Lascaux

By Roger Topp

Naia says she could be the girl with the black top reads LOSER in big capitals, or the woman in the reptilian stripes and knee-high boots. “I could be the drunk woman not fooling the traffic cop. I could be as wrong as them, or I could root through the suitcase for your last clean shirt.”

She could be the monster’s pockets, but across the square there is a man with a loop of string, two riding crops, and a kitchen sink making soap bubbles the size of box jellyfish. Directly above me, a bronze of a man my size wears a suit and a bulldog, and the late morning odor of café and city have given over to cart-horse manure. I don’t have to look to know that's a jet plane coming in to land.

People want to take pictures of the statue I’ve claimed, and the girl in the spacesuit, and the other one who's a mouse not Mickey, and the lion and the clown. At noon, the bells ring as if noon, as if there’s somewhere I should be. Around and about the tidy man with the bowl of soap, children in white shirts and jeans bounce as if the paving stones are trampolines.

The mothers want to know how they can do the bubble man’s trick at home with a couple garden stakes, a clothesline, and book on knots. They capture him and his tools with tiny cameras embedded in glass and aluminum bricks.

In the Place d’Armes, and hundreds of photographs are taken every minute. This is a record of a string of moments. Pick twelve characters, because it is noon, and run the interval through each of their perspectives. Specific cues will repeat: when the bubble man's coin box is upended by the children, when the two cigarette sweepers start an argument, when the man leading the tour from Brazil walks through with his tiny flag on a ten-foot stick, when the white horse and carriage runs behind the child mid tantrum, when the band finds its crescendo and the crowd erupts with applause.

The jellyfish escape around the fountain, and gangly teenagers can't resist chasing them. The moms stab the small ones the children miss. Like a running con, the coin box has flipped over half a dozen times. When the box is kicked a culture gets on its hands and knees to help. The kick happens when I look away. Everyone is heads down in a circle when I turn back around.

Naia says, “The fancy dress is a distraction. I know you. She will wear a simple little black number. You will think her pretty and you will keep all the fine details to yourself. That is how you will know.”

“What were you wearing when I met you?”

“Black dress.”

“And boots?”

“And boots. Clever you. Your eyes were on the dress,” says Naia. “What am I wearing now?”

I have no idea. Naia is a voiceless whisper, spontaneous thought assuming the role of someone with whom I can share a running conversation.

I am here alone.

“Yes.”

Solitude in the city.

“Yes.”

The band closes their set seconds before the one o’clock chimes smother the square. My face is warm from an hour in the sun, but an hour in a café will bring the temperature back around where I can watch the foot traffic from a window half a story above the sidewalk. I begin to study human hair. It seems to serve no purpose but to keep our brains warmer than the world. It reminds me we are primitive, and I might imagine the world is a series of coiffed and windblown wigs blown by at the height of my knees.

Für Elise plays while a tourist on a horse-drawn carriage takes pictures with I don't know what sort of camera. He wears sunglasses with alternate red and blue lenses. I have no idea what he sees or in how many dimensions, but I think it won't be long till eyeglasses come in touchscreen.

“I didn't know you smoked?” I say.

“Only in Europe.”

“This is not Europe.”

“Yes, it is. Anyway, I like to set limits. If you smoke too much, you begin to smell like you smell. I like to smell pretty, not like a scorched field in Virginia. Everyone should have a predictable smell, a smile, eyes of a shape. Workout, shower, dry towel, perfume. Everything must be taken into consideration. Changes must be gradual and handled with prayer and patience. See. Smell? Art form, yes?”

“Yes,” I say.

“I promise I will smell the same tomorrow.”

“Hotel soap.”

“Not on your life,” says Naia.

“Hotel water?”

“A practical evil. You won’t know the difference.”

“Then?”

“I know the difference. I’ll complain about it all day in both blunt and subtle ways. You will tune me out if you know what’s good for you, and that will make me grumpy. But dinner will be spectacular and I’ll get over it, because in the end, I’m happy your sense of smell is underdeveloped.”

“I use the hotel soap.”

“I know,” she says, saying just enough. She has given me a chance to mend my ways.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I say.

