He looked at me, his mouth screwed down at one side. “I don’t remember. We can’t stay here”—he raised his index finger to signal the waitress—“it’s a fucking ghost town, and frog sounds like a head cold to me. I’ll get this.”
HE WANTED to go somewhere new, but I wasn’t interested in Germany (I’d had enough of it in Switzerland), and he thought Italy was going to be mainly farms. We compromised and settled on Strasbourg, a midsized town on the border between France and Germany. Louis’s guidebook described it as “a relatively sedate town with some lovely gardens.” Avignon it had called “a town of famous bridges, from the songs of your childhood.”
In the Avignon station, I bought a blank notebook, thinking I’d keep a diary. I hadn’t written in a diary since I was a teenager (my last entry, from 1977, if I remember correctly, was WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING TO ME?). Already I’d seen some things and had some thoughts I wanted to remember, and I believed that if Louis saw me being contemplative he might start to feel like talking. I limbered up with a postcard on the train as Louis was getting us two Kronenbergs.
Honey—you’ll probably get this after I get back, but I want you to know I’m taking notes for our trip. You’ll love the south of France—it looks just the same as the paintings you like. We’re on our way to Strasbourg now, which is supposed to have some nice gardens! Love you, Paul.
The front of the postcard was that famous picture of two Parisians kissing. Funny how uncomfortable her hand looks, I thought.
Louis came back with the beers.
“You looking forward to Strasbourg?” I asked him.
“It’s still frog, but I guess it’ll do.”
“They speak German there.”
“Mm,” he said. He flicked open his newspaper and folded it back. It was USA Today, and the front page featured a picture of an American bishop kicking a soccer ball. “You having a good time over there?” he said from behind the newspaper.
“Great,” I said. “You?”
“Just like I thought.”
I leaned across and pulled the paper down. “You keep saying stuff like that. Are you not enjoying this? We can do something else if you want.”
“Naw, it’s great, honest it is. You’re going to love Strasbourg.”
“How do you know?”
“It just sounded like you really wanted to see it.”
I let the paper go and he raised it over his face again. Louis seems different, I wrote in the notebook. I looked up from time to time to see the fields and bridges and piles of wood speeding by. A couple of children waved at the train from a street in a small village. European children always seemed kind of grown-up to me. I wrote, Louis has been acting like some other part of him is arriving in the next few days. He’s a little boring, like he was when we were roommates.
“What are you writing?” Louis asked.
“Just some stuff about traveling.”
“Don’t write shit about me in there.”
I flicked the back of his paper. “I’m taking notes on your condition.” He snorted.
IN COLMAR, a woman got on the train and sat down beside Louis, who was sleeping now, the newspaper crushed against his chest, his mouth open. The woman was wearing a yellow rain slicker, like the ones kids wear when you see them running for school buses. I guessed she was around thirty. She had a perm and wet brown eyes, and if you’d run into her on a train in Toronto, you’d figure she came down from Sudbury. But she was French, and the styleless perm looked fashionable on her. She wore a cornflower-blue cashmere pullover under the raincoat, and the two garments against each other seemed casually erotic, as though she’d stood in her closet that morning in her black underwear and thought about what might make her feel good.
It was nearing dusk, and we were getting closer to Strasbourg. Outside the train, the language of billboards was shifting back and forth. One showed the new Lexus and a woman in a bikini standing in front of it with her arms crossed. The caption said Ne touchez pas. Sauf si vous savez ce qu’elle a besoin. The next one showed Tony the Tiger. Sie sind Schmackhaft! he said.
The woman leaned across Louis and drew down the canvas blind to block the hard orange sunset. She looked across at me. “Ça suffit?”
“Uh, oui . . .”
“Pour écrire.” I smiled dumbly, like a tourist, and she tried, “Sie sind ein Schreiber?”
“Angleterre,” I said, accidentally.
“Oh!” she said. “You are from England.”
“No, Canada. Do you speak English?”
“Oh yes, I do. Canada. There, the French people want to run away.”
“Well, they need the money, so they’re staying for now.”
She nodded at that. It was nice to have said something really offensive without anyone shouting about it. Of course, I didn’t really have any idea how I felt. The woman smoothed her raincoat down along her legs and smiled. I waved my pen, as if to say, Well, back to work on my political writing! since I couldn’t think of anything to talk about, even though I wanted to. For some reason, in the four days we’d been in Europe, we hadn’t had any interesting encounters—perhaps, I thought, because Louis looked so dark and unapproachable. The woman took out a paperback novel and opened it to some part near the end, and read, biting her bottom lip. I imagined that maybe she and I were married and heading back to our place in Strasbourg, and later she would tell me about her book, how the heroine escapes her beginnings, or some such thing. And that later, we’d be in the bath or looking over travel brochures, choosing between Ventemiglia or the Côte d’Azur for our holidays, and she’d say, Do you want to wash my hair? Although I also imagined her saying, Did you clean the barbecue like I asked you to?
Louis shifted in his sleep and the paper slipped out of his arms and onto her lap. She collected it awkwardly and folded it and put it back on the table between us.
