by Lily King
We are at her mercy, I thought. She hangs us up the way it suits her: by the neck, by the foot, apart, squeezed together. Perhaps nothing we had ever said or done was not a part of her design. She had slipped her hands inside us and watched us dance for the simple satisfaction of what seemed to be her deepest belief: that people will always disappoint you. You can trust them for exactly nothing. What is it like, Nicole, to be a demigod? To lie on a silver cloud and watch us down below in the dirt, frantic to please and deceive you? What does it feel like to extend a painted finger, give a little nudge, and wait for the inevitable outcome? You beg to be betrayed, like any god begs, in order to condemn and be forever free from condemnation.
Nicole lifted Guillaume’s sleeping torso and resettled it against his own chair. She stood up to peer over the ledge at her daughters dancing.
“She always wanted to be a lawyer,” Marc said.
She turned. “I always wanted to be a judge.”
Marc remained seated, tracing figure eights around his line of unanalyzed letters. “Who did you put as most admirable when you did this?” He looked up at me, and the blankness was gone.
At first I could not hold his gaze. I wanted Nicole back, Nicole laughing. I’d failed. I’d destroyed the connection. I wished I had the strength to lie to him, but I had lifted my eyes again and did not. “C,” I said.
* * *
I started helping Nicole practice Spanish.
“Estamos en la playa,” I said.
“Estamos en la playa,” Nicole repeated. “We’re on the beach.”
“Muy bien. Tengo hambre.”
“Tengo hambre. I’m hungry.”
“Look at the little girl watching Lola,” Marc said.
I glanced toward the water, where Lola was creeping on her stomach along invisible hands through the shallows, her body swaying like a reed behind her. A small child watched from the shore, shadowing her progress down the beach, giggling when Lola’s head dipped beneath the water and yelping when she shook it out at her.
“Isn’t she adorable?” he said.
She was a pudgy child with dimples in her joints and thin hair that in the sun was clear as glass. Her skin, however, was brown like Nicole’s. When Lola lifted herself out of the water, the little girl followed her back to her towel.
Marc had guessed German and I said Dutch, but the child was French.
“Bonjour,” she said to us, with a confidence that announced, unmistakably, Here I am!
In a bored, slightly condescending tone, a tone she used to use with me, Nicole asked her her name.
“Marni,” the child answered, preparing her fingers for the next question.
“And how old are you?”
But Marni was already holding up her thumb and three fingers.
“Marni’s a clever girl,” Marc said. His voice, too, I recognized.
Marni looked over at two boys digging near a red umbrella. “They don’t think so. They called me stupid.”
“Are those your brothers?” I asked this quickly, hoping to be taken for one of the family.
“They’re mean. I hate them.”
“You don’t really hate them,” Marc said.
Up until this point, Marni had been directing all of her conversation at me and Nicole. Now she turned to Marc in the chair, meeting him full on with her small, heavy-lidded eyes. “I hate them all.”
Under the red umbrella was a couple in plastic recliners. The man read a newspaper and the woman was waving at us. We were too far away to call out, but the woman called out anyway, saying we should send Marni back when she began to bug us. But she had used a word, emmerder, which wasn’t just to bug but to bug the shit out of. It was a word Nicole forbid her children to say.
“You’re not French,” Marni said, turning back.
“No, I’m not,” I answered, as swiftly as possible: noshweepa.
Marni, who was not particularly impressed, told me she used to teach her old fille to spell in the sand.
Before I could gracefully decline, Marc was on his feet, saying he’d teach Marni instead.
Lola trailed behind them but, because Marc never let her write or say the answers, she wandered back into the warm water.
“That’s not a word!” Marni shouted again and again, her giggles rising up like slow bubbles out of a bottle.
From our towels, Nicole and I watched Marc, his long body folded in two, one hand writing and the other hopping along to keep up.
“Marc has a new playmate,” Nicole, said, lying down flat again. “Tell me some more Spanish, Rosie.”
“Hace calor hoy.”
