Those Who Service the Seraphim

The first time I saw the jewels, I was ten or eleven. I was interested immediately. There were probably two thousand of them, of varying size and color, and they covered the domed ceiling of the room on all sides, inlaid inside a black backdrop. They were healthy. Or rather, they were polished—someone was cleaning them. I wanted to be responsible for cleaning the ceiling jewels, or acquainted with the person pious enough to hold the job. Because I was non-cartoonishly gaunt and a child, I was invisible to adults, and no one noticed when I laid on the floor of the restaurant to get a better view.

It was my sister, two years older, who people noticed. She was beautiful and often the center of attention. She envied my invisibility. So, she saw me lay on the floor. We were good friends, however. She didn’t say anything to our parents or their friends about it, even though I’d briefly attracted positive attention for ordering veal, a choice my parents found mature for a girl of my age. My sister could’ve pointed out that I hadn’t taken a single bite of veal. Instead, she let me lay on the floor to look at the jewels, and then she grew up and became a successful actress.

I didn’t go back to the restaurant for many years—I think around twelve. The next time, I was in my early twenties, and, again, I was with my family and my sister. By then my sister was already famous, and my parents and their friends made a reservation at the restaurant for the specific room with the jeweled ceiling. We were welcoming my sister back from an extended trip to Portugal where she had been filming a new movie. My parents and their friends wanted to know all about the trip and the movie set and the unwieldy and anachronic director, so, quite like the first time I’d been in that room, no one noticed when I spent most of the dinner looking up at the jewels. Because I was older and had a more developed vocabulary and worldview, I realized it was unlikely that the jewels were gemstones of any serious value. They were plastic. But they were embedded in the ceiling. This time, at the restaurant in my early twenties, I didn’t wonder about the existence of a jewel polisher. Instead, I fantasized about the person who had carved out specialized holes for each of the thousands of plastic gemstones in the ceiling of the dome-shaped room.

But I was still young in the scheme of things, and that dinner was a celebratory one, one in which my sister was the star, and so I did not talk about the ceiling. It didn’t come up until ten years after that, when I was living with a woman who coincidentally knew a friend of my parents. Me, my parents, the woman I was living with, and my parents’ friend who knew the woman I was living with, all dined at the restaurant with the jeweled ceiling together.

The woman I was living with was twelve years older than me, which meant she was in her mid-forties. I called her the woman I was living with and not my girlfriend nor partner nor wife because even though our relationship was sexual and somewhat domestic, she had a wife who lived abroad. The wife had a house somewhere in northern Spain, near Bilbao. I never met the wife. But the woman I was living with was named Marcelle. She went by Marc and had short but ungovernable black hair like a skateboarder. Marc and I met through my sister—I’d recently been employed by my sister as her personal assistant, and Marc worked in film, doing costume design. We fell in love and during the years we were in love we rented an apartment together that we barely used because of our work travel, and during that time she met my parents and we went to the restaurant with the domed room and the jeweled ceiling. I went into the dinner thinking I didn’t like the friend of my parents who happened to know Marc. This was because I considered that friend a social climber—I’m not sure that this was correct, because the time when I was around her the most, when my sister was becoming a renowned actress, was a difficult time in her life. I think she genuinely needed friends. Her name was Rosalie and she had long blonde hair fried stiff with hot tools. She needed friends because she had married a heart surgeon who was thirty years older, even though her dream was to write confessional poetry and be married to a novelist or academic. My parents had known her in college and were surprised when she’d married the elderly surgeon. The marriage was around the time of that dinner following my sister’s return from Portugal. And at that dinner, I’d assumed she’d come in order to meet my sister and had no actual poetic aspirations nor difficulties with her narrow marriage—there were a lot of random people who appeared in our lives following my sister’s rise to stardom claiming lifelong friendship with my parents.

