Cat In A Topaz Tango

“You are one of these urban daredevils. You are in New York City. You reach the eightieth floor before the police can arrive and you snap a line to an opposite building. You will wire-walk over the urban chasm while everyone below gets stiff necks watching and waiting for you to fall. You won’t fall, but you will get arrested at the end of your stunt, and a great deal of publicity. When you have your press conference, you will present the lovely lady from Channel Five with a flower shaped like a dove, and take her to bed later.”

He laughed, longer and harder than he thought he was capable of.

“Will the lovely French psychiatrist the court orders me to see take me to bed also?”

“That depends how much she likes her swan-shaped flower.”

Revienne daubed her lips with the limp corpse of his swan napkin.

“That’s a wonderfully inventive scenario, but it still doesn’t tell me why you became a psychiatrist.”

She sipped wine again, setting aside the demolished salad plate and uncovering their plates of salmon.

“I’ll tell you after we eat the main course.”

So they ate in silence, flake by savory flake of baked salmon, crunch by crunch of the tiny strips of potato, sip by sip of the white wine until the bottle was gone.

He thought over Revienne’s imagined high-wire act.

He’d felt in that position often during his stay at the clinic and later escape. It was an apt metaphor for what he knew of his life these last few days. He watched his hands with the exquisite Christofle sterling flatware. His fingers were indeed long and strong, as his legs would be again. As other parts were rehearsing for being again.

This escape, this idyll, was almost over. He was sorry about that.

He was startled from his reverie when she poured from the opened bottle of white wine into fresh glasses, and swept the empty dinner plates together and to the side.

He took sliced fruit and cheese from the desert plate, and sat back.

Revienne nibbled on a wedge of pungent white cheese. “Why I became a psychiatrist.” She sighed. “How could I be anything but, after Sophie.”

He waited.

“My younger sister. Do you have brothers and sisters? We don’t know, do we, Mr. Randolph? I had the one sister. There were four years between us, enough for me to feel superior. Cruelty, indifference must be educated out of the young, I believe. They are greedy, self-centered, and frightened.”

He said nothing, the best way to keep a story being told, but he wondered if she was obliquely referring to him in his amnesiac state.

“Sophie trailed me and embarrassed me in front of my cool new friends. She still had baby fat, while I had breasts and boys. Her skin was unfortunate but my parents assured her that she’d be just like me someday. Frankly, I would not want to be like I was then, vain, selfish, and stupid.”

There was nothing of the seductive woman in her now, just the voice of truth and self-disgust.

“She lost a great deal of weight. No one suspected bulimia. Her skin got worse, but she was thinner than I was. She had no breasts and she never would. I came home one day when our parents were away to find Sophie outside the third-floor mansard, poised like a diver.

“I called to her from the street, begged her to wait, to hang on.

“‘I can fly,’” she told me. “‘I am finally light enough to fly.’”

I screamed for the neighbors to call the police and ran up the four flights to the roof. While I ran up step after step until my legs shook, she took flight. I arrived where she had been to see her on the street below.”

She crumpled the napkin into a tight ball in her hand.

“My God.”

He felt an odd kinship with her. Had he failed a brother? He felt a wave of anger and guilt, and then fury with his fled memory that forbid him responsibility for his past.

“I shouldn’t have asked,” he said.

“It was a long time ago. It gave me purpose. The public was ignorant then of the suffering of young people. I’ve specialized in trauma cases, but I work gratis with the young from poor families in Paris. Don’t weep for me. I make a lot of money on my celebrity cases to underwrite my charity work.”

“I’m a celebrity case?”

She smiled. “Presumed so. You have the money to afford the clinic and my exclusive time.”

“This has been more exclusive than I’d imagined.”

“It’s been . . . invigorating for me, in a way. You are difficult. I like the challenge.

“Will I ever fully remember, do you think?

She assumed her professional face. “These cases are unpredictable. The added pressure of someone trying to kill you might choke off your memory even longer. Your best course is to reunite with your uncle. Once I put myself together again and return to the clinic, I can contact him, direct him to where you’ll be. It’s time you had another keeper, Mr. Randolph, and you know it.”

He nodded.

“Why did you pursue me when I vanished instead of going your own way?”

“A number of reasons.”

“Yes, Mr. Randolph?”