Invisible

  All the odder, then, that he should make up those things about you.

  I know you don’t believe me. I know you think I’m trying to protect myself, that I don’t want to admit those things could have happened between us. But it wasn’t like that, I promise. I’ve been thinking about it for the past twenty-four hours, and the only answer I’ve come up with is that those pages are a dying man’s fantasy, a dream of what he wished had happened but never did.

  Wished?

  Yes, wished. I’m not denying those feelings were in the air, but I had no interest in acting on them. Adam was too attached to me, Jim. It was an unhealthy attachment, and after we’d been living together for a while that summer, he started telling me that I’d spoiled him for other women, that I was the only woman he could ever love, and that if we weren’t brother and sister, he would marry me in a second. Sort of joking, of course, but I didn’t like it. To be perfectly honest, I was relieved when he went to Paris.

  Interesting.

  And then, as we both know, less than a month later he was back—booted out in disgrace, as he put it to me at the time. But I had another roommate by then, and Adam had to look for a new apartment of his own. We were still friends, still the best of friends, but I started to put a little distance between us, to back away from him for his own good. You saw a fair amount of him during your last two years of college, but how often did you see him with me?

  I’m trying to remember . . . Not a lot. No more than a couple of times.

  I rest my case.

  So what happens to his book now? Do we put it in a drawer and forget about it?

  Not necessarily. In its present form, the book is unpublishable. Not only is it untrue—at least partly untrue—but if those untrue pages ever found their way into the world, they would create misery and disaster for untold numbers of people. I’m a married woman, Jim. I have two daughters and three grandchildren, dozens of relatives, hundreds of friends, a stepniece I’m very fond of, and it would be a crime to publish the book as it stands now. Agreed?

  Yes, yes. You won’t get an argument from me.

  On the other hand, I was deeply moved by the book. It brought my brother back to me in ways I hadn’t expected, in ways that utterly surprised me, and if we can transform it into something publishable, I would give the project my blessing.

  I’m a little lost. How do you make an unpublishable book publishable?

  That’s where you come into it. If you’re not interested in helping, we’ll drop the matter now and never talk about it again. But if you do want to help, then this is what I propose. You take the notes for the third part and put them into decent shape. That shouldn’t be too hard for you. I could never do it myself, but you’re the writer, you’ll know how to handle it. Then, most important, you go through the manuscript and change all the names. Remember that old TV show from the fifties? The names have been changed to protect the innocent. You change the names of the people and the places, you add or subtract any material you see fit, and then you publish the book under your own name.

  But then it wouldn’t be Adam’s book anymore. It feels dishonest somehow. Like stealing . . . like some weird form of plagiarism.

  Not if you frame it correctly. If you give credit to Adam for the passages he wrote—to the real Adam under the false name you’ll invent for him—then you won’t be stealing from him, you’ll be honoring him.

  But no one will know it’s Adam.

  Does it matter? You and I will know, and as far as I’m concerned, we’re the only ones who count.

  You’re forgetting my wife.

  You trust her, don’t you?

  Of course I trust her.

  Then the three of us will know.

  I’m not sure, Gwyn. I need to think about it. Give me a little time, okay?

  Take all the time you need. There’s no rush.

  Her story was convincingly told, more than plausible, I felt, and for her sake I wanted to believe it. But I couldn’t, at least not entirely, at least not with a strong doubt that the text of Summer was a story of lived experience and not some salacious dream of a sick and dying man. To satisfy my curiosity, I took a day off from the novel I was writing and went up to the Columbia campus, where I learned from an administrator at the School of International Affairs that Rudolf Born had been employed as a visiting professor during the 1966–67 academic year, and then, after a session in the microfilm room of Butler Library, the same Castle of Yawns where Walker had worked over the summer, that the corpse of eighteen-year-old Cedric Williams had been discovered one May morning in Riverside Park with more than a dozen knife wounds in his chest and upper body. These other things, as Gwyn had called them, had been accurately reported in Walker’s manuscript, and if these other things were true, why would he have gone to the trouble of fabricating something that wasn’t true, damning himself with a highly detailed, self-incriminating account of incestuous love? It’s possible that Gwyn’s version of those two summer months was correct, but it’s also possible that she lied to me. And if she lied, who can blame her for not wanting the facts to be dragged out into the open? Anyone would lie in her situation, everyone would lie, lying would be the only alternative. As I rode back to Brooklyn on the subway, I decided that it didn’t matter to me. It mattered to her, but not to me.

