Her voice is what first comes to mind. In her pronunciations and their cadence a certain lucidity akin to when your body, if only for the briefest of moments, touches cold water. Like when she called and said, Your Papa, he is not laughing anymore.
That was how she described it. Those who don’t know her would perhaps think her choice of words not only inappropriate but colored with sarcasm. But if you ever met Lys — and I hope you do — you would very much be aware of her sincerity. She was always sincere. Once, she bought a new dress, carried it to the apartment in a bag the size of a tissue box and pulled it out in front of me with her thumb and index finger. She then wrapped the thin piece of sky-blue silk around her head and said, It is my new hat! with a beautiful sadness in her eyes, the way they always seemed on the verge of tears, and I didn’t laugh. This was summer. Many years ago. I was staying with her for a few weeks in the apartment she and my father had shared. They were lovers, although neither of them ever used that word. It was just the way I thought of her. My father’s lover. Four years older than me.
I don’t know where she is these days. I don’t believe I will see her again. Sometimes I think of her in other cities, or in the countryside somewhere, riding a Vespa close to a river. Other times I imagine that she is above, on airplanes crossing oceans. Or maybe she decided, after all, to join the circus. To swing on a trapeze. Because once she told me a story about a doll. And I think of Lys with her arms raised in midair, wearing a dress the colors of a parrot, and I see her sad eyes and her smile. And I think that sooner or later she will let go.
* * *
That summer I had been invited to Paris by my father’s architecture firm to discuss the project he was involved in when he passed away. It was an entry into a competition: to redesign a cultural center on the Right Bank that lay, save for a single floor, underground. Four stories within the earth, with shopping boutiques, cafés, and a cinema. The building itself was to be a large glass dome, like a blooming planet. He was most excited about the cinema that would remain open throughout the evening, on the lowest floor so that people would go up and down by way of escalators and glass elevators with a full view of the night sky.
Exactly what I would do with his partners I didn’t know. But I agreed and Lys offered the spare bedroom in the apartment where they spent ten years. It lies on Rue Christine in the 6th arrondissement, a few blocks south of the Pont Neuf, next to a restaurant my father often frequented, Chez Philippe.
She looked the same as when I saw her last, at my father’s funeral. Chin-length dark hair and slim, an inch taller than me. Her pale skin was covered by a thin cotton Lacoste dress with the collar flapping as she approached me at the airport. She wore sunglasses that resembled two pieces of round metal stringed together with thin wires. She held my face and kissed me and then kissed me again and said, Your tie is striped! in that voice of hers, between each kiss. She smelled of cigarettes and lavender.
Lys spoke to me in English even though I had told her that it was all right if she spoke French. She refused, wanted to practice, she said. She was thirty-six that year. I was thirty-two.
In the taxi she told me her old modeling agency had begun sending her checks. She didn’t know what they were for until she saw her twenty-two year-old face in a clothing catalog.
Digital technology, she said, tapping the window pane. It is like a game of Barbi dress-up. They strip you of your clothes in an old photograph and select a new outfit. Then they change the scenery and brighten the photo so that it looks new. I was very insulted! They can’t ask for a picture of me now? I look that old? But then I changed my mind. Think of how many faces they could have. Yet they chose mine. Out of all the beautiful bitches in Paris they chose mine. So. This is a very complicated feeling, yes? I was insulted and honored. Maybe that is impossible. To feel two things that are so opposite. No? Maybe I only feel one or the other and I haven’t decided which.
I said that I would feel very honored.
No, I think you would feel very confused, she said, then laughed.
It was four a.m. in Boston. I shut my eyes.
The first time I met Lys was at Chez Philippe. I was twenty-two. She and my father were waiting for me at a table in the back of the room and Lys was smoking a cigarette and her other hand covered the mouth of a wine glass filled with rosé. She was twenty-six. We touched cheeks and ordered several plates of escargot. They held hands under the table, I could tell by the way their arms seemed to intersect at a point somewhere beneath the red-checkered cloth. We talked of the firm that had hired me and I remember my father saying that he was proud and then he reached over to touch my shoulder with his thick wrinkly hands and all at once Lys said, I am proud for you as well. I looked at her and noticed her wet eyes for the first time and in her stare there was an intensity that made my breath grow light and soft and she reached over to grasp my other shoulder and it is difficult for me to explain but when she said those words and I felt her strong grip I knew she would be good to my father and that was all that mattered to me then. Because in her I saw honesty. And that is more than I can say for myself, though I have tried to be so in all that I share and recall.
