by Lily King
“I wish we didn’t have to go in,” he said, as he pulled away. It was a lie. There was nothing more predetermined than a night like this. If she had suggested they leave, he would have insisted on dropping in, just for a minute, just to see who was there.
Odile got out of the car and waited for him to join her on the sidewalk. He would jangle his keys after he put them in his pocket; he would lean on three fingers against the trunk of the car as he came around it. What had gotten into her? Why was she seeing him like this, at such a distance? At the beginning of the evening she had wanted to get out to the living room where he was with Maman; she had been jealous of their easy talk on the couch. And he was a kind, sensitive person. He always meant well. He had taken Paul’s hand at the end of their visit to the hospital with the same firm shake he would have given him at the beginning of a party, as if to rouse him from his confusion. His collar had been soaking wet by then.
The club was packed with clusters of bodies shifting restlessly through its rooms. Luc, Jeanne, Micheline, and Isabelle were just inside the door. Alexandre leaned into the group and said something that made them all laugh. It was impossible to hear what it was, and if she asked he’d say it was stupid. He never laughed at what he said himself, and he never repeated a joke. He reached back for Odile’s hand and Isabelle fell in behind her as they made their way to the bar.
The music grew louder and Isabelle put her mouth in Odile’s hair, just behind her ear, to be heard. “Look at the tiles on the floor. They’re gorgeous.” And, a few seconds later, “There’s a faucet over there. This must have been a bathhouse.” Then: “Look at the ceiling!”
Odile had been to this club at least ten times. She had been here at the end of a long night when there were only a handful of people standing around, and she had never noticed what Isabelle somehow saw despite hundreds of human obstacles. Above them was a mosaic of tropical birds in flight, exactly as they would be seen from below. One bird had fuchsia talons, another a vermilion belly and long muscular wings. Despite the smoke and the flickering light, the scene was perfectly vivid.
“Isn’t it spectacular!”
Odile kept her head craned toward the ceiling, which made her hair fall back and Isabelle’s lips brush briefly against her earlobe. If she were the sculptor’s son, Isabelle might have pressed her lips even closer, might have licked the lobe.
Ahead of her, Alexandre stopped. Into the other ear he said, so loudly it made her flinch, “Are you trying to break my fingers?” But he was smiling. At the bar he said more softly, “We really should’ve just gone home.”
“Yes,” she said. She had never been so uninterested in his waxy kisses. He handed her a rum and coke, and she took a long gulp. She rarely had more than two small sips of any drink. When they went to dance, her glass was empty. She set it on a table with embarrassment.
Usually she hated to dance in a crowd like this. There was no way to keep your own rhythm; you were always getting elbowed or stomped on by someone else’s. In truth, Odile had always used the crowd as an excuse not to dance. She didn’t enjoy dancing even when the floor emptied out. She never felt more like Maman than on the dance floor. Not that she’d ever seen her mother dance to rock music, but she knew if Maman ever did it would be identical. They shared an instinctive restraint, an inability to relinquish. Relinquish what? she asked herself, as she carefully shifted her weight from side to side, holding her arms as others around her held theirs, stepping small steps, trying to hear a beat that everyone else seemed to feel at their core. “Are you tired?” Alexandre had asked the first time they ever danced together. She thought of that question every time they danced now and could never see herself as anything but droopy on the dance floor. For some reason she had never thought before that alcohol might help. But the rum and coke seemed to clear a passage. After a few songs, she felt her arms leave her side in unexpected undulations; her feet, in brief intervals and in sheer imitation of the bald man beside her, nearly moon-walked. Alexandre gave her a cryptic look. Amusement? Disapproval? She didn’t know. She didn’t care. The next song had a quick staccato beat, and she found herself shuddering to it perfectly.
She had moved away from Isabelle, but now, feeling more confident, she peered between people to find her. Then she danced imperceptibly in her direction. As Odile got closer, she saw that Isabelle did not dance like anyone else. The song had a machine-gun beat, but Isabelle swayed in slow waves as if she heard some profound rhythm within the music. It was beautiful. She was lost in it. She had forgotten everyone in the room. What would it feel like to be wholly inside yourself, to give up that vigilant second self that believed it could know how others saw you?
Odile tried to fix her eyes on Alexandre, who reached for her with warm hands and an anticipatory grin, but, once released, her attention drifted back to Isabelle. She was dancing even more slowly now, her arms above her head. Had she had sex with the sculptor’s son? Yes. The certainty overwhelmed her. Odile felt how feeble her own movements were, how expressive of her virginity.
Why was she still a virgin? Alexandre insisted that they should go at whatever pace she felt comfortable, but once he had told her he felt that she was trying to keep him in a tiny box and it was painful, physically painful, to be so cramped all the time. He told her that since she was a girl he didn’t expect her to understand, but that was how he felt. Watching Isabelle, Odile realized she herself was also in a box. Perhaps tonight, she thought at the bar, gulping down another rum and coke. She would let him make love to her tonight.
On the way out they ran into Paul’s sister. The passage was too narrow for three so Odile stood behind Alexandre, who spoke seriously and shook his head during the whole exchange.
