Days Between Stations Page 8
He forced his legs inside hers, prying her apart; then he pulled at her hair again until she was forced onto her knees and hands. She tried to get a grip on the sand and kept slipping. If she turned her neck just a bit, she could see him from the corner of her eye, caught in the light and gazing to the east. Her hair was wrapped around his hands and she resigned herself to letting him take it. He dropped her hair for the moment and held her below the waist, pulling her to him so he was deeper in her; they seemed to go on in waves. She could feel his fingers press into her sides, down to her legs; stunned by the sight of her white smooth back, he became harder and faster, pulling her closer and driving himself deeper until it didn’t seem enough for him. He brought his hands up her belly and took her breasts, and leaning forward fell in frenzy across her back, and her arms gave way. She felt herself being driven across the sand, clawing at the ground trying to accommodate him, pulling herself across the dune while he held her by her breasts. When her whimpers became cries it seemed to make him crazier, and she put her hand in her mouth to silence herself; but she cried out louder. She was begging him no, no, but he tore at her on the sand until she collapsed beneath him motionlessly, with the sand in her mouth and the night in her eyes, and the recognition of that which she’d tried to crawl away from: and that was that she wanted him to go on doing this until he consumed her. Almost unconsciously she said, It hurts, Michel. It was simple and hopeless the way she said it; she never expected it would mean anything to him. Perhaps it was its hopelessness that made him stop, as though struck, and look down at her. Everything came to a halt, the enflamed momentum of it shut off. She looked up at him and he looked away for a moment, down at himself caught inside her. He started to withdraw, but she contracted and held him. Don’t, she said, and she contracted and released over and over; and when he came it was as though he had never felt it before; he could not have looked more amazed. They lay together there awhile. The wind rose and the moon moved higher. She was almost asleep, just vaguely aware of him picking her up and carrying her up the slope to the broken window from where they had come.
When she woke, she could see through the door someone’s arm. She got up and crossed the office and peered through, and she could see all the bodies. Had she been more conscious she would have screamed, but she only went back to his side. Their clothes were in a neat little pile nearby, where he’d put them. Somewhere far off she could hear a truck.
They dressed and left; he had awakened with all the bodies falling in the back of his mind. They went through the window, and down the slope. There were sirens far away and smoke on the horizon. They crossed to a deserted gas station and used the toilet. The toilet and the faucets released a small flow of muddy water; the pay telephone didn’t work. Sunset Boulevard was glass and sand and white buildings. Michel finally found a telephone and dialed the police; the switchboard was impossible to get through.
They took the freeway going back. It was empty. At the interchange Michel and Lauren descended into a maze; small campfires burned in the distance. There were vagabonds around the fires, a vast hobo city. Both of them were thinking different things. Lauren couldn’t help it that Jason crossed her mind; she couldn’t help wondering where he was, what news he was hearing, what he’d be thinking. Michel kept trying to call the police from phones along the way. He tried calling hospitals and the National Guard. For all the sirens, he never saw anyone but the helicopters above them when they came out of the interchange. They walked down Vine Street.
Pauline Boulevard was not as hard hit. Whole sides of buildings were stark white in the sun, and there were no signs of life, no rustling about in the street; but no windows were broken and everything seemed bolted and latched. The sand wasn’t as deep, certainly not piled to the second or third levels. In this last catastrophic storm the street slipped away on its own, not unwounded but unaffected.
He stopped her at the door. She turned and looked at him, her eyes wide. “I want you to call them,” he said.
She bit her lower lip. “No.”
“You can. You always could.” He stepped behind and took her by the shoulders; he faced her toward the street. “You always could.”
She exhaled, and looked from building to building; she couldn’t see even one. What if there was none left? What if they were all buried under the sand? But she knew that hadn’t happened, because somehow Pauline Boulevard had slipped away when the sand came last night, and they had slipped away with it. “I’ll make you a bargain,” she said.
He waited.
“I’ll call them if you’ll look at your movie again.”
“I can’t look at the movie.”
“Then I can’t call them.”
She felt him behind her, pressed to her. “All right.”
“A bargain?”
“Yeah.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah.”
She called. She called the way she used to in Kansas. She didn’t call them by their names of course; that would have been preposterous. She called them with a code she had known. It was nothing precise like a chant or a ritual; she was talking to them, not conjuring them. It was the level of her voice, and an implicit trust; and, as he had implied, it was the degree to which she believed they would answer. She called and nothing happened, and she called again. A minute went by, and she sort of sagged in his arms with defeat; he could feel it. Call them again, he said. They’re not coming, she said. But she called once more and her voice carried in the street, somewhat flat and indistinct; but, though she hadn’t spoken loudly at all, anyone on the street, in the lowest cellar or the highest attic, would have heard the voice.
