Read Online Paris Twilight by Russ Rymer - Free Book Online

paused to say goodbye when someone pulled the drapes aside to crack open a window of the recital salon—that they inside could be enjoying such heat that they had to let some of it go!—and a keystone of light spilled toward us. A slab of amber dropped across the blue-white snow.
    We looked up into the chamber—isn’t it one of those delicious things, to glimpse the crimson beating heart of
within
from the icy exclusion of
without
, to view our intimate life, usually so fuzzy and indistinct, from a clear and frozen remove? It’s like floating in the cold of the cosmos and knowing all of Earth, its every hearth and campfire, furnace and candle. I can count the times I’ve experienced that duality, can count them on two hands, no fingers raised: once on a starry, motionless night in the December of my seventh year, or was it my eighth? It was near Christmas. I’d paused in the yard with the sled reins clutched in my mitten, home later than I’d promised, my urgency to arrive arrested by the stolen vision through the kitchen window of Roy and Alice walking out of and into the light, busily being my parents, busy getting our dinners ready, and knowing without regret that these belonged to me, these alive, these busy people, but that somehow I wasn’t theirs, that their faces, framed in the window side by side, were impossibly far away.
    So: that moment and this one, on the sidewalk in front of the conservatory, you, your violin case slung on its strap across your shoulder, eager to get to your teaching and to get inside and out of the chill before it wrecked your fiddle’s tuning, and then the curtain parted and the window opened, and out slipped the adagio on a carpet of light. Who could separate sound and warmth? The two arrived entangled. We stood bundled in each other’s breath, listening to the music as though the music were a way—as though it were intended as a way—of listening to each other’s listening. We were engrossed in a deep, keen unison when the last chord hit. Do you remember the last note of that movement? A brief suspended silence as deep as a cleaver’s chop, and then four hands find their tone exactly as one, landing so gently on a chord that fades to nothing. Systole, diastole: sound, silence, sound . . . silence.
    Come in
, you encouraged,
and we’ll hear the rest
. But I shook my head, preferring my prospect of the golden room to the experience of the room itself, and then you climbed the steps and went inside and I watched until the door closed before I walked off, and I suppose as I think of it that our idiot Willem, in all his snottiness, may not have been so wrong after all.

VI
    A T FIRST GLANCE , after I stepped inside, I found it hard to differentiate Café Portbou from any of its pestiferous brethren: an array of Cinzano ashtrays on a battered zinc, a bottle of pickled eggs and a basket of croissants, racks of cigarettes and phone cards and Métro tickets over the cash register, linoleum floor and mirrored columns and a handful of little round tables surrounded by pressboard-bottomed chairs, the whole smelling strongly of espresso and tobacco and mildly of disinfectant. Black-and-white photos from another era lined one wall, inevitably of celebrities long since forgotten who had stumbled in, the frames jostled slightly out of alignment and never set back straight. Near them, in the nether regions by the restrooms, a short bank of video games blinked through the shadows, erupting at intervals into blaring come-ons, in English, lamentably, desperate for some bored customer to pay attention and drop a coin. One console featured a lurid image of a fighter jet zooming straight toward me, wing guns ablaze, pilot grimacing hatefully through the cockpit glass. Air War, it was called, which seemed appropriate, or at least ironic. You could say the war had led me there.
    I’d spent the week—the week that followed my chez Saxe