“Oh, of course! Sit, please. Nice to meet you. I’m Pauline Langlais,” the woman responds, quickly extending her hand and shaking Louise’s vigorously for several seconds. The woman is warmer and less formal than her husband. Louise likes her forthright smile and her faintly electrified blond hair, rising in diaphanous wisps in the dry wintry air.
“The weather seems to have cooled off slightly,” Louise observes.
“Yes, but I think it’s supposed to get warm again soon. Strange, so late in the year.”
The two women sit together watching Pauline’s towheaded son attempting to dig some sort of tunnel through the slightly wet sand in the box. The knees and seat of his pants are darkened by moisture, his face flushed a fierce red by his scooping efforts.
“What’s his name?” Louise asks.
“This is Antoine. He’s five. He’ll go to school next fall. They grow so fast.”
“Do they,” Louise replies, without the rising inflection of a question.
“They do. The middle one is called Lionel, and he’s nine, and the eldest is called Nicolas, and he’s almost thirteen.”
Out of nowhere, it occurs to Louise in a flash that had Camille given her a bastard child on the day she wouldn’t let him make love to her on her narrow bed, the child would be about the same age as Nicolas. As if Pauline has picked up a scrap of what Louise is thinking, she reflects aloud, “It was hard being alone with Nicolas during the war. I was so frightened.”
Immediately Pauline’s eyes come sharply into focus as if she has just realized that she is speaking to a woman she has