Absinthe and After

The Cafe de la Rotonde had a scratch on the wall behind the bar that marked the progress of Eleanor Vance's writing. It was a small line, made with the point of a knife, and it appeared every time she finished an article that met the word count her editor in Chicago demanded and nothing more. By the time she met Jack Calloway, the scratch-mark had become a dense forest, a wall of tiny lines that looked like the bars of a cage from a distance and like the teeth of a saw up close.

She was twenty-five, a journalist for a magazine that published pieces about Paris life for Americans who had never been to Paris and wanted to believe they had. Her assignment was straightforward: write about the expatriate community, capture the glamour, the absinthe, the way the sun hit the Seine at four in the afternoon and made the water look like it was on fire. She did this for three months. She wrote twelve articles. She made twelve scratches on the wall. And each article was thinner than the last, not in word count but in substance, as though the more she wrote about Paris, the less Paris there was to write about.

Jack occupied the corner table on the left side of the cafe, the one nearest the kitchen door and furthest from the window. He had a Remington typewriter in front of him, an old machine with keycaps so worn that the letters were almost smooth, and he typed with a speed that suggested he was trying to get the words out before he changed his mind about them. His hands were large, the knuckles scarred, the fingernails cut short in a way that suggested military discipline. Eleanor noted these things the way she noted everything, automatically, the way a bird notes the shape of a branch before landing.

She was working on an article about veterans when she noticed him. Not his hands, not his machine, but the way he stopped typing and stared at the page, then typed again, then stopped again, the way a man walks into a room and forgets why he is there and stands in the doorway until the memory returns. She wrote it into her article: the veteran who cannot finish the sentence of his own life. Her editor sent it back with two words in red ink: too literary.

She began to interview him on Monday.

She approached his table with the confidence of someone who had interviewed diplomats and painters and a man who claimed to have been Napoleon's illegitimate grandson (she did not write this last one into her article, but she kept the story, because it was good for later). She introduced herself as a journalist working on a piece about American veterans in Paris. She asked if he would speak with her.

"I do not give interviews," he said. He did not look up from his typewriter.

"Not an interview," she said. "A conversation. I write about things. Sometimes the things are people. Sometimes the people talk back."

He looked at her then, and she saw his eyes. They were the color of the Seine in winter: gray, with something underneath that might have been green if the light were different and the war had not gotten to them first.

"My name is Jack," he said.

"Eleanor."

He nodded. He went back to his typewriter. She sat down at the neighboring table, which she had been occupying, and she opened her notebook and she began to write down things he said, which were very few.

The first day, he said: "I type to keep my hands busy. Talking is not how I keep them busy."

The second day, he said: "Most people who ask me about the war want to hear something heroic. You just want to write it down."

The third day, they did not talk about the war. They talked about the cafe. They talked about the coffee, which was terrible, and the absinthe, which was illegal but available, and the way the light changed through the windows from morning to afternoon. On the third day, Jack closed his typewriter and said, "Come walk with me," and they walked through Montmartre without a destination, and the walk lasted two hours, and neither of them spoke about anything that could be written down.

She wrote him into her article. Not the way he looked, or the way he typed, but the way he existed in the space between words. Her editor sent it back with a different note this time: too vague. Make it concrete. Give me something I can sell.

She showed him the note. He read it, folded it, and put it in his pocket. "You write me like a specimen," he said. "Like something in a jar. Like you are trying to preserve me before I rot."

"I am trying to understand you."

"Writing is not understanding. It is organizing. You put things in boxes and label them and put them on a shelf and then you say you know what is in the box. You do not know anything."

She should have been angry. She was a professional. She had been given a assignment and she was doing it. But she was not angry. She was afraid. Because he was right, and she had suspected it for months, and the suspicion was a crack in the wall she had built around her work, and cracks were dangerous things because they let the cold in.

She stopped showing him her work after that. She continued seeing him, but the dynamic shifted. The interviews became dinners. The dinners became walks. The walks became something she could not name because naming it would require her to admit that the boundary between journalist and subject had dissolved, and if that boundary dissolved, what was she? A woman sitting in a cafe with a wounded man, drinking terrible coffee and watching him type words he would never publish.

He woke one night and knocked on her door at two in the morning. He was wearing the same clothes he had worn that afternoon. His leg was bad that week, the old wound in his thigh flaring up with the damp weather, and he was walking with a stiffness that he tried to hide.

"I could not sleep," he said.

"Could not sleep is not a reason to knock on a stranger's door at two in the morning."

"I know. That is why I am here. I am a stranger knocking on a door at two in the morning. I am exactly what I seem to be."

She let him in. He sat at her table and drank a glass of water and sat there for an hour, staring at the wall, and then he left without saying thank you, which was the most honest thing anyone had ever done for her.

The fire happened on a Tuesday in November.

She had gone to his hotel room on the Rue de Seine to return a book he had lent her, a collection of Rilke in an English translation that was almost as bad as the original was good. The door was unlocked. She pushed it open and called his name, and the smell hit her before she saw the fire: wool and cotton and the sweet, chemical smell of burning fabric.

The blanket on his bed was smoldering. A cigarette had fallen from his hand onto the sheet while he slept, or something he had mistaken for sleep, and the blanket had caught and was now eating itself slowly, the way things eat themselves when they are not in a hurry.

She threw the blanket off the bed. It burned her forearm, and she did not let go. She dragged it to the sink, turned on the cold water, and soaked it until the smoking stopped and the smell changed from burning to wet, which was not better but was different, and difference was what she dealt in.

Jack woke up during this process. He emerged from the bedroom in his underwear, his leg stiff, his face blank with the particular shock of a man who wakes up inside a disaster and has to take a moment to orient himself to the fact that his life is on fire.

He looked at the blanket. He looked at the sink. He looked at Eleanor, who was standing in front of the sink with a wet, smoldering blanket in her hands and a burn on her arm that was turning red.

He sat down on the floor. He did not cry. He did not shout. He sat with his back against the wall and his knees drawn up and he looked at the wet blanket and he said, in a voice that was so quiet she could barely hear it over the sound of the water running in the sink, "I cannot even keep a blanket safe."

She turned off the w

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