But my sister wasn’t at the third dinner at the restaurant with the jeweled ceiling. Instead, Marc and Rosalie caught up on what had happened since they last met. They knew each other because Rosalie had been involved in the rescue of Marc’s now-deceased son Fido. Fido had escaped a heart surgery (performed eventually by Rosalie’s then-husband) when he was six years old by quite literally running out of a hospital in Berlin, and Rosalie had saved the day by lying down in a ditch next to the hospital’s parking lot.

“The night before, I’d been black out drunk in that ditch and lost my bracelet,” Rosalie explained to me and my parents, underneath the jeweled ceiling at the dinner with Marc.

She’d been black out drunk because she hated her elderly surgeon husband and correctly assumed he was cheating on her with a younger surgeon from Freiberg named Krause. She often drove drunk to the hospital in attempt to catch the two of them in what she imagined was an impassioned midnight tete-tete between surgeries, but that night she ended up in the ditch next to the hospital, where she passed out for a few hours and lost the bracelet before driving home. So, the next day, she drove back to the hospital to look for the bracelet and instead found Fido running towards her in a paper gown, followed by Marc and Marc’s German mistress, followed by Rosalie’s surgeon husband, followed by the doting Dr. Martin Krause. She then laid down in the ditch. The six-year old Fido stopped to examine Rosalie, like a dog, and she latched onto one of his legs, preventing him from running any further.

This story made me more interested in Rosalie. She’d laid down in a ditch? And then a meaningful friendship between Rosalie and Marc had formed? How? Marc, I should mention, had withdrawn during the telling of Rosalie’s story—I thought Fido must be on her mind, because Fido had survived that heart surgery, but had only lived for two more years after that. In response to my “How?”, Rosalie and Marc laughed knowingly.

“The bracelet was the seraphim,” Rosalie said to me.

Which made me realize I was acquainted with the bracelet she was talking about, or its double—Marc’s bracelet. She often wore it and was wearing it now. The band was silver snakeskin, and in the center of the band were two six-winged beings kissing. I’d always thought Marc liked the bracelet because of its sapphicness. “The seraphim?” I said.

My parents didn’t understand either, and after examining the two women’s matching bracelets, I think my de rigeur mother also assumed it had to do with sex or religion, so she quickly changed the subject.

Before we left the restaurant, I managed to ask the waitress about the jeweled ceiling—did she know who had done the decorating for the restaurant when it first opened? She had no idea. The restaurant was family owned—the cuisine was French—and had opened in the eighties, she thought.

“The family’s last name is Leduc,” the waitress told me. Leduc was also the name of the restaurant. I didn’t know any Leducs.

*

The next time was only a couple years after that—my sister was going through a divorce with the comedian she’d been married to for seven years, and she suggested Leduc’s because it reminded her of childhood and snugness and felicity. We went alone, without our parents.

Marc and I weren’t together anymore. I’d moved out the year prior. The seraphim bracelet had gone unexplained—Marc and I had other problems. I forgot about the bracelet until I was back in the private domed room at Leduc’s with my sister, years later.

“That’s when I was facing the shower head,” my sister said. We’d both ordered veal. I didn’t want veal—I’d ordered it unthinkingly because she had.

“But when I turned to face the wall, away from the shower head,” my sister said. “He suddenly turned over in my mind, like a three-dimensional object. He’d been in a single pose for so long, for years maybe, and I suddenly felt him flip, then turn, as I physically turned my body away from the running water. He looked and felt so different to me then. And that new pose is the pose that remains. I can’t imagine him in the old pose at all. But it feels physical, as though by physically turning my body in the shower, I turned him over ontologically in my own waking mind.”

We had a bottle of red wine, and I poured more into her glass. Her story was related to a condition my sister and I had both had since we were kids. We’d decided it was a condition because we hadn’t met anyone else with it. There had been times in our lives where we laid down to go to sleep at night, and by resting our heads on our pillows in certain positions, we remembered dreams from the night before. The sensation wasn’t déjà vu exactly, because it was a memory. The memory of a dream. But it was the physical sensation of being in a certain pose in the bed that conjured the memory of the dream.

