Paris Twilight by Russ Rymer Page A

the floor in the corner of the room, which would afford anyone cringing there an excellent surveillance of the stairs? How, except with a diagnosis of extreme paranoia? And I began to suspect that the weather stripping was engineered not to keep the hall light out of the apartment, but to keep the apartment’s light and all signs of internal life invisible from the hall. What on earth had the poor man been afraid of?
    Along with all this, though, I encountered a paupered dignity, a grace in the proportions of the room as he’d laid it out, in the bolster propped against the wall to make the divan comfortable, in the careful conceits of his day—that so spare an individual would bother to wax his floors at all. Can you read a man by Braille? My sweeping palm tried. The distressed floor wax smoothed away easily; the phantom all but vanished. In this way, even as I encountered Saxe, I erased him. I tossed out his toothbrush and his shaving kit, mapped with a moist sponge my own private kingdom cleansed of the dust of his life, directly in the center of his world, a beachhead of safety whose borders I dared extend only so far.
    What on earth was I afraid of? The closet, for one thing—I couldn’t imagine invading so personal a precinct. It felt as though his shirts and shoes might rise up to defend their owner’s privacy. Even less could I bring myself to open the drawers of his dresser. So I mopped out my little ammonial empire, which enlarged satisfyingly with every pass of my arm and every backward shuffle down the floor, until I bumped into something and felt behind my denimed fanny the leg of the writing table.
    Of the two varieties of fate—the one that seeks and the one that lurks—I’ve always feared the latter most, and the table leg gave me a start. Of course it had been there all along, and of course I had known where it was—how often in life are we surprised by the inevitable, the crease beside the eye, the spot on the skin, the lump in the breast that wasn’t there yesterday but must have been? So here’s where my search for safety had brought me: directly to the thing I feared. For the table was the prelude to the dresser that was prelude to the closet—atop the table was his mail.
    The evening was waning by now, and it was getting too dark to read, but the gloaming also emboldened me, afforded me some cover, cast a welcome shadow over my surreptitious mission. The first envelope I opened was a bill from a neighborhood tailor, the second was another bill, and the third, forwarded from some establishment named Café Portbou, was an itemization, apparently, of toll calls racked up on its phone. The fourth was a statement of account from a hospital, which I scrupulously avoided inspecting, alarmed at what I might see, and the last two were utility bills I greeted with the same reflexive outrage that I lavish on all bills as a matter of policy before even reading the damage. The damage in this case was spelled out in print so faint that I had to carry the invoices over to the divan, in order to determine in the light through the window if the totals sounded reasonable. Two hundred and thirty francs, one said. Was that a lot?
    My brain was still calculating when it struck me—
quelle idiote!
—exactly what I was doing: straining to read a utility bill in the dark. Hadn’t I just completed a microscopic survey of the premises? I had found, excluding the one radiator and the water out of the tap, not the least indication of any public infrastructure whatsoever. Could the gas charge be an assessment for a percentage of the heat, a hot-water tithe? Implausible, even in implausible France, and anyway, what of the electric? There was in the entire benighted joint no wall switch, no outlet, no place to plug in a TV or hair dryer or toaster oven or table lamp, no ceiling light or wall sconce, nothing in the category of artificial illumination beyond two old