A Private Sorcery

by Lisa Gornick

  For a week, she alternated between astonishment at Reed’s assurance that she would find him and the awareness that she did not want to go—not so much out of fear (it seemed unlikely that now, nearly a year and a half since Saul’s arrest, anyone was watching her) but rather because it was too soon after Guatemala, those sights and sounds not yet digested. On her walks home from work, though, she was flooded with memories of Reed: how after three nights sleeping on the floor of her room in the apartment they’d shared by the beach, she’d come back from Alil’s to discover a mattress and dresser he’d hauled home for her, discards, he’d claimed, from the moving company, but now, it occurred to her, things he’d probably bought. His taking her to Yosemite, the first time she’d ever seen a mountain, where they hiked through Alpine meadows blanketed with wildflowers and he hung their food from a tree to keep it from the bears.

  She’d planned her trip for September, after the crowds but before the snow. She mentioned going to the mountains to no one. Instead, she booked a flight to Bordeaux and said she would travel on to Nice. A reasonable journey, traversing the country west to east. Not a trip anyone would expect to involve a detour into the Pyrenees.

  Everyone had their hidden South of France they wanted to share: Maggie’s list of the best auberges in the Dordogne for eating the real Quercy fare, her mother’s boss’s itinerary through the villages perchés of the Luberon, the Roman ruins at Arles, the Gorge du Verdon. Saul threw in his two cents—Bregançon, the campers’ beach beneath a château that served as the southern residence for the president of France—and then, to Rena’s amusement, a note from Klara with a clipping from Vogue on shopping in Saint-Tropez. Only Leonard, whose narrowed eyes had betrayed his disbelief at her bitten-by-the-travel-bug claim, offered no advice.

  SHE LANDS IN Bordeaux at noon. Driving east, she crosses the Garonne in full view of the Pont de Pierre. A haze of heat hovers over the water, the bridge, older than anything outside a museum she’s ever seen before, a hallucinatory quality to entering a world where the centuries are layered on top of one another and schoolchildren race through thousand-year-old arches and plazas laid out in the time of kings. In San Francisco, the Victorian houses had been their ruins. In Novato, antiquity had been the shopping center on Route 101.

  It’s an hour’s drive to the inn at Tremolat where she’s reserved her first three nights’ stay. She follows the innkeeper upstairs to her room overlooking the gardens behind the church. Closing the shutters, she bathes and climbs still damp under the cool white sheets of the bed. She sleeps until dusk and then, in the evening, walks to the café on the square where the college French she’d boned up on this past month works for an order of grilled trout that arrives with string beans fine as matchsticks.

  For two days, she lackadaisically follows Maggie’s itinerary for the region. She visits the medieval towns of Domme and Sarlat and the monastery in Souillac, picnics on white peaches and soft cheese from the épicerie on the square. Dimly recalling a canoe trip she’d made with Reed when he’d joked that he was going to have to teach her the things kids learn when they go to camp and, lucky her, she’d be spared the bug juice, she rents a canoe in Limeuil, where the Dordogne and Vézère converge and families of ducks make their home. Mostly, though, she is watching: watching to make sure there is no one watching her.

  At night, she reads guidebooks and studies maps. Not about where she is, this gentle cultivated landscape, but where she is going: into the rugged mountains, where heretics and revolutionaries and resistance fighters have hidden and, she presumes, where Reed now lives.

  SHE LEAVES AT DAWN, fighting to keep the little pit, half fear, half excitement, deep in her stomach. The fields are filled with people picking grapes for the annual vendange. Driving south, the farms grow scrappier, the picturesque yielding to light industry. At Montauban, she picks up the autoroute. She stops for gas and a sandwich in a futuristic rest area that abuts the Canal du Midi. Pleasure boats dock adjacent to the pumps, and families eat on outdoor tables surrounded by fierce flies and the roar of the highway. She abandons her sandwich after two bites.

  Fifteen kilometers north of the Spanish border, she exits the autoroute and cuts back to the west through the red clay town of Ceret, where she’d read that Picasso had fled one beautiful lover accompanied by another, toward the foothills. The fruit orchards disappear as she climbs and the towns thin to an occasional hamlet. The bends in the road sharpen and she downshifts, using the gears to control the curves.

