The Path Of All That Falls Read online

  ALSO BY FRANZ NEUMANN

  Promises Of The Head To The Heart, stories

  Facts About Blakey, stories

  Streams At Night, a novel

  THE PATH OF ALL THAT FALLS

  a novel

  Chapter 1

  Copper brought the news. The words tunneled through bundles of telephone cable buried underground, then leapt softly across the city on arcs of telephone wire. The syllables entered a third-floor apartment and there, with the strength of a whisper, ended in the receiver Bianca held to her ear. I’m sorry, repeated a woman’s voice. So, so sorry.

  Bianca felt calm when the gendarmes arrived to escort her to her husband. During the labyrinthine drive, she watched the cars jockey for open patches of slick pavement. She watched the windshield wipers sweep across the whole scene, almost tireless in their duty were it not for a hint of rubbery complaint. She did not panic. David would be nursing a sprained leg, or a broken arm, perhaps just a bandaged contusion from his accident. The car pulled up at the rear of a gray building. From the outside, the building was unassuming, inside it was hushed, almost pretending not to exist. She realized they were at the morgue. As she followed the gendarmes down the corridor she felt the urge to laugh. Where was she at this moment, really? Sleeping, of course. Was it the middle of the night now as she dreamt, or was she drugged within the unknown boundaries of an overly-long afternoon nap? She could be in a park, in the rented apartment, maybe even on a bench along the river. It was disconcerting, this sense of not knowing where she actually, actually was. Instead of napping, she should be shopping, or waiting to pay the bill at a cafe. La note, s’il vous plâit. Or, since she was on the subject of this dream, she should be having flamboyant fantasies instead of finding herself issuing bone-real complaints. She was certainly not here, so many turns and doorways later, staring at her husband’s body, laid out as though asleep on the brushed steel countertop that matched the one in their kitchen back home. David, wake up, she said to herself. Let’s end this scene with a cliché.

  He died immediately, someone said. The man who spoke appeared to be a doctor. Was he a doctor? she asked. Yes. Yes he was. Like the other men in the room, this doctor seemed both somber and bored. She wondered why there would be a doctor in a morgue. He could be lying. She tried to conjure up some dream extras, a clown, cats, Walter Cronkite. She wanted Walter to recite the lyrics to a Stevie Wonder tune, as he had a few dreams ago, in a reassuring, droll roll of words. Like a fool I went and stayed too long / Now I’m wondering if your love’s still strong / Ooo baby, here I am, signed, sealed delivered, I’m yours. But Walter Cronkite was a no-show for this act. She glanced at the present company and wondered what was expected of her. She nodded at what they told her, but she wasn’t really listening. No one, it seemed, spoke English, or at least the kind of English Bianca could understand at this moment. Simple words, free from accents and talk of accidents. If this were real, she knew she wouldn’t be this calm. She would be desperate, crazed, collapsing with grief. That was a great consolation. Then the explanation came and poisoned everything. This is shock, a voice inside her explained. She recognized the voice. It was Walter Cronkite. Mr. Cronkite cleared his throat. He’d just read the information on a bulletin and now he had to tell her. He was duty-bound. He had no choice. Your husband is dead. What you’re feeling now is shock. The truth’ll hit you and then you’re going to lose it. But not just yet. I’ll keep you posted. That’s the way it is. The man who said he was a doctor rattled a half-filled orange vial, then pressed the container of pills into Bianca’s hand. He folded her fingers around the petite bottle. She had such difficulty grasping the container.

  Back in the apartment she and David had rented, Bianca tried to rid the rooms of the darkness. But no matter how many lights she turned on, and no matter the number of windows she unlatched and swung wide to the warm outside air, the darkness would not leave. Bianca felt the same numbness that had followed her from the morgue. She took three more of the small white pills to keep herself numb.

