Each babbled over the other in their own language, reliving the entrance and maneuvers of their bat and the expressions on the other’s face, and then both cracked up again at the sheer improbability of the intrusion as well as the absurdity of their recounting it to themselves.
As she lowered herself back onto her cot, he extended a hand above her head, protecting her from bumping into the frame of the upper berth.
“Merci,” she said.
“Pas du tout,” he returned with a slight bow.
And then both collapsed onto their mattresses, laughing all the way down. Betsy thought this was not so unlike a slumber party after all.
Once they had regained control of themselves, they spoke slowly, haltingly, both confessing to only two years adolescent instruction in the other’s tongue, though he professed fluency in German and admitted to a passing familiarity with Japanese. His work as an economics consultant had taken him through Europe and Asia—he was just now returning from a business trip to Switzerland—but never, to his regret, to the United States.
They closed the window in the compartment to prevent their voices from being sucked out into the hot night. They found they could make jokes together. Betsy felt the anxiety of travel melt away.
She told him how in a café in Tours she had serenely ordered a bottle of rouge blanc, thinking she’d asked for red wine. She had at first been baffled by the waiter who, taking the middle ground, delivered a bottle of rosé to her table.
Her gentleman apologized for any lashings she had suffered at the tongues of his countrymen while she declared the mistreatment of Americans by the French to be a myth: she had received nothing but kindness. (Betsy had conveniently erased the Paris taxi driver from her memory.)
Instead, she told him about splurging on a dinner cruise along the Seine and regretting her decision almost as soon as she had boarded as every person on the boat, with the exception of their guide and the crew, was half of a couple. “I am traveling alone,” she explained, as though he hadn’t noticed. She told him how, as the remnants of their meal had been cleared away, the guide became a crooner, singing a cappella in a low, sweet voice. When he had finished to warm applause, he proffered his microphone to an elderly gentleman at a nearby table, who rose to the occasion and, facing his companion, sang to her what was surely a love song—no translation was necessary. Then the guide crossed the deck and, to Betsy’s horror, held out the microphone to her. She shook her head but still he extended his arm. “Je suis américaine,” she apologized. “Do not Americans sing?” he asked, entertaining the assemblage. So Betsy accepted the microphone to a smattering of encouragement from her fellow diners. But nothing came out of her mouth. She did not want to sing anything in English before this gathering and she would not sing Frère Jacques. The first seemed shabby and the other pathetic. So she stood and sang the only other French song she knew. She got as far as Allons, enfants de la patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé when all the other passengers stood and joined in, thank God, because she wasn’t sure of remembering all the words and was sure she would be garbling most of them. When they had finished singing, everyone applauded her as though she had performed an aria and they had been her rapt audience. And then her glass was filled from the bottle at an adjoining table and a young couple joined her at her table and others came over to toast her. And when the boat docked, she was the recipient of many kisses on both cheeks.
Betsy and her gentleman laughed again, but this time it was the laughter of comrades rather than two strangers thrown together in an absurd situation.
Betsy told him she had to give credit to the nun who had taught her high school French for opening class each morning with the Marseillaise rather than a prayer. She confessed she also had to give most of the credit for their ability to communicate to that same perpetually disappointed Sister Jean Louise, who had cringed at Betsy’s rendition of vowel sounds, a little credit to her own interest in etymology, and some to the church Latin of her youth. She was surprised at how much could be conveyed with a very limited vocabulary and, as the conversation continued, at how much more could be left unsaid.
He reached across and tentatively touched her shoulder as he spoke of the cities he attributed to her. “Milwaukee is on a lake, yes?” So close to Chicago? He hadn’t realized.
His hand rested long enough to telegraph another message.
Betsy asked if he had always lived in Nice and he laughed, this time at her notion of him as an urbanite. “You are the citadine,” he said. He had grown up in the countryside, where his parents bred rabbits and daughters: he had five sisters. His childhood had been both rich and impoverished and neither had anything to do with his family’s modest accumulation of francs.
