Paris Twilight by Russ Rymer

table
, a pint of skim milk, tea, a teakettle, and, my pièce de résistance, a small chafing dish with extra Sterno refills. A subsequent trip brought a bag of ice and a bouquet of Gerber daisies.
    With the bag and the pint in the icebox and all my purchases in place, I emptied my suitcases into dresser drawers and onto bathroom shelves and closet rods; this, though, after first giving the closet a serious dusting out. My timing was lucky, as I’d stumbled upon an important element to life at Saxe’s: for a few minutes midmorning, the sun through the window caromed off the bureau mirror and ricocheted into the closet, lighting its depths like a magnesium flare. At least, that’s what it did this morning; perhaps for the one time in the year, the way, on the solstice, the sun’s rays line up through the columns of Stone Age temples, requiring a sacrifice. The glare lit every hanger scratch and drifting dust mote, every ding in the old horsehair plaster. I dragged a suitcase in, and as I anointed the renovated closet with fresh clothes, the sun shifted farther and glinted off a shiny object, a nugget of Nibelung gold embedded in the side of the cave. It was a key, hanging from a nail in the wall beside the sealed-up door. Its correlate sprang immediately to my mind.
    The safe. I had avoided thinking about that armored presence crouching in its corner, simply because it was obdurate, and I don’t mean by that only that it was heavy for its size and refused to budge when I kicked it. The strongbox struck me right away as a stubborn problem hard to solve, and I had no use for another of those, I already had Willem. Now, with the solution glittering directly before me, the problem went from impossible to irresistible. I pulled the key off the nail, knelt down, and tried it in the key slot.
    Nix. Right away I could see it was a no-go, male and female absurdly mismatched. But with the hunt initiated, I went to do something I’d been meaning to do for a while: search through the blue bowl of odds and ends wherein I’d found the mail key that first afternoon. I retrieved the bowl from the sock drawer—I’d stashed it next to Saxe’s yarmulke—and dumped its contents onto the divan’s counterpane. Here was all the predictable boy detritus: cuff links; a gold-filled wristwatch with a broken band; coins; an odd large medallion stamped with a spread eagle; more coins; a menthol inhaler; an old transit pass; a borrowing card for Bibliothèque St. Geneviève, expired; and amid it all, a leather pouch shaped like a teardrop and sealed with a zipper that gave a dull grating clink when I shook it and that released, when I opened it—bingo!—a gaggle of keys. They displayed the variety you’d expect of any worthy lifetime collection of mystery-keys-to-forgotten-doors. Two were skeletons, two others small enough they might have opened jewel boxes. One resembled the key I’d found in the closet, cast brass, unplated, its bow ornamented with a vine motif forming the letter
W
. Among them were several that looked like plausible candidates, and I swept up the entire menagerie and dove back into the closet to see what I could do. Surely one of these would work. It must!
    Except that none of them did. Some fit the slot and wouldn’t turn, others not even that, and after I’d tried several a second time—out of disbelief, or to give luck a chance, or maybe just to wallow in my despond—I sat on the floor in a puddle of disappointment surrounded by an audience of cheerfully useless keys and facing a smug, impervious, and seemingly inviolable box, and that’s when it occurred to me. I can thank Maasterlich for the revelation, or any of those other teachers who drummed it into our heads. For that matter, I could thank myself, for don’t I drum it into the heads of my own students? One day you will make a misdiagnosis, I tell them, and it will be for the