“I turned my body while standing in the shower,” she said, sipping her wine. “And he turned in my mind, too. Permanently. It is bodily position that determines mind.”

The waitress brought out the veal. I asked my sister if she remembered our parents’ friend Rosalie. She said no. I asked her if she’d ever seen a silver bracelet with two angels kissing on it. She said no.

“It’s almost a filmic conceit,” my sister continued, fixated on her epiphany. “Showing a character’s thought process as they work through a problem or emotion by filming them working through different postures. Sitting to standing. Standing to being tragically supine. Restlessly turning over in bed.”

At the end of the meal, I asked the waitress if she knew anything about the ceiling, or about the domed room, or about the Leducs.

“My grandfather opened this restaurant in the late nineties,” she said. Then she introduced herself as Simone Leduc. I wanted to talk to her about the room. She lifted my uneaten plate of veal from the table and put it onto her tray. Then she put the entire tray down onto the table and typed her phone number into my phone.

*

I think Simone was scared of the room. We didn’t talk about it at all at first. In fact, we didn’t meet for over a month, although we texted some. Later, she’d tell me she thought I was coming on to her, and I was, but I held to the excuse of the room and the jewels. She was younger than me. By then I was thirty-four, and she was in her mid-twenties. We texted a little about different things. She was freshly out of college, working at her family’s restaurant. She’d studied film and wanted to make films. I’m sure she knew who my sister was, but we didn’t discuss it. There was a reason the special domed room with the jeweled ceiling was always available when we called to make a reservation, and I’m sure my sister was the reason.

Instead, we texted about Tarkovsky. Simone was interested in the idea of the zone. If she were to make a film, she texted me, it would be about a cosmically problematic zone like the zone in Tarkovsky’s Stalker. We sent images back and forth that conjured a consonant feeling of the zone from Stalker. Then we discussed the sentient ocean from Solaris. We agreed Solaris and Stalker were basically the same movie. At that point I was no longer employed by my sister. There had been a scandal—I’d managed the correspondence between my sister and the literary agent who was going to help sell my sister’s ghostwritten autobiography. I ended up sleeping with the literary agent, and when we broke up, the literary agent terminated things with my sister professionally. My sister forgave me, but the truth was that I was also sleeping with the ghostwriter of the autobiography. I only later told my sister that part of it. At the time, I quit working for my sister as her assistant and continued seeing the ghostwriter secretly. But around the time we met Simone, the affair with the ghostwriter was over and I had a new job - thanks to my sister’s name - at a private university managing a lecture series in the film department where we invited film industry professionals to speak on topics relevant for film students. I had keys to the media building on campus. I eventually texted Simone to see if she wanted to watch a movie with me in the auditorium where professors held film screenings. At six p.m. on a Friday, we sat in the empty auditorium and watched Andrei Rublev. Afterwards, she decided the zone was still present in this movie but was less literal—Andrei enters a zone, but his zone is spiritual.

Eventually, I asked her about her grandfather’s restaurant.

Her grandfather had built it, which meant he had also built the domed room that was slightly off to one side of the dining room. She didn’t know why. She didn’t know who had decorated the domed room, or why it had been decorated with inlaid gemstones. She didn’t know why it was domed.

“I don’t trust that room,” she said. “I get a weird feeling every time I wait on that room.” I told her about laying on the floor when I was a child, and then about Rosalie and Marc and the story about Fido and the matching bracelets with the silver snakeskin band and two winged beings kissing. “Snakeskin?” Simone asked.

“Well, it had grooves,” I said.

“Grooves?” Simone said.

“It’s not about the grooves,” I said. “The point of the bracelet is the seraphim. Two angels, kissing in the center of the band.”

“Grooves?” Simone repeated.

I hadn’t been looking at her, I’d been looking at the credits on the paused auditorium screen, but when I did look at her, I saw that she’d placed a finger underneath her eyelid and was pulling the bottom of the eyelid down lazily.

“Do you want to fuck me?” she said.

