The Rules of Magic (Practical Magic 0)(81)
He was turning the pages when a woman sat across from him. She was older, extremely elegant, wearing sleek white-framed sunglasses despite the hour. She wore black, and took a cigarette and gold lighter from her leather purse.
“So here you are,” she said.
Vincent looked up and shrugged. “Je suis désolé, madame. Vous avez fait une erreur. Nous ne nous connaissons pas.”
“We don’t know each other, it’s true,” the woman remarked. “But I am not mistaking you for anyone else. I knew your mother. To tell the truth, I knew her extremely well. I’m the same as you and your family, you see. From a very long line here in France. When your mother lived here in Paris, Susanna didn’t deny who she was. That came later. We remained close, by long distance, and I know she would have wanted me to watch over you, which is what I’ve been doing.”
“I see.” Vincent put down his paper. So he was not anonymous after all. Because this was Paris and not New York, he did his best with the pleasantries of polite conversation when in truth he wished to merely storm off. “Perhaps I don’t wish to be looked after.”
“But you’re one of us, so you see I have no choice.”
Vincent shook his head. “I’m not anything.”
The woman looked at him sadly. “We never change who we are from the beginning. You still have your inheritance from your bloodline. We may have experience and loss, but who we are at the core, that never changes. You are something special, the same as you’ve always been.” She went on to introduce herself as Agnes Durant. “I have an apartment behind Place Vend?me. We often gather there. We’ve been here in Paris for so long we don’t have to hide as Americans do. No one sees us if we don’t wish them to. You think you’re in hiding, but your presence is quite evident.”
Vincent flicked down some money for the bill and stood, nodding courteously. “Then it’s best for me to go.”
“And keep running? That’s the coward’s way, isn’t it? Please. Don’t go.”
Something in her tone moved Vincent. He sat back down again. “Madame, I appreciate your offer of help. Really. I do. But there’s no point.”
“You have nothing worth living for?”
Vincent laughed. “Not so much. No, I don’t.”
“Because you can’t go back to America? Because the government will never let you be?”
“Because I lost the man I loved.”
“Oh.” Agnes nodded. That she understood. “Many of us lose the man we love. And it’s terrible. I know that for myself.”
Vincent heaved a sigh and leaned forward, his expression bleak. He saw that this woman was the age his mother would have been and he felt a connection despite himself. “I have nothing left.” He had always known his life would be over when he was still young.
Madame shook her head. “Vincent,” she said with emotion. She clearly had the sight. “One life may be over, but another can begin.”
Vincent gazed at the orange light. He could see every molecule of air, all of it infused with possibility. He picked up the scent of the sweet grass in the gardens, and heard the ringing of the goat’s bell and felt the chill of the evening as it approached.
“You’re in Paris,” Madame said. “You might as well live.”
So that he could live freely Madame Durant advised it would be best if he died. It must be public and final. He would no longer be a wanted man. His government would forget him, and so would everyone else. He could be himself, but with a new name and a new life, and what’s more, he could then avoid the Owens curse.
He checked out of the hotel in the Marais. He had very little with him, but there was enough cash left from Franny’s generous gift so that he could shop at a music store near the Sorbonne. There he spent the afternoon searching for an instrument that might replace his cherished Martin left behind in the States.
He found the guitar at the end of the day. A Selmer, the kind the brilliant gypsy musician Django Reinhardt had used. Reinhardt’s third and fourth fingers were paralyzed and became webbed after he suffered burns in a fire, but he continued on with a style that was his alone. The guitar Vincent chose was made of laminated rosewood with a walnut neck and an ebony fingerboard. It had been made in the early fifties, and had been banged around, but once Vincent picked it up he didn’t want to let it go. He hadn’t played since his fingers had been broken, and so he was tentative at first, but he thought of what Django had gone through, and how he’d managed to become one of the greatest jazz guitarists of all time, therefore he couldn’t feel sorry for himself.
He was not as skilled as he once was; all the same, strumming the guitar felt like sorcery. The tone was so singular, so nearly human in its trembling pitch, it was as though he’d found his soul in a dusty shop. He was in Paris and he felt alive. Perhaps Agnes had been right: you remained who you were. Vincent bargained, but not too much because he wanted it so. And then he saw a little record player in a corner, a clever little machine fit into a rose-colored leather traveling case. He bought it without bargaining, full price, and he took it with him, tucked under his arm.
He went to a stationery store, where he bought an airmail letter. He then sat at a café, ordered a coffee, and composed a message to his sisters. He told Jet that one of the best days of his life was when they arrived at the hospital after the accident to find she was alive. He reminded Franny of the story she had told about the minstrel who lost his voice.