Silent Bird (19 page)

“What do you want for dinner?” Jeannot asked on the day before his performance. “I would cook something special, but there is not much food left in the house.”

Of course there wasn’t. The rains had started pummeling Montpellier early that morning, my usual shopping time. By afternoon, water seemed to be blowing sideways.
The city of wind
, I marveled from the open window. No wonder the wind ’round these parts was called
mistral
— “masterly.” No one can argue with wind. It just goes where it wants, blows down laundry lines and tree branches and whatever else it deems weak. Below our apartment, people wobbled and scurried about as if balancing eggs under their chins. Just sticking my head outside for a few seconds stung my eyes and turned my mop of curls into dreadlocks. So I shut the window and watched from the other side as wind chased bright summer leaves and snapped umbrellas and transformed Madame Nony’s cloth napkins into small flying carpets diving and dodging while customers scrambled for shelter under trees and fought back with menus.

“
I’ll
cook for
you
this time,” I told Jeannot, turning on the TV news. “A surprise.”

“There is no update on the seven-year-old girl reported missing eight days ago in the village of Villefranche sur Lez. The public is asked to please call this number if they have seen her or have anything of possible interest to report.”

I shut the TV.

I worked in the kitchen while Jeannot
braved the rain to go to the pharmacy for a pregnancy test and my developed photos. And I was, by turns, looking forward to those photos but dreading the test; and dreading the photos but looking forward to the test. So I just concentrated on my task, to serve Jeannot a simple, easily improvised meal…

Nicely set table,
voilà!
Long-stemmed wine glasses and the inevitable bottle of family table brand. Tired baguette from yesterday in a basket. At the last moment I felt inspired and added a little French to my plain old garlicky pasta: a blob of melted Brie. Yum!

Jeannot would love this.

Jeannot would not love this.

Maybe he
would
have liked it, if he had actually put the stuff in his mouth. Instead, my fiancé came home, smiled at the set table, handed me the pharmacist bag, which I tossed into the bedroom, and looked at his plate; at the melted Brie. And he leaned back in his chair like a surly three-year-old and said patiently, “
Chérie
, I am sorry but one does not eat Brie this way.”

I stared at him. “
Why not? You like Brie. All I did was melt it.”

“
Yes, I see that. But…on pasta?”

“
Yes, on pasta. Why not?”

“
Because...it simply is not done.”

“
Oh, really. And why is that?”

“
There is tradition,
Chérie,
about how cheese is eaten.”

In my head I heard Tevya from
Fiddler on the Roof
belting out his song:
Tradition! TRADITION!

I said,
“How it’s eaten
here
, you mean. Anyway, traditions change.”

“
Not French cuisine. That will never change.”

Cheese did
n’t really matter, couldn’t have put these tears inside my throat. “For God’s sake,” I muttered in English. Then back to French. “Why can’t the French flex a little? This is cheese, not murder! You can at least try it.”

“
I cannot,
Chérie
. I am sorry. Not on pasta.”

“
If I can try snails…"

He gaped
at me as if I'd started speaking in tongues. And maybe I had. Suddenly the French words felt foreign in my mouth, like bad water.

“
Pilar...please, don’t be offended,” he said soothingly. “I know you mean well. But I cannot eat
fromage
like this. You have to understand, it is not eaten this way.”

“
Here.”

“Yes
, here. And
by the best chefs around the world—”

“
Oh, give me a break,” I muttered in English.

But he would never understand an idiom like
“Give me a break” any more than he would eat this pasta. Melted Brie was too spontaneous, too inventive—too rebellious. Even when we grew old together and lost our teeth, Jeannot would be slurping snails and I'd be doing uncouth things with pasta.

That’s just the way it is, I realized.
You say
tomaytoes
; I say
tomato sauce from a can.

So I dropped the subject like I’d dropped the pharmacy bag. W
e picked our way through the rest of the meal and even cracked a few jokes at our awkwardness. He wolfed down a ton of bread but consumed only a few morsels of pasta with almost no cheese on it, and we discussed how different our cultures were.

T
hen the phone rang. To my surprise, Jeannot darted like a teenager to answer it. His face lit up as he listened, and then he burst into a laugh that sounded more genuine than anything I’d heard that day. He said, “Well, I hope you can make it after all. I would love to see you in the audience”—more listening and laughter—“Yes. A little. Do you blame me, at my age?”

Still grinning, he returned to the table. The pasta had started looking slimy to me too, but I shoveled a forkful into my mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “What did Thérèse say? Did she decide she’s going?”

“I told you, she is trying to change her plans so she can make it.”

“How long does it take to reschedule something? She knows how important this is.”

“She had those plans first; I told her
she should not feel pressure. I understand.”

“No you
don’t, and neither do I,” I retorted. Not that I wanted to see Thérèse at La Peña. I hoped she left the continent.

He shrugged
then coughed a little, as if accidentally inhaling some melted Brie. “I am sorry, I cannot eat any more
,
” he said without looking at me, and went to the piano.

