I stood and turned away, pretended to check the damp clothing that I knew couldn’t possibly have dried yet. And what was it you wanted when you came up here? Your voice was harsh, Jane, as raw as the corroded door hinge on an abandoned jail cell. You remember? What are all of you always looking for inside me?

But I made no reply to that, Jane; and none to the anger, either, or the fear, nor to the language you used the same way you cut thin grooves of living pain into your wrists and arms. Nor, for that matter, did I ever devise a response for the sweetness of your face peering up at me from my sleeping bag that night and asking plaintively if things might be better tomorrow? And would I help you? The grid of infected wounds on your scalp was livid in the tossing light of our campfire. I levered the unburned ends of sticks into the center of the blaze with a wand of green willow and said yes, as you knew I would.

#


More alley than street, Rue Jacques Callot links Rue de Seine to Rue Mazarine. The Ecole des Beaux-Arts is nearby, and students perfecting the art of nonchalance helped to buffer the infestation of tourists that might otherwise have disfigured our favorite café. La Palette became for Sunny and me a place of rendezvous at the end of the day. Newlyweds indulge each other; but Sunny’s fondness for sorting through the interminable shops of La Rive Gauche was not matched by my own, and I was allowed to wander. On the day that we learned Jane was dying, I had spent much of the afternoon in Musée d’Orsay, continued on up to the Pont de la Concorde then returned by Boulevard St-Germain. The outdoor tables at La Palette stretched down “Jack Alley,” as we called it, and I found Sunny tucked in among the potted plants, a glass of Brouilly untouched before her on the small round table, the plastic slab of her cellphone lying beside it like a tiny high-tech coffin, and her eyes roaring with apprehension: Where were you! Sunny loved touching objects as much as you loved stripping them away, Jane. Sunny picked things up, turned them over, cradled them in her palms, hefted them, stroked them with her fingertips, held them out at arm’s length to consider them within a wider context or brought them up close as if she would sniff them, taste them, kiss them even in response to the pleasure she felt at their existence. You avoided physical contact, Jane, walked in the middle of passageways or staircases, as if the side walls or hand rails might leap out and seize you.

The waiter at La Palette trailed after me doubtfully, guessing correctly that my usual glass of Leffe would not be appropriate.

It’s in her liver! Sunny cried as I settled across from her. And her lymph nodes! Everywhere!

I have no memory of you at our wedding, Jane; although of course you would have been there. Wouldn’t you have blessed our nuptials? Lifted a wine glass and offered an amusing toast? Wished us well and meant it? Of course you would. And I can remember your poor mother speaking for your father who had not lived to see either of his daughters married, and Sunny’s friends, one of whom seemed to think he should have been in my place, and even Jack Shott, smugly irritable and eager to leave as soon as possible. But of you, Jane, nothing. No recollection.

But then I can only barely reconstruct your presence at your own wedding, so self-muted had you become. Your acknowledgment of your vows had seemed the most casual of affirmations, like the choice of paper over plastic at the supermarket checkout counter; and it was the deepening of your absence from yourself that had brought Sunny and me together, much the way buildings on the opposing rims of a sinkhole tilt toward each other before finally toppling in.

I remember how lightly you disregarded your poor husband’s broken hands—hands that at the end of the evening were so swollen and livid he could no longer even close them into fists. Some men at some bar, you said vaguely in one of the few moments we managed to have alone. Probably they made comments. You looked away, a tiny smile arriving, your bare shoulders and pale chest frail and insubstantial in the humid starlight, your slender arms hanging at your sides, boneless as bleached eels.

Your new husband had trapped me coming out of the bathroom, Jane. I think he must have followed me there. I tried to walk past him but he turned with me until I was caught awkwardly in the hallway leading down to his boyhood bedroom.

You’ve come a long way for this, Jack Shott said.

I nodded. He kept looking at me so I said, Yes, I have.

You were Jane’s teacher. Over there in La La land. He gestured vaguely toward the west with one swollen red claw. You took care of her.