Céleste

In my comings and goings from 41 Norland Square, the more I acquired a sense of the building's other occupants, the less I knew about them.  It was important to know something.  Most of the other tenants, except for Mrs. Russell, of course, hit the road early in the day, heading off to work, not to be seen again until evening.  In the mornings, although I got up with the earliest, I was still dressing as, one by one, the London Transport commuters slammed the building's big oak door.  Even if I had my metal brace on, shoes tied, trousers fastened, there was still the matter of breakfast.  I made tea, poured muesli in a bowl and listened to Jimmy Saville on Radio 1.  American and British pops interspersed by Jimmy making inane jokes, sometimes singing over the songs.  Silly and familiar and morning.

In the daytime, there was one mystery.  Céleste.  She occupied the one-bedroom flat, if one could call it that, on the ground floor.  The narrow building, cut up to provide a hallway to the stairs and rooms above, had squeezed what was left into a narrow succession of rooms that, in London, amounted to a flat.  The Frenchwoman who lived there, Céleste, had a baby and an Englishman who could easily have passed for a husband, although not over time.  He was there for one month, gone for the next.  Their arrangement was unclear and unsteady.  Clive...I got these names from the small paper strip inserted by each electric button next to the front door...had the rosy pinch-cheeked face of a truly English man.  And he had an earnest, deeply serious, almost troubled look whatever he emerged from the shotgun flat.  I wondered what was going on in there, passing Clive in the hall.  The baby cried, Céleste yelled, but so what?  Clive was never out for very long.  He retrieved something from his car, ran the rubbish out to the bins and slipped back into his world behind the closed door.

Céleste's appearances were infrequent but much more dramatic.  She smoked in the lip-hanging style of a French film actress and appeared in the hallway wearing a short robe or long blouse, something she had thrown on to provide minimal cover at the time of day when the building was empty, save for the rouged Mrs. Russell or the crutch-clicking American.  Céleste stood at the hallway table eyeing the morning's mail with a world-weary air.  She said hello with the empty, pro forma manner of someone who is waiting for a bus, or maybe Godot or can't remember and doesn't care.  I decided not to take it personally.

This decision was a tough one.  Everything was secretly personal, and this was my personal secret.  Each morning I slipped into my disabled body as though it belonged to someone else.  One morning en route to the tube station I made the mistake of leaning against a tree and idly feeling the bark.  Unnerving to feel how little I could feel...rough from smooth, yes, but not sharp from smooth...the nervous system unnerved.  It hit me with a shudder.  I continued walking, another realization scraping at me, sadness piling up and up.  Which was why it was a good thing that I had a part-time job of sorts, 50 minutes a day, up the velvet stairs to the psychoanalyst's in Montague Square.

On the way back, to vary the experience, I sometimes sailed past the entrance to Marble Arch Tube Station, crossed Oxford Street and waited for a bus.  That's where I ran into Lucy, the American girl who had willed me her room in Norland Square.  Lucy, working her way up in the British publishing world, was no longer at the bedsit level of British socioeconomics.  She had a flat, on her own, and now told me about it as the 88, then the 12, bus sailed by.  I didn't care.  I certainly had time.  How are things in the house, she asked.  Unchanged, I said.  Céleste still smoking and looking existentially burned out at 25.  What about Joséphine?  Lucy stared at me and I stared back.  Who was Joséphine?  Céleste's bedmate, of course.  Was she gone?  Lucy had never heard of Clive.

In the coming months, when the door of the ground floor flat opened, I sometimes saw more than Céleste.  A toddler emerged, gripping the door frame, weaving like a drunk, then bolting like a prison escapee.  If the one-year-old had a name, I never learned it.  Céleste eyed him with amusement, sometimes even smiling at me.  I usually stopped to watch the short-legged antics of her son.  A terror, she said, crossing her arms and surrendering to something like motherly pride.  The moment lasted as long as it could, then sagged, then one of us departed.  Céleste had an oddly light way of holding the boy's hands aloft as he toddled.  She seemed amused, perhaps half surprised, at her own maternity.

Clive became a weekend dad.  He wore a leather car jacket, dark glasses and keys hanging off a ring as he strode in on Saturdays.  Clive looked more together, less pained and overwrought, as he collected his son.  Céleste gave him up without protest.  Sometimes the door stood open as thelittle boy staggered about and Clive came and went, packing and unpacking his car.  It was spring now, and the front door could stand open without dire consequences.  I heard the two parents in the hallway, alternating between French and English, sometimes even laughing.  They had reached some sort of accommodation, a clearing where both could move about.

I kept going down the stairs, and up.  Into the West End to the psychoanalyst's and back.  I'd had the idea, very fixed and emotionally rooted, that couples really weren't.  Their conjunction was about pain and distance.  And things didn't work out.  Walking by Céleste's flat was no longer a drain.  Whatever mysterious knots they had tied, now there were three of them, and one was unmistakably growing.