“Hace calor hoy. It’s hot today.”
“Marc tiene una amiga.”
“Marc tiene una amiga. Marc has a friend.”
“Soy Nicole.”
“Soy Nicole. I am Nicole.”
Marni was tickling Marc’s feet with a shell and he was howling, jerking his foot away, then coming back for more. Lola called to him to watch her somersaults, but he didn’t hear her.
The woman beneath the red umbrella said “Marni!” sharply, not as a name but an accusation, and she went running. Marc came back up the beach.
“Marni’s leaving tomorrow,” he said, as despairingly as if he’d heard the sun wouldn’t rise again.
“Papa, come swim!”
“Can’t,” he called. “Too exhausted.” He fell into his beach chair. The nylon straps cracked and the tin legs sunk. He watched Marni peel the plastic wrap off a sandwich, hold it with two fat hands, and bite down. “She is such a clever kid.”
This was the way it was with Marc. His heart had a narrow field of vision. I knew it held a great many things, but the aperture was small and I had to wait my turn to be rotated back around into the light where I would glow so brightly I’d be all he could see.
Nicole waited only for another Spanish phrase.
“Soy Nicole.”
“Soy Nicole. But you already said that one.”
Like so many things, it happened around us. We did nothing to precipitate it.
The next day, Lola came running up to our spot on the beach with her friend from Geneva to plead for permission to go with her family for lunch at a nearby hotel that had a pool with two slides. Before jealous tears had time to collect in Guillaume’s eyes, Nicole had secured him an invitation as well, and once they were packed off she announced that she, Odile, and Aimée would take a taxi into town for the afternoon. Magazines were flipped shut; towels were shaken and rolled; dark tanning oil was capped and wrapped in a plastic bag. Through all these motions of departure, Marc remained engrossed in his mystery novel. He raised his head once to answer a question about the room key. I sat up attentively, awaiting instructions. I might be sent up to wash out the children’s dirty clothes from yesterday, which lay in a pile on their bathroom tiles, or correct the math packet Guillaume promised he was working on every evening before dinner. But just before turning away, Nicole simply told me the children would be back at the hotel at three.
In hopes that she could still see me out of the corner of her eye, I leapt to my feet and began to gather up all my things, as if I never would have chosen to remain on the beach beside Marc. As soon as they were safely up the steps and through the French doors, I put my bag back down in the sand and waited for Marc to receive this cue. He kept reading. He scratched the back of a calf. He turned a page. I knew he liked to stop reading at the end of a chapter and there was no break on these new pages. I didn’t know whether to lie back down on my towel or shake it out and leave. I looked toward the water with false scrutiny, not seeing the sea at all. My eye was inward and miserable, wanting only Marc’s elusive attention. Finally we could have more than a few minutes of privacy—how could he waste a precious second of it finishing a chapter? By now Odile and Nicole would be on the other side of the hotel waiting for a taxi. It took only fifteen minutes to get to town. What if all the stores were closed for siesta? Another fifteen minutes and they’d be back. I leaned down f
or my towel.
“You’re not leaving me, are you?” The voice was much more comfortable and intimate than it had ever been before. For a moment I couldn’t identify the change. It wasn’t just the tone. Then I knew. He’d switched to tu.
“No.”
I sat back down, the ploy of the packed bag in my lap. There was a gap between us, where Lola had been, and four small depressions that her restless fingers and toes had dug.
“I’ve got to get you closer than this,” he said. I marveled at the difference from vous. It seemed as powerful as a confession of love in each sentence. “Do you want to take a walk?”
A walk. I looked to the water’s edge where for five days I’d watched the slow stream of couples moving past. I couldn’t have imagined something more thrilling, to be a couple walking on the beach.
