The Opposite of Chance

by Margaret Hermes

  Poor Christian wanted very much to praise Élodie’s handiwork. He thanked her but she knew that something was wrong. “What?” she demanded. “We washed out all the bottles with soap, and after we cut them, I dried them in the sun on the balcony. There’s no bleach in them anymore. And they’ll never rust. What is it? Tell me.”

  “There can be no plastic in the hutches,” he said regretfully. “’Plastic and rabbits do not go together.’”

  “But why?” she tried not to whine.

  “That’s one of my father’s rules.” He shrugged.

  “But why?” she repeated, this time with tears of frustration.

  “He only says, ‘Because,’ but I think it is that they would eat the plastic and the meat would be poisoned. I’m sorry, Élodie.”

  When Élodie, this time without tears, reported the results of her grand project to her father, Gustave said, “And there you have the difference between the father and the son. One declaims; the other explains.” As much as Gustave had grown fond of Christian, just that much had he become disenchanted with the boy’s father.

  Gustave took it upon himself to see to Christian’s education. He was unsurprised yet disappointed when Christian’s father didn’t object. And again unsurprised and disappointed when his own wife did object. He said, “Our daughter doesn’t seem inclined to give him up despite the parade of boys you invite to the apartment and to the country. So we might as well see to it that he is made ‘suitable.’” But Gustave was not just grooming Christian to make him more acceptable to his wife or a better provider for his daughter. Perhaps unconsciously, he was recruiting a son for himself. It never occurred to Gustave to worry that he might be taking Christian out of his element. Nor did it occur to Christian. The only elemental consideration the boy recognized was his determination not to be separated from Élodie. He would become whatever he must in order to secure her. His gratitude, respect, and affection for Gustave, who didn’t stand in his way, who in fact made everything possible, were uncomplicated.

  When Élodie’s mother protested at the pair’s announcement of their intention to wed at age twenty, Gustave said, “Can’t you see that waiting won’t change their minds? So why make them unhappy? Why not enjoy their happiness? You know, we are lucky. Christian is smart and kind and he loves our daughter. He will never do anything to hurt her.”

  Even after Christian had been taken under the wing of one of Gustave’s friends in finance and then emerged to start a small firm of his own, his mother-in-law persisted in thinking of him as a former farmhand. When Élodie and Christian still joined her parents for their vacations near Gémozac, Madame Rochefort felt that he ought to be staying at the rabbit farm. Perhaps she would have come round eventually had the young couple given her grandchildren, but the fact of their barrenness juxtaposed with the thought of breeding rabbits caused explosions of bitterness in her brain.

  For the Christmas after they declared their love to each other, Christian gave Élodie one of Bernard’s paws on a necklace he had made from a pull chain. “You know what they say,” her mother shook her head at Élodie. “’That foot did not succeed in bringing luck to its original owner.’”

  For her fifteenth Christmas, Christian gave her a muff he had made from pure white skins. Every Christmas after that, he gave her a book carefully chosen. Gustave approved of each of these gifts and of the sensibilities of the giver. The year of the muff, Madame Rochefort asked Élodie if she really wanted such a cheapskate, un rapiat, for a boyfriend. “His family sells the meat and he gives you the discarded skins instead of throwing them into the waste bin.”

  But Élodie knew that Christian had skinned the rabbits himself and tanned the pelts and worked them until they were supple and then painstakingly sewn the muff under the tutelage of one of his sisters so that the stitching could be neither seen nor felt. She knew that the record album she had given him was nowhere near so fine a gift. When she was not proudly wearing it, she slept cradling the muff like a stuffed animal.

  Christian barely noticed where he stepped as he looked back to check the time on the ornate clock on the façade of the Nice Ville Train Station. It was dangerous to be preoccupied while walking about in Nice in 1981—the sidewalks were paved in dog shit—but his thoughts were fixed on the woman who had shared his sleeping compartment. She was an American and she was charming, two adjectives he would not have previously linked together.

  He would have made love to her—he had thought they were going to have sex until she brought up her husband. He couldn’t believe he had so misread the cues. But one doesn’t bring up a husband on the brink of lovemaking. The fact of the husband had made Christian sad out of all proportion to a missed misadventure. He’d felt an urge to stop the train. Their destination meant an ending. A death.

  He was in mourning for what was not to be.

  And he was confused. Surely, he loved Élodie, had loved her for all the years before and since their marriage. He had never been either scandalized or envious of friends and colleagues who had strayed from their vows of fidelity; he had just felt lucky by comparison. He wondered how it was possible that Élodie and all they had shared could seem irrelevant now.

  What had it been about the woman on the train? Was it the laughter? He could not remember laughing so much, not ever, not with anyone. He was stunned to realize he didn’t know her name. He had learned so much else.

  In all fairness, Élodie was the more beautiful, certainly more striking in appearance than his American. Perhaps the explanation was that he was accustomed to his wife, that there was no longer anything alien about her to keep him enthralled. But he could not rid himself of the feeling that he had missed his last chance. Not just for something—someone—new and surely not just for the opportunity for sex without attachment—that is always available if one really wants it. What he wanted was to be attached to the woman on the train, to laugh with her. Every day. With her he’d been able to shed the snakeskin of sophistication. He felt he could be himself instead of the person others had needed him to become.

