“What if there’s a machine gun in the case and she wants to assassinate Shymanski?”
“Shymanski’s not here and he’s not coming back.”
“He always says that.”
“This time it’s for real. The sons are selling the house. New owners on the first of September. Everything changes.”
“I didn’t know that,” Claude said, visibly sinking. You could see it in his face.
“Maybe they’ll keep you on.”
“If they don’t I’ll go on strike.”
“You’re in a union?”
“No.”
“There’s probably enough time to form a gardeners’ union if you start today. Meanwhile, tell the woman, the female, to come in.”
“Does she know where to go? Has she been here before?”
“Point to my door. And, Claude ….”
“Yes.”
“Did you tell her anything about me?”
“No. Why would I?”
“Although what I have in mind doesn’t apply to her, that’s good. If anyone else comes to me from now on, please tell him nothing about me.”
“Him? Who is he?”
“No, if any people come – them.”
“What would I tell them?”
“Nothing. That’s why I said tell them nothing. And, after this, for everyone who comes to visit me, if you’re discrete, I’ll give you twenty Euros.” It was part of the plan.
“Twenty Euros? Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. Go. Don’t let her stand in the …” – he looked up – “snow.”
THE DRIZZLE HAD become a snow squall when the wind picked up from the west. It drove dark clouds at great speed eastward over the palisade of trees in the park, across the sunken cut of the Seine, toward the tense, ugly walls of La Défense, and then over Paris, which in the thick of the snow was as relaxed as Manet’s Olympia reclining on her divan. Large flakes sped nearly sideways in almost parallel lines and were frequently seized by whirlwinds that made them knock about in captured circles, rising, falling, jerking left and right, and sometimes just holding position in the air, like confetti in a photograph. It was almost night, and sometimes the squall was violent enough to obscure the gatehouse.
Coming through alterations of light and dark was the tall, slim figure of a woman. And as Claude had said, she was carrying a massive brown case behind and at her side. In the islands of the squall, color came through like a sunburst – yellow, white, gold, and some black. And as she got closer, Jules thought he had gone mad. For the slim, young figure approaching seemed in appearance exactly the same as the woman in the hotel in Beverly Hills. At first, because of what his eyes told him, he thought it was she.
It was Élodi, dressed in a yellow print silk dress that if not of precisely the same pattern as the dress in California was very close. Élodi’s hair, which had been straight, was now buoyant and wavy. Jules didn’t really know what women did to their hair – his was cut every month for ten Euros and that was all, except that in the summer the sun lightened it by many shades – but now Élodi’s hair, previously a white gold, was richer, almost the color of brass. The silk dress was tight on her body. She wasn’t wearing a coat and seemed not to mind the cold. The dress clung to her abdomen as if it were her skin, the silk firm against her breasts.
She walked straight to him, stopped, and paused. Other than that she was carrying a cello, he had no idea what she might be doing there, although just that she was there separated him momentarily from all his concerns. The snow fell for some seconds of silence and accumulated on her hair and on the silk covering her shoulders. A light air of perfume clung to her as a remnant of a formal occasion. Although dressed exquisitely, because she was focused on work she seemed more beautiful than if she had been dressed primarily for show. When she saw him she asked, “Are you going running?”
“I was.”
Inside, as the door closed behind them, she said, “In the snow?”
“When I was a young soldier in the mountains of North Africa, I would stay out all night in the snow. You get used to it, and it becomes a point of pride. You don’t have a coat.”
“I’m not cold. What mountains?”
“In Algeria.”
“The snow there must be less snowy, I would think.”
“Mostly it disappears the next day with the sun.”
“I shouldn’t interrupt you,” she said, the cello still suspended from her shoulder and not touching the floor.
“That’s all right. I can be done for the day.”
“Doing what?”
“I run five kilometers and swim one, twice daily.”
“Why?”
“I have to pass a very important physical.”
“You won’t pass if you’re dead.”
“That’s what they always say, but what do they know? You can put that down.”
She carried the cello into the expansive room with the piano. As she put it down she looked about, and through the portes fenêtres that led to the terrace. Having taken note of the gatehouse, the address, the grounds, and the Château itself, she said, “I didn’t know you were a billionaire.”
“I didn’t know either,” he replied, “because I’m not. You’ve heard of Henri Shymanski?”
She shook her head to indicate that she hadn’t. Had she been older, she would have. Jules thought this was both charming and frightening.
“Pharmaceuticals, jet engines, hotels, ships … banks. The house belonged to him, and now it’s his sons’. I ran it, watched it, and gave lessons to his Brazilian spawn.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“His wife is Brazilian, and the boys are like animals. It’s made him perpetually sad. He wanted them to play the piano, to be physicists or artists, to be upright, dignified, honest, and deliberative.”
“And they’re not?”
“No. They look and speak like drug kingpins, go around with a retinue of bimbos and strumpets, play music in their cars that cracks foundation walls as they pass, beat people up in bars and pay them to shut up, and they sleep until three o’clock in the afternoon.”
“Not my type,” she said, sitting down on the sofa. “Where were you?”
“Where was I?” he repeated. “When?”
