The Little French Bistro

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The Little French Bistro Page 18

by Nina George


  “Was that the other woman?” asked Marianne after a while. Jean-Rémy nodded and propped his chin on his hand, then filled both their glasses to the brim.

  Later, as she hauled herself up the stairs to the Shell Room, Marianne decided that she would commence the next morning by apologizing to everyone. She would apologize for coming, for leaving, and for not being honest with them. It was only when she was lying in bed with one leg on the floor so that the room didn’t spin around her so much that she realized that she wanted to give a name to the cat. He should belong to her, and his nomadic soul would have reached its home.

  “Good night, Max,” whispered Marianne into the darkness. The cat purred.

  Was it only when hearts broke that they revealed their true nature?

  Sidonie, the sculptress, sensed a surge of something inside her that she hadn’t experienced for many years: sadness. She caught a tear as it ran down her cheek, and examined her rough, chapped fingers. She failed to hear someone knocking on the garden door to her studio.

  “Hello. Anyone there?”

  As Marianne came in, Sidonie set down the two halves of the broken stone heart that she’d been sculpting on top of the laboratory report. It had just arrived from her doctor’s office this morning.

  Marianne’s smile faded and was replaced by a look of concern. “What’s wrong?” she asked, noticing Sidonie’s tears.

  “Nothing,” said Sidonie. “Just…some dirt. And the sun.”

  And death and love.

  Marianne crossed the studio in a few long strides and put down on the table the basket containing groceries for the Goichons and a bag of chocolates resembling small pebbles that she had brought for the sculptress. Then she embraced Sidonie, who was too surprised to dodge her approach. To an unwitting observer it must have looked as if Marianne were forcing the other woman to dance with her. Sidonie’s arms hung limply by her sides, her head resting on Marianne’s shoulder, and together the two of them rocked back and forth, their feet moving in time.

  As they performed this strange waltz, Sidonie sobbed, noiselessly at first, then more and more uncontrollably, until she had to cling to Marianne to prevent herself collapsing. Her sobs were interspersed with words of attempted explanation. She felt that Marianne’s embrace was drawing something out of her—a torrent of fear, anguish, sorrow, and rage at the injustice of death.

  Marianne felt Sidonie’s emotions flooding toward her like a spring tide. She also felt pulsing inflamed areas as she let her fingers glide a few fractions of an inch, like sensors, across the sculptress’s stout torso. Her fingers picked up what her eyes would never be capable of seeing. She wanted to heal her friend.

  “Cancer” was the word that Sidonie kept repeating as she pointed to various parts of her body—her chest, her head, her kidneys and her abdomen. The cancer was everywhere. It had slumbered inside her for decades, then exploded in a matter of months.

  Marianne’s palms were burning. She had a taste of copper on her tongue, and she pulled Sidonie close to her again. Abruptly, the sculptress stopped weeping, as if her reservoir of tears had run dry. Now Marianne was rocking her and humming a melody until Sidonie stopped shivering. She guided her to an armchair in a corner of the studio, and slipped into the kitchen to make some tea. Catching sight of a bottle of cognac in the corner, though, she turned off the gas under the kettle and poured some of the vintage brandy into two cups. One she filled to the top, and handed it to Sidonie.

  “Down the hatch,” she urged.

  Gradually she wheedled out of Sidonie how long she’d known (a long time), who knew (no one except her) and that she didn’t intend to tell anyone, not even her children Camille and Jérôme: they ought not to feel obliged to uproot themselves for a few months from their normal environment and bear the burden of their mother’s death. Not Colette either—under no circumstances!

  “Why under no circumstances? I thought you were friends?”

  “Yes, we’re friends. Only friends…” The way Sidonie said only made Marianne prick up her ears.

  “Seulement la grenouille s’est trompée de conte”—only the frog ended up in the wrong fairy tale—she said under her breath, quoting one of the countless phrases Pascale Goichon had taught her.

  Sidonie stared at her. “I’m the frog,” she said. “I’m never going to turn into a prince—not even into a princess’s lapdog. I love Colette. She loves men. End of story.”

  “End of story?” said Marianne. “A terrible story.”

  Sidonie shrugged her shoulders.

  “You must tell her.”

  “What?”

  “Everything!”

  “I’m not going to do anything.”

  “Do you just mean to lie down and…die?”

  Sidonie shut her eyes. The fact that she knew she was soon going to die was one thing, but that someone else should say it out loud was quite another. Much worse. It made it true. “Exactly. I’m going to die. Just like that.”

  Marianne sighed deeply. “All right,” she said, and stood up to pour them both another brandy.

