The Same River Twice Read Free Page B

all the sewing herself, and sometimes months elapsed between completed designs.
    As he climbed the stairs Max called out to her again, but the pounding sound of water continued unabated. In the kitchen he poured himself a glass of vegetable juice and flipped through his mail, absurdly hoping that a note from his daughter—some conciliatory token—had managed to precede him across the Atlantic. His visit had been an ordeal for them both. Adolescence had lately descended on Allegra like a malevolent wind, stripping her of her childish clarities and swathing her instead in furious black silences that he was not invited to understand. She avoided his eyes, shrank from his touch, and found excuses to remove herself from his company. Toward the end of his stay, when he asked her to a friend’s screening, she’d actually stomped her foot at him in rage. “Movies are just another kind of
lie
!” she had shrieked, shocking him thoroughly. He had always been truthful with her about the divorce. It shamed and angered him now to have imagined that the truth alone would suffice.
    The water in the bathroom stopped. Max stood by the window skimming the previous day’s
Le Monde
for stray items of the sort that sometimes ended up in his films—a butterfly scourge in the Dordogne, a ballerina poisoned by her dentist, illegal immigrants arriving by parcel post—but today there was nothing for him, and he tossed the paper aside.
    Simultaneously the bathroom door burst open, and in strode a tall, rangy woman in her twenties, naked and oblivious, shedding water athletically in all directions as she toweled dry her tangled ink-black hair. Rachel, an American expat and frequent guest of the household, stood six feet tall in bare feet.
    “Rachel, it’s me,” he said so as not to startle her. “Max.”
    “What?” She snatched her glasses from the kitchen counter and peered through them, her eyes dark blue and fathomless. “Yikes! It
is
you.”
    “I finished up a couple days early.”
    “Well, way to go, Daddyo!” She pranced over to deliver a welcoming embrace, then, recalling that she was naked, wrapped herself somewhat belatedly in the towel. “Have a good time?”
    “Ah, you know.
Comme çi, comme ça
. Where’s Odile?”
    “Haven’t seen her. I’m just here for hygiene and such.” She lived with her Dutch boyfriend, Groot, on a decrepit houseboat docked nearby on the Seine. Odile had extended them bathing privileges within an hour of meeting Rachel, almost a year ago. “You get your mail?”
    Deciding to defer the phone messages, he wrote a short note for Odile, nodded goodbye to Rachel, and left.
    Max had long had it in mind to film Rachel. She was all limbs and unexpected angles, and she moved with a recklessness that might have been merely awkward were it not for her scale. With it, though, she was an event. He half expected her, on some sunny afternoon, to take a long, straight run and lift up into the air like a late-developing seabird. The right scenario in which to explore these kinetic rarities hadn’t yet revealed itself, so his demeanor with her was frequently one of irritated speculation. Maybe she had to be her own film.
    Walking the length of the courtyard, he paused midway to retrieve two cobblestones from in front of a neighboring studio and replace them in the walkway. The anarchist collective housed there, students and ex-students, sometimes used the stones to prop their front door open on warm days, and it was understood that Max would put them back. He enjoyed the exchange and looked forward with interest to the day when the stones would, in someone’s moment of need, be used as projectiles. In Paris such things always came to pass, sooner or later.
    He found the studio unlocked and his assistant, Jacques Bollinger, in the editing room, sitting in front of a computer screen. Hip-hop issued from a boom box at low volume. The air smelled of espresso and hot plastic.
    “You’ll be really glad you came