The Window on Rue de la Glacière

Short Story

She had a test at seven and the afternoon was long.

Cléo knew this the way you know a sound is getting louder - not by measuring it but by the pressure building in the room around it. The doctor had said Tuesday. Tuesday was today. The results would be phoned to her apartment by seven, and between now and seven she had to fill the hours with something that wasn't waiting.

She left the apartment at four.

The street did what it always did. The men looked. The shop windows looked. The café windows looked. She had been beautiful for so long that she had stopped seeing herself and started seeing only the reflection of being seen - the surface of the glass that showed her back to herself the way the world wanted her: composed, glossy, untouchable. She walked past a hat shop and went in. She tried on a hat. The hat was blue. In the mirror she was a woman in a blue hat, and the woman was fine.

She left without buying it.

At the café on Montparnasse, she sat in the booth and ordered a coffee she wouldn't drink. The seam in the mirror split her face in two - left side lit, right side dark - and she thought: *this is how the test will come back. Split. One side fine, one side not.* She moved to a different seat. The new seat had no mirror. It had a window instead, and through the window she could see the street, and on the street a woman was walking with a small white dog, and the woman was alone, and the woman was fine.

The coffee cooled. She thought about calling someone. Angèle. Michel. She thought about the tarot reader who had said *a complete transformation of your whole being* and then, to her husband, *she's doomed.* She thought about how the word *doomed* sounds different when you don't know it's about you. How it sounds like a weather report. How it sounds like nothing at all.

At five-fifteen she left the café and walked. She walked without a destination, which was something she had never done. She had always been going somewhere - to a rehearsal, to a fitting, to a man. Now she was going nowhere, and the nowhere was full of things she had never seen. A cat on a windowsill, watching her with the patience of something that had been sitting there for hours. A boy selling newspapers who looked twelve and forty at the same time. A couple arguing in a doorway - the man saying *you think I have all day to wait for you?* and the woman saying nothing, her face turned to the wall.

She walked into a park. There was a bench. She sat. An old man was sitting on the next bench, reading. He didn't look up. He didn't look at her. She sat there for a long time, and the not-being-looked-at was the strangest thing she had felt in years. It was like taking off a coat she hadn't known she was wearing.

The light changed. The park emptied. The old man left without looking back. She was alone on the bench and the trees were above her and the sky was the colour of a bruise - not violent, just present - and she thought: *the trees don't know I'm here. The sky doesn't know. The bench is holding me but it isn't watching.*

She thought: *this is what it feels like to be the one who sees.*

At six-forty-five she stood up. She walked back through the streets that had been watching her all afternoon, but now she was the one watching. She saw the cracks in the plaster. She saw the way the lamplight fell on the wet pavement. She saw a woman in a hat shop trying on a blue hat, and the woman looked fine, and Cléo walked past without going in.

At seven, the phone rang. She answered it. The voice on the other end said words she would remember for the rest of her life. She listened. She said thank you. She put the phone down.

She went to the window. The street was still there. The streetlights were on. The people were walking. Nobody was looking at her. She was just another face behind a window, and the window was not a mirror, and the light was not a spotlight, and the city was not a stage.

She was the one who sees. The seeing was the life.