The Isle of Youth: Stories by Laura van den Berg Page B

pitch dark and no one could see that we were escaping. I marveled at all that could be gotten away with in the dark. Someone’s life could fall apart—or together—without anyone noticing a thing. I thought of all the nights I lay beside my husband in bed and agonized about where my life was going, where it had gone, about being thirty-five and having not done much of anything. All those hours in darkness, a shadow life that was never revealed to him. I might as well have been robbing banks on the sly or having an affair.
    Outside, I touched my cheeks and felt the paint smudge. When I pulled my hand away, there was white on my fingertips. I was sweating beneath my mask and robe. Jean-Paul broke into a light run, still holding my hand, his bells jingling, my sandals slapping the ground like Frankenstein feet.
    “Where do you want to go?” Jean-Paul asked. We were running down a street lit by globular lamps.
    I remembered the first thing I took an interest in when studying a map of Paris on the plane. I read about its history in the guidebook and charted its path on the map with my fingertip.
    “To the river!” I said.
    By the time we reached the Seine, we had given up on running. We knew better than to feign being young and carefree for very long. The paint was making my face itch. I scratched the side of my nose. I had lost my sash and my robe billowed open. When I looked down at my sundress, it seemed unfamiliar, a stranger’s clothes. The Seine stretched out before us, dark and endless. We took a small set of stairs down to the concrete sidewalk that lined one side of the river. The path was lit by goldish hanging lights. We walked along the river, underneath one of the bridges and past an empty bench. Jean-Paul smoked a cigarette and gave me drags. The concrete wall beside us insulated us from city sounds. For a long time, the bells were the only noise I heard.
    “You forgot your case,” I said when I realized he wasn’t carrying it.
    “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “One of the others will take it.”
    “How did you learn acrobatics?”
    “I went to an acrobatics school in Normandy,” he said. “I was taught by the same man who taught my father.”
    “It seems like it would get tiring, all that performing.”
    “I like having a job where I get to wear a mask all day.”
    When he asked what I did, I tried my best to explain my job as a forensic accountant. I worked in the offices of a divorce lawyer in Hartford and spent my days examining bank statements and stock portfolios, trying to figure out what really belonged to whom, where money had been hidden or lost or spent. I hoped the office would be understanding when I called to tell them I was extending my vacation.
    “Once our office had a case where the wife had been grinding up tiny amounts of glass and mixing it into her husband’s food for the last year of their marriage,” I said.
    “Maybe it’s best your husband left when he did.”
    “Maybe so.”
    A riverboat, the bottom exploding with blue phosphorescent light, drifted past us; music and voices rolled across the water. When the quiet returned, I stopped walking. Jean-Paul faced me. I touched his shoulder, right where the silk rose into a little peak, with my paint-smudged fingers.
    “Take off your mask,” I said.
    “Sorry,” he said. “It’s against the code.”
    I wondered what the mask was hiding, if he was elaborately scarred. “I’ll take off my mask if you take off yours.”
    He smiled. “But I already know what you look like.”
    “You don’t know my name. I never told any of you my name.”
    “I’ve already made one up for you,” he said. “I do that when I meet people.”
    “And?”
    “It’s Sabine. What do you think?”
    “Not even close.”
    I took off my mask and let my bathrobe fall onto the concrete, the black silk pooling at my feet, and undid the straps on my sandals. It looked as though a wizard had evaporated, leaving behind everything but the body.