The taxi driver passed the Hotel Christine with its potted plants drooping in front of the windows and then parked beside the apartment building. Across the street, a waiter from Chez Philippe sat on a chair facing the restaurant. He wore black with a slim red tie and on his lap was a crate of string beans. With a knife he snipped their ends, one by one, and the blade glinted in the sun.
Mathieu! Lys called, waving her hand and exiting the car. Look who has come!
He raised his knife into the air as a way of greeting and then, in French, asked whether or not we would like some string beans.
Tonight, Lys said. And cook them, please. Mathieu waved his knife and went about his work. A luminous blue Vespa was parked beside him.
It’s new, Lys told me. He just bought it. A beauty.
The cinema a few blocks down was showing Westerns this month. They only showed American films. Lys asked if I wanted to see one and I shook my head because I never liked Westerns. At Chez Philippe, a man placed a large chalkboard behind the restaurant window listing the dishes of the day.
This was where my father died. Reading the menu through a glass window. It was evening and he and Lys had stepped out to have dinner.
I often wonder about what he saw last before his eyes shut. Whether it was a description of the duck or veal or a view of the diners already eating their meals, their shoulders hunched forward and their elbows on the table edge. Or perhaps all he saw was a reflection, of Lys stumbling to carry his weight as his hand sought his heart.
They had first met when she was in her twenties. This was some time after my mother left for California with another man. Lys was acting then, in theater. There was a party, they shook hands briefly then parted. Months passed. The story is that Lys followed my father home one evening after recognizing him in a restaurant. That is my father’s version. Lys’s version is the opposite. Either way, they both recognized each other’s faces one way or another and they both agreed that it was this — the familiarity — that pulled them. As though they followed each other to complete a thought, a recollection. She was on the tip of his tongue. He was on hers. And from there they leapt.
* * *
In the apartment there was only a single photograph of my father. It stood on the dresser of Lys’s bedroom. Our bedroom, she still called it. It was of the two of them, taken by someone she had forgotten. Her arms around his neck. He was smiling foolishly, his razor-straight teeth gleaming and his eyes the size of coin slots and his grey hair windblown. A coastal town in the south and my father, who was, to my mind, very fashionable, in a light-colored suit jacket and a red t-shirt with words printed across his chest that I couldn’t read. Lys wore a pale green dress that hung loosely on her shoulders.
She had brought it to me into the living room where a pair of tall arched windows faced north with a view of the tops of the buildings and the sky. I was on the couch. She was on the floor beside a coffee table, sitting on her legs with her knees pressed together.
I gave away the rest, she said. To you and to his friends.
You just kept one? I said.
I only wanted one, she said. It is more than necessary, don’t you think? Why would I want more? It is all in here, anyway.
She tapped her head.
And out of all of them you kept this one, I said.
Yes. Out of a hundred. I counted. Exactly one hundred photos we had.
So why this one?
Because it looks the least like him, she said. And that is what I have the most trouble remembering. When he didn’t look like himself.
It was true. He looked like a little boy with dyed white hair.
He seems very happy, though, I said.
She shut her eyes and stretched her neck and rolled her head around her shoulders.
How is your woman? she asked.
I wasn’t seeing anyone. I told her so and she shook her head.
Do you know what he said to me once? He told me it had come to the point where he felt as if he had been with me longer than he had been with his family. He meant it as a compliment, I think. I am not sure anymore.
I saw little of him as a child. And if life is in the telling then I am not sure what I can say about him. I left for America, for schooling, and his absence was no longer a fact I strove to reverse but play a part in. I wanted to race. Run with him. From a distance.
Lys placed a finger under her lip and then stretched her back.
When I am gone, she said. Will you miss me?
I laughed, saying, Yes. yes. I will miss you.
But we hardly know each other, she said.
We don’t?
No. We don’t. I knew your Papa and you knew him. He knew you and he knew me. In this way we are like the lines of a triangle. But a triangle that never touches. Just sees.
She then stood and leaned over to place her hands on my shoulders.
Will you sleep?
I shook my head.
Good, she said.
I began to unpack my duffel bag in the bedroom beside hers. The wall between us was thin and I could hear her enter and shut the door and there was the sound of humming, a song I couldn’t recognize. She kept it going until all my clothes were in the dresser and hanging in the closet. And then she stopped. I imagined she was probably looking at the photograph for a good long while because it didn’t look like him at all and that was worth remembering.
I had left my door open and she knocked on it. She leaned against the jamb, having changed into jeans and a t-shirt with tiny holes scattered all over it in the shape of stars.
Whenever I see you, it is like we have just met, she said. Hello, I am Lys.
