The Pleasing Hour

by Lily King

  Out in the courtyard the rain had stopped but the sky was still low and fragile, as if we had stepped inside the shell of an egg. The sixty seconds of my every minute were spent in wait, in patient suspension until Marc’s attention fell briefly back on me. When it did, the change in me was instant and extraordinary. I hoped it was only noticeable from the inside, but Odile caught it and called me over to the brightly tiled wall for a picture because, she said, I looked so pretty.

  “You really do, Rosie,” she said, not bothering to hide her surprise. She passed the camera to Guillaume so she could go stand next to me. We put our arms loosely around each other. Beside me and without heels, Odile was shorter than I’d thought. We were probably close to the same height. Guillaume wanted to take another, so we leaned in closer. After all these months, I suspected Odile now wanted to be friends. Part of me recoiled. She had been so distant and dismissive up till now. But at the other end of the reflecting pool, Marc looked up at the future photo, and reflexively, as if I thought he could feel it somehow, I held Odile tighter. Odile squeezed back.

  Nicole was already on the path to the next building. A redheaded teenager leaned in toward her, as if they were both standing still, to ask for a light. She shook her head and the boy dropped back reluctantly.

  Lola squatted at the pool’s edge to look down at her green reflection, showing her underpants to everyone on the other side.

  Guillaume accidentally took a picture of his left sneaker and Odile snatched the camera away from him, accidentally snapping a shot of a kneecap of a man from Wisconsin.

  Above us all, the sky grew stronger.

  Inside the Winter Palace it was even more congested, and we shuffled through, pressed together, reaching out occasionally to the painted walls and carvings, brushing fingers as our hands fell back at our sides. Light began to pour in like thick cream through high windows and low latticed archways. One ceiling held the pocked texture of a honeycomb. Carvings curled and roiled endlessly from room to room. In one, an Australian guide spoke loudly about blood and beheadings. In another, cursive phrases from the Koran swam like fish across a wall. Some of the lettering looked like L’s and Lola traced them, saying they were trying to spell her name. I barely heard her, so great was my effort to maintain a reasonable distance of a few inches but no more from Marc’s side. I was certain he was aware of my struggle, perhaps even bemused by it, steering me this way and that with an arm that never actually touched.

  As we were disgorged onto the Patio de los Leones, the sun pressed down on our necks and backs like a great hand. All around the fountain people were shedding layers. It seemed as if everyone peeling off clothes must have been thinking in some vague way about sex. Everyone except Nicole. It was impossible to think of Nicole caving in to an impulse. Even an unanticipated smile seemed to frustrate her.

  We walked into a large round room where people stood with their ears pressed to the wall. Some were speaking, though their voices were inaudible.

  “What are they doing?” Guillaume asked.

  “Listening for the sea,” Marc said.

  “Really?” Lola went to an empty spot at the wall. Guillaume and Odile went to another. They listened, then looked above them in bewilderment.

  Marc laughed and told Nicole to go to a certain place along the wall. He walked to a spot directly opposite her and they stood speaking to each other back to back, forty feet apart, Nicole’s head cocked like a teenage girl on the phone and Marc with both arms braced against the wall, as if it were about to cave in. While their children moved from one spot to another and the other tourists we’d been traveling through the Alhambra with filed in and filed out, Marc and Nicole remained in place, carrying out the longest public conversation they’d had since we’d left Paris, observed only by me, their fille, who took anxious note of such things.

  Unforgiven

  SOMETIMES STILL I WAKE UP IN THE DARK ROCKING, AND IF THERE’S A MOON UP IT WILL be swimming, swaying like the old trawler that anchored on the opposite bank in winter. I’ll watch its light for as long as I can bear remembering, until I know that it’s me rocking and all I have to do is stop.

