The Pleasing Hour

by Lily King

  A clock struck eight. How would one paint this sound into this scene? How would one capture those plunging tones that were at once soothing and menacing, that began, each one, with the voice of an eager child and ended, no more than a second later, in a melancholy echo? The sounds, now six, now seven, seemed to accelerate the voices, the gestures, the hope of speaking and being understood. And then the last stroke, eight, tapering off like smoke above their heads. She wanted to capture that, bottle it: the effect of the stroke of eight on a roomful of people.

  “Odile, you get prettier every time I turn around.” M. Girard wrapped his large hands around her upper arms, lifting her slightly as they kissed.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re catching up to your mother, though to surpass her would be quite a feat.” He glanced at her friends Claire and Simone but found no words of reassurance, nothing to make them less resentful of her. Then he returned to Odile. “How is your father?”

  “Fine. Busy as always.” Papa was respected for his work but considered a freak, she was sure, at a party. He chose the most obscure topics or he repeated the puns Lola brought home from school. Either he rambled on or he sat alone, staring down into the one drink he never finished. While it embarrassed her to be with him, Odile envied his defiance of their codes. How she would have loved to go sit in a chair and study the scene instead of carrying out her half of this banal conversation about her family with M. Girard.

  The bell rang shrilly at the threshold with none of the aplomb of the clock in the corner. It trembled frantically at the tips of Mme. Girard’s fingers and would not be stilled until every head had lifted and turned, every smile had acknowledged that dinner was served.

  Finally satisfied, Mme. Girard replaced the bell on its silver tray and returned to the kitchen.

  Couples sought each other out for the move into the next room, where they would once again be separated. Alexandre gave her hand a long squeeze, an apology of some sort. Yes, she squeezed back, it’s all right. What she was forgiving she was sure neither of them knew.

  In front of them, Jeanne leaned to say something quietly to Luc and they laughed together, each reaching for the other’s arm at the same time. Odile and Alexandre had introduced them almost a year ago. They were at a dance and there was a run in Jeanne’s stocking and Luc gave her a piece of gum to stop it. They danced then, to several songs, and when they came back the run had traveled to her ankle and Luc had stepped on the gum, but something had happened. Their bodies no longer seemed cumbersome; their words weren’t hesitant or polite. Something had happened—and so fast. Odile knew it had never happened to her.

  “My sister, Isabelle, is here,” Micheline Girard whispered to her, as she began to circle the dining room table, looking for her card. “And you’ve been placed next to her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she says you’re more tolerable than my other friends.”

  “But why is she here? Why isn’t she in Italy?”

  “She showed up yesterday. She has a few days’ vacation.”

  Odile didn’t dare look down to the other end where Isabelle and her own place must be. It wasn’t surprising that she had appeared at the table without suffering through any of the preliminaries in the living room. Most likely she had stayed in the kitchen, taking lessons from the hired chef. She was like that. She took either an intense interest or a profound dislike in things, and above all she abhorred these formal dinners.

  When Odile took her seat, Isabelle was turned in the opposite direction, listening to Paul’s girlfriend tell the whole story of the bike accident out in Vincennes.

  Six places down on the other side, Alexandre was talking to Julie Silvan. Odile knew he was not thinking, as she often did, of how Julie’s father died last spring on the train from Lyon after a massive heart attack just before the Tonnerre stop, how Julie’s father had boarded a train one evening like so many other evenings and descended on a stretcher, had left Lyon alive and arrived in Paris dead. After Alexandre poured their wine, he leaned toward her and said something deliberately covert. Julie covered her mouth and began to shake. How did one learn to laugh again after death? Was it possible to forget, even for a few seconds at a time? Around Julie now, Odile never forgot death, and she always felt uncomfortable. Her words seemed frivolous, disrespectful. She wished she were more like Alexandre, who would never question or regret anything he said later.

  She had been watching him too long. He would tease her about being jealous and she would tell him what she was thinking and he wouldn’t believe her. To avoid such a conversation, she looked instead straight across to where Jean-Paul was telling the beginnings of a story to Marie-France.

