by Lily Tuck
Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived
short stories
Lily Tuck
In memory of my father, Rodolphe Solmsen,
and to Georges Borchardt
In the air, that’s where your roots are, over there, in the air.
—Paul Celan
Contents
Epigraph
La Mayonette
L’Esprit de L’Escalier
Verdi
Fortitude
Gold Leaf
Second Wife
Horses
Limbo
The View from Madama Butterfly’s House
Rue Guynemer
Ouarzazate
Next of Kin
Hotter
Dream House
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Lily Tuck
Copyright
About the Publisher
La Mayonette
We arrive at La Mayonette very late at night. My husband, Charles, and I had calculated eight hours for the drive but it took much longer since we did not take into account the winding part on the map between Geneva and Lyons—that part alone took five hours. Also, not realizing how far we still had to go, we had stopped along the way to have a picnic lunch and, lastly, just after it had got dark, the two bicycles that were attached, upside down, to the roof rack of the car worked themselves loose and we had to stop once more to reattach them. “If the bicycles fall off, someone could get hurt. Seriously hurt,” I kept saying to Charles, as I tried to hold the flashlight steady and as he tried to tighten the bungee cords that held the bicycles down, and this, too, took up more time. Now, and for once uncomplaining, our two boys are huddled against each other in the back of the car asleep as we drive up to Francine’s house to get the key to La Mayonette. We wake her up but she does not seem to mind. She was afraid, she tells us, that we had had an accident; she is relieved to see us. Her long hair is tied into a single old-fashioned braid and hangs down her back, and the bright-green Mexican dress she is wearing as a nightgown is wrinkled from her sleep. She does not look any different since I last saw her, and we embrace warmly. I introduce her to Charles whom she has never met. She gets us the key, a long iron key, like a key to a city, and tells us how to find the house. We kiss again and say à demain.
La Mayonette is painted a rough yellow—the same yellow van Gogh used when he painted the houses there—and although there are several other buildings, mostly farm buildings, next to them, it looks garish and out of place. In the morning before I am properly awake, I can hear roosters crowing and a tractor starting up and setting off down the road. When I look around at the unfamiliar room—last night, not bothering to unpack, barely turning on a light, we all went straight to bed—I see an ordinary room sparsely furnished with a bedside table, two straight-backed chairs, and an armoire; only the wallpaper seems inappropriate. More than inappropriate: the wallpaper disturbs me. The design on it is a profile of a woman with red hair and dark sharp features, repeated a dizzying amount of times all around us. To make matters worse, the wallpaper was hung by an amateur. The faces do not match at the seams and are distorted—where there should be a nose, there is a chin, where there should be a mouth, hair.
In the next room, I can hear our two boys talking; their words are as distinct as if no wall separated us. “Shit,” the younger boy says, “the bastard flew around me all night. I never got to sleep.” He makes a buzzing sound and the older boy laughs. Something crashes to the floor and they both laugh. Already smiling, Charles opens his eyes and reaches an arm toward me. “We are going to have a good summer,” he promises.
“In college, I read a story about a woman who goes crazy looking at the wallpaper in her bedroom,” I answer.
La Mayonette is the name of the house we have rented in the Var district of France for the month of July. The house belongs to Francine’s family and it was my idea to rent it, because of Francine, who was my classmate and friend a long time ago when I was a student in France, and because of the countryside. The countryside is hot and dusty and the azure sea and the crowded Riviera beaches, which are a few kilometers away and only a twenty-minute drive from the house, seem very remote from La Mayonette. Here the land is given over to vineyards and orchards and is contained by a ragged ring of scrub mountains on which grow patches of wild rosemary and thyme.