  Several months went by, and in that time I scarcely thought about Gwyn’s proposal. I was hard at work on my book, entering the last stages of a novel that had already consumed several years of my life, and Walker and his sister began to recede, to melt away, turning into two dim figures on the far horizon of consciousness. Whenever Adam’s book happened to make an appearance in my mind, I was fairly certain that I didn’t want to get involved with it, that the episode was finished. Then, two things happened that led me to reverse my thinking. I came to the end of my own book, which meant that I was free to turn my attention to other things, and I stumbled upon some new information connected to Walker’s story, a coda, as it were, a last little chapter that gave the project new meaning for me—and with that meaning an impetus to begin.

  I have already described how I revamped Walker’s notes for Fall. As for the names, they have been invented according to Gwyn’s instructions, and the reader can therefore be assured that Adam Walker is not Adam Walker. Gwyn Walker Tedesco is not Gwyn Walker Tedesco. Margot Jouffroy is not Margot Jouffroy. Hélène and Cécile Juin are not Hélène and Cécile Juin. Cedric Williams is not Cedric Williams. Sandra Williams is not Sandra Williams, and her daughter, Rebecca, is not Rebecca. Not even Born is Born. His real name was close to that of another Provençal poet, and I took the liberty to substitute the translation of that other poet by not-Walker with a translation of my own, which means that the remarks about Dante’s Inferno on the first page of this book were not in not-Walker’s original manuscript. Last of all, I don’t suppose it is necessary for me to add that my name is not Jim.

  Westfield, New Jersey, is not Westfield, New Jersey. Echo Lake is not Echo Lake. Oakland, California, is not Oakland, California. Boston is not Boston, and although not-Gwyn works in publishing, she is not the director of a university press. New York is not New York, Columbia University is not Columbia University, but Paris is Paris. Paris alone is real. I managed to keep it in because the Hôtel du Sud vanished long ago, and all recorded evidence of not-Walker’s stay there in 1967 has long since vanished as well.

  I finished my novel late last summer (2007). Soon after that, my wife and I began organizing a trip to Paris (her sister’s daughter was marrying a Frenchman in October), and the talk about Paris got me thinking about Walker again. I wondered if I could track down some of the players from the unsuccessful revenge drama he mounted there forty years ago, and if I could, whether any of them would be willing to talk to me. Born was of particular interest, but I would have been glad to sit down with any of the others I managed to find—Margot, Hélène, or Cécile. I had no luck with the first three, but when I googled Cécile Juin on the Internet, abundant amou
nts of information came flying up onto the screen. After my encounter with the eighteen-year-old girl in Walker’s manuscript, I wasn’t surprised to learn that she had grown up to be a literary scholar. She had taught at universities in Lyon and Paris, and for the past ten years she had been attached to the CNRS (the National Center for Scientific Research) as part of a small team investigating the manuscripts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French writers. Her specialty was Balzac, about whom she had published two books, but numerous other papers and articles were mentioned as well, a whole catalogue of work spanning three decades. Good for her, I thought. And good for me, too, since I was now in a position to write to her.