  It’s nearly five by the time she reaches La Trinité. She leaves the car in a turn-out across the road from the church, hugging her arms in the cooling air. Across the valley, she can see the jagged peaks of the Pyrenees, the tallest already snowcapped. She’d expected a village, but there is only the church, a phone booth and a bulletin board with postings about the surrounding parkland. The little pit, now almost all fear, rises up as she thinks about how many leaps there’d been between the scrap of paper and this church.

  The iron door is open. Inside, it’s dim, the only light coming from a stand of prayer candles. A coin box requesting money to help pay for the electricity hangs next to a switch. She puts in a five-franc piece and flips it on. A faint spot shines on the altar where Jesus with outstretched hands is flanked by a man and a woman. Serpentine columns laden with marble grapes surround the threesome.

  A woman with a lace kerchief tied under her chin plods flat-footed through the doorway. She turns off the spot. “C’est fermé, mademoiselle.” Rena follows her out to the courtyard. She asks if there are lodgings in Prunet. The woman shakes her head. She points up the road. “Il faut aller à Saint-Marcel.”

  It takes twenty minutes to reach Saint Marcel. Two men drink and smoke under a Cin Cin umbrella in front of a grim auberge. Inside, the proprietor leads her to a room on the top floor dominated by a massive armoire with a crack in the mirror. She leaves her bags and then, in the waning light, takes a walk through the village. Women sit in their aprons on the steps of the ancient stone houses. Teenagers with a tape player have congregated near the phone booth outside the post office, the girls smoking and dancing, the boys just smoking.

  She eats at the auberge, one of three diners. She watches the bar, which by the end of her meal is populated by a weathered-looking couple, a man in a leather vest and a young couple with their baby in a stroller. She knows that Reed will not simply walk through the door. Yet she half expects him to.

  She waits until after the proprietor’s wife has cleared the table to inquire: the cousin of a friend, she’s forgotten his name, who lives nearby. Tall with blond hair.

  “Non. Il n’y a pas d’américains içi.” The proprietor’s wife tilts her head in the direction of the weathered couple. “Ces gens sont des hollandais. Le seul autre étranger de la région, c’est un canadien qui loue le Mas Gontine. Il est très grand mais il a les cheveux noirs.”

  A Canadian. Very tall with black hair. Inside, Rena laughs. Sammy’s laugh when she’d seen Rena’s shoe-polished curls.

  IN THE MORNING, Rena carries Reed’s Atlas Routier across the street to the épicerie. She buys fresh figs and a bottle of water from a man in a butcher’s apron stiff from starch. After she pays, she asks for directions to the Mas Gontine. The man directs her back toward Prunet. Left at the sign for Col Fortou and then the first right onto an unpaved road. Au bout de la route.

  She packs up her things and pays for the room. Driving toward Prunet in the morning light, she can see the wild blackberries in the bushes along the road. Every hundred feet, the trees open to reveal the valley dotted with squares of farmland. It’s a landscape with extraordinary depth, one thing rolling into the next: grazing pastures for sheep, bales of hay ready to be moved into the barns for winter, always, at the horizon, the mountains stacked like dishes.

  Turning onto the dirt road, she’s uncertain if she feels more nervous about finding Reed or a large Canadian with black hair. The lane leads into a ravine edged with the gnarled roots of the trees
above. The car bumps over the stones. At the end is a wooden gate with a sign: MAS GONTINE.

  She parks outside the gate, from where she can see the back of the old mas, so laden with vines that it appears to have grown right into the earth. She unlatches the gate and walks down the path, past an abandoned henhouse and a clothesline with dish towels hanging to dry. She can hear music. John Coltrane. Her heart pounds. Rounding the bend, she sees the stone steps leading to the open door. She climbs the stairs and peers into the dark.

  “Yoo-hoo,” she intends to holler. Her voice is barely above a whisper. She knocks on the doorjamb.

  A figure wrapped in a towel approaches. A shadow shades his face. He squints into the sunlight where she’s shivering. Rolls of fat drape his belly; his hair, an inky black, is thin and coarse. Only in the fine nose and the sweep of his athlete’s shoulders can she detect the traces of Reed’s past leonine beauty.

