She lay with her hair spread upon the pillow like the sun upon the Seine, far beneath which she still slept.  He had got up already and opened the curtains, and though it was still early and the sky an indecisive blue, he could hear the day begin.  Far below, a garbage truck was collecting the week's waste and the few figures that had already risen were striding briskly down the sidewalk, with, it seemed, a sense of going somewhere.  He was as quiet as he could be and went downstairs and out into the street.  There was a nip in the air he had not expected, and he bought croissants, two coffees to go and, for good measure, fresh orange juice.  When he came back up, she had turned from the window and her arm was stretched across to where he had been sleeping, bright now with sunlight.  That she had not wakened at the smell of the coffee, as she would have before, saddened him but he banished the thought from his mind and sat upon the bed and put his hand on her shoulder to waken her.

"Jess," he said.  "Jessica.  Breakfast."  Her eyes opened and were briefly frantic.  She felt his hand upon her shoulder, her nose twitched at the smell of the coffee and she closed her eyes again and smiled.

They had flown to Paris to get away.  The months of tests back home had become routine, the forced gaiety of their friends had become mechanical, and all the different pills to be taken and the different remedies suggested and the doctors of all sorts had almost become comical - but still all were like too many clouds crowded on that horizon which had already been cut short, as if one were looking beyond the screen where an infinite sky had been projected and saw nothing now but emptiness.  They had needed to 'get away' even if they couldn't really afford it, for in sickness as in health there are bills to pay and Robert could not help but count these in his head.  He even tallied the fresh orange juice, almost proud of having bought it, for it was an unneeded luxury; he was in a way throwing caution to the wind; if Jessica had not been dying he would not have done that.  But then death makes one do a lot of things one wouldn't normally do.

Their hotel was on a quiet side-street, near the museum where Jessica wanted to see some pictures by painters whose names he dimly recognized.  He had booked it for that reason, because the name of the hotel shared the name of the museum, and when he saw on a map in the front lobby that they were just two blocks from each other, he breathed a sigh of relief, for he felt he had done something right.  He had organized dinner, too, at a restaurant the tour books said was 'authentic and charming', and for the next night an opera whose name - and this is the reason he chose it - he had recognized from among Jessica's disc collection.  Altogether they had three nights.  Yet already the vaguely pungent odor of the hotel room, the mauve-green marble upon the dresser with a matching bedside table, it's smallness or 'intimacy' as the brochures put it, as compared to their rooms back home - all this made them feel that they had successfully slipped under their pace of life back home to some pocket of stillness which, now that they were there, felt as if it had been waiting for them always.

They ate and showered and Robert took out Jess' pills and lay them on top of the bed he had remade.  Coming from the bathroom, she paused upon seeing them, with her back turned to him and still wrapped in her towel.  Then she took them up and with the glass of water he'd left on the bedside table swallowed them down without turning around.

"The book says we should get there early," he said, pretending to read.  "It's just around the corner."

Paris in early Spring, before the leaves have fully bloomed along the boulevards and the parks explode again with life, has a remote melancholy, like the last of Winter's damp hung high in the air, lingering with a sad sigh backwards before receding.  But this day seemed to have burst through to mid-season.  The sun, as early morning passed, inched its way towards full glory.  Along the quays of the Seine, on the steps of buildings as on the terraces, where the steam from coffee cups nipped at the chill that remained, people paused to lift their faces to the light.  Shadows were being pushed back and even the buildings seemed to have stepped forward from behind the winter dark, with their windows and gold traceries glinting and beaming.

"Oh," Jess said, taking his arm, "Isn't it beautiful, Robert."

It was difficult, looking at her, to think that she was sick.  She was 28 and her excitement gave her face, which at times could seem pale, a positive glow.  There was the faint odor of medicine that she exuded and to which, perhaps, he was too sensitive; perhaps it wasn't even coming from her but had remained in his nostrils from the flasks he'd opened, that he was smelling from his own self or even imagining - but in any case he smelt it now everywhere, even when she wasn't there.  They had taken a somewhat circuitous route and were standing on the place, with the tickets he'd reserved in his hand.  She remained beside him with a muted exuberance; her hair was pulled back and the sleeves of her sweater pushed up and she stood looking about her in wonder.

"Yes," Robert said, "It is.  It is beautiful."

The relationship between Robert and Jessica had always remained a mystery, even to themselves.  Outwardly, passing them on the street, one would not have thought anything incongruous.  Both were attractive and both, one could see at a glance, sprang from the mid to upper middle classes of the North East.  They had shared the most superficial expectations that their class made on life:  a comfortable home, a steady job, an agreement to believe in the necessity of marriage.  Their views on the most general aspects of life were not widely divergent.  But the similarities stopped there; beyond these, if one took each separately, one would have found them almost diametrically opposed.  The most punctilious critic would have put Robert as uptight and career-obsessed.  He could be hard and humorless, at times arrogant, and of late, appearing like the curl of a small wave beneath which the whole ocean is churning, risen with the scarcely admitted feeling that his career too was floundering, there often came to his lips a supercilious smile, such as had appeared when he'd first been passed over for promotion.  The same critic, again, would have found Jess a bit immature, romantic and dependant, with bursts of girlish enthusiasms - at, for example, the news of a friend's pregnancy - and a way of making the most ingenuous comments in the company of Robert's colleagues that often made people think she was stupid.

