Last Night in Montreal Read Online Free

here, sitting quietly in the Café Matisse when he walked by the window or came in for a coffee. She came here often, and when they were here at the same time he liked to try to sit as nearby as possible. On this particular day, when he’d left Thomas and Geneviève at the Third Cup Café across the intersection, there were no empty tables when he’d wandered in— thank you, God—and in a catastrophe of blind courage he’d walked across to her table, insinuated himself into the opposite seat, and introduced himself. By some small miracle she’d smiled back and said her name instead of telling him to leave her alone and wait for his own goddamn table, and that had been six or seven hours ago. The café was quiet now, and the morning waitress had left for the day. The afternoon waitress was leaning on the countertop, staring out at the uneventful street.
    “But what about you?” he asked. “You know I like dead languages, but what do you like?”
    “Live languages,” Lilia said. “Reading, taking photographs, a few other things. Do you work in the neighborhood?”
    “Yeah, a few blocks from here. I stand in an art gallery staring at the wall four days a week. You?”
    “The wall? Not the paintings?”
    “There aren’t that many paintings there—actually, there aren’t any— I don’t want to talk about my job,” he said. “I don’t like my job very much, to be perfectly honest. What do you do for a living?”
    “I wash dishes. Do you like to travel? I went to New Mexico recently; have you been?”
    “Several times. And what’s interesting,” he said, “is that we’ve been talking for hours now, and I hardly know anything about you. Where are you from?”
    She smiled. “This will sound very strange to you,” she said, “but I’ve lived in so many places that I’m not entirely sure.”
    “I see. Well. How long have you lived in New York?”
    “About six weeks,” she said.
    “And where were you just before that?”
    “You mean where was I living when I boarded a train to New York?”
    “Exactly. Yes. You arrived here from somewhere.”
    “From Chicago,” she said.
    He felt that he was finally getting somewhere. “You lived there for a while?”
    “Not really. A few months.”
    “Before that?”
    “St. Louis.”
    “Before that?”
    “Minneapolis. St. Paul. Indianapolis. Denver. Some other places in the Midwest, New Orleans, Savannah, Miami. A few cities in California. Portland.”
    “Is there anywhere you haven’t lived?”
    “Sometimes I think there isn’t.”
    “You’re a traveler.”
    “Yes. I try to be as up-front about it as possible now,” she said.
    He wasn’t sure what she meant but let it pass. “You said you liked live languages,” he said.
    “I like translating things.”
    “What do you translate?”
    “Random things that I come across. Newspaper articles. Books. It’s just something I like doing.”
    Four and a half languages not including English, she said, when pressed for more details. Español, Italiano, Deutsch, Français. Her Russian, she admitted, was shaky at best. Her wrist was warm beneath his fingertips.
    “I envy you. I don’t speak any living languages except English. What else do you like?”
    “I like Greek mythology,” she said. “I like that Matisse print over the bar. It’s the reason why I come here, actually.” She gestured at the opposite wall, and he twisted around to look. The Flight of Icarus, 1947: one of Matisse’s final works, from the time when he’d subsided from paint into paper cutouts and was moving closer and closer to the end of the line, unable to walk, his body slipping away from him. Icarus is a black silhouette falling through blue, his arms still outstretched with the memory of wings, bright starbursts exploding yellow around him in the deep blue air. He’s wingless, and already close above the surface of the water: Matisse would be dead in seven years. Icarus, plummeting fast into the Aegean Sea, and there’s