Without discussion we headed down and away from the hotel, through the clear shallows, which made our feet paler and bigger than they normally were. Lola would have asked why the water did that, Odile would have stepped out, not liking the sight of her own feet, which she already thought too large, and Guillaume would have made fun of someone else’s. I made a conscious effort to banish the children’s voices. I was finally alone with Marc. I was going to enjoy it. But Marc didn’t really seem to want to get me any closer after all. The distance between us as we walked grew so great that oncoming pairs, hand in hand or arm in arm, flowed through us. I thought of several things to say but hesitated to speak, unsure if I too should switch to tu. He felt like such a stranger now it would seem ludicrous. My fingers hung heat-bloated and sticky at my sides. I wanted him to stop and take hold of them.
A string of gray and black rock islands curved out from this end of the beach toward the horizon, the last of them only half visible, like apparitions caught in the glittery haze, where the blue of the water dissolved into the blue of the sky. So much of this trip had been spent gazing at spectacular sights, which always filled me, as this one did now, with an unexpected, agonizing frustration. Why couldn’t I simply accept and enjoy beauty? What was it that stirred up this terrible discomfort? I imagined discussing it with Nicole. We would agree that it was the impermanence, the inability to possess, the reminder of death. And that was all true, but it was something else as well. I thought of the painting back in Paris of the three women in the white waves. I wanted to be able to paint or do something—write, sing, dance, I didn’t know what—not just to possess but to express, to force it somehow through me.
We reached the end of the beach. Without acknowledging me, Marc stopped and turned toward the water. I stopped beside him. The silence between us had hardened, and all of the turmoil inside me rose and crashed against it. He was so rigid and remote, so full of inaccessible thoughts, that it felt like being with Nicole. I glanced back at our towels, the 127 steps, the long tasteful hotel where our rooms faced the other end of the beach. The scene was entirely indifferent to us. I was tired of my own passivity. All week I’d clung to the belief that I was less guilty because I was not acting but receiving. It was a lie. I took his hand.
He clasped back but kept his gaze on the sea. “I think the most painful thing about not believing in God is that there is no one to thank when you need to,” he said.
I wasn’t sure what he was thankful for, the sparkling islands or my hand in his.
“Grief I can handle on my own, but gratitude is less manageable. It requires something on the other end.”
It was easy to blame it on the language barrier, to tell myself that my expression wasn’t yet equal to my comprehension, but the truth was I would have been tongue-tied in any language. I felt young suddenly, holding this middle-aged doctor’s hand, in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time.
I wondered what would happen now with the hour and a half left to us. Nicole wasn’t there to orchestrate us, and it seemed we might drown ourselves in our freedom to choose. I was aware of the cliff above us that at lunch we often spoke of climbing, and of the path that led up to it, just behind us now. Glancing at it, he said, “Should we explore a bit?”
I nodded, but something in my face must have revealed a hesitancy. He still felt far away. He was being so falsely nonchalant. Another surge of frustration came over me.
“I just want to do what you want to do,” he said, lifting his hands defensively, and I could see in this gesture the years he’d suffered with a woman who did not love him, who rarely touched him, who was incapable of anything more than an occasional good mood, a woman who could receive even less easily than she could give.
I am not her, I wanted to say. Instead I took back his hand. “Let’s go.”
The sand on the sloped path was far hotter. Halfway up we had to step off onto a patch of scrub until the sting wore off. It was surprising to us that there were no other footprints, that no one had ventured up from the beach. At the top, the trail forked left out to the cliff and right toward a grove of trees. Another decision.
“It’s your turn,” I said, in the tu form, using an expression I’d only ever used when playing games with his children.
He led me inland. The path disappeared but we kept walking. All the sounds from the beach—hungry gulls, children splashing, gunned jet skis—fell away, replaced by closer bird and insect clamor. There were shaded patches, then wide-open areas of stiff fried grass. A path reappeared and wound us into a small overgrown courtyard formed by three sides of a low rounded wall that had the color and texture of soap. Olive trees hung over this wall, their leaves casting fluttery lime shadows. Once inside we saw it was a graveyard. Shriveled black olives stained the flat unmarked gravestones and crouched like withered beetles in the tall grasses between them. The odor of their baking clung to the hot air.