The street was so still that at first it seemed illusory, neither of them could really tell what had stirred: no door had opened, nor a window; but because everything was that still, the slightest motion caused a ripple—a vague, undetermined buckling. Michel narrowed his eyes. She shook her head. Then she felt something soft against her ankles, and she looked down and there was the cat. The cat was looking up at her, crying to her. It was the cat who had lived with her, the birth of whose kittens Lauren had witnessed in the closet. And when Lauren and Michel looked up from this cat, there, before them, filling the street from curb to curb, were hundreds of them. They were slinking out of passages, emerging from shadows; some were climbing up out of the sand. Some were dropping from the rooftops or uncurling themselves from hidden ledges. Slowly, cautiously, they moved to her like a Kansan field itself, their footprints spotting the sand in the street behind them. They came until Lauren and Michel were enveloped with them; everywhere the two of them looked, the cats were waiting—at their feet and at their sides and above them on the buildings, all sitting and waiting. Lauren looked at Michel and looked back at the cats, and in his arms she broke down and cried.
On the last June night of the nineteenth century, he was left with his brother at the bottom of the steps that led up to the Pont Neuf. A tramp sleeping on the quay woke to see a woman put them there, and got up to approach the small white bundle. He was surprised to find there were two of them. He took one and started weaving down the side of the river, unsure what to do until apparently, for no reason whatsoever, he decided to toss the child in. This was seen by a woman named Marthe from the boulevard above the river, and she ran down the steps to pull the baby from the arms of the tramp. There was a scuffle. The tramp may have even gone into the water himself; Marthe didn’t remember later, so intent had she been on rescuing the child. She walked back up the river to the steps beneath the bridge, only to find the other infant gone.
The women at the house where Marthe lived and worked reacted to the baby with predictable enthusiasm; only the madam was dubious. A note had been left with the two children, crumpled down in the blanket behind the one’s left ear; it read: “They are Maurice and Adolphe, both born of the same mother on 20 April of this year, near the village of Sarre.” There was discussion about this note. The madam, who could already see where things were headed, su
ggested that the mother really wanted the children returned—like a would-be suicide who wants to be stopped at the penultimate moment. The other women disputed this: despite the mother’s apparent wish to impart some identity to the children, they had been abandoned ominously close to the river; one had come close to drowning, the other probably had, and the mother had clearly left the matter to fate. The second point of controversy was: which was this one, Maurice or Adolphe? Logically everyone understood it shouldn’t matter; but intuitively they all somehow felt it did, that to make a mistake of this sort would start everything off on the wrong foot. No one could decide.
They raised him there in the house, Number Seventeen on the rue de Sacrifice, not far from Montparnasse. Number Seventeen was by far the most exclusive of what were called the Houses of Unwoken Dreams there on the boulevard. It was not open to a general clientele but stood as a maison privée, owned by one of the wealthiest men in Paris, who had dealings with coal in America and was involved in the construction of the Métro, scheduled to open the following year. He would bring to the house friends and business associates, or send clients with a reference; otherwise no man could buy his way through the door, no matter how many thousands of francs he might offer. The eight women who lived and entertained in Number Seventeen were imperatively ravishing: six brunettes, two of them sisters, and two blondes. They ranged in age from seventeen, the youngest, to thirty-six. The seventeen-year-old had only recently arrived, brought personally by Monsieur Monsieur—as he called himself for purposes of discretion—from Tunisia, where he bought her on the auction block; brought naked before the bidders, the spectacle of a blond Tunisian nearly provoked a riot. Monsieur Monsieur made a bid with which no one could hope to compete. He called her lumière de Tunisie—light of Tunisia—which got shortened to Lulu. When Lulu held the child that Marthe brought home from the Pont Neuf, everyone understood that in a family of eight equal mothers, Lulu would somehow be most equal of all.
Lulu looked into the eyes of the baby and tried to decide for herself whether this was Maurice or Adolphe. She called him one or the other, to see which got a reaction; this went on over a year, the women calling the child Maurice or Adolphe depending on their own preference or whichever came most quickly to mind. During this time, they raised the child in the secret room. Number Seventeen had been built some hundred and thirty years before, when unrest in France and particularly Paris was rampant; a room had been added behind what was the study. Revolutionaries hid there from the troops of Louis XVI; later, after Louis’ decapitation, when the revolution was devouring itself with frequency, revolutionaries hid there from other revolutionaries. It was a wonder everyone in Paris didn’t know about this room. But in fact the room had been forgotten, so that even Monsieur Monsieur didn’t know about it when he bought the house; one of the women had discovered it on her own. In a moment of truth, the madam of the house had to decide whether to tell Monsieur Monsieur about the room or enter into a conspiracy with the other women; she decided it made sense to have one secret that the master of the house did not share. So the room belonged to the women, and its silence and invisibility belonged to them as well. That was where they kept the child, hurrying him behind the panels in the study when Monsieur Monsieur arrived in the evening with his guests. The child, as though intuitive of secrets in a way deeper and wiser than his young life, almost never cried when in the sanctuary.
