Love Begins in Winter Read Free Page A

sentimental drunkard after lovers and friends.
    And then I stopped walking. My eye was drawn by movement. I couldn’t quite see what it was—most likely a human figure passing before a dark window like a fish barely visible beneath the surface of a pond.
    Each window held its very own candle. But they weren’t real candles, just electric lights shaped like candles. The long house was tucked into an alley that glowed with snow. The streetlights at the far end of the house cast a great shadow on the side of the crooked church. The house was almost a smaller version of the one in which I had grown up—the bourgeois manor my father had spent his life maintaining like a mute first-born child. There were other windows too, ones without candles, ones so dark it was almost as if there were no glass at all. An inscription above the door read, “Par le Coeur de Mon Fils,” and then a stone relief of a hand entering what appeared to be a human heart. Also, a large crucifix carved into the heavy wooden door. The order and cleanliness of the corridor that was visible through the only brightly lit window, on the ground floor, made me think this was a convent.
    Then I saw the figure pass by the window again. It stopped. Whoever it was had seen me standing outside in the freezing air. It was past three in the morning. We were the only two inhabitants of an entire city; footprints on each other’s island.
    The figure swiftly moved to another window, one with a candle, and I saw who it was.
    I could distinguish her profile, but details remained a mystery. She stood with the poise of someone young. Her hand pressed up against the pane. Then, in the mist which had laid itself thinly upon the early morning glass—as if solely for the purpose of what was about to happen next—this woman whom I knew but would never know, this lost, sleepless figure who found herself wandering the corridors of an icy dawn, wrote something very slowly with her finger upon the pane. Then she lifted the candle against the letters she had drawn with her finger:
    Â 
    Allez
    Â 
    I took my hands out of my pockets. It began to rain and she disappeared. I turned and walked slowly away.
    I said the word over and over again as I paced the city. And I felt suddenly warm, full of strength, full of life, and ready to give life. I suppose I need people to tell me what I already know.
    My father and mother would be awake by now.
    The kitchen sink full of vegetables freshly pulled from the earth.
    My brother in Paris reading beside the window—his new girlfriend still asleep.
    And Sandy, my agent—with her daughter in their hot bed, nestled in one another’s arms. Their breathing is soft and private; mouths open against hillsides of pillow.

    I must have returned to my hotel room around breakfast time the next day. I was out all night in the cold and soaked through. I left a small pool in the elevator. The couple staying on my floor with the miniature poodle will probably be blamed. The staff here is very gracious, and the grand Chateau Frontenac hotel is like something from the mind of Chekhov.
    I am now soaking in a hot bath.
    My chest protrudes from the bubbles like an island upon which the carved head of some great deity has come to life. I must remember to write in my diary that I spent the early hours of the morning making eyes at all the statues in the city and then soaked in a tub.
    My shoes were so wet they had ceased to make a sound on the cobbles. I have put them in the sink. The leather is impossibly tender now; I don’t think it will ever go back to normal. I think of the word. I can feel her finger moving across my back in the shape of letters.
    Â 
    Allez
    Â 
    When I get back to New York, I’m going to start getting up early. I’m going to invite my brother to come and see me. We will sit together in the park in heavy coats. We will watch the clouds pass. Sometimes I imagine that each cloud holds the