“Ah non!” the guide cries out, and screams something in French that I think means “Touch that again and I’ll break your neck!”
The boy shrugs and curls his lip in boredom like it’s no big deal, and socks his hands down into the pockets of his blue jeans. If the guide had yelled at me I think I’d want to cry, but the boy just laughs it off. As soon as the guide turns his back the boy has his hand back up in the branches, his fingers leaving faint greasy butterfly-shaped prints on the bottles.
“How’re you supposed to eat the pear?” someone in the group calls out.
“Ah, the fruit is too hard to eat,” the guide says dismissively. “But it doesn’t matter, no one buys Pear William to eat the pear anyway,” he snorts, and the group laughs along with him, like they all knew this.
The boy and I lag behind the crowd. His eyes travel up and down my body like he’s checking me for damage. I could kiss this boy in a second. I am ready. For months I have been practicing by kissing the palm of my hand, not too hard, not too soft, very little spit. Still, practicing on your hand or a pillow isn’t like kissing a boy.
As I think all this, the boy’s eyes are boring into me. He jerks his head back toward the pear trees like he wants me to slip off with him, but suddenly I’m all nervous. What if my mother sees me and drags me away? She’d say, “You’re too young,” or “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Except for my father, of course.
What if my father finds me with his camera and takes my picture—how could I deny that I wanted this boy? I smile and pretend I don’t understand what he’s saying. You’ve got to keep them guessing. Be mysterious. Be playful, like a tigress. That’s what the magazines tell you. I keep walking, but slowly, moving my hips side to side like I’ve practiced in my bedroom mirror. The walk that is supposed to drive men wild. Then he is behind me, speaking in French, and it’s like some wonderful dream. “What is your name? You are so pretty. I want to kiss you…”
Back at the château we enter the caves, which aren’t caves at all, but big, low-ceilinged rooms dug out of the earth. It’s a little like a bandit’s hideout or a root cellar, but fancier. Coming out of sunlight into the murky dark, it takes a few moments for my eyes to adjust. I stand in the dark and feel how cool and dry it is in the cave, how the air smells spicy. The walls are lined with giant wooden casks of wine, and further back in the gloom are metal racks stacked with hundreds of bottles lying on their sides like they’re sleeping. The room is lit by a chandelier of candles, and many more little white candles stuck in the hollowed-out walls of the gloomy room. I’ve lost sight of the boy; I hope he hasn’t cut out. I want him to see me in this light. Seventeen says that candlelight is the most flattering light there is; the next is a red lightbulb, or a red scarf thrown over a white lampshade, to make your skin look pink.
Set out on top of some giant wooden barrels are dark green bottles of Pouilly-Fumé and a clear, almost bell-shaped bottle of Pear William that is half empty. The pale yellow pear juts out of the remaining pool of eau-de-vie like a woman reclining in a bathtub. What I want is to touch that pear for just a second.
There are also glasses full of Pouilly-Fumé and Pear William. They gleam with the light of hundreds of tiny candle flames, leaping against the glass. The glasses’ stems are shorter and the bowls smaller than the wineglasses we have at home. I wonder if this French wineglass is the one Cosmo says the perfect breast is supposed to fit into? Or was that a champagne glass?
Everyone, including my parents, is hovering around the guide, who is describing a wine as tasting of meadows and figs with a pineappley nose. No one is paying any attention to me, so I snag a glass of Pouilly-Fumé. As I take it into my mouth I realize that the fumé is the fire, the sting on my tongue, the burning in my throat. I don’t smell any vanilla or taste any honey, but I pick up another glass and take it off into a dark corner of the cave to sip it alone. Not that anybody would notice me anyway, seeing as everybody, even Dad, seems hypnotized by our guide, who scolds a woman for picking up a cork and smelling it.
“Ah ah ah, one reads a cork, one does not smell a cork,” he says condescendingly. “The cork, she smells like cork.”
I scan the room for the French boy. I feel a little light-headed from the first glass of wine, but I think now that the wine tastes good, and it’s relaxing me. I’m good at this.
