The Same River Twice Read online

  At daybreak, wide awake in her seat by the window, Odile washed her face with bottled water, brushed her hair and pinned it up. Watching Thierry sleep made her own wakefulness painfully acute, and she examined him now with the pinpoint attention of someone given only minutes to construct a life-saving device from common kitchen utensils. In fact, her husband’s first feature film contained exactly such a scene, flashes of which now fired off unbidden in her mind. Her earlier episode of déjà vu, riding between cars with Thierry, had left her unpleasantly quickened.

  When the train entered the outskirts of Brest, she woke him up. He was wretched and poisoned, ill-disposed to talk. She put on lipstick and perfume. He changed his socks. Ten minutes later they rolled to a grinding stop at the Brest station, just a river’s width from Poland, and they descended with their bags and all their fellow passengers into the frigid morning.

  Built in the Stalinist style of the 1950s, the station was more mausoleum than depot, with a big arched entryway and a cavernous hall into which they now passed unspeaking. Here was ruin. The chandeliers that had once lit the hall today hung twisted and dark from the blistered ceiling. Plaster peeled away from the walls in sheets, doorways were boarded up. But as their eyes adjusted to the dim light, Odile and Thierry saw that the hall also held a large crowd of would-be passengers, elbowing one another and pushing forward in quiet struggle while militiamen with pistols looked on.

  “Stay here with the bags,” she told him. “I’ll be right back.” He shook his head in disgust and seated himself on the suitcases, now grouped in shadow just inside the hall.

  Edging into the crowd, Odile was surprised and then dismayed by the vehemence with which these people besieged the ticket window. When she saw the object of their maneuverings—a lone gray-haired woman writing out each ticket by hand—she changed course, cutting across the throng to enter an adjacent hall, as large and dim as the first.

  Here two lines of passengers waited mutely before tables on which X-ray machines sat idle for want of electricity. These were the customs officers’ stations. Behind one, a uniformed man sat reading a newspaper; behind the other, his colleague stared off into space. They were waiting to be relieved, and neither gave any sign of noticing Odile as she took two declaration forms from a third table and started back.

  In her absence, Thierry had willed himself to life and with unsound energy was loading the suitcases onto a flat-bed trolley. Odile had no idea what he hoped to gain by claiming them as his own at customs.

  “Listen, Thierry,” she said as he heaved the last of the bags into place, “it would really be much better if I were the one to take them through.”

  He blinked, said nothing.

  “A woman attracts less suspicion, especially when the inspectors are men. And of course there’s always the insultingly simple male ego to work with.”

  A smile flickered across his face and was gone. “We could flip a coin.”

  “No need. I’ve already made up my mind.”

  He seemed about to protest but instead gave her a long, appraising look that made her flush. In the end he shrugged. “If you like,” he said.

  They filled out their customs forms accordingly. She took the trolley, and they split up without ado. Just as she was about to plunge into the crowd, some stray instinct made her look back over her shoulder. Thierry was smiling a real smile then, a private smile marking a private victory.

  She would have plenty of time to think about it.

  CHAPTER 2

  ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, two days ahead of schedule, Max Colby flew into Charles de Gaulle. The visit with his daughter had not gone smoothly, and a project of his, now come unexpectedly to crisis, required his attention at home.

  He took the RER into town, sharing a car near the back of the train with some Algerian youths. None of them was older than fourteen, and they were dressed international style, in baggy pants, logo warm-up jackets, and loose-laced sneakers. Glancing at Max uneasily, the oldest-looking boy produced a plastic freezer bag. One of his friends squeezed a tube of rubber cement into it. As they passed the bag around, each fitting it over his nose and mouth for a couple of breaths, the boys grew animated. Their lustrous eyes were the color of ripe olives.

  From the Gare du Nord, Max took the métro under the Seine and southeast to the thirteenth arrondissement, where he and Odile lived in a small pocket of winding streets and cul-de-sacs that had inexplicably escaped urban renewal’s clean sweep of the area in the 1950s and ’60s. Made with materials recycled from the Paris Expo of 1900, their building was a two-and-a-half-story mews, laid out so that twelve ground-floor studios, each with an interior staircase leading to living quarters above, faced one another across a narrow cobblestone courtyard, at either end of which stood century-old chestnut and maple trees. Designed as low-income housing for artisans and artists, the mews remained a modest place, with almost half the studios retaining their original dirt floors. Max and Odile rented two lightly renovated units on opposite sides and ends of the cobblestone walk. They lived together in one of them; in the other Max maintained a film studio. Inexpensive though this arrangement was, they sometimes had trouble paying the rent.