  On the floor of the bedroom, David’s suitcase yawned open like a giant clam displaying a fabric muscle. David had been so busy over the past couple weeks that he hadn’t even bothered to move his clothes out of the suitcase. On top of the half-filled dresser sat pages from David’s project on Fryderyk Chopin, as well as a book of Chopin’s correspondence, various dog-eared journals on music theory and music history, and a small pocket-sized bust of the composer that David had been using as a paperweight since he’d begun writing the Chopin book last year. Bianca picked up the bust and ran her thumb over Chopin’s face. She placed it aside, took the book of Chopin’s collected letters, and sat down on the bed. David’s illegible notes were scrawled in the margins. Her eyes rested on a page where David had circled a line Chopin had written: You can’t think how delightful it was to meet her more intimately, just in the house, on a sofa. She closed the book.

  Just a year earlier, David had been having an affair with one of his students. He’d even brought the girl over to their house during finals week. Afterward, there had been flimsy excuses on his part for having cheated, not mentioned specifically, but there. His stupidity, Bianca’s seven-year age over him, their failure at pregnancy. She had kicked David out of the house for a week before letting him return. He’d then taken a one-year sabbatical from the college, holed himself up at home in his office and wrote his book on Chopin. Now they were spending a month in Paris while he worked with a French translator. A publisher here with a reputation for putting out academic titles with low print runs had accepted a French translation, even though David hadn’t yet published the book on Chopin at home, in English. This was, at least for him, a working vacation. A tax write-off. A deduction.

  Coming to Paris had marked an entire year since David’s cheating—affair was too gracious a word. On days when she forgot his infidelity, life seemed good again. And then there were the other days, even here in Paris, when the thought of the student raced to her mind as soon as she awoke. On those days, she wondered what David’s eyes saw in a waitress, or a woman following her dog down the street, or the college girls laughing their way back into Paris now at the end of summer. Bianca’s suspicious eyes became masculine, alert to the shadow of cleavage, high hemlines and tight skirts. On such a day, the smallest thing could bring up such hurt, like this line in a letter by Chopin. You can’t think how delightful it was to meet her more intimately, just in the house, on a sofa. Had David circled the line because of its happy coincidence to his own feelings with the student? Even after a year of repentance, of verbal I-love-yous, did he love her? Bianca loved her husband, still, but she trusted him less now. The sad fact was that one indiscretion flawed him so deeply, for life. And then, right then as she sat on the bed with the closed book of Chopin’s letters in her hand, it hit her. David. Dead.

  Chapter 2

  Earlier that day, aboard a tourist boat on the Seine, David Ferriswheel felt a phrase drop into his head. It went like this: What kept him good was the fear of facing death during a moment of guilt. The sudden, full-formed appearance of the sentence spooked him. He couldn’t place the words from anything he’d recently overheard, read or seen. It felt intimate, almost whispered in his ear. Which didn’t surprise him. For the past few days, he’d felt as though he were being shadowed.

  David took his hands from Bombay’s shoulders and backed his chair slightly away from hers.

  “I’m sorry,” Bombay said. “Your hands must be tired.” Her neck was red from the pressure of his thumbs working her muscles, there below the blonde, half-curled wisps of her hairline. She turned her chair to face their small table at the boat’s edge. The phrase had interrupted David while he’d been conce
ntrating on more than Bombay’s stiff neck. There was her hair, for one. She was a natural blonde in a shining Parisian sea of brown and black. A Dane by birth. And there was the perfume she wore, so familiar that he was almost certain his wife used it. He didn’t know the name of the perfume, but the scent was strong and stirred him in a manipulative, sentimental way.

  A moment of guilt.

  No, he decided. The phrase was foreign. He certainly didn’t feel guilty enough for his subconscious to spit out such a long literate line. But before it slipped out of his memory, he considered writing it down.

  “Do you have a pen?” he asked.

  Bombay set her purse in her lap, opened it and found one. “Okay?”

  David nodded, taking the Mont Blanc and pulling off the cap. “Regi’s?”

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s been using them all week.” David found a clean spot on his napkin and, keeping the space taut with his thumb and index finger, wrote:

  What kept him good was

  the fear of facing death

  during a moment of guilt.

