The Radiant City by Lauren B. Davis

thin grey strings of hair pulled up in an untidy knot, wearing a man’s jacket and several layers of skirts. The old woman touched the girl’s arm over and over again, as though trying to wake her. That girl was so beautiful. Death had made her beautiful. Pale and peaceful, completely lovely. Drained of all tension, all fear. So unspeakably frail and still and undefended. I wanted to touch her but when I put my hand out, the old woman grabbed me and bit the fleshy part beneath my thumb until she drew blood and I hit her on the back of her head, hard enough to make her let go. I walked away, nursing my hand, weeping for this girl, whom I had never seen alive, whom I loved and was dead. For days I dreamed of her and for weeks could not get her image out of my mind. I think she lives there still.
     
    Later, when I came back to Kate from that time away, there was a moment when she lay sleeping on the couch. We had gone for a walk that afternoon, to see the cherry blossoms, pink and white, like a young girl’s skin, the colour of a nipple, of a lip, of an earlobe. A man bumped into Kate on the sidewalk, and I was instantly enraged, pushing the man, challenging him, stupefied by the look of astonishment on his face as he apologized and said it was an accident. Kate stepped in front of me and made me look at her, her hands on the sides of my face, smiling as though smiles were a charm against bullies. “I’m fine,” she said. “Look, no harm, no harm.” And I saw that this was true and held out my hand to the man to shake, to say I was sorry, but the man scuttled away, muttering. We went home, Kate and I, and made love and I lost myself for a moment in her butterscotch skin. Then she’d dozed off with a book on her stomach, and her head tilted toward the sun coming in the window. It made her face look pale, too pale, pale as a phantom in the afternoon light. It was sudden, the way I couldn’t stand to look at her and how I had to get out of the apartment right then, immediately, or I would choke. When I returned, drunk as Davy’s sow, in the wee smalls, Kate was mad as hell and how could I explain?
     
    Sack of skulls.
     
     
     
     
     
    Matthew sits back, his fingers cramped around the plastic shaft of the ballpoint pen . Don’t read it back; don’t read it back. He opens the drawer, grabs an envelope, scribbles a note to Brent and stuffs it, and the pages he’s just written, inside. Licks the seal. Flattens it with a pound of his fist. Let’s see what you make of that . Matthew laughs out loud, addresses the envelope, and then sticks a stamp on the letter and grabs his jacket. He will mail the damn thing. He will. Still laughing, he heads for the door.
     
    After mailing his pages to Brent, Matthew strolls back to his apartment, but realizes he does not want to go in. He stands at the heavy wooden door with his hands in his pockets. He has nowhere else to go, at least not until tonight and dinner at Anthony’s. He wonders how this can be. How can a person live in Paris and have nowhere to go?
     
    On previous visits to Paris over the years he had always been contemptuous of a certain type of expatriate and how the city supported their illusions. All the beachcombers, and soon-to-be novelists, painters, dancers, jazz musicians. They teach English or work as babysitters or moving men or at some other bad-paying job, or else they live off their trust funds or savings or, yes, disability checks, and don’t actually do any writing, painting, dancing, whatever. They sit in cafés and smoke Gitanes and they bolster up each other’s lies and they tell each other they are all Hemingways, or Josephine Bakers, or Picassos. Back in some place like New York, say, they would have to make it quick or be chewed up and spat out in record time and back to a bus to Minnesota and the Mama’s lutefisk. But not here. Here they slink along café to café. Now, he fears he is becoming one of them.
     
    “Mr. Matthew!” The teenager