I did. We went back to my apartment. But the way her eye looked in that moment during the credits of Andrei Rublev remains with me. As though it could have fallen out of her socket. Also, the word grooves.

*

It didn’t last long with Simone. I put her in touch with people who knew my sister. Someone got her PA work in L.A. and she moved there. I didn’t go back to the restaurant for many years after that, even though I often thought about it. In the meantime, both of my parents died, my father from lung cancer and my mother from a stroke. My mother’s death, a year after my father’s, made national news because my sister wore the same dress she’d worn to receive her Golden Globe to the funeral.

My sister never fully recovered from our parents’ deaths. She hadn’t remarried after the divorce with the comedian, and after our mother died, she stopped taking roles. I remember there was a year where she was worried her hair was falling out. Eventually it did start to fall out, but not then. She was only in her late thirties. But she has not been in a movie since then. Even though she owned several houses internationally, she sold them, then moved back into our childhood home, where our parents lived before they died. She didn’t travel at all during that time. She’d always given me and my parents money, but she formally offered to support me completely after our parents died, so I quit my job, moved in with her, and took care of her and our childhood home. I didn’t like seeing her like that, but I did like taking care of her. I’d always liked taking care of her. I remember being confused about what was plaguing her exactly, and we would talk about it occasionally, the blackout shades pulled down in her childhood bedroom at midday, the shadowy tray of food I prepared for her lunch balanced between us on the twin-sized bed. “It’s not the reality of death that scares me,” she said once. I could barely make out her features in the dark. “It’s the unreality of it. Death has no meaning. We might as well be dead now, because whatever death is, we won’t know it. Which means whatever this is that we’re in right now—life—is as good as death. It might even be death.”

“You’re letting something that doesn’t exist influence something that does,” I said.

“No,” she said.

She moved the spoon slightly to the left on the lunch tray, away from the dish of sliced peaches. Then she laid back against her upright pillow without eating anything.

“No,” she said. “Nope. What you just said has no meaning according to my theory.”

*

We did go back to the restaurant one more time before we sold our childhood home and moved to the south of France. We also kissed. The kiss happened before we went back to the restaurant or sold the home. I was with her in her bedroom, but we weren’t sitting—we were hanging a vine to the left of the door. I was up on a chair, and she was shining her phone’s flashlight up at the ceiling, so that I could see the nail I was hammering. She had a no-overhead light rule in the bedroom. Early on in her stay, she’d removed the lightbulbs in the light fixture. Once I hammered the nail and hung the vine over the nail, I climbed down and sat on the chair. She put her hands on my knees, then leaned down and kissed me on the mouth. It wasn’t a long kiss, but I was holding the hammer with both hands, and I remember she held the top of the hammer while she kissed me. Then she went and got in her bed, and I went into my childhood room and got into mine.

“I was acting,” she told me the next day when I brought her breakfast in bed. “I was acting, and my role was your wife.”

It was after the kiss that she decided she was ready to leave our childhood house and move to Marseille. The time frame was something like a few months, I mean, between the kiss and the decision. And while we were making plans and selling furniture, we went to the restaurant and reserved the room with the domed ceiling and the jewels.

She ordered the veal again. I tried to order something else. I consciously thought about it and looked at the menu for a long time, but somehow when the waiter came, I couldn’t make up my mind and ended up with the veal.

“You don’t like veal,” my sister insisted, after the waiter had already gone.

“I know,” I said.

Being at the restaurant was significant because my sister hadn’t been to a restaurant in two years. I remember she was wearing a hat because she was worried about hair loss. The hat was white felt—it had been our mother’s, and our mother had allegedly worn it in the snow when she was a child in Montreal. Someone managed to take a photograph of my sister and the hat at the end of the night when we were pulling out of the parking lot at Leduc’s. The photograph was grainy, and all you could see was a white dot through the car window. It was the first photograph published online of my sister in two years.

But before that, in the domed room at Leduc’s, we were brought a bottle of red wine. My sister drank her first glass of wine in several sips, all at once. Then she said: “What is it about this room?”