“The news has putted him to sleep,” she said.
“Mm. Put him to sleep. He’s my friend, actually. Louis.”
She held her hand out. “Janine.”
“I’m Paul.”
“And so, you are going to Berlin or Amsterdam, I guess.”
“No—we were going to go to Germany or Italy, but we couldn’t decide, so we’re going to Strasbourg.”
“Strasbourg!” She was delighted. “I live in Strasbourg! But why are you coming there? You have friends?”
“No, we just thought we should see it. Is that a bad idea?”
“No, no—only every year many people don’t come to Strasbourg. I was surprised!”
The perm did look good, in some inscrutable French way. I was thinking this as we kept talking. She told me about her work and where she was born, and some bike tours Louis and I could take from Strasbourg, and of course the big church, the Munster, which was the main reason to come to Strasbourg, unless you were going to school. When the train came into the station, she leaned over and woke Louis up by stroking his arm. He looked at her, displaced, then at me.
“Who the—?” he said.
“This is Janine.” I smiled hard at him. “She’s invited us to dinner.”
WHEN I first met Carol, I was at a St. John’s Ambulance course at Our Lady of Grace, just down the street from where I lived. It was 1991 and I’d been single for so long I thought my face had started to scare women. In desperation, I started taking first aid courses—a friend had met a girl that way. I figured that knowing how to save lives would be a quality really sensitive women would be able to pick up on.
When I arrived at the church, I saw Carol instantly. She was tall for a woman, and had hair on her arms, something I liked for reasons I still don’t understand. At first we paired off into uncomfortable same-sex duos and did a certain amount of bandage-applying and pulse-taking. Above us, the Virgin Mary held her son and stared off into space. There really were a lot of things wrong with that picture, I thought, starting with the fact that it didn’t even occur to her to keep him warm, or to put some pressure on those cuts.
The instructor laid out her dummy and showed us where to place our hands on our partner’s chest. Carol lay on the blue mat, with her hands by her sides, and I put my palm down below her clavicle and covered it with my other hand. I hadn’t touched a woman since 1989. Carol took my hand and moved it up. “Don’t break anything.”
I pressed down, simulating heart massage.
“It’s unlikely you’ll ever have to do this,” the instructor was saying, “since if you’re alone with someone and you’re doing CPR, it’s probably all over but the crying. More likely, it’s artificial respiration you’re gonna need, and that’s a skill you better get down.”
I lay on my back and Carol put her hand under my neck, tilting my head back. “I hope you brushed your teeth,” she said.
“I haven’t eaten in a week, knowing this was next.”
She put her mouth to mine and blew out a lungful of warm air. Her breath came streaming out of my nose, ten degrees hotter. I came up coughing and laughing. There were a lot of people laughing.
“Remember to pinch the nostrils,” the instructor said, “and don’t breathe for real—it’s nasty.”
“Now she tells us,” I said. But Carol was just sitting back on her thighs with her hand over her mouth, laughing.
STRASBOURG WAS lit up with flowers; more than I’d ever seen in my life in one place, although I’d never been to Holland and from the pictures I’d seen, Holland was worse. Louis put on his sunglasses and walked behind. Janine was singing. The whole place smelled like a potpourri.
“God, it’s cheery here,” said Louis.
“You have to let go all your bad energy,” said Janine, walking backward. “When it comes spring in Strasbourg, the students arrive for summer studies, and everything changes.”
“I bet the average age goes down by five years,” I said. “Ten.”
“Tsh!” said Janine, and she linked her arms in ours. “You put your bags in my house and we will open a wine and make toast to the summer.”
Janine lived above a store near the Munster. We walked up three flights of stairs and opened a door on a small, airy apartment. All the plants were alive. Louis walked slowly around and looked at things, flashing black in front of the windows, one of which was filled with the church in the square behind.
“You like Elmore Leonard?” he asked her, pulling a copy of Swag off her bookshelf.
“He is so sensitive,” said Janine. “I think he is the best at the way people speak.”
“I’ve never read him,” said Louis. He laid the book down on a side table, like he was planning on borrowing it. Janine watched him and glanced over at me. I was sitting still, which seemed the polite thing to do, and finally Louis sat down as well, in one of her Ikea-style dining-room chairs. He leaned it back against a wall. “I’ve never had a home-cooked French meal before,” he said, and Janine smiled and went into the kitchen and dumped frozen fish sticks and fries onto a cookie sheet. She put it in the oven and we waited, drinking wine. Janine smiled at us a lot.
“What is that song, ‘Meilleur Ces Dotes’?” she asked. “There are some American students at the coffee shop who this morning were singing it, but I do not know it.”
“What?” said Louis.
She sang a line.
“It’s a song,” I said. “Some nonsense song parents sing to their children.”
“So it is for children?”
“Yeah. It’s called ‘Mairsy Dotes,’ I don’t know.”