  “Is that something for your next book?” Bombay asked, running her hand along her neck to feel what good he’d done. On the taut fabric covering the hollow between Bombay’s breasts lay flecks of oil from their shared appetizer. He considered changing what he’d written to: during a moment of indelible guilt. Food stains turning into adjectives, modifiers of guilt. But the phrase didn’t seem his to embroider.

  “You’re staring.” Bombay smiled. “Did you write something about me?”

  “No.”

  “Paris?”

  He shook his head and handed back the pen. “Just a phrase that dropped into my head.” He coughed.

  She grabbed the napkin from him before he could react, and read what he’d jotted down. “Who said that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She kissed the napkin and handed it back to him, rouged. “You can take that back with you to California. A souvenir.”

  He tucked the napkin beneath his wine glass to keep Bombay’s imprinted kiss from blowing away. Bombay was as much a flirt as he, engaged in that low-grade flavor where the possibility of anything more was just fiction. The kind played between strangers with different trains to catch. Office-party flirtation. She was attractive, sure, though calling her beautiful was a decision that seemed to need outside corroboration. She possessed the kind of face that demanded study. Large eyes, an eighteenth-century chin and straight bangs cut high on an already high forehead, like the hair on an old doll that’s been put through generations of child-inflicted styles. Bombay could be any age between twenty and thirty. Decade accuracy was the best David could do. Time enough to grant Bombay the possibility of children and a half-dozen heartaches, for half-innocence or tired desire. Her body, though, was incontestably beautiful. Even her tense neck, which was probably in knots from the work she did for Regi, was sculpture. The idea of Bombay having typed up Regi’s French translation of the Chopin book made David smile.

  David divided the rest of the wine into their glasses. He held the napkin down while he brought the glass to his mouth, his index finger changing the stain of Bombay’s lipstick into a symbol for a whisper. He listened and heard only cars and the boat’s engines. He breathed deeply, taking in the odor of traffic and sandstone, of paint, flat beer and flowers—scents that cooked in the setting autumn sun. Surprisingly, it wasn’t an unclean smell. The city seemed able to transform the different elements into a recipe for sweetness. As the boat slid into the refreshing shade of a bridge, David wished he and his wife didn’t have to leave Paris so soon. He didn’t want to seriously consider the end of his sabbatical or think of the fall semester and a return to an undistinguished career as an assistant music history professor. Just then, a smear of yellow fell from the far side of the bridge, not far from the edge of the boat. Again, he felt something like déjà vu, only even closer and more intimate.

  Bombay turned at the sound of the splash, sending the wine from her glass into the river. “What was that?”

  David stood up for a moment, realized he was a bit drunk, and sat back down. A mass of pigeons emerged from their camouflage under the bridge and took to flight in a flutter of gray. A car horn sounded and did not cease. As they neared the bobbing concentric circles at the edge of shade and sun, David leaned over the railing and followed the rays of light as they descended into the Seine like rosaries, here a bead of Styrofoam, further down some water-clogged wood, then hairy clods, reflections and darkness. For a moment he saw it. Deep, dark and fading.

  “A scooter,” he said. “A Vespa, I think.”

  As the tourist boat emerged from beneath the bridge, he gazed back and saw a man wearing a motorcycle helmet hanging from the edge of the bridge railing. Behind him, two drivers climbed from cars fused at the grills. A hood flew open on its own. As pedestrians pulled the motorcyclist back onto the bridge, the drivers tried to disconnect the horn. David didn’t know if they succeeded, or if the tourist boat simply drifted out of earshot of the accident.

  “I hear you get a wish when a scooter falls into the Seine,” Bombay said.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s a fact. My wish is more wine. You?”

  David saw no reason to keep the libations down to one bottle. His luck was good. After all, his work was done now, as of this afternoon. Bombay would have the manuscript ready for the publisher next week, and then there would be one pure week of vacation before having to leave. “Sure,” he said.

  “Sure,” Bombay repeated slowly, exaggerating the word. He didn’t like the way she mimicked him, but he did approve of the way she nudged her glass until it was beside his, making the hour seem a prelude to impending temptation. He knew how far he could take it, now.

