The Pleasing Hour

by Lily King

  “She couldn’t have children?” Nicole asked, stalling, but her mother rushed on.

  “There is so much for you there. Do you remember telling me once that you wanted to be a judge? You were only five or six. It was during the Bruno trial in Roussillon. You must have seen a picture in the paper.” She had never seen her mother so agitated. Her eyes leapt from one place to another as she rocked toward and away from Nicole on the seat, her hands curled tight around the envelope as if it had become a rope. “And the dances and the dinners. And the Seine, Nicole.”

  Nicole could find nothing in her words to imagine. She couldn’t remember seeing a picture of a judge. Was it a photograph or a drawing? Dinners and dances and the Seine? She couldn’t see any of it. It meant nothing to her.

  “We can’t go without Papa,” was all she could think to say, though she was also curious to know if she would have to wear a uniform to school and if she would have to take a train to get there. She loved taking trains.

  “He would visit us. And we would come back to see him and the girls. Aunt Anne is very well connected. And she wants us there, Nicole. She has said as much right here.” She clutched the rolled letter even tighter. “She married into a good family. She’s able to give you opportunities. Opportunities to be someone, to be independent, to be a success. I think she’s willing to do that for you.”

  What opportunities? Had her mother forgotten she was only eight and a girl? Judges weren’t girls.

  “There is life there. This”—she turned toward the window in disgust—“is not life. It is not the life I vowed to give you when you were born. You’re not like the others. You know that.”

  Nicole didn’t follow her mother’s gaze outside but looked to the room instead, to the corner wall where Monique had taught her to stand on her head, to the rug where Marie-Jo had showed them all a naughty Brazilian dance their father later punished them for, to the closet where Juliette had sought refuge after her best friend Yvonne was struck and killed by lightning. This was life. It was all of their lives. It was all she knew. And her sisters, scattered now all over the valley, lived still in this room.

  Her mother tried again to describe more vividly the flavors of Paris, the possibilities, all the worlds in that one city. She spoke of the variety of nationalities, of women as educated as men, of a certain painting she knew to be on the second floor of the Louvre. As she spoke, she became as flushed and alive as Marie-Jo when she whispered to Nicole in the mornings of her nights with Paco Paniagua, and as devout as the disk of Frederí Lafond’s face tilted up to the long dark window. But her words of what could be fell somewhere between them, unheard by Nicole, who had filled her eyes and ears with what had been.

  Even before Marcelle had ceased to speak, the bloom had faded from her face, replaced once again by the translucent blue pallor. She continued to rub first one rim of her eye, then the other, with an unfiled nail, and with each stroke Nicole feared she would draw blood. When she was finished, she said, “Tell me you’ll come, Nicole. Say yes to me.”

  Downstairs she heard her father cough. He always coughed on the first puff of his pipe as he lit it. Caught a bit of flame in the throat, he’d say, or Lungs still pink as a baby’s.

  Her mother had drawn her knees to her chin, her arms tightly wrapped about her folded legs, the curled letter dangling between two fingers off to one side. She had become very small.

  It must have been part of a fairy tale she heard when she was very young, though she was never able to find it in any storybook.

  A boy is walking and walking, sometimes through the woods, sometimes in the desert, always with a huge heavy stone tied with strong twine to his ankle. He is looking for something: his home, his family, his town; Nicole is never sure. Parallel to his trail is a dark pit that weaves its way alongside him, the side on which the stone is tied. Sometimes his path narrows and the pit sidles up so close he must be very careful not to step in such a way that the stone slips over the edge, for he knows if the stone goes he will follow. Sometimes Nicole is the boy; sometimes she is just watching. Sometimes, lately, the boy is Frederí Lafond. The dreams in which the stone never falls have become just as terrifying to her as the ones when the boy is flung over the side and she wakes up.

  She no longer went to her mother’s small bed when she had the nightmares.

  “Did you hear me last night, Maman?” she would ask the following morning. “I had one of those dreams. I called for you.”

  “Did you? I’m sorry,” her mother would answer, smoothing Nicole’s hair out of her eyes, sometimes even giving her a brief hug. Marcelle had become more and more affectionate since their talk in the wide room, but behind each touch was the sense that she was still waiting for an answer, and a tension had grown that could only be broken by Nicole’s acquiescence. It became more comfortable to spend time with her father, whose eyes asked so much less of her.

