Paris Twilight Read Online Free PDF Page B

attend to it. His box was becoming a problem for everyone, and everyone’s problem always turned into hers, she was a human mop for all their messes, a scandal it was, and here came another fine one to burden her more, as though that were possible, as though it mattered. She raged her way back whence she’d come. I managed a shouted
“Merci, madame,”
before the door slammed, then picked up one end of the miscreant rug and dragged it like a corpse across the cobbles in the direction her finger had indicated.
    I found the mail drop there also and saw what the scourge had meant—the box marked SAXE was so packed that letters stuck from the slot like leaves of an old corsage. It was locked, but when I went back upstairs for the freezer-chest refuse, I found, in the blue bowl on the dresser top, just where you’d expect it to be, a mailish-looking flimsy silver key that opened the postbox nicely to unpin the avalanche. The envelopes I extracted were mainly of two types, neither (let us conjecture) personal: junk, which I trundled around the corner to join the stinking carpet in the trash, and bills, which I carried upstairs, along with the one item I couldn’t categorize, a manila envelope with
M. Saxe
scrawled on it but no postage stamp and no address. I placed the little bundle on the yellow table and then, on the Métro heading back to the hotel, I wondered why I’d done that. Who was I so carefully leaving all that for, if not myself? I was probably now responsible for M. Saxe’s accounts—I would be, wouldn’t I?—and what kind of spendthrift might he have been, though his lodgings implied otherwise. But, oh my God, how long had he lingered in that hospital? And if his debts were now properly mine, what propriety guided me in opening his personal mail, as I assumed the manila envelope to be (the envelope was marked
confidentiel
)?
    The more I thought about my unwanted inheritance, this insane imposition, the more agitated I became. I even smelled volatile heading home, my good clothes, already damp, now perfumed with a soupçon of stove oil, and as soon as I reached my suite in the Clairière, I dialed Rouchard’s number to make an end of the travesty. I was fueled with resolve and dudgeon, flushed with anger at the presumptuous lawyer and even more at my own compliance, for letting myself be dragooned into spending my leisure day in glamorous Paris performing maid service for a dead man. Perhaps it was the case that the esteemed firm of Rouchard et Associés closed early before the weekends, or maybe there was another explanation involving the brusque secretary I’d made the mistake of deciding to like after all. At any rate, no one answered the phone. That was all right; I would deal with it on Monday.

IV
    D ANIEL, YOU KNOW HOW I hate it when the rain clears away in the middle of the afternoon, have always hated it. Surely you remember that about me, how I could handle almost any event, weather-wise, could face down a tornado, outlive a drought, except for that one exact, particular thing: the day that starts out stormy, only to abandon its conviction by three or four thirty and dwindle into cerulean. I look up at the empty sky and emptiness explodes inside me! As though love had fled, or a child were lost, as though all intensity—the morning’s moodiness, the day’s drama, a cloistered inwardness—had come to nothing, had forgotten what it was about. A dreary day that improves by lunch is a parable of youth and optimism. Let it happen at teatime, and it reminds me, creepily, of early-onset Alzheimer’s, a blank sky scrubbed, at the edge of evening, of every clue of all that had transpired.
    So it was odd for me, as I left the hospital Saturday afternoon, to see that the rains had lifted and be glad. I was even gladder the next morning as I headed to meet Willem through a tinsel-glitter day that verged, almost, on warm. Pristine sidewalks,