  We exchanged two short letters. In mine, I introduced myself as a friend of Walker’s, told her the news of Adam’s recent death, and asked if it would be possible for us to get together during my upcoming visit to Paris. It was short and to the point, with no questions about her mother’s marriage to Born, nothing about Walker’s notes for Fall, simply a request to meet her in October. She wrote back promptly. In my translation from the French, her letter read as follows:

  I am devastated to learn of Adam’s death. I knew him briefly when I was a young girl in Paris many years ago, but I have never forgotten him. He was the first love of my life, and then I did him an ugly turn, a thing so cruel and unforgivable that it has been weighing on my conscience ever since. I sent him a letter of apology after he returned to New York, but the letter came back to me, marked Addressee Unknown.

  Yes, I will be happy to see you when you come to Paris next month. Please be warned, however. I am a silly old woman, and my emotions tend to run away from me. If we talk about Adam (which I assume we will), there’s a good chance that I will break down and start crying. You mustn’t take it personally.

  Fifty-eight wasn’t old, of course, and I doubted there was anything about Cécile Juin that could be described as silly. The woman’s sense of humor was apparently intact, then, and successful as she was in her narrow world of academic research, she must have understood how peculiar a life she had chosen for herself: sequestered in the small rooms of libraries and underground vaults, poring over the manuscripts of the dead, a career spent in a soundless domain of dust. In a P.S. to her letter, she revealed how sardonically she looked upon her work. She recognized my name, she said, and if I was the James Freeman she thought I was, she wondered if I would be willing to participate in a survey she and her staff were conducting on the composition methods of contemporary writers. Computer or typewriter, pencil or pen, notebook or loose sheets of paper, how many drafts to finish a book. Yes, I know, she added, very dull stuff. But that’s our job at the CNRS: to make the world as dull as possible.

  There was self-mockery in her letter, but there was also anguish, and I was somewhat startled by how vividly she remembered Walker. She had known him for only a couple of weeks in the distant days of her girlhood, and yet their friendship must have opened up something in her that altered her perception of herself, that thrust her for the first time into a direct confrontation with the depths of her own heart. I have never forgotten him. He was the first love of my life. I hadn’t been prepared for such a forthright confession. Walker’s notes had dealt with the problem of her growing crush on him, but her feelings turned out to have been even more intense than he had imagined. And then she spat in his face. At the time, she must have felt her anger was justified. He had slandered Born, he had upset her mother, and Cécile had felt betrayed. But then, not long after that, she had written him a letter of apology. Did that mean she had rethought her position? Had something happened to make her believe Walker’s accusations were true? It was the first question I was intending to ask her.

  My wife and I booked a room at the Hôtel d’Aubusson on the rue Dauphine. We had stayed there before, had stayed in several Paris hotels over the years, but I wanted to go back to the rue Dauphine this time because it happened to be smack in the middle of the neighborhood where Walker had lived in 1967. The Hôtel du Sud might have been gone, but many of the other places he had frequented were not. Vagenende was still there. La Palette and the Café Conti were still open for business, and even the cafeteria on the rue Mazet was still dishing out inedible food to hungry students. So much had changed in the past forty years, and the once down-at-the-heels neighborhood had evolved into one of the most fashionable areas of Paris, but most of the landmarks from Walker’s story had survived. After checking into the hotel on the first morning, my wife and I went outside and wandered through the streets for a couple of hours. Every time I pointed out one of those places to her, she would squeeze my hand and emit a small, sarcastic grunt. You’re incorrigible, she finally said. Not at all, I replied. Just soaking up the atmosphere . . . preparing myself for tomorrow.

