But the doctor was Russian, so it didn’t matter, because they can’t tell the difference. “Terrific,” he told him. Then, “Horoshow! You must have good genes. How long did your parents live, assuming they’re no longer with us?”
“They died in the war.” This, the Russian doctor did understand. “I’ll never know how long they might have lived. They certainly would not be alive now. When they would have been a hundred, I felt a kind of relief, as the years that were taken from them were finally over.”
“Okay. Lie down.”
After a thorough and uneventful physical exam, Jules had an uneventful EKG, a chest x-ray, and an assessment of his mental acuity. He passed. Then, with the EKG leads still attached, they put him on a treadmill.
“You do this to old men?” he asked.
“Gently,” was the reply.
It started that way, but as he adapted to the increasing pace and elevation, it wasn’t so gentle. He hadn’t run as hard since his collapse, but he didn’t want to quit, for fear that they would think he was in distress. In fact, he had easily passed earlier in the test, but the doctor was scientifically curious about such an intact specimen at such an advanced age, and given that the pulse and the EKG were clipping along as orderly as those of a young man, speed and elevation were increased until, sweating as if he were running in the desert, Jules was racing at the ramp’s peak elevation and at fourteen kilometers per hour. He didn’t want to die, but he couldn’t ask to stop.
“Feel good?” the doctor asked.
Jules nodded as if it were true, but his expression was too pained to convince. Then, he thanked God, the machine was stopped.
“You passed for someone much younger. How do you like that? Leave the EKG on and have a seat. We’ll watch until your pulse returns to normal, just to make sure.”
“I passed?”
“You did a lot more than pass.”
“I mean, the whole thing?”
“They won’t go beyond the actuarial tables for your age, but they’d write you a million policies if they could. They like people like you. They like Gilbert’s syndrome. They like non-smokers. You’re good business. What company?”
“Acorn.”
“High-value?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’ll live forever.”
“Actually,” Jules told him, “I’ll live till I die.”
A WEEK LATER, Armand Marteau delivered the policy in person. He had been saved, and the weather cooperated with his happiness, bursting into premature spring. He brought four copies. “Most people,” he informed Jules, “put one in a safe deposit box, keep one at home, and give a copy to each beneficiary. Thus, I’ve brought four for you, and a card you can carry in your wallet. Let’s go over it for your consent so you can sign off on a seven-sixty-A to show that the terms have been explained and accepted.”
The policy was locked-in – for Luc, for Cathérine, and a portion (ten percent: a million Euros) for Élodi, who wouldn’t receive a copy. The insurance company would find her. Cathérine had to have the policy in hand so as to get the money as quickly as possible. Her copy would be in an envelope to be opened only after Jules’ death, but he would push her to plan for what they wanted to do. She would protest that it was impossible and therefore senseless, but she would accede – not because of him but because of Luc.
Armand Marteau carefully went over the terms. Ten million Euros. Everything else paled in the face of that. “Euro five million to be held in trust for Luc Hirsch by Cathérine Hirsch, née Cathérine Lacour, Trustee. Euro four million to Cathérine Hirsch, née Cathérine Lacour. And Euro one million to Élodi de Challant. It would be good for you to provide me with addresses, contact information, and, if possible, a photocopy of their identity cards, although none of this is required.”
“I’ll see what I can do. I don’t think I’ll be able to copy the card of Mademoiselle de Challant. Did the physical rank me highly?” Jules asked. He knew. He wanted confirmation.
“The highest for your age.”
“The bank references?”
Armand Marteau reddened. “Yes, they were fine.”
“But?”
“The trust. The bank can give no information as to its owners. The money in it was as you said, the numbers and titles correct, but no names are accessible to me.”
“Taxes,” Jules said. “You understand.”
Armand looked around, lowered his voice. “Yes. I gave you the benefit of the doubt. The normal procedure would be to pursue it until there was an answer, but I passed it through.”
“And what if, purely hypothetically, I were not the owner of the trust? What would happen? Would that be fraud?”
