"The Invisible Life of Addie Larue"

[fiefoe]

As with "The Time Traveller's Wife", this is an elaborate thought experiement dressed up as fiction. But instead of the love story at the core of the former book, V.E. Schwab gave us a more independent heroine. The Darkness/Luc is very 霸道总裁, the scarier version in the beginning was more convincing.

• She smiles a little as she plays on. This is the grass between the nettles. A safe place to step. She can’t leave her own mark, but if she’s careful, she can give the mark to someone else. Nothing concrete, of course, but inspiration rarely is.
• March is such a fickle month.
  It is the seam between winter and spring—though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens. You don’t know what you’ll find, until you step outside.
  Estele used to call these the restless days, when the warmer-blooded gods began to stir, and the cold ones began to settle. When dreamers were most prone to bad ideas, and wanderers were likely to get lost.
• She chews on the inside of her cheek. “How many gods are there, Estele?”
  “As many gods as you have questions,” answers the old woman, but there is no scorn in her voice,
• Addie has had three hundred years to practice her father’s art, to whittle herself down to a few essential truths, to learn the things she cannot do without.
• And this is what she’s settled on: she can go without food (she will not wither). She can go without heat (the cold will not kill her). But a life without art, without wonder, without beautiful things—she would go mad. She has gone mad.
  What she needs are stories.
  Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget.
• Rise and Shine is a coffee and pastry stall run by a pair of sisters that remind Addie of Estele, if the old woman had been two instead of one, divided along the lines of temper.
• But here is the danger of a place like Villon.
  Blink—and a year is gone.
  Blink—and five more follow.
  It is like a gap between stones, this village, just wide enough for things to get lost. The kind of place where time slips and blurs, where a month, a year, a life can go missing. Where everyone is born and buried in the same ten-meter plot.
• somewhere between the first sip and the third he sees her, and smiles, and for an instant Addie thinks—hopes, even now—that he remembers something, because he looks at her as if he knows her, but the truth is simply that he wants to; attraction can look an awful lot like recognition in the wrong light.
• His blue eyes went somewhat glassy as he spoke, and she wondered if this was what he called on when the script ordered tears. If this was the place he went. Addie has secrets, too, of course, though she cannot help but keep them.
  Still, she knows what it’s like, to have a truth erased.
• She has the sense that they would have been friends. If he’d remembered. She tries not to think about that—she swears sometimes her memory runs forward as well as back, unspooling to show the roads she’ll never get to travel. But that way lies madness, and she has learned not to follow.
• The sun is high, the day hot, and she lays the dress out in the grass to dry, sinks onto the slope beside it in her shift. They sit, side by side in silence, one a ghost of the other. And she realizes, looking down, that this is all she has.
  A dress. A slip. A pair of stolen shoes.
  Restless, she takes up a stick and begins to draw absent patterns in the silt along the bank. But every stroke she makes dissolves, the change too quick to be the river’s doing. She draws a line, watches it begin to wash away before she even finishes the mark.
• There is Estele, closing her door.
  There is Isabelle, one moment kind, and the next filled with horror.
  Later, much later, Addie will make a game of these cycles, will see how long she can step from perch to perch before she falls. But right now, the pain is too fresh, too sharp, and she cannot fathom going through those motions, cannot weather the weary look on her father’s face, the rebuke in Estele’s eyes. Adeline LaRue cannot be a stranger here, to these people she has always known.
• Addie remembers the first time she found the work, the small miracle of it, sitting there on its clean white block. The artist, Arlo Miret, a man she never knew, never met, and yet here he is, with a piece of her story, her past. Found, and made into something memorable, something worthwhile, something beautiful.
  She wishes she could touch the little bird, run her finger along its wing, the way she always did, even though she knows it’s not the one she lost, knows this one wasn’t carved by her father’s strong hands, but by a stranger. Still, it is there, it is real, it is, in some way, hers.
  A secret kept. A record made. The first mark she left upon the world, long before she knew the truth, that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root.
• But now, alone, a menace has crept in, like fog, erasing the buoyant charm, leaving only the sharp edges jutting through the mist. One version of the city replaced by another.
  Palimpsest.
  She doesn’t know the word just yet, but fifty years from now, in a Paris salon, she will hear it for the first time, the idea of the past blotted out, written over by the present, and think of this moment in Le Mans.
  A place she knows, and yet doesn’t.
• But with cities like Paris, London, Chicago, New York, she doesn’t have to pace herself, doesn’t have to take small bites to make the newness last. A city she can consume as hungrily as she likes, devour it every day and never run out of things to eat.
• It was, for Sam, a rare impulsive moment.
  It was, for Addie, the second month of an affair.
  A passionate affair, to be sure, but only because time is a luxury she can’t afford. Sure, she dreams of sleepy mornings over coffee, legs draped across a lap, inside jokes and easy laughter, but those comforts come with the knowing. There can be no slow build, no quiet lust, intimacy fostered over days, weeks, months. Not for them. So she longs for the mornings, but she settles for the nights,
• Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered? It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods.
