Nocturne

"Streets of Paris, pray for me."

Cyril Connolly

I

Everything had gone wrong between us, all my fault, admittedly. And there were long silences--silences as tangible as a feathery red cardinal found stone dead on your patio deck, as tangible, I suppose, as liar's smile--for about a week. Which was before she cried so much. I should have admitted it was over.

II

Then one night I woke in the bruised blue darkness, and suddenly I knew what had to be done. You see, there was no choice but to tell her outright.

Sleeping, she mumbled, "You're a liar, Davey," and I passed it off to some other territory she had been wandering through in her dreams, even if my name is Davey and even if she had been in tears--beautiful tears--only hours before. Still, I had to tell her--she with her honey hair so tangled now, she with her rare aqua eyes, certainly bloodshot from all that crying, all of what she knew deep down were, indeed, my lies.

The ceiling fan chug-chugged, the cicadas of this university town that could be Austin, Texas, continued with their tinny racket, there beyond the screens of the sliding doors in that bedroom open to the balmy May night. Maybe I shouldn't have woken her. But I did, gently nudging.

Naked, she hoisted herself to her elbows.

"I was sleeping," she said so softly.

"I know, I'm sorry I woke you."

"I was dreaming," still softly, "you were in the dream."

I almost wanted to tell her I knew that, too, and I had overheard what she had been saying, but, of course, I didn't tell her that.

I pushed back a strand of hair from her damp forehead. She was beautiful and she was intelligent and she was young; I fully realized that I had no right to bring the sadness I had brought into her life, and I shouldn't have disturbed her in her hard-won sleep now-though that was the very idea why I woke her, because it had suddenly come to me, and I knew what I had to do.

She took my hand and held it to her cheek, which was warm; she kissed it with her pouted lips maybe more out of habit than anything else, because we both knew that what there had once been between us was probably over now. She especially knew that, and hadn't she whispered somewhere in her somnambulistic other world of, surely, mansions of many golden chambers, beautiful maze gardens at lavender twilight, that it was a fact--I was a liar.

But there might be a chance.

I apologized again for having woken her, and I told her. I explained that everything might be different if I could just go to the Musee Carnavalet there on rue de Sevigne in Paris and somehow get into the building at night, if I could just go to that little upstairs room where they had reconstructed the Paris chamber of Marcel Proust.

I mean that could be it--that could make everything different. Couldn't it?

III

"Ces certains terrains vagues et la lune," a title that translates as, "These No Man's Lands and the Moon."

Or: "Une branche d'ortie entre par la fenetre," which translates as, "A Branch of Nettle Enters Through the Window."

Or even: "L'eau creusait des longues filles," which translates, roughly here, as, "The Water Was Carving Out Tail Grills of Girls."

All of which is to say, for days I tried the titles of French surrealist poems on her at any moment of the day--when she returned from her own work at the record store (a ridiculous part-time job she wanted to can if she could get a decent fellowship for her graduate work the next semester) or when she got back from shopping at the decidedly yuppified new Whole Foods market, where at least, she argued, you could have some hope of getting less than the normal overdose of carcinogens in the simplest of things like Gala apples or somehow sacredly plump nectarines. Yes, that was it: as she unpacked the paper sacks on the table in the condo, I uttered the words in my best French, which, in truth, isn't good. Nevertheless, I was convinced that this could be a start, that with her hearing the soothing syllables even during our awkward silences that had set in since the Big Argument, I could make my point--that it was Paris where we had to go, it was the Musee Carnavalet where we had to somehow find a secret entry, t o come upon again that reconstructed chamber of Proust, for me to do what I had to do.

Breton, Aragon, Soupault--I muttered titles of poems by them all. It just possibly might work on her, and I had to make myself believe that--it was my only chance, but so fragile a one, admittedly, that like a tuft from a dead dandelion, it could be there one instant--and then, puff!--gone the next, vanished in the invisible wind that sometimes haunted, ached through, those silences between us. But she seemed immune, or she seemed to be steeling herself against my guile. In fact, she had been talking of how she herself had to get away from Austin (as I said, I think we're here) for a while, how she really should see her mother up in Minnesota, and she admitted she had been chiding herself for not having gone there since her widowed mother's last operation. Actually, her mother, even if she was getting older, seemed to be doing fine, though in the course of my speaking those titles, she did tell me something strange about her mother that she had never previously told me. She said it was before her father, mayb e one of the last of the truly general practice M.D.'s, died of the sudden heart attack, so it couldn't have been attributed to any understandable disorientation for her mother after that.