“There is something about it,” I agreed.

“When I was a kid I asked the jewels to make me an actress,” she said, sinking, then leaning her head all the way back so that it rested on the top of the chair.

“What?”

We were brought veal. I waited until the waiter was gone, and then I said: “What do you mean you asked the jewels to make you an actress?”

“It was just something I thought about,” she said. She sat up. I poured her another glass of wine, then cut her veal for her into six pieces.

“I remember seeing you on the floor,” she said. “And I knew I couldn’t lie down on the floor. Because everyone was always watching me. So, I thought if I couldn’t be you, the least the jewels could do was give me a successful career as an actress.”

“I thought you wanted to be a doctor then,” I said.

“You’re right,” she said “I wanted to be a doctor. I asked the jewels to make me successful. I didn’t ask them to make me an actress.”

By then she was spinning a cube of veal around on a fork, so I stopped asking questions so she could put it in her mouth. I cut my veal into two symmetrical halves. Then I finished my glass of wine and poured another.

The waiter came in at that point. He was a teen boy, probably sixteen or seventeen. He looked at me strangely from the door of the domed room.

“Is,” he said.

I held his gaze for a moment, and then my sister looked over at him.

“What?” she said.

“You’re going to France?” he said.

“Who told you?” my sister asked, turning to look at me.

“You did,” he said to my sister. “On the phone. When you made the reservation.”

“Well, that can’t be right,” my sister said, still looking at me. “Because Allie makes all of the reservations.”

“Then it must’ve been when you walked in,” he said.

She turned back to look at him. Then she lifted her glass of wine, then set it back down on the table. Then she lifted it again and took a sip.

“Ohhhhh,” she said, smiling. “Right. That was you.”

He came further into the room and stood beside me, staring down at the symmetrical halves of veal.

“There’s another Leduc’s in France,” he said to the veal. “Depending on where you’re going.”

“Marseille,” my sister said cheerfully.

“There’s a Leduc’s in Nîmes,” he said. “An hour and a half drive from Marseille. The original Leduc’s. My great aunt still lives there—she runs the restaurant. It’s an hour and a half drive from Marseille.”

“That’s very close,” my sister said.

“Is,” he said to the veal.

I didn’t look at him. I reached for the bottle of wine, but he intercepted it and poured it for me, refilling both of our glasses.

“Is everything all right with the veal?” he said.

*

On the plane to Frankfurt, where we’d catch our connecting flight to Marseille, my sister passed me a piece of paper on which she’d written a quote. She was sitting in front of me. Our tickets were business class, and the lights were off, but she hadn’t reclined her chair, and wouldn’t for the entire flight, because she was writing intently in her journal. The quote she passed me was this:

A moment would come when the book would be written, would be behind me, and I think that a little of its radiance would fall upon my past. Then perhaps through it I could remember my life without disgust … I should be able, in the past, only in the past, to accept myself.

In the Frankfurt airport sky lounge, my sister explained to me that this quote was from Jean Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea. Her head was wrapped in a purple scarf and her eyes were covered with large black sunglasses. She was sitting cross-legged on the sofa, leaning towards me, a cardboard coffee cup resting in the space between her feet and crotch.

“For a long time,” my sister said. She took a sip of the coffee.

“For most of my life really,” she said, putting the coffee back down. “When a film was finished and I saw myself on the screen, I felt something like what Roquentin feels in that quote. I was happy time had passed and that I had completed something, because the time I had spent acting in the film now had a radiance about it. A radiance had fallen upon my past, despite the fact that during the actual filming of the movie, I was mostly disgusted with myself.”

“You’re an artist,” I said.

“No,” she said.

She turned her head towards the tall glass windows, where white planes were moving laboriously back and forth on asphalt.

“No,” she said. “Allie, you have to understand something. I was never proud of anything I made. No blockbuster, no ad, no art film. It was never about the feeling of accomplishment. It was always about the feeling I’d get after the fact. The feeling of the memory of doing it. The memory, drained of the chaos and neuroticism of the moment, was always more profound than the actual lived experience.”