  If no one heard it, did it happen?
  If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?
• It will take years for her to learn the workings of this city. To memorize the clockwork of arrondissements, step by step, chart the course of every vendor, shop, and street. To study the nuances of the neighborhoods and find the strongholds and the cracks, learn to survive, and thrive, in the spaces between other people’s lives, make a place for herself among them.
• “I wish I could show you my favorite piece,” she’s saying now. “It was the first in the series. One Forgotten Night. I sold it to this collector on the Lower East Side. It was my first major sale, paid my rent for three months, got me into a gallery. Still, it’s hard, letting go of the art.
• No, she doesn’t. Addie knows she could follow Sam right into the shower, wrap herself in a towel, and sit on the living room floor and see what kind of painting Sam would make of her today. She could. She could. She could fall into this moment forever, but she knows there is no future in it. Only an infinite number of presents, and she has lived as many of those with Sam as she can bear.
• Addie sees it, and she is grateful he doesn’t ask if she would go back, trade this for that, because for all the grief and the madness, the loss, the hunger, and the pain, she still recoils from the image in the glass.
• He has given her a gift tonight, though she doubts he knows it. Time has no face, no form, nothing to fight against. But in his mocking smile, his toying words, the darkness has given her the one thing she truly needs: an enemy. <> It is here the battle lines are drawn.
• Time slides by as they bounce from bar to bar, happy hour giving way to dinner and then to late-night drinks, and every time they hit the point where the evening splits, and one road leads their separate ways and the other carries on ahead, they choose the second road.
  They stay together, each waiting for the other to say “It’s getting late” or “I should be going,” or “See you around.” There is some unspoken pact, an unwillingness to sever whatever this is, and she knows why she’s afraid to break the thread, but she wonders about Henry.
• He was supposed to come, that was the nature of their dance. She did not want him there, has never wanted it, but she expected it, he has made her expect it. Has given her a single threshold on which to balance, a narrow precipice of hope, because he is a hated thing, but a hated thing is still something. The only thing she has.
• “Do you have a name?” he asks, and she doesn’t know if he’s asking for her own, or that of her disguise, but she decides on “Thomas,” watches him turn the word over like a bite of fruit.
• “Remy,” she echoes, tasting the softness, the upturned vowel. It suits him, more than Adeline ever suited her. It is young and sweet, and it will haunt her, as all names do, bobbing like apples in the stream. No matter how many men she meets, Remy will always conjure him, this bright and cheerful boy—the kind she could have loved, perhaps, if given the chance.
• And yet, the time between Thursday night and Saturday afternoon is merciless, every second doled out with the care of an old woman counting pennies to pay for bread. Not once does it seem to quicken, not once does she lose track of it. She can’t seem to spend it, or waste it, or even misplace it. The minutes inflate around her, an ocean of undrinkable time between now and then, between here and the store, between her and Henry.
• Nervous, like tomorrow, a word for things that have not happened yet. A word for futures, when for so long all she’s had are presents.
  Addie isn’t used to being nervous.
  There’s no reason to be when you are always alone, when any awkward moment can be erased by a closed door, an instant apart, and every meeting is a fresh start. A clean slate.
• The other girl nods. “I have this theory that every face belongs to one. A time. A school.”
  “Henry here is obviously pure Romanticism. Our friend Robbie is Postmodern—the avant-garde, of course, not the minimalism. But you…” She taps a finger to her lips. “There’s something timeless about you.”
• Addie stares around, bemused. It is not a speakeasy at all, not in the strictest sense. It is simply one thing hidden behind another. A palimpsest in reverse.
• Remy nods thoughtfully. “Small places make for small lives. And some people are fine with that. They like knowing where to put their feet. But if you only walk in other people’s steps, you cannot make your own way. You cannot leave a mark.”
  Addie’s throat tightens.
  “Do you think a life has any value if one doesn’t leave some mark upon the world?”
  Remy’s expression sobers, and he must read the sadness in her voice, because he says, “I think there are many ways to matter.” He plucks the book from his pocket. “These are the words of a man—Voltaire. But they are also the hands that set the type. The ink that made it readable
• She cannot erase the memory of those other nights—so she decides to become a palimpsest, to let Remy write over the other lines.
  This is how it should have been.
• But for once, she can’t. Robbie sees Henry, and Henry sees her, and they are in a triangle of one-way streets. A comedy of memory and absence and terrible luck as Henry wraps an arm around her waist, and Robbie looks at Addie with ice in his eyes and says, “Who’s this?”
• It is easy to be honest when there are no wrong words, because the words don’t stick. When whatever you say belongs to only you.
  But Henry is different, he hears her, he remembers, and suddenly every word is full of weight, honesty such a heavy thing.
• Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost.
