by Lily King
Nobody else seemed to notice that the world had begun spinning in the opposite direction, or that the air was thinner this way around, or that the sun felt like ice and the long moon below the sea had been extinguished. No one noticed any of these changes, not even Marc, who was exactly the same, offering Nicole his wary, eager-to-please face, ignored pats across the table, and the same sulks and rebounds within their briefest exchange.
This became routine: the three of us remaining, long after our lunch plates had been cleared, beneath the thatched canopy of this restaurant on the beach where waiters in shiny black shoes slogged through the white sand from table to table. What do they make of us? I wondered one afternoon when the rosado had taken a particular hold, convincing me that our table with the pale pink cloth and blue-lipped tumblers must be the center of their world. I was certain they knew I was not French, that I was the jeune fille, that yesterday when Nicole had gone up to their room for a dry towel Marc had followed me into the ladies’ room, lifted my breasts out of my bathing suit, and sucked one, then the other, circling the nipples so gently with his tongue it brought tears to my eyes. But it had been his solemn face so close that had moved me, for still his touch brought only numbness. It wasn’t until I was alone again in the dank bathroom that my whole body began to throb again in want of him. Surely our waiters knew all this, even if his wife did not.
Nicole became more beautiful. I couldn’t explain this, but the more Marc and I began to touch, the more beautiful Nicole became. It was not simply the sun, though her skin was now the polished color of expensive wood and her teeth were whiter and her eyes greener against it. It was just as much the languor of movement, the way she would doze off on her towel with both arms above her head or rub her full belly after dinner. The mask of strained pleasure had dissolved, and beneath it lay a face that at certain moments seemed nearly content.
“Days pass deliciously slowly here, don’t they?” Nicole said, after lunch on our fourth day at the beach.
I agreed, lying, for I was aware only of their flight. Three full days left.
“Why do you think,” Nicole said, “life passes so very slowly when you are a child and so quickly when you are grown?”
“Nicole,” Marc whined.
“I’m not trying to be morbid. I’m just wondering.”
“I think,” I began, without the slightest idea of what I’d say but wanting to balance Marc’s irritation with interest, “I think it’s because”—and I saw in my half-drunk, sun-sogged mind a small child surrounded by tall kitchen furniture and on the wall an enormous clock, its second hand in fluid movement around the two other hands that never changed—“it’s because when you are young, everything is so much bigger. The tables, the chairs, the clocks.”
I looked from one to the other. They were nodding gravely. Yes, that was the truth of it. Then Nicole let out a strange sputter and Marc leaned over the side of his chair as if something on the ground had caught his attention, and Nicole, seeing his body begin to shake, could hold back no longer and hung onto the table for support and soon they were both, then all three of us, shuddering in absolute and silent laughter. Marc, taking in a breath, stretched his arms way out and said, his mouth unable to wrap completely around the words, “Big chairs,” sending us all into more painful paroxysms.
When we had recovered, Nicole said, “No, I’m serious,” her voice still a bit wobbly. Mascara had stained the pink napkin she held. “I want to know why.”
“I was being serious,” I said, feigning outrage as Marc often did.
“I’m not sure it’s true that—” he said.
“You think that since your father put you to work from the moment you could walk, time always …” Nicole made circles in the air to indicate the predictable rest.
Marc looked as if a bird had been snatched from his mouth.
“I disagree,” Nicole went on, “because I bet those days seemed infinitely longer than they would now. I bet your childhood seemed as endless as ours. Endless work, but endless.”
“It did,” Marc said. I worried that he would feel resentful or belittled and that the warm wake of the laughter would be disturbed, but he seemed simply pleased that his difficult childhood was being sufficiently pitied.
“I remember once,” Nicole began, as she pulled an empty chair toward her and draped her legs over its arm, “I remember standing outside a church. I couldn’t have been more than five. It was this time of year, this kind of weather. It was Easter Sunday, and my father and I were waiting for my mother and sisters to come out. They had gotten way behind us somehow, so we went and sat by this tree and I’ll never forget how long it took for that church to empty out. It took so long I forgot what my mother looked like. Really, I forgot her face. I didn’t know who I was waiting for anymore. My father lit his pipe and I waited and waited.” For a moment or two, she was not beautiful. Her features seemed to forget each other, lost in this memory. Then, wholly aware, she recomposed them. “I swear to you the time it took for my mother to emerge from that church was the equivalent of what would be a year to me now.”
“This was in Plaire?” I asked, solely for the sake of pronouncing the town with such a lovely name. I’d heard of it only through the children. Nicole herself had never spoken of the place.
She nodded, unsurprised that people spoke of her in her absence. “But why is it?” she persisted, looking out at the wet sand where Lola and Guillaume were batting a blue ball back and forth. “Is it simply innocence?”
“The beginning of anything is like that,” Marc said. “You—”
I cut him off. “It is an innocence, I think. An innocence of loss.”
“—have a piece of pie in front of you, and the first half lasts forever and the second half is gone before you blink.”