She smiles at that. “But taste,” she says. “The taste of a person's mouth must be a vastly changeable thing, like the moon. It should be slightly salty, exotic and comforting, and it is no place to enter with expectations. It is the alien soul. It is secret and to discover it you must step within dagger range. Kisses are intimate, not entree. Tapas, vulnerable and cannot in the course of conversation end the night. You will always want more, and you should. As much as you can. Not enough people understand this. Share, share. Breath mints are for fools.

“Naia?”

“Yes.”

“You are encouraging me.”

With each successive day in Montreal, I cling to an opportunity that should never have come, a past life revisited, a date with what was once / is / could be the love of my life—and at the same time know it’s a brief rekindling only. The anticipation gives over to great detail. Everything is in focus. When she arrives, I’ll be gone in a flash. Secretly, I may already know she’s no longer mine, but we can pretend—and the pretending is real.

 Naia leans forward. “You’ve been away too long.” She has something else to say. “The man next to us thinks his shellfish is too salty.”

More distractions. I make do with a smile. We can’t kiss with a table between us. We are not birds. “It’s all this sunlight.” I am clothes shopping for survival. I packed for the North Atlantic, not summer in Montreal.

“I just want something to do with my hands,” she says. “It's very important in Europe that you have something to do with your hands.” She turns the ashtray round by twelve degrees with two fingers.

“When were you last in Europe?”

“It’s like this. Look down at your food, then look up. Then look back down. How long before you look again, fearing she has passed you by?

“Who?”

“She that can sell you a future. Is that her, do you suppose, who can take us back to Lascaux—explore the painting, the torch soot, the oubliette?”

Is a cave so different from living in the bowels of an old boat on the high seas? Cramped? Claustrophobic? Stale air. Old molds. Tenants turn over faster than diners in a café and none of them shower. Hot lamps, computers bright like a scream. Realization that nothing remains still.

“It’s been near twenty years,” I say.

I arrived in Montreal a day early. Now, how many have passed? I should see the rest of the sights, but I don’t want to see the sights. I want to watch people like I haven’t seen people in a very long time, as if I’ve just got off the boat and not waited, interminably for it to arrive. I want to stay close to my hotel and my sea bags.

“They are all bones with skirts.”

“I like bones.”

“You think you do. They hunch like frightened cats, like men shuffling down into a cave, faces lathered with fat and smoke. Looking at a stranger is like making a handshake. It's not just showing her you haven't got a weapon. It should not be casual. Get the measure of her palm, the texture of her skin, the wear and the tear, the width of fingers and ligaments and laws of the muscle. A person’s hands cannot lie like the eyes. The walls are, as they say, unvarnished.”

I’m remembering the cave paintings at the museum. My own first wild adventure was in college—and underground—leaving Elizabeth’s bed in the roil of fall to ride into West Virginia to find a hole in a hill. Crawl around inside and come out in the early evening to find snow on the ground.

“Oh, look the bride. It is nice to be invited,” says Naia. She straightens her knife. She refolds the poultry mess of her napkin.

The bride and groom walk past the busker and violin and come across the street to have their picture taken on the benches near the restaurant. The busker alters his tune to something beautiful and traditional and then follows the melody with his own camera. He poses while he snaps photographs. The couple is a pleasant sight in a city manufactured of pleasant sights. Everyone takes pictures of strangers.

“Site of their first date,” Naia suggests. “This is where they shared ice cream cones, tasting both, learning about small things and differences and loving them—instantly.”

The couple moves from the benches to stand and make faces before a storefront’s arbor-draped flowers. Electric sconces wink and brighten in the tumble of early evening.

“What you don’t see is how long they were kept apart.”

I let them go, take the crick out of my neck. A woman wears a black-filigree tattoo all the way down her left arm. She steps like a deer through a clearing. Her dress is grey lace and buttons and her shoes are a thin net of white string and pink straps. The buckles are black.

Naia reaches over and squeezes my hand.

“The wedding was beautiful,” I say.

“It was, wasn’t it?” She smiles like a cashier handing me store-wrapped gifts.

We walk. In front of us, a man slips his two fingers inside the change cup of a parking kiosk. He presses the button with his thumb. He barely breaks his step. Naia asks if I saw. I nod.

“That too was beautiful,” she says. “Do you think he knows where they all are, and the fastest way to check them, or is he just short a quarter for a cup of coffee?”

“I could offer him a quarter.”

“Would that tell us anything?”

“If we ask.”

Naia disagrees. “Do I look like someone who needs to know the answers?”