“What did she say?” she asked, when they got outside.
“No improvement. Nothing.”
“But they said in a couple of days he should be—”
“I know what they said, Odile, but they were wrong. He’s not getting any better.”
In the car, Alexandre sat with his hands on the wheel for several silent minutes before turning the key. Odile thought to reach out for his hand or stroke his hair, but she feared he might resent the attention drawn to his sadness and reject it. She wanted to withhold her touch until they got to her house. So she sat as silent and still as he, though the music in her head rang shrilly and the rum gave everything motion.
She hadn’t noticed before that Micheline’s car was parked across the street. She wished Alexandre would start the car; she didn’t want to have to see the two sisters come around the corner. In two days, Isabelle would be dancing on Italian tiles, walking beneath an Italian moon. She hadn’t said anything more to Odile than good-bye. Odile tilted her head to see if there was a moon above Paris. Roused by this slight movement, Alexandre turned the key.
He parked alongside her house, not one barge down as he would have if he were planning to stay.
Come in. It would have been easy to say. But she had never said anything like it. He decided whether he would come in or not; he decided when to slip his fingers into her bra and where to lead her hand. Come in, Odile practiced in her head, but she would never say it.
He hadn’t cut the engine; he stared straight ahead, more ghoulish than ever in the mottled light from the street above and the river beside them.
Then the rigid surface cracked without warning. The stiff mouth gaped, the eyes crumpled, and the smooth cheeks bunched up around them.
“Alex.” She touched his face. It was already wet. He turned from her, but she pulled him back. She leaned over and kissed him, but his lips could not conform.
He pushed her away and laid his forehead on the steering wheel. “I’m so scared for him, Odile.”
“Let’s make love.” She heard the words with as much shock as he did.
He lifted his head and let out a sound that could have been a laugh or a sob.
“Let’s.” She took his hand.
“Not now. Not like this.”
&nb
sp; But no was not a possible answer. She had made her decision.
She brought his fingers to her mouth and began to suck them, the littlest finger first. She took her time. She let him cry. But when she got to the thumb he was moaning for her.
She reached down, lowered his seat all the way back, and climbed on top of him. She heard him say her name from a great distance, in both protest and pleasure. He was still crying softly and couldn’t kiss, but his hands were full of another emotion as they grappled through her clothes and underclothes.
The alcohol sharpened her will but not her senses; it emboldened her movements, yet she felt as separate and numb as always when his mouth covered her breast, his fingers fumbled between her legs. But instead of stopping him here she let him continue. The car grew hot and moist with their breath. The city outside lost its definition and she felt drunk, newly drunk all over again. He kissed her now, a salty insatiable kiss. She could feel him grow harder beneath her as he spun his heavy tongue around in her mouth.
When he raised her again above him to reach her breast with his mouth, she saw instead small unpainted lips and she arched and shuddered and hollered to herself, no. She opened her eyes. Alexandre, she thought. But she felt the space between them swell and the only way to feel what he felt was to give in to the images in her head. She let the softer lips touch her breast; she let the thin hands with the sharp bones slip between her legs. She buried her face in damp wavy hair. She pressed herself hard against the body below her and everything but her own desire disappeared.
“Look at me, sweetheart,” she heard, but didn’t obey.
When he was inside her, she was inside Isabelle. She was the sculptor’s son. Their cries were blunt and echoless against the clouded windows.
When it was over, he brushed the hair from her face. “Are you okay? Here, come here. Around like this.” He made a place for her beside him and wrapped his arms around her. “That was beautiful. I felt so strange, so scared. This thing with Paul—”
“I know.”
“It’s so frightening that there might be permanent damage and that he might never … that he might just be gone, for good …”
She lay beside him with her back against his chest, which was moist with sweat and stuck to her every time he took a breath. As he spoke, his chin bobbed on her shoulder. She wanted to get out of the car, but he continued on about Paul.
The steamed windows seemed to be moving closer. She had thought about Isabelle while making love to Alexandre. Was she losing her mind? Of course not, a psychiatrist would say. You were scared and a little drunk. It was the first time. A person is bound to have odd, inappropriate thoughts the first time.
“ … and when you think of it, the brain is just this flow of fluids and electric impulses, and all it takes is a little jostling to throw it out of whack forever.”
Her heart pounded harder and harder. There was something wrong, terribly wrong with her. Breathe deeply, breathe slowly, she told herself. With her fingers she wiped clear a patch of windshield and saw three figures beginning to make their way across the east bridge. One, ahead of the rest, walked swiftly backward. From this distance it was impossible to tell if they were male or female, young or old. The lights of the city were carried in pinpoints on the river, below them, and in big yellow smudges in the clouds above. She felt it rise soothingly inside her, that ache to preserve the scene, to forbid it to shed its frail layers—the walkers would reach the other side, the sky would whiten, the river would stir—and vanish in the churn of memory.