  “My appointment was at four-thirty and I arrived promptly.” He never stopped talking about himself. Beside him, Marie-France was already flushed, not from the wine but from the pleasure and good luck of having been seated so close to J-P. She was already laughing; the mere tone of his voice, the way he said the word promptly, had gotten her going. She had been in love with him for years. Other eyes began to watch his face as he told stories that rendered them all slowly unconscious—unconscious of the long table, the courses yet to be served, Mme. Girard’s sharp words to the servants when they tried to clear the plates too soon, the two bottles of wine M. Girard would drink by himself, the white cracks in the center candelabra where the polish had not been completely rinsed off, the dark green curtains that were too heavy for their rods, and the dolorous, solitary note as the clock in the living room struck the half hour.

  Odile refused to be lulled.

  J-P included her in his rounds of eye contact as he shepherded his audience, but she had never begun to listen. She used him to avoid Isabelle, who had turned back from Paul’s girlfriend and now ate with her head down. Odile could feel Isabelle’s arm brush against her own as she lifted the fish bones with her knife; Isabelle was determined not to give J-P the slightest bit of what he got in abundance from everyone else. But Odile could not simply turn her attention to her plate for the evening. She wished she could, but it felt so rude even glancing down to secure a mouthful of fish on her fork. The most insulting thing she could manage was not to listen, though she compensated by affecting the face of a rapt listener.

  Odile could smell her. It was not a perfume—Isabelle would never wear perfume—but a shampoo or rinse rising from still-damp hair. She had an impulse to turn and lift the long shank of hair from Isabelle’s back so that it would not leave watermarks on the silk blouse.

  They should have greeted each other already. She knew it was her duty, for though they were in Isabelle’s house, they were on Odile’s territory.

  She had known Isabelle since they were five and seven. Seven going on twenty, twelve going on forty, Maman always said of Isabelle. She was intelligent—too intelligent, she had heard Papa once lament, as if intelligence were a great weight in one’s head that might topple the whole body. Odile admired her intensity, and whenever she found in herself moments of pure focus, she attributed it to what she’d once observed in Isabelle. But despite all that promise (and this was an inevitable word in any discussion of Isabelle), she hadn’t gone on to university. She was a sculptor’s apprentice in Rome. Was it true she had asked to sit next to her? And now were they not ever going to speak? She waited until J-P paused for a sip of wine, then removed her attention from him altogether.

  “Isabelle.” She had aimed for some sort of tone of surprise but, upon hearing its first false syllable, continued in a soft voice that tried to imply an inability to break away sooner. “How are you?”

  They kissed. Odile felt others watching: how rude not to have acknowledged the person beside you for an entire course. A servant’s arm, clearing plates, came between them as they separated. Isabelle wore no makeup. It made Odile feel the absurdity of her own painted features. Isabelle’s eyes were luminous and vulnerable, her lips full of natural color. They were smiling sardonically. She would never answer a question like How a
re you?

  Unnerved, Odile reached up to Isabelle’s neck to touch a pendant that hung on a chain. “What’s this?”

  “Just a gift from some kids I tutor.”

  It was a tiny plastic key. Odile let it hang from one finger. She could feel the heat from Isabelle’s neck across the back of her hand. “It’s so green,” she heard herself say.

  Isabelle laughed, and the key fell back onto her chest. Odile withdrew her arm.

  How is Italy? She didn’t want to ask this. Surely there was a more interesting question to pose. She remembered the clock and wanted to ask her if she’d ever tried to sculpt sound. Perhaps the clock would strike again soon. She would ask her question then.

  Neither of them picked up the next fork for the new course.

  “How is Italy?” It couldn’t be helped. The silence had to be filled, and Isabelle would not help. Silences amused her.

  “Beautiful. Poor. Hot. Those are my standard adjectives, at least.”

  “And the nonstandard?”