She stared at the planes outside the window.

“Do you remember the posture of that waiter, that boy, back at Leduc’s?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, as if she’d been expecting the question. She turned her head back towards me.

“Do you think he stands like me?” I said.

“He did,” my sister said. She nodded. Then she slightly tilted her head and laughed. “He did have the posture of some humans. As though he didn’t have any muscles, didn’t need them. As though he was being held up by a string.”

*

In Marseille, we settled into a house near the water, on the east side, a half hour away from the port. My sister started going for long walks that began at sunrise and culminated at dinnertime, when she’d meet me at a restaurant somewhere. I was mostly restless during the day. My sister had found a replacement vocation—walking—but I had yet to find anything to replace taking care of her. I thought I might be useless in a general sense. I didn’t have any passions. It felt too late in life to develop a passion. I turned thirty-nine that year. But I did look forward to the dinners. My sister was full of life at the dinners—she’d walked all day and usually discovered something geographically interesting, such as a monument or natural wonder, or else she’d discovered something psychologically interesting within the depths of her own mind. So, there was a lot to discuss. I found her beautiful and impervious at those restaurants. I mostly just watched her while she talked. She glowed.

Occasionally, someone would recognize her, at the restaurants or on her walks, and would want a photo or autograph. But it happened less than it did in the States. So, when Rosalie found her climbing on some rocks down by the water, and insisted she’d known our parents, my sister called me to confirm.

“There’s a woman here!” my sister said on the phone, laughing. “Who says she knows you!”

By that point, Rosalie was very old, seventy-four, older than our parents had been when they died. She suggested to my sister that we get dinner with her and her new girlfriend. This is how we ended up at the Nîmes Leduc’s with Rosalie and my ex, Marc.

*

Marc had a car in France, both because she was from there and because her wife still lived near Bilbao. The four of us drove to Nîmes together from Marseille. “Are you shocked that we’re together?” Marc asked me from the driver’s seat, referring to her relationship with Rosalie. I was next to her in the passenger seat.

I said it wasn’t shocking exactly. I asked Marc how her wife was faring, the wife who still lived near Bilbao.

“We’re divorcing,” she said. “We’re divorcing and I’m marrying Rosalie.”

“Congratulations!” my sister said from the back seat, her nose pressed onto the passenger seat window as she looked out.

It was dusk, and the French countryside was flying by outside the window, warm golden hues. I thought I saw an extremely tall person in a field that prefaced the protracted coppice we were passing, but when I turned around to look back at them, the angular entity was actually a pole for a weathervane.
“Do people live out here?” I asked. “Why is there a weathervane in that field?”

“People live everywhere,” my sister said, dreamily, into the window.

“Sooooo,” Rosalie said, from the back seat, planting her elbows on the sides of the cupholder console that was between me and Marc, her cheeks resting between her palms.

“Are you two…you know … together?” she asked.

I looked back at her and stared. Rosalie was grinning, and when we made eye contact, she raised her eyebrows and flicked her eyes towards my sister suggestively.

Then, in an unmelodic falsetto, Rosalie began to sing:

The unplanned wishes that we make
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤare often what we want,
but that’s because the seraphim
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤknow how to be forgot.

“Your mother wrote that,” Rosalie said. “She wrote that poem. Your mother was so sensitive. She could laugh at her own lust.”

“My mother didn’t write poetry,” I said.

“Oh yes she did,” my sister said to the window. “I think she did, actually. She must have.”

“No, she didn’t,” I insisted.

“We’re almost there,” Marc said, looking over at me warningly.

And we were. The highway signage for Nîmes was multiplying. On the side of the road, I again saw a tall person standing and staring at our car, but when I turned to look back, no one was there.

“There!” I said to my sister. “Did you see that? There was a person there!”

“What, Allie?” my sister said.

