Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
                Thou foster-child of silence and slow time . . .
                (John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn)

In the latest of a series of unworkable relationships, Reid Sims had fallen in love with a dead woman.

The circumstances were perfect for romantic pining, and he was ripe for it. He’d stopped in Paris with the stated intention of “malingering” on his way home from Turkey and the dig. It was late September, with days waning and the light mellowing richly before finally leaching away, reminding anyone with literary leanings of Prufrock or Strether (Eliot and James, respectively), who life had wistfully passed by. Reid, at merely 37, couldn’t claim that for himself, but felt it threatening nonetheless. He drifted for long, elegiac hours along the river, across bridges, at the alluring mouths of alleyways, past warm-lighted cafés, feeling that sense of not belonging anywhere, with anyone.

To add to his rather delicious melancholy, Rachelle was expecting him for dinner the next evening. The immigration lawyer he had been involved with for five years and put off in his vague—“maddening”—way for five, until her sister’s death and her resultant need for something deep and lasting he didn’t have in him sent him back to California, counting himself lucky to have put an ocean and a continent between himself and his emotional failure. Six months later, in the mairie du XVIe close to the Embassy of Bangladesh, Rachelle married Jean-Yves Bertrand, an earnest Savoyard Reid had first known at the Sorbonne. The couple was insistent now he come and see them while he was in town.

“And Josine,” Rachelle added.

“Your mother?” Joëlle, he thought, confused. Surely he remembered her name? Joëlle, jowly and fierce, with a defining vein of self-disgust like the dark matrix veining turquoise, which she’d passed on to both her daughters.

“Our daughter, Reid. Born just after the New Year. I know Jean-Yves let everybody know.”

That threw him. He supposed he had ignored the e-mail, and a wave of grief for what was lost, what might have been, took him completely unawares. It was complicated by the recurring remorse at how badly he had behaved two years ago—how badly he always behaved. The loss was bigger than just this one woman.

He ended the phone call with stammering promises of showing up for dinner, bringing cheeses from a shop he knew—a Bleu d’Auvergne, a Tomme de Savoie.

“And un morceau de Brie,” Rachelle directed. “I’ve got figs and prosciutto to go with it.”

***

Before he got caught up in others’ affairs, as was the way of things, Reid needed to take care of a matter of business of his own. And so that afternoon he crossed Paris in search of something prosaic to him—little knowing a coup de foudre would ensue.

Jean-Yves, a forensic artist who painted watercolors of barges and longboats on the side, had given his old classmate the address of a remote atelier as the most likely place that Reid might find a copy of an ancient bust for his father’s 70th birthday—Scipio Africanus, it should be, who had defeated Hannibal and ended the First Punic War.

So Reid proceeded to the atelier by train and then on foot, in the washed-out September light, the pale grayed-yellow wash of watercolors on the distant neighborhood as if on grainy, watermarked paper. Near the Cimetière Parisien de Bagneux, where Oscar Wilde was first buried, and Modigliani’s common-law wife, painter and model Jeanne Hébuterne. He’d often roamed the great Parisian cemeteries, and loved the grand old trees in this—but today had to focus on the task in hand.

In fact he quite disliked his father’s collection of warrior masks back home in southern California, constituting instruments of death. Reid was a pacifist by nature, a true-blue avoider of unpleasantness and pain—of causing it (ironic how often he seemed to do so, just the same), of having to admit it into his cosmos at all. But he was correspondingly a considerate son, and knew his father would be greatly pleased to have this bust. 70 years was, after all, something of a milestone.

And as some kind of karmic payment, once he’d seen the scowling Roman general safely wrapped and boxed and labeled for shipping, he chanced upon the very different mask of one of death’s quiet victims, entirely serene. Reid fell in love with the still face at once—grateful for her closed eyelids and her sympathetic smile. Her aura of remove which he admired and envied. Her silence. Such a difference from Rachelle’s abrasive nature and her typically hostile challenge on the phone.