Louis leaned forward and the front legs of his chair came down. “It’s ‘mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy,’” he said. “That’s the song, it’s not a nonsense song, only everyone calls it ‘Mairsy Dotes’ because it’s cute.”
“I had no idea,” I said. “I always thought it was nonsense.”
“Some people do.”
Janine chiseled the dinner off the cookie sheet—it smelled fatty and rancid, but we ate it. She wanted to talk about American television. There were some people doing their doctorates on Baywatch, but we both said we never watched it. Louis stopped drinking wine and started drinking the beer he’d bought on the way. I gave him a sharp look when Janine was back in the kitchen, but he just shrugged. “I’m not a social-occasion person,” he’d once said back at school. Whenever people got together in groups and started talking fast, he’d hang back. I’d forgotten he was like that. He also always accused me of being slick with women, which was utterly untrue, but I realized it was obvious that Janine liked me.
“Let’s just go,” I said quietly.
“We don’t have to be rude.”
“It’s not rude. This isn’t about making friends, you know—I thought we were here for you.”
“Yeah, well . . . let’s just set awhile.”
Janine came back in with a plate of digestive cookies. “You both have the same watch,” she said.
“I bought them for us in the airport,” said Louis.
“That is romantic.”
She dropped two cookies on each of our plates. Her fingernails were painted a light silky blue I hadn’t noticed before. We ate the dessert in silence. At eight o’clock, the church bells rang—eight heavy, deep gongs that made the windows rattle. “I live too close to the church,” Janine said. “But it makes me feel safe.”
BACK AT the hotel, we unpacked the clothes we wanted to air out for tomorrow. Louis stood in front of the hotel mirror, checking his face and squeezing blackheads, a disgusting habit he’d apparently never kicked. The sink was full of clothes. I lay on my back on the hard bed, the grease from Janine’s dinner roiling in my gut. She’d kissed each of us on both cheeks at her door, sorry that we had to go and inviting us back to say goodbye before we left town. She kissed me on one cheek, and then the other, but the second kiss overlapped the corner of my mouth.
“A la prochaine, écrivain,” she said.
“What was that thing she told you?” Louis asked me in the cab.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t speak French.”
At the mirror, his face angled up so he could see his chin close in the glass, Louis mumbled something about how the French and the Germans didn’t make good bedfellows. He thought the architecture stank.
“Why are you so negative?” I said.
He grimaced in the mirror and wiped something off it. “I’m just saying.”
“And you should stop that. You’re lucky you don’t have craters all over your face.”
“From what?”
“Fucking . . . squeezing your face like that.”
He ignored me and turned to look at the side of his nose. We were up five floors, and there was a square of dusk in the window. In the building in front of the hotel, there were three big yellow steel cones attached to the building below the cornice. Transformers, maybe. They gave off an anxious hum.
“If you washed your face,” I said, “your pores wouldn’t fill up with garbage.”
“Did you think when we were in university that people just pretended to like each other?”
“Why would they do that.”
“You never know what people are going to turn into. You might need them one day.”
“What does this have to do with hygiene?”
He angled himself away from the mirror a little and looked at me with a flat expression. “You don’t think there’s such a thing as social hygiene?”
“I’m losing you, Louis.”
“I wonder if people thought you and I were just friends because we had to share a room. Y
ou think?”
He turned back to face the mirror, and I pushed myself along the bed so I could see his face again. His reflection was staring back. I was in an awkward physical position, half up on my elbows, but I held it because I had the odd sense that I had to remain still. Louis reached for a towel and now he was facing me. I sat up straighter.
“So, why did you come here with me, Paul?”
“Why? I came because you asked.”
“You came to help.” He dropped the towel in the sink. “I make you feel good about yourself, don’t I?” His eyes were immobile. “I’m your country bumpkin.”
“Look, Lou—I don’t know where all this is coming from, but you’ve obviously been under—”
“Aw, forget it,” he said, and he turned away and reached back into the sink where earlier he’d been washing a shirt with a wooden scrub brush. “It’s not worth it.”
“That’s not what—” I started, but I was cut off by the sight of his body spinning back toward me, his arm arcing around. I saw a thin stream of water trailing behind the scrub brush before it cracked into my temple with the ringing sound of a golf ball being smashed off a tee. I flew back against the bed, my head assailed by a shrieking, car-alarm pain, and I lay there, panting, waiting for the rest of the assault, but nothing came. Maybe he’d slipped or had an attack of some sort. I looked over to him, lowering my arm slightly, and he was standing there frozen, looking at me with an expression that was somewhere between fear and rage. The side of my head was pounding.
“Lou?”
“What.”
“Can you . . . go over into that corner, please?”
He looked to where I’d gestured and he walked over to it and stood there with his arms at his sides.
I sat up and checked for blood. There was a hard lump with a dimple in it over my eyebrow. My hand was shaking. “Okay,” I said. I kept an eye on him and stood up, moving for the door. I took my coat down from the hook.
“I’m taking the bed under the window,” he said.
I nodded at him as I opened the door. “Okay, you go ahead then.” I closed the door on his profile, his eyes still staring straight ahead.
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