RAYMOND by Peter Gordon
It was the end of winter and Paris had that shut-in, grayed-out look going for itself. A chill wind blew up and down the avenues, sinking its sharp little teeth into whatever dared walk through it. The last coating of ice still lay on the wings of the golden angels posing on the edifice of the Opera House. I had packed too hurriedly – it was one of those things where you get a call and get on a plane with no wasted motion in between – and so I only had an unlined, crepe-thin raincoat to shield me from the elements. A few hours later I was buying a British army jacket from a man selling assorted stuff, some of it surprisingly choice, in an alleyway off the Rue Montorgueil. He had sunglasses, silk scarves, almost authentic Vuitton briefcases and portfolios, and several expertly cut suits that looked unworn until you looked a second time. He had only the one army jacket, and I imagined it being stolen the night before from the overflowing coatrack of an underground grunge nightclub and instantly black marketed, which only made it seem more exotic to buy. The jacket was in near pristine condition, the black buttons still shiny, the swirls of green and brown camouflage still as bright as fresh paint. It was surprisingly heavy when you picked it up and heavier still when you put it on; its weight had a kind of gravitational pull that made you feel as though you were safely anchored to the earth. In one of the six pockets, I discovered a nearly full pack of Gauloises, a good sturdy box of matches and a photograph of a dark-haired woman sitting on a park bench with the Eiffel Tower in the background. Her head had dropped away and to the side, strands of black hair flew across her eyes, and, on closer inspection, her face was such a mask of despair that anyone could see she wanted nothing more than to be left alone, not to have some guy take her picture and then carry it around with him as though he possessed her. If it were me, if I were her, I would have smashed the camera on the ground and walked out of his life forever.
The first time you see the Hôpital Sainte-Marguerite-Marie, you think it’s some sort of walled-in, out-of‑the-way art museum overlooked by all the guide books. It’s set off the Rue Cabanis, fronted by an archway that was commissioned by Napoleon and bombed, but only superficially damaged, by the Nazis. A small bronze plaque at its base says in French something that loosely translates to: “This Arch Stood Up to Fascism.” High limestone walls enclose an expanse of lawn that is more dirt than grass, seasonal gardens penned off by chicken wire, and a modern glass-and-steel building that replaced the original brick sanitarium structures built in the 1890s. When you walk the grounds in springtime you see chestnut trees and rosemary bushes and a white marble fountain that bubbles forth now and then, and statues and sculptures in such numeration that you have to be careful not to bump into them, including a boyish St. Jeanne d’Arc on horseback, St. Denis with his poor head in his hands, and, of course, St. Marguerite-Marie herself, an aged maternal figure lost inside a whirlwind of robes, her head thrown back in ecstasy and her arms lifted towards the sky. On the winding gravel paths, depending on the weather, you might see patients out walking – some haltingly but independently and some with assistance – while others are being pushed in various kinds of sleek machinery. The best time is the very late afternoon when everyone has gone back inside, the only things moving are the skinny rabbits scurrying for cover, and nothing but shadows sit on the stone benches by the pond.
Once the turbaned Pakistani guard waves you through the hospital front gates and your taxi follows the loop road halfway around, you pull to a stop under the portico of the main building. The whole structure is like a glass music box with its shining innards exposed and four rectangular single-story wings going off in different directions as though they had minds of their own – the east, west, north, and south wards. On the morning I arrived in the west ward, a sudden burst of brilliant, blinding sunshine filtered through the glass roof and made the pearl-gray linoleum in the hallways look on fire. I didn’t know it at the time – who ever knows anything at the time? – but it would be the only sunlight I’d see all week.
The room had a window, I’ll say that much for it. The view was nothing special, just a weather-chipped, paint-peeled statue of St. Genevieve holding her book and staff and standing on a lopsided granite block, a patchy swath of browned lawn behind her and the tops of some denuded oak trees high above her. Typically I sat by the bed but moved my chair to the corner of the room whenever the nurses or the technicians or the orderlies came in. Most of them would tell me to remain where I was if I wanted to – some knew me from past visits, some didn’t – but I liked to give them their space. The truth was, I didn’t want to see everything they were doing and I was also very conscious of the fact that no matter what the circumstances, no matter how close to the end, there was still such a thing as privacy.
There was Nurse Pauline and Nurse Nathalie and Nurse Sylvie. There was Henri who cleaned the room and dumped the trash in the mornings, and old Georges who did it, taking twice as long, at night. There was the simple, round clock on the wall, usually the only sound in the room, its chunky red hands moving with great effort against a stark white face. If you sat too close to the window, you felt the cold brush of a draft. If you sat too close to the radiator, you caught the slight scent of burning fibers. If you stared at the linoleum floor for too long the blue dots started to vibrate. The primary care physician, Doctor Gaudet, came once a day, usually late morning, and liked to stand very close to me while speaking in his slowed-down child’s version of basic French to make sure I got everything, punctuating it by continually repeating, “Do you understand this? What I am saying to you?” He looked after my welfare, too, making sure I was eating and getting up at least once in a while to stretch my long legs, and when I told him that I was having trouble sleeping, he described to me an orthopedically friendly way to unfold myself in a chair that put less stress on your neck and back muscles. The next time I saw him, he asked me how I was doing, and I lied and told him that I was sleeping like I did when I was a boy.