But one did not see, at one of these office parties where Jess remained uncomfortably at the drink-stand or quietly fingering her drink, the conscientiousness with which Robert, without any manifest signals, always knew when it was time to leave; and one did not feel, when he aired his views among their friends, even if she were talking to others or had gone to the kitchen, the surety he felt in her presence.  For far beneath their social selves, where their more silent beings met, there was a need in Robert to be needed, tolerated, even adored, that he was incapable of giving to himself; and in Jessica, an unsaid understanding of this need, patience, and yes, a certain strength that Robert had always leaned upon.  Which is why all the major decisions in their life - to move in together, to find a bigger apartment, the talk, once, of a child - had all been, if silently, guided by her.

The appearance of the sickness in their lives and its long duration had changed much.  After the initial hysteria had passed and the months wore on without any definite end in sight, Robert became more outwardly giving while inwardly he removed himself from her more and more.  Then on a business trip once, after he had gone out and got very drunk, he cheated on Jess with a woman whose name he could not even remember in the morning, beginning a habit that would continue, here and there, along the length of her sickness.  At one point, her sickness went into remission.  For 6 months, there had seemed some hope.  Jess had looked so well that one might have never thought her ill, except that now, as far as Robert was concerned, a new compartment seemed to have opened inside of her to which he did not have access.

When the sickness finally did return, it was clear this time that it would not go away.  But the damage to their relationship had already been done.  A void existed between them that had not been there before.  And the scramble to feel that everything should be as it once was, especially under the circumstances, had played into the decision to come to Paris, something Jess had always dreamed of and for which, set like Someday on their mutual horizon, Robert had never before found the time.

They spent the morning at the museum, where he would often find Jess in front of a painting alone.  When he arrived beside her, she would turn and say something like 'She's beautiful' or 'He's so sad'.  She bought a few prints before leaving that were given to her in a long, cumbersome bag.  When Robert reached down to take it from her, the sight of a vein raised upon the pale of her hand jolted him, as if a shot had gone off somewhere inside him.

"I can carry it, Robert," Jess said.  "It's okay."

"The point,' Robert said, once they were outside, to dissipate the silence that had risen between them and in which he felt, again, Jess's absence, as if she'd disappeared into that new compartment she carried within her like a safe - "The point is not that I don't like them, Jess," harkening back to a conversation begun earlier, " or that I can't appreciate them" - and here he sounded spiteful - " but that their value is equal to their demand.  If everyone didn't say they were so beautiful, a lot of people wouldn't even look at them.  The sentiments, if you like, are manufactured."

He felt himself getting angry, though he couldn't say why, and the hurt look Jess darted at him - though he hadn't meant to include her in the last sentence; it hadn't been meant as a personal reproach when he'd thought it, even if it had come out as such - made him put his arm around her and rapidly launch into something else.

Paris, as they walked, unfurled about them like a flag hooked to the very beauty of the world, slapping broadly and proudly in the wind.  The Seine, swollen with winter rains, coursed through the center, and it was amazing to see the number of people about, as if some distant tattoo had lured everyone from their offices and homes outside, hypnotically, to meet it.  It seemed not only a hiatus from the working day or work but almost from Time itself, as if, in certain moments, the sun was stilled in its course and even with the constant motion - with the traffic passing, the people walking, the shadows bouncing among the trees - the whole world was held aloft, in a single shimmering frame, with God's eye.  They had lunch on a terrace, beneath a patio umbrella because Jess was tired, and walked out to a pedestrian bridge that an older fellow, having heard them speaking English, had recommended.  There, sitting with their backs against the grill and a slight breeze blowing upon them, a moment of sadness rippled across Jess's face which Robert, his eyes raised to the sun, did not see.  In it, she remembered again the anger that had seized Robert's face, then she let it go.  Taking his hand, she lay her head upon his shoulder and told him she loved him.  And if one could hear such things, it would have been the sound of that safe inside her, of which Robert was so jealous, briefly opening and these same words being issued out - "I love you, Robert" - just as if they had been stored in keeping for so long:  they rang with a pristine clarity, shaken free of the tangled moss of emotions that often cling to the same expression:  hard, quiet, almost iridescent like a diamond; a definite statement, strong and true, if yes, about the edges, where it still clung to hope in this world, tinged with sadness.

But if it had seemed to Jess that Robert had not heard her, she was wrong.  She had not seen, with her head upon his shoulder, two small creases tighten at the corners of his lips, as if a ray had pierced his sunglasses; and after they'd gone back to the hotel so that she could get some rest, he walked about the city with these words rattling in his heart like three pebbles in an empty jar.

He waited until she seemed asleep, got up from the chair where he had been pretending to read and went down to the front lobby, when he remembered to leave Jess a message he had wanted to write upstairs.  "Please tell my" - he almost said 'wife' - "Please tell my girlfriend I've gone for a walk", and with that strode outside.