Because of his interest in the matter, Armand may not have been the most meticulous examiner possible, although as a salesman he was not an examiner. “No, it would not be fraud. When we vetted that provision the responsibility became ours, as we are obligated to exercise due diligence. Fraud would be more in the nature of misrepresenting your health, or anything that occurs after policy acceptance, such as a faked death. It’s our job to determine if you qualify for the policy, not yours. After all, there’s no law that says we couldn’t write a ten-million-Euro policy for a Gypsy.”
“A poor Gypsy?”
“Most of them are poor. I think maybe all of them. Just as long as you pay your premiums ….”
“Armand,” Jules said. Armand was young enough that Jules could be familiar. “Why didn’t you pursue it?”
“Because of this house,” he said, looking up and around. “It suggests that perusing it would be unnecessary. Your manner and bearing, and your kindness, also suggest that it would be unnecessary.” By now, Armand knew that something was out of kilter. He saw it in Jules’ eyes and expression. “And because, Monsieur Lacour,” he said, “I have a family.”
“You have a family.”
“Yes.”
“Who would, otherwise,” Jules asked, feeling his way, “be in distress? If you had not sold this policy?”
In briefly closing his eyes, Armand Marteau confirmed that this was so.
Neither of them said anything until Jules asked, “What would happen to you if they discovered that I was not the beneficiary of the trust?”
“They won’t. They can’t.”
“How is that?”
“The verification is done with emails, and every six months the servers are wiped clean. That’s Acorn, worldwide, if the law allows. Certain records we have to keep, but we keep only those. There have been too many investigations, I suppose. No one ever bothers anyway to check the appropriateness of the sale. It’s the premiums that count, and, as you saw, suicide is excluded, as would be hiring someone to murder you, or anything such as that. If you die tomorrow, that’s too bad for them. They’d fire me, that’s for sure, but I received a two-hundred-thousand-Euro bonus just for writing the contract, I get another two hundred thousand when the policy pays out, and they can’t touch that either.”
“You don’t like them.”
“No,” Armand answered nervously, “I don’t.”
Jules smiled slightly. “Neither do I.”
Now they stared at one another somewhat in shock, having discovered, although not daring to speak of it, that they were accidental co-conspirators. Because of this, they both became extremely polite and distant, as if they were afraid of one another.
“So,” Jules asked as he saw Armand out, “tell me again. When do they dump the servers?”
“August.”
“What date?”
“The first.”
“You’re sure.”
“I’ve been there a while.”
“You’ve been a great help, Monsieur Marteau.”
“And so have you, Monsieur Lacour. Thank you.”
Halfway down the drive, Armand Marteau turned back to wave to Jules, who was still watching him from the doorway.
NOW THAT JULES knew approximately the time of his death, he felt truly free for th
e first time in his life. Although he didn’t believe that he would actually come to see his parents, Jacqueline, or the Mignons, he took the greatest comfort that he had ever experienced, in knowing that by following them, he would be like them. He didn’t look forward to death, but he was happy that it would come, if it would – according to his plan – when he was straining at his utmost, flushed and red, in the sun, and in the open air. On the path above the Seine, in the heat of summer, he could hit the gravel hard and go down fighting.
In the time remaining, he had Paris past and present, with colors and light, and layer upon layer of sound and music drifting over the whited city like the smoke of spring fires.
As Light and Warmth Put France at Ease
AS LIGHT AND WARMTH put France at ease, winter elided gracefully into spring. Cathérine thought her father had lost his mind. Because she hadn’t enough strength left to pity him, she was frightened instead. David counseled patience, but she had none to spare and would lash out at Jules when she felt he was acting crazily. That he was insistent and unrelenting convinced her only the more that he was out of his senses. When she begged him to see a psychiatrist he laughed, and said, “I saw one. He was riding in a bus around and around the Rond Point. Or maybe he was chasing a hamster in the pet store, ‘round and ‘round on the wonder wheel.” After he said things like this he would laugh like a crazy person. It rather shook her confidence in him.
