She stared at him a few minutes with a doleful look, then, slowly, shook her head.
"C'mon! You had a sister, I even danced with her. What was her name again?"
"My sister's name was Dora. She's dead now."
Dora. How could he have forgotten that name? They'd loved each other for a night, and now she was gone. He didn't dare ask how, or how long ago. All he said was, "That's awful!"
The girl nodded and went back to drying glasses.
"What about your parents?"
He was happy to hear they were doing well, aging gracefully out in Brittany, where they'd bought a small house in the middle of an orchard overlooking the sea.
"Great, great, good for them…"
He left some coins on the counter. She put the glasses away. She said good-bye without looking up.
Night had fallen. Blackest night, with a few stars here and there as if to say, this is the sky up here since there are stars in it, though perhaps it wasn't the sky at all. Everything was quiet. Moe remembered the first time, the hubbub of voices and laughter, jokes ringing out from all sides, the impromptu dance music, Dora's kisses. Dora was dead. He wondered if he was dead, too. Were you ever sure? You lived step by step. What makes us think we're alive and nothing's happened is continuity. But as soon as that was shattered, you knew nothing, you could very well be dead and keep right on going same as ever for a while, like a ball dropped down a flight of stairs. It might bounce from step to step, but finally it was bound to stop. He chased these outlandish ideas from his head. He was alive, period. He resolved to walk all the way to end of the street this time, like a mustachioed explorer from a past era tracing a river to its source, all the way to the initial rivulet trickling out from between two rocks, to know once and for all, to dispel all doubt. As he moved forward, the night began to look like soup separating as it cooled-thin in spots, thick and clotted in others. The sidewalk rang hollow beneath his feet. He glimpsed a cat between two trash cans, a stroller chained up in a vestibule, an old abandoned refrigerator against a wall like a disused sarcophagus…The street was almost real. Behind its facades, families were having dinner, men and women were yawning in front of TV sets, bickering, embracing, or sleeping in all too believable ways. He thought of Dora, who'd pulled him with her to the other side, behind the scenes. He had difficulty recalling her face. He'd never seen her in daylight, only beneath the muted lamps in the back room of her parents' cafe, and then in the darkness of her bedroom. Above all he remembered her warmth, her perfume. He stopped suddenly, letting out a cry of fear. Before him yawned a chasm into which he'd almost disappeared without a trace. He stopped himself just in time, catching hold of the last lamppost at the edge of the abyss. There was nothing at the end of Sweet Street. No lane or avenue, alley or boulevard, bridge or crossing. Only pitchblack nothingness. He froze, gazing on it for a moment, breathless, heart pounding, before finding the courage to let go of the lamppost and move back. After a few shaky steps, he managed to break into a run, then fled toward his cab. He started it up, sweating blood and tears to make a U-turn in a street too narrow for his huge sedan. He finally gave up and threw it into reverse, afraid some vehicle might come up and block the entrance to the street at any minute. None did. This time, he deliberately looked away from the sign showing the name of the street he'd backed onto. He didn't want to know. He was done with Sweet Street. He'd send the next fare who asked to go there packing. Ten minutes later he was back home. The soup was on the stove. The girls were mooning over the bleached highlights of some TV pretty boy. Maria had her tongue stuck out in concentration, painting a small bouquet of anemones on a napkin ring of blond wood.
Palaiseau, February 2002
The Bronze Schoolboy
he apple of the world is not yet ripe…" or "There's no such thing as chance-perhaps…" Dorsay loved tossing out these sorts of phrases before select audiences, in his fine poet's voice. Yes, he had a fine voice. A bit finer, and it might have been an actor's. But it had too big a string section and not enough brass for it to carry on stage. Yet, like an actor, its owner knew how to dramatize a silence. When he said, "There's no such thing as chanceperhaps… he was careful to leave the perhaps hanging over a pool of silence, like a line from a fishing rod.
Dorsay numbered among those men for whom a life of obscurity was no life at all. Not so much full of himself as uncertain of his own existence, he needed the stares and attentions of others to confirm it as often as possible. Of course, he took care to draw these stares, these attentions, and fasten them to himself. In this game-so vital to him-his fine voice and the effects he plied from it were far from his only assets. He'd declared himself a poet at quite a young age. And indeed-tall, erect, slender, with a face at once manly and childlike, and the somewhat vague expression of a man whose life wasn't as simple as it seemed-he was the very semblance of a poet.
What-or perhaps whom-did he resemble? The idea of a poet, let's say.
It would be a mistake to look on him and see nothing but a poseur. His aphorisms and insinuating questions weren't mere verbal grenades thrown into conversation. He had given thought deep and true to the world's hypothetical unripeness. He'd quite honestly wondered if the word "chance" ever concealed anything besides our intrinsic inability to untangle the knot of causes and effects. Since no step we take can ever be completely inconsistent with those that came before, it is written from our first stumbles as rug rats that we will one day cross the threshold of this church, that nightclub, that museum, or any other place where we set foot, unremarkable as the sight of it may seem. On such things Dorsay reflected readily, and his reveries nourished his work.
It was work few concerned themselves with. He knew as much, and usually spared himself the attendant suffering. As he saw it, humanity was headed right down the tunnel of the future without a lantern. Soon, no doubt, it would fall into an abyss, and that would be just too bad. While waiting for the apocalypse to prove him right, he put out a collection every two years, on a subscription basis. Sowing words on costly paper. Even free, verse was no longer possible. But the word remained: raw, naked. He used them like unmixed colors. He stopped with the word, just as they'd stopped, for a while, with the atom in sundering the universe: because you had to stop somewhere, cling to something to catch your breath for a minute in all this metaphysical slicing and dicing. Of course, since the days of Epicurus and Leibniz, the atom had had its share… Was it time to dissect the word now? Dorsay couldn't bring himself to do so. Perhaps someday he'd take that step. Then it would be his turn to venture forward without a lantern.
The world: well, there always came a time in every life when you gave up trying to save it. And man? A runner who set out at a sprint and, after a while, slowed to a jog and was satisfied. Dorsay jogged along at the center of a small crowd of close comrades. Old friends, former mistresses, vague hangers-on. He usually printed three hundred copies of his collections, twenty on Japan imperial paper. A good village baker did better with his apricot tarts on any given holiday. Dorsay had come to see himself as just one more little maker of poems. Just one more poet, husband, lover, and father. He had come to this humility fairly early, all things considered-at the stroke of forty. A secret, shameful humility, for he'd been careful not to admit it. Would others ever admire us if we didn't throw them a line? In reality, if he kept on pretending to the uniqueness of an artistic temperament, it was to avoid disappointing his faithful flock. They needed him, he thought, as he needed them. Many people draw a powerful sense of comfort from the feeling of being close to another consciousness. He vampirized them without their knowing it, sucking the warm blood of their presence from them through painless, invisible bites. Predator and shepherd to his insiders, he didn't like any thinning of the ranks, even if these days he rarely added to them. The death of one grieved him as much as it aggrieved him.