  Spring came late that year, delayed by rains and a scissorlike mistral from the northwest. The week after Nicole’s ninth birthday was the first patch of steadily warm weather they’d had. On her way home from school that Friday, she noticed that the cherries were still small and black when usually by now they would have been picked and sold. There was a swift warm wind that stroked her bare arms and prodded fat clouds across the blue sky.

  She had just checked out a biography of Danton from the library, which she was eager to take to her room and begin. If her mother was not in the kitchen she did not like to be sought out, Nicole knew, so she made her snack quietly and went up to her window seat. When the blue turned violet and the clouds massed in orange embers in the hollows of the hills, she got up to put on a light, trying not to feel uneasy about the onslaught of darkness and the emptiness of the house. Soon, her father returned and she heard him pause in the dark below before calling for her.

  It was not particularly strange to them that her mother was not there, that dinner had not been started, and that there was no note or clue to her whereabouts. All those things had happened before.

  But Marcelle never returned.

  Their neighbor, Lucie Quenelle, came over each afternoon of the week that followed. She made bread and casseroles and stroked Nicole’s hair until she fell asleep. But late in the night, after Lucie had gone home, Nicole could hear her father moving through the house, and when she could no longer hear him, she rose and watched him from the window as he walked out to the barns, to the creamery, and then across the fields. What she could not see was the vision before him of his wife, of her black shoes or her braided hair, so vivid sometimes he nearly tripped over them. She could not see how he trembled, pushed on through the dark only by the thought of his youngest daughter finding the body herself. And she could not know that he went as far as the quarry one night, or that he found the moon there, nestled in the black water like an eye rolled back.

  But he could not look to the edges. Surely someone would have found her by now, he thought, and quickly turned away.

  It was a ribbon that was found there. The magistrate brought it the next morning. Octave held it with two hands and nodded.

  Nicole slipped past him in the doorway to get a better look.

  “No, Papa. Maman didn’t have any black ribbons.” She looked carefully. She saw the crease in the middle and the smaller ones closer to the ends where the bow for her plait had been knotted. Yes, it had the length and the slanted ends of a ribbon of her mother’s, but she had no black ribbons. Nicole was sure of that. Besides, her mother hadn’t gone swimming. She’d gone to Paris. She’d told her father a thousand times. She would have taken all her ribbons.

  Octave could not speak. He handed the ribbon to his child. She was shocked by its weight, how cool it felt in her hands. It was Marcelle’s green ribbon, blackened by water.

  They attempted to drag the quarry, but it was by no means a flat bottom. Crags and deep crevices, they explained indelicately, in front of the child. No body was ever found.

  After her mother disappeared (she
never stopped believing in the possibility of disappearance), Nicole never had the dream about the boy and the stone again. Or if she did, she did not remember it. Or perhaps it simply did not scare her. For what could possibly have terrified her more than the steady waking lie of her mother, not gone to Paris but lying beneath twenty meters of black water?

  Times of Day

  A FOG HAD LAIN PRONE ALONG THE RIVER FOR THE MONTH OF FEBRUARY. MIDDAY it might separate briefly to allow a bright sheet of light to glint across the water, but mostly it stayed whole and motionless, receiving the incessant spit of rain silently on its back. After weeks of this, I began to feel permanently waterlogged and was often surprised to look at my fingertips and find them unwrinkled or to touch my hair and find it dry. My limbs were heavy, my skin raw, and my toes, no matter the pairs of socks, numb from the soggy chill.

  “¿Tiene usted naranjas?”

  “¿Tiene usted naranjas?” I repeated, stumbling a bit on the last word. I rewound and mimicked again.

  Marc couldn’t keep a secret. The trip was supposed to have been a surprise, but since the beginning of January he had been saying things like “Lola’s eyes” (which were brown) “are the color of an Andalusian sky today,” or quizzing Guillaume on his knowledge of the Moors, or asking Odile how many flamenco dresses she thought she had. At the end of a Sunday dinner two weeks ago he said, “So where do you think we’ll be on Easter?” He tried then to assume a casual pose: he leaned way back in his chair, head cradled in laced fingers, as if he might have time for a nap. Even if this were a customary position, the curl of the smile he was fighting and the jiggle of his knee against the underside of the table would have given him away. “In Spain.” The answer had slid easily out of every one of our mouths.

