Last Night in Montreal Read Online Free Page A

a red spot on him, a symbol, to mark the last few heartbeats held in his chest.
    “I like mythology too. When did you get interested in Greek legends?”
    “Two days after I turned sixteen.”
    “That’s very specific. You got a book for your birthday?”
    “No, someone I knew was talking about the story, so I read it as soon as I could. I don’t really know Matisse, but I like that print. I like the story,” she said. “I think it’s the saddest of all the Greek legends.” She blinked; her voice seemed suddenly tired. “What time is it?”
    “Late,” he said. “Probably eight o’clock or so. May I walk you home?”
    HER HOME was a rented room with a window that looked out on an airshaft, a brick wall three feet from the glass. Night fell at one-thirty in the afternoon. The times when he came to her in that room he had the feeling of stepping into a cave, or stepping outside time. She slept on a mattress on the floor. A suitcase, opened against the wall, held a jumble of clothes and a battered manila envelope. She had a Polaroid from her childhood pinned neatly to a wall: Lilia in a diner, twelve years old in the summertime in a faroff Southern state, leaning over the countertop with the waitress.
    Lilia: she had ink stains on her fingers, and the most beautiful eyes. She wore a silver chain necklace but wouldn’t say where it was from. She was obsessed by the topography of language: she followed the maps of alphabets over obscure terrains, parted the shifting gauze curtains between window, fenêtre, finestra, fenster and peered outward, wrote out long charts of words and brought home books in five languages. She maintained a secretive, passionate life of study. She was without precedent; Eli had dedicated his life before her to not being alone, he had surrounded himself with other people for as long as he could remember, but he had never known anyone remotely like her.
    She had a mind like a switchblade. She sometimes stayed up all night. She worked four or five nights a week washing dishes at a vast Thai restaurant near the river, where Manhattan shone across the dark water at night. She returned from the restaurant at midnight with an aura of dish soap and steam, peanut oil, kitchen grime, her face shiny with exertion and her eyes too bright. She stayed up reading till morning, her lips moving as she struggled with the Cyrillic alphabet, and crawled into bed beside Eli at dawn.
    Her hair was dark and cut unevenly, in a way that he found secretly thrilling; he knew that when it got too long she cut it herself, fast and carelessly, not necessarily in the presence of a mirror. The effect was rough but she was pretty enough to pull it off. She had scars on her arms, a faint and complicated pattern of lines suggesting a long-ago accident involving a great deal of broken glass, visible only under certain lights; she never talked about them, and he could somehow never bring himself to ask. She had four or five unevenly spaced freckles on her nose, like Lolita. She gave the impression of harboring enormous secrets. She had been traveling alone from city to city, in his understanding, since she was no older than sixteen or seventeen years old. She alluded occasionally to her father in New Mexico and she talked to him on the phone sometimes; her father had a girlfriend, and they had two small children together, but Eli was never sure if there was anyone else. The existence of a mother, for example, was far from clear. When he asked, she said she’d never known her mother and then went quiet.
    She moved in with him at the midpoint: three months after he walked her home from the Café Matisse and three months before she disappeared. Cohabitation held certain surprises. She had a specific way of living that seemed to him at once erratic and ritualistic and frequently caused him to wonder about her sanity—a faint unease came over him while sitting beside the bathtub, for example, chatting and watching her shave her