  Isabelle looked at her as if remembering her, Odile Tivot, for the first time. “Sensual is the first one that comes to mind. Not sexual, but they seem to pay close attention to all the senses separately.” She shook her head. “I sound like a tour guide on a bus through Florence. But it’s true.” As she spoke, she fingered the key. Her hands were familiar to Odile; they were like coming across an old toy or a favorite picture book, the forgotten shape and color and texture suddenly so precious. How well she knew those hands, the long palms, the square, unfiled nails, the sharp, straight bones across the tall knuckles. “And you? Micheline says you’re preparing for the sciences.”

  “I know,” said Odile, responding to an unspoken reproach. She had long ago planned to do languages and art history. “I don’t know what happened.”

  “You became practical.”

  “I guess,” Odile said, feeling suddenly that if Isabelle hadn’t gone she wouldn’t be memorizing the formulas for magnesium sulfide or aluminum nitride. Perhaps every void in her life had been created by Isabelle’s departure, though at the time it had seemed insignificant. She and Micheline had waved from their old balcony when M. Girard drove Isabelle to the train two years ago.

  “Do you still paint?” Isabelle asked.

  “Paint?”

  “You made me that card, for my fifteenth birthday. I have it somewhere.” She pointed upstairs toward her bedroom. The door had been shut when she and Alexandre were shown up there; she had barely thought of Isabelle then. Mme. Girard hadn’t even mentioned she was home. Odile wondered now what was up there, what she treasured, what she kept in her drawers. Had she been home for the move to this new apartment? Had she chosen to keep Odile’s card, or had all her belongings just been packed up and shipped across town without her? It was a watercolor of a lime tree, with fifteen limes on it.

  “No, I don’t paint.”

  “You did oils, too, didn’t you? I know I remember one hanging somewhere.”

  “I did a few, but I don’t think I have any of that stuff anymore. I don’t know.”

  Isabelle’s naked eyes bore into hers. You should know, they seemed to say. You should.

  Odile was eager to get off the subject of herself. “Is it frustrating to be helping someone else with his work and not doing your own?” She was pleased with this question. It came out of nowhere.

  “Sometimes.” Isabelle’s eyes drifted down as she gave the question more thought. What was it about her that made her seem more vital, more awake and alive, than anyone else in this room? There was an eruption of laughter on the other side of the table. J-P had reached the punch line of one of his stories. The girls laughed the longest, tinkling on like shattering glass. “It’s actually quite good discipline to be kept away from it. It builds up all sorts of ideas and urges. Gioconda’s work is conservative—well, I mean, she’s not doing statues of generals or anything, but it’s more reserved than mine—and I think that helps, too, to be bound and gagged all day.”

  “You work for a woman?”

  “Yes, Giaconda di Niota.”

  “I pictured this old Rodin type.”

  She gave a weary nod and Odile wondered if her mind was capable of offering something Isabelle hadn’t heard a dozen times since yesterday. “No,” Isabelle said, “she’s more of a Mme. Beauvais type.”

  Odile smiled in feigned comprehension. She knew she should know who Mme. Beauvais was, but no image or paragraph from her French civilization textbook came to her aid.

  “Remember her? Down the hall at our old place? Tall and abrasive.”

  Odile was too embarrassed to laugh. The clock would strike nine soon. She would redeem herself then. “Do you have any time for your own stuff?” she asked, not wanting to veer too far from the subject of art.

  “At night.”

  At night. An upstairs studio, street sounds coming through the high dark open windows in hot gusts, those hands focused and separate from her body—not separate, but laden, as if all of her self had been poured into them.

  “Which is not as romantic as it sounds,” Isabelle continued, and Odile wondered if she had said something aloud. “I drink a lot of coffee and have chronic back pain like an old woman.” She reached behind her, arching and wincing, to rub the base of her spine. “Here, you can feel the knot.” She turned it toward Odile, lifted her shirt, and pointed to a spot below the waist of her skirt. “You won’t believe it. This huge bulb of pain. Feel it.”

