In Sunlight or In Shadow Page 5

  With this I looked from the Esterels back to Solange. At her toilette she’d painted her cheeks and her mouth afresh. Heavily. Luridly. She’d created a nakedly impassioned face. But she immediately shot me her eyes. I know the nuance of her looks. I have painted them. This look was to say: I will snare him for you. He will buy your paintings. He will have me only through you.

  This is what she told me. All of this in the briefest of glances. She returned her attention at once to the colonel, and they continued.

  So I lowered my face and looked across the table.

  And he was there.

  He did not startle me. I had already taken my seat in the theater. I had already begun to watch a scene from the Commedia. Colonel Leclerc and Solange—as Il Capitano and Columbina—were so absorbed in each other they did not even notice Pierrot’s entrance. They still haven’t.

  Now we look at each other, Pierrot and I. He is painted as if by a child using Delacroix’s palette, his hairless head and face done in zinc white, his outsized lips and his arched brows and the tears of the cuckold falling from his eyes done in vermilion. This is the living portrait of the tormented clown painted on the canvas of the actor’s face. The theaters are near this hotel, along the Avenue de la Gare. He has, no doubt, come straight from a performance. Perhaps he too is hawking, for his troupe.

  His eyes are deep in darkened sockets. But that is the actor, not the clown. Perhaps he is old. Perhaps he just did not have the strength tonight to remove his makeup. Not till he can drink for a time.

  Those eyes in shadow are impossible to read.

  But we stare at each other for a long moment and then he mimes with two fingers the drawing of a cigarette to his lips and, with a flourish of his other hand, mimes the striking of a match and the lighting up, and then the blowing of a perfect smoke ring, which I fancy I can actually see. He angles his head. I cannot see his eyes well enough but I imagine he has just winked.

  I understand.

  From my inside pocket I pull my pack of Gitanes, but with a crooked smile Pierrot flips his chin and unfurls his right hand. He has conjured a lit cigarette. He puts it in his mouth and he drags deep and blows a real smoke ring, which dilates toward me.

  I look to Leclerc.

  He is still enrapt with Solange.

  The ring of smoke drifts beneath his gaze and dissolves without his noticing.

  I return to Pierrot and we smoke together for a time, long enough to twice mingle plumes above the table. Between the first and the second, Solange sits down to my left. I do not need to look at her or at the colonel to feel their gaze still linked together.

  And then Leclerc addresses me. “Monsieur Vachon. I offer my apologies to you and to Mademoiselle. I am weary and will retire. I will come in the morning to choose a painting.”

  I turn my face to him.

  He is looking past me.

  “But of course,” I say.

  He rises.

  He goes.

  I watch his wide, muscled back move away, rendered in Napoleonic blue.

  I turn to Solange.

  She smiles. “He will buy,” she says.

  I cannot help but hear the ambiguity. Still, I overcome this. After all, she has fallen deeply in love with my genius. She has fallen in love with the image of herself I’ve made for her. I have revealed the true colors of her flesh, in sunlight and shadow, in sleep and in passion. Beneath the garish colors she has used to paint the ardent face she presents to Leclerc, only I know the true flush of her cheeks, the raw sienna and yellow ochre and cadmium red of it. We have come to understand, Solange and I, that in the deepest sense she no longer exists except by my hand.

  She has been looking only at me since Leclerc left. I glance at Pierrot and he is staring at me as well, unwaveringly, solemn-faced. I look back to Solange and I unfurl my hand in the clown’s direction, as he did in his bit of legerdemain.

  She follows the gesture.

  She registers nothing. Indifference. Not even this incongruous figure can shake her from her intentions. I think: She has her mind on the tin-pot soldier.

  I am tired of this. I do not wish to drink my wine and smoke my cigarettes while trying to read her mind.

  “Go up now,” I say to her. “I will drink a while longer. Wait for me.”

  She begins to push back in the chair.

  “Be wary,” I say, employing my own ambiguity: wary of him; wary of me.

  She pats my forearm. Then she rises.

