As I read the notebook, again distressed by Myers's effort to reproduce Van Dorn's agonized words and handwriting exactly, I reached the section where Van Dorn described his epiphany: La Verge! I walked! I saw! I feel! Canvas! Paint! Creation and damnation!
After that cryptic passage, the notebook – and Van Dorn's diary – became totally incoherent. Except for the persistent refrain of severe and increasing headaches.
I was waiting outside the clinic when Clarisse arrived to start her shift at three o'clock. The sun was brilliant, glinting off her eyes. She wore a burgundy skirt and a turquoise blouse. Mentally I stroked their cottony texture.
When she saw me, her footsteps faltered. Forcing a smile, she approached.
"You came to say goodbye?" She sounded hopeful.
"No. To ask you some questions."
Her smile disintegrated. "I mustn't be late for work."
"This'll take just a minute. My French vocabulary needs improvement. I didn't bring a dictionary. The name of this village. La Verge. What does it mean?"
She hunched her shoulders as if to say the question was unimportant. "It's not very colorful. The literal translation is 'the stick.'"
"That's all?"
She reacted to my frown. "There are rough equivalents. 'The branch.' 'The switch.' A willow, for example that a father might use to discipline a child." She looked uncomfortable. "It can also be a slang term for penis."
"And it doesn't mean anything else?"
"Indirectly. The synonyms keep getting farther from the literal sense. A wand, perhaps. Or a rod. The kind of forked stick that people who claim they can find water hold ahead of them when they walk across a field. The stick is supposed to bend down if there's water."
"We call it a divining rod. My father once told me he'd seen a man who could actually make one work. I always suspected the man just tilted the stick with his hands. Do you suppose this village got its name because long ago someone found water here with a divining rod?"
"Why would anyone have bothered when these hills have so many streams and springs? What makes you interested in the name?"
"Something I read in Van Dorn's diary. The village's name excited him for some reason."
"But anything could have excited him. He was insane."
"Eccentric. But he didn't become insane until after that passage in his diary."
"You mean, his symptoms didn't show themselves until after that. You're not a psychiatrist."
I had to agree.
"Again, I'm afraid I'll seem rude. I really must go to work." Clarisse hesitated. "Last night…"
"Was exactly what you described in the note. A gesture of sympathy. An attempt to ease my grief. You didn't mean it to be the start of anything."
"Please do what I asked. Please leave. Don't destroy yourself like the others."
"Others?"
"Like your friend."
"No, you said, 'others.'" My words were rushed. "Clarisse, tell me."
She glanced up, squinting as if she'd been cornered. "After your friend stabbed out his eyes, I heard talk around the village. Older people. It could be merely gossip that became exaggerated with the passage of time."
"What did they say?"
She squinted harder. "Twenty years ago, a man came here to do research on Van Dorn. He stayed three months and had a breakdown."
"He stabbed out his eyes?"
"Rumors drifted back that he blinded himself in a mental hospital in England. Ten years before, another man came. He jabbed scissors through an eye, all the way into his brain."
I stared, unable to control the spasms that racked my shoulder blades. "What the hell is going on?"
I asked around the village. No one would talk to me. At the hotel, the manager told me he'd decided to stop renting Van Dorn's room. I had to remove Myers's belongings at once.
"But I can still stay in my room?"
"If that's what you wish. I don't recommend it, but even France is still a free country."
I paid the bill, went upstairs, moved the packed boxes from Van Dorn's room to mine, and turned in surprise as the phone rang.
The call was from my fiancée.
When was I coming home?
I didn't know.
What about the wedding this weekend?
The wedding would have to be postponed.
I winced as she slammed down the phone.
I sat on the bed and couldn't help recalling the last time I'd sat there, with Clarisse standing over me, just before we'd made love. I was throwing away the life I'd tried to build.
For a moment I came close to calling my fiancée back, but a different sort of compulsion made me scowl toward the boxes, toward Van Dorn's diary. In the note Clarisse had added to Myers's letter, she'd said that his research had become so obsessive that he'd tried to recreate Van Dorn's daily habits. Again it occurred to me – at the end, had Myers and Van Dorn become indistinguishable? Was the secret to what had happened to Myers hidden in the diary, just as the suffering faces were hidden in Van Dorn's paintings? I grabbed one of the ledgers. Scanning the pages, I looked for references to Van Dorn's daily routine. And so it began.
I've said that except for telephone poles and electrical lines, La Verge seemed caught in the previous century. Not only was the hotel still in existence, but so were Van Dorn's favorite tavern, and the bakery where he had bought his morning croissant. A small restaurant he favored remained in business. On the edge of the village, a trout stream where he sometimes sat with a mid-afternoon glass of wine still bubbled along, although pollution had long since killed the trout. I went to all of them, in the order and at the time Van Dorn recorded in his diary.
Breakfast at eight, lunch at two, a glass of wine at the trout stream, a stroll to the countryside, then back to the room. After a week, I knew the diary so well, I didn't need to refer to it. Mornings had been Van Dorn's time to paint. The light was best then, he'd written. And evenings were a time for remembering and sketching.
It finally came to me that I wouldn't be following the schedule exactly if I didn't paint and sketch when Van Dorn had done so. I bought a notepad, canvas, pigments, a palette, whatever I needed, and for the first time since leaving graduate school, I tried to create. I used local scenes that Van Dorn had favored and produced what you'd expect: uninspired versions of Van Dorn's paintings. With no discoveries, no understanding of what had ultimately undermined Myers's sanity, tedium set in. My finances were almost gone. I prepared to give up.
Except…
I had the disturbing sense that I'd missed something. A part of Van Dorn's routine that wasn't explicit in the diary. Or something about the locales themselves that I hadn't noticed, although I'd been painting them in Van Dorn's spirit, if not with his talent.
Clarisse found me sipping wine on the sunlit bank of the now-troutless stream. I felt her shadow and turned toward her silhouette against the sun.
I hadn't seen her for two weeks, since our uneasy conversation outside the clinic. Even with the sun in my eyes, she looked more beautiful than I remembered.
"When was the last time you changed your clothes?" she asked.
A year ago, I had said the same to Myers.
"You need a shave. You've been drinking too much. You look awful."