Last Night in Montreal Read Online Free PDF Page B

title in Russian, taking obvious pleasure in what he could only assume was an impeccable pronunciation, and got up to show it to him. The Cyrillic alphabet spiked inscrutably at him from the cover above an artfully blurry black-and-white photograph that may or may not have depicted a girl in a nightgown walking over hot coals, or perhaps walking on water. It was Great Russian Literature, she said. In the absence of any knowledge of Russian, he was in no position to contest this.
    “It’s late,” he said finally. He’d been holding her on the couch while she lapsed into quiet, flipping through the first few pages. He was half asleep, almost dreaming, her warmth against him; he was breathing the scent of her latest shampoo, like cinnamon and violets.
    Later he lit a candle in the bedroom and she lay beside him staring up at the ceiling. Sleep was out of the question. He waited, and after a while she began to speak again. A trajectory of cities, of places, of names. He wondered if she was telling the truth. There was no reason to suspect that she wasn’t. Her voice was nearly expressionless. I used to see mirages in the desert. Pools of water on the highway. We were driving in a small grey car . . . She twisted onto her side, facing him, and her hand cupped the bone of his hip. A long stroke down the outside of his thigh. It was shadowless. I think the sand was almost white. We’d been driving for so long, and there was another car behind us . . . She trailed off midsentence, stopped the motion of her hand. He held her close and touched her hair, kissed her softly on the forehead, Lilia, Lilia, it’s all right, shhh . . . but she wasn’t upset, just absent, and he felt that she was slipping away from him. She smiled in the candlelight, but her eyes were unfocused. We must have driven through a thousand towns that year, and then we came into Cincinnati at night . . .
    He woke from a fitful dream of cars and deserts, a twilight kind of sleep. She was breathing beside him in the light of first morning, an arm extended over the tangle of sheets. Her lips were parted slightly, and he could see the movement of her eyes beneath her lids. Eli wondered what she was dreaming of and was shot through with sadness. He got up without waking her and went back to the café; the coffee was strong there, but the newspaper was failing him again, and he was still dazed and only half awake when he left. How could a story throw everything off so suddenly, so clearly? He felt the foundations breaking apart beneath them.
    He found Thomas and Geneviève in the Third Cup Café and sat with them for a while trying to lose himself in complicated arguments, and then went to the gallery for an utterly uneventful four-hour shift. When he came home in the late afternoon she was in the bathroom. Judging by the razor blades on the edge of the bathtub, she’d long since finished shaving her legs; now she sat cross-legged in a foot of bathwater, removing her pubic hair with a pair of tweezers. This apparently required her complete attention; she barely glanced up at him when he entered the room. He’d seen her do this before, and it always unnerved him. He stood nearby for a second, watching her without comment, and then sat down on the toilet lid.
    “That can’t possibly be making you happy,” he said.
    She smiled.
    “It makes me wince to look at it. Are you all right?”
    “Fine,” she said pleasantly. “I’m fine. Thank you.”
    “That . . . that doesn’t . . .” he gestured toward her, but she didn’t look at him.
    “What?”
    “That, uh, that doesn’t hurt?”
    “Oh,” she said. “No, not really.”
    “It seems a bit obsessive, don’t you think?”
    She didn’t reply.
    He rested his elbows on his knees, clasped his hands in front of him, and stared between his wrists at the white tiled floor.
    “I was just at work,” he said, “a little while ago. No one came into the gallery; it was just me standing there for four hours,