• He feels like he’s stepped into another version of his life—not ahead, or behind, but sideways. One where his sister looks up to him and his brother doesn’t look down, where his parents are proud, and all the judgment has been sucked out of the air like smoke vented from a fire. He didn’t realize how much connective tissue was made up of guilt. Without the weight of it, he feels dizzy and light.
• “Of course,” he says, a little too fast. He likes her. And sure, he also likes that she likes him (the him that she sees) and there’s a Venn diagram between those two, a place where they overlap. He’s pretty sure he’s safely in the shaded zone. He’s not really using her, is he? At least, he’s not the only one being shallow—she’s using him, too, painting someone else onto the canvas of her life. And if it’s mutual, well then, it’s not his fault … is it?
• He remembers being in love with that smile, back when it felt like a victory every time he earned a glimpse. Now she simply hands it to him, brown eyes shrouded in fog.
• You are whoever they want you to be.
  You are more than enough, because you are not real.
  You are perfect, because you don’t exist.
  (Not you.)
  (Never you.)
  They look at you and see whatever they want …
  Because they don’t see you at all.
• “I wish you saw yourself the way I see you.”
  What Bea sees is a good friend.
  And Henry has no excuse for not already being one.
• “You can’t make people love you, Hen. If it’s not a choice, it isn’t real.”
• A presence, a solid weight, the first steady pull he’s felt in months. The strength of someone else’s gravity.
  Another orbit.
  And when the girl looks at him, she doesn’t see perfect. She sees someone who cares too much, who feels too much, who is lost, and hungry, and wasting inside his curse.
• She makes a second mark, and a third, lets out a breathless laugh, and then, her hand on his, and his on the glass, Addie begins to draw. For the first time in three hundred years, she draws birds, and trees, draws a garden, draws a workshop, draws a city, draws a pair of eyes. The images spill out of her, and through him, and onto the wall with a clumsy, frenzied need. And she is laughing, tears streaming down her cheeks, and he wants to wipe them away, but his hands are her hands, and she is drawing.
• For years, she will lie awake and tell herself stories of the girl she’d been, in hopes of holding fast to every fleeting fragment, but it will have the opposite effect—the memories like talismans, too often touched; like saint’s coins, the etching worn down to silver plate and faint impressions.
• Fifty years, and she is still learning the shape of her curse.
  She cannot make a thing, but she can use it.
  She cannot break a thing, but she can steal it.
  She cannot start a fire, but she can keep it going.
  She does not know if it’s some kind of mercy, or simply a crack in the mortar of her curse, one of the few fissures she’s found in the walls of this new life.
• Henry has asked for the truth, her truth, and so she is telling it. In pieces, fragments tucked like bookmarks between the movement of their days.
• She moves through marble halls, and counts the pieces she has touched, the marks left by other hands, but guided by her own.
  At last count, there were six in this particular collection.
  Six pillars, holding her aloft.
  Six voices, carrying her through.
  Six mirrors, reflecting pieces of her back into the world.
• The words bite, even now.
  “Take your echoes and pretend they are a voice.”
• And she wants to be honest, to say that of course she does. She never gets closure, never gets to say good-bye—no periods, or exclamations, just a lifetime of ellipses. Everyone else starts over, they get a blank page, but hers are full of text. People talk about carrying torches for old flames, and it’s not a full fire, but Addie’s hands are full of candles. How is she supposed to set them down, or put them out? She has long run out of air.
• “I refuse to believe that Joan of Arc made a deal with the dark.”
  The smile splits, showing teeth. “Well, perhaps I let her believe I was a little more … angelic? But deep down, I think she knew. Greatness requires sacrifice. Who you sacrifice to matters less than what you sacrifice for.


• “I know I can be cruel,” he says. “But nature can be crueler.”
• “The aftermath breeds art,” he says. “But war makes believers out of cynics. Sycophants desperate for salvation, everyone suddenly clinging to their souls, clutching them close like a matron with her finest pearls.” Luc shakes his head. “Give me back the Belle Epoque.”
• “Because it’s what you wanted. You were so set upon your need for love, you could not see beyond it. I gave you this, I gave you him, so you could see that love was not worth the space you held for it. The space you kept from me.”
• And this, he decides, is what a good-bye should be.
  Not a period, but an ellipsis, a statement trailing off, until someone is there to pick it up.
  It is a door left open.
  It is drifting off to sleep.
• Addie has said so many hellos, but that was the first and only time she got to say good-bye. That kiss, like a piece of long-awaited punctuation. Not the em dash of an interrupted line, or the ellipsis of a quiet escape, but a period, a closed parenthesis, an end.
  An end.
  That is the thing about living in the present, and only the present, it is a run-on sentence. And Henry was a perfect pause in the story. A chance to catch her breath. She does not know if it was love, or simply a reprieve. If contentment can compete with passion, if warmth will ever be as strong as heat.
  But it was a gift.
  Not a game, or a war, not a battle of wills.
  Just a gift.
  Time, and memory, like lovers in a fable.