  He puts his arms around her, lifting her slightly. His skin smells of things fermented, his breath of nicotine. Releasing her, he grins. “Well done, Giraffe.”

  WHILE REED SHOWERS and dresses, she surveys the kitchen: an ancient fireplace flanked by pots large enough to boil laundry, a modern stove, a small window adorned with a spider’s web, a bachelor’s refrigerator stocked with wine and cookies and a bag of espresso beans. On the shelf, she finds a carton of sterilized milk. No tea. While the coffee brews, she walks to her car and brings in her things. She washes the figs and makes a tray of coffee, sliced figs and cookies.

  They breakfast on a table in a grassy clearing in front of the house. From here, she can see how the mas—in parts, Reed tells her, over nine hundred years old—is built into the hillside. Wooden doors with metal closures lead to the place where the animals were once lodged, home now to an old washing machine and a pair of fruit bats. Among the peaks in the distance, Reed points out Canigou, a sacred site for the Catalans. To the left, a peach orchard. To the right, a pasture for a neighbor’s sheep.

  In the sunlight, she can see the crow’s-feet that spread out from Reed’s eyes, the skin underneath soft and bumpy like the rind of an overripe fruit.

  He sees her looking. “I know. I’ve gone to shit. Penance for my sins.” He touches his brow. “Saul the innocent probably has a brow like a baby’s ass.”

  “He does look pretty good for someone locked up for four years.” “Four years?”

  “Yes.”

  Reed closes his eyes, presses the lids with his fingers. A minute or more passes before he speaks. “I reached Bria in Tenerife right before I came here. She told me she’d informed the police about Saul. His role was so small—I assumed he’d gotten off on parole.” He lowers his hands. “Four years. Long time behind bars.”

  “You didn’t expect she’d tell them about Saul?”

  “No. First of all, I never thought she’d get nabbed. She grew up on smuggling; her old man used to smuggle diamonds out of Cape Town. Christ, she remembers diamonds taped inside her diaper. And I’d scripted this whole worst-case scenario for her—what to do if she got caught. How to call me, pretending I was her lawyer. I figured it would take them a day or two after no one showed up to realize it was a ploy, but by then I’d have gotten the loot in Tenerife and hightailed it out of there. She could tell them about me and try to use that to bargain her way out.”

  He pushes his chair back from the table. His shoulders are slumped, his eyes cast down toward the lax gut. “I still can’t figure out what happened. I couldn’t believe it when she told me she’d given them Saul. I was sure he was home free on this one. His role was such small change. He supplied the list of drugs and the pharmacist’s schedule, in exchange for which he got his tab with Fabio—that was the dealer he owed money to—wiped out and just enough stash to detox himself with.”

  Reed takes a pack of Gauloises from his pants pocket. “My best guess is they played hardball with her and she got scared. Or maybe Fabio got to her and threatened that if they found out about him, he’d get back at her so she gave them Saul as a diversion.”

  “How’d you end up here?”

  “From Tenerife, I caught a boat to Agadir in Morocco. I hid out for a couple of months in Marrakech, used some of the pills to wean myself from the cocaine, then sold the rest in Tangiers, where someone got me a Canadian passport. I came here on that. Robert Allen. A bookkeeper from Ontario with a small inheritance from an aunt.” He puts the cigarette to his mouth but doesn’t light it. “Why four years?”

  “It was the manslaughter charge.”

  “No one was hurt.”

  “The pharmacist, Kim Sun, miscarried. She was nine weeks pregnant. She lost the baby a few days after the burglary.”

  They sit in silence, Reed staring off at the horizon, the unlit cigarette still dangling from his lips, the platter of figs browning in the sun.

  IN THE AFTERNOON, he takes her on a drive along the treacherously windy D618. They’re in his car, a used Fiat he bought for cash in Marseilles. They round hairpin turns without guardrails, the rocky riverbed a sheer drop below.

  Reed rolls down the window, lights a cigarette. “That asshole Fabio. He sent an idiot to do the job. We had a list typed up of the pharmaceuticals that were supposed to be handed over. A robot could have done it. Then, at the last minute, this moron asks her to throw in something for his girlfriend’s period cramps. So he can save the four ninety-nine.”

  “So he pulled a gun?”