  I turn my attention to Pierrot as Solange moves behind me and away. His eyes are in shadow but his head is painted against the night; he does not seem to follow her passing. But after she is quite gone, he nods at me. As if: Well done.

  I lean a little toward him.

  He arches his brows and leans toward me.

  “She does what I tell her,” I say.

  He lifts his shoulders at this, lifts his face, pushes his lower lip upward, inverting the faint smile of his vast clown lips, turning it into a skeptical frown. He metronomes his head back and forth, as if weighing the possibility that I am correct, but his frown and the measured movement of his head clearly convey that he thinks I am wrong.

  I let this pass. He is a clown. I am to laugh this off.

  I do. Though the laugh sounds as forced as it feels.

  But it satisfies Pierrot. His face descends. A smile blooms, a bright, large smile. He is good, this actor. I must be wrong about his being old. His face is wonderfully flexible.

  Now I realize why he captivates me. Why I am ready to laugh at him, even if he contradicts me. I say, “I’ve seen you in a pantomime.”

  His eyes widen and he cocks his head.

  “Perhaps not you the actor,” I say. “I’ve seen your character.”

  He furrows his brow, nods contemplatively.

  “It was long ago,” I say. “I was a boy.”

  I pause with another realization. This is, in fact, a difficult memory. A place I should not go.

  But something presses me on. “How old?” I ask this question of myself, lowering my voice, trying to visualize the boy I was.

  Pierrot shrugs and flares his hands as if I am asking him.

  I have been prompted to remember by this simple image of childhood before me—the face of a clown—even as the adult in me wishes to stop. There is someone sitting at my side in the memory.

  Pierrot has begun to beam, canting his head, now to one side, now to the other and back again, encouraging me.

  I have computed my age, but I need say no more. I do not have to go on. Still, I do. Resolved, though, to remain focused on the pantomime itself.

  “I was twelve,” I say. “In Valvins.”

  I pause. Pierrot has resumed his pose of rapt attention.

  I study him as he studies me.

  Perhaps I was right about this man’s age. Could he possibly be the same actor? He need only be in his fifties. Unlikely things do happen.

  I say, “The theater in Valvins. I saw Paul Margueritte’s Pierrot the Murderer of his Wife. He himself played Pierrot.”

  I watch the actor across the table, looking for him to give me a sign that it is he. A lift of the brow, perhaps. A nod. Something. But he is once again a portrait in oils, unmoving against the darkening blue of the night.

  “He was brilliant,” I say, baiting him with praise, and I wait again.

  “Do you know the play?” I ask, with a wink.

  He hints at a smile.

  “Do you know him? Monsieur Margueritte?”

  This Pierrot lifts a forefinger and tick-tocks it, as if to say You have found me out, but do not speak of that.

  “I understand,” I say.

  The lifted finger stops and the hand flows into an upcurving gesture for me to continue. Then that hand falls and plumes upward again but this time with the other hand rising in concert: He wants to hear it all.

  So I begin now to describe Paul Margueritte’s protean performance, perhaps to the man himself as if he were someone else. B
ut I can hardly hear my own voice. I am transported to that stuffy suburban Paris theater on a late summer night three decades ago, and Pierrot, in white surtout and white kerchief, acts out his crime, terrible but seemingly perfect, unsolved. The stage flats, tightly defining an undertaker’s parlor, are black. On one of them is an oversized funeral poster announcing the lying in state of Columbina, Pierrot’s wife; on another is her portrait, the poor dead woman. In the retelling of the murder, Pierrot plays both himself and his wife. No. More than that. Even as a boy I am dazzled by these people inside people. Paul Margueritte the writer creates the pantomime in which Paul Margueritte the actor plays Pierrot who in turn plays himself, and plays his wife as well, in a re-enactment of an event in which the clown becomes a murderer and his wife becomes his victim.