  It seemed to Christian that if she had not set her husband between them, the two of them would at this moment be plotting the gentlest way to abandon their respective spouses, their homes, perhaps even their countries. He wondered if it all seemed so plausible because neither of them had children to abandon. He pictured them learning a new, shared language together in a tropical setting. “Merde!” he cursed appropriately as he stepped into a smear of dog shit. “Merde!” again for his failure to insist on escorting her to a hotel, to arrange another meeting, to acquire any information whereby he could find her again. What had he done? With each step homeward, he grew lonelier, more bereaved.

  He reached the Art Deco building where he and Élodie had spent the last fourteen years. Where he had been content, he reminded himself. He wondered if he would be content again, if the interlude on the train had been a mere ephemeron or if his life had been altered, had come undone. He adjusted his features, erased his frown. None of this was the fault of Élodie. She would be unchanged when he walked through the door; he would try to appear the same.

  His key in the lock must have summoned Élodie for she stood just inside the doorway, looking at him, unblinking. Her stare recalled how she had reacted all those years ago when she first witnessed the birth of a litter on the farm. “They are born with their eyes open!” she’d whispered, astonished and disturbed. “They see everything!”

  Christian barely had time to set his cases down before she fell into his arms. He felt a surge of panic rising in his chest. They had been so close for so long—had Élodie sensed some alteration in their marriage even before he entered? He experienced a small thrill, followed by relief: he had needed things to be different and somehow they were.

  Élodie buried her face in his shirt. “Papa,” she said, her voice unsteady. “Il est mort.”

  So this was the death that had been comin
g. Gustave had died in the night while Christian was with the woman on the train. Now he noticed his mother-in-law, sitting in the next room, smoking a cigarette and staring at a blank space on the wall.

  Had he been a different sort of man, say a man who had grown up with brothers instead of sisters, Christian could have convinced himself that he had remained faithful to Élodie, had never actually strayed, that ultimately nothing of consequence had occurred. But the death rattling his bones said this was not so. He had betrayed Gustave. And he would atone for that.

  He kissed Élodie’s forehead and, a supporting arm around her waist, guided her into the next room, where he placed his free hand on the cold shoulder of Madame Rochefort. As there were no children taking up the extra bedrooms, spilling over into the shared space, there was ample room in their apartment to welcome Gustave’s widow.

  Primo Class

  5.

  Had Hester Prynne lived in Nice, Betsy theorized, she would have had no convenient site upon which to stitch her scarlet letter. Betsy was everywhere confronted by bare breasts: on billboards advertising fashion magazines, on posters in bus kiosks heralding rock concerts, in pharmacy windows promoting skin care, and in heaving mosaics of salmon, coral, sepia, maroon, and walnut nipples burnishing in the sun upon the sand beaches.

  Eager to put Nice behind her, Betsy paid the surcharge for a reservation in a first-class coach. She had tried to purchase a second-class Eurail pass in Milwaukee but Dottie, her slightly dotty travel agent, had said, “You can’t send a blouse to your sister for the book rate, dear.” Deciphered, this turned out to mean that the second-class pass that was available for purchase in the States was only for students and Betsy was finally finished with all that.

  That evening, she walked beside the track, checking and rechecking her ticket against the flaking black numbers painted on the outside of the coaches and then against the raised, once gilded numbers over the compartment doors. Unable to rely on her understanding of the words trumpeting out of the loudspeaker, she found herself doubting her ability to read numbers as well, as though 7 properly translated might yield a 2.

  Her compartment was already overflowing with only one passenger. His suitcase occupied one of the seats next to the door; his briefcase another; a folded newspaper took up a third; his madras jacket was sitting in the fourth; and he himself was seated in the fifth. Betsy took the only remaining seat before he could rest his feet on it.

  “Bonjour,” she nodded curtly.

  He looked so blond and hearty she supposed he was another of the ubiquitous Germans until he drawled, “Same to you, honey.”

  Betsy shivered at the prospect of fending off conversations about the arrogance of French waiters or the foulness of un-American tap water until she feigned sleep. “Pardon, monsieur?” she said after a moment’s hesitation, trusting he didn’t have enough French to expose her.

  “Forget it,” he shook his head elaborately. “It was nothing. Nada.”

  She gave him the brief shrug that signals the end of unsuccessful communication.

  “Roger,” he responded. “Over and out.”

  She settled into her seat, allowing herself a self-satisfied smile, which was sure to be taken as further evidence that she was French.

  A small, dark young man with eyes flattered by thick lashes slipped into the compartment but remained by the door looking at the littered seats.

  “You’ve got a first-class reservation, pal?” Betsy’s well-muscled compatriot flexed.

  The other pulled a ticket from the breast pocket of his white cotton shirt.

  “No offense,” the blond said. “No harm in checking, right? Name’s Bradshaw. Last name. First name Kelby.”