“ … and you were so wonderful, just pulling up the covers and telling him to quiet down. I wouldn’t have lasted in there without you. I felt like throwing up. There’s something about hospitals, those long corridors and knowing that behind each door is another person’s tragedy. …”
And just then, as if she had willed it, a clock across the river rang out, one thin solitary stroke.
“How do you think, if you were a painter, you would paint a clock striking the hour into a picture?”
“What?”
Tomorrow she would search the closets for her paints. The easel was in the laundry room behind the ironing board. She would set it up right out here, on the river. She would remember these three figures. They were already stepping off the bridge now, the backward one facing forward again, hailing a cab with a gray sleeve. Nothing about them would be lost.
Alexandre held her tighter. In a little boy’s voice, he said, “I don’t think you’re listening to me.” Of course, he didn’t believe it.
When he moved his hand toward the inside of her thigh, she resisted the instinct to clamp a hand on him as she had countless times in this car before, saying not yet. Not yet was gone forever.
And this time her mind would be pure. She would keep her eyes open and feel his lips, his body beneath hers. The first time was over, and now, the seal broken, she could return to herself, she thought, but her hands traveled down his spine to a soft lump and her eyes closed to find Isabelle patiently waiting.
III
Unfinished, Unsent
Oct. 3
Dear Sarah,
Please don’t be angry. I know how worried you must’ve been but I needed this time. I’m better now. I’ve found a job on a houseboat taking care of three children.
How is everything there?
Oct. 12
Dear Sarah,
How are you? How are all of you? Sometimes it’s so hard just to ask this.
Oct. 22
Dear Sar,
So much tugs at me sometimes. I want so much. I guess I always did. We all went to a concert last night. Just three instruments, piano, violin, and flute. What is it about music? In the car driving home so much seemed possible. I am still young. Sometimes I forget that completely.
Oct. 28
Dear S,
I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to write. I’ve started a few letters but it’s just hard to explain
Nov. 1
I remember so much. I am remembering all the time. Today I thought of the first time I realized you were not me. I was five and you were setting that red alarm clock and I watched you and I knew that you weren’t having the same thoughts. That you wouldn’t dream the same thing that night. And that we would die at different times. And that you might die first. It was the first time I ever felt alone. I feel that all the time now.
Nov. 3
I have insomnia these days. It’s 3 a.m. and I’m in the kitchen and I feel like writing you the longest letter imaginable. I feel like writing you every little detail about my life here. Marc (the father in this family I live with) has insomnia too. I can hear him in his study. Every now and then his seat squeaks. It’s not so bad having insomnia when someone else in the house has it too. We’ve only run into each other once. (I try to stay in my room but sometimes like tonight I have to move around.) We ate cookies and he told me his best way of falling asleep is to imagine untying this barge we live on and drifting downriver. I’ve tried it, but it doesn’t work for me
It feels good to be sitting here writing you a letter, though I’ll probably never send it. I’ve begun a lot of letters to you. There is this pressure I feel to account for things. I always think each time I’ll circle around to the perfect explanation, but I never do. It was easy to describe everything to you before. I felt so good. I had a purpose. I felt important. I felt alive. The minute he was born, everything just flew out of my hands. I can’t really describe it better than this. It’s as if before I was the center of everything because he was inside me, and then suddenly I was just this sloughed-off thing. There was so much anger in me. I don’t really expect
Nov. ?
One day is identical to the next, so it is impossible for me to know which one this is. I wake up. I make breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Mondays I go grocery shopping. I have no idea why I came here or what is to become of me
Nov. 17
My bathroom is on the Seine side and the tub is raised and when you sit in it
you are level with the windows and the water. The light at dawn is miraculous. It makes you hope for things and believe you will get them
Nov. 22
Today I think is Thanksgiving. Is it the third Thursday in November or the last? I can’t even remember. But today feels like Thanksgiving so I’ll pretend it is, which means it’s been exactly a year since the day everything was decided.
Nov. 29
You always wanted to know how it felt to be pregnant and I tried to answer you, though now that it’s over I think I can describe it even better. It was like wanting and having all at the same time. It was like being perfectly full. And afterward you are emptier than you can ever imagine.
Dec. 15
It is late but I am so awake I know I won’t fall asleep tonight. Finally I feel I am coming out of something and it feels good. Today was so glorious I probably shouldn’t write a word. But if I describe it to no one, will it have existed? And who else to tell if not you? You are the only person I ever think of writing to. I try to write you letters, but I never manage to finish them. Maybe I’ll throw them all in a big envelope and mail them to you tomorrow.
Saturday is Lola’s thirteenth birthday, so at breakfast her mother asked if I would go with Marc to pick out a few things for her. We met at a metro stop at the top of the street at five-thirty, and my French just fell into place. It’s strange how that happens, how one minute you can’t put one sentence together and the next you speak in full paragraphs. More than anything it depends on who you’re talking to. With Nicole my French is disgusting. Even when I’m not speaking to her directly, if she’s just in the room, it’s terrible. But with Lola or Marc it just flows. All right, maybe not flows but trickles steadily. It’s strange. I’m a different person, or more of a person, with them. I just step into myself.