In her room, she switched on the small television that sat on the dresser and scanned news channels for a report on the incident in the metro, but found nothing. She went into the kitchenette and put a kettle on the stove, then sat at her desk and watched commercials for perfume and cleaning products before turning off the TV. She had scuffed hardwood floors that always felt cold in the morning and a single lamp on the bedside table, so there was never any good light. She had not unpacked her prints to hang on the walls and unopened cardboard boxes were still piled in a corner.
She heard footsteps in the hallway. The door opened and Leon stepped into her apartment. He had not shaved since she saw him earlier in the week and his white tee-shirt had specks of paint around the collar. He grew up on the southern coast of France — close to Spain, where he’d lived with his father after his mother died — and had maintained the room across the hall for two years. After a few chats in the hallway when she was still new to the building, he started dropping by on Friday nights for coffee. In the beginning, she thought it was possible something might happen between them, from the way he occasionally touched her knee, his eyes settling on her face with unbroken focus. But they had instead eased into something that was intimate and charged but managed to sidestep the erotic. When the heat was malfunctioning on their floor one evening in winter, they’d gone to Bistro d’Henri for drinks and she told him about coming to Paris and the riots and Cole leaving. I left all his clothes in the old apartment, on the bed, and my wedding ring on the dresser, she’d confessed near the end of her story, though she could not bring herself to tell him that she sometimes thought it would be easier if Cole had died, that she wanted so desperately to be done with the searching and the wondering that the certainty of death, of understanding what, exactly, she was mourning, would be a relief.
She waved Leon inside. “That is a look of desperation.”
“What can I say?” He shrugged and rubbed the stubble on his chin. Like Juliana, he was in his forties. His eyebrows were full and streaked with gray, although his hair was still a rich black. He pulled up a chair and sat across from her. “The tourists aren’t even giving me a second look. I need to have a new vision.”
Leon split his time between waiting tables at a neighborhood café and standing outside the Pompidou Center in a skeleton costume. There were always a handful of street performers in the square; on the afternoons she had gone to see her neighbor, she counted a man who had painted his entire body gold, two violinists, and a teenager doing back flips. The head of Leon’s costume was the most startling: five times the size of a human head with huge black sockets for eyes and jagged teeth. He alternated between jiggling his limbs whenever people walked by and breaking into a kind of grotesque dance, an open guitar case close to his feet. She took a photograph during her last visit: Leon leering at a pack of American teenagers, the shot mistimed so the skeleton head and the buildings in the background were blurred. She kept it on her dresser, propped against the side of the television. She thought of them as people between the acts, although he seemed to be handling limbo with more assurance.
The kettle whistled. She got up and made two instant coffees, knowing what he wanted — lots of cream, no sugar — without having to ask.
Leon sniffed his coffee. “This smells dreadful.”
“I’m out of the regular,” she said. “Don’t drink it if you don’t like it.”
He shook his head and took a sip. She opened her purse and pulled out a sheet of white paper, a drawing she had found underneath Fredrick’s desk this afternoon and chosen not to share with his mother. “Look at this.” She handed it to Leon. “It’s the worst yet.”
Leon was quiet for a moment, holding the paper close to his face. The picture showed a man lying in what appeared to be a river, his stomach cut open and flushed with blood, the hands and feet missing. The man had the same red hair, like all the others. “A madman.” He shook the paper. “I cannot believe he is only eleven.”
“Today I found out the man in the pictures is his father.”
“That’s no surprise,” he said. “Most boys hate their fathers.”
When he gave it back to her, she folded it up and slipped it into a drawer, which contained several other drawings she had brought home, thinking it might be smart to collect evidence, in case something ever happened.
“Careful.” Leon pointed at the drawer. “That stuff will get in your dreams.”
“My dreams are already full of things I don’t like,” she said.
“Juliana.” He finished his coffee and set his cup on the floor. “Would you consider going on a trip with me?”
This was not the first time he’d offered to show her the other regions of France, but she had always declined. The very prospect of travel made her tired and she was unsure of how to interpret the invitations, if he was making overtures.
“I work, remember?”
“We would leave tomorrow and be back by Sunday, traveling south.” He stood and walked over to the photograph on her dresser. “It’s supposed to be even hotter in the city this weekend.”
She was already feeling worn down by the summer temperatures and imagined breezes gusting off the coastline. “What would be the purpose of our visit?”
“To go to the beaches. To get away from your students and those drawings and the heat. We’d take the train to Marseille and then drive to the coast.”
“I’ll think about it,” she replied. “If I can have the window seat.”
“Do you know how I got the idea for this?” He pointed at the photo. “When I was in Spain for the Day of the Dead celebration, I saw skeletons dancing everywhere.”
“Sounds awful.”
“At the time, it was a happy sight,” he said. “But we’ve gotten off subject. Will you come?”
They agreed to meet at Café Concorde in the morning for coffee, then catch the nine o’clock TGV train at Gare de Lyon.
“I wouldn’t drink another cup of yours if you paid me.” He picked up his mug and put it in the sink.
She rose and kissed him on both cheeks. “So stop coming over for coffee.”
After he left, she added her own mug to the sink and filled them with warm water. Then she opened her door and looked outside. The hallway was completely dark, the light by the stairs burned out. Things were always breaking down in the Hotel de Roch; her toilet overflowed three days after she moved in and the hot water once stopped working for an entire week. She went back inside and opened her window in time to hear a melodic siren passing on the street below.
II
The morning train from Gare de Lyon was curiously empty for a weekend. Juliana leaned into the aisle to get a look at the other passengers, but could only see fingers and elbows and tufts of hair. She watched the blurred landscape, a swirl of yellows and greens with occasional bursts of red and violet. It felt strange sitting so close to Leon, their legs crowded together in the narrow space between the seats. She shifted and squirmed to prevent her knees from pressing against him, but after an uncomfortable period of keeping her legs pulled back, she relaxed and let them bump against his, a small gesture of intimacy that both comforted and unnerved her.
She told Leon about the dream she had last night. She was in the city, standing on a bridge that reached across the Seine, although she wasn’t sure which one. The city was empty — somehow she knew this. The trees had lost their leaves and she could only hear the hollow sound of the river passing underneath. The gray buildings pressed against the sky like graves on a hilltop.
“Then my sister called and woke me. I couldn’t go back to sleep or remember anything else.” They flew by a cluster of stone houses, a dirt parking lot with a pair of dogs stretched out on their sides. “She always forgets the time difference.”