With eight females in the house, including his widowed aunt and paternal grandmother, he emerged the family pet. The women and girls coddled him. “They feed me cakes.”
“Gâteaux,” she confirmed, nodding. She pictured him: eyes large and luminous, thin then as now, his mouth opening and closing birdlike as each sister vied to stuff him with sugared treats and honeyed words.
He reached across the small space between them and laced his fingers through hers. A small flutter of disappointment rippled through her—it felt as though he were trying to draw her into his memories, not seduce her.
He confided that, as full as his childhood was of female affection, it was equally bereft of male companionship. His eternally disappointed father expected him to be manlier, to casually break the necks of rabbits—with his free hand he sliced a karate chop in the air—and cheerfully skin them after. Neighboring boys sought him out not for his own sterling qualities but for his proximity to his sisters, all uniformly blonde, beautiful, and buxom. This time with his free hand he pantomimed shielding his eyes from the light of the sun.
“Dazzling,” she provided the word he was seeking. She struggled to reconcile his soft hands with those of a farmboy.
He tasted the word: “Dazzling.”
So his friends were never really his friends but rather his sisters’ suitors. Only after his sisters were wed did he acquire true friends in the shapes of his brothers-in-law.
“Pauvre petit garçon,” she patted the hand that still held hers.
He told her that a “peculiar” thing happened (he grinned at the surfacing of the English “peculiar”). He said that, after their weddings, each of the four of his sisters who married let go of their looks. He believed that being beautiful had been a burden to them “no less than the pack a donkey carries.” His theory was that, once married, they had no more need of beauty. He was sure it was a conscious choice. And—he offered as proof—only his spinster sister remained dazzling. It still hurt to look at her.
Betsy told him this was the perfect bedtime story, a fairy tale to dream on.
He started to say something but stopped. She could feel the uncertainty telegraphed through his fingertips. W-H-A-T (tap-tap-tap-tap) N-E-X-T (tap-tap-tap-tap)? He released her hand to drink from the water bottle she had set on the floor between them. He was buying time, gauging her responsiveness to his words, his touch.
He was utterly transparent. She marveled that she’d been fooled by the tailored suit and his manicured fingernails into supposing him austere and superior. She thought about his dapper pajamas, his orderly cases, his guarded smile. She saw a wife waiting in the distance. When they arrived in Nice, he would find his breakfast table laid, his morning paper folded beside the plate.
He set the bottle back down and leaned over, his finger following the curve of her arm. “Vous êtes très douce.”
“Je ne comprends pas,” she said in all sincerity. Did he say she was very two?
“Tu es très jolie aussi.”
This time Betsy recognized that she, not a babe in arms, was the subject of honeyed words. And she noticed his slide from the formal to the familiar tu.
He leaned into th
e space between their cots and kissed her hand. Then he turned her hand over and pressed his mouth into her palm.
The sensation of his lips on her skin surged through her like an electric current. Involuntarily, her hand trembled in his. There was no mistaking his intention now.
Betsy supposed that even if he had kept his vows until now, he couldn’t evade the claim of national honor, international ardor, that called upon his manhood. At last fate had chosen her to be the one in the right place at the right time. Or was it that fate had chosen him to be there, for her? He was an elegant gift that destiny had bestowed upon her, one that she deserved.
“I was very young when I married,” Betsy said slowly. “Only twenty. Vingt ans,” she confirmed. She said nothing about her divorce.
“Non!” he exclaimed, taken unawares and, then, after a pause, “Moi aussi. I, too, only twenty.” Relief and disappointment struggled in his voice. “C’est ça,” he sighed, more to himself than to her. He withdrew his limbs to the island of his berth, relaxing finally.
Idiot! she congratulated herself. Lauren Bacall would never have released him like that.