  Without a moon through the window, everything is sucked up and stolen, and even the small bellies of stone against my palm along the hallway are pure hallucination. Everything is gone in the hot dark of the house, until I reach Lucie’s door. Then I sink to the cool slate floor and wait to hear her sleeping. The sound is less a snore than a whimper, less adult than small child. It can be almost an hour before she comes out with one, and always only one, as if she once shared a bed with a sister who slept lightly and elbowed her hard at the first sound. There is always only one because even now, over seventy years later and the sister maybe dead, maybe lost to her in some other awful way, she still feels the swift nudge at her side. I hope she had a sister and that they shared a room and a bed, and that sometimes years and years ago she’d wake up with her sister’s toes squeezed tight around her own. But I also hope she’s forgotten all that, that her toes never feel too loose or too cold in the mornings.

  Lucie is sick. There is pain but she won’t complain. She takes meals in bed now: soup dribbles on her nightgown; peas fall in the folds of the sheet. I eat beside her, neatly, on a fold-out table that lists hard to the left. After lunch I read to her. After dinner I wash her with a cool cloth. Four times a day I carry a pan to the toilet. Once there was blood.

  Last week I overheard her telling Henri to find someone in town to take care of her. “This is no place for a child,” she whispered.

  On his way out, I stopped him and begged to stay.

  “I’ll be back in two days,” he said, and when he returned he was alone.

  Each night is hot and long. Sleep comes close to dawn, for an hour or two, never more, and only when I can prevent my mind from traveling too far. Behind me, there are only mistakes; ahead, there is nothing at all. Instead, I think again of Marie-Jo, whom we saw in town the last time Lucie was well enough to walk there with me.

  She was on the terrace of the Cafe Plaire, dragging a canvas bag between the plastic chairs toward the back entrance.

  “That’s one of Nicole’s sisters,” Lucie told me, and we stopped to watch. She wore an unbelted cotton dress the mottled color of a coffee stain. Her hair was iron gray beneath the corner of a scarf. When she saw Lucie, she dropped the bag, wiped her brow with her hand and her hand on her dress, and wound her way back through the chairs out onto the sidewalk. She placed her cheek gingerly against the old face, as if it might bruise.

  “You’re so thin,” Marie-Jo said, though it was clear she meant old. I felt responsible somehow for this decline. But Marie-Jo looked aged, too. It was hard to believe that she was born only eight years before Nicole. If there had once been a resemblance, nothing remained of it. Marie-Jo’s nose had swelled, her chin had doubled and grown fuzzy, her ankles spilled over the sides of dusty white loafers.

  “What are you doing with that bag?” Lucie asked.

  She told us. She spoke with a thick accent in sentences strewn with Provençal words, but I understood that she and Paco had split up and she was moving into a room above the café. She explained at length what had led to the decision (something about his mother and a plum tree), how their grown children, four of them, had taken it (badly, dividing into sides), how perhaps it was only temporary (his mother, after all, would not live forever). She held on to Lucie’s arm the whole time she spoke, sometimes squeezing, sometimes shaking her so hard I had to steady her from the other side. Marie-Jo’s other arm was even wilder. She flung it up to the sky, dashed it to the ground. She wiped away tears and covered up loud laughs at herself. When she sneezed, she didn’t pinch her nose, like Nicole. She just bent over and sent a sharp chhh to the pavement.

  Though Marie-Jo left no room for introductions, she included me as if my round American face were perfectly familiar to her. I stood there mute but amused, enjoying her clamorous gesticulations. Marie-Jo was alive. She was part of the
world, with her accent and honesty and brushed-away tears.

  It was only as we were saying good-bye that Lucie managed to insert how I had come here. Marie-Jo nodded as if somehow she’d already known, as if she saw in my face, as I could not see in hers, some trace of Nicole.

  And then she was gone, across the terrace, hoisting the bag and disappearing through the doorway in back.

  “She didn’t want to know about Nicole?”

  “No. Nicole has never been forgiven.”

