Aunt Gwyn. She lives back east, so I never got to know her very well. But I’ve always liked her. A generous, funny woman, and she and my mom hit it off, they were solid together. She came out for the funeral, of course, stayed right here in the house, and went home just this morning. My dad’s death really shook her up. We all knew he was sick, we all knew he wasn’t going to last long, but she wasn’t around at the end, she didn’t see how he was slipping away from us, and so she wasn’t expecting it to happen so soon. She cried her heart out at the funeral, I mean really broke down and sobbed, and all I could do was hold her and try not to break down myself. My little Adam, she kept saying. My poor little Adam.
Poor little Gwyn.
Poor little everyone, Rebecca said, as her own eyes suddenly began to glisten. A few seconds later, a single tear fell from her left eye and slid down her cheek, but she didn’t bother to wipe it away.
Is she married?
To an architect named Philip Tedesco.
I’ve heard of him.
Yes, he’s very well known. They’ve been married for a long time and have two grown-up daughters. One of them is exactly my age.
The last time I saw Gwyn, she was a graduate student in English literature. Did she ever get her PhD?
I’m not sure. What I do know is that she works in publishing. She’s director of a university press in the Boston area. A big one, a prominent one, but for the life of me I can’t remember the name of it just now. Dammit. Maybe it will come to me later.
Don’t worry about it. It’s not important.
Without thinking, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a tin of Schimmelpennincks, the tiny Dutch cigars I have smoked since my early twenties. I was about to open the lid, saw Rebecca looking at me, and hesitated. Before I could ask her if it was all right to smoke in the house, she sprang out of her chair and said: I’ll get you an ashtray. Matter-of-fact, sympathetic, one of the last Americans who had not joined the ranks of the Tobacco Police. Then she added: I think there’s one in my father’s study—at which point she smacked the heel of her hand against her forehead and muttered angrily: Good God, I don’t know what’s wrong with me today.
Is there a problem? I asked, bewildered by how upset she had become.
I have something for you, she said. It’s sitting on my father’s desk, and I forgot all about it until this minute. I was going to mail it to you, but then, when I looked in the date book and saw you were coming here tonight, I told myself I could give it to you in person. But I swear, if I hadn’t mentioned my father’s study, I would have let you walk out of this house empty-handed. I think I must be going senile.
So I accompanied her into the study, a midsize room on the ground floor with a wooden desk, another wall packed with books, filing cabinets, a laptop computer, and a telephone—not so much a lawyer’s miniature home office as a place to think, a vestige of Walker’s early life as a poet. A nine-by-twelve manila envelope had been placed on top of the shut computer. Rebecca picked it up and handed it to me. My name was written out across the front in block letters, and just below my name, in much smaller cursive, I read: Notes for Fall.
Dad gave this to me two days before he died, Rebecca said. It must have been around six o’clock, because I remember coming here straight from my job at the hospital to check in on him. He said he’d talked to you on the phone about two hours earlier, and that if and when, in the event of, I don’t want to say the word anymore, in the event of his you-know-what, I was to get this to you as quickly as possible. He looked so drained . . . so worn out when he said that to me, I could see he’d taken a bad turn, that his strength was beginning to leave him. Those were his last two requests. To delete the 1967 file from his computer and give you the envelope. Here it is. I have no idea what Notes for Fall means. Do you?
No, I lied. Not the foggiest notion.
Back in my hotel room later that night, I opened the envelope and pulled out a short, handwritten letter from Walker and thirty-one single-spaced pages of notes that he had typed up on his computer and then printed out for me. The letter read as follows:
Five minutes after our telephone conversation. Deepest thanks for the encouragement. First thing tomorrow morning, I will have my housekeeper send you the second chapter by express mail. If you find it repugnant, which I fear you will, please accept my apologies. As for the pages in this envelope, you will see that they are the outline for the third part. Written in great haste—telegraphic style—but working quickly helped bring back memories, a deluge of memories, and now that the outline is finished, I don’t know if I have it in me to work it up into a proper piece of prose. I feel exhausted, frightened, perhaps a little deranged. I will put the printed-out ms. into an envelope and give it to my daughter, who will send it to you in case I don’t hold on long enough to have our famous, much talked about dinner. So weak, so little left, time running out. I will be robbed of my old age. I try not to feel bitter about it, but sometimes I can’t help myself. Life is shit, I know, but the only thing I want is more life, more years on this godforsaken earth. As for the enclosed pages, do with them what you will. You are a pal, the best of men, and I trust your judgment in all things. Wish me luck on my journey. With love, Adam.
Reading that letter filled me with an immense, uncontainable sadness. Just hours before, Rebecca had jolted me with the news that Walker was dead, and now he was talking to me again, a dead man was talking to me, and I felt that as long as I held the letter in my hand, as long as the words of that letter were still before my eyes, it would be as if he had been resurrected, as if he had been momentarily brought back to life in the words he had written to me. A strange response, perhaps, no doubt an embarrassingly doltish response, but I was too distraught to censor the emotions that were running through me, and so I read the letter six or seven more times, ten times, twelve times, enough times to have learned every word of it by heart before I found the courage to put it away.