I spot the dark-haired boy as he picks up two glasses of wine like he’s at a bar, like he does this all the time, and starts to walk over to me. I drink my wine quickly, watching out of the corner of my eye as Dad swishes wine around in his mouth like Listerine. My mother sniffs her wine, then takes a loud sip, sucking the wine into her mouth. It’s too embarrassing to watch. Dee is standing between them, pouting, and still wearing the sunglasses, which must make the room pitch black. Poor Dee really believed that there were bats in these caves. Even when my mother told us my father was joking, even when she told us, “And it’s not cave, it’s cahh-v.” Dee still wouldn’t let go of the possibility. To her, cave-cahv was no different than vase and vah-z. Same diff. Dee didn’t want to get it.
“You like, yes?” the boy says in my ear, and hands me a glass of wine. I sip it, it’s the Pear William, it’s thicker and much sweeter than the wine. Eau-de-vie tastes like syrup with heat.
“Merci,” I say, hoping I don’t sound too nervous, or too American, although he must know I’m not French, since all I do when he speaks is grin like a baboon. I could speak with him, but I’m just too nervous now—my parents are here, not to mention Dee, who is always spying on me. I wish I were wearing my mother’s tight black sundress instead of a camp shirt and cutoffs with sandals. I’ve got a Band-Aid on my knee from where I wiped out racing Dee in the hotel parking lot two nights ago. I look like a stupid kid. He stands close to me and drinks his wine down in one gulp, his eyes fixed over the top of his glass on my breasts. At least I have those.
I look back at my parents and Dad’s eyes are on me. He looks a little confused, like maybe he isn’t sure if it’s me, or not. After all, it is dark, and this guy is standing right in front of me. Then he looks away. It isn’t me, it isn’t his daughter.
“J’aime le poire,” I say, pointing to the pear lying there in the last bit of brandy.
“You want?” he asks, with a shrug.
“Oui, je voudrais.” I would like, I guess, but too much more and I will be très drunk.
“Le poire?” he asks, checking with me, although I don’t know what else he thinks I mean.
He picks up the bottle and gives it a good whack on the side of the table. The sound of breaking glass is like a firecracker. All conversation stops for just a second, but everybody is having such a good time, nobody cares that a bottle got broken. My parents don’t even look for me. My breath is caught in my mouth; I can’t believe no one suspects us. But why would they, the boy is holding the bottle at his side, just below the broken neck, so casual, no one can see what he’s done. He sticks his hand sideways through the broken neck and pulls out the pear, wetting his hand.
He licks the pear, then hands it to me, like it was no big deal. Like he’ll do anything for me. I hold the slippery pear in my hand.
He licks his knuckles. There’s blood on his hand. I pull his hand toward my mouth and lick his wound. The blood mixed with the brandy is making me drunk.
Who am I? I wonder, watching myself lick this boy’s fingers, noticing the dirt beneath his nails and not caring. Who is this girl? I don’t recognize her.
I slowly start walking backward away from the crowd, drawing him toward the wine racks that touch the ceiling. I need to catch my breath, but mostly I need to get out of my parents’ line of vision, because I know that I’m about to have my first kiss, finally my first real kiss, and it’s with a Frenchman.
“So you are American, yes?” the boy asks, wiping his cut hand against his pants leg. He’s checking out my legs and my Levi’s, which I guess give me away.
“Oui,” I say. The pear in my hand feel
s like a grenade. Suddenly, I feel like he’s wearing those glasses they advertise in the back of comic books that let guys see through your clothes.
“So you speak French, yes?” he asks, brushing his hair out of his eyes in a kind of bored, cool way.
“Un peu,” I say, holding my finger and thumb apart. I want to seem cute, not too smart, not too weird. That turns boys off. But I want to speak more French, not only because the language is so romantic, but because it would be part of the foreign experience; still, he has to speak really slowly for me to understand what he’s saying.
He leans toward me and picks up some strands of my hair, and he smells them with his eyes half closed. I’m not sure what that’s about, but I’m glad I just washed it last night. Then he whispers in my ear something I can’t understand. The scar intersecting his eyebrow looks like a road between two fields—maybe it was a dog bite, maybe he fell off his bicycle. I laugh out of nervousness, or maybe it’s excitement. He steps closer to me and puts his hand on my shoulder like he’s feeling the fabric of my shirt. I lean toward him, then back off. He’s so tall I’m going to have to stand on tiptoe to kiss him.
