Dreams of Bread and Fire (2 page)

As Ani handed the card back to Asa Willard, she confronted a pair of indigo eyes patterned with black diamonds. His skin had the smooth warmth of ivory and his hair was the color of the fine sand above the surf line. Her face must have registered some kind of dismay because he asked, Are you okay?

I’m fine, she said. She had watched him walk away with the grace of someone whose bones were strung together with purple satin.

A few days later Ani was sitting on the carpet in the poetry room of the English library reading through a pile of new books. Asa Willard surprised her by bringing her tea at four o’clock.

You want a cookie? he asked.

No, thanks, Ani said.

I’m Asa Willard, he said, sitting cross-legged on the floor across from her. He was wearing gray rag socks, baggy jeans, and a red plaid flannel shirt.

I remember you from the reserve room, she admitted.

Now you’re supposed to tell me your name, he prompted.

Ani Silver.

Nice to meet you, Ani. What class are these for? he asked, gesturing to the books.

No class. It’s what’s left of my spiritual life, Ani told him.

Lapsed Catholic? he asked.

Armenian Evangelical, she told him. She hoped he wouldn’t ask for an explanation of what that was. How to describe the old Armenian aunties in the front pews singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” under the direction of Southern Baptist Pastor Duke? She saw tiny cubes of white bread on one silver-plated communion tray and thimble-sized glasses of Welch’s grape juice in the other.

I’m a lapsed half Catholic, he told her.

What does that mean? You go to mass every
other
Sunday?

Mother’s Catholic, Father’s Episcopalian. I have pagan leanings.

Ani reluctantly glanced at her watch. Damn. I’m late for work. Thanks for the tea. She scrambled to her feet.

What time do you get off work? he asked, smiling crookedly.

When he walked her home that night they paused under the lantern over the dorm entrance. It was snowing. He pulled off his mitten and brushed the snow from Ani’s hair. He kissed the tip of his forefinger and touched it to the center of Ani’s forehead.

That’s your third eye, he said. The seat of wisdom. Good night, Ani.

Ani peered out the plane’s window at the city’s lights falling away beneath her. The Kersamians’ car sped along Memorial Drive toward home. Her grandmother was in the front seat rubbing the lenses of her glasses with a lace-trimmed handkerchief. In the backseat her mother Violet bravely sniffed back tears. Baba kept a firm grip on the steering wheel and admonished the weeping women, “
Vhy
babum,
you two. Save your tears for somebody’s funeral.”

The man in the seat next to Ani was flipping through a magazine about motorcycles. His knees were jammed into the seat in front of him and his shoes poked out into the aisle. Ani believed that if she didn’t say a word to him the invisible wall between them would hold firm. She’d never have to see the snapshots of his children or hear about his new girlfriend or the reason for his trip to Paris.

After the flight attendant cleared away the dinner tray, Ani closed her eyes. He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not, the plane’s ventilation system hissed. Soon it had shifted into the noise of rolling surf.

She was startled awake by the pilot’s voice over the intercom. They had begun their descent into Orly Airport. In a windy cloudbank, the plane bucked slightly and Ani’s stomach swooped toward her ribs. She gripped the armrests. Ani hated the landings most of all. What if the wheels didn’t descend? What if the brakes didn’t work? On her first flight to France a few years before, Ani had thrilled at the sound of the passengers clapping as the plane’s wheels touched down. We should all applaud our miraculous, death-defying arrival on the tarmac.

At the baggage carousel Ani waited for her cobalt-blue backpack, the one Asa had bought for her. It was an internal frame mountaineering pack, now crammed with clothes and shoes. She had used it on a miserable canoe trip they had taken to Acadia National Park. After paddling in the bow until the muscles in her arms burned and her palms blistered, she had stumbled under the weight of a sixty-pound pack during the portages. They hadn’t seen another soul for days and the mournful call of loons made Ani want to cry. Asa accused her of lily dipping with her paddle and took it as a personal offense when she lay coughing in the tent during the fifth consecutive day of pouring rain. When they got back to town she was diagnosed with a bad case of bronchitis.

Ani hoisted the pack to her back and made her way out of the terminal past pink-faced French soldiers standing guard. The soldiers’ boots were black and they had big guns slung over their shoulders as though ready for combat with a deadly enemy. Ani nervously hurried past them.

The taxi driver didn’t seem to understand when she repeated the address for the second time, so she handed him the slip of paper. He nodded gravely and pulled from the curb. They sped along a highway until they entered Paris via a broad boulevard lined with shops. In the heart of the city they wound through narrow cobbled streets. Finally the driver pulled onto the sidewalk in front of a glass-paned double door. Ani handed the driver some colorful notes as he propped her pack inside the front hall. The concierge, eyeing Ani up and down as though inspecting a horse, gestured toward the elevator. Ani rode it to the second floor.

The apartment door swung open. A blond woman dressed in a lime-colored knit dress and a matching headband smiled broadly. Her teeth were as regular and white as Chiclets. She extended a hand on which glittered a diamond the size of a chickpea.

“Hello, Annie. I’m Tacey Barton. And this is Sydney,” the woman said, gesturing to a thin sour-faced child at her elbow. The girl had honey-colored hair and was dressed in a smaller version of her mother’s outfit.

“Hi,” Ani replied. “My name is pronounced Ah-nee.”

The mother said, “Well, Ah-nee, we’re thrilled to see you. Just in time. John and I are leaving on a trip to Vienna and Budapest tomorrow morning. We’ll be back on Tuesday. Sydney has been looking forward to meeting you, haven’t you, honey?”