He was drawn by the stranger’s air of otherworldliness, of living out of time, beyond all daily strife. Like the ancient Near Eastern archaeology which was Reid’s work, the past was safe because only traces of violent doings were left, worn and abraded by weather and time. And of human torment and agony, nothing at all—though Jean-Yves would probably tell him otherwise, casting the bones that were his daily fare in forensics. In weathered inscriptions, at least, his vocation, the whole mess of emotions had been tamed, bleached paper white, sweetened, like the face in his hands this afternoon in the rain-softened atelier.

He wanted her badly, as balm for his lonely heart. To wake to her, mornings, back in his Santa Barbara bungalow, and take her with him into dreams at night. He had to have this mask, no matter that they laughed a little (why?) and told him it was a death mask, all that was left of a poor unnamed woman drowned once in the Seine.

They wrapped his new love up in paper though he would have had her clothed instead in watered silk and pearls, and he rode with her in a taxi back to le 6ème arrondissement where he was staying. In his arms, pressed closely to his heart in the back seat in the way of any French lovers.

Rachelle would say in scathing tones when he told his story, “Well of course. You’d rather have a compliant female, not able to speak for herself, so you can give her obedient words—your specialty.” She’d always scorned Reid the epigraphist whose preferred talent was deciphering ancient inscriptions, words long since drained of color and of heat.

Jean-Yves would refrain from comment, but know how little death—or indeed love—resembled this romanticized version. L’Inconnue de la Seine was really rather a cliché, a joke to modern day Parisians.

***

On the street leading to the cheese shop, the drizzle having all but stopped, Reid was astonished to meet an apparition distinctly corporeal—Aggie Cruz from the dig. One of his father’s advisees back home, someone he’d hardly spoken to in either place but recognized at once from her look of Frida Kahlo (whose self-portrait with thorn necklace and hummingbird he’d been made to study in a graduate art class). Dark of complexion—as they all were now, after their months in the unrelieved Turkish sun—but this native New Mexican even more so, serene of face, pleased to see him. And cleaned up now, with hammered sterling silver earrings with turquoise beads and a drop of carnelian, Indian or African, and a gauzy embroidered dress far different from the muddy clothes of the past weeks. This Aggie transformed, apparently as deep-rooted as he was in the heart of his favorite chimeric city, struck him dumb.

“I’m on my way to Saint-Germain-des-Prés.”

“What will you hear?” he managed to ask her.

“Somebody’s Stabat Mater, though I didn’t notice whose . . .”

“Pergolesi, probably?” His mother, Ruth, was fond of sacred music, and he’d listened to it lots—quite happily—before the storms of adolescence, the defensive posturing of young adulthood when he’d veered off into Jimi Hendrix and Neil Young, and later, oddly, Turkish hip-hop.

“Come to the concert?”

Tempted, Reid started to say yes, then caught himself, declined with some vague lie. He’d been in company too long, one of the drawbacks of his profession. Leading the dig, teaching, consulting with colleagues extensively—not something you could do alone in a closed room. And he’d arranged for the following day to look in on a friend of his mother’s, Harriet Winthrop, a reclusive language teacher in a shabby upper-story apartment in one of the arrondissements up beyond the Bastille, looking down on the Canal Saint-Martin with its deep and inviting water. Then he would lose the whole evening to Rachelle and Jean-Yves, assailing his defenses, stirring up his insecurities—and to l’enfant Josine, surely an energy vampire too.

He wanted only to wander and to browse, alone within the crowds. Speaking to no one, answerable to none, adhering to no schedule imposed from without. He had a new detective novel and a favorite bistro; a bottle of good Calvados in his backpack to counter the earlier advent of the dark, the chill of rain supposed to settle in tomorrow afternoon for the rest of the week. And there was now, he remembered with a grand Parisian eons-in-the-making kind of thrill, L’Inconnue waiting for him with her perfect patience back at the hotel.

So he told Aggie no, much as he would have liked to walk with her just then, inside her field of unexpected radiance, to the old Left Bank church.

“Thanks anyway.” Solitude called.

