I turn and look at her. “See, to me, these are totally sexual,” and then we both burst out laughing, our laughs booming in the gallery where others are whispering as if it were church.
“They’re sexual maybe — like a foot fetish is sexual,” says Marguerite.
“Exactly,” I say. “Exactement.”
Afterward we hike up to Père-Lachaise to look at Jim Morrison’s grave, where there is a constant beer party, and where so many bottle caps have been mashed and pounded into the dirt they have made what looks like a carpet of coins. Over the sound of one badly tuned guitar, strummed by a barefoot German, Marguerite tells me that what she’d really like to do is make films. She knows the film she’d like to make — stories of Algerians in 1962: how they were herded outside Paris in camps; how many of them were killed, disappeared. How even now, on the outskirts of Paris, Africans in bright ski pants work the toxic jobs, the factories and power plants, how Paris is built and running on the backs of these people, on the back of abominable history. The Nazis, welclass="underline" Everyone knows about the Nazis.
There is no place to put such facts, not properly. There is only one’s own mournful horror, one’s worthless moral vanity — which can do nothing. The bad news of the world, like most bad news, has no place to go. You tack it to the bulletin board part of your heart. You say look, you say see. That is all.
“… So if this production company comes through, that is what I’d like to do, work with some of these documentary people,” says Marguerite, “and make that film.”
“Marguerite,” I say. “That’s great.” That’s great. “You must.”
From Horsehearts to Paris, I think, staring at the ceiling. Has anyone even put those two places in the same thought before?
“I’ve been thinking about our genes,” says Daniel, when I ask him how the day’s conference events went. We are in bed, and it’s hard to sleep. There are car alarms, motorcycle alarms, disco noises. A woman in the street below is singing, “Eef I ken mek eat there, all mek eat onywhere, eats op too you, New York, New York.”
“Yes,” I say.
“I mean, maybe it’s all for the best. Besides the Tay-Sachs. Look at the genes. On your side there’s diabetes and bad hearts.”
“And bad blood.”
“That’s right. Bad blood. And on my side there’s, well—”
“There’s arrogance and not listening,” I say.
“Arrogance and not listening.” He laughs in a sighing way. “Did you have a good day with Marguerite? What are you thinking about?” he asks. “Was it fun? Don’t worry. I can have this whole conversation by myself. You can just watch.”
“I really like Marguerite,” I say.
“I know you do.”
I sigh, clutch the covers up under my chin.
“That’s it? That’s all that’s on your mind?”
“Also Manon Lescaut,” I say. Last week we saw a production of it at the Bastille.
“Manon Lescaut?”
“I’d like to die like that,” I say. “All my jewelry on, and singing about madness.”
“You would?”
“With all my jewelry on? Sure.” Probably, in real life, I would die in a bathrobe, the telephone cradled in my neck.
“Do I know you?” asks Daniel. “You don’t even wear jewelry.”
“Yes, I do.”
“A watch. You wear a watch. Lots of lipstick and a watch.”
“It’s a nice watch.”
“It’s gorgeous,” Daniel says now sleepily. The air in our room is damp from the rains; it has turned my hair strumpety and full, but has made Daniel’s skin moist and pale, color in his cheeks coming only in the day, outside, in the hurried pace to and from drier destinations. He seems delicate and young beside me.
I keep talking. “You know, that’s one thing Manon wasn’t wearing: a watch. You don’t see a lot of watch wearing in the soprano world. Have you ever noticed that? Tosca? No watch. Madame Butterfly? Again, no watch.”
He is no longer paying attention, but it doesn’t stop me. We have traded places. “If in La Bohème you gave everyone wristwatches, you’d have a happy ending.”
“You would?”
“Sure,” I say. “You wouldn’t have that guy singing about his coat. He’d look at his watch and go ‘Yikes!’ ”
“Now that’s what I’d like to hear. A nice aria with the word ‘yikes’ in it.”
Daniel has never really liked opera. “What I like is philosophy,” he said to me once. “Philosophy’s great. Except I don’t like the whole Existence thing. Do we exist? That really pisses me off. But I like Good and Evil. I like What is Art. But just a little of What is Art. If you get too much it circles back around again to Do we exist?, which pisses me off.”
“I’m not really looking forward to going home,” I say now.
“Really?”
“I feel disconnected these days, in the house, in town. The neighbors say, ‘Hello, how are you?’ and sometimes I say, ‘Oh, I’m feeling a little empty today. How about you?’ ”
“You should get a puppy,” he says sleepily.
“A puppy?”
“Yeah. It’s not like the cat. A puppy you can take for walks around the neighborhood, and people will stop and smile and say, ‘Ooooh, look — What’s wrong with your puppy?’ ”
“What is wrong with my puppy?”
“Worms, I think. I don’t know. You should have taken him to the vet’s weeks ago.”
“You’re so mean.”
“I’m sorry I’m not what you bargained for,” Daniel murmurs.
I stop and think about this. “Well, I’m not what you bargained for, either, so we’re even.”
“No,” he says faintly, “you are. You’re what I bargained for.”
But then he has fallen over the cliff of sleep and is snoring, his adenoids a kind of engine in his face, a motorized unit, a security system like a white flag going up.
THE FIRST few days of July Isabelle began to show up at odd times and just stand at my cash register, watching. She would do this for five minutes, then leave, go back to her office.
It was making me nervous. The park was crowded. The lines were long. I had stopped doing any money, except, well, once in a while, when Sils and I would decide to go out to dinner someplace fancy — the Lafayette Café, the General Montcalm Inn — where we would order surf ’n’ turf and stingers and baked potatoes with sour cream.
Then, the second weekend of the month, something happened in the park, and Isabelle seemed briefly to have disappeared with her new concerns: the Lost Mine crashed.
The Lost Mine was a roller-coaster-style ride through a dark tunnel up in the Frontier Village part of the park: lighted mannequins dressed as old miners made snarling robotic noises as the little five-car train you were in zipped by them. I had taken the ride twice that summer: once early on, with Sils, and then another time, only just the week before, by myself, on a break, what the heck. You weren’t really supposed to do that, as an employee, but mostly no one was watching, and the guys running the rides didn’t care. I don’t really know what the thematic point of the ride was except to plunge you into darkness alongside a narrative involving people who had gotten lost in that same darkness, stuck there in time: If you entered the Lost Mine (all that was Mine is Lost!), you, too, could become a trapped ghost, the worst kind of ghost, though of course the most common. Somehow I liked it. It made me feel that I was availing myself of whatever excitement there was in the world.