“Yes, sir. I do.”
“Well … she is old enough to make up her own mind, I suppose.”
Gerry found it difficult to see his face. “You don’t sound very enthusiastic, sir, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“Why should I mind your saying so? I’m not.”
“Sir – I love Chloe with all my heart. Nobody could take care of her the way that I’m going to take care of her.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
Gerry looked toward Chloe, perplexed. Chloe was rearranging sweet peas in a large glass vase. She said nothing, but smiled to herself.
“Won’t you give us your blessing, then?” asked Gerry.
“I’ll pray for you.”
Just then, Chloe’s mother came in from the garden, carrying a basket full of lettuce and chives.
“It’s so windy out there today,” she complained. She set down her basket, and took off her veiled gardening-hat, and it was then that Gerry saw that she looked almost exactly like Marianne’s mother – the woman in the black woollen dress to whom she had introduced him at the Moulin du Vey. He stared at her, and then he stared at Chloe. He felt as if the day were folding in on itself, like origami.
Chloe came across and possessively took hold of his arm. “Maman, this is my husband-to-be.”
Her mother stared back at Gerry with undisguised dislike. “So, it has come to this, has it?”
Gerry said, “I’m sorry … I’m not too sure what this is all about. All I want to do is to marry Chloe and make her as happy as I can.”
Chloe’s mother picked up her basket of lettuces and walked past him toward the kitchen. At the doorway, she paused. “You will never make anyone happy, Chloe least of all.”
“Take no notice,” Chloe smiled, and kissed Gerry’s cheek. “Mother doesn’t approve of anybody.”
They were married in September at the hotel de ville in Beauvoir. Chloe seemed to have hundreds of relatives, stocky matrons in black suits with hair like scouring-pads, and thin uncles in camphorated pinstripes who chainsmoked and talked racing. A reception was held at the large grey house at Ossuaire, with roast hams and galantines and pickled herring. The sun shone, but it rained, and the wind blew the rain against the garden in golden curtains.
Gerry found Chloe sitting upstairs in her old room. He sat down on the bed next to her and kissed her.
“Are you all right?” he asked her. “You’re looking pale.”
“I’m fine. A little queasy, that’s all.”
“Do you know how much I love you?” he breathed, very close to her ear.
She nodded, and smiled. “That’s why I’m here. That’s why I married you.”
She paused for a moment, and then she said, “That’s why I’m having your child.”
“You’re not—?”
“Pregnant, yes. The doctor confirmed it yesterday.”
“You’re kidding me! Why didn’t you tell me as soon as you knew?”
“Perhaps you would have changed your mind. Perhaps you wouldn’t have married me.”
“Are you crazy? I’m over the moon!”
“Really?”
“Of course really. I’ve just married the most beautiful woman in the world and the most beautiful woman in the world has just told me that she’s carrying my child. Hey, come on downstairs, we have to tell everybody. We have to break open some more champagne!”
She clasped his hand. “No, Gerry, don’t tell everybody. Not on our wedding day. Wait till we come back from Nice.”
He kissed her, and she kissed him back. Before he knew it, she had pushed him back onto the bed and straddled him, hitching up her cream linen skirt to reveal cream stockings with lacy suspenders.
“Chloe—” he protested, but she almost suffocated him with kisses. At the same time, she reached down and yanked open the zipper of his formal black pants.
“Chloe, supposing somebody—” he panted, but there was no stopping her now, even if he’d wanted to stop her. She twisted her skirt up around her waist, and he saw then that she wasn’t wearing any panties.
She grasped his crimson-headed penis and nestled it up between her legs. Then, with a long sigh, she sat down on it, so that it slid right up inside her.
“You’re pregnant,” he gasped. “What about the baby?”
“Don’t worry.” She smiled, as she lifted herself up, and then eased herself down again. “There’s plenty of room for both of you.”
He had never in his life felt so ridiculously happy. His secretary Alexis renamed him “Gerry the Merry” and Carl thought he was on Prozac; but his only stimulus was Chloe, and their new life together, and the prospect of having a child. They flew to Nice for two weeks on honeymoon, and when they came back he started to look for apartments around Caen.
In the second week of October he found a huge newly-decorated apartment overlooking a park on the south-west side of the city. He called Chloe from the realtor’s office, while the realtor beamed at him from across the room and shuffled his papers in approval. Gitanes smoke drifted across the room.
Chloe’s father answered. “She has just left.”
“Is she going to be long? I have some good news, that’s all.”
“I don’t know. She said perhaps two hours. She went to the village.”
“All right, then. I’ll see you later.”
“Very well.” Chloe’s father was no longer gratutitously rude to him, but he never missed an opportunity to make it plain that he disliked and mistrusted him. Chloe’s mother rarely spoke to him at all.
Gerry drove back toward Mont St-Michel in an odd, unsettled mood. The sun had been shining all day but now the sky had turned thundery. By the time he reached the water-meadows, the clouds behind the monastery were inky-black, and lightning was flickering in the distance.
The road curved ahead of him, between the nodding trees and the windblown bushes. Just past Beavour, he was overtaken by a large silver Citroën, driving so fast that it slewed from one side of the road to the other. He heard its tires howl as it slewed around the bend just in front of him.
Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong. For some reason, he felt compelled to accelerate, and to catch up with it, even to overtake it, as if—
As if wherever it was going, he ought to get there first.
He drove faster and faster – much faster than he usually dared. The narrow road unwound in front of him like a firehose. On the sixth or seventh bend, he caught sight of the Citroën’s tail-end, and sped breathtakingly fast down the next straightaway. Lightning flashed; thunder grumbled; and huge fat drops of rain began to spatter his windshield.
He swerved around the next bend and the Citroën was in sight. But something else was in sight, too. Along a narrow diagonal pathway, a girl in a primrose-yellow dress was cycling, slow and measured, making her way toward the road. Her head was held high. She could have been singing or cycling with her eyes closed.
God, it was Chloe.
Everything fell into place in front of his eyes. Everything was here – just the same as the day when he had struck the young girl in the yellow dress. The lightning striking the spires of Mont St-Michel. The water-meadows, spangled with light and shadow. Chloe, cycling, his pregnant darling. The Citroën braking, already braking, smoke billowing out of its tires, dark rubber-marks slashing the road.
Then Chloe flying, tumbling. Her bicycle pedalling itself into the ditch. And the Citroën speeding away, not stopping, driving so fast that by the time Gerry had stopped, and stepped out onto the road, even the sound of it had vanished.
She lay face-down and blood ran out of her hair and into the grass. He picked up her skinny-wristed arm and felt for her pulse, but he knew that she was dead. It wasn’t just a matter of vital signs – he knew. It was fate, it was punishment, it was wheels within wheels.
He turned her over, very gently. Her hair flew in the wind. Half of her face was perfect. The other half had been smashed against the road. One eye
lay dangling on her cheek like the eye of a broken doll.
He pressed his hand against her swollen stomach, but of course it was too early to feel anything, or too late. His child was dying, or dead, and there was nothing he could do to save her.
He stood up, and walked a few mechanical steps along the road. Then he knelt on the verge and started to sob. He felt like an empty jug that had been filled to overflowing with pure grief. He couldn’t do anything but sob, and sob, until his throat hurt, and he fell face forward into the grass.
He was still lying there when he heard footsteps approach him. He lifted his head, and looked up, but the sun was in his eyes. A man in a grey suit was standing over him. Not far away, a woman was kneeling over Chloe’s body. Her primrose-yellow dress billowed in the breeze.
“He killed her,” said Gerry, in a swollen voice. “He killed her and he didn’t stop.”
The man nodded. “They don’t realize, do they, that they’re not killing just one woman, but many? They’re killing a lover, and a wife, and a daughter, and a friend. They’re killing a pretty girl that you might glimpse on a bus, and never see again. They’re killing a young student who meets her boyfriend outside an art gallery, on the day that it happens to be closed.”
He paused, and then he said, “They leave so many lives unlived. They cause so much grief to so many people. Perhaps, if they were to feel that same grief themselves …?”
Gerry lay face-down and couldn’t move, as if the weight of his grief was greater than gravity; as if a huge stone had been placed on his back. The man in the grey suit walked away and left him to rise as best he could.
He was sitting in the departure lounge at Charles de Gaulle, waiting for his flight back to New York, when he heard the girl laughing.
He lowered his copy of the Herald Tribune and looked across at her. She was sitting amongst a group of friends – six or seven girls in their early twenties – but she was obviously the prettiest and the most vivacious. Her blonde hair shone in the sunlight that filled the terminal, her laugh rang like bells.
He sat watching her for a very long time without blinking. He looked very tired and grey, and his eyes were still puffy from nights of hopeless weeping. After a while, she turned her head and caught sight of him watching her. She turned back to her friends, but then she glanced at him again, and then again, and gave him a quick, coquettish smile.
She looked so much like Chloe, and Stephanie, and the girl on the bus in Rouen. She looked so much like Marianne. The same hair, the same cheekbones, the same endearing weakness in her mouth. But this time he didn’t feel elated, or excited. This time the feeling of grief pressed down on him harder than ever.
He folded his newspaper and stood up. Leaving his flight bag on the seat, he walked toward the girl and stood right behind her. One of her friends nudged her, and she turned and looked up at him.
“Have we met before?” he asked her.
She laughed, and all her friends laughed, too. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I think I would have remembered you.”
“Your name’s not Chloe, or Marianne?”
“No, it isn’t. It’s Bernice.”
“Bernice. Ah. You don’t play the cello by any chance?”
“Yes, I do. But I’m only learning. One day—”
“One day you’ll be famous. Yes, I know. One day you’ll be able to live in a big city in America, where you’ve always wanted to live.”
The girl turned to her friends, perplexed. Then they all giggled again. “You must have met him before!” said one of them. “He knows you better than I do!”
Gerry said, “Your watch. Do you mind if I see your watch?”
The girl protectively covered it with her hand. “It isn’t valuable.”
“I know. But I just want to look at it.”