  Cécile Juin showed up at four o’clock the following afternoon, striding into the hotel bar with a small leather briefcase tucked under her left arm. Judging from Walker’s descriptions of her in the notes for Fall, her body had expanded dramatically since 1967. The thin, narrow-shouldered girl of eighteen was now a round, plumpish woman of fifty-eight with short brown hair (dyed, some gray roots visible when she shook my hand and sat down across from me), a slightly wrinkled face, a slightly sagging chin, and the same alert and darting eyes Walker had noticed when they first met. Her manner was a bit skittish, perhaps, but she was no longer the trembling, nail-biting bundle of nerves who had caused her mother so much worry in the past. She was a woman in full possession of herself, a woman who had traveled great distances in the years since Walker had known her. A few seconds after she sat down, I was a little surprised to see her pull out a pack of cigarettes, and then, as the minutes rolled on, doubly surprised to learn that she was a heavy smoker, with a deep, rumbling cough and the rough-edged contralto voice of a tobacco veteran. When the barman arrived at our table and asked us what we wanted, she ordered a whiskey. Neat. I told him to make it two.

  I had prepared myself for a prissy, schoolmarmish eccentric. Cécile might have had her eccentricities, but the woman I met that day was down-to-earth, funny, enjoyable to be with. She was simply but elegantly dressed (a sign of confidence, I felt, a sign of self-respect), and although she wasn’t someone who bothered with lipstick or nail polish, she looked thoroughly feminine in her gray woolen suit—with silver bracelets around each wrist and a bright, multicolored scarf wrapped around her neck. During the course of our long, two-hour conversation, I found out that she had spent fifteen years in psychoanalysis (from age twenty to thirty-five), had been married and divorced, had married again to a man twenty years older than she was (he died in 1999), and that she had no children. On this last point she commented: A few regrets, yes, but the truth is I probably would have been a terrible mother. No aptitude, you understand.

  For the first twenty or thirty minutes, we mostly talked about Adam. Cécile wanted to know everything I could tell her about what had happened in his life from the moment she lost touch with him. I explained that I had lost touch with him as well, and since we hadn’t resumed contact until just before his death, my only source of information was the letter he had written to me last spring. One by one, I took her through the salient points Walker had mentioned—falling down the stairs and breaking his leg on the night of his graduation from college, the luck of drawing a high number in the draft lottery, his move to London and the years of writing and translating, the publication of his first and only book, the decision to abandon poetry and study law, his work as a community activist in northern California, his marriage to Sandra Williams, the difficulties of being an interracial couple in America, his stepdaughter, Rebecca, and her two children—and then I added that if she wanted to learn more, she should probably arrange to meet with his sister, who would no doubt be glad to fill her in on the smallest details. As promised, Cécile broke down and cried. It touched me that she understood herself well enough to have been able to predict those tears, but even though she knew they were coming, there was nothing forced or willed about
them. They were genuine, spontaneous tears, and although I had been expecting them myself, I genuinely felt sorry for her.

  She said: He lived around here, you know. Just thirty seconds away, on the rue Mazarine. I walked past the building on my way to see you just now—the first time I’ve been on that street in years. Odd, isn’t it? Odd that the hotel should be gone, that terrible, broken-down place where Adam lived. It’s so alive in my memory, how can it possibly be gone? I was there only once, one time for an hour or two, but I can’t forget it, it’s still burning inside me. I went there because I was angry at him. One day early in the morning. I cut school and walked over to the hotel. I climbed the rickety stairs, I knocked on his door. I wanted to strangle him because I was so angry, because I loved him so much. I was an idiot girl, you understand, an impossible, unlikable girl, a gawky imbecile girl with glasses on my nose and a sick, quivering heart, and I had the temerity to fall in love with a boy like Adam, perfect Adam, why in God’s name did he even talk to me? He let me in. He calmed me down. He was kind to me, so kind to me, my life was in his hands, and he was kind to me. I should have known then what a good person he was. I never should have doubted a word he said. Adam. I dreamed of kissing him. That was all I ever wanted—to be kissed by Adam, to give myself to Adam—but time ran out on me, and we never kissed, we never touched, and before I knew it he was gone.

  That was when Cécile broke down and started to cry. It took two or three minutes before she was able to talk again, and when the conversation continued, the first thing she said opened the door onto the next phase of our encounter. I’m sorry, she mumbled. I’m blathering on like a madwoman. You have no idea what I’m talking about.