Betsy smoldered in the breathless compartment. She had wanted him to turn heedless, ruthless, to sweep her away as all the women in those movies had been swept. She was furious with herself for saving him and was tempted now to seduce him. She was angry that it was her marriage that had made him safe: always the gentleman.
She saw now that she had miscast herself. This was not a romantic screwball comedy; this was a television sit-com. She was Mary Tyler Moore playing Mary Rogers, a character to whom things almost happened.
Suddenly the smell of armpits and feet and bad digestion closed in upon her from the walls and floor and ceiling of the sleeping compartment, as though she were sharing the cabin with all the bodies that had ever steeped there in their own juices. Opening the window as far as it permitted, she delivered a curt “Bonne nuit” and hardened herself against the bewilderment in the economic consultant’s face.
Sleep eluded Betsy for the brief remainder of the night.
In the early light, he began to organize his things. Behind half-closed eyes, she watched him sort through his case and tried to think of the word she would use to describe him to her sister. His nose was perhaps too long and his moustache too thin to qualify as “cute.” There was some kind of gunk in his hair, and he wore cologne—she hadn’t noticed that before—so she wouldn’t label him clean-cut. Dapper, she supposed, described more than his pajamas—a word she’d never had any use for until now.
As he bent to retrieve his shoes, the bat emerged and shot out the open window.
He yelped in surprise, then shook his head and grinned at Betsy. She merely shrugged in reply.
They took turns dressing a few stations outside Nice and then stood side by side in the corridor while he offered commentary on the passing sights. He told Betsy he was worried about her. He feared she would not find a place to stay in his tourist-strewn city. Forehead furrowed with the effort to construct a proper sentence, she said, “There’s always a room for me: Il y a une chambre pour moi toujours.”
They left the sleeping car together, walking the long platform, descending stairs, passing through a tunnel, then the station proper, emerging at last into daylight. Betsy stopped as if to get her bearings. He, too, stopped. Setting down his two slender cases, he took her hands in both of his. His polished nails gleamed with the sun. She looked at them and felt a flash of sympathy with his farmer father and then looked away, ashamed that he might see this in her.
His was a long and wistful speech. It was only after she had said goodbye—in English, no au revoir for him—and was heading in the opposite, unknown direction that she realized she hadn’t understood a word he’d spoken since their arrival at the station in Nice.
Rabbit Punch
4.
Christian waved away a taxi outside the station and began the short walk home in the first light of an already sultry morning. Élodie had offered last evening to pick him up when he phoned before boarding the train, but he had told her to sleep in. One of the great conveniences of living in the Quartier Musiciens was its proximity to the station. Another was that their apartment had been a gift from Élodie’s father, Gustave, who also lived in Musiciens. Christian made good money, but not enough yet to afford their princely rooms on Boulevard Victor Hugo.
Christian had long benefited from Gustave’s intent to keep his little family close. When Christian was growing up, that resolve meant that at least twice yearly he would have the company of Élodie. They met when they were both twelve years old during one of her family’s vacations at their estate not far from his family’s rabbit farm. Wherever else they might travel, Gustave brought his wife and daughter to their property on the outskirts of Gémozac for the Christmas holidays and for the first two weeks of every August.
Élodie liked Christian from the time of her family’s initial excursion to the rabbit farm. Élodie’s mother had been drawn to the farm’s hygienic display of fresh meat at the Friday market as well as the cassolette de lapin prepared and individually packaged in a red-and-white-striped serving cloth by Christian’s older sisters. That was the last time Madame Rochefort was pleased by anything to do with Christian or his family, but it had been she who had suggested to her husband the visit to the farm as a family outing.
Gustave Rochefort, like his daughter, admired Christian from that first visit. He watched the boy guide his only child through the two long, narrow barns and listened as he explicated the care and feeding of the stock.
“Right now we have sixty-three does and twelve bucks for breeding.” Having grown up with five sisters, he was not shy with girls.