  “Odile?” he called once he let himself in. Upstairs, the bathtub faucet was running full force.

  Most of the ground floor was set up as a workspace for Odile, who designed clothes for a limited but adventurous clientele. She worked alone by preference, doing 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 back early,” Jacques said, keeping his eyes on the screen while he worked the mouse. “Everybody and his dog have been asking for you.”

  “Let them bark. I’m still in New York.”

  “Ouah, ouah!” said Jacques absently. “Bow-wow. Woof.”

  Max paused before a bulletin board onto which his protégé had tacked some inspirational images. A sequence of black-and-white stills depicted two monocled gentlemen in turn-of-the-century dress attempting to subdue an apparently hysterical female patient. Beneath the pictures Jacques had stapled two squares of yellow poster board; on one of them, written in block letters, was the word MISÈRE, on the other MYSTÈRE. Max valued his assistant highly and prided himself on having snatched him from the jaws of commercial TV. He was ten years younger, a true child of the image age.

  Dragging a red plastic chair over to the editing deck, Max straddled it, facing him. “Now, in plain, low-impact language tell me where we stand.”

  Jacques sighed and saved to disk. “Part of it you already know. Our backers are having a crisis of faith, okay? But with more emotion than usual. They want to see a revised script.”

  “Fine, we’ll give them one. It’s not as if we’re planning to use it.”

  “I think they’ve started to realize that, Max.”

  “Fuck them. We’ll handle it just like we did with White Room/Black Room.”

  A short silence followed while they both reviewed the somewhat unorthodox means by which Max had kept the backers of his last film from withdrawing their support at a crucial moment. The truth had been bent quite far, and possibly the law as well, but in the end the film got made. It had been well received critically and even earned a small profit. For the most part, Max’s films tended to fall into the category of succès d’estime.

  “Hopefully it won’t come to that,” Jacques said soberly.

  “We’ll give them a revised script by next week,” Max assured him. “What else?”

  His assistant shrugged and blew air from his cheeks in a pantomime of disavowal. “Isabelle is very upset. She says she won’t work in natural light—it’s too anonymous and unpredictable. Either you let her bring in her own lighting stylist for her scenes or it’s finished. She won’t do the part, end of discussion.”

  “Think she’s serious?”

  “One has to assume it, yes. She’s Isabelle.”

  Max sprang to his feet and began pacing the room. “Actors—more trouble than they’re worth. Half the time you’d do better just picking out someone on the street.”

  “Before you pursue that thought, Max, let me remind you that without Isabelle our distribution deal is null and void. And our investors—”

  “I get it, okay? Christ!” Max kicked the red plastic chair across the room. “How can I work if my principals won’t trust me?”

  They listened for awhile to the music: gunfire and police sirens spattered across bass and drum, voices syncopated in rhyme. It was masterfully mixed and suggested a place not unlike the real world, but much clearer.

  “You could recast,” Jacques said finally.

  “No, I don’t think so.” Max wandered back to the bulletin board and gloomily looked it over. “Maybe this one just wasn’t meant to be.”

  He spent the rest of the afternoon upstairs in the screening room, watching miscellaneous footage he’d shot at various times and places. Some of it he hadn’t seen in years: a foundering sailboat that he had planned to use in a memory sequence, twelve minutes of Odile strolling through a pear orchard, two old Marseillais staging a knife fight that had somehow turned into the real thing. Even unedited, these snippets might, to the discerning eye, be recognizable as his own. Any one of them held enough visual force to provide the kernel for a full-length film, yet viewing them left him strangely restive. They no longer offered what he needed.

  At dusk he closed up shop and walked back across the courtyard. Rachel had decamped, and there was no sign of Odile. He unpacked and showered. When at last he checked the answering machine, he found fourteen new messages waiting, the earliest of them delivered nearly a week ago, none of them from Odile.

