“I can’t stand this heat anymore.”
“Yeah,” said Anthony.
“I can’t sleep, even though I have AC in my bedroom.”
“It’s driving everybody crazy. Did you see in the newspaper, about the guys over by Blonds-Champs?”
“No,” she said.
The idea already amused her. Appalling things were always going on over there. At that, she downed a big slug of vodka.
“There was a family living there with a lot of kids, grandparents, dogs everywhere. Nobody had a job. Anyway, you know what I mean. And they were all naked.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It was too hot. They’d stopped getting dressed.”
“You’re kidding!”
“I swear. The neighbors called the cops. They couldn’t stand seeing the whole tribe like that, walking around without any clothes.”
“Ha! You can’t be serious.”
“It’s true, I swear. My mother showed me the article. The whole family, naked. Apparently the cops had a lot of trouble taking them in.”
By then, the liquor had taken them under its wing. Seeing Steph laughing, Anthony started to get his hopes up. They began telling more anecdotes like that one; the valley was full of them. Incestuous families where brothers, fathers, and cousins all got mixed up in tangled family trees. Post office holdups with crowbars, high-speed Massey-Ferguson chases, dances that ended in blasts of buckshot, the inbreds, welfare scams, incest over three generations—local color, in other words.
Over on the far shore, a light went out.
“Look,” said Anthony.
Steph rested her head on his shoulder. It was only the two of them, just drunk enough, protected by the night, the fire, the lake. After that, everything followed wonderfully. She kissed him, a nervous kiss with the medicinal taste of the vodka. Very quickly they tipped backward and stretched out on the coarse sand, their legs tangled. When she squeezed his cock through his jeans, he pulled back.
“What is it?” whispered Steph.
Without even realizing it, she was moving against him. She wanted it. She kissed him.
“Don’t worry, it’ll come.”
“I know,” he said.
Steph chuckled, then sat up to take off her blouse. Underneath, she was wearing a little bra without any underwire. You could make out her nipples through the fabric. She stood up to get rid of her shoes and shorts. Her nearly transparent white panties were tiny relative to the volume of her thighs. Her full, overflowing body looked like one big cleavage.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go for a swim.”
“In there?”
“Come on, I’m telling you.”
She helped him stand, then pulled him toward the water. As she walked, her ass swayed unctuously. He wanted to take his shirt off.
“Fuck!” she suddenly shouted, and started hopping around.
“What happened to you?”
“I don’t know. I stepped on something.”
She dropped to the ground to examine her wound.
“Get out of the light. I can’t see anything.”
Sitting on the ground with her right foot drawn up on her left thigh, she studied the thing with a look of dismay. Anthony crouched down to see. She had a neat little almond-shaped cut in the very pale skin of her plantar arch. It looked like a mouth.
“It’s not very deep,” he said. “But I think you’d better not go swimming.”
“Carry me.”
He looked up at her.
“Bring me to the water. I don’t want to get sand in it.”
Anthony took the time to pull off his jeans, then helped her climb onto his back. As she wrapped her arms around his neck, Steph caught his smell again, the one she’d breathed on the road. She laid her forehead on his neck. She was becoming simple, patient. The water rose around them. When they were in up to their waists, she slid off and came around to face him. They kissed again. She held him in her arms and wrapped her legs around him. He was supporting her, his hands under her legs, brushing the fabric of her panties. The water was quite warm, almost cloying.
“Feels good, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
Steph was now talking quietly. She let herself lean against him. The water blended with the sky. Anthony thought of all the filthy things crawling under the water, like fishes, and catfish, and the Colin boy’s rotting corpse. He could feel the mud squeezing between his toes as they went farther. He shivered.
“Are you cold?”
“No.”
She put her head against his collarbone. Anthony kept walking. The water was deep now. Very soon, it would be over his head.
“Hold me,” she said.
“I’m holding you,” he answered.
They floated, insular and white in the darkness of the water and sky, and life really felt worthwhile.
“Stop,” she said.
“Are you scared?”
“A little.”
He planted a kiss below her ear. Insensibly, she had started to wriggle against him. They felt good, the water was delicious after all, and the rain wasn’t coming. He rocked her gently, taking advantage of her heavy, malleable ass.
“Wow, you’re really hard…”
She had said that under her breath. Anthony wanted to show her just how true it was.
“Don’t move,” she said.
She was very gently swaying against him. Through the fabric of her panties, he could feel the furrow of her pussy, that call within. She rubbed against him, and her breath gradually quickened. Under the water, he tried to push the fabric aside, so he could enter her.
“No…” said Steph.
She hugged him hard, urgently, languid. The movement between them had given rise to a kind of regular lapping. He dug his fingers into her flesh, feeling a tremendous urge to knead and enter it. He must have hurt her a little; she moaned.
“Again…”
“What?”
“Do it again,” she said. “Hard.”
