13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [76]
“It looks just the same, Henri. Everything is just the same.”
“Do you want me to turn that girl away when she comes to see you today?”
“Dear me, no. Everything will be all right. You mustn’t worry. I was just thrown for a bit, that’s all. Does my father know I went away?”
“No, but Pierre does. He is quite convinced you went away with a man. He offered to track him with me and hold him down as I beat him up!”
For a moment, Louise pictures this scenario with Xavier and is about to be alarmed when she sees that her husband is smiling broadly, quite amused at the absurdity of the idea. “Imagine me beating someone up!” He chortles.
“Well, didn’t you shoot people? During the war, I mean.”
“Oh, Louise, you know we were all different during those times, like animals. We had to be.”
She wishes she’d had the courage to be different back then, an animal. Instead she’d mistimed it and she became an animal just after the war ended, on the day her brother died. Now she is a breed meant to be errant, but constantly under confinement, always wiggling out of her restraints when nobody is looking. Poor Louise, being now what she should have been then and being then what she should be now: what an unfortunate mix-up.
“I saw something interesting on the metro ride back here,” Henri says. “While the train was stopped at a station, I watched a woman come up to a man and ask him for a light. The fellow, who was smoking, said, ‘It’s funny you should ask that because I just got a light from someone else; I don’t even have a match on me.’ The woman with the unlit cigarette was about to walk away when the man said, ‘Wait—here, you can light it off mine.’ The two of them connected their cigarette tips and sucked. There was a small red flare-up as ignition took, and at this moment the train door closed the scene from me. We pulled away into the tunnel with a great grinding of gears and I left them there like that, exchanging this small kiss of fire. I will never see them disconnect. They could still be there on the platform, lighting each other up.”
“Out of time. While the rest of us proceed.”
“There is no way to know, is there?”
“That information is not in the documentation.”
Henri laughs at this strange pronouncement from Louise, but does not find it out of place. Husband and wife feel relief at this moment, as if they have been through some great trial while they were apart, and now all will be well again. It is a moment of companionship. Louise reaches for Henri’s hand, and he takes hers. For several seconds they gaze into each other’s eyes, quite absorbed with observing each other, their fingers entwined. Louise sees how much they have both aged in nearly a decade together, how the peaks and hollows of their faces have softened and how time has etched fine lines into their skin. She is glad for it, for the record time makes in flesh and for the record bodies make in each other. She is glad for the heat of his hand against hers.
Without disconnecting his fingers from hers, Henri sighs and remarks, “You ought to get up and get dressed, Louise, and gird yourself. Garance will be here soon.”
“Yes,” she answers, “it’s time to get back into the flow of things, isn’t it?”
IT IS SO MUCH easier with Garance than she expects. The girl is so happy that Louise is back, and seems to feel no awkwardness. Since they can’t manage to sit still while they talk about what Louise did while she was away, they take a walk together in the Jardin du Palais Royal. They stop at the flower patches and lean together on the fence that separates the tiny garden from the walkway, elbow to elbow. The plants are small and scraggly at this time of the year, green uninterrupted by any bloom.
“Look!” shouts Garance, pointing excitedly like a child half her age. When Louise glances where she’s told, she is amazed. There is a solitary fragile flower unfurled delicately in one of the plants, a splash of color wavering tremulously in the cool afternoon breeze. It is a pansy, purple and white, an unexpected, daring offspring of this unusually warm November.