Last Night in Montreal Read Online Free Page B

legs, change razor blades, and then shave her legs again. She would pause occasionally to sip from a tall glass of water that sat on the edge of the bathtub next to four or five bottles of shampoo, which she used in rotation. She could disappear with her camera for hours, particularly in thunderstorms; her shift at the restaurant ended no later than midnight but on stormy nights she came home at three or four in the morning, hair plastered to her forehead, soaked to the skin. He would have suspected her of cheating in those times except that it was clear from the condition of her clothing that she hadn’t been indoors all night. She’d extract herself from layer upon sodden layer of clothing, happy and shivering and her skin cold to the touch, and then she’d spend an hour or so in a steaming-hot shower and sleep in until at least noon. She had no explanation for these evenings except that she liked walking in rainstorms and her camera was waterproof. He was desperately curious but never asked where she went. He tried not to press her for too many details, about her scars or her family or anything else; she’d come from nowhere and seemed to have no past, and it seemed possible, even in the beginning when everything was easy, that the tenuous logic of her existence in his life might collapse under close examination. He didn’t want to know.
    “What I want,” she said quietly, on the third night he spent with her, “is to stop traveling and stay in the same place for a while. I’m starting to think I’ve been traveling too much.”
    And for Eli—frustrated, aimless, working at a job he didn’t particularly like, failed scholar, unable to decide whether he was a writer or a latent genius or just an academic fraud—the idea of traveling too much was unimaginably exotic, and he pulled her close and fucked her again and imagined staying beside her forever. But that was only the third night she spent with him.
    She was easily distracted. She had a photographer’s fascination with quality of light. An upside-down CD reflecting rainbows on the bedroom ceiling, a glass of red wine catching the light of a candle, the Empire State Building piercing white against the sky at night. She loved details, and the world, and inevitably became lost in both. Violently beautiful sunsets could reduce her to tears. She was virtually incapacitated by fireflies. She was sublimely abnormal, and very frequently unnerving, but she was his psalm; what a live-in lover offers you, ultimately, is the unprecedented revelation of not being alone. She slipped so easily into the folds of his life. Her few belongings vanished into his apartment.
    It always seemed later on that he loved her, at least partially, because she rendered him fraudulent. He talked about traveling, but she had traveled. He talked about photography, but she took photographs. He talked about languages, but she translated them. He felt that if she were a screenwriter she’d write screenplays instead of talking about screenplays and sketching outlines of screenplays and analyzing screenplays the way Thomas did. If she were a dancer, he felt that she’d dance. What he liked best were the times when they went into the café and none of his friends were there, so they could sit together and read the paper in blissful silence. Or the afternoons when he sat at his desk and measured sentences, written and then deleted in equal measure, or did research while she sat in the armchair nearby and studied Russian texts, her lips moving soundlessly over the words. And life settled into a state not far from perfection, until he found the lists.
    One: a list of names, ten pages, beginning and ending with Lilia . Most names had arrows that trailed out into the margins, where the names of places were noted in small print: Mississippi, south Kansas, central Florida, Detroit. Two: a list of words in a number of languages, which could’ve meant anything at all. He recognized the Spanish word for