The child grimaced. Ani guessed it was a smile of some kind. She knew the Bartons had another child, a boy named Kyle who was at boarding school in Connecticut. Ani had negotiated with Tacey Barton over the telephone: in exchange for room, board, and one hundred and fifty francs a week Ani would see Sydney off to school each morning and watch the child four afternoons and three nights a week. This arrangement with the Bartons would supplement Ani’s meager student fellowship and leave plenty of time for classes at the university.

“Drop your bags by the door, Ani, and I’ll show you around.” Tacey turned on the heel of her lime flats.

The apartment had twenty-foot ceilings and French windows overlooking the Palais-Royal garden. Although it was bigger than any house Ani had ever been in, she pretended that it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.

Sydney accompanied Ani to the top floor of the building to the servants’ quarters under the eaves.

“Do you spend much time up here?” Ani asked the child, as they made their way down the windowless hall.

“No. But I always take the au pairs upstairs on the first day.”

“Have you had a lot of them?”

Sydney shrugged. “I don’t know. About six, maybe.” The child pointed to a door on their right. “This room is for the housekeeper. But right now we have a lady who comes four mornings a week and lives someplace else. Her name is Beatrice.”

They turned a corner and faced a door at the end of a short hall.

“This is your room,” Sydney said.

Ani inserted the long jagged key in the lock and turned it once. The door wouldn’t open.

“That’s the wrong way.” Sydney pushed Ani’s hand aside and turned the key twice in the other direction.

It was called a
chambre de bonne,
and it appeared to Ani that the maids in the Palais-Royal had lived pretty well. The room was spacious and airy with white walls and a high ceiling—especially for a garret. On the twin beds under the dormer windows the white sheets had been cuffed neatly over yellow wool blankets. A couch and two armchairs were grouped on one side and a small round kitchen table with two stools sat in the far corner. There was a washbasin in a tiled alcove in another corner of the room.

“Where’s the rest of the bathroom?” Ani asked.

“Out here,” Sydney said, opening the door and pointing to the hall.

Sydney and Ani stood on one of the beds so they could look out the window at the long rectangular garden below. A fountain cast up sparkling jets of water as couples strolled along the tree-lined allées.

Sydney asked, “You know how to make pancakes?”

“Sure do,” Ani answered, making an effort to sound cheerful. She needed a shower and a nap.

“Our last au pair was this nasty English girl who smoked cigarettes and always had a hangover. She made pancakes one time and burned them. One night she was supposed to be baby-sitting when she left me alone in the apartment to go meet her boyfriend. My mother fired her.” Sydney stared at Ani expectantly.

“That’s too bad,” Ani said feebly. Her energy level was dropping precipitously.

Sydney asked brightly, “Are you poor?”

Ani had no idea where this question came from or where Sydney was heading. “What do you mean?”

“What class did you fly on the airplane?” the child asked eagerly.

“Coach.”

“You’re poor.” Sydney nodded with satisfaction, a small smile on her lips. “
We
fly first class.
We’re
rich. But I suppose it wouldn’t make sense for an au pair to be rich. I mean, why else would you work as somebody’s servant unless you were poor?”

As Ani examined Sydney’s fine symmetrical features, she understood that this was one of those animal moments where if she didn’t assert her authority she’d suffer for the rest of her tenure with the Bartons.

“Listen, Sydney,” Ani said, “let’s get this straight. Your mother hired me, but she doesn’t own me. I’m bigger than you are and you have to do what I say. You got it?”

Sydney stared. As Ani turned back to the scene outside the window she saw from the corner of her eye that the child’s small pink tongue had flickered out and in with defiance. Ani pretended she didn’t see the gesture.

“So, you know how to make pancakes?” Sydney launched the conversation anew.

“Sure do,” Ani repeated.

“I love pancakes,” the girl said.

At dusk, when the sky was blue-gray nearing black, Ani went down to the garden. The fountain was idle and the place was empty except for two boys kicking a soccer ball. After righting a metal chair, Ani sat in a pool of light with brittle leaves skittering at her feet. A woman’s heels clicked historically along the tiles of the lighted arcades. Ani propped a stiff-backed notebook on her lap and pulled out a thin sheet of writing paper.

Dear Asa,

I wish you were here right now so the dark garden would be romance instead of loneliness. Missing you is like the deep ache in my bones I have with a fever. When you get here in December I’ll show you the garden and the streets, and everything that seems like shadow now will be vivid and solid because we’re seeing it together.

Ani crumpled the paper, tossing it into a nearby trash can. She wanted to be cheerful and resolute. I hate it when you’re clingy and dependent, Asa had said to her. Pretend you’re a sunflower, Ani told herself, instead of a grapevine. But the face of a sunflower couldn’t help but turn toward the sun. And wasn’t that a bit much: making Asa out to be a celestial body at the center of the solar system and herself to be a lowly plant?

Early the next morning Ani leaned against the sill of the Bartons’ kitchen window. Under the glowing red and white
TABAC
sign on the corner store, a gaunt African in royal-blue coveralls swept the flooded gutters with a twig broom. Ani turned from the window to forage in the cupboards and the refrigerator. She wondered where in Paris Tacey Barton had managed to locate individually wrapped slices of Kraft American Cheese. There was no flour, but Ani found a box of pancake mix, some milk, and a carton of eggs.

By the time Sydney padded into the kitchen in her fluffy slippers and quilted bathrobe, Ani had a stack of pancakes to offer her. The child was on her second plate when her father burst into the room in his running clothes. He was a trim, handsome man with the energy of a coiled spring.

“
Je vous en souhaite bienvenue,
Ani,” John Barton said, with a strong American accent. Not waiting for Ani’s reply to his welcome, he turned to his daughter. “
Comment ça va ce matin,
Sydney?”

“
Assez bien, merci
.” The child’s response was barely audible.

“
Qu’est-ce que tu as dit
?” the father barked.