Cautiously, she lifted her hand toward him, and he took hold of her slender, blue-veined wrist. She was wearing a cheap gold watch with a red strap. On the dial was printed the brand name Hi Tyme, but the second foot of the ‘H’ had been scratched, so that it looked as if read ‘Pi Tyme’.
Pity me.
He took out his billfold, counted out 7,500 F and gave it to her.
“What’s this for?” she said. “I can’t take this!”
“Don’t you remember? It’s all part of the game.”
“But this is so much money!”
Gerry gently touched her shoulder, and gave her a regretful smile. “This time I want you to have it.”
“This time?”
There were tears in his eyes. He couldn’t tell her. He couldn’t tell her anything.
“He’s mad!” said one of Bernice’s friends. “Look at him, he’s crying!”
But Bernice stared up at him and her eyes were as grey as a winter lake.
“I love you,” he said. “And I’m sorry.”
He walked off, across the departure lounge, and back along the moving walkways that would take him to the terminal exits. He didn’t even bother to pick up his flight bag. Bernice watched him go as if she were gradually beginning to remember who he was; or who he might have been.
“You ought to go after him!” urged one of her friends.
But Bernice lifted her hand, and said, “Un moment,” as if she were expecting something to happen.
Gerry walked out of the airport exit into the first blinding light of a sunny shower. He didn’t see the Air France coach that was speeding toward him, and even if he had, he may not have tried to get out of its way. He heard a horrible screeching and then something knocked him so hard that he flew across the concourse and smashed into a glass bus shelter.
He wasn’t aware of much else. He lay face-down, his stomach penetrated by a large triangular piece of glass, and he could see blood dripping onto the wet asphalt in front of him.
Somebody said, “What is your name, my son?”
“Gerry,” he bubbled.
“Te absolvo, Gerry. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”
From where he was lying, he couldn’t see Bernice, who was standing in the crowd that surrounded him white-faced, her hair blowing in the wind. Unlike everybody else, she looked extraordinarily tranquil, almost satisfied, and after a while she turned and walked away, as if she knew nothing at all about pain, or misfortune, or grief, and never would.
Her parents were waiting for her on the corner, dressed in black.
The Secret Shih-Tan
Los Angeles, California
In a town where lunch is taken even more seriously than death, it is essential for one’s image to be seen eating at the right places. Personally I never bothered to eat at the right place. I used to go to the Palm on Santa Monica for steak and lobster because it was good and I used to have salads at Butterfields on Sunset because it meant that I didn’t have to use the car. But the standard of cooking in the best restaurants in Los Angeles can rival any cooking in the world, and the only thing that grieves me is that most of the customers are more concerned with where they are than what they’re eating.
For the restaurateur, this snobbery can be expensive. When I was researching this story, I heard time and time again of diners who pilfered the ashtrays and cutlery of elite restaurants, just to show their friends that they had been there. In one year, La Scala lost over $5,000 in stolen wine goblets, cappucino cups and cutlery. At La Cave, manager Dean Evans used crystal ashtrays to dress up his tables, and was appalled to see the wife of a judge slipping one of them into her purse. As a counterploy, he gift-wrapped another ashtray and presented it to her as she left, saying, “There – now you have a pair.”
The Secret Shih-Tan is another story of predatory diners. But these diners, for once, are not interested in where they dine, or whether they can take home a souvenir. These diners are another face of fear.
THE SECRET SHIH-TAN
‘Men eat the flesh of grass-fed and grain-fed animals, deer eat grass, centipedes find snakes tasty, and hawks and falcons relish mice. Of these
four, which knows how food ought to taste?’ – Wang Ni.
Craig’s father had always told him that cooking was just like sex. It aroused you, it empowered you. It enabled you to play God with other people’s senses. Afterward it left you feeling sweaty and exhausted, but the first inklings of what you might cook next were already teasing you like a girl who wouldn’t stop playing with your softened penis.
Tonight, Craig had cooked over 112 covers since the Burn-the-Tail Restaurant had opened at six o’clock, and now he was sitting on an upturned broccoli box in the back yard, drinking ice-cold Evian water out of the bottle and listening to the clattering and clamouring of dishes being washed.
He smeared his eyes with the back of his hand. He was so tired that he couldn’t even think of anything to think. But he knew that there was fresh carp being delivered in the morning, and there were so many amazing things you could do with fresh carp. Carp with dry white wine, horseradish and prunes. Carp with celeriac and leeks, simmered in lager beer and dry white wine. Carp stuffed with scallions and ham and winter bamboo shoots.
Craig didn’t look at all like somebody who had been obsessed by cooking ever since he was old enough to stand on a chair and reach the stove-top. He was twenty-eight years old, as gangly as a stork, with a thin, sharply-etched face and short hair that stuck up like Stan Laurel’s. But both his parents were brilliant cooks, and had inspired him to play in the kitchen in the same way that the other kids used to take piano lessons.
His father George was French-Canadian, and used to cook for La Bella Fontana at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. His mother Blossom was half-Chinese, and had taught him everything from the four levels of flame to the eleven shapes by the time he was nine. Between the two of them, they had given him the ability to be able turn the simplest ingredients into dishes about which Los Angeles magazine had said, ‘there’s no other word for Craig Richard’s cooking except erotic.’
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