  For five years after she left, Nicole came back summer and Christmas to Plaire. She sat in her sisters’ kitchens and endured their criticism of her cropped hair, her polished fingers, the strange fabrics of her dresses. Far more painful than being different and apart was being alone in the conviction that her mother was still alive. Her sisters spoke of Marcelle as they spoke of long-dead aunts and pets. They brought up her name carelessly, without emotion, often in mild insult to each other. “That was just like Maman,” one would say. Or, “Maman would have thought so.” When Nicole was there, they pointed to her and told their families, “Can you imagine? This is how Maman wanted us all to turn out.”

  They believed Nicole had gone to Paris for a fairy tale, to live like a princess with rich Aunt Anne. She never told them she’d gone in search of their mother. Lucie Quenelle was the only person who knew that within a year Nicole had been to every hotel and pension in the city with the only photograph of her mother she possessed. She visited parks and museums. She rode buses and trains to all the outskirts. A long braid, a sky blue cardigan, a desultory step would send her heart racing, but these things in the end were never attached to Marcelle.

  In the meantime, between searches, she fell in love. He was the brother of her school friend, Pauline, who often invited her to their country house on weekends. If they were to go on Friday, by the Wednesday before, Nicole had stopped eating, her stomach cramping tighter and tighter as the minutes advanced. At night her quick pulse made the sheet tremble against her skin, and she slept badly. Delivered on Friday evening into his presence, her body relaxed and Pauline’s parents joked about the enormous appetite of such a small girl. They had taken to calling her Kitty, for she was often found curled up on a window seat fast asleep in the middle of the day. Her place at the dinner table was beside his, and she bit her lip to keep from laughing too hard at the little things Stéphane said. Everything about him that irritated Pauline and her parents was sacred to her: the way he crashed up and down the stairs three at time or swung the unwilling dachshund upside down. Even the way his voice would rise to a piercing squeak when he was losing an argument with his father was endearing to her. His face, apparently ordinary to everyone else, was the perfect orb around which, Friday to Sunday, the whole of her attention surreptitiously circled. He was two years and two months older, and it took him nearly twice that amount of time before he came to regard her as anyone but Kitty, his little sister’s feline shadow. Nicole tried to take an interest in other boys, but the only ones she noticed were those in whom she recognized the slightest aspect of Stéphane. There was one with the same sort of wave to his hair, another with a similar gait. There were some whose resemblance to Stéphane was less easily identifiable and she would have to dance with them all evening in order to narrow in on it. And then there was someone named Marc, who, from the back, was wholly indistinguishable from Stéphane but head on was an assault to his perfection. More than once she had approached this Marc from behind, tugged at his jacket, and, as he turned around, felt violated by the contrast. Whenever this happened, Marc smiled right through Nicole’s disappointment, as if he had somehow done it all on purpose.

  It was a humid evening in March when Stéphane finally kissed her. She had gone with him and Pauline to a matinée, and when they came out of the theater, a brief rain had wet the streets. The air was warm, and up from the pavement came the sweet coppery memory of a summer shower. Nicole barely spoke, stirred by thoughts of Plaire and the lingering anticipation she often felt after a film. Pauline, anxious to prepare herself for a date that evening, moved ahead of them on the sidewalk. When exactly Stéphane took her hand, Nicole was never certain. It was a moment she had imagined so often that she had trouble believing she was not inventing it again. Then he stopped, waited for Pauline to turn a corner, and kissed her.

  She had loved him for so long. She tried to keep it in, let it trickle out slowly, at the same slow rate his feelings would seep out for her. But it was like trying to contain a hurricane inside her. And he was not prepared. She knew his past better than he knew it himself. She could remember four Novembers ago, the play he went to, the girl he took, and the shoes she wore. She called him by his stupid family nicknames. She knew the foods he would not swallow. She knew a child had fallen and died right beside him in the park when he was four. There was nothing for him to reveal—except love, for which she waited patiently and in vain. When he took a job in London the following year, there was no mention of her coming, not even to visit.