  * * *

  “Bueno. Déme por favor cuatro naranjas.”

  “Bueno. Déme por favor cuatro naranjas.” My r’s were not good. I’d just mastered the French r, forcing it halfway down my throat, and now I had to bring it all the way up to the roof of my mouth. I stopped the tape and practiced: “Rico, rojo, rosa. Rico, rojo, rosa.” Awful. An American speaking Spanish with a French accent. But the anticipation of a trip to Spain prodded me through each dank day, one after the other.

  In the morning I still studied French, but during the afternoon in the kitchen, instead of my radio mysteries, I listened to the tapes Nicole had brought home and after two days abandoned. If she had finished all her homework, Lola would join me later as I did the dishes. She could trill rico, rojo, rosa effortlessly.

  The tape fell silent; then a voice in French said to turn over for more Español Ahora.

  “¡Español ahora!” I shouted with equal verve to the empty house.

  I flipped the tape and returned to the cutting board.

  “Y una cosa más. ¿Tiene usted manzanas?”

  “Manzanas?” I glared at the machine but it carried on. Pommes, it said, in the booklet I kept on the counter.

  I rewound a bit. “Bueno. Pues, déme cinco por favor.”

  “Bueno. Pues, déme cinco por favor.”

  There was a freedom in Spanish, or at least I felt free after the constraints of French. It was like unbuckling your belt after an enormous meal. Every word was pronounced the way it was spelled and each vowel had only one sound. I could speak what little the tapes had already taught me loudly and, except for the r, with a confidence that surprised me.

  Everyone was out that afternoon: Odile at the library, Guillaume at fencing, Lola at Francine’s house, Marc still at the hospital, and Nicole wherever she went during the day. She had appointments, committees, luncheons, meetings, but with whom or for what purpose I never knew. There was a detachment and a fatigue that pervaded Nicole’s life as well as mine, which allowed us both to move in and out of the same spaces all week long without any sense of what the other was doing with her free hours.

  “¿Algo más?”

  “No, gracias.”

  I listened to several more scenes, one in a clothes shop, another in a line for a movie, while skinning chicken and chopping vegetables.

  Across the water, streetlamps blinked on, then hung unsuspended and haloed pink in the fog. Grainy daylight drained out slowly through the long kitchen window. This was the start of the devastating time of day, when, if you turned on the overhead, the texture of the walls and the edges of objects became too vivid and you found yourself straining to remember one thing that had ever brought you any joy, but if you didn’t and just let the window continue to blacken, sick and slow, it felt like being lowered into a grave. It was the moment when all pleasure of solitude vanished and you needed a body beside yours—or at least a voice calling your name.

  “Es tres cientos veinte.”

  The recorded voices lost their echo. All interest in Spanish, in anything, was beginning to dwindle.

  The first footsteps were the heaviest, and at the sound I realized I had been hoping for them more than any others.

  “Aquí tiene.”

  “Aquí tiene,” I repeated, not knowing anymore what I was saying, hearing the footfall, the briefcase dropped, the coat removed.

  “Hasta mañana, Señor Perez.”

  “Hasta mañana, Señor Perez.” My voice had lost its verve. The door cracked on its hinges.

  “Hasta mañana,” Marc said behind me.

  He’d stopped in the doorway. Languages swam in my head. The cassette went on loudly to a scene in a crowed restaurant and I moved slightly to shut it off, then caught myself for fear of revealing my wish that he remain. Above the noise he asked how the Spanish was going, and though I meant to say Ça va, I said Está bien instead. Then he came all the way in the room and shut off the machine.

  I thought of asking about the rain, which I could now hear slapping the river, but rejected that idea and struggled to think of something more engaging.

  As if I’d said something, he raised his hand and leaned his head into it boyishly, wet curls flattening, then springing back. He was a man without vanity, a man who had never been given any indication by a woman that he was attractive.