Even though we’re back behind the casks, I’m still anxious about getting caught. My parents would put me under hotel arrest, or rental car arrest—either way, they’d never set me free in France again. Plus it’s not that romantic. I want to be outside in the pear grove. I want him to throw me down on the grass and kiss me. I put up my hand to warn him, not here, not now, but he pulls his hand away from my shoulder and his eyes cloud up, like I’m rejecting him, but I’m not.
“Non, non,” I say, and I make a grab for his hand because I’m afraid he’s just going to walk away, and I don’t want him to. I don’t want him to leave. I want to talk. I just want to hold his hand first. I want to stroll through the trees as the sun is setting and share this pear. I close my eyes and try to come up with the proper words to say, “Let’s go somewhere else, back outside.”
When I open my eyes again he’s staring at me, the muscles at the corner of his mouth sort of slack, his eyes sort of unfocused like he can’t see me anymore. I can tell he thinks I don’t want him to kiss me, but I do. I do want him to, I think. I love the pear he gave me. Then he says something that sounds hurt or angry and sort of hunches his shoulders and drops his head. For a minute he does nothing, then he sticks his foot out and rubs the toe of his black loafer up the back of my leg. I don’t know what to think, I can’t think. I know I don’t want him to leave. He keeps rubbing his toe into the socket behind my knee. Back and forth. It’s wrong, I know, but it’s also weirdly good. I can feel my whole face turning red. He stops, and for a second I think maybe he’s about to apologize, but he doesn’t. He just stands there staring at me, but not really at me, more like right through me. I stare hard into his eyes, looking for the boy he was earlier, trying to bring him back. His eyelids start to droop, then he’s doing something at his crotch, yanking his hand back and forth like he’s trying to start up a chain saw. I don’t want to look, or I don’t want him to see me looking. But then his pants are unzipped and he’s pulling and shaking his thing at me like it’s angry, or like it’s trying to escape, and I can’t look away. I mean, I just stare at it, like I’m hypnotized. It’s weird but I like it a little. I am making this happen, I think. He can’t help himself. Does this mean he likes me? I can’t believe it. It isn’t until he cums on the top of my foot that I realize how stupid I’ve been. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Cry, scream, laugh? I know I should laugh. This is a bad joke, but I can’t laugh. I don’t make a sound.
He grabs his thing and stuffs it back into his fly, which is gaping open like his mouth, zips up, and then walks quickly away from me. He doesn’t smile or say good-bye, he just leaves. His cum drips down between my toes. I swear it smells like boiled chicken. Why was it that so many things that were supposed to be exotic or special were all just another lousy form of chicken?
The boy walks fast back out into the main part of the cave, head down, and no one even seems to see him, and then he’s gone. Peering through the rows of bottles, I see his profile in one of the small cave windows as he heads back toward the orchard. How could I have let this happen?
Maybe I’m just really drunk, and if I just don’t look down, if I don’t see it, it hasn’t really happened. But my foot is slick and cool with cum. I’m still clutching the pear in my hand. It had seemed so precious. It was stupid of me to think of that pear as being like a woman. I drop it, and when it rolls under a cask, I think for a second about rescuing her—it seems mean to leave her—but I don’t. I hope she rots there.
I kick off my sandal and drag my foot back and forth across the dirt floor of the cave until my foot is dirty and it burns. I pour the rest of the eau-de-vie on my foot; it tingles like medicine. Then I shove my foot back into my sandal and head for the door, my face turned to the ground. I don’t want my parents to see me, see the look I must have on my face.
My mantra surfaces in my mind, “Pouilly-Fumé, Chardonnay, Pouilly-Fuissé, Sancerre,” but it seems dumb now. They’re just words.
For a second I wonder if he’s outside waiting for me, and my heart beats faster. But outside the sun is just starting to set, blazing orange, smearing the sky with streaks of pink and purple, the way my mother’s lipstick bleeds into her dinner napkin, and the boy is gone.