Lulu was privately Monsieur Monsieur’s in a way none of the other seven had been; she was reserved for only him, she was never offered by him to his friends or associates. It couldn’t be said that he slept with only her, but he slept with her when having a woman seemed to matter most to him. All of them suspected he was in love with her. It never could have occurred to her to love him in return, because he was much older and not particularly attractive. He was kind and never beat her. He even once suggested to the madam the possibility of divorcing his wife and marrying Lulu, a suggestion that astonished her and probably himself as well. He dismissed the notion almost as soon as he said it. But it’s not likely he would have even thought of it if he didn’t think that in this way he could acquire of her something he didn’t have, which was her love. When Adolphe-Maurice was three and Lulu was twenty, she became pregnant. This had happened to a couple of the other women in the house, and without any deliberation they had been compelled to abort. But Monsieur Monsieur couldn’t bring himself to have Lulu abort, and this had more to do with something deeper than just the privileges of possession. Lulu had the child.
It was a girl, and named Janine. She was blond like Lulu, not quite as dark but with her mother’s brown eyes. She was raised in a house that was just getting over the tribulations of raising another baby; Adolphe-Maurice accepted the other presence fatalistically, even with fascination. After a year, when Adolphe-Maurice was four, Janine’s first word was not for her mother, or any of the small animate objects that first attract children; it was rather a garbled, but recognizable, version of the name Adolphe, to which the boy responded for the first time in a definite, comprehending way. He was always Adolphe after that, and it made perfect sense to everyone in the house that a new baby would understand which name was right in a way everyone else had not. Lulu liked, rather romantically, to call him Adolphe de Sarre.
Years later, he would still vividly remember those things from that world of which he was first conscious: the voluptuous blues of the fabric, the glint of the mirrors at night just before he was escorted off to the secret room, the supple marble of the stairs leading up through the center of the house and the sound of footsteps up and down the stairs all night. He would recall the paintings, diminutive and understated, streaked with strange passions in which each seduction was a phantasm; and the music he heard through the walls was wrathful and haunting—Debussy’s silhouette symphonies and the parlor-tunes-gone-mad of Satie. At dawn when he ventured out from the room, Number Seventeen’s interiors glittered with the light of its crazy windows, their colored panes flickering on the floor. Creeping past each room, peering through each door ajar, he caught each of his surrogate mothers in a different pose of sleep—reclined on blue sofas, slumped languidly in velvet chairs, faces buried in white fur rugs now streaked with rouge. Outside in the street he heard the clanging of the ice truck and the huge frozen blocks that were dropped with a thud in the doorways; and even through the unopened gate of Number Seventeen came the smell of bread. All the suppressed child-rearing instincts of the women in the house were vicariously satisfied through Adolphe and Janine; the boy was clothed and fed and entertained, so he only hungered for two things. The first was real movement, which was carefully restricted: raised in secret, every bit of freedom was purloined by dark escapes out the back and over the wall of Number Seventeen’s private courtyard. Otherwise he spent most of his childhood in this house, and most of his evenings in the room. Leaving him to hunger for her.
It was not so much a question of beauty. She wasn’t the most beautiful girl he would ever see—beyond twelve she would never really change anymore; tall though she already was, her body would not fill out much, and still and fathomless though her eyes looked, they would never look wiser or sadder. Since she had begun bleeding at the age of eight, sitting there on the bidet in one of the rooms upstairs staring silently at the dark thick blood on her fingers, the look in her eyes had been like that; she looked up from the blood to him in the doorway, a weary knowing smile somewhere in the corner of her mouth. She sat looking at him and he stood watching her, and a wind came in from the courtyard. It caught her face in a blur of blond, a when he was a young man on the Champs-Elysées he would look at the bare tangle of branches on top of the trees and see within them her brown eyes and full plum-red mouth, and remember that first day she bled. As a girl growing up in Number Seventeen, she had no reason to do so secretly, and so of course she chose not to grow up with Adolphe; he listened to her voice beyond the walls, and caught of her blond hair every glimpse offered to him by chance opportunity, and did so ti
ll he was sixteen, wondering if he would ever get out.
He never questioned why he had to spend all his time in this room; this was for two reasons. The first was that he hadn’t known anything else, he hadn’t been given any reason to think it was unusual. The second reason, which extended from the first, was that he finally decided this was the way men lived their lives, as opposed to women, who obviously had the run of the place. He had grown up the only male in a house full of, now, nine females, and the fact that he of the lot had to stay in this room was logically due to being a male. Whenever men visited the house in the evenings, they were immediately taken off to rooms of their own—even Monsieur Monsieur disappeared with Lulu. Adolphe assumed Lulu was his mother. For this reason he assumed Janine was his sister, which complicated and darkened his feelings for her and the way he watched her from the room. By the time he recognized the instinct for what it was, he still wasn’t clear whether it was right or wrong to desire his sister, or whether in fact it was his right, as her brother, to have her. All these things derived from growing up in this room no one else seemed to know, and from the inevitable conclusion that men were meant to live in these rooms, always secured from the knowledge and trespasses of other men, the entrances and exits of which were clearly determined by women. Barely five years later, when at the age of twenty he began the work that would consume his entire life, scenes always took place in rooms of destiny and exile, transcendence and madness, moments seized and murders pending.