The white wall was cool on my back. When I put my arms around him, he let out a long breath and said, “You’re so strong.”
I tried to remember Nicole with compunction but all I could feel was a sadness for Marc, for I wasn’t particularly strong; it was just that Nicole had never held him tightly. He was parched for affection in a way he hadn’t revealed when stealing those quick kisses before. I kissed his neck and I thought he would faint in my arms. I moved toward his ear and he cried out. When we kissed, his mouth could only hold the shape of a moan. I envied his pleasure within the moment. He seemed to have drained his mind of memory and conscience, as if this early part of a Friday afternoon was for him a lifetime in itself, with no past and no consequences. I held him tighter, then tighter still, but he wasn’t close enough. I could not wrap my arms around the afternoon. My desire for him, so pure and powerful when he was near but not touching, shattered now into terrible fragments of other emotions, all of which made me yearn for him still, though none was satisfied by his actual touch. I was at both ends of the moment, full of the anticipation of its beginning and the awful loss of its passing. Feel, I commanded myself. Feel him here now. His hands and mouth began to travel across my body. Feel. We sank into the grass and olives. Feel him.
He whispered all kinds of things, words I’d never heard or words I knew but couldn’t make sense of. I wanted to tell him not to speak but found myself speaking back instead, in English. Finally I could feel him. Each time I spoke he swelled and filled more of me. I forced him in farther. With his first tremors, I gripped him hard, blood and life safe inside me. But he pushed against my clutch, extracting himself in one determined motion.
It is a subtle violence, the violence of absence. No one can see it; no one can be accused. Things rushed in to fill it—uselessly, grotesquely. Slick with sweat, he slid along to plant fat loud kisses on my stomach and shoulders. His skin felt like wet rubber. He told me I was beautiful, warm, fresh. He asked, “How do you feel?” stroking the damp hair from my forehead as if I were sick with fever.
I wondered how to say gutted.
“You have brought me to life,” he said, when I did not answer, and settled his head on my breastbone.
Through the narrow leaves the sky seemed too dark a blue. There
was only one cloud, compact, with sharp edges and thick shadows. Though it floated in place high above us, it looked heavy, as if filled with mercury.
I remembered my mother. I never thought of her—I only abruptly remembered her. She was a simple, faceless fact that I was capable of forgetting for months at a time. All my life I’d felt lucky that I didn’t miss her like my sister did; I’d felt stronger in that way, though I knew it was no feat, for I’d lost her before I could remember her. Unlike my sister, I’d never imagined my mother anywhere, never believed she was watching me, loving or disapproving of me. But at this moment I felt she was some part of that fat cloud that sat motionless in the dark blue sky, and I turned my face away.
My sudden sobs made me heave against him unwillingly, a parody of what we had just done. He did not raise his head but held my shudders tightly to him. I could smell his scalp. It smelled old. I ached for the smell of birth.
When it passed, he cleaned my face with his shirt. “It’s all right,” he cooed and stroked. “It was beautiful. I could taste it. I could taste your inexperience. It was like an orange, a tart and just slightly unripe orange.”
He thought I was laughing at his bad poetry, and laughed with me.
I could smell myself on him. An evening and a morning had already passed, but now with the sun directly above again, I could smell myself baking in his hair, on his fingers, beneath his shorts, and the smell rose up stronger than the squid or roasted garlic or any of the other half-eaten plates that remained on the table. Even when the coffee, three doubles, strong and black, arrived, I smelled it still.
I could not look at him. I tried but his lips were so suddenly red and full and spread contentedly that my eyes recoiled without warning from his happiness.
Nicole drank her coffee in two neat sips. It was easier to watch her. It was easier because now it was done; everything had been pushed to its limit. I was certain Nicole knew. What exactly had Leslie meant when she said the French had a totally different definition for the word marriage? There seemed a camaraderie between them today. I don’t care, I thought stubbornly, searching for a place inside myself to retreat. I found it in Lola, for we were going to make necklaces before dinner with dental floss and the small pink opaline shells we’d been collecting.