  After dining alone on asparagus and broiled chicken, he poured himself a Calvados and took it into the living room. He had met Odile six years ago in New York, some months after his divorce. At the time, his ambitions for the films he intended to make absorbed him completely, and, though he hadn’t realized it, he was in retreat from the world. The only people he saw were those he needed in order to work—his actors, crew, producers, backers. When not with them, he looked at film. Sometimes, when he couldn’t sleep, he took long walks through the half-night of Manhattan.

  Late one such evening, as the downtown clubs were starting to disgorge their patrons, Max heard the quickened staccato of a woman’s high heels coming up behind him in the street. A female voice, lightly accented, seemed to greet him delightedly with a name not his own. Before he could turn around to correct the error, the speaker caught up with him and slipped an arm through his. “Please,” she said, “there is a man following me. I will walk with you.”

  Without looking back, Max took her to a nearby bar and bought her a drink. The night was warm, they sat outside. After they’d chatted for fifteen or twenty minutes, just as Max was deciding that there had been no man, no pursuer, the woman leaned forward and said, “I’m sorry about this, okay? But that man coming toward us is the one who followed me. He is a very bad person. You will have to hit him.” And an altercation had in fact ensued, though the man was quite drunk and the violence mostly pro forma. Afterward, once he staggered off into the night, the woman wept a little. Max used a napkin dipped in ice water to clean up and ordered another round of drinks. When it arrived, Odile lit a cigarette and introduced herself. She was twenty-eight. So from this encounter, of which they did not speak again, Max and Odile had fallen by degrees into a relationship. Trust had preceded intimacy, it had preceded knowing anything at all about each other, yet neither of them wished to question that trust, preferring to treat it more like an appointment than an accident. Instead they had slowly built upon it, revealing themselves bit by bit over the course of that spring and summer.

  A few hurried footsteps, a rejected lover, the instinct to protect: in that first night lay the seeds of all that was to follow. Max and Odile married a year later, and a year after that they moved to Paris. He had never felt especially at home in his native land, and she, from the first, had intended to return eventually to France. It seemed to him now, sitting by the window, looking out at the dark, that they had made the right decisions.

  Around ten thirty he got up and poured another Calvados. After reviewing his options, he decided to call Odile’s father, Sebastien, whose house in Brittany had long been her retreat of first resort. The line was busy. Max
relaxed. Since Sebastien spent much of his time away on business and famously hated the phone, it was almost certainly Odile tying up the other end.

  Taking his drink with him, Max retired to the bedroom and lay down without undressing. The problem, as he saw it, was this: that while he had, at forty-two, accomplished much of what he’d set out to do, had made the films he wanted to make and done so mostly on his own terms, he lately had begun looking for something more, from both himself and the world. His dissatisfaction wasn’t with film, whose capacities he had never doubted, nor even with the subsidiary pursuits, demeaning and distasteful though they were, that filmmaking inevitably entailed—the endless whoring after money, the petty despotism and psychologizing, the deceptions large and small. What disquieted him, rather, was the suspicion, shading more and more toward certainty, that he had come unexpectedly to the end of something—a part of his life, a habit of thinking, he didn’t know.

  Five feature films in theatrical release on both sides of the Atlantic; seven shorter ones screened at festivals, universities, and museum programs; videos, a handful of them aired on European TV. Considering them together, half a lifetime’s work, Max felt a mix of pride, consternation, melancholy, and the beginnings of detachment.

  His work to date, it seemed to him, cohered to a degree that ought to be apparent to the attentive viewer. He had tried to make light yield up a few human secrets before darkness snatched them back again, and the visible world, in his films, danced deceitfully close to sense.

  But just a step beyond coherence completion lay, and he knew better than to hold on to what was finished; he’d already let it go. The intuitions he’d had about the world, intuitions he’d spent his youth putting to the test, had brought him this far and no farther. He hadn’t foreseen their exhaustion, he hadn’t made provisions. So now, having reached the horizon of his ambitions and longing for something more, he found himself separated from past achievements, lacking momentum and even clear direction. He was adrift in the world, floating with the tide, at the mercy of the passing breeze.