Radiant Days (14 page)

We settled at a table near the wall. “How was that beer?” I asked.

“Beer is always good. You’ve got money?”

“Not much.”

It was a while before anyone came to take our order. While we waited, we took turns making raids on plates that still had food on them. Arthur polished off the dregs of a few more glasses. When a waiter finally appeared, Arthur glanced at the menu and said something I couldn’t understand. The waiter snapped back at him in French, then turned to me.

“Tell your friend he’s too young and I will throw him out if I catch him drinking anything else. Do you have an ID?”

“I just want water. And some fries, and I guess some bread.” The waiter stalked off, and I raised an eyebrow at Arthur. “What’d you say to piss him off?”

“Nothing. I just asked for a beer.”

“Yeah? Nice try. What are you, fourteen?”

“Sixteen,” he said hotly. “In two weeks, October twentieth.”

“The drinking age here is eighteen.”

The food came soon, some fries not much warmer than the leftovers, a stale baguette, and for Arthur a plateful of pigs’ feet.

“Ugh? What the hell is
that
?”

Arthur took a bite, pointed at the sign above the bar—
AU PIED DE COCHON
—and pushed the plate toward me. “Try some—they’re not bad. Not as good as my mother’s.”

“No thanks.” I averted my eyes as he began to gnaw at a pig’s foot. “The weirdest thing my mother ever made was boiled saltines for breakfast. It was disgusting.”

He picked up a second pig’s foot. “This place isn’t so different.”

“Different from what?”

“Everything.”

I doused my fries with ketchup. “Well, it’s a French restaurant.”

“That’s not what I mean. All this…” He gestured at the window, to where lights shone and flowed with passing traffic. “This
hallucination
. This dream.”

“Is that what you think? You’re in a dream?” I laughed. “I can guarantee you, this is not a dream. Not
my
dream, anyway.”

He cocked his head and recited, “‘What if you slept, and what if in your sleep you dreamed, and what if in your dreams you went to heaven and there you plucked a strange and beautiful flower, and what if when you awoke you had the flower in your hand?’”

“That’s good.” I pushed my plate across to him, and he grabbed some fries. “Did you write that?”

“No. Coleridge. Do you know him? He’s fantastic.”

“I don’t read a lot of poetry. No offense.”

“Most of it is shit. Not Coleridge, though. And Paul Verlaine, do you know him? A genius. Everyone else is shit. I wish I had a beer.” He polished off the fries. “So, what’s your family like?”

“I hate them. My parents, anyway. They divorced a long time ago. I have no idea where my mother is. My father…” I stared at my empty plate, drew an arabesque in the ketchup with my
finger. “I hate him. I haven’t talked to him in months. I’m never going back.”

“How did they get divorced?”

“Who knows? It was horrible when they did, especially for my little brothers. But they just fought all the time. My mother was a drunk. Now my father’s one, too. I was glad they split up.”

“A divorce.” Arthur shook his head. “My father disappeared when I was four. I would have run away, too—my mother is a bitch. But divorce?”

“What, people don’t get divorced in France?”

“It’s a mortal sin!” He gave a caustic laugh. “With my mother, it would have been a good idea. I don’t remember my father. He got one thing right: he knew a bitch when he saw one. My mother says he was a drunk, too. Frédéric says he used to let him drink from his cup.”

“Frédéric?”

“My older brother. He joined the army this summer. He’s an asshole. I have two sisters, Vitalie and Isabelle. They’re younger than me.”

“My brother’s in the army, too. Are your sisters twins?”

“No.”

“My brothers are. Roy and Davis. They’re twelve now—no, thirteen.” I winced. “Shit. I should’ve called them—I totally forgot, their birthday was last month.” I sighed, brushing the hair from my eyes. “Why’s your mother such a bitch?”

“All she cares about is money, and me being top student at
school. And working on the farm. It’s slave labor, I should call the police on her.”

“You live on a farm?”

“In the summers. I hate it, and I hate Charleville.” He said it so vehemently that the table shook. “It’s a complete shithole, and now you can’t even get newspapers or books because of the war. Napoléon’s troops, and the Prussians—they screwed up everything.”

“Napoléon?” I assumed this was like people continuing to blame Nixon for everything.

“Yes. Frédéric enlisted so he could escape, but I’m stuck.” Arthur kicked at a chair. “That’s why I took off to Paris last month. Only I got arrested as soon as I got there.”

“Is that when they put you in jail?”

He nodded. “I only paid for a ticket that would take me halfway there. When I got off in Paris, I had no money or papers or anything, so they said I was a vagrant.” He grinned. “And, you know, they were right. So they threw me in Mazas.”

“For how long?”

“Two weeks.”

“Jesus.” I’d never known anyone who went to jail for more than a night or two, usually for drinking and fighting. “Couldn’t you call someone? Didn’t your mother bail you out?”

“My
mother
? Christ, I’d rather stay in prison! No—I wrote one of my teachers, and he came and got me. Took him a while.”

“You’re kidding—a
teacher
got you out of jail?”

Arthur shrugged. “He’s useful. I’d never ask my mother for
anything. She’s crazy—she used to wait every day outside of school for me and Frédéric, to walk us home. She did that
last year
. At least she’s stopped, now that Frédéric’s gone. All she cares about is how well I do on my exams.” He paused. “I always get first in everything. Except discipline.”

“My father’s like that too. Totally paranoid if I ever went anywhere by myself; he’d have a heart attack if he thought I was hitching someplace. He’d go through my stuff, my sketchbooks, everything. He didn’t even care when I got a scholarship to college—all he cared was it wasn’t going to cost him anything. And that I’d be gone.”

The waiter made a point of removing our plates and dropped off the bill. I read what was scrawled on it.