  “It’s raining again?”

  “In spears,” he said.

  Without Lola it always took us a few minutes to fall into sync. I looked back down at my work, still struggling for words. In my nervousness I’d chopped too many carrots. They covered the cutting board and overflowed onto the counter. There were enough carrot rounds to tile the kitchen walls.

  “Alors,” he said, peering over my shoulder. “Des carottes.”

  Who can explain why a few words in a particular tone can clear acres of sudden unfamiliarity? Could anyone else hear those words exactly as I did? Would that person look up and grin and find him grinning back, full of the sweet miraculous relief of having been perfectly received? He was not just mocking the ridiculous proportion of those carrots to the other ingredients on the counter. He was saying, If it’s not carrots it’s something else; he was saying, How futile life is, the slicing of carrots, the eating of meals; he was saying, How wonderful life is, to come home to the security of carrots in the kitchen; he was saying, Another day come to its devastating close. He was saying all this and I heard him because he was like me, entirely ambivalent about life. It was almost a question: Should I be full of joy or despair, Rosie? Joy, my face always replied to him, not because I felt sure that was the answer, but because I’d begun to want to make it his.

  And so the idea of Spain lured me on through February and into March. The night before we were to leave, I slept deeply. I’d had a warm, pleasant dream, which I didn’t remember until I’d pulled my suitcase out of the closet and begun packing. I hadn’t been pregnant in the dream. A hand had slid up under my shirt and I’d felt both the heat of the fingers and the leaness of my own belly. That was all I could remember. I sat back down on my bed and felt again the warm touch. I hadn’t been pregnant in the dream, and at first the relief of that absorbed any concern I might have had that the hand was Marc’s.

  I practiced
my Spanish on the clothes: un vestido azul, una camisa larga, dos zapatos negros. Small waves of renewed anticipation rose and fell. The hand on my stomach brought strange, guiltless comfort. It was a harmless dream. With Marc there was no danger, no chance of a moist sock on my ankle at dinner. He was good and kind and could not keep the smallest secret. It was a safe crush. He was not a man who could have an affair.

  My fingers, rapidly stuffing underwear into the side pockets of my suitcase, grazed against the comb. It’s okay, I told myself, and pulled it out. It was even smaller and flimsier than I remembered, the blue plastic so thin at the edges it was translucent. The red hairs were still wrapped in the teeth.

  Nicole gave me no warning, no sound in the hallway. She was simply there, leaning in through the door she had opened with no knock. “You haven’t packed!” These were her favorite moments, when she found exactly what she was looking for, when someone did let her down precisely as she suspected they would. In this strong soprano voice, perfect in its fluidity even at 6 A.M., there was a note of joy.

  “Of course I have,” I said, zipping up the half-empty suitcase and pulling it off the bed and onto the floor. “I’ll bring it out right now.”

  Nicole issued a punishing très bien and followed me down the hall lit only by the living room lights at the far end. All the children’s doors were shut and the cracks between door and frame dark. She walked behind me impatiently; I could hear the air passing through her nose. I had a strange suspicion she was fantasizing about clubbing me to death; perhaps she’d prefer something cleaner, something that wouldn’t stain the carpets: strangulation, maybe. When we emerged from the narrow passage she passed me immediately, dismissively, rushing toward her bedroom like a hurried commuter at a connecting metro stop. I almost laughed out loud at her sense of urgency.

  I deposited my suitcase with the rest. Nicole and the children had matching suitcases of dark green leather and brass bolts, though Lola’s and Guillaume’s were slightly shorter. Beside these, Marc’s tattered carrying case looked terrible, with its makeshift wire fastener to compensate for broken buckles and strips of tape so old even they were cracking apart. It was so purely like him to have saved this case from childhood, from some first trip somewhere. Looking at this splintering contraption and all the efforts to preserve it, I could feel what it meant to him. I could feel his love of travel and the deep disappointment that somehow those dreams had been thwarted. I could feel his hands running over the surface of the suitcase as he pulled it out, all the urges and resentments and pressed-down yearnings rising up again. No doubt Nicole had pleaded with him to replace such an eyesore. I admired him for this small resistance.