“That’s it, isn’t it, the innocence of loss. My mother died that year, a few months after that Easter. And nothing ever felt slow again.” Nicole bored her eyes into mine, a sustained penetration. I held it, not wanting to appear cowardly or guilty, the two qualities Nicole’s presence enhanced in me. She seemed to be asking something desperately of me, something entirely unrelated to Marc and my involvement with him. At the edges of my vision, in the small spaces where Nicole’s face was not, sand and water flickered red, then yellow, then green. I wished I could unloosen a memory as a return offering. But I could not.
“Les deux femmes morbides,” Marc said, somewhere out of periphery. “It should be the title to something.”
Nicole began to watch me. Blatantly, unapologetically, she kept a vigilant eye on me when I spoke to waiters or elevator operators or the young man at the front desk. She created unnecessary encounters just so she could watch them play out. Sizing me up, straining to understand why her husband would be attracted to such an awkward, average sort of person.
It was puzzling to me too. Beside Nicole on the beach I was splotched and plump. My hair dried badly, in tufts like crabgrass. Guillaume made fun of the matronly cut of my American swimsuit; Odile told me to be more careful when applying lotion and eventually took over the process herself. I was always finding food in my teeth, flakes of snot in my nose, dirt under my fingernails. What drew Marc to me remained a mystery.
Whenever I was left alone with Nicole, I braced myself for accusation. I stopped asking her to repeat herself when I didn’t quite understand, fearful that in the brief tangle of sounds was a sharp insinuation. I imagined again and again packing my bags in shame, boarding a plane alone, answering another ad. The only hope I allowed myself was that somehow Lola would not find out.
Late in the afternoon, Nicole stood in the wet sand and called me out of the water where Marc and I were judging the children’s handstands. In her voice was a terrible reluctance, as if someone else had put her up to the confrontation. I moved through the water slowly. With each step there was less water and more of my own weight to carry. In the chest-high depth beside Marc I’d felt light and delicate. Now, as the waves lapped at my calves, then my
ankles, then only at the soles of my feet, my body felt, more than ever, an enormous unnecessary burden that could be packed off at any moment.
She asked me to walk up to the snack bar with her. I glanced at the long flight of steps and wondered on which one it would be spoken.
We headed across the sand in silence.
On step number fourteen, Nicole said, “What you get, is it a granizado or granizada?”
My lips were trembling. “Granizado.”
“Granizado limón?”
“Yes.”
“Is it quisiera? Quisiera un granizado limón?”
“Yes.”
“Quisiera un granizado limón.”
“Yes.”
Nicole said nothing more.
In the hut, it was dark and cool. Only thin straws of light slipped through and fell on the ground. There was one table free. I imagined how she would sit and place her wrists at its edge, on their sides, hands in loose fists. Her voice would be deliberately soft. But she moved toward the bar. The bartender raised his eyebrows to me with familiarity, finished his sentence to the two men at the far side, and came over. He asked me how the water was today (I’d forgotten to grab a towel and in my trembling dripped slightly still) and if I’d found a boyfriend yet.
“No, todavía no,” I said.
He nodded obsequiously to Nicole, then asked me what we’d like. I turned to Nicole, “You order.”
“I can’t,” she whispered.
“Yes, you can. And I’d like one too.”
“Quisiera dos granizados limón, por favor,” she said, perfectly.
“Vale,” he said, and went to the back freezer where the vats of lemon ice were kept.
“Vale?” Nicole asked, her eyes wide and alert like Lola’s.
“Okay.”
“Ah.”
As we waited, Nicole swung her head all around, popped three almonds in her mouth, made a design in the sand with her toe.
The bartender slid the cups across the counter. It was clear he wanted to say more to her but was at a loss. Nicole took them and said, “Vale, gracias.” She walked past the table and out the door. At the top of the steps, she handed me my twin granizado. “I was so nervous. You made me so nervous.”
“I made you nervous,” I shouted, overwhelmed by relief, by the sudden heat, by the disappearance of the trembling.
“I wasn’t sure if it would be dos granizados limones or just limón.” And, like this, she chattered all the way back down the 127 steps.
That night after dinner, I stopped just inside the French doors that led to the terrace. The evening had cooled slightly and Nicole was lifting a white sweater over her shoulders. She had turned her chair out to face the oblong moon and its restless streak upon the water. Marc was still seated square with the table like an obedient schoolboy, though he swayed slightly to the salsa music that rose from the level below, where Odile, her new friend Aimée, and Lola had gone dancing. Guillaume slept soundly with his head where his plate had been.
I remembered stopping like this in the doorway to the back porch of my sister’s house, just before I left. They were on the wicker couch. Sarah was holding the baby and Hank was singing. I stood there, witnessing my own absence in a room. If I had stepped through, I would have disturbed them all—an ungainly swell in placid, defined waters.
I wished in a way I could feel that now, the necessity of my own disappearance. But tonight Nicole was in a good mood and Marc anxious that he might ruin it. They sat waiting for me, needing me once again to soften their edges.
A waiter brushed past me with a perfunctory perdón, and I followed him through the doors. Marc lifted his head. He had only two ways of looking at me now: one that acknowledged everything between us, and another that forgot it all. He gave me the first kind, a prisoner’s gaze that admitted both guilt and indignation, that begged for help yet knew the futility of the plea, that confessed his own errors yet railed against a greater injustice. It both imposed and apologized for his feelings for me.