He did so and she moaned again, louder. Despite his excitement, Anthony was experiencing a strange impression of solitude and seriousness. Steph’s face remained hidden. He was alone in confronting the darkness, the lake’s animal presence, the weight of the sky. Huddled against his chest, she was using him, her hips producing that maddening female swaying. Anthony could hardly stand it. His cock almost hurt, he so badly wanted to plunge into that meaty softness, that pulsing, blood-warmed heart, Steph’s vagina. He freed one hand and grasped her by the waist. She arched her back. He tried to push into her in spite of the fabric. Again, he tried to free his cock.
“Tch!” she said.
“I want to.”
“Be quiet. Stay like that. Hold me, dammit.”
He tightened his grip. She was now breathing really fast, and her hips were moving in rhythm with her breath. It was now, he told himself. She was going to come.
“Wait,” he muttered.
He wanted to come too. But at the same time it wasn’t so easy in this water, and this darkness. She held him with all her strength and an odd, almost grotesque sigh rose from her chest.
“Wait,” he said again.
But he could already feel Steph’s body slackening in his hands, becoming like a piece of cast-off clothing. She let go, stood facing him, looking. He very quickly lost his erection. The silence around them had an almost unbearable relief.
“Take me back now. I’m exhausted. I’m cold.”
He watched her step out of the water. Her clearly outlined silhouette was solid, she was limping a little bit, and this jerky movement gave her flesh a pointless, sexual quivering.
“Are you angry?” she asked.
She was rubbing her arms and hopping in place, waiting to dry off.
&nb
sp; “No.”
A few minutes later, they were able to pull on their clothes. They headed for the motorcycle, leaving the fire behind them to die. This time, Steph held on to the saddle. As a farewell gesture at the power plant, Anthony was treated to a peck on the cheek. For a few days he tried to convince himself that he had fucked her. But it was really the other way around.
THREE
July 14, 1996
La Fièvre
1
All in all, things had fallen into place pretty automatically.
Anthony turned eighteen in May. Then in June he passed the technological baccalauréat without having to take the orals, and also without any illusions about what would happen next. In any case, it no longer mattered. In March he and his class all went to a career fair in Metz. Schools had come to the freezing exposition hall there to push their offerings. Technical and engineering diplomas were touted; the universities made their pitches. There were lots of daunting possibilities Anthony knew nothing about. The army had a booth as well. He took a prospectus and talked with the woman there, a cheerful blonde in uniform. She gave him a CD and showed him images of a marine, a submariner, a helicopter pilot, and jungle warfare training in Guyana.
Anthony signed the enlistment papers in April. He was leaving on July 15. That was tomorrow.
* * *
—
Meanwhile, he did his daily ten-mile run in the cool morning of July 14. He crossed the Petit-Fougeray woods, then ran around the lake before following the departmental highway to the Relais des Chasseurs, where he retrieved his Opel Kadett. His head was empty; he felt light and hard. He felt good.
His mother had given him her old car as a reward for passing the baccalauréat. Some present! It broke down every chance it could. Fortunately, Anthony could go see the Munsterberger brothers, who ran a little garage on the Lameck road. They rebuilt his clutch for free, then did the spark plugs, carburetor, and brake pads, all still for free. But during an oil change, Cyril Munsterberger finally decided that enough was enough.
“We’ll show you how to do it, so you won’t go on being such a pest.”
The brothers were pals of his father, big guys with butt cracks on permanent display. They were rough-hewn and nice, with hands that never got clean. Hélène called them the scrap dealers. Their mother took care of the paperwork. She was still young, and dressed well. From her glassed-in office, she watched to make sure the shop ran smoothly. Anthony now knew how to fix his car himself. These days when he went to see the brothers, it was to have a cup of coffee and talk.
Once back at his mother’s place, Anthony went directly to the little garden out back. Hélène had found herself an attractive little one-story row house, and the rent wasn’t too high. The neighborhood had been built on the site of an old orchard. A few sickly trees remained from that rustic past, including a plum tree that Anthony had hung his pull-up bar on. He took off his T-shirt, strapped a weighted belt around his waist, and began his series: five sets of twenty. It was ten in the morning, and despite the plum tree’s shade, sweat immediately began to run down his sides and back. He continued with sit-ups, push-ups, and stretching. His back, arms, thighs, and belly all felt sore. He was satisfied. He checked out his reflection in the glass door to the kitchen: slim body, well-defined muscles. He flexed his deltoids. His mother opened the door.
“What are you doing right now?”
“Nothing.”
“Help me fold the sheets, then.”
Anthony picked up his gear and followed her into the living room. The shutters were closed, and she was doing the ironing while watching Laurent Cabrol’s TV shopping program.
“Here,” she said, handing him the corners of a fitted sheet. They backed up, tightened the sheet, then folded it.
“Is your bag ready?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you think to go to the train station, to check the schedules?”