“Not everybody’s choice, for sure,” she laughed, maybe deliberately misunderstanding. “Have a good time, however long you’re here.”

“Another week, I think, though I’m on standby. School starts again the 28th—I know I’m cutting it a little close.”

“I’m not rushing back either. I’m here until Sunday, seeing some friends and hitting the museums. Should you need drinks or dinner or a friendly face, just text me anytime—I’m staying at the little Hôtel Julian, near the Académie.”

“Decent?”

“Homely; perfectly nice. A place my father—an artist—stayed once, long long ago, so it feels rather like family.” (More family than my mother now, she thought, feeling the pain and the perplexity of that.)

As Reid continued on to the cheese shop, Aggie was carried by the crowd off down the street, away.

***

Opening his laptop to let Harriet know what time he planned to show up the next day, Reid looked up L’Inconnue. On screen the dead woman’s still face took on itself the varicolored glaze of light from the Parisian street outside his hotel windows. It tantalized him with its ageless beauty—and its immutable strangeness that asked nothing from him. Because it would forever be the face of a stranger. So different from the friendly fluid face he’d been offered along with sacred music. The quizzical eyebrows, the handsome silver earrings, and the smile that he had by his lackadaisical nature, his lifelong cowardice, let get away without seeing again.

The woman of the mask had drowned herself, like Rachelle’s sister—a realization which insinuated itself into cracks and crannies in his heart and complicated his desire. And that was only the beginning of L’Inconnue’s centuries-long love affairs. “An attendant at the morgue was so moved by her beauty and youth that he ordered a plaster mold of her face,” he read. In the decades immediately following, her death mask was much reproduced, becoming an objet d’art. Among those she had silently seduced were Picasso, Giacometti, Man Ray, Truffaut, Nabokov, Rilke. Camus referred to her as the “drowned Mona Lisa.” And then—he couldn’t believe it, the ultimate profanity—her face had been used to model the doll everyone used for learning CPR, the doll every mouth kissed in their unlovely attempts to keep death at bay. He could already hear Rachelle mocking his sentiment, his hackneyed yearnings.

Defiant and trying not to acknowledge a hovering sense of disappointment, Reid needed to look at his maligned inamorata as he’d first seen her, to feel her face between his hands. He went to the little desk beside the bed where he had put his packages—and after sorting through them twice stood stupidly, aghast. He understood at once what he had done. He’d set the package with the mask down on the countertop while paying for the cheeses—fishing for reading glasses and for Euros in his hidden passport holder pouch, dealing with change, feeling the shopkeeper bristling with impatience to shoo the two late customers out the door so he could lock up. And in that flustered confusion of packages, the cheeses wrapped in paper not significantly different from the first, the other customer’s purchases set down right by Reid’s, he’d gotten back to the hotel without the mask. He felt stricken by uselessness.

So here he was again—at fault and out of luck. Another one gotten away. The latest of a series of foolish and failed relationships. Not even a dead woman could be induced to stick with someone so careless with his love. The sound of laughter drifted up to the second-floor window where he stood gazing blankly into the night, making him feel still more alone and unremarked in the vibrant city, known only to the spinster language teacher, to his one-time lover and her husband of like mind with their prodigious daughter, their Miniature Schnauzer, Diderot.

But as Reid saw the clouded moon among suddenly playful leaves on trees across the street unsettled by a little gust of wind, he remembered that he was also known to Aggie Cruz, the student from the dig, and felt his circle of acquaintances widen, lighten, come alive with unfamiliar possibility.

It wasn’t quite too late, he calculated. He could be there by intermission, in the church of Merovingian kings where centuries of sung and spoken prayers were massed, sent rising up to the vaulted ceiling singing with stars again tonight but fast passing. So he slipped out anxiously into the peopled streets, despite his waiting Calvados and moules-frites, his avowed preference for solitude, and hurried through the breezy autumn night to rescue something from the general slipping-away—half of a Stabat Mater, an uncomplicated hour on an oak or walnut pew with Aggie Cruz beside him, radiant with life and willing to share it.