“We’re almost there,” Marc repeated, again. “We’ll stop by the hotel, then we’ll go to Leduc’s.”

“Why a hotel?” my sister asked. “Why don’t we drive back to Marseille after dinner?”

“It’s only because,” Rosalie said. “I’ve wanted my whole life to die in a hotel.”

Marc swerved into the exit lane for Nîmes.

“She’s just kidding,” Marc said to me, grinning, revealing her bottom teeth.

*

At the Nîmes Leduc’s, we all ordered veal. It was unavoidable. I miserably looked down at it. We were in a domed room, and the room had jewels embedded in the ceiling, although in lieu of the multi-colored variety in the Leduc’s back home, each and every jewel in this room was obsidian. The black jewels felt ominous to me. No one else seemed to notice. Rosalie ordered bottle after bottle of red wine, and eventually even I was drunk enough to consider eating a bite of veal.

I looked down at my plate wonderingly.

My sister had been telling an overlong story about a suspicious lamp cord. The situation had occurred when she was married to the comedian. Basically, the comedian had turned off the lamp by pulling on the metal cord, and the cord had swung for far longer than the laws of physics necessitated.

“We had sex,” my sister insisted. “And even after the sex, the cord was still rocking back and forth, side to side. We figured there must’ve been an airflow source in the room that we couldn’t find. But we never figured it out. I watched it after Colin went to sleep. It went on for hours. I fell asleep before it slowed, but when I woke up with the light on hours later, it was completely still.”

Marc drained the rest of her red wine in one sip.

“Another bottle!” Rosalie commanded, happily, to the waiter who had appeared at the door of the domed room.

“The thing,” Marc said to me, confidingly, even though we could all hear her. “About this place? Is that the time I went with you and your family? And Rosalie was there? I remember looking up at the jewels and thinking, please, give me a woman as helpless as Rosalie to spend the rest of my life with.”

I stared at her across the table.

“No offense,” Marc said to me. “You know it wasn’t working. You and I were both helpers. You weren’t helpless.”

“That’s a mean thing to say!” my sister said. “That’s a mean thing to say to Allie!”

By this point I was growing concerned about an object around my sister’s neck that I had never seen before. It was a silver chain, and the pendant, hidden underneath her tank top, was making a indention in the taut fabric.

“It happened to me, too,” Rosalie said to me, on my right side. “Because you know, during that dinner, I wished for someone as capable as you to take care of me.”

The waiter brought another bottle of wine, and Rosalie filled all four of our glasses.

“To the things we want,” Marc toasted, holding up her glass.

“Speaking of which,” Rosalie agreed, nodding at Marc. She put down her glass and faced me. Then she leaned over and placed both hands on my thighs, quite like my sister had done when she kissed me in her bedroom.

“What do you want?” she said.

Her once-blonde hair was bone white and neatly tied back in a bun at the nape of her neck. A single piece of hair had escaped the bun and was resting on her left cheek. The strand distracted me. I watched it move as Rosalie spoke.

“Why don’t you want anything?” Rosalie whispered to me.

“It’s OK to not have a passion,” my sister insisted. I could tell she was getting annoyed with both Rosalie and Marc. “Allie has other qualities. For example, she loves taking care of people.”

“But there has to be something you want,” Marc said to me, from across the table. “Something for your life. Or maybe it has to do with a relationship? A romantic relationship?”

“That’s how it was for me and Marc,” Rosalie said, her hands still on my thighs, her face still close to mine.

“They will help you,” Marc said. She breathed deeply across the table from us. “They will, Allie. You just have to ask.”

I stood up from the table to shake off Rosalie.

“What is that on your neck?” I asked my sister.

“It’s my angel necklace,” she said, frowning.

“You haven’t even touched your veal,” Marc said to me. “Baby, sit down and eat some veal. It’s not healthy to drink so much on an empty stomach.”

“She does always order the veal,” my sister said, laughingly. “Even though she hates veal! That’s Allie!”