I went to the minibar, poured two little bottles of scotch into a tall glass, and then returned to the bed, where I sat down with the résumé of the third and final part of Walker’s book.
Telegraphic. No complete sentences. From beginning to end, written like this. Goes to the store. Falls asleep. Lights a cigarette. In the third person this time. Third person, present tense, and therefore I decided to follow his lead and render his account in exactly that way—third person, present tense. As for the enclosed pages, do with them what you will. He had given me his permission, and I don’t feel that turning his encrypted, Morse-code jottings into full sentences constitutes a betrayal of any kind. Despite my editorial involvement with the text, in the deepest, truest sense of what it means to tell a story, every word of Fall was written by Walker himself.
FALL
Walker arrives in Paris a month before his classes are scheduled to begin. He has already rejected the idea of living in a student dormitory and therefore must arrange for his own housing. On the first morning after crossing the Atlantic, he returns to the hotel he stayed in for several weeks during his first visit to Paris two years before. He plans to use it as a base while he searches for better lodgings elsewhere, but the half-drunk manager with the two-day stubble of beard remembers him from his earlier visit, and when Walker mentions that he will be staying for an entire year, the man offers him a monthly rate that averages out to less than two dollars a night. Nothing is expensive in the Paris of 1967, but even by the standards of that time this is an exceedingly low rent, almost an act of charity, and Walker impulsively decides to accept the man’s offer. They shake hands on it, and then the man ushers him into the back room for a glass of wine. It is ten o’clock in the morning. As Walker puts the glass to his mouth and takes his first sip of the acrid vin ordinaire, he says to himself: Good-bye, America. For better or worse, you are in Paris now. You must not allow yourself to fall apart.
The Hôtel du Sud is a decrepit, crumbling establishment on the rue Mazarine in the sixth arrondissement, not far from the
Odéon metro station on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. In America, a building in such a state of disrepair would be condemned for demolition, but this is not America, and the broken-down eyesore Walker now inhabits is nevertheless a historic structure, erected in the seventeenth century, he thinks, perhaps even earlier, which means that in spite of its filthiness and dilapidation, in spite of the creaking, worn-out steps of the cramped circular staircase, his new digs are not entirely without charm. Granted, his room is a disaster area of brittle, peeling wallpaper and cracked wooden floor planks, the bed is an ancient spring contraption with a caved-in mattress and rock-hard pillows, the small desk wobbles, the desk chair is the least comfortable chair in all of Europe, and one door of the armoire is missing, but setting aside these disadvantages, the room is fairly spacious, light pours through the two sets of double windows, and no noise can be heard from the street. When the manager opens the door and lets him in for the first time, Walker instantly feels that this will be a good place for writing poems. In the long run, that is the only thing that counts. This is the kind of room poets are supposed to work in, the kind of room that threatens to break your spirit and forces you into constant battle with yourself, and as Walker deposits his suitcase and typewriter by the foot of the bed, he vows to spend no less than four hours a day on his writing, to bear down on his work with more diligence and concentration than ever before. It doesn’t matter that there is no telephone, that the toilet is a communal toilet at the end of the hall, that there is nowhere to shower or bathe, that everything around him is old. Walker is young, and this is the room where he means to reinvent himself.
There is university business to be taken care of, the tedium of consulting with the director of the Junior Year Abroad Program, selecting courses, filling out forms, attending an obligatory luncheon to meet the other students who will be in Paris for the year. There are just six of them (three Barnard girls and three Columbia boys), and while they all seem earnest and friendly, more than willing to accept him as a member of the gang, Walker makes up his mind to have as little to do with them as possible. He has no inclination to become part of a group, and he certainly doesn’t want to waste his time speaking English. The whole point in coming to Paris is to perfect his French. In order to do that, the shy and reticent Walker will have to embolden himself to make contact with the natives.
On an impulse, he decides to call Margot’s parents. He remembers that the Jouffroys live on the rue de l’Université in the seventh arrondissement, not terribly far from his hotel, and he hopes they will be able to tell him where he can find her. Why he should want to see Margot again is a difficult question to answer, but for now Walker doesn’t even bother to ask it. He has been in Paris for six days, and the truth is that he is beginning to feel somewhat lonely. Rather than renege on his plan not to fraternize with his fellow students, he has steadfastly stuck to himself, spending every morning in his room, parked at his wobbly desk writing and rewriting his newest poems, and then, after hunger drives him down into the street to search for food (most often at the student cafeteria around the corner on the rue Mazet, where he can buy a tasteless but filling lunch for one or two francs), he has consumed the rest of the daylight hours by walking aimlessly around the city, browsing in bookstores, reading on park benches, alive to the world around him but not yet immersed in it, still feeling his way, not unhappy, no, but wilting a little from the constant solitude. Except for Born, Margot is the one person in all of Paris with whom he has shared anything in the past. If she and Born are together again, then he must and will avoid her, but if it turns out that they are well and truly separated, that the breakup has indeed continued for these past three-plus months, then what possible harm can come from seeing her for an innocent cup of coffee? He doubts she will have any interest in renewing physical relations with him, but if she does, he would welcome the chance to sleep with her again. After all, it was the reckless, unbridled Margot who unleashed the erotic maelstrom in him that led to the furies of late summer. He is certain of the connection. Without Margot’s influence, without Margot’s body to instruct him in the intricate workings of his own heart, the story with Gwyn never would have been possible. Margot the fearless, Margot the silent, Margot the cipher. Yes, he very much wants to see her again, even if it is only for an innocent cup of coffee.