We are soon settled in La Mayonette and the days establish themselves into an easy routine. The two boys bicycle and run around as if they had always lived here and as if it does not matter that they are in France. The bread man delivers a loaf of flat round country bread every morning; and Jacqueline, who lives in one of the buildings clustered around La Mayonette, comes twice a week to clean and do the wash. She is silent and efficient and I am relieved that I do not have to speak to her and tell her what to do. Even so, I warn Charles to hide his money, his valuables; I do likewise. We learn our way around Pierrefeu, the little village perched on a hill six kilometers away. From there, we tour the caves to taste the wine grown in the region and end up buying two large plastic bonbonnes of pink and red wine—more than enough for a month, Charles says. We also buy a quantity of food: olive oil, tomatoes, garlic, fish, fruit—mainly the juicy yellow peaches that are in season.
On the Fourth of July, the younger boy says that he wants to bake a cake, but, inexplicably, he makes mashed potatoes instead. The kitchen is the largest room in the house and the one we use the most. A long oak table stands in the middle, and already, the tabletop is crowded with pitchers of wild flowers and china bowls of peaches. We have brought in two armchairs from the living room, and Francine is sitting in one of them and her two daughters, who are a little younger than our two boys, are sitting together in the other. The little French girls stare at our boys but do not speak to them, although I hope that by the end of the month they will. The two boys are mashing the potatoes with vigor and unaccustomed camaraderie, no doubt for the benefit of the little French girls.
Francine, her husband, Didier, and the two little girls stay for dinner. In addition to the mashed potatoes, we eat roast lamb and ratatouille. Afterward, Charles and Didier light firecrackers while the rest of us sit on the terrace and watch. I hold the younger boy by the arm to keep him out of the way and safe, but he manages to squirm out of my grasp. I don’t much like fireworks—they make me afraid of burning flesh and dismemberment—but so as not to spoil the fun, I cheer with the others. “Bravo!” I shout. When the fireworks are done, we sit quietly and a little anticlimactically in the dark but star-filled Var night. The little girls have fallen asleep on Francine and Didier’s laps and our two boys have disappeared inside the house, probably to read comic books. I look up at the sky for shooting stars—lovelier than fireworks.
La Mayonette, Francine explains to us, belonged to her aunt, her father’s sister. When she was young, the aunt was very beautiful—Francine has seen photographs. She painted, she wrote poetry—Francine is not sure which but in any case the aunt was considered artistic. Mainly, the aunt kept to herself, Francine says, except that she loved dogs. When she died, there were more than a dozen dogs in the house—all kinds of dogs, strays for the most part—and, as a result, the people around here were afraid of her. Amongst themselves, they said she was crazy or else they said she was a witch—almost one and the same thing. Francine says she remembers coming over to La Mayonette as a child, for tea. Her aunt was fairly old by then, or, anyway, she seemed old to Francine; even so there was nothing about her to be afraid of. Her aunt had gotten quite stout and the dogs were friendly and benign. Poor woman, Francine says with a sigh, she was b
orn with a third nipple—only Francine does not know the word for nipple in English, she uses the French word, mamelon. Of course, Francine adds, her aunt never married. No one speaks for a moment, then Francine says, “I worried a lot about it when my daughters were born, in case it is hereditary. One never knows, you know.” She laughs a little and Didier makes a joke of it—something about more breasts to caress, he says, in French—and we all laugh.
Later, in bed, I confuse Francine’s aunt with the woman in the wallpaper—no longer just a profile, the woman is depicted in her entirety and she is naked. Also, she is grotesque: on her body where there should be a leg, there is an arm, where there should be a hand, there is a foot. Charles touches me, and relieved, I wake up.
Every morning, Charles and I walk and our two boys bicycle down the drive of La Mayonette and across the main road to Francine’s house. She has a swimming pool and a tennis court. Francine and I like to lie in the sun and watch while the children swim. In the water, they are friendlier, and the two boys are learning a bit of French. Francine and I talk: I talk in English, Francine answers me in French—this way it is easier for us both. Predictably, we talk about our children, our marriages, and what we do. Francine is a potter. We also reminisce about our student days and a trip we once took together to Egypt. We laugh when we talk about Egypt—what Francine remembers about the trip I have completely forgotten and vice versa. I remember that on our last night, in Luxor, I slept with our tour guide and, afraid that Francine would disapprove, I did not tell her then—nor, although I am tempted to, do I tell her now. Francine sunbathes topless and, although unaccustomed, I do likewise. My breasts are not very big and when I lie flat on my back, one hardly notices them. Francine’s breasts are bigger, and in spite of myself I think about her aunt.