  “How do you do?” the other said with an enunciation that reminded Betsy of Masterpiece Theatre. “My name is Winston.”

  “First or last?” Kelby hoisted his suitcase up onto the overhead rack.

  “First. My last name is difficult to spell, impossible to remember,” Winston apologized as he brought his battered, soft-sided suitcase in from the corridor and placed it on the opposite rack.

  “So where are you from, Winston?”

  “Pakistan.” He looked over at Betsy, offering her a small, impeccable smile.

  “A foreigner,” Kelby explained to him. “Doesn’t speak English. So, you came over here to get a job?”

  “I came to study. I am between classes and so have opportunity for travel.”

  Betsy wondered what kind of student would be traveling first class. She was beginning to regret that she had renounced English.

  “Well, I’m an attorney, Winston. From Tampa. That’s in Florida. Where we have plenty of sun and great beaches, but nothing that can compare with Nice,” he shook his head.

  “No?” the Pakistani said.

  “Hell no. Three days I went without lunch, but between breakfast and dinner I made a meal of all those boobs. A picnic. A banquet. The beach was so crowded, you could barely move without brushing against one. You must have seen it: acres of sun-kissed nipples puckering on the sand—and then when they would sit up and rub themselves with oil: Christ. Nothing like that back home. But then everyone there except me is over sixty-five so I guess it’s just as well.” He inclined his head toward Betsy. “You know, I think that little lady over there looks more and more familiar. If we could get her to take her blouse off—I’m not very good with faces, Winston, but I never forget a boob.”

  Betsy’s eyes flashed at the scenery that had begun flashing past the window when the Pakistani entered the compartment. Bas-tard, bas-tard, bas-tard, she counted the telephone poles as they clicked by.

  She stood and lifted her borrowed canvas backpack toward the overhead rack. Carrying it was one thing, lifting another. Three quarters of the way up, her arms began to tremble and the Pakistani student silently rose to brace the backpack. Suddenly the powerful smell of leather and juniper encircled them and the backpack was removed from both their grasps. “No problemo,” the lawyer said as he swung it up onto the rack.

  “Merci,” Betsy said crisply to the sun-darkened lawyer, then, “Merci,” more feelingly to the darker student.

  “This is your first time abroad?” the Pakistani asked after a short silence.

  She almost answered him without thinking, grateful for his redirection of the conversation, but the lawyer saved her. “Yeah, I’m on my honeymoon.”

  The Pakistani put his fingertips together and bowed his head slightly. “Then congratulations are in order.”

  “Thanks,” said the Floridian while Betsy tensed, waiting for the student to ask all the obvious questions, but he only unfolded his copy of the International Herald Tribune.

  Maybe the bride was traveling in a sleeping compartment while he preferred to travel upright. Maybe she didn’t like trains and was flying to meet him in Rome. He couldn’t have invented the honeymoon to lure Betsy into English. Kelby didn’t have it in him, she was sure.

  When the lawyer picked up his copy of the Herald Tribune, she pulled a bottle of mineral water and her copy of the Tribune from her oversized, shopping-bag sort of purse. At the station her glance had landed on a reprint from the New York Times with the headline “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” She started to read about Gay Related Immune Disorder, or GRID as they had titled it, then realizing her blunder, quickly stuffed the English language newspaper back into the bag.

  She wondered what her parents would think of the Messieurs Kelby and Winston. It was her parents’ gift of money when she finished her master’s that had augmented her travel fund enough to launch her trip, so she found herself frequently wondering if they would approve her choice of cities, her choice of hotels, her choice of dinner entrées. She was confident they would approve of her wordlessness; they set great store by reticence and even more by reserve.

  After her divorce, Betsy had plunged into therapy unt
il she decided she couldn’t afford both her therapist and anything else. She banked her “therapy money” in a separate account and it accumulated faster than the insights ever had. Europe was only fourteen unattended therapy sessions away when her parents gave her a check for a thousand dollars and told her she’d better get going.

  Betsy felt a little trapped by their check: it seemed less a gift than a challenge. She always suspected that her parents didn’t expect much from her, though they would never say. They had seemed surprised when she enrolled in a doctoral program in anthropology, impassive when she abandoned her dissertation, and surprised again when she went back for a master’s in library science. But nothing had surprised them more than when she had married at age twenty. Her father said she was setting a bad example for her younger sister. Her mother asked her if she was pregnant.

  As she waited in the long line at the railroad station in Nice, it had struck Betsy that they had hardly raised an eyebrow between them when she told them about the divorce. She shuddered at the thought that perhaps they had been among the legions who were aware of Greg’s unbridled unfaithfulness.

  At the border crossing of Ventimiglia, the coach instantly filled, the passengers materializing in mid-sentence. Bodies burst into the musty, upholstered compartment and were fended off by the booming young lawyer from Florida. “Taken,” he would growl, indicating the three unreserved and vacant seats menacingly. “No comprendo,” he was adamant. He explained to Winston that in Italy whole families, the generations layered—“you know, like lasagna”—rode the rails in the dead of night.