I didn’t know what I gave back to him. I aimed for a mildly affectionate and bemused look, a detached appreciation, a full and nearly glib acceptance of the limitations of our situation. Perhaps from a distance this is what I achieved. But as the table came closer and I saw a bent leg jut out from beneath it, the sharp kneecap defined by thin cotton pants, I felt that all that remained on my face was the effort and not the mask itself.
When I reached my chair, he said, “Ah, you’re back,” and Nicole turned and his eyes went blank.
At dinner Lola had conducted a psychology test she’d learned from a girl from Geneva she’d met on the beach. You had to cross a desert and were given five animals: a cow, a lamb, a horse, a lion, and a monkey. Then you had to rank the animals in order of their importance to you. After we’d all made our lists, Lola revealed what each of them represented. Nicole had put the horse first, Odile the cow, Guillaume the lion. Marc and I had had identical lists: Monkey, lamb, horse, lion, cow. Lola translated it to children, love, work, power, money. At the end of the meal I managed to slip our two lists from the table unnoticed. I’d begun to collect—in my head, in my pockets—this kind of proof.
I’d mentioned that I knew a similar test but then stopped myself, realizing that it wasn’t appropriate for children. Nicole remembered that now. “What about that other little game, Rosie?”
“Yes,” Marc said, “the X-rated one.”
“It’s not really X-rated.”
“Forget it, then,” Nicole said, batting the idea away. “We need something truly scandalous.”
“No, let’s do it,” he said. His hand flinched; instinct had drawn it toward mine and reason jerked it back. Even so, his whole body had begun to curve toward mine in a nearly proprietary way. Could Nicole not see this? Did she not recognize that her own inexplicable contentment was allowing it?
I told them the situation. There are five people, A, B, C, D, and E, on a boat way out in the ocean. A storm comes up and the boat begins to sink. There are two islands nearby and A, B, and C swim to one, D and E to the other. C is the only woman in the group and she is madly in love with D. Desperate to find a way to get to D, C goes to B for advice. He says he has no idea how to get there; perhaps she should ask A. A says yes, he does know a way, but first she’ll have to sleep with him. C agrees. A keeps his promise and she is reunited with D. But when C tells D how she got there, he is furious. He tells her he never wants to see her again. Eventually E takes her under his wing and they spend the rest of their lives together on the other end of the island.
I drew the scenario on a napkin.
Then I took another napkin, ripped it, and slid a half to each of them. “So, now you have to rank these people from most admirable to most despicable.”
Nicole picked up the pen and wrote hers out in a straight column without pausing. Marc wrote one letter and quickly covered it up. I laughed at him and Nicole joined me. I felt a warm pressure in my chest. I loved it when it was like this, when the connection between the two of them ran directly through me.
“Who’s B again?” Marc asked me, his face empty of everything except the task at hand. There was no trace of recollection that he had kissed me now at least seven different times, touched my breasts, and before dinner in the elevator tonight told me that he was constantly imagining what it would be like to hold me afterward, after we’d made love.
I pointed to the arrow on the diagram in front of him.
“Okay, okay,” he said, in my accent. But he didn’t look up. He wrote his list.
“So,” I said, “let’s start at the bottom. Who’s least admirable?”
“C,” Nicole said.
Marc threw down the pen in mock outrage. “What? She’s the most admirable!”
“Why?” I asked, secretly pleased by his choice.
“Because she makes this enormous sacrifice.”
“For herself,” Nicole said.
“For both of them,” Marc said.
�
��She was entirely selfish.”
“My God, Nicole. She was in love. And she was loved. She simply wanted to be with him for the rest of her life, her only life. She assumed he would want that too. Why is that not admirable, to have made a sacrifice for their union?”
Nicole had made a hard shell, thick as an oyster’s, around her. “You know how I loathe your life-is-so-short speech.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
I felt as if I were suddenly trapped beneath their bed, forced to listen to a conversation I could neither fully understand nor gracefully escape.
“I just don’t see that making a sacrifice for love is so saintly. I’m sorry. Love is not a virtue, Marc. D sacrifices in the face of love, despite his love. He denies himself this pleasure because he has certain principles. That’s admirable. Whether you agree with that system or not, it’s admirable that he adheres to it even when it will only bring him pain. He has integrity. C does not. She doesn’t waste any time making compromises. She is sexually manipulated but I don’t find victims inherently admirable either. And if she loved D that much, she should have understood his terms and not simply behaved according to her own. She didn’t have the first idea about love.”
“That’s absurd,” Marc said. “You’re missing the point, Nicole. You’ve missed the most essential point of it all.”
Fight for it, Marc. Fight for that essential point, that warm irrational human element missing in Nicole that we have in abundance. Fight for a world built solely on love, whose first and last value is love, where people keep and cherish what they love, despite all systems. But he had retreated. He stared impotently at the black pen in his hand. Nicole stroked Guillaume’s sunburnt forehead. He was still fast asleep. The white sweater had slipped off a shoulder and her taut skin seemed to glow in triumph.