Two days went by. Read something aloud, the staff implored me. Something from the newspaper, a magazine, a book. Maybe a poem because poems can be especially nice. The hospital had a small library – a kind of walk‑in closet, really, but they called it the library – with shelves of books and stacks of magazines, and even a few ones in English. I took a copy of an abridged version of Robinson Crusoe. It was a long book and I didn’t want to begin at the beginning, for the obvious reasons, so I opened it up a good ways in and started reading the part right after the shipwreck where Crusoe takes the tools he got from the sinking ship and builds a little area for himself to live. I got all the way to the part where he adopts the parrot and teaches it to speak, and then listens gratefully to the sound of another voice even if it’s not quite human.
If someone says to you, “It could happen at any time,” you know what that means, in general terms, but on the other hand, you can’t help but feel it is slippery knowledge, because even a child knows that anything can happen, or not happen, at any time.
Jealousy is watching someone sleep when you can’t remember how to do it yourself anymore.
This is what happened.
I got out of my chair, walked out of the room, out the back gate of the hospital, and found myself on an avenue whose name I’d never even heard of. It was early evening, just after six o’clock. There was a nearly invisible frozen rain coming down, like tiny needles falling from the sky, while the traffic flowed both ways in a steady white stream of headlights. I was just getting used to the feeling of being out in the world when I heard a woman frantically calling out, “Raymond! Raymond!” Okay, to be honest, at first I wasn’t sure exactly what she was yelling but I kept going, head down, until the voice got closer and closer, like when a siren goes from being a generic howl to one that’s bearing down on you alone and you have no choice but to pull over.
The woman caught up with me on the sidewalk and tugged on my arm. As soon as I turned and she saw my face, her hand flew to her mouth as though she was stifling her own scream. She was an old woman. Her face was deeply creased and heavily rouged, except her forehead which was white as a cloud. She was wearing a black hat, not a beret but more like a knitted skull cap, with fringes of curly white hair spilling from it. Big red oval earrings swung from her ears like little lanterns. She had on a long, black, fur-collared coat that was clearly too big for her.
She said something to me in French. Basically I understood it as: “I saw your coat, I knew it was you.” I kept walking but she kept pace. She said the same thing again, and this time I tried smiling but the look of hopeful terror on her face didn’t go away. It occurred to me that maybe I should look around for a policeman or a soldier or even a witness to the fact that I was just walking down the street minding my own business when I was accosted by this total stranger. I could see the soft blue lights of a café about three blocks away. If I just kept going in their direction, if I kept my eyes on them and nothing else, I’d be there soon enough. Unfortunately, there were no crowds to wade into, no alleys to duck in.
Now she screamed at me. It was something like: Where have you been? Where did you go? Those kinds of questions over and over. She started striking me with her small, nearly weightless fists. The blows felt like nothing, like thoughts that didn’t have time to form before they reached me. I finally stopped in the middle of the sidewalk if for no other reason than to let her know – and anyone else who might be watching – that I wasn’t going to be a moving target, and I wasn’t trying to run away from her. We stood there facing each other while a young woman and her small white dog – it seemed to be a popular hour to exercise small animals – were forced to walk around us.
She looked at me as if she didn’t understand why we had stopped moving. She was shaking with cold. Tears spotted her face. Suddenly she threw her arms around my neck and started to sob in a way that made her whole body heave. “Mon Raymond,” she whispered. “J’ai su que je vous trouverais.” As in: I knew I would find you.
I was going to pull away. I was going to set her straight. But you know how there are certain times when you want to perform some act of kindness all out of proportion to the situation? So for the next few hours, I turned myself into this Raymond. I did that for her.
When I got back to the hospital, it was very late, and I had to explain to the security guard several times who I was and why he should let me back in.
Right after it happened and the room started filling up with people, I asked Nurse Pauline if it would be all right to call in someone who cut hair and did makeup. I wanted a good person too, not the cheapest one available or someone who serviced institutions and was only used to working on people in hospitals and jails. I wanted a real stylist. Was that possible?
Less than an hour later, a young woman appeared in the doorway carrying a small black bag. Pauline told me her name was Margot, and she assured me that she was well known in the right parts of the city. She did a lot of the society people, the ones you see in the paper. She cut the hair and did up the faces of some of the ministers’ wives, and even their mistresses too, though not, of course, on the same day. Ha ha.
It took Margot about an hour to do the whole treatment. Foundation. Eyeliner. Lipstick. Hairdo. Then it came down to a few last snips, a final sweep of her fingers through the top of the hair where so much had fallen out and where she had miraculously created the effect of fullness. She was done. She stepped back from the bed to give me an unobstructed view.
“Magnifique,” I said, and everyone in the room had to agree.
Peter Gordon is the author of the short story collection Man Receives a Letter (Red Hen Press, 2009). His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Review, The North American Review, Glimmer Train, and Pushcart Prize XXI: Best of the Small Presses.