  “I’m going to freshen up,” Bombay said. The phrase made David feel like he was waiting in a hotel lobby, or better yet, just outside the doorway to a hotel bedroom.

  David watched her walk away, spying the wedge of bare skin between the bottom of her skirt and the top of her stockings, bands of white that flashed with every stride toward the stairs. He watched her until she disappeared, leaving him with the first stirrings of an erection he wasn’t sure he wanted. He switched his thoughts.

  Sure. Without the context of Bombay’s smile, her repetition of a harmless, ascending word spoken like tightness gone slack, seemed tinged with something half-heartedly malicious. He disliked being stripped down to the status of a tourist. For the past month, he’d worked at assimilating himself into just a passerby, a man on his way to work or to see a friend. He’d hoped to evoke the stride of a resident and pass streets without giving them a diversionary glance, as though he knew their stores and cafes, their quirky angles and small, shady parks. When he was with Bianca, this pretension was impossible. Having never been in Paris before, Bianca was drawn—and drew him—to storefronts blindingly bright with window glare, or to the distant brass tones of a band performing in a park they couldn’t quite find. This was his first extended trip to Paris as well, but he tried not to be so blatantly purchased by the swirl of the traffic, the rise of ornate apartments or the anno over the transom of the buildings they passed. Mornings, when he left his wife in bed and grabbed a paper and fresh bread from the corner market, he tried to believe Paris was his hometown. He’d even resurrected his one semester of high school French, counting his steps up and down the apartment’s stairs in the strange logic of the language’s numerics.

  David checked his watch. He picked up Bianca’s cell phone, there on the table, and punched in the number for the apartment he and his wife were renting. As he waited for the connection to go through, David tipped his near-empty wine glass on its side and watched the puddle of wine bead to the edge and gather on the rim. It swelled, but did not go over. The self-restraint of meniscus. Self-restraint was key. Finally, he heard the apartment owner’s answering machine kick in, and after a few words of French, a tone.

  “Bianca?” he asked. �
�It’s David. You there? I’m...where am I? I’m somewhere on the Seine. Hello?” He paused. “Nope, not there. Okay.”

  David placed the phone back on the table and listened to the multilingual gossip about prices, waiters, architecture and food rising from the deck of the boat and from the open windows on the floor below. David’s French was confined to the un, deux, trois of his footsteps. If Regi, his book’s translator, were here, he’d translate the entire post-Babel gamut for David. They were the same age, David and Regi, both in the final gasp of their thirties. That Regi had found the time to learn so many languages irked David. While researching his book, David had read of Chopin’s inability to completely transmute his ear and tongue from Polish to French. It was a great consolation to David how Chopin, despite his musical genius, Parisian tenancy and change of citizenship, could only write French words he didn’t need to look up in a dictionary. Or he’d make do by spelling a word with the phonetics of his native Polish. If genius had trouble mastering the language, David didn’t feel too badly about only being able to count a few numbers. Besides, Regi was different. He must have grown up on a different metabolic clock. Or perhaps he never watched television, or was never dulled by sex, or never slept. He could, conceivably, be a robot.

  David stared at the empty staircase down which Bombay had disappeared, while his mind’s eye hooked on an image of flashing bands of white skin. His heart skipped a beat and a slightly queasy feeling returned to his stomach. Perhaps it was the sulfites in the wine. If not the wine, David was certain it was the lack of sleep that was making him feel odd, out of sorts, slightly self-less. He looked forward to the coming week, to mornings spent sleeping until noon. In truth, he was sick of Chopin. He knew all the facts, knew all the music. And there was nothing like genius to make you feel mediocre. He envied his wife, who hadn’t yet read his manuscript, though she’d promised to do so this last week. Specifically, he envied what would be her ability to read just the words without having to think of the way a chapter had been contorted, draft after draft, into its present form, or how the accretion of endless notes had, after thousands of hours, pressed itself into something that could be read in one sitting, then forgotten.