I dumped the leftover pasta into the trash.
Then I wandered into the bedroom and stared at the pharmacy bag.

I didn’t open it; not yet. I already had a headache.

“Can you come to the library, please?” asked Monique on the phone the next morning, her voice hoarse. “Will that bother you?”

It was still raining, still windy, still the kind of day no one wants to go out in. Jeannot seemed so damn tense about the concert; I felt so damn tense from avoiding the news and from watching my fiancé play piano or pace around the living room. A long walk in the deluge outside sounded pretty good about now.

“It won’t bother me at all,” I said. “Is something going on?”

She sighed. “Yes. A small group of children come here one time every month. Their mothers attend a class in this building. Usually I read to the children. But I have a sore throat, and it pains me to talk. I hoped perhaps you—”

“I’m on my way,” I said.

“What about this one?” I asked the children as I held up
The Cat in the Hat.

“We read that already!” one of the tots cried out triumphantly. “Three times!”

Today the American Library seemed especially ancient despite the electric lighting. I guess there is something about huddling inside a timeworn building in a timeless rainstorm. Five children, ages three through six, circled my feet in the children’s section. They were half French, half British, so they spoke English just fine. They sounded like high-pitched actors from Masterpiece Theatre.

I was pleased to do something to help out Monique for a change, happy to be working in a library. But entertaining children? That was outside my comfort zone. I didn’t get close to children in general. Didn’t babysit. And though I longed to write stories, I didn’t read them aloud.

“How about this?” I asked the kids, and help up a classic chapter book from my own childhood:
Mr. Popper’s Penguins
.

The little kids wrinkled their noses. “We want
pictures,
” a girl said.

The boy next to her started picking his nose.

I desperately cast around for Monique but she was at her desk drinking hot tea. How could she ask me to do this? She knew I wasn’t the maternal type. I liked kids, of course; I loved their books. I just didn’t know what to say.

“Tell us a story,” pleaded another girl. She had a Beatle haircut the color of mustard and wore a turtle neck and boots. Smart, I thought; her feet were probably dry…

“Well, we have a ton of books here,” I said. “I’ll read whatever you want; just choose.”

“You
make up
a story,” said the boy with the finger up his nose.

Another imploring glance at Monique, but she was paying no attention. The three year old had glommed onto the damp leg of my jeans. She had round dark eyes that reminded me of a cartoon baby. The oldest child, a girl with pigtails and a yellow down vest, sat intently watching me. Her eyes seemed keenly sad, as if they hid questions and secrets entrusted to no one.

“Tell us a story,” another child chanted.

First one, then three, then the bunch of them except the child in the vest began bouncing. “Tell! Us! A! Story!
Please
?”

Crap
. “Any story I tell won’t have pictures,” I said, but they ignored that.

Suddenly, I got an idea. And went with it, surprising even myself.

“Once upon a time there was ‘The House That Sneezed,’” I began.

“The children love you,” Monique said afterward, her face all aglow. “You tell stories! I cannot do this in English or French. Wonderful, my friend.”

“Not so wonderful,” I said. “You didn’t hear it. My story wasn’t the most cheerful thing in the world.”

“But they listened with attention. They did not wish to leave you. The bigger girl”—another glowing smile—“asked to stay with you.”

“That’s because I depressed the hell out of her by talking about a house that is kinda sick because it lost someone. She is probably traumatized and will need therapy just because I came here to help you.”

Monique’s smile turned upside down, no doubt like the house in my story. “So why tell a
sad
story?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t
all sad. It ended better, the house was getting strong. Anyway, I didn’t plan it but then I had to continue. They insisted. I’m sorry.”

“No, you haven’t to be sorry. This is life, yes? We show who we are to children because they show who they are to us.”

“I would have been better off with talking flowers or singing bunnies. I mean”—I half-laughed—“
The House That Sneezed
?”

“It sneezed because it needed to sneeze,” said Monique, looking a bit ticklish herself. “What is wrong with that?”

A few hours later
I was home again, in the bath and scrubbing myself raw with glove-shaped washcloths, when Jeannot rapped on the door.

“
Pilar, can you hear me?” he shouted through the sound of running water inside and rain and thunder outside. “My God, did you hear that? It’s still raining! Do you think anyone will go out tonight?”

“
Yes, of course,” I called back, wondering if anyone
would
go out tonight. The streets were flooding already; the wind had a mad, freakish quality to it. The trees seemed to be shrieking, their branches flung in protective poses. What bad luck for Jeannot to debut on such a shitty night! He needed to play well, and he needed to have an audience.

We needed to have something to celebrate.

“Wish it would stop!" he called.

“
Maybe it will!"

“
No, this is probably…Noah’s flood…of all the luck.” The knob rattled. “Why did you lock this? Are you afraid I will come in?”

Yes
, I thought. Which was like, shall we say closing the barn after the cow has escaped? I flicked open the tub drain, climbed out of the tub, wrapped myself in a thick towel, and unlocked the door.

“
Sorry to disturb you,” he said, glancing at me oddly.