  At first, alone, Pierrot agonizes over why he must kill her. She has robbed him. She has neglected him. Worse. She has gone to a man and lain with him. She has betrayed Pierrot, has made a cuckold of him. Then he considers how to kill her. Perhaps a rope for strangling, but the face he will provoke, with bugging eyes and gaping mouth and flailing tongue, is too awful. A knife for slashing, but all the blood. Blood and blood. Poison brings convulsions and vomiting. A gun brings the police. And in the fervor of his planning, Pierrot trips and hurts his foot. He rips off his shoe and rubs at his bare foot and he begins to laugh, in spite of the pain he is trying to alleviate. He can’t help tickling himself. He rubs and laughs and he rubs and laughs. A desperate laugh. Then he knows what to do.

  “The next was masterful,” I say to the clown across the table. “You were masterful.” And in my mind I see Margueritte portray, with absolute clarity, both Pierrot and his wife in bed together, embodying now one and now the other, as the clown binds his wife to the headboard and strips off her stockings and tickles her bare feet and she laughs and cries out and laughs and cries until, in a wild undulating spasm, she dies from the agony of unremitting reflex hilarity.

  Though all the laughter and the cries are mimed—are utterly silent—the murder scene clamors terribly in the head of my twelve-year-old self. But as soon as Columbina is dead, my head now, as an adult, fills with something else.

  I feared it. I ignored it. And now it is upon me.

  I have not listened to myself speaking to the Pierrot of this veranda in Nice, but I hear myself suddenly fall silent with him. And in that theater in Valvins, as Columbina dies, I enter another pantomime beside me.

  I turn my head to look at my father.

  His muscled bulk. His drunkard’s bloated red nose. His vast, pocked red nose. But a smart man, for all that. A dealer in bonds. Even a refined man. My father frightens me and he enchants me. His black wool suit, his long roll collar faced with black satin. His absolute attention on the stage. His fierce attention. He has brought me many times to the theater.

  He senses me looking at him.

  The crowd around us gasps and laughs. The pantomime on stage continues, but my father turns to look at me. Our eyes meet. I do not understand the look, but it is as ferocious as his gaze at Pierrot a moment ago.

  I look away.

  That night at the theater is the last time I will ever see my father.

  The next day my mother is dead, her neck snapped.

  And he has vanished.

  I struggle against all this now. I widen my eyes, trying to return to the scene before me. The veranda of the Hotel Splendide in Nice. Chinese lanterns. The just-vanished twilight in Prussian blue. A clown. A frowning clown. I feel my own mouth widening to him, forcing a smile, as if I were myself a clown trying to distract a frightened child.

  And Pierrot speaks.

  “You must go to her,” he says. His voice is a deeply rasping, jagged thing. A voice ravaged by disease or injury or long use. I think: He was once a stage actor. He has somehow lost his instrument and become a mime from necessity.

  He flexes at the shoulders. Impatient with my delay.

  “Be wary,” he says. “You must go.”

  His vermilion mouth arches upward into a vast frown.

  I understand. My chest clenches. I’ve been a fool all along.

  I jump up. I am pressing past the other diners, men in evening clothes, women with shoulders bare, and I am through the veranda doors and walking briskly across the marble floor of the lobby, trying not to run, trying to contain myself. My face. My face feels stretched tight. Frozen in a mime’s pose. I think: Do they know, those lounging in chairs between the Corinthian columns, holding their drinks, pausing their conversations, turning their eyes to me? Can they read my furious silence? Did Solange and Leclerc meet here, brazenly? Did she put her arm publicly in his?

  I stride faster, turning beside the front desk into the passage to the cast-iron door of the electric elevator. But the carriage is not there. I veer to the carpeted stairway and hurry now, mounting the stairs one floor and then another, two steps at a time, and I am strong and I am quick and I am light as the flames that flare in my chest and behind my eyes, and I emerge from the staircase into the hallway to our rooms.

  I rush down the corridor, but as I near our door I slow abruptly. If she is unfaithful I do not want to alert her. I will find her out. I slow to a stop. Only a few more steps to go. But I wait. I am panting. My hands are trembling. I need to be calm.

  And then I am. I draw the key from my pocket. I am now as calm, as coldly deliberate, as I was enflamed a few moments ago.