  The fall that Stéphane left, when Nicole was twenty-one, they drained the quarry in Plaire. Lucie wrote to say that remains had been found. There was to be a private family burial. The Church had refused to recognize it. The letter gave the date and the time. Enclosed was a train ticket to Plaire. Nicole didn’t use it. She did not go to the burial and she never wrote again. The following summer, the town clerk leaked the news that Nicole Guerrin had sent for a copy of her birth certificate: she was to marry a man named Marc Tivot on the first of August.

  IV

  Les Deux Femmes Morbides

  FORMENTOR, ON THE ISLAND OF MALLORCA, WAS MARC’S BEST-KEPT SECRET. HE had not prepared any of us for its narrow peninsula road, its terrifying drops, its stark sand below, or the color of its sea, which was a blue unlike any other. It was not an Atlantic navy or a Pacific cobalt or a Florida turquoise; it was not even the color of the Mediterranean I’d seen from the plane that brought us here. It was a pure, perfect blue that seemed lit from above and below, as if beneath the basin in which the water rocked stretched a long luminescence, a cool, diffused sheet of light like the moon’s, which rose toward sharp spears of sun. Against this haunting luster, the bright afternoon sky was unremarkable. We all stared in silence out the windows of the hotel minibus at the spectacle. Though I was seated far from him in the rear beside their bags, I could feel Marc’s relief. His mouth would be taut with suppression of it. There would be a hard knot in his throat. His greatest pleasure was to please, and this sight was a small miracle.

  Once we had arrived at this beach resort, there were no excursions: no maps, no bridges, no cathedrals or palaces. The trip I had grown used to had come to an end, and in its place was a new trip, to which everyone else seemed to adjust immediately. Each day they rose with renewed vigor to spend the day flat out on a towel. Their bodies—all except Marc’s—turned instantly brown, Nicole’s by far the darkest and most even, as if she hadn’t tanned but simply washed off a chalky layer of Paris that had clung to her skin all winter. She was the first one in the water in the morning and the last out in the evening. She took quick, efficient dips, dunking her body all at once and reemerging a few seconds later in a different spot. Her hair that week was always wet and shimmering. Each time she came back to her towel she reached into her bag for her comb, cut a perfect part, made three strokes around her head, and lay back down. She wore the same black bikini bottom I’d met her in. Odile also bared her breasts, but Lola, who had surveyed the beach the first day and found this was not obligatory, did not. Nor did I. I rarely lay on my towel at all, preferring to dig in the sand with Lola and Guillaume or chaperone their trips to the snack bar, where we ate olives stuffed with anchovies and listened to a radio station that played American music indiscriminately while waiting for our chips and frozen lemonades.

  On the third day, Marc followed me and Lola up there, and while the bartender went up to the main building for more ice and Lola was in the bathroom at the back and the others were 127 steps
below (Guillaume counted every time), he stood close, then closer. It was barely ten o’clock in the morning; the stools at the bar were empty and the plastic chairs were still stacked against the far wall. From the transistor radio on top of the refrigerator crackled the song “Slow Boat to China,” and as I was wondering whether to translate it for him, and thinking how smooth the voices were back then and how gingerly expressed the sentiments, and remembering a photograph in my sister’s house of our parents dancing in Louisiana on the night they met, Marc kissed me. I had always imagined our first kiss would be unwilling, a slow struggle as if against gravity. Or tentative. Or apologetic. But this kiss was hard like a punch, determined, as if it had been a dare. He tasted of anchovies and sunblock. With his mouth finally pressed against mine, the ache for him was gone but nothing filled its absence except a dread of its return. I clung on until we heard a flush, leaving just the right amount of distance for Lola to jump in and wrap an arm around each of our waists. I wondered how she was able to walk right into the space between us, sensing nothing, just as later, at lunch, when I got up to follow the children back down to the water, Nicole told me to stay. We could watch them from here, she said, touching my arm and urging me back into my seat beside Marc. I did stay, and Marc asked me to order another jarro de rosado, and we all three clinked our glasses and polished it off as if there were something to celebrate.