  “Something she said made him think she was messing with him.” He’s driving with one hand, smoking with the other. He takes the single-lane blind curves without slowing first.

  “What do you do if there’s a car coming in the other direction?” “One of us goes off the cliff.”

  Reed glances at her. With his eyes off the road, she covers her own. She hears the ashtray open and close, then feels the car slowly decelerating. “Sorry. Nasty joke. Don’t worry. I know these roads like the back of my hand.”

  Reaching the highway, they drive west to Prades, where they stop at an épicerie opened for the evening trade. Reed hands her a wad of francs and stays in the car while she selects apples, pears, garlic, lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, a bunch of carrots with the dirt still clumped in the tops, then points to the fusilli, green tea and olive oil.

  Back at the house, she boils water, washes lettuce, chops tomatoes. Reed puts on a CD of Casals, who, he tells her, came from these mountains. Through the window, she watches him build a bonfire in the stone hollow next to the chicken coop. He spreads out an old blanket close to the fire and then scrubs the outdoor table with a sponge. He puts a citronella candle on top.

  Rena carries the food outside on the same tray from the morning. The lights from the village across the valley sparkle in the distance. They finish the second bottle of Rousillon wine with their cheese and fruit.

  She is drinking too much. The numbers blur together. Eleven months since Reed came to live here, forty thousand dollars from the sale of the pills he’d mailed to Tenerife.

  “Sixteen left.” Reed points to the chicken coop. “In a fireproof box. Enough to get me through another winter. Then I’ll have to get me some work. Pick peaches. Dig ditches. Something.”

  “What do you do now with your time?”

  “There’s no such thing anymore. Just the hands on the clock cycling round and round. I do the basics here around the house. Noontime, I go into town for bread and lunch at the café. It’s pretty much straight through buzz-on from then. Yeah, yeah. I have a night every six weeks or so when I vow to start up some sort of self-improvement thing.” Reed laughs. “I’m sure that’s what Saul did. Start running. Teach myself Chinese. Read all of Stendhal in French without the Cliff notes. But by the time the next afternoon rolls around, the only thing that looks good is a bottle.”

  Reed fills both of their glasses. In the fresh air with the woody smell from the fire, the wine slips down her throat. Her thoughts bump into one another. Turning toward her, Reed cups his hand and lights a cigarette and in th
at one gesture she can see the residue of his former grace. The bemused expression when they first met and he told her about his time at Mountain House, where they’d shaved his head and assigned him to scrubbing latrines. The arc of his back and arms when he pounded the stakes for the tent into the hard Sierra ground. A conductor’s quick wave as he flagged a cab for them on rainy nights when she’d visit him at Columbia. Coming from New Haven, she’d felt like his country cousin from Paskokie—squeaky in her blue jeans and parka.

  Reed is smiling at her. “I always thought you were a lovely fawn but too skinny and fragile for me. But looking at you now, I could have a wet dream just sitting here.”

  She stares at his heavy but still handsome face.

  “I can’t say I’m sex-starved. There are two girls from Ceret. They like to visit together.”

  Rena feels her cheeks flush and her heart start to quicken, mortified that he’s turning her on, and when he pushes back his chair and lumbers toward her, leaning over her like a bear gathering up its dinner, a paw sliding inside her shirt, she feels her body responding, stirring from its hibernation: all those years when she felt a taboo between them as though they were siblings, but behind that the belief that he was out of her reach, his kindness toward her the noblesse oblige of the prince to the chambermaid.

  He lifts her out of her chair and onto the blanket near the fire. Stones dig into her back and hot air blows off the fire. He takes a swig from the bottle and hands it to her as he pulls off her pants. She feels embarrassed to hear her breath growing choppy, to notice how much she likes his abundance of flesh. “A condom,” she whispers. Already naked, he runs into the house. Through the open windows, she hears a drawer bang.

  He comes quickly and then moves down her body. He laps at her with exuberance, rolling his tongue in and out of her as if she were an exotic fruit that has to be taken off its pit, and she listens to herself moaning into the stars.

  IN THE MORNING, she feels repulsed by him. The big gut. The boozy consciousness. Repulsed by herself, that she’d been aroused by this debased specimen of a man, the old feeling about their different stations in life having taken sway over the reality of smoky breath and stained fingertips.