Paris Twilight by Russ Rymer Page A

predictable reason: you were looking so hard for what you expected that you missed what was right in front of you.
    Right in front of me, eye to keyhole, as it were, was the lock of the door in the back of the closet. I’d given the knob an inquisitive twist on first meeting, but I had never really inspected it, at least not sufficiently to appreciate its ornamentation, the tendrils covering the knob and the escutcheon with a rampant brass garden of vine. I felt around on the floor as my eye took this in, and the awareness struck, and my fingers came up with the original key, the one I’d removed from the nail, and I set it into the slot, and gave it a turn, and that’s how I came to be admitted into the palace, and so into Corie’s life.

 
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PART TWO

VIII
    C OWARD, YOU LEFT before we could settle up. I’m thinking about our oldest and most idiotic argument, the thing I always told you I would hear no more about, about whether we would ever have children. Which meant: whether I should want them. I never wanted them, Daniel, as it turns out, and now I can tell you happily that I never will have them, so one of us is finally an authority on the thing we both used to rant about. You were correct on one point, and there was a price to pay, though it wasn’t the one you predicted, that everyone prattles on about. I haven’t mourned for that rejuvenating force of the future, the pitter-patter of little feet, the sky-blue gaze of tomorrow from the depths of the perambulator. You see, I haven’t betrayed the future with my lack of children. This is what you learn when you cross the mysterious bar and childlessness becomes part of your identity, this is what I want to tell you that you could never have known: I didn’t betray the future, but the past.
    To whom will I pass on the stories I was given? Whom will I tell about you? I am the last carrier, a testifier without an audience. My family’s endless heritage ends with me; its meanings are my responsibility, mine alone, now. Sometimes the accumulation of decades—perhaps, sometimes, centuries—crashes against me like a storm surge hitting a seawall, but there is no release; beyond me there is nothing, no one to relieve the burden, assume my duty, hear my tale. More to the point: my parents’ tales. That is what children are, in the long run. You could make it definitional: your child is the person who carries your parents’ tale. It’s the job of your future to make sense of your past.
    I hear your quibble:
But Tilde, what centuries? You never had actual parents to give you a tale to pass on
.
Okay, Alice and Roy, adoptive ones—that’s love, but it’s hardly a lineage
. Point taken. But point not taken, all the same, for Roy and Alice were parents to me, ample and sufficient, and their family and its sagas all I knew. Which is all the more reason why I think, today, as I sit here in Portbou, that I was never really orphaned until I was orphaned by my childlessness. I never produced an heir who could relate my history back to me.
    That’s correct: Portbou. I got the heave-ho at the old place, Daniel, that dreary-day café where I began this saga, the place I wrote you from yesterday. It wasn’t a place I’d have entered if the rain wasn’t hounding me. Dingy, in a word. The lack of affection turned out to be mutual. You’d have been amused by it: bum’s rush, don’t
oubliez
your
chapeau
. Swept out of my rain refuge by the swish of a dishrag. I guess my residence in the banquette was threatening damage to the bottom line (not to mention the damage to my bottom) and so at any rate, now I must begin you a new letter from a friendlier clime. Passim will defend my squatter’s rights against all comers, at least today. It’s Saturday. The offices that supply his lunch clientele are closed, and, poor Passim, there just aren’t that many comers to defend