Her voice had gone unbearably quiet.
Okay, I said.
And I will not cry. That is a promise.
And I won’t either.
She extended her hand. I took it. Her skin was cold and soft.
Now go wash, she said.
Do I smell?
Like him, she said.
I lifted my shirt and inhaled, though I couldn’t distinguish anything. I remembered his foreign scents as a child, when he pressed my shoulders up against the wall of his study to record my height. We were living then in the south and he would place a ruler on top of my head, his movements as delicate as cloth, and I would shut my eyes and allow myself to be measured. He drew a small dash against the white paint and dated it and sometimes when he was away I would look at each one and imagine myself growing up toward the ceiling.
And what did he smell like? I said.
She tilted her head against the door and crossed her arms.
Pencils, she said. He smelled like pencils.
* * *
I met with my father’s firm once during that first week. They gave me a tour of the offices, as though I had never been there, showed me my father’s blueprints, and told me that they would call if they had any further questions.
Afterward, I met Lys on the Pont Neuf. She wore her sunglasses. She had tied her hair behind her head, the ponytail short as a knob; a thick strand fell loose, which she ignored so that it swung around her cheek like a vine. We sat on a bench facing west, the Seine River, and the distant view of the buildings thick and ancient and hazy white under the sun. My father used to call Paris “The Low City,” which made the Eiffel Tower seem taller than it was. And so to him the beauty lay in the illusion.
We turned and leaned over the bridge to watch a Batobus cruise by, the tourists shouting to hear their echoes as they passed under us. Among the crowd on the boat a child with light-colored hair held up a doll and began to wave it.
It is naked! Lys shouted, pointing.
She was speaking of the doll. Its blond hair and smooth pink body swung at an odd angle while the child furiously arced it into the air in a grave manner, as though she were holding up a flag.
Hello! Lys went on. Hello! Your doll is naked!
The child, however, didn’t seem to understand and continued waving. How she dropped it neither of us could recall later. Perhaps her mother had bumped into her, concentrating on the digital camera she held. Perhaps the boat lurched forward. But the doll fell, quickly, disappearing within the wake of the foamy evergreen water and the child froze, in shock, it seemed, as though she had lost a limb. Lys covered her mouth with her hand, the other grabbing my wrist. The girl slowly stepped forward and grasped the railing. She leaned over. By then the boat was far in the distance and she began diminish.
She is still looking for it, Lys said.
The sky was clear that day and we stayed there for another hour, turning back around to sit on the bench.
As the other tour boats passed by underneath us — there were many — she told me a story about her childhood. She once owned a doll named Rosine. Her neighbor, an old woman, called herself the doll caretaker and she would ask all the girls in the area to bring their dolls to her apartment for tea. And if their dolls had ripped their dresses this woman would mend their clothes as well. The girls weren’t allowed to go in. Just the dolls, who stayed for an hour or so. But all the girls trusted her, knew that she was a good fairy, knew that once inside, these dolls would come to life and drink and move and talk and it was simply this hope, this imagination, that convinced these girls to give away their dolls.
So Lys, every week or so, knocked on the woman’s door and held up Rosine, who had brown hair and big wide eyes and wore a blue dress. The woman smiled and told her that what Rosine needed was a good cup of strong China tea to make her feel better and Lys nodded and returned to her apartment.
One afternoon, however, she grew curious — she just needed to see Rosine alive, just needed to — so she stepped out on to the balcony and jumped over to the next one — the old woman’s — and pressed her forehead against the window.
There was Rosine. Beside a table as still and lifeless as always. The same blank stare and plastic skin. And then she saw the old woman moving in and out of the frame of the window. She paced around the room, shaking her finger in the air, shouting, You’ve been so bad! What am I to do with you? Look at all those dishes! And your room! What a mess! You are not to leave this house for a week! For a week!
Lys ducked. She wanted to run. Instead, in her panic, she jumped a bit too early so she slipped, and when she opened her eyes she was dangling on her parents’ balcony, her hands gripping the edge, four stories high.
What she felt then was not what she expected. She neither noticed the ache in the tips of her fingers nor was she afraid of falling and breaking her bones. It was all of a sudden quiet. Not even the sound of cars passing. And the longer she hung there the more she grew convinced that she could stay there all day. The calm increased. No one saw her. No one knew she existed under this balcony at this very moment. She was a secret. And therefore free. As air brushed up against her legs.
She thought of the circus. Midair, on a trapeze, and wearing a dress the colors of a parrot. She didn’t care for the audience. It was, rather, the swinging, the distance between two ends.