“Well, the veal is obviously the only thing to order,” Marc said.

“It’s hard not to order it,” my sister agreed.

“I just wanted you to get something you want,” Rosalie said, sullenly. “What do you think is the point of all this wine? I just want you to accidentally ask for something that you want.”

The waiter had appeared at the door again. I hadn’t looked at her closely before. Now I realized she was looking at me closely. She was similar in age to Rosalie, with long white hair clasped behind her neck in a ponytail. I hadn’t noticed how tall she was, but she was extremely tall, with her head almost grazing the top of the doorframe.

“I know the veal isn’t for everybody,” the waiter said to me in English, from the doorway. “But I would encourage you to give it a try. Your friends have attested to the fact that it is very good. And I believe it must be much better here in France than it is in the United States of America.”

“That’s soo true,” my sister said. “The veal in France is much better.”

“Nothing is shameful,” Rosalie said. “If you want it, it can’t be shameful. You’re only human.”

“Do you really want to die in a hotel?” I said to Rosalie.

She suddenly smiled. Then she picked up her fork and took a huge bite out of my veal.

*

I never ate the veal. I still haven’t to this day, twenty years later—I never went back to Leduc’s, and I don’t imagine I ever will. Marc thinks that my refusal to engage with the cuisine is what has angered the seraphim and has caused them to refuse to fulfill my deepest desire. On the contrary, I believe that I simply have no desire for the seraphim to fulfill. Besides, it’s hard for me to fully believe the mythology Marc and Rosalie invented with the restaurant and the veal and the jeweled ceiling, despite the fact that I have no explanation for where the seraphim jewelry came from, and neither do they.

Rosalie died in the hotel in Nîmes the night we went to Leduc’s. We did not discover her death until the next morning, but I think we all expected it, even my sister, who has largely refused to engage with Marc or Marc’s guardian angel theory after that trip. The theory is too simple for my sister. If the room and jewels are powerful, it is not because they are haunted by angels, she insists.

But she has always been more philosophically minded than me.

Another theory Marc has is that I am not one of the chosen. This theory has only surfaced in the past five years, but she occasionally writes me letters - from Bilbao, where she has finally settled down with her wife - explaining what she means. She believes that perhaps the seraphim only choose women of a certain type to grant wishes to, and in turn the lives of those women fulfill some of the seraphim’s own designs, in ways we can’t even see or conceive of. I’m not offended by the theory. I have never felt chosen.

Recently, however, she pivoted slightly and sent a letter in which she decided that perhaps she’d been wrong all along—perhaps I am the only chosen one. She wrote:

Who else, other than you, has been at every single dinner at
Leduc’s where one of our wishes was made and fulfilled?

“Marc is so corny,” my elderly sister said earlier this afternoon, reading this letter in her armchair by the window, the window that looks out over the sea. “There’s no reason to believe this mysterious force is the work of something as obvious as wish-granting cherubs. Just because the force bestows angel-themed jewelry onto the bodies of the wish-receivers doesn’t mean the force is literally an angel.”

“You’re so smart,” I said.

“Plus,” she said. “How does she know you haven’t gotten exactly what you’ve wanted out of life? How does she know it is not all within you?”

“You know all things,” I said.

My sister looked up at me. I’d brought her a snack on a tray: homemade applesauce and a mug of rosehip tea. She traded me Marc’s letter for the tray.

“But she is right,” she said. “You’re not like other people.”

We spent the rest of the evening in silence. My sister read her books, and I watched her from my adjacent armchair, then looked out at the sea. The sea didn’t matter to me, but it mattered to my sister, and I thought I saw a long-limbed person out there in the waves, floating horizontally, staring up at me. I often saw this person. But instead of trying to interact with them, I shut my eyes and let the afternoon light dance across my closed eyelids. If I looked closely enough, the staticky visual projected onto the interior of my eyelids looked like thousands of little jewels, vibrating in their sockets.

It might all be within me. But I will never know.


_____
Mary Elizabeth Dubois lives in the United States.