Charles and Didier play tennis, and although Charles is tall and lanky and Didier is short and wiry, they seem evenly matched. One morning Charles wins, the next Didier wins. From the swimming pool, one can hear the ball bouncing and the two men keeping score. Since they keep score in French, to me it sounds as if they were playing another game, not tennis.
Charles disapproves of topless sunbathing on account of our two boys, he says, and on account of Didier, too, and when I hear that they have finished their game I put back the top of the bathing suit, and so does Francine. It has happened, however, that on one or two occasions I have pretended to fumble with the straps of my bathing suit. I have put back the top at the last minute so that when Charles and Didier walk from the tennis court to the swimming pool Didier can see me.
This morning while we were walking down the drive to go to Francine’s pool, the younger boy, who was riding his bicycle ahead of us, was nearly hit by a car. The car that nearly hit him did not try to stop or to brake for him. At first, because the speeding car was between us and the boy, we imagined the worst had occurred and it was only when we ran across the road and saw that he was sitting cross-legged on the side of the road holding on to his arm, his bicycle on the ground next to him—the spokes of the front wheel bent, handlebars twisted wrong way around—that we realized that he was all right. Or almost all right.
On the way to the hospital in Toulon my husband drives and the younger boy sits on my lap. I stroke the back of his blond head at the same time that I try to protect him from the car’s jolting motion. I also try not to look at his arm, which is already swollen and red and is dangling at such an odd angle that it looks as if it belonged on his other side. In the backseat, the older boy does not utter a sound, so that when we arrive at the hospital I have forgotten about him. “Oh, you are here, too,” I say distractedly.
Only after we have been admitted to the emergency room and a nurse is cutting away his T-shirt with a pair of blunt-nosed scissors does the younger boy start to cry.
“Does it hurt a lot?” I ask him.
Sitting up on the examining table, the younger boy crosses his good arm protectively over his narrow, bare chest, he shakes his head no.
“Don’t worry, we’ll buy you a T-shirt just like it,” I promise him lamely.
Nevertheless, while the doctor goes about setting his arm, I have to leave the room.
Back at La Mayonette, I suggest to the younger boy whose arm is now encased in shiny white plaster and held securely to his chest with a sling, that after all he has had to endure he should take a rest. He can lie down on my bed in our room for a while and I will read to him. But he refuses. He says he wants to go along with his brother to the swimming pool; even if he cannot swim, he can at least show the little French girls his cast, his sling. I don’t insist. Instead, I tell Charles to go ahead with them if he wants to, but that I want to stay home.
It is around noon. Outside my bedroom window, I can hear the farmhands taking their midday break. Their lunch is spread out on the ground, as well as bottles of water and wine. The men are talking and laughing and I would have to concentrate to understand what they are saying, but I don’t. I only listen to the sounds they make. Tomorrow is Bastille Day and I think that I can already hear the echoes of the holiday in their laughter. It is a laughter I cannot share and I envy their hard-earned, simple pleasures. From all four walls of the bedroom, dozens of sharp-faced, red-haired women are staring at me. “He is my boy,” I say out loud and take off one of my sandals and hurl it as hard as I can at the woman nearest me in the wallpaper. I take off the other sandal and do the same thing, then I start to cry.