Eventually she climbed back up and through her window and lay in bed with the covers up to her chin and then took courage and returned to the old woman who petted Lys’s hair and told her to visit soon.
The doll Rosine she never gave to the woman again. She threw it away the following day.
It looked like the old woman, Lys told me. When I got her back. That was all I could imagine. An old, old woman shaking her finger at me. If I kept Rosine, I thought I would turn out to be her. I really did. Punishing dolls. And alone.
And you never joined the circus, I said.
No. I never did. Because it seemed silly, no? The older I grew. It seemed very silly.
She lifted her arms, smiled sadly; she extended her fingers, let go.
I think I would have lived a very different life if I had joined the circus.
You wouldn’t have met my father.
No, she agreed. Because he hated tents. He thought them a waste of space. Because they could be built in a few hours. So he never went to the circus, wouldn’t even go to the ones in theater buildings. He couldn’t stand the thought of people on the trapeze or being shot out of cannons. Hated anything to do with flight, really. He preferred trains. He was very stubborn. But I loved him. Yes, I loved him. It is very easy to love someone the same as you. Try loving the opposite. That takes great effort. But when you do, it is understanding. It is the middle point. The very middle. And that is when you are most happy. I promise you.
* * *
The only time Lys ever met my mother was at the funeral. She had flown in from California. My mother by then was dying her hair to hide the grey, a bronze-red color, and she wore a black suit. They shook hands briefly. That was all. When my mother turned to walk away Lys stuck her thumbs against the sides of her head and stretched her fingers like antlers. I don’t think anyone saw this. It lasted only a few seconds. And I’m not sure what it meant. Most likely it was a taunt. Although to whom I couldn’t tell. It seemed for herself, this gesture. On that day Lys wept in a way that seemed as though her body had turned inside out and even the air against her hurt.
I remembered when my mother told me that she was leaving my father. It’s no longer him for whom I wake, she said. I was no older than twenty. She then held me and I didn’t see her again until some months later when she remarried on a cliff overlooking the sea.
My father continued with his work, traveled more than ever throughout Europe. When Lys entered his life, she went along. Always by train. Although Lys wanted to fly. In addition to wanting to be an acrobat she wanted to be a pilot, or if that weren’t possible then an airline attendant.
It was height she yearned for, she said. Although when she was with my father she didn’t think so much about it. Because with him she felt both on this earth and airborne all at once and she had never felt that before. It had always been one or the other.
The first boy she loved rode a Vespa. They flew. Made love in fields.
The second hit her and shoved her head into the toilet when he was drunk.
My father neither drove a Vespa nor did he ever hit her or threaten any sort of violence. He was a quiet man. Who had a mind of electric.
Spheres, Lys told me one night. Each creation of his was like a sphere. He wanted thousands of them spread under a single large one so that they never strayed too far up to where the gods belong.
Even you, she added, touching my face. And me.
A few days after his funeral, she slit her wrist. She gashed her left arm with a pair of scissors, then vomited after watching her skin split and poor dark. Mathieu, the waiter, took her to the hospital. She called me overseas from the recovery room the next morning and said, Hello, I am still alive today.
* * *
Another week passed. Every evening we dined at Chez Philippe. Mathieu served us. He took Lys’s hand and raised it to his lips but never touched her. It was a simple gesture which made her blush and swallow a copious amount of rosé.
He is so handsome! she whispered to me.
Warm from the wine, we walked down to the banks of the Seine where the stone embankment sloped down into the water. We sat on the edge, a few pedestrians lingering in the distance. On the opposite bank a group of teenagers began bursting firecrackers. With each pop they flung their beer bottles into the river until there was nothing left to throw and then they left and it was quiet. Behind us stood several trees and the street lamps above cast a warm glow through the leaves and the river water below our feet was violet and still.
We had been talking about my father’s firm.
I am glad you came, she said. I wanted to see you again.
She took my hand and we stayed that way for some time, silent. She wore a dress with my suit jacket over her shoulders and her legs were crossed and angled down against the slope of the bank.
I told her that I would have come regardless of any invitation.
No, she said. You would not have.
Don’t be ridiculous, I said.
I am not. I am never ridiculous. Without your father, it is pointless to come.
She turned her head and smiled. Perhaps it was the dim light, but it was in a way that seemed laden with guilt. And it was then that it occurred to me that she had planned this. That she had convinced my father’s firm to invite me so that I would visit. It seemed plausible. There was no reason for me to be here. And she was right. I wouldn’t have come.
I squeezed her hand. I am sorry, Lys, I said.