He walks to the café on the corner, buys a telephone jeton from the barman, and then goes downstairs to look up the Jouffroys’ number in the directory. He is heartened when the phone is answered on the first ring—then shocked when the person on the other end proves to be Margot herself.
Walker insists on conducting the conversation in French. Back in the spring, they spoke to each other in French a number of times, but mostly they communicated in English, and even if Margot is a person of few words, Walker knows she can express herself more comfortably in her own language. Now that he is in Paris, he aims to give Margot’s Frenchness back to her, wondering if she might not show herself to be a somewhat different person in her own country and her own tongue. The real Margot, as it were, at home in the city where she was born, and not some disaffected, hostile visitor stuck in an America she could barely tolerate.
They run through the common litany of questions and answers. What in the world is he doing in Paris? How are things? Was it pure luck that she picked up the phone or has she moved in with her parents? What is she doing now? Does she have time to join him for a cup of coffee? She hesitates for a moment and then surprises him by answering: Why not? They arrange to meet at La Palette in an hour.
It is four o’clock in the afternoon, and Walker arrives first, ten minutes in advance. He orders a cup of coffee and then sits there for half an hour, growing more and more convinced that she has stood him up, but just when he is about to leave, Margot wanders in. Moving in that slow, distracted way of hers, the flicker of a smile parting her lips, kissing him warmly on both cheeks, she settles into the chair across from him. She doesn’t apologize for her lateness. Margot is not a person who would do that kind of thing, and he doesn’t expect it from her, he would never dream of asking her to play by anyone’s rules but her own.
En français, alors? she says.
Yes, he answers, speaking to her in French. That’s why I’m here. To practice my French. Since you’re the only French person I know, I was hoping I could practice with you.
Ah, so that’s it. You want to use me to further your education.
In a manner of speaking, yes. But speaking is only part of it. That is, we don’t have to talk every minute if you don’t want to.
Margot smiles, then changes the subject by asking him for a cigarette. As he lights the Gauloise for her, Walker looks at Margot and suddenly understands that he will never be able to separate her in his mind from Born. It is a grotesque realization, and it utterly smashes the playful, seductive tone he was trying to initiate. He was foolish to call her, he tells himself, foolish to think he could talk her into bed again by acting as if the horrors of the spring had never happened. Even if Margot is no longer a part of Born’s life, she is tied to Born in Walker’s memory, and to look at her is no different from looking at Born himself. Unable to stop himself, he begins telling her about the stroll down Riverside Drive on that May evening after she left New York. He describes the stabbing to her. He tells her point-blank that Born is without question the murderer of Cedric Williams.
He watches Margot’s face carefully as he recounts the gruesome particulars of that night and the days that followed, and for once she looks like a normal human being to him, an undead fellow creature with a conscience and a capacity to feel pain, and in spite of his fondness for Margot, he discovers that he enjoys punching her like this, hurting her like this, destroying her faith in a man she lived with for two years, a man she supposedly loved. Margot is crying now. He wonders if he is doing this to her because of the way she treated him in New York. Is this his revenge for having been dumped without warning at the beginning of their affair? No, he doesn’t think
so. He is talking to her because he understands that he can no longer look at her without seeing Born, and therefore this is the last time he will ever see her, and he wants her to know the truth before they go their separate ways. When he finishes telling the story, she stands up from the table and rushes off in the direction of the toilets.
He can’t be certain if she will be coming back. She has taken her purse with her to the women’s room, and since the weather outdoors is warm and mild, she was not wearing a coat or jacket when she entered the café, which means that no coat or jacket is slung over the back of her chair. Walker decides to give her a quarter of an hour, and if she hasn’t returned to the table by then, he will get up and leave. Meanwhile, he asks the waiter for another drink. No, not coffee this time, he says. Make it a beer.
Margot is gone for just under ten minutes. When she sits down in her chair again, Walker notices the puffiness around her lids, the glassy sheen in her eyes, but her makeup is intact, and her cheeks are no longer smudged with mascara. He thinks: Gwyn’s mascara on the night of Andy’s birthday; Margot’s mascara on a September afternoon in Paris; the weeping mascara of death.
Forgive me, she says to him in a subdued voice. These things you’ve told me . . . I don’t . . . I don’t know what to think anymore.
But you believe me, don’t you?
Yes, I believe you. No one would ever make up something like that.
I’m sorry. I didn’t want to upset you, but I thought you should know what happened—just in case you ever felt tempted to go back to him.