“Eleven dollars? Those pigs’ feet were
six bucks
!” I counted out the exact amount from what I had. “You have any money? We better leave a tip or they’ll come after us.”

Arthur fished in his pockets and dumped a few coins on the table. “That’s all I’ve got.”

“French money? I don’t think they’ll take it.” I picked up one of the coins, a heavy silver piece with a picture of a goateed man stamped on one side and the words
Empire Français
on the other. The date read 1870, but the coin was smooth and shining as though it had just been minted.

“You should hang on to this,” I said slowly, and looked up at him. “This is an antique, right? It’s probably worth a lot of money.”

“It’s worth five francs.” Arthur laughed. “Keep if it you want.”

We left through the back door and headed across the street. A moment later someone shouted after us.

“Hey! Come back and pay this or I’m calling the police!”

We raced down the sidewalk, darting into the first alley we came to, and cut to another side street before we finally stopped.

“What the hell?” I fought to catch my breath. “I told you he’d be pissed if we didn’t tip.”

Arthur shook his head and thrust his hand at me. There were the coins I’d left on the table. I stared in disbelief, then laughed.

“And here.” With a flourish he pulled something from beneath his heavy overcoat: a bottle, almost full, a cork protruding from its mouth. “Cognac. This’ll keep us warm.”

“Jesus, you’re fast. Thanks.”

I pocketed the money, and Arthur made a mocking bow, pointing toward an overflowing Dumpster. “After you.”

Behind the Dumpster a narrow alley wound between an overgrown hedge and a brick wall, so encrusted with ivy it was like burrowing into a green tunnel. Moonlight seeped through the tangled branches overhead, and there was a pallid yellow glow from the upper windows of a nearby row house. After twenty feet or so the alley widened into a tiny courtyard surrounded by buildings in varying stages of decay. Cracked flagstones covered the ground, along with dead leaves and several plastic chairs that had blown over. Small tables were pushed against the rear of a warehouse, its windows boarded shut. A tattered
CLOSED
sign flapped from a door chained with a padlock.

“At least there’s no line to get in,” I said. I picked up two of the
fallen chairs, swiped moldering leaves from their seats, and set them beside the door, out of the wind.

“And no waiter to tip,” said Arthur.

We sat, pulling the chairs together. The wind gusted, sending up flurries of leaves as Arthur bit down on the cork, pulled it from the bottle, and took a swig.

“Not bad,” he said, and handed it to me.

I drank, my eyes watering. The cognac scorched my throat, not as fiery as whatever Ted had given me, but strong. For a while we passed the bottle back and forth without talking. When Arthur’s fingers accidentally grazed mine, he smiled.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said softly.

“Yeah, I know,” I said, and swallowed another mouthful of cognac.

Around us the moonlit courtyard took on a burnished amber glow. It seemed to burn away something inside me, the toxic fear and rage that had seeped into me during the last few months with Clea. When I thought of her now, I no longer saw the flesh-and-blood Clea but the figure I’d painted on the wall of my room at Perry Street, a woman composed of shadow and shifting light, a woman whose only power came from the pigments and charcoal pencils I’d cloaked her with. Beside me Arthur lit his pipe, his face bright as an ember in the enveloping darkness. A spark fell onto his trousers, burning a hole.

“Look.” He brushed aside a wisp of ash. “I invented fire.”

He drew on the pipe, then exhaled luxuriously, staring at the
gnarled branches that poked above the wall. After a moment he looked at me. “Why do you dress like that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like a man. You wear trousers, and a work shirt, and this.” He flicked at the mangy fur collar of my bomber jacket.

“Everyone dresses like this. I mean, not exactly like me, but girls wear pants all the time. They don’t in Paris?”

“Never. That’s how you know you’re with a woman—you can never find what’s hidden under all those clothes.”

“I’m not hiding anything.”

“I know. That’s why I like you.” His hand dipped into his pocket, and pulled out the wad of paper he kept there. A page slipped free and I caught it, squinting to read the first line:
Grammaire nationale
.

“Homework?” I asked.

Arthur shook his head. “It was, but I’m writing poems now. I’m a poet.”

He smoothed the sheets on his knee, filled with writing in blue ink—real ink, not ballpoint—and a few cartoonish drawings of people. He shuffled pages, then handed some to me. “Here.”

His handwriting filled each crumpled sheet. Many words were scratched out, and while I couldn’t read French, I could see that the same verses had been painstakingly corrected and copied over and over again. Not just once or twice, but dozens of times.

No one I knew wrote and rewrote like that. I took another sip of cognac and shifted pages from one hand to the other, as though
that might somehow bring meaning to the words. At last I turned to Arthur.

“I’m—I’m sorry. I told you—I don’t understand French.”

He gazed at the night sky, finished his pipe, and folded it back into the pouch. He took the pages from my hand and said, “That’s all right. Listen. This is called ‘Romance.’”

I’d always hated it when people recited poems in school, droning on or whispering pretentiously in voices that put me to sleep.

But Arthur read as though this was just another part of the
night’s long conversation; as though he was speaking to me. I wasn’t aware of his voice, or his face; only his words.

I felt as though a veil had been torn away, revealing a landscape at once familiar and unknown. I closed my eyes, and for the first time realized how a poem might be like a painting, each word a brushstroke, a color or flash of motion: words combined the way I mixed pigments, or slashed a sun across a wall in arcs of neon yellow.

Arthur fell silent. I opened my eyes and stared at the inky sky, a single white star trapped among leafless trees. Somewhere a dog barked.

I drew a finger to my lips. Had Arthur kissed me?

No—he sat with the pages on his knees, and like me stared at the stars overhead. I had imagined it, spurred by the words he’d spoken. The poem’s images clung to me like a dream, but someone else’s dream, and not my own. It was several minutes before I spoke.