I stop short because I see soccer balls in a shop window, and what must be a replica of the last World Cup.

“Seriously?”

“In the morning,” I say.

“I see.”

“Yes.”

“Because I’m wearing glasses?”

“You look smart,” I say.

“Chauvinist.”

“Yeah.” I search the street. “Maybe we’ll see her tomorrow.”

“How long will you wait? You should wait. Wait for dark. Maybe she only comes out at night? Maybe she’s had engine trouble.”

I have no answer to that. Dispatch says—dispatch does not know what to say. I want to say I have a long-standing relationship with the sea, but it’s more like a string of passionate but noncommittal affairs—a slow process of stranding and learning to swim again.

In the bright, narrow light of the afternoon Naia asks, “To whom do we give our loose change, the Victorian and his net of bubbles, or the bohemian on the unicycle?”

“Juggling.”

“Juggling fiery torches.” Naia waves her hand across the scene like a magician. “Fire is easy," she says. “We got fire. We got fire a long time ago. The bubble man can go on for hours, making all the children happy.”

“The juggler has skill, athleticism.”

“He stalls like a madman. He spreads out his tricks. Anyway, since when do we applaud skill? We applaud entertainment!”

“We applaud skill.”

“Then tell him to go catch me breakfast.” Naia rubs her belly. “This girl's hungry. Then I will applaud. Then I will have his babies.”

“He's scraggly.”

“Yes, he’s an artist. No. You are safe. I am yours. I will have your babies.”

“I’m confused.”

“I want to survive. And you smell okay, and oddly predictable.”

“What do I smell like?”

“Like a predator,” she says. “No. It's a good thing. I like a man that eats meat. You know where to find food. And scat and broken twigs and footprints in the mud by the pond.”

“That was pleasant.”

“That was cold. Wait till we invent running water, and bars of soap, and hot tubs.”

“Yes, I agree,” I say. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to tell you, Naia. Sometimes when you leave, you know, in the hours in-between, sometimes I expect I've imagined you.”

“That's silly.”

“We’re a long way from the ocean,” I say.

“And yet?”

“Yes. Because here you are.”

“Yes, but that’s your thing.”

I watch a girl in a bright blue and very short dress checking her hemline as she crosses the road under a fresh breeze. I prefer the diaphanous costume coming the other way. It’s cast dark blue, stitched tight to her lower thigh and flaps loose when she walks, like a banner. When she calms, it folds about her legs like a cloak, keeping her warm in the shadows.

“What do you look at?” I ask Naia. “The boys all look the same.”

To my surprise, she does not disagree. “I imagine their voices,” she says. “Look at the slits on that dress. I watch the girls too,” she admits. “They’re all so young here.”

“You’d think there’s a university nearby.”

“That must be it. Is it a Saturday? It must be a Saturday, and everyone is shopping. We should have come early. Then we could spy on all the couples that have slept together. See, now that boy’s special.” Argyle socks to his knees. “What ever happened to the peacock’s feathers?”

A woman and her date exit the café. She gives the pigeon that collides with her head the most disapproving look. If her date says anything, he will be met with silence, and then she will turn left into a store selling gloss and bright plastic everything—and that will be the last he sees of her. She wears an almond-colored cotton dress. The weave weighs heavily today, but as she walks into the sun, and it hits the dress with all the nuclear fury of the star. The light pipes through and blinds like an x-ray.

A happy customer in a suit comes loudly out of a doorway. “It's very good food,” he says to the next person in line for a table. “You will see. You will be very happy too. See here, look at the menu.” He sounds like a Russian in his fifties. His hair is white and cut with a laser.

A public piano is kept company in front of a church. He plays Wicked game, In the Air Tonight, Yellow, Unchained Melody… He knows what vibrates across two blocks and traffic.

We stop at a corner crosswalk that encourages the girls to fix their lipstick. Maybe there are benches loaded with boys on the next block. Perhaps the mirror finish on the building across the street reminds them of who they are. Maybe it’s just the heat of the traffic lights? I search in vain for Naia in the line of reflected suspects.

Easier if she were the girl with the little orange flowers in her hair, and the big, black belt that looks like three belts woven together by a Celtic princess. Not so many. Looks like her day off from the renaissance faire.