It was rarely far from his mind all that he had not achieved and there was always a touch of resentment for Jess in these thoughts, as if, though he never put it to himself this way, the illness was somehow her fault.  He felt cheated; and over the past two years, when it became clear that she was not going to get better, sometimes in his mind came the wish that she would die.  It appeared and disappeared like a moth fluttering about him in the darkness before he could grasp it or realize what it was.  It was not something he actively thought and it did not in any way mean that he wished her harm.  Nor was it so much the disappearance of her purse as the wish for a new life, or, more precisely, the life he felt had been waiting for him before the sickness.  It was when, slipping from beneath his discontent with the present, the dream of new life opened before him that furtively, so furtively he was hardly conscious of it, the wish for her death flitted by.  And it was at such moments, too, that he sank deeper into that mire beneath which he felt he was being buried alive.

It was mid-afternoon when he walked outside.  The small street their hotel was on was covered in shadow and he turned right to where he saw the sun declining on the avenue and the flash of passing cars.  Away from the close dark of their room and from that feeling of stagnating he had not felt so acutely in a long time, something equal to the way he had felt when he first began cheating on her.  He hit the sun and turned right, following the flow of traffic, and coming to an intersection turned left, down a grand boulevard, where gently above him the great trees swayed as if they were somehow giving him their assent and the mutely vibrating joy of the city barely, just barely, touched upon him, like light upon a statue in one of these churches long forgotten.

Back in the hotel room, Jess lay in silence with her eyes open.  She was still dressed and on her back, as she had been when she had heard, as if from far away, the click of the door opening and closing and Robert leaving, before she'd opened her eyes again.  It had been a long time since they'd made love.  It had begun with Jess's illness and her physical incapacity, and had been carried on by Robert's infidelities, which, with a woman's perspicacity, she had guessed from the first.  Once or twice later, on her instigation, they had tried but it had seemed too late:  the feeling was gone and the action mechanical, forced.  After that, she'd looked upon the fact of his different women with a sad understanding each pretended the other did not see.  She pretended that she did not know and he pretended that he believed she did not know and everything physical and emotional between them, except a vague sense of guilt on both sides, dissolved, died away, unsung and unsaid.  She la y still in the dark thinking of this, where, perhaps, only a year ago, they would have been talking; and in the place where Robert would have been, now there, no less reticent, less obdurate because one could not feel, as she could with Robert, an ocean held back behind stone, the three flasks he had taken out this morning remained, mute and observant, on the bedside table.

Between the two - between Jess in her bedroom and Robert on his walk, which extended from one hour to two to three, until he didn't know where he was anymore - the day diminished.  And as if their thoughts were linked, as if, stretching between them like a rainbow, the dissimulated shimmerings of dying love rose from one to the other, both came to think in different ways of the same thing:  their past.  And, again in separate ways, there came to both a certain melancholy that it could no longer be any other way than it was now, that even the presence of death could not rekindle the feelings they'd once shared and which should, in their final months or year together, have been there, too.  The Parisian sky stretched over Robert in paling blue and he walked until evening.  He was a handsome man and had learned early to walk erect, no matter what was going on inside him.  A small crease appeared above the bridge of his sunglasses, the tails of his Spring blazer were pushed behind him.  He walked through runnelled streets and up along another grand boulevard, stopping once before a more modern statue, where beneath the supercilious curl that had come to his lips the first flickerings of memory stirred, and, twitching as it were behind his lips, the smile faltered.  At one point, he found himself in a park.  He had walked in there without really being conscious of it, with all trace of that smile gone and something in his face relaxing, making him look older.  From the fountain was the slap of water tumbling back upon itself.  Running about its edges, a small boy was chasing a toy boat while his mother, beside a baby carriage, was calling out to him in French.  The tops of the trees rustled and a breeze blew dust up from the gravel.  It blew up in high, wide wheels so that dust covered his shoes and face and hair, though he didn't notice until later and then stopped briefly, looking into a shop window, to fix himself.  Now, he pulled out a chair and sat watching the children, the sound of the flute rose and faded; and in the intimate blending of shadow and dark, of music and silence, of the day's calm and the stir of night's beginnings, the Spring moon began to emerge, pink and pale and distant.

He found her, back in the hotel, sitting on their bed in her nightgown.  Her face was thin and drawn and her hair disheveled; she looked up, raising her head from her hands, as if she had been waiting for him.  Behind her on the rumpled sheets, her suitcase was half-repacked and the sleeve of a blouse hung limply from its side.  A moment passed between them like a ripple upon water, and under the buzz of the desk lamp, in which they stood without speaking or moving, one could almost hear, as if from somewhere in the distance or buried far beneath their silence, the small slight crack of one land mass separating from another.

"I'm sick, Robert," she said.  "I'm really sick."

There was another moment and with that, a trembling coming across his face like the last breath of something dying within, he began to weep.  Outside, the moon hung full and heavy; and along the boulevards, above the traffic there gathered, or moved perhaps by the breeze that still blew, the leaves shivered, sending up the last of winter, too.

Author Bio

William Prendiville was born in Ireland, grew up in Canada, and now lives in Paris, France.