“Yeah.”
He was lying. For the last week she hadn’t stopped pestering him about this. For Hélène, preparations for his departure had taken on a nearly existential dimension. She made lists, couldn’t sleep, feared unlikely calamities. The train schedules in particular were the topic of constant concern. Anthony let her talk. She spent all her time worrying anyway.
Once the laundry was folded, he went into the neat little kitchen. He opened the fridge, took a bottle of Contrex mineral water, and downed it almost in a gulp, his head thrown back, naked to the waist, his hair wet.
“Hey, the fridge…”
Anthony closed it with his foot, then stretched his arms overhead, fingers laced and palms out. Hélène didn’t like what she saw. From dorsals to trapezius, he was all of a piece, a dense, veined pattern that gathered at the shoulder to burst out in his triceps. To Hélène’s eyes, it was just violence in reserve. Beneath the muscle, she sensed the possibility of punches. She’d seen too many of them and now hoped only for peace, a calm paradise without shocks or remorse. A dreamy gray flatness.
“You’re going to hurt yourself, with all that exercising.”
“I’m gonna take a shower.”
“Think about your bag.”
“Okaaaaay!” he said, spreading his arms wide. “Enough! Stop it!”
“Haaa!” she growled irritably, shooing him away like a fly.
She hated his weightlifter look, those beefy arms angling out away from his body like the Michelin Man. She hoped the army would know what to do with that big, idiotic body. Anthony saw things differently. Like thousands of poor kids who had never been happy in school, he was going off to make his way, learn to fight, and see the world. To fit the idea that his father had of what made a man. Watching all those Clint Eastwood films hadn’t been in vain. He had explained this to his mother. Hélène just laughed. She had seen plenty of boys sign up, hoping for combat and exoticism. They came back disgusted with the discipline, bureaucratic and nitpicky, having never left their barracks except to go drink bad beer in small-town bars.
* * *
—
After his shower, Anthony shaved. In the mirror, he no longer saw his lazy eye, only the taut cabling of his shoulders, the flat vertical of his pecs, the obliques, the biceps that bulged even at rest.
The skittering pschtt of the pressure cooker valve could be heard, and a smell of cooking spread through the house. Hélène was listening to Radio Europe 1, as usual. Hit parade titles alternated with falsely cheerful chatter. Anthony recognized “Gangsta’s Paradise.” Then the phone rang while he was brushing his teeth. He turned off the faucet and cracked the door to listen. Between the pressure cooker and the music, he couldn’t hear much. Hélène was talking quietly, “Yes…No…Yes…Yes, of course.” She called up to him:
“Anthony!”
He stood in the doorway without saying anything, toothbrush in hand. The mint flavor tingled on his tongue. He held his breath. After a few moments, his mother repeated:
“Anthony!”
“What?”
“It’s your father!”
“I’m in the shower.”
“No you’re not, I can hear you.”
“What does he want?”
“How do I know? Come on.”
“Tell him I’ll call him back.”
“Come down, for god’s sake.”
“No, I’m naked.”
“Then get dressed, dammit!”
He slammed the door, so she would get the message. Then he went back to the washbasin, spat, and rinsed his mouth. His forehead knit in a worried frown. He looked at his reflection in the mirror for a moment. He really didn’t see how he could avoid it.
When he joined his mother in the kitchen, she was smoking a cigarette and leafing through an old copy of Point de vue that her neighbor had given her. The table was set. The pressure cooker was still hissing. The windows were steamed up, and you c
ouldn’t see out. Anthony sat down facing her, waiting for Hélène to decide to look up. She didn’t.
“So what did he want?” he asked after a moment.
“What do you think?”
She looked at him over the top of her glasses (on sale, two for the price of one) with that expression both annoyed and satisfied that he found so irritating. He forced himself to breathe calmly. This would all be over tomorrow, no point in getting angry.
“He’s your father.”
“I know.”
“When do you plan to go over?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re leaving tomorrow.”
“I know.”
She took a drag on her cigarette, carefully stubbed it out, then stood and walked over to the stove.
“I made a roast and green beans. Would you like some noodles, too?”
“Yeah, sure.”
He needed slow sugars for energy and protein to build bulk. Anthony’s nutritional regime had become a big thing. Hélène had to cook him meat at every meal. His bodybuilding was a bottomless pit.
“What did you tell him?”
“That you were in the shower. What else could I say?”
“What did he say?”
She filled the pot at the faucet and took a package of macaroni from the cupboard. The bluish gas flame hissed as she waited for the water to boil. Hélène still had her back turned to him. He saw her shake her head no.
“He didn’t say anything special.”
“I’ll stop by later,” said Anthony.
“And this evening?”
“What about it?”
“You aren’t going out, are you?”
“I might go out for a while.”
“Let me remind you: you’re leaving tomorrow.”
“I know.”
And Their Children After Them Page 29