“What do you call the babies?” she asked.
“Kittens,” he said, shrugging.
“What is this one’s name?” Élodie swirled the fur of a brown-and-white with her fingertips through the cage wire as though dipping into a pond.
“These are livestock, not pets,” he replied soberly, quoting someone. “You don’t name livestock.”
“You don’t? Really?”
“Well, you shouldn’t. Anyway, that’s not one that I’ve named.”
“Then I will call him Bernard.”
“Bernard is a girl.” Christian explained that with an immature rabbit you couldn’t tell gender by looking. He opened a cage further down the row and told Élodie to take the trembling creature by the scruff and slowly run the fingers of her other hand—the hand that had rippled the fur—down the animal’s belly. “If it’s very smooth, like…like a fur jacket, then you are holding a doe. If you feel tassels under the fur, then you have a buck.” He waited. As she maneuvered to corral the young rabbit, he took a step back and appraised her. The girl struck him as alien. At first he thought this a distinction conferred by wealth. Christian was certain he would have known she came from money even had he not witnessed the gleaming Jaguar MK II the trio arrived in. Then, with a sudden insight sophisticated for both his years and circumstances, though he would not have been able to put the notion into words, he understood that he had been accustomed to an antagonistic standard of beauty. His flaxen, earthbound sisters were opulent in their golden looks, a different kind of wealth. Élodie’s short bob, arched brows, and deep-set eyes were more than dark—they were austere. Even at that tender age, her finely chiseled features made an imprint on the beholder. If he had been asked to describe Élodie’s appearance, he would have said not blonde but meant a sort of stunning photographic negative of what he had been used to regarding as the feminine ideal. This foreignness initially intrigued him and, eventually, enthralled him. “Well?” he said when her lips parted in surprise.
“A buck,” she announced, startled that she had successfully followed his directions.
Gustave marveled that neither of these pretty children seemed self-conscious in this talk and touch of sex. H
e thought that had they met a year or two later, this earnest tutelage would never have taken place. As it was, two years later they became sweethearts.
“Amour de l’adolescence,” Élodie’s mother dismissed. “Puppy love,” she added in English with a sneer. “Bunny love,” Gustave smilingly corrected, also in English. “The babies are called kittens,” she said, reminding her husband that she never forgot or forgave anything.
Élodie worked harder during her vacations than in any other setting. Not, Gustave was confident, because she was enamored of rabbits, though she even helped Christian rake the droppings out from under the cages and bag for sale at the Friday market the prized fertilizer that wasn’t used on the farm gardens. Christian would try to time the replacement of rusting water and feed pans with her arrival. Using tin snips, he would curve down the sides of empty large tomato cans and roll the sharp edges which Élodie would pound flat with a hammer and then nail to the wooden supports inside each pen. Élodie loved to wield the hammer, but she absented herself from the farm on the days when stock was slaughtered and skinned.
When she was fourteen, conscious of the ache Christian suffered in his right hand from cutting down the metal cans (though he didn’t complain but rather thrust his fist into a can of ice at the end of the day), Élodie spent months collecting empty plastic bleach containers from the mothers of her classmates, or from their housekeepers. Her urbane schoolmates swooned at the episodic fairy tale of the country boy tending a flock of fluffy rabbits between visitations by the damsel who resided in a distant palace.
She and her friends cut the containers into the shape Christian rendered the tomato cans, trimming down the sides and front and leaving a wide neck at the back for nailing to a post. Élodie was delighted with herself as she anticipated Christian’s appreciation of her efforts and his admiration of her cleverness. Gustave was amused by her project; Madame Rochefort was not. She was annoyed at having to share their apartment and finally their car with the enormous stack of nested bleach containers and she was more than annoyed that her daughter persisted in this childish infatuation with that unsuitable boy. “The farmhand,” she called him, “l’ouvrier agricole.”
The Opposite of Chance Page 4