Ever After Read Online Free Page A

my parents, I daily disproved the illusion: Paris was the living, breathing rendition of itself.
    “… di dolce-ezza e di piacer …?”
    Somewhere on those wanderings to and from school, in the crisp, rimy breath of a January morning, I looked up from the pavement through a tall, lighted window and saw—a true vision. Three—four, five—ballerinas, dressed in leotards and tights, swathed in woollen leg-warmers, dipping, stretching, balancing, raising one leg, extending one arm in that curving way ballet-dancers do, while clinging with the other to a wall bar. I stood transfixed, entranced.
    How many times did I pass that window again? How many times was the blind cruelly drawn? Once—but this must have been at a later time of day and I must have been by then a fully-fledged truant,
flâneur, voyeur
—I passed a café at the further end of the same street, and there, sitting at an outside table, even in that midwinter chill (warm and pink from exercise), were my ballerinas. But no longer poised, living sculptures. They were little chattering
mesdemoiselles
-about-town, crossing their legs, nestling their chins into their scarves, responding boldly to the
badinage
of the waiter, blowing at the steamy froth on their
chocolats chauds
. I drew close, feigning interest in an adjacent shop-front. Glowing faces. A sound of female glee. Two eyes, in particular, beneath a dark fringe, which momentarily turned on me. Two pink lips, a flicking tongue adorned with the flakes of a croissant.
    A crude case of my mother’s shop-window lusts? But I knew it was more than that. What enthralled me was the pathos, the dignity, the ardour of
rehearsal
. The sublime fact that in a world so in need of being sorted out, young girls of sixteen and seventeen (but, of course, to me, then, they were Women) could devote themselves so strenuously to becoming sugar-plum fairies.
    Lift the axe! I wish I could have taken him, gripped his hand, as he gripped mine, suddenly, on that wet, chilly day as we emerged from the gloom of Les Invalides, stood him before that secret window and said: There, it’s for that that you are sorting out the world. I wish he could have gripped my hand more firmly still, come closer to me out of his remoteness; told me, warned me.
    Paris first bred in me the notion that the highest aim of civilization is the loving perfection of the useless: ballerinas, café chatter, Puccini operas, Elizabethan sonnets, silkunderwear,
parfumerie, patisserie
, chandeliers, the magic hush when the lights go down in an auditorium …
    “Mimi! Mimi! Mimi!”
     … and Romantic Love.
    She actually cried, she actually wept in the seat beside me, dabbing her eyes and clutching my hand, while her lips mimed the arias.
    Lift the axe! A Paris morning, in April. Perhaps that very morning I had peeped at my ballerinas. Morning turning to midday. Sunshine; pigeons; the smell of food. She is waiting beyond the gates of the
école
, though by now I am used to making my own way home. She is alone and somehow purposeful, fixed in her own space. She opens her arms and gives me an engulfing hug, as if I have returned from somewhere far away. But she is not smiling (or crying). She is composed and authoritative; the hug is like some solemn ceremony.
    “Your daddy has had an accident, at his office.”
    “An accident?”
    “Your daddy has had an accident. And died.”
    The second part of this statement, uttered unemphatically, almost perfunctorily, scarcely registered at first. Certain announcements take time to reach the brain.
    “An accident with a gun.”
    With a gun? With a
gun
? What was he doing, in his office, in Paris, in the seventh
arrondissement
, in the centre of civilization, with a gun? A sudden, racing fantasy, a whole alternative life for my father, who was now dead, bloomed in my head. He was a spy, an undercover agent, he was on some hush-hush mission. It explained his distance, his absences, his resonant words about