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Page 33.
Chapter 7
 A telephone waited by a couch. Once a week, a duster held in long, slender fingers descended to brush away the effluvium of time, that weightless dust of motes, some of them raining to earth out of the sum and essence of spent meteorites, others rasped off mountain tops by the wind and after airborne months seeking shelter behind white and remodeled walls; some, more prosaic, raised out of the pores of the sun-baked sidewalks of the Fifth Arrondissement around the Pantheon-Sorbonne on the Left Bank, part of the ancient Latin Quarter. Sunlight and heat pressed through the old walls after a brief flight to tumble microscopically over the fields of wood and rug and couch. Sometimes the stereo glowed in dusty warmth with throbbing music. More usually it was quiet, a silence filled with the rustle of cellulose crackling in growing house plants, the rustle of a stray breeze in yellow curtains, the padding of bare feet on sticky wood floors, the sigh of a comb through long blonde hair, and once in a great while, the murmur of a voice speaking alone. From the gardens below, ghostly children’s voices rose when sunlight flooded the room, echoing generation after timeless generation in their playful conflicts and conspiracies.
Nightfall.
It had been a hot, sunny day and now night steeped the room with inky-blue-black promise. The telephone slept, cut off by the weight of its receiver from the million-fold electronic babble washing the city in conversations. A fan hummed, oscillating under a rubber palm on a teak table. A gadzillion of crispy leaves crinkled directly outside. It was the earliest summer heat. That rare, brief moment of year was at hand when one would be comfortable with the temperature of evening, when inside and outside falsely promised never again to be irreconcilable, when moths brushed blindly against window screens, when a lemon ice could pierce the palate with citric relief, when streetlights outside were yellow and friendly.
A distant and electric urge startled the sleeping telephone, but did not yet cause it to ring.
The apartment was bathed in a cool blue light. The dry, warm voice of a TV announcer, the rustle of thousands of football fans, the stirring march of a razor blade manufacturer made the dim apartment come alive. A pair of long, slender pale legs were draped carelessly over the armrests of an easy chair. Long fingers crunched in a bag of cheddar puffs. The air smelled of salt and butter. Ice tinkled in a cola glass. A taxi tooted outside. The phone rang. A jet whistled high up in the night sky amid thinly banked clouds under some constellation. The phone burred under the rubber palm. The taxi tooted impatiently. The phone burred. A car passed in the night. A door slammed in the rambling, turreted house.
“Hello?”
“Emma.”
“Yes?”
“Marc Fontbleu.” A car door closed, a taxi radio crackled, a motor revved, tires rustled on the dry street speeding away.
“How are you?” She sounded vague, or absent, or something.
“I’m okay,” he said.
“How are you?” she repeated senselessly, feeling an unexpected surge in her stomach.
“Okay, how are you?” he insisted.
She dropped an uneaten handful of cheddar puffs into its bag and settled on the couch, her long bare legs shimmering in the TV light as the million fans shouted, footballers ran on the field dribbling the ball with their cleated shoes, and the leaves crinkled outside, bringing in a fresh and sweet-smelling breeze. “I didn’t think I’d hear from you again,” she said.
“Maybe you were right,” he said.
“Where are you?” She heard the unmistakable sound of a tractor-trailer rig passing on a busy street, and realized not quite immediately that it wasn’t outside but on his end. How close they were, so far yet in one head together like a pair of earphones, a left and a right, a male and a female.
He sounded bored. “Oh, one of these bars. A regular meat rack. I want to leave. I’m so sick of that whole scene.”
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