A Sport and a Pastime (16 page)

“How about you?” he says.

“It’s nothing. Alix invented it.”

“Come on.”

“No. Really.” I feel like an idiot.

Alix is smiling. The show comes on again.

“I don’t like this singer as much as the other one,” Cristina says.

When we finally come out the sky is still dark, but its authority is gone. The night has passed. We drive back to their house. Billy turns on all the lights. He insists on preparing breakfast. He wanders around the kitchen with a huge pan in his hand. He begins to break a dozen eggs into it.

“How about making the toast?” he says.

I’m not even hungry. He gives me a dish with a big square of butter on it, right out of the refrigerator. It’s too hard. When I try to spread it, I tear the toast. He is pouring milk into the eggs, then Worcestershire sauce.

“How do you like them?” he asks me. “Hard or soft?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

He looks at the color.

“They need more milk,” he says.

In the long, richly furnished salon, the women are sitting on the sofa. It’s almost light outside. The brightness of the room and the windows paling makes it seem like the end of a long crisis. Their hands are moving. I can hear their palms against their wrists. I sit near them.

“What are you doing?”

“Flipping,” Cristina says.

They compare coins. Their attention to the game is solemn, unreal.

“We’re flipping for you,” she says. A pause. “It’s one up.

Neither of them looks at me. They match again and hold their wrists near each other. Cristina breaks into nervous laughter.

“Who won?” I ask.

No answer.

“Three out of five,” Alix suddenly says.

“All right.”

The coins flicker in the air. Cristina drops hers. It doesn’t seem right for me to help her find it. She searches the dark, Oriental rug on which it has disappeared.

“It’s by the coffee table,” Alix says.

“Where?”

“Just inside the leg.”

Cristina’s on her hands and knees.

“It’s heads,” she says.

Billy comes in to announce everything is ready.

“What’d you drop?” he says.

“Hm?”

“Where’ve you been?” Alix says.

We sit in the dining room in the five o’clock light of a Paris morning. Against the wall is a huge, mahogany buffet. Mirrors which reflect the dawn. The table is large enough for twelve. Billy brings in the platter heaping with eggs that smell alarmingly strong.

“What are these?” Alix says, taking a small portion. “Eggs?”

Billy is sitting at one end of the table. He stares at her. He becomes serious when he drinks. Cristina begins laughing. She can’t stop. She laughs as she tries to serve herself, and Alix starts in, too. They laugh insanely; helpless, crying laughter. Eggs have spilled from the serving spoon onto the table, and Cristina tries to pick them up. By now she can’t even control her hand. She can’t look at Alix. They slowly fall into silence, but the slightest sound from either of them starts it again.

“What’s so funny?” Billy says. He hasn’t even smiled.

“Nothing.” The last syllable explodes. They are laughing so much it hurts.

“Aren’t you going to eat any eggs?” he finally says.

“What?” Cristina forms the word cautiously.

“I said aren’t you going to eat any eggs?”

She shakes her head slowly, no, then yes.

“They’re very interesting,” she says.

“Are they? Why?”

“I’ve never tasted eggs quite like these,” she says. She tries to become serious. Alix is laughing.

“Is that so?” he says.

“Did you make them, dear?”

“You’re very funny,” he says.

She gets up and begins opening drawers in the buffet, looking for napkins. Billy hands me the platter. The eggs are very dark, almost brown. They look curdled.

“I don’t think they’re bad,” he says.

Behind him, Cristina suddenly performs an obscene gesture, one hand in the bend of her white arm. It’s so deliberate I can’t think. Billy is bent over his plate.

“Keep it up,” he warns.

“What’s that, sweetheart?” she asks.

“You’re going to get it,” he says.

As she comes back to the table she begins to sing. Somehow it frightens me. I’m exhausted. I don’t know how to smile.

“Aren’t you even going to try them?” he says.

“Of course,” she says. “I love them.”

“There’s nothing wrong with them,” he says flatly. He eats methodically, watching her. He takes a sip of coffee.

I try the eggs. They taste like salt. Cristina strolls around the table humming as she gives everyone a napkin.

“Alix?” she asks sweetly. “More eggs?”

“Sit down, will you, Cristina?” he says. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

“You’re beautiful,” she says. “I love you.”

