large houses looked alike from this height.
She stayed in the same hotel. They gave her a room overlooking an air shaft, and she considered complaining but then decided it would be quieter and darker than if she were facing the avenue. She left her bag on the bed and went out, walking along the Seine, passing Australians and Germans (most French knew better than to take the scenic route).
The Seine wasn’t really water, in Elm’s opinion. There was nothing about it that was riverlike. At most, it was an excuse for historic bridges, a way to maintain the vista of the opposite bank. No one walked along it, no barges trawled, no commerce was conducted, and it never rippled. Yet it was probably one of the most famous rivers in the world. In front of her, a dog stopped to pee, looking at her. The urine, green against the stones, shiny like antifreeze, slinked down the pavement toward the water.
She had lunch in a cute little square with a fountain in its center. She was early; the seating area was almost empty and the waiters were crowded together like bored pigeons. She ordered an omelet with salad and sipped water while she waited for it to arrive. Her anxiety turned to hunger and she nibbled on bread.
Tomorrow at this time she would be at the clinic. There would be a syringe there with the few cells that were almost Ronan and she would climb up onto the table and put her feet in the stirrups and then pray for implantation.
Her eggs arrived, and the symbolism of what she’d ordered struck her. She put down her fork and drank more water to quell the gag reflex.
She took the métro back up to the Seventh and bought a ticket for the Musée Rodin, one of her favorite museums in Paris. She had always loved Rodin; she had taken her first sculpture class because of him. But sculpture was so technical—the clay models, the covering with wax to make the negative mold, the pouring of the metal and then the melting of the wax, the conduits that had to be scraped. It was impossible for her to understand the negative space, that she was making the inverse of what the final product needed to be, and that’s how she understood that she wasn’t really an artist.
After she entered, she went straight to the garden. The grounds were well manicured, but dead in spots where people had tromped on the grass (FORBIDDEN, the signs warned, but the command was unenforceable). Neatly spaced bushes marked the edge of the gravel path. Her shoes chopped noisily on the gravel—she wanted to be quiet and yet her footsteps were so loud, so regular, like a deafening heartbeat.
She stood in front of the Bourgeois de Calais and looked at their faces, wondered how Rodin was able to convey their expressions so precisely through all those various stages of the casting. She put her hands in her pocket and found a sticky note. “Very Important,” she had written, with nothing else. What had been so important, she wondered, and wasn’t it funny how time made lint out of importance?
She left without looking at any of the other sculptures, not even The Gossips, her favorite Camille Claudel work. She had loved the movie they made out of her life, the romantic way in which she seduced and served as muse to Rodin, and then went mad. The Gossips she loved because of its title in French, Les Causeuses, which was both onomatopoetic and slightly vulgar, and because of the way the women leaned into one another. It explored the erotic nature of female friendships, a comfort in sharing their bodies, brushing one another’s hair, touching hands, hugging. The sculpture always made her feel sad that she didn’t have intimate female friends, that she rarely experienced this kind of closeness devoid of sex, the wonderful ease of sameness.
Again the mysterious car, again the circuitous route, again the deserted grounds. Elm’s anxiety seemed to move up her body, like a cloud of warm air, starting in her restless legs and ending up a metallic taste in her mouth. When she contemplated what she was about to do, she felt like she had entered an alternate reality.
The car stopped at the large house and the porter opened her door. Once inside, a woman in her early twenties, hair pulled back into a messy bun, lab coat open to reveal a blouse and black