“
Sorry I locked the door,” I said.

He continued to stand there ogling me, so
I grabbed a hairbrush and began detangling my hair. The mirror was fogged over, making Jeannot’s face appear in patches behind me: a fragmented, handsome creature rising from the steam. “Your hair is sexy.
S'il te plaît
?” He reached around me for the brush, and I gave it to him. Slowly he pushed the bristles through my hair as light flickered and flashed. We looked haunted.

“
Relaxing, yes? Your hair is like wavy silk,” he said.

I thought of
Thérèse's short hair and smiled.

“
You smell good too.” His voice sounded low in his throat: a purr. “We have an hour to spare. Perhaps you can lose the towel?”

Jeannot’s eyes were so beautiful; I tried to concentrate on their warmth.
My vision blurred over as if I were chanting to the flame of a candle. Brown, brown, brown.

The drumming of the rain did make this moment romantic
—cinema at its best. Good lighting, muted sound. Steam for fog.

It had been romantic the
night we made love in the sea. The beach had cradled us in shapes and textures and the light of the low-slung moon. I had felt sexual then, at least at first. I had forgotten
the
mechanics
of sex. I had joined the rhythm without analyzing it; ridden the inner tide; owned the wanting like a layer of second skin.

Why not now?
Well…because he expected things. The expectation felt like a weight we carried around with us.

All men expect things.

Ironically, I had responded when we’d been strangers, too. With a cooler heat, I know now. The kind of heat that, after the pleasure, leaves you as empty as a husk of shucked corn.

Stop thinking!

Jeannot tugged gently at my towel, which fell to the floor. “This is exactly the inspiration I need,
Chérie
.”

From fingers to palms, he pressed my skin.
He measured the weight and shape of my breasts, moved down to my waist, followed the flair of my hips; stroked my legs…

"Mon amour
.”

My love. My love. Concentrate on the love
.

T
oo late, though. A switch had gone off. My soul crawled into its hidey-hole and studied the world through a windowpane.

God help me, but
I did not want to be touched. How had I allowed him into the bathroom when I preferred to keep it locked?

I invited him in!

I lowered myself to the bath mat. Jeannot held the top of my head as I pulled off his bikini underwear. And I shut my eyes, fighting the suffocation. Fighting the knowing that
this
is what he wanted from me,
this
is what they all want no matter the price;
this
is what the rest of our lives would be, as man and wife…

Except…
this is Jeannot!
I love him!

“
Pilar? Are you crying?” His voice boomed down at me as if from a giant.

I flinched
.

“
Chérie
? Talk to me, please. What is it?” He squatted down, an adult reasoning with a distraught child. “
Shhh
. Is it me? Did I do something? I thought…”

I shook my head.
Couldn’t explain this; didn’t know how to begin to explain this.

Certainly
Thérèse wouldn’t remove her lover’s hands from her breasts. She wouldn’t lock the goddamn bathroom door. She wouldn’t get angry at Jeannot for asking if she had come during sex. She wouldn’t stop
wanting
sex the moment she fell in love!

“
I love…this, Pilar. You know that. But if you prefer that I stop, you must tell me…”

“
Of course,” I said lightly and grabbed my towel off the floor. Then I balled it up against my stomach and walked out of the bathroom as naked as the day I was born. My heart chimed in an agonizing slow canter
: pthup, pthup, pthup…

Jeannot followed.
“Pilar?
Are you all right? What is
wrong
with you?”

Except the French version of what he said translated to
“
What do you have?
”—and that question, that warped wording, snapped me out of my funk.

There is nothing wrong with me. No
Evil Eye. Only evil men. Or evil acts.

I heard myself produce one of Grandma’s snorts.
“Let’s not talk now, please. Not before your concert.”

“
I care about
you
more than the concert,” he said quickly. Though his eyes shifted ever so slightly, as if he finally recognized what brand of corruption lay underneath my scrubbed skin. “Pilar, you look sick. Are you all right?”

“Yes, I told you; I am fine!”
I removed my towel and dropped it on the floor, just to show him I wasn’t nuts. Then I slipped on a thong that any French woman would be proud of. I reached into the armoire to snatch a red dress I’d never worn before, a gift of Monique’s that she had blessed as “beautiful.” Next I chose patent leather sandals with stiletto heels and open toes. I’d cripple myself and have squishy toes all evening, but what the hell. It seemed a minor price to pay for the histrionics.

“
Did you, ah, take the test yet?” Jeannot asked, his voice suddenly different—edgy? Angry? He walked over the desk and poked the pharmacy bag.

I held up my pinky.
“I will tomorrow, promise.”

He hesitated
then hooked his pinky with mine. Guess pinky promises are international…

I said,
“We do need to hurry up if we want to eat before your concert.”

I watched him pull a
coffee-colored silk shirt from the hook on bathroom door, polish his shoes and slap gel on his hair. But when he reached for his bowtie, I grabbed the bag off the desk and made a beeline past him into the living room.

The hell with the test, for now; I had to see those photos.