“You didn’t show up.”
“For what?”
“Two lessons. I waited through, the whole time. They don’t know,” she said, meaning the administration, “so I have credit, but no instruction.”
“What lessons? I have nothing until spring.”
“No, you’re on the calendar, for me.”
Jules went to his computer and called up the schedule. She was right. “No one told me.”
“How often do you look at your email?”
“I don’t, really. If I don’t expect anything.”
Incredulous, she said, “You don’t look at it unless you’re expecting something?”
“No.”
“Okay, but, on average, how often?”
“Maybe once every two or three weeks. I prefer the telephone or the mail.”
Élodi found this funny enough to laugh. Laughter changed her, and, because he really loved it, he found it as upsetting as it was wonderful.
“You’re my student now?”
“Yes. I told you I would be.”
He read her name in the computer: “Élodi de Challant,” he said. It was the first time he had seen it. “Very aristocratic.”
“A thousand years ago.”
He looked at her from top to toe. She was not at all, as the other students had said, strange. She was rare, breathtaking. “I don’t see,” he said, “if indeed your ancestors were magnificently refined, that in those thousand years anything was lost. Did you grow up,” he asked, “as one of your fellow students speculated, a lonely girl in a house full of books?”
“I did. I did. From my room you could see the Alps – snow-covered – and we had enough land so that not a single work of man was visible around
us. A swimming pool, horses, a tennis court, but neither my father nor my mother played tennis, so I would hit the ball against the backboard – and play the cello, another thing you can do alone, although of course,” she said pregnantly and a little archly, “you need a teacher.”
“What does your father do?” Jules asked, thinking that her father was probably young enough to be his son.
“Neither of my parents is living. My father tried to make money but lost it. He was never good at that.”
“The tennis court? The swimming pool? And the rest?”
“Inherited.”
“You’re here for the lessons I owe you?” He thought, what am I doing? And he felt a chill and something akin to falling.
“Only if you want to. I had a job in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and thought I would stop by, since you never showed up.”
“I’m so sorry. Would you mind if I changed? I don’t feel comfortable giving a lesson in running clothes. Maybe if it were summer and everyone else was in shorts.”
“I’ll set up. Is that yours?” She gestured to Jules’ cello leaning in a corner. “Obviously it’s yours, but I mean, it looks …. Like mine, it’s not just off the shelf, is it?”
“No. It was my father’s, and it’s very old, Venetian. I heard him play it only once.”
“Why?”
“Let me change. Did you bring music? Do you have anything specific in mind?”
“Neither.”
“Then I suppose it’s all up to me.”
WHEN JULES RE-ENTERED, fully dressed, he looked younger and more dignified than when he was in running clothes. Among other things, in near panic mode he had combed his hair, and the cut and collar of a polo shirt does wonders. Élodi had taken a chair opposite the chair closest to Jules’ cello, her own instrument resting as casually against her as a sleeping child, the bow in her right hand pointing relaxedly at the floor.
Before Jules sat down he asked if she would like something to eat or drink. “Thank you. I spent the afternoon at a wedding reception, and the musicians ate for yesterday, today, and tomorrow.”
“I remember doing that,” Jules said. “Sometimes we drank so much Champagne that what we played sounded Chinese. We were terrified that we wouldn’t be paid, but they never seemed to notice, because they had had twice as much Champagne. And young people who have just been married never notice anything but themselves anyway. I remember that, too. It’s as if you’re in an opium dream.”
Élodi seemed slightly hurt by this. He thought he understood, although if it were so it would be very hard to believe. He took both a paternal interest and the liberty to ask, “No boyfriend?” He wanted her to understand that he was too ancient to be exploring with his own interest in mind, but to his embarrassment he realized after he spoke that he was doing just that.
She understood perfectly. She shook her head in an almost imperceptible motion that meant no, and that she suffered.
“Inexplicable,” he said. She had brought forth every fatherly instinct in him, and he loved her in that way, too. “Absolutely inexplicable. Except that perhaps you scare them off because they think they can never come close to matching you.”
“I’d hardly say that. It’s just like everything else. I have refined expectations, a very slim pocketbook, and I don’t want to be rescued.”
“Someone will come along, someone with equally refined expectations and an equally slim pocketbook, and you’ll fall in love like crazy. My late wife and I – that’s her,” he said, pointing to a photo of Jacqueline that was on the piano: she was in her gray suit, and devastatingly beautiful – “had the best time of our lives when we had nothing. I know that’s a cliché, but you’ll see.”
Élodi nodded and looked down. She thought after seeing the picture of Jacqueline that what she had assumed and felt about her attractiveness to Jules was both incorrect and presumptive. She was as beautiful as Jacqueline, but she knew that remembrance of things past is the preeminent anchor of the heart.
Jules understood from her expression what she might have been thinking, but rather than explaining to her, as he could not, that the pull of Élodi in the present was no less than the power of Jacqueline in her absence, he changed the subject. They had already waded in too deeply, as they had the first instant they beheld one another, and the first time they touched. Even so, no water was too deep to exit. He’d done so before, and would do so now.
