Paris Twilight by Russ Rymer Read Free Book Online

The farther I got from Willem, the clearer it was that I wasn’t going to leave him behind. The man was like the human corpus we delight in describing to schoolchildren: mostly water. Only a quarter of Willem was solid; I’d give him maybe 30 percent, at the most. The rest, for me, was a shifting, murky gel of memory and apprehension. Our brunch together had punched big holes in the great cosmic membrane, that essential diaphragm that seals the present safely away from the past. Now the barrier was breached and the phantoms released, and as I walked I struggled to get my mingled lives re-sorted out.
    Toward something, for once . . .
was that really what I was, a runaway from love? That’s what he’d meant, in all his snottiness—and a runaway not just from love, but from him. He’d paused to let his arrow land, and when it did, I had the reaction I’d always had when his arrows landed, back in those days when I knew him a little better. Poor Willem, he’d always been the type who couldn’t fire back without revealing his position, who couldn’t land a punch without setting himself up for the kill. Which was why being the target of his zingers had often given me a bit of guilty pleasure, as it did now.
Why, Willem!
I’d thought to myself with amazement, and some fondness, after his outburst in Le Faux Henry.
After all this time!
    But as my guilty pleasure faded, offense blossomed within me: even to consider the question was to collude in his presumptions. Yes, we’d had a fling, a student affair or whatever you wanted to call it—a mistake, an entanglement—and yes, it was I who’d ended it, who’d done the spurning, and it had been decades since I was able to remember it with any precision beyond some dim scenes of resentful sulking in places where we couldn’t avoid each other, Maasterlich’s classroom prominent among them. But I remembered it well enough to know I hadn’t ditched Willem because I loved him too much, as agreeable as that formula might sound to him in retrospect; to the contrary, there hadn’t been any love worth ditching, not on my part, anyway. And now, these many years later, to be diagnosed with a fatal character flaw by the light of a carried torch! (And to have poor great-god Maasterlich obscurely singed in the indictment.)
    Maasterlich! Once the heartless old bastard had been invoked, he refused to be evicted from my thoughts. Heartless old softhearted bastard. Concerning surgery, he was more than merely a teacher: he was a paradigm, a pure example of the form in action. In his lectures, he’d carved into our young, unblemished minds with consummate skill and with an absence of mercy, to our eventual good, of course.
Eventual
was the key: you had to do some healing first before you could admit to the benefit. We cringed, we railed at his cruelties, his excessive incisiveness, his trite formulations: “Failure to prepare is preparation for failure”; “Anything worth suturing is worth suturing twice.” We searched his character for any imperfection that would diminish his dominion, give us a fighting chance.
    We found what we sought in the doubleness of his nature, his (as we insisted on seeing it) Janus face on a bipolar soul. For he’d hammer us on procedure, hammer and hammer and hammer, and when he had us as hardened as tool steel, he’d soften us up with philosophy—if that’s what you could call his wandering, melancholic free associations—the combination driving us crazy with its inconsistency. Every time we encountered this ruminative side, this pudding within the granite, it seemed to us as weirdly misplaced as a swamp on a mountaintop. That’s how we felt; we felt it was something freaky, and suspected we’d been badly used—had he led us up the face of the Matterhorn just to plant our flag in a bog? Yet dutifully we climbed, and dutifully we bogged, not