We wait for the lights, and the girl in the short black dress, and the shirtless boy. If I had his tattoos, I too would leave off my clothes. As we walk, I estimate at least four homeless per block, sometimes six. By three o'clock, most of them have pushed back into the cool shadows, tired of asking for forgiveness. “She will come today,” says Naia.

I have my doubts. Each morning, I ask the hotel for another night’s stay.

The desk attendant waves off my worries. “It’s no problem,” he says. A port is a port. I’d have more fun if I didn’t worry. I can’t wait another week. Decades can go by in a blink.

For a long while, I had imagined the first time I sailed the North Atlantic was aboard the SS France, westbound from England to New York. She was the longest steamship in the world and remained so until 2004. But that was too early. I’d completely underestimated how long my parents were in country before conceiving me. They’d come across in ’69. I’d come later. And  five weeks after I was born in America, we sailed east for South Hampton on the Queen Elizabeth II. So, if we’re talking strictly about what really happened, that was my first crossing, and Naia was not there.

If Naia were real, I’d tell her about the girl from Médecins Sans Frontières. I tried to carry the French for more than a few lines but moved away from both that and the sun, which was reflected in her face. She switched to English in a seamless second. She knew where the church was. Wait, no. I asked for the museum. I was distracted by her smile.

I play the piano outside the church. The woman who takes my picture seems to think I should continue, but I have difficulty making spontaneous chords out of the black keys. I possess an inordinate love of the black keys—but there are bad mechanics hidden away in the upright. This is me, trying to play a minor key melody in bright sunshine.

The girl in the zebra skirt and the tiny purse has learned to smile and to sneeze into her wrist at the same time. Her belly is a quarter moon and beautiful. Her eyes are brighter than all the satellites of Saturn. She runs her hands up her stomach while looking across the street. She makes sure she carries nothing she cannot live with. It’s not like checking for lint or cat hair or stray stickers from who knows where stickers come from. She’s putting her fingers on her confidence and carrying it through traffic.

I rub my eyes and squint while the orange dress steals the regatta and the cakes. She is gone before the brûlée arrives. I never see her face.

I like the tall, happy couple with sand in their hair. They’ve polished up nicely for the evening. She is tall as Athena and he is a head taller, checking the oncoming traffic and carrying his side of the conversation like a boy that can pay attention. He will age like bronze. If this is a first date, these barques are far too confident. I try to imagine them unhappy, quarreling, puking, screaming at each other, but I have nothing to go on. There’s not a flaw here, seasickness aside, and I wonder if I should be sorry for them.

I wouldn't be wrong to say those dresses are little more than polyester tube socks. Smart Canadians wear them large and are confident they will clutch at the hips, letting the waist breathe and turn a slow circle, like the bubble man.

“A woman in a beret. It’s about time.” Naia’s laughter is loud for late in the afternoon.

I see a woman without legs and without arms to the elbows. She maneuvers her machine easily up the bricks and cobblestones. There is a song in her head. It wanders like a loose thread but leads her through the pedestrian storm. There are scars in the lyrics. Then she catches a liquid tune pouring from a house band across the street. She holds it until the next block where a brunette, in pigtails and a recorder, whistles something simple, a song like a piece of string by which she could fly a kite, long and strong and endless.

The restaurant polish is out in front to attract the boys. They breed thin, they smoke guiltlessly, and they will not die of diabetes. She says hello through her teeth and I can feel the buzz from across the street. In English, we open our mouths as if we're breathing. In French, she blows a kiss.

My waiter mimes his question from across the patio.

“Fin,” I mouth and nod. Now they've moved the umbrella to allow for an extra table, I’m exposed to the balconies. I am being watched, which is only fair.

These couples we see have only just emerged from out the caves and intimacy, surfacing briefly to get a look at the world, to freshen their clothes and collect their vitamins. They glide across the bright, sun-drenched exteriors so they can be seen by those that have claimed chairs. Then they retreat to the clandestine, intimate spaces where they can whisper coolly and paint the furniture with musk. Outside, bleach falls heavily out of the sky.

