The Watchtower

long days of the Paris summer had fooled me. I felt a twinge of guilt then, followed by a pang of grief. I wasn’t going to get a message. If Will had really sent the painting of the church—and even that certitude was fading fast in the limpid evening light—perhaps he had only sent it as a farewell. An apology for betraying my trust and stealing the box. A reminder that he’d needed it to embark on his own quest for mortality. Perhaps it served no more purpose than a postcard sent from a foreign land with the message Wish you were here. It hadn’t been an invitation at all.
    With another pang I recalled another moment by a river. That very first night I had spent with Will we had sat on a parapet above the Hudson and he had told me his history. “When I was a young man,” he had begun, “I was, I am sorry to say, exceedingly vain of my good looks, and exceedingly shallow. So vain and shallow that although many beautiful young women fell in love with me and my father begged me to marry and produce an heir, I would not tie myself to one lest I lose the adulation of the many.”
    I remembered looking at his profile against the night sky and thinking that he might be forgiven a little vanity, but that he had surely gained depth over the centuries.
    But had he? Might I not be just another of those young women who had adored him and whom he had spurned?
    The sun-struck water blurred into a haze of gold light in front of my eyes. I thought it might be one of my ocular migraines, but then I realized it was only my tears blurring my vision.
    He isn’t coming, he isn’t coming. I heard the words chiming inside my head as the bells of Notre Dame began to toll the hour.
    How many disappointed lovers had stood on this bridge and thought those words? How many had leaned a little farther over the stone parapet and given themselves to the river rather than face another day without their beloved?
    Well, not me, I thought, straightening myself up. As I did, I felt the timepiece ticking against my chest like a second heart. I looked at it again, pleased with the work I’d done. The week hadn’t been a total waste. The timepiece would be the basis of a new line of jewelry when I got back to New York. I’d found exactly the inspiration I’d told my friends I’d come here looking for. Could I hate Will for calling me to Paris if this was the result?
    No. The answer was that I couldn’t hate him. But that didn’t mean I had to spend the rest of my vacation sitting in a dark, musty church waiting for him.
    I walked slowly back toward the Square Viviani. I had never tried to go to the church after dark, mostly because of the concerts that were held there at night. Tonight was no exception, but I thought if I waited until after the concertgoers left, I might be able to sneak in. I felt I had to go tonight while my mind was made up. I had to go one last time to say good-bye.
    The concert was still going on when I got there, so I waited in the square for it to finish. At first the square was crowded enough with tourists that I didn’t worry about being safe here at night. This area by the Seine, across the river from Notre Dame, was especially popular with the students who filled the schools on the Left Bank during the summer. I listened to a group of American girls laughing about a man who had approached them outside Notre Dame that day.
    “Was it crazy pigeon man again?” a girl with wavy, brown hair and a dimple in her left cheek asked.
    “No,” a redheaded girl answered. “It was crazy pigeon man’s friend Charlemagne man!”
    “Oh, yeah!” a third girl with black bangs low over her forehead replied. “The one who went on about how Charlemagne was a great man and he founded the schools so we could come here to study art. Don’t you think he’s got Charlemagne mixed up with Napoléon?”
    “I think he’s got more than that mixed up!” the dimpled girl responded.
    I listened to them dissect the crazy ranting of the two street characters—I’d seen them myself in the square in front of Notre Dame—and then go on to talk of the paintings they’d seen at the d’Orsay that day, the eccentricities of their art teacher (“What do you think he means when he says my lines need more voce ?”), and the accordion players on the metro (“I like the one at the Cluny stop whose accordion sounds like an organ”), and I thought, how wonderful to be a student in Paris! Why shouldn’t I enjoy myself the way they