I crawl into the backseat of Josephine and sit there numbly working the door lock. I want to go home now. How could I be so stupid? I slump down in the seat and roll onto my stomach, the way I slept as a baby. I can just imagine my parents’ patient smiles that say, share, but mean but don’t hurt us. Lie to us. Don’t tell us anything that will get you in trouble. Worse than their anger would be them feeling sorry for me.
I am sitting up, resting my head on the window, by the time my parents and Dee show up. My stomach feels sour and queasy from drinking. My mouth is so dry, it’s like I’ve eaten cat litter.
“Jesus, how long have you been out here?” my father grouses, sliding into the driver’s seat. He stows his camera bag in the backseat at my feet. He must be out of film.
“I don’t know, a little while,” I mumble.
“We were looking for you,” my mother says. “We were worried.”
“Sorry,” I say.
“Are you all right, honey?” my mother asks, cocking her head like she can see me better this way, like she’s peering through a keyhole in an invisible door. She leans over the seat and puts the back of her hand to my head, her eyes searching mine for clues.
“Sweetheart?”
My father checks me out in the mirror. A long hard stare. I can’t meet his eye.
“I feel sort of sick, I guess.” Holding my stomach, like if I move my arms something will spill out of me, something I didn’t know I could lose.
“Why didn’t you come get us?” she asks like she feels bad for being so mean to me earlier. My father pops his sunglasses in the glove compartment. He rubs his fists into his eye sockets, looking tired and annoyed. My mother hands him two aspirin, and he swallows them without water.
“Let’s get on the road, then,” he says, and starts up the car. “We’re behind schedule.”
Dee says, “You can put your head in my lap if you want to. It’s okay.”
“I’m okay,” I lie, and close my eyes.
“I promise I won’t touch you or anything,” Dee says, and it’s almost enough to make me cry again. She has no idea how much I would like that, and how I can’t let her.
I lean my head against the window, willing myself to sleep. I watch the landscape through my lashes, green, black, brown, it’s all a blur. I can’t tell what’s fence and what’s tree. My father told me once as we walked through the woods behind our house that I didn’t need to be scared of snakes. As long as you saw them first you had the upper hand. “Snakes see the world as either tree or food. If you move, you’re food, if you don’t, you’re a tree.” My father thinks the world is this simple. Thi
ngs are magic or true, food or tree. Never both. Dee is humming to herself and flipping through our rock ’n’ roll magazine.
“I like Keith Moon too,” she says to me, but I pretend I’m sleeping. She pulls my feet into her lap and pets them. “I’m sorry I called you a sexpot,” she whispers.
“Mom,” Dee calls quietly, “I think she’s asleep,” and points at me.
“Dee, honey, did you see Evie drinking wine?” Dee shakes her head no, her forehead creasing with worry. She can’t imagine why you’d want to do that.
“Don’t worry,” my mother says, and pats Dee’s leg. “She’s okay. Everything’s just fine.”
I try to force myself down into sleep, into that place you come up from feeling somehow cleaned, but I can’t. I see the boy’s face, I see my father’s eyes watching me, watching me walk backward into the dark with that boy.
I am still awake when we reach the hotel. My father goes in to register, leaving us in the car. My mother watches me in her side mirror. Her smile is soft, like she’s watching a baby sleep. When my father returns, she whispers to him, “Should we wake her up, Chas?”
My father shakes his head. I wonder how long they will leave me here in the car, in this parking lot. Fine, leave me here like a pile of dirty laundry, I don’t care.
I keep my eyes squeezed shut, then I feel my car door open. Through my lashes I see my father standing there, the sun blotted out by his body, his arms hanging limp at his side. Then he kneels down and leans inside the car. I try not to cry, or move, or do anything that might tell him I’m pretending, that all I want is for him to touch my skin, to hold me. Then I feel my father wrap one arm around my shoulders and pull me into his chest. He slides his other arm under my legs. His knees buckle slightly as he lifts me up. His breath is heavy and wine-scented. I let my head fall against his shoulder and I stay asleep in his arms.
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