She is the color of the church as the last of the day’s stronger light hits the bricks. He is the color of the doors. The frames of his discarded glasses are the iron hinges and the window grills. His head is on her lap and she holds it like it might break like a cake under pressure. Her thumbs go into his eyes. When she pulls them down to his cheeks, they are stones pulled from a stream. In the beginning, I think her sneakers are black, but a pearl ribbon shines near the sole. A red vein pulses. She is a dozen straps and lines and folds, cloth and bag and frown. She wraps her shawl around her elbows because that is where she gets cold. I notice the pair of them because she is pale like sunlit rock. Her face is hard. He is the sensible one, the one who thinks before he speaks, the one who wears dark jeans and a team jersey. She is the one who doesn't think much of the two-foot feather attached to the head of the carthorse.

Her phone is the size of my dad's old, bi-fold wallet. With very long nails she plucks a corner in and out of its bumper like I tap my fingers when I need the waiter to bring me the check—right—now. They take a selfie. In five seconds, everyone can see she knows how to smile for a camera.

I may have upset the man. No doubt he properly captured the hard rainbow of light through the lobby glass the way generations will remember it. I spoiled his found poetry with my point-and-shoot. Or perhaps, he didn't think much of my choice of perspective. This building, like the square, exists to be photographed, and a hundred photographs a minute does not scratch the paint. But if we could map the hot, holistic shutters, as one day I am certain we will, the cloud of bright lights would perfectly describe the positions of dying stars as we look down upon the galaxy. Next time I am alone, I’ll remember the universe loses 275 million stars a day. How many of those orbits a civilization scrambling for a ride? How many enjoy the tan?

She has the big eyes of youth, the long, glossy, black hair of youth, a white tank top with faded art, the silver computer and the bright blue camera she points across the cafe—and then as I begin to look away, turns the lens on me. It’s exactly how I take pictures of strangers in public.

The rush of people are disabling, but I have begun to feel one of them. We can tell I’ve been here too long when I can say, with some degree of certainty, that the polyester cap at the tartare express works Tuesday through Saturday, unless she’s exhausted, which was her luck yesterday when the boss was on a furious cleaning tear.

Over there. Is this our girl with a black dress and a doorway tucked into a pocket? Her long blonde hair, her top, and her tapas skirt snap like a flag. Back to the cave. Down is alien, but this is where we need to go. The source bubbles out. We only had to spend a little time in the sun. Naia looks nervous, and I suppose she gets that from me. “You don’t have to come,” I tell her. “Wait here. Hold on to the other end of the thread. It’s okay.” She is old monsters and not prepared for the salt, the shipwreck and the thunder of ill-fit anchor pockets.

A message arrives. There was a message. I am sent for. My ship is riding the St. Lawrence. I can collect my bags from the hotel. They will be sad to see me go.

When the taxi driver asks where to, I tell him the port. “The airport?” he says. “No, the port,” I say, “Ships.” “The Old Port?” he says. “No.” I’ve been to the Old Port and the science museum and seen the exhibit and Lascaux and the models of caves and the drawings of horses and bison. Part of me still explores the depths of those caves, with torches, with artists in the dark. They feel like a starting point. No, I mean the port. “I’m meeting a ship,” I say. I’ve waited a week in Montreal for it to arrive. Engine trouble out of Cleveland—but that’s all fixed now. “Drive,” I say. “I’ll know her when I see her.” In time, she’ll sail south and cut through Panama, but in two days, she’ll smell saltwater for the first time.

“This is what you do?”

I haven’t done this in a very long time. Decades go between adventures where I am reacquainted with the sea. I have to be careful not to fall in love—again. I forget that catching a ship is not waiting for a flight. When the call comes, I race to the docks but wait as the ship is secured. I wait as immigration boards to look at passports and decide who will be denied the port as the ship is fueled—because they’ve a DUI or some other black mark.

I wait another night while she’s tied. So, I go back into the city and drink with the assistant cook. A week in town alone. He might ask me if I’d made a friend. He might ask what I’d seen. He does neither. We say very little. There’s an entire voyage ahead. We settle ourselves with a warm cave, a lineup of local bands, and three pitchers of beer between us. Naia bartends. We don’t say goodbye. Later, stagger through the dark of Montreal B-sides and dewy medians, sailors stumbling back aboard before dawn.

END

Author Bio: Roger Topp lives in the boreal forest of Interior Alaska, where he received an M.F.A. from UAF. By day, he is a director of museum exhibition. His writing has appeared in a dozen publications, including Five on the Fifth, The Maine Review, Dunes Review, Into the Void, Bennington Review, Zyzzyva, and West Branch.

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