  I step to the door.

  I turn my head and draw it close to listen.

  I hear nothing inside.

  I lean to the keyhole beneath the knob. My hand is as steady as if I am holding my brush and I have taken up a bit of paint and I am about to make the first touch of the day.

  I slip the key gently, quietly into the hole. I grasp the knob with my other hand. I take a deep breath, and I turn key and knob together. I push open the door. Softly.

  Our parlor is empty. My easel stands before the window. The door to our bedroom is ajar and the crack is lit with the urinary yellow of electric light. From within, Solange laughs lightly, and there follows a rustling of clothes and the grunting of a man.

  I cross to the bedroom, a great, blue stillness expanding within me. I push open the door.

  It is true.

  They stand at the foot of the bed, Leclerc enfolding Solange in his arms, leaning into her, and she is bent backward, about to tip and fall upon the bed, her hands splayed white against his bastard blue back. He is kissing her on the lips, but she has seen me in her periphery and her eyes cut to me and widen and there is a stopping in her and he senses that and also stops, and for a moment they pose there as if for my brush.

  Then she fists her hands and makes a show of beating on his back and they break apart and struggle upright. Leclerc turns to me, and he straightens into military erectness.

  I think for a moment I will have to fight him.

  But suddenly he blinks and then he shivers, as if a winter chill has come over him. He says, “It is a lie. She has seduced me.”

  He clicks his heels and marches toward me and past me and out of the bedroom and away.

  Solange is posing again. I could never hope to capture—even with my estimable art—the complexity of expression on her face as she seeks a lie and plans an escape and fears for her life and rues her cuckolding passions, stymied here but fulfilled half a dozen times before, betrayals that she sees me recognizing now, in retrospect.

  The room is hot and she is beautiful and she is my Muse and I hesitate. But suddenly a shoulder-wide column of achingly frigid air descends upon me, and all my passion for Solange—the unified passion of body and creative spirit—freezes and shatters, and I cross the room quickly, so quickly her face does not even change, her eyes do not even widen, and my hands are upon her throat and I watch them clamp hard upon her and I squeeze and squeeze, and as I take away her life, I ponder first the shade of blue stained upon my fingers and then her wide-mouthed soundless cry.

  Finally she is dead. />
  I let her go and she falls upon the bed.

  And I am filled with a smell.

  Greasepaint and Gitanes.

  I turn.

  Pierrot is standing barely an arm’s length before me. His face is solemn.

  He nods once and raises his right hand and it pauses at the base of his throat, and he grasps something, and now his hand is rising and the whiteness is rising with it. More. It is his skin, his flesh rising, and the bones of his neck are emerging and now the chin of a skull, and higher his hand goes, passing upward, and the skull’s teeth appear and the bones of cheek and lip and now a fleshy nose emerges, preserved in this skull, and in one final stroke he rips off the rest of the clown’s face and all is gray bone and empty eye sockets. All but the nose, which remains uncorrupted by the grave. A drunkard’s bloated red nose. A vast, pocked red nose.

  As skulls are apt to do, it is smiling.

  I cannot share the smile.

  “Father,” I say. “What have we done?”

  Previously a television director, union organizer, theater technician, and law student, LEE CHILD was fired and on the dole when he hatched a harebrained scheme to write a bestselling novel, thus saving his family from ruin. Killing Floor went on to win worldwide acclaim. Night School, the 21st Reacher novel, is due November 2016. The hero of his series, Jack Reacher, besides being fictional, is a kindhearted soul who allows Lee lots of spare time for reading, listening to music, and watching Yankees and Aston Villa games.

  Lee was born in England but now lives in New York City and leaves the island of Manhattan only when required to by forces beyond his control. Visit Lee online at www.LeeChild.com for more information about the novels, short stories, and the movies Jack Reacher and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back starring Tom Cruise. Lee can also be found on Facebook.com/LeeChildOfficial, Twitter.com/LeeChildReacher and YouTube.com/leechildjackreacher.

  Hotel Lobby, 1943