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By Root 475 0

a spirit of pragmatism that she would need to balance the rather many uncompromising facets of her future. She thought of Ronald in the next room, old as he was and at the height of his career, and how she had seduced him, and it made her realize that she was no longer a child, or even a student. She felt confident, as if she had mined an intuition on which she would have to rely to motivate and guide her—particularly after she left Juilliard—to practice, to choose her roles, or to make any number of other important decisions related to her prospective career. That she had discovered this in the course of having sex with Ronald, she knew, was not an accident; she saw her father’s coin, except she was not holding it in her palm thinking about nothing, as she usually did, but it was slowly flipping through the air—as when he had tossed it to her on that last night in Pittsburgh—and she could see her embossed silhouette as much on one side as on the other.

34

Into the Millennium (The Criminals)

PARIS, 1870. After his arrival at the Gare du Nord, Lucien took a carriage to the Île, where he found his father about to sit down for lunch. As much as Lucien might have wished otherwise, his gaunt expression could not disguise a continuing struggle with grief, even now, four years after Eduard’s death.

“I wish you could find a way out of this,” Guillaume said as he pulled the cork out of a bottle of red table wine. “I’m sure when you were a teenager you never would have predicted the day I would say this, but you should be singing.”

“I’ve tried,” Lucien replied, “but it’s not there—I still can’t seem to breathe.”

Lucien’s grief had not been constant; in the first days, his friends had to prevent him from jumping out the window like a trapped animal, and then he had been gripped by an irrational belief that Eduard was not actually gone, so that he ran through the apartment opening and shutting doors. During the funeral cortege, which had snaked all the way from the opera house to St. Stephen’s—an honor decreed by the emperor himself—Lucien had bit the insides of his mouth to resist the temptation to wave and laugh at the Viennese who lined the route, absently nodding with their vacant, dull expressions. This initial phase eventually gave way to a more reflective but guilt-driven state, in which he sat for hours, obsessively replaying not just the day in question but their entire past, looking for clues to exactly what had gone wrong—besides the rains and the flood—as if there were still a chance of doing things differently. He could not imagine, for example, why he had not woken up on the morning in question but managed to sleep while Eduard walked out to be shattered by a chance conversation with the emperor; and if their exchange in the flooded opera house had been a final performance, it didn’t prevent him from revisiting his lines over and over, like a mad composer writing for the dead.

Guillaume considered him for a few seconds. “When your mother died,” he said, “it was devastating in ways you now appreciate, but there’s a limit to how many times a young child can see his father in tears.”

“How did you manage it?”

“Do you think you’re the only actor in the family?” Guillaume gently chided him. “I’m not saying I was very good, but children can be—or at least, you were—a forgiving audience. They’re naturally happy; they cry for a little while and get over it—they become distracted by their curiosity about the world and their place in it. You might even say they’re little scientists.”

Lucien nodded; it made sense, not only in terms of scientific inquiry but also with the kind of larger meaning he had always ascribed to music.

“I’m not saying it’s easy,” Guillaume continued, “or that you should act like a child—or for that matter, have one—but you have to find something. As I’ve said to you before, we only get one chance at life, so there’s a limit to how much we can squander. I’m not saying you have to sing, but if you stop trying to understand—well, then—”

“You’re dead,” Lucien concluded, and he did not protest