Paris Twilight Read Free

further elaboration, it requested me to contact, “with due regard for urgency,” a Monsieur E. Delacroix Rouchard, provided a telephone number and an address on rue Delembert in the seventeenth arrondissement, and closed with
Avec mes plus respecteux hommages, je vous prie, Madame, d’agréer l’expression de ma très haute considération
, one of those ornate cordialities (translation: “I’m in no rush, are you?”) that only the French, among the nations, remain silly enough to come up with and pompous enough to pull off. I called the number, but the phone kept ringing with that dreadful flat buzz that is the most awful sound in the daily life of any place on earth, and no one picked up, not even to yell
Ne quittez pas!
and put me on hold.
    I wasn’t surprised. An office where an attorney addressed his own envelopes (Did he melt the wax too? I wondered. Was he himself the courier?) was not likely to be one where staff would still be working at this hour. So I finished my tea and dabbled at my dinner, and took a bath, and retired with a book whose secrets were guarded by my exhaustion, for almost immediately it lay open beside me on the duvet, and I woke after a while to turn off the light, and succumbed back into a dream that must have lasted most of the rest of the night, of swirling snow past a speeding train, a sensation of being unable to understand anything close by, of everything immediate flying past in a frenzy too fleet for me to grasp, while the trees and houses guarding the horizon stayed sharp and clear and precise to the eye, so that there were in the world only two things I was certain of: the feel of your hair beneath my palm, and the horizon, as patient and gradual and slow to pass as a thing remembered, even as it melted into distance and stillness and white.

II
    T HE WOMAN MANNING the reception desk of Rouchard et Associés, Avocats, struck me instantly as a sort I’d met a thousand of and never once been inclined to like, maybe in small part because none of them has ever been the least inclined to like me either.
“Oui?”
she said by way of welcome, without looking up from a ledger, her tone tinged slightly with some odd extra quality—was it incredulity? Was she aghast at the sheer effrontery of my stepping through the door? I gave my name and she warmed up enough to chide me, or at least to chide (the implication was blatant) “those people who don’t think to make an appointment.”
    â€œJust happened to be in the neighborhood,” I rejoined, but to myself, for she’d already sped from the room to fetch her boss.
    In the abrupt abeyance of hostilities, an oddly domestic commotion arrived at my ear—a buzzy little incantation, like the creak of a porch swing or a deck of cards being shuffled and reshuffled, that I identified, after a moment, as the quiet musings of a bird in a birdcage, though where the cage was, I couldn’t tell. Looking down at the receptionist’s abandoned desk, the too-many-times-polished veneer not worth polishing beneath the vase of fading Jour des Morts chrysanthemums, I saw that she hadn’t been reading a ledger but making one, in the old French banker’s style, scribing a grid of columns and rows onto the blank pages of a leather-and-clothbound accounts book, using a ruler and a ballpoint pen. Her desk held no computer monitor, no Minitel. The telephone—the very beast I’d been pestering from afar, for I had rung Rouchard’s number again in the morning, fruitlessly, several times, before heading over to happen to be in the neighborhood—was an ancient black lump of Bakelite with a rotary dial. The newest object that I could spot that might have cost a penny was a twenty-year-old correctable Selectric set on a gray metal typewriter stand. The little bird chirped, and its voice was like the dry, careful setting down of cards in a convalescent wing that once was part