With a hand on her chin, she rolled her eyes at me.
From the right, a tour boat was approaching. Its light cast silver and extended over the waters to where we sat.
This was when Lys jumped and pointed down at the lit river. She stood, my jacket flapping about her, and she shouted, Look! Look! It’s the doll! and she squeezed hard on my hand and began climbing down the incline. I looked. There was nothing I could see. She was pulling my hand and I was pulling hers. She kept walking down the cobblestone, slowly, stretching her fingers toward the river and saying, Rosine! Rosine! Rosine! as she bent her knees. I dug my heels hard into the bank and pulled with both hands and told her to get back up or she would fall but she extended farther toward that water with her toes already wet. She shouted that she could see the doll and that if she just reached a little more she could grab it. I saw my jacket slipping from her shoulders but by then the tour boat was passing and its lights were white and sharp and I could hear people clapping and laughing and it seemed to go on for a very long time so I gave into the light and the noise. I shut my eyes. And waited. I leaned back as far as I could and held her wrist and for the first time felt, with the tips of my fingers, the scar that ran up her skin like a vein long ago dried and caked solid.
* * *
Lys slipped, but it was backward against my lap. Her legs were soaked from the wake of the tour boat. As was the hem of her dress. She leaned against me and I wrapped my arms over her stomach and we sat there, her head on my chest, and I smelled her hair which smelled sweet and light. The boat faded and the tourists cheered to hear their echoes as they passed underneath the Pont Neuf.
What she saw in the river she never found, taken by the waves that eventually calmed to a flat stillness once again.
We walked home holding hands. Chez Philippe had by then boarded up its windows for the night. In the apartment I ran water for a bath and, after dipping my fingers into the tub, I left her and waited in the living room with its arched windows, the outlines of the low buildings across the street and the sky dark and starless. I listened to her body shift in the water.
She fell asleep soon after. I lay in bed, awake, rubbing my palms together. The skin there felt thick.
It was my father I thought of. How many times he had held her wrist.
The following day Lys bought a new suit jacket for me and a new dress for herself which was folded into a bag the size of a tissue box.
It is my new hat! she said, wrapping it around her head.
We never mentioned that night by the river. She told stories about my father but I had lost interest. No, that wasn’t it exactly. It was just that it no longer seemed of great importance.
On the last day Lys offered to go to the airport with me but I told her that it wasn’t necessary. It would be best to say goodbye in front of the apartment building. She agreed. So we stood there and waited for the taxi. It was a clear day. Mathieu was snipping string beans across the narrow street.
You must miss Boston, she said.
I’m looking forward to it, I said.
She nodded slowly. And then she tilted her head and placed a finger right below her lips and looked up at the sky.
I just realized something, she said. You live right in the middle of your parents. Your mother is in California. Your father was here. You live right in the middle. You went east. Here. So now it’s time to go west.
And then she kissed me on both cheeks as the taxi arrived. She opened the door and bowed, gesturing with her hand for me to enter, with flourish. Through the car window I saw her approach Mathieu and whisper something into his ear and he nodded and soon they were on his blue Vespa. A gave her a large black helmet. She wrapped her arms around his waist. And then they turned and sped past me down the street.
She wore a dress on that afternoon. Pale green, the same as the one she wore in that photograph in her bedroom.
In Boston, I called to tell her I had arrived. She didn’t answer the telephone. She never called back. A few months later, I received a letter from her lawyer saying that the apartment on Rue Christine was now in my name.
I go there once a year. And every time I wonder if there exists any evidence within the rooms that she has recently been inside: a toothbrush on the sink, a used towel, an unmade bed, food in the refrigerator. There isn’t. I don’t sleep on her bed. The photograph she left but I have moved it into my room and it reminds me of what my father did not look like. Lys, too, because in that picture her eyes are too wide although she never mentioned it.
I eat at Chez Philippe although Mathieu, too, is no longer there. A few years ago a truck crushed his Vespa as he attempted to pass it.
My father’s project lost the competition. It was to be in the shape of a planet, half of it submerged underground, the other in air, made of glass. His partners gave me an early draft of it as a birthday gift. It hangs now in the apartment, framed, between the two arched windows. On the paper are my father’s scribbles, a set of stars above the dome in a childish manner, the points exaggerated and of varying lengths. If it had won, I would have gone there on some nights to ride its escalators and watch the stars from inside.
Instead, there are these windows. There is this room. Against a wall, a pencil marking. I measured my height some years ago. I am five feet, eight inches tall. I would be surprised if I grow any taller, but I check anyway, whenever I am here.