“I’ve been remiss,” he said, “and I apologize. The next lesson will be in the studio in the Cité de la Musique.”
“I hate it there,” she said. “I hate the architecture. I hate the commute. The Romans made the age of concrete, and it took a thousand years to come to this ….” She pointed at the warm, rich wood of her cello. “Look at the patina, like the skin of something that’s alive. And now our age is again the age of concrete.”
“We could meet in my office at the old faculty. They didn’t think about this when they built it, but the acoustics are better. Wood and stone.”
“Why not here? Isn’t it allowed?”
“It’s allowed, but it’s so far.”
“It reminds me of my house.”
This caused him to ask, “How is it that, for someone with a slim pocketbook, you dress as you do?” He meant beautifully. “The suit you were wearing when we recorded ….”
“Chanel.”
“Chanel. And this?” He gestured toward her sunburst of a dress.
“A young designer in Italy, young but expensive. The only friend I have in Paris is an apprentice – I can’t tell you for whom. I promised. They buy these clothes to reverse-engineer the cut, the fabric, the stitching, tailoring. They literally take them apart. She smuggles out the pieces and fits them to me and to herself.”
“That’s a great trick,” Jules said. “And,” to compliment her again, “it works.”
It was almost dark enough not to be able to tell a white thread from a black thread, and Claude threw a switch in the gatehouse that sparked on the lights illuminating the compound. Though normally the curse of billionaires, the security lighting now caught and exaggerated the snow, making each gyrating flake glow against the black sky and thickening the snowfall so that it appeared twice as dense as it really was. Student and teacher stared at the storm shining beyond the windows as snow fell almost silently, muffling sound. Because he wanted to love her and knew he could not, there was nothing left to do but begin the lesson.
“I THINK I CAN now afford to be direct. If not in absolutely everything, certainly in this. I have nothing to lose, nowhere to go, and I’m just about finished.”
She heard in his tone and saw in his expression that this was something, if tinged with regret, that was pleasurable in the freedom it bestowed.
“My duties have been lightened, and are probably in the midst of being lightened further as we speak. I’m not … not so much in demand. I was never much in demand, but now there’s almost nothing. That’s why I don’t even check the schedule.
“What I’m supposed to be able to give you is, first, a moderate amount of musicianship, the equivalent of explication de texte, say forty percent; then a huge dose of theory, fifty percent; and ten percent of vagary about the philosophy and spirit of music. That is, about the ineffable, of which the moderns think even one percent is too much.
“But I’m deficient according to present beliefs. I give seventy percent to musicianship, ten percent to theory, and twenty percent to the ineffable. That’s what makes me vulnerable, because, obviously, the ineffable is ineffable, so it’s not as if I can punch a clock and claim a salary for doing what by definition is invisible. But if my teaching and your learning are successful, they’ll have effortlessly and undetectably strengthened and purified your musicianship, mating with it so that they’ll be indistinguishable both to the audience and to you. That is, together they’ll be ninety percent. But, enough, I’m not a statistician. I short-change theory, which is what the leaders in the field crave, because I don’t like it. I’ve
never brought myself to assimilate it and I have no patience with it. The language and syntax of music, like the language and syntax of all art, is as imperfect as our bodies. And its relation to mortality is the same as our own. Though the music of language can do this almost as well, nothing expresses so closely human sorrow, joy, and love – in its rhythms, its changes of tone, and changes of tempo – as music. People say God didn’t speak directly to us. Maybe He didn’t, but He’s granted us a powerful part of His language, with which, at the highest, we can come close to dialogue.
“You know Levin of course.” Jules had never experienced heroin, but had read that in coursing through the arteries and veins it brought a burst of love and pleasure. He tried not to look at Élodi, but felt intense love and pleasure when he did, so much so that he was unable not to look at her.
“Yes. Who doesn’t?”
“You’ll have to take his course. He plays like a machine. Never a mistake, never a variation. Have you heard his cadenzas?”
“I haven’t.”
“And you never will, because he can’t do them. The imperfections in how music is played – the small, sometimes microscopic variations in tempo, in pressure on a string, in emphasis – are what give us even in the midst of its perfections the pathos we need so that we can truly love it. It’s like a person, whom, though so many of us do not know it, we love as much on account of imperfection as anything else. That’s what’s so stupid and wasteful about people who pride themselves on their standing, their appearance, their achievements. Love is the great complement to imperfection, its faithful partner.”
“What about God?” Élodi asked. “Who’s perfect, and yet loved?”
“For Jews God is perfect but imperfect. The God of Israel is jealous, demanding, and sometimes cruel. We argue with Him. It’s like a goddamn wrestling match, and exhausting. If you’re a Christian – I say ‘if’ because these days people your age all seem to be proud atheists – your God is split into three parts. He suffered as a man, He was tempted, He even died, just like the rest of us. The more perfect something is, the less it can be loved – like a face, a body, voice, tone, color, or music itself. In playing a piece, don’t strive for perfection: it will kill the piece in that it will prevent it from entering the emotions. That’s the kind of advice you can’t do anything with except perhaps later, when you don’t even know you’re doing it. It’s part of the freeze of counterpoint.”