  For a long time afterward, as more food appeared and plates were replaced by bigger and then eventually smaller ones, as they chatted on, and as the clock struck nine—nine perfect rings of sound encircling the two of them—the sensation of the tiny hairs, the moist skin, the springy rise at the base of the spine remained on Odile’s fingertips. That one act of dipping down, touching, and withdrawing seemed permanent, as if somewhere, on another plane of existence of which she was only allowed partial consciousness, it was happening over and over again.

  After coffee, plans were made to go to a nightclub across the river. The girls, all but Isabelle, gathered in Micheline’s bathroom to reapply themselves.

  “Poor Odile, stuck with the sullen sister all night,” Marie-France said to her own reflection, which was still bright and beaming from dinner.

  Before Odile could manage a polite denial, Micheline said, “She’s not so bad anymore, is she?” Without waiting, she went on. “It’s because she’s all in love.”

  Odile recalled how when they were children Micheline used to accuse them of being in love and not loving her. It surprised her that Micheline remembered this now to tease her with. Though growing older had always frightened her, remembering the past was a pleasing sensation. She watched her own face in the mirror spread into a smile.

  “With who?” Marie-France asked, lowering her lipstick in exaggerated curiosity.

  “The son of that sculptor she works for.”

  “Giaconda di Niota.”

  “Is that her name?” Micheline said.

  “Yes,” Odile said, stroking on more blush to cover the rising natural one.

  Watching her, Marie-France said, “God, I wish I had just one of your bones.”

  Alexandre was waiting at the foot of the stairs with her coat. He was a catch, Maman said. Clever, ambitious, handsome. He studied law, but in the summer he was an assistant director for his uncle’s films, famous films. He went on location to places like Lima and Sydney. She had heard Alexandre’s name a thousand times before she ever met him. All her friends had been and maybe were still in love with him; certainly Micheline was. She never knew why he picked her. Because you’re so beautiful, Maman told her. Odile feared it was that simple.

  Out on the sidewalk, Isabelle said, “Come with us,” pointing to their father’s Renault.

  Not even to go to a nightclub had she put on a little makeup, and yet standing there between Micheline and Jeanne, she seemed more elegant and polished, as if the others were off to a masked ball. Her hair had dri
ed in waves that caught thin crescents of light. She beckoned Odile to the car as though they were the oldest of friends. She glowed. She was in love with the sculptor’s son.

  Micheline explained that Odile had come with Alexandre, who then took Odile’s hand and led her across the street, away from the rest.

  In the car he encapsulated all his conversations for her, then teased her, as he always did, for talking to one person the entire meal. He imitated her, nodding, sipping. “And then what? And then? It’s not talking, it’s bloodsucking. You’ve got to learn how to spread yourself out in a room.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s a skill you’re going to need all your life.” He said this in a mock-parent tone, but he meant it.

  When they reached the club, they circled around for a parking space for over a half hour. She knew not to speak while this was going on. He hated this part of any evening and yet behaved each time as if it were a wholly unexpected hitch, as if they didn’t, every night they went out, comb some street for a parking spot. Tonight she used this time to examine his face. Was he handsome simply because of the absence of anything jarring: a nose like her father’s, a hooked chin like M. Girard’s, acne pocks like Luc’s? His face was illuminated, then obscured, then lighted again as they moved beneath the lamplight of each street. In the dark he could have been any man; in the light his skin looked as glossy as wax. She looked at his lips. Had she really ever kissed them? They seemed unfamiliar to her. He wedged the car backward into a tiny spot.

  “Finally,” he said, cutting the engine and leaning back on the headrest. He tipped his head toward her. “You are really stunning tonight.” With a finger he looped a bit of her hair over her ear. She hated the way it felt; it reminded her of being very young and playing in the sand. Don’t do that, Maman said, lifting the hair free. It will make your ears stick out. But this was one of his tender gestures. Then he would kiss her. Once without tongue, then tongue, then without again. Not yet; now; not yet. She couldn’t shake the impression that his lips were not flesh.