Luc had stabilized but not improved. The prognosis remained the same. Cathérine couldn’t bring herself to banish her father from the house, but every time he came she wanted to strike him physically, because he brought information about clinics in Switzerland and the United States – in Boston, Baltimore, Ohio, Texas, and Minnesota – and information from the Internet that covered real estate, climate, schools, immigration, banking, etc. It enraged her.
“If you’re going to be so stupid as to show us real estate ads for these places, why is every house over two million Euros? We can’t qualify for a visa to live in these countries, or even afford to visit, and the course of treatment wouldn’t be covered in any one of them. Why? Why?” And then as often as not she would break down in tears, and despite the fact that he was the cause of it she would go to his arms as she had when she was a little girl. Her hair was still red – many shades lighter than her mother’s deep auburn – and she still had the freckles common to both Celts and Jews, although no one knew why.
“Make these plans and be ready to go,” he said authoritatively.
She pulled away, took in a long breath, looked at him in frustration and astonishment, and replied, “It’s cruel of you. We don’t have the money. You don’t have the money. Is Shymanski going to give it to us?”
“No.”
“Then, what? You don’t have secret wealth. Did the grandparents have diamonds? Are you going to rob a bank?”
“I just think that you should plan on taking Luc to one of these places, living there as he gets treatment, and – because of the situation here – staying. In the middle of August.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Have everything ready to go just in case. Promise.”
“We don’t have the time!”
“You have the time.”
“False hope.”
“Cathérine, I respect you greatly, but I’ve seen much more than you have. I know more. There are things in the past and in the present that I absolutely cannot tell you. You’ll have to trust me. Why would I hurt you?”
So Cathérine did as he asked, but it hurt to fly up in such a dream when her bonds held her so tightly to the ground.
ALTHOUGH JULES KNEW that in regard to Luc, Cathérine, and David he was anything but mad, he admitted to himself that in regard to Élodi, quite apart from his now damaged relation to Jacqueline, to whom he had remained loyal nonetheless and whom he would always love no matter how painful it might be; quite apart from his morals, ethics, and concern for the girl herself; apart from his contempt for professors who fell in love with their students; apart from his strong suspicion that a single kiss would shatter not only the illusion but that all feeling on his part and any on hers, if indeed she harbored any, would cruelly vanish, leaving as punishment emptiness and a sense of sin; and apart from the unseemliness of it, his knowledge of his failing body, and his rapidly approaching death; apart from all that, he loved her – inappropriately, wrongly, foolishly, and hardly knowing her. He had touched her hand, once.
Though on one level he thought he was suffering a delusion or perhaps a fall into schizophrenia, in his mind Élodi had somehow fused with the city, the low, gray and white, undulating city that over a long history had fallen as softly and soundlessly as a blanket across its rounded and submissive terrain. Like the women who had led the surging crowds at the Liberation, at whom he had stared in photographs as a child, hoping and believing that they were angels who could make whole what had been lost and that they might bring back his parents, whose bodies had never been found …. Like the women in white at the head of jubilant waves on the streets of Paris in the shock of freedom, Élodi appeared to him in white as well, suspended above the ground, her form and presence indistinguishable from music in the same way that pure energy, which is not matter, is what matter is made of. It was as if she flew, as if she were with him even when she was not present, the angel he had once hoped for. It was a sad thing, because he knew that, as much as he might want to, he would never ask her, so early, to share the burdens of age.
SPRING, HOWEVER, IS the season of benevolent surprises. The air is soft, the soil is warm, colors bloom in the sunlight, and the world is again like a garden, though when night falls winter comes halfway back. The alternation of rich, warm days and cold nights sparkling with stars is like a declaration that everything is possible but nothing is promised, that what is given will be reclaimed.