“Just keep going.”

“I
love
the eggs. Some more eggs?” she asks me.

Everything is left on the table, the plates with their uneaten portions, the cups of coffee, the toast. The servants will take care of it all when they get up.

I drive Alix home in a taxi in the bright of morning. It’s not very far. The dawn smells cool and pure as we cross the sidewalk. She is very sleepy. She releases me with a word or two, a tired smile. The door closes. The lock sounds like a well-ordered life.

I walk back. In the streets there is an absolute silence, not a car moving, not a person. In the pale sky there are no birds. It’s like entering the past. Nothing is altered. Nothing makes a noise. On the corner, in the window of a café they sometimes go to, a cat is sleeping, a huge cat, soft as a dream. I pause there, awake before the city. I think of walking along the river, but my whole body is like dry wood. I turn down the street on which they live, a wide street, blue and empty, empty sidewalks as far as I can see.

[27]

T
HEY ARE STILL IN
bed, windows open to the morning coolness. Her face has no make-up, her skin no shine. She has a cheap look in the morning, young, without resources. And then as I watch, they wake at the same instant, like actors, like the cat in the café which opened its eyes to find me staring through the flat glass. Her breath is bad. My images are repeating themselves–there’s nothing I can do. I’m too weary to sleep. They crowd in on me. They come again and again, I cannot struggle free. Besides, there is no place to go, they would follow me into dreams.

“
Bonjour
,” she says. She kisses his stiffened prick.

“He never smiles,” she says, looking it in the eye.

“Sometimes,” Dean murmurs. Her mouth feels warm. I try to find darkness, a void, but they are too luminous, the white sky behind them, their bodies open and fresh. They are too innocent. They’re like my own children, and they illustrate an affection which has little reason to, which in fact does not exist except that she–at the very bottom it is her only real distinction–she knows how to make things come true. Her mouth moves in long, sweet reaches. Dean can feel himself beginning to tumble, to come apart, and I am like a saxophone player in a marching band, in love with a movie queen. Soft-eyed, lost, I am tramping wretchedly back and forth at halftime. My thoughts are flailing. The batons flash in mid-air. The whole stadium is filled. I am marching, turning, marking time while she slowly circles the field in a new convertible. I am a clerk in her father’s brokerage. I’m the young waiter who sends bouquets of flowers. I am a foreigner who answers the telephone wondering who can be calling, and it is the police. I cannot understand at first. They have to repeat it several times. There is an instant when my heart turns to lead: an accident. A motor car…

There is a rise on the road to Sens and then, suddenly, on the down side, a hundred meters farther on, the skid marks, tar-black. The road curves. There is broken glass, motorcycles, people gathered around the wreck. The ugly underside of a car is showing, turned up to the sky. The wheels are motionless. A
gendarme
in white leather gauntlets is waving drivers past. People bend over to look beneath the wreckage. There is no haste. Everyone moves with deliberation. Only a few children are running, out on the grass.

“It’s a Citroen,” Dean says. A motorbike is crushed beneath it. They pass slowly. Now they can see the feet of someone laid out near the trees. On the paving are dark runs of blood.

“They’re always in accidents,” he says. “I don’t understand it.”

“They’re very fast,” she tells him.

“Citroens? They’re not so fast.”

“Oh, yes.”

“How do you know? You don’t even drive.”

“They always pass us,” she says.

I know this road well. It leads to Les Settons, the lake where they go to swim. Anne-Marie stands in the shallow water. She has earrings on and a necklace. She bends her knees to immerse herself and then swims like a cat, her neck stiff, her head up. After a moment she stands up again.

“You must teach me,” she says to Dean.

He tries to show her the deadman’s float. Breathe out through your mouth, he tells her. No. She doesn’t like to wet her hair.

“You have to.”

“Why?”

“Come on,” he tells her. “You can’t learn unless you do.”

She shrugs. A little puff of contempt–she doesn’t care. Dean stands waist-deep in the water, waiting. She doesn’t move. She is sullen as a young thief.

“Take your earrings off,” he says gently.

She removes them.

“Now do what I say. Don’t be afraid. Put your face in the water.”

She doesn’t move.

“Do you want to learn or don’t you?”

“No,” she says.