As a farewell dinner on our last night in Egypt, a méchoui was held, a few miles out in the desert. From Luxor, we were given the choice of getting there on horseback or on camelback. Most of the group, including Francine—she is frightened of horses—chose to go on camelback. I chose horseback, as did our tour guide. At the méchoui, there were Bedouins dressed in burnooses who roasted an entire sheep on a spit. There was a band playing indigenous music while a belly dancer with a sparkling stone pasted to her navel gyrated ceaselessly. A great deal of wine was served which we drank out of silver-looking cups. Afterward, on the way back to Luxor, the full moon was so bright that I could see the desert as clearly as if it were noon. The little Arab mare I was riding, unused, perhaps, to being out so late, was a bit nervous. Her gait, a half prance, half trot, rocked me pleasingly in the saddle. On his horse next to me, the tour guide rode so close that his knee pressed almost painfully into mine. This, too, added to my mare’s excitement.
Although it is Bastille Day, we are subdued. The two boys are quiet. The younger one is tired—the cast, now decorated with drawings and signatures (even the cleaning woman, Jacqueline, has written her name on it) is bulky and uncomfortable—and he is also depressed. To try to cheer us up, Charles decides to drive to Ramatuelle for dinner. He takes the longer but more scenic road and, going around a sharp curve, we come perilously close to having a head-on collision with a van coming from the other direction; no one dares to say a word. In Ramatuelle, we walk single file down the picturesque narrow streets. On a whim, I announce that I want to go to the cemetery and visit the grave of Gérard Philipe, the actor. Our two boys have never heard of Gérard Philipe but they humor me as I tell them how Gérard Philipe died too young and at the height of his career and how the entire country mourned him. The cemetery overlooks the sea and is quite beautiful; even after all these years, there are a half a dozen bouquets of flowers heaped on top of Gérard Philipe’s grave. Oddly, the cemetery makes me worry less about the younger boy’s broken arm, and we enjoy our dinner in the restaurant. We stay and listen to the village band and watch the fireworks display. This time I am not frightened. It is late again when we drive home and in the car I hold Charles’ free hand.
When I wake up the next morning I get out of bed and get dressed without waking Charles. I drive to Pierrefeu. Already, the streets there are crowded with housewives doing their morning shopping. To feel as if I belong with them, I buy milk and oranges; I also buy fresh croissants. A group of cyclists wearing yellow-and-black jerseys are getting ready for a race. They call out to ea
ch other: “Jean-Claude,” “Jean-Pierre,” “Jean-Marie”—all of them have double names—as they make their last-minute adjustments to their bikes. I stand and watch them for a while and one of the cyclists looks up and sees me watching him. I smile and tell him bonne chance. I am still smiling when the cyclist makes a braying noise at me—the high-pitched honking bray of a lonely donkey. He does it again so that the other cyclists with the double names look up from their bikes and laugh loudly. Startled and ashamed, I quickly turn away. I realize that I have no business being there and that I have been gone much longer than I intended. Charles and our two boys must be awake by now and wondering where I am. I walk back to where I parked the car and drive home to La Mayonette as fast as I dare; as fast, no doubt, as the person who drove the car that nearly hit my son.
The last week of July is much hotter and we are not as energetic. We get up later and later each morning, and from our bed I count the woman’s profiles. One hundred and seven—not including the profiles I cannot see, behind the armoire. Each time I get a different number, I start counting her profiles all over again. Also, Charles and I do not make love as often; when we do, my eyes are shut and I make believe that Charles is Didier. Afterward, I blame the red and pink wines we drank the night before; I blame the one hundred and seven profiles of the woman in the wallpaper watching—no, spying—on us; I blame myself. Outside, the air seems dense and hard to breathe; in the house, there are many more mosquitos and flies. The younger boy collects them in an empty jelly jar which he leaves on the table in the kitchen. I want to tell him not to, but I pick on him enough as it is. Also, he complains about how his arm in the cast itches and he does not sleep at night. Since he cannot swim, he spends most of the morning in the driveway under the pine trees where it is cooler, picking piñon nuts with the little French girls. Our boys tower over the little French girls, but at least they are speaking together. The two big bonbonnes of wine are nearly empty and neither Charles nor I can believe that we have drunk so much wine. “It does not seem possible,” Charles says, shaking his head. Already, I am anxious at the prospect of leaving La Mayonette and I wonder when Francine and I will see each other again.