Because Jules had turned cold to her, Élodi stopped the lessons. She thought that, angry because of her forwardness, he had pulled away. In the painful and embarrassing position of having opened herself warmly and courageously only to be rejected, she quickly came to resent him, but she didn’t understand that it was only with the most agonizing discipline that he was able to resist her attraction. She felt as if he were punishing her, so she transferred to another teacher – to Levin, his rival – and broke off all contact. Though it was what he wanted, he found it impossibly difficult. He tried not to think of her, but thought of her all the time. She tried to put him out of mind, but she thought of him sometimes with overpowering love.
Now he had no individual students, and only one class every week, sparsely attended. His reputation among the up-and-coming and those in mid-career was that of someone who was used up and on the way out, as most certainly he was, even though he retained every quality, skill, and talent for which students once had sought him. But he was suddenly older, and it seemed useless for him to focus on and repeat things he had known and practiced for most of his life. That which to the public had formerly been exciting was now forgotten.
Many years before, as he struggled to support his young family, he had had a job in a quartet playing at a Swedish Embassy reception. During a break in the music he rested quietly on his gilded chair, unnoticed by the British and American ambassadors in conversation nearby. The American asked the Englishman if he had seen an editorial in Le Monde the day before. “I don’t read the papers,” the Englishman replied. “They’re not worthwhile.”
“Cables are enough?”
“Cables are too much, and I read them only when I must. We have a low-level person who stands on the cliffs at Dover and barks across the Channel.” Understating while overstating, he was perfectly in character, and, still holding his bow, Jules cocked his head to listen.
“But really,” the American said. “You have to know what’s going on. I spend hours and hours each day keeping up.”
“I don’t.”
“How is that? How can you not?”
“There are only so many plots
of action,” the British ambassador said, “and they repeat themselves. If not exactly, still closely. I’ve been in the diplomatic service for almost fifty years, and when something comes up, as it does every day, I need know only the one or two details that depart from the same thing I’ve seen a hundred times before. My young aides are surprised as each situation unfurls. That’s how they learn. But I know what’s coming already and can save a lot of effort. They look to us not because we’re smarter – we aren’t – but simply because we’ve been there. It’s all very neat, and given that when you get to be my age you have to conserve your energy, it dovetails.”
“I’ll try it,” the American ambassador promised. But he was thirty years younger.
“You can’t. Not yet. It wouldn’t work. Eventually, however, it just comes to you. You slide into it without even knowing, and it’s a wonderful way to end up, because it’s like looking back at the world as if it were a play. You see things as a whole.”
Upon hearing this, Jules had looked forward to when he might have calm, clear vision, and equanimity. But he’d had no choice other than to plunge back into getting and spending, striving, struggling, and all the things appropriate to his age at the time.
Perhaps because of something in her early life, the way she was raised, her loneliness, or a quality inherent to her, Élodi had passed those things by and was already in the state of those whose appetites have largely disappeared and their lifelong desires become just a flicker or a dim memory. At an inappropriately young age, combined with the resilience, strength, and sexual heat of youth, she had the outlook of a woman who had lived a long and full life. In that way, Jules was appropriate for her, though cruelly appended was that it could only have been for a very short and perhaps unhealthy few years.
Having passed by and passed up just about everything, and now, in a sense, actually rich, because he knew he would make only one more quarterly insurance payment and had therefore more than a hundred thousand Euros left to spend before August – more than one thousand a day – Jules decided that he would try to let down his guard. The insurance proceeds were set to go where they were needed. He had thinned out his possessions and organized those that remained for Cathérine to keep. He paid no rent, owed nothing to anyone, and had dissolved his friendships not out of anger but because it was time for them to end. He would not even have remained friends with François Ehrenshtamm would that have been possible. Unlike the British ambassador, François was still enmeshed in the details of life. He was ambitious and craved reward. Jules didn’t know whether François’ youthful energy upwelled to fulfill the needs of his continuing appetites, or if his continuing appetites were the result of upwelling youthful energy. But it didn’t matter, because, like Jules, François was in a boat with no oars.