They put their clothes on behind the car. No one else is around. Near the shore the surface of the water is broken by weeds. The leather seats are hot, and when Dean starts the engine small birds skim out of the bank grass and out across the lake.

They eat in Montsauche in a little
auberge
. Sunday. Everything is hushed. Dean sits looking out at the street. It’s a silent meal. Afterwards there is nothing to do. He feels as if he is taking care of a child. He is thinking of other things. The day seems long. They drive–Dean takes the top down and they head towards Nevers, the wind curving in, the sun on their backs. He begins to grow sleepy. They pull off the road.

They lie down under the trees. Pines. It’s very quiet. The dry cones click in the breeze. The shadow of branches is laid across their faces. Dean closes his eyes. He is almost asleep.

“Phillipe,” he hears her say.

“Yes.”

“I would like to make love in the woods sometime.”

“You’ve never done that?”

“No.”

“Strange,” he says.

“You have?”

He lies, “Yes.”

“I have never. Is it nice?”

“Yes,” he says. It’s the last thing he remembers.

When he wakes, he feels cold. He sits up and rubs his forearms. His skin is creased from the grass. A few dry pieces are stuck to him.

They walk aimlessly, Anne-Marie brushing the back of her skirt a little, down to a stream. There’s a small, iron bridge. They stand in the middle of it. Beneath them the water moves slowly. In places, clear as reflection, one can see the bottom. There are fish in the shadows, completely still. The water flows around them.

“Do you see them?” she says.

Dean is dropping pieces of twig. They meet the surface gently, drift away.

“We could catch them,” she says.

The pieces are light. They seem to float down from his fingers.

“Do you like to fish?” she says.

“No.”

“No?”

“It’s too cruel,” he says.

“They don’t feel.”

“How do you know?”

“Oh,” she says, “they don’t.”

The fish linger, aligned with the flow. A few drift across the pale flats where the water is clear, pass to a deep, vanish.

“Why catch them?” Dean says. “They’re happy.”

“Until they are eaten by a
brochet
,” she says.

“Well, that’s what menstruum I’d be,” he says. “A
brochet
. Live in the river.”

“They would catch you.”

No. He shakes his head.

“Yes. Someone.”

“Not me,” he says. “No. I’d be a very smart
brochet
.”

“All right,” she says. “And I will be your
brochette
.”

The water is moving very slowly. Dean throws a small stone. The surface dissolves. I will be your
brochette
. It is really a quiet, domestic life they are engaged in. Suddenly he perceives this. The phrase pierces him like wire. She smiles. She begins to grow beautiful once more. It is always mysterious how she can change. By evening, in the Etoile d’Or, he can hardly take his eyes from her. She has fixed her hair and made up her face. She butters a piece of bread for him.

“
Ça va?
” she says.

He nips at her finger. The oestrus of night comes down over him like a hood. He can feel it descending, changing his flesh.

They climb the stairs. She goes first, as always. Her calves flash before him, turning away, rising on the narrow treads. Her key opens the door. Dean’s prick begins to stir, and as he doubles the pillow later and she rises on her elbows, his mind is already cut loose and wandering as if he cannot keep himself together. He is thinking of what it will be like without her. He cannot repress it. Like the cough of a sick man, a weakness rises to frighten him, an invisible flaw, and he embraces her with a sudden, dumb intensity. Her back, even the word for it is beautiful,
dos
, lies beneath him, the back she never sees, the smooth intelligent back upon which, like a table, he has gazed for so many hours. He rears in the darkness to admire it. He had forgotten. Every minute of the day seems to have converged. He wants to slow them, to have this sweet ending last.

[28]

O
VER
F
RANCE A GREAT
summer rain, battering the trees, making the foliage ring like tin. The walls grow dark with water. The gutters are running, the streets all abandoned. It started at dusk. By nine it is still pouring down.

They are in Dole. They stare out the window of a plain café where they have been sitting for an hour or more. Across from them is an empty park, not very large. In it a strange apparatus is being erected. A high wire. Two tall poles have been guyed to the ground. Men are still working in the rain, testing the lights. From time to time the façade of buildings opposite appears in the blue floods, but the wire itself, strung in the upper dark, is invisible. Over the rooftops, like flowers, fireworks burst without sound.