  Sidonie put on a record, and Maurice Chevalier’s voice filled the studio. As she walked back to the table, the familiar pain seared through her, but this time it went deeper than usual. The devastation was beginning. She held onto a chair, which toppled over, banged against the table and swept the broken stone heart to the floor. She waited until the pain relented and took several deep, regular breaths. Marianne bent down to pick up the pieces of stone. There was something hidden in the core: a red streak with a shimmer of pale blue. She helped Sidonie to her bed.

  “Anyway, why did you come here?” asked the sculptress.

  “To apologize,” said Marianne.

  “But…for what?

  “For lying to you all. For being married and for not being the person I pretended I was.”

  “Yes, but you’re still yourself, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Marianne. “Yes, I am.”

  But I had forgotten myself.

  —

  When Marianne had left Sidonie, she rode her scooter restlessly to Pont-Aven. She longed to escape into Yann’s arms, and yet he was the one she had hurt the most. Could she really expect that he was going to make light of that? No, he would reject her, as every man of reason and honor would do. She headed for Colette’s gallery and waited with feigned patience until she had finished advising a group of tourists from Hamburg. When they had left, Marianne turned the sign on the door round to “Fermé.” Closed.

  The first thing she did was to stammer her apologies, but Colette waved them away with a flick of her cigarette holder. Marianne’s concerns were as inconsequential as the smoke that drifted out of the half-open window. “We like you,” said the gallery owner. “Didn’t that ever occur to you?”

  Marianne smiled before pronouncing the hardest words she’d ever had to utter: she told Colette of her friend Sidonie’s imminent death. Colette slumped back onto the chair behind her elegant bureau. It was only from the quaking of her shoulders that Marianne could tell she was weeping. She was weeping for all the years she had not lived with Sidonie, and she was weeping for the brief span of time that she had left to make up for what was gone forever.

  The brandy’s effects on Marianne had eased, and she was hit by a wave of sober shame for daring to meddle in other people’s lives.

  “Merci,” Colette said in a tear-choked voice. “Merci. She would never have told me. That’s how she is. She never wanted to make things hard for others, only for herself.”

  The sign would not be turned back to “Ouvert” again that day, nor in the weeks and months that followed.

  The mark of a magnanimous spirit was that that person never turned others’ errors against them. Pascale Goichon walked toward Marianne with wide-open arms as she got off her Vespa.

  “Oh dear!” she cried. “That man on television! Hopefully he’ll stay in there and never come out.” She enfolded Marianne in her arms. “Emile says he found h
im slimy,” she whispered into her ear.

  Her husband gave a curt nod as Marianne entered the library, then handed her the shopping list. When she opened her mouth to make her planned apology, Emile raised a hand in warning.

  “You’re not stupid, Marianne Lance, so stop acting as if you were. You didn’t betray him; he betrayed you. He should have let you go and left you in peace, instead of exposing you before the entire nation. Would you get that into your head?”

  I’ve never thought of it that way.

  “A man in love will set off barefoot across the Congo to find his wife, but he just stands up in front of a camera like a silly cockerel and starts whingeing.”

  He was about to say that the man should grow a pair, but then he decided against it. He thought it wasn’t proper to mention the family jewels in the presence of ladies, so he simply tossed her the list and the car keys instead.

  —

  Marianne didn’t notice anything in the supermarket at first. It was only when Laurent asked her confidentially whether he should start ordering her some specialities that Marianne paid more attention.

  “Animal hearts, perhaps?” said the small, fat man with the black mustache, leaning in conspiratorially. “The heart of a deer, a bull or a dog, if you need one. Or a few chicken bones?”

  She could sense his disappointment when she merely ordered fillet for the dogs and braising steak to cook the Goichons a German casserole.

  As she was standing in the fruit section, sniffing the melons and rubbing the Greek asparagus stems together to see if they squeaked—a sign of freshness—a saleswoman came toward her.

  “Are you buying those to enhance potency?” she asked. There was a mixture of awe, timidity and hope in her expression.

  Shopping that day was like running the gauntlet, and Marianne had no idea why. Madame Camus at the cheese counter, Mademoiselle Bruno at the till and even the Moroccan cleaning lady Amélie hurled questions at her. “Will I find love this weekend? Is he the right one? Should I do everything my husband requests in the bedroom?”

  Marianne decided to employ some of the often perplexing phrases she had picked up from Pascale. “A handful of love is better than an oven full of bread. If you squeeze your nose, milk comes out. You don’t have to drink the sea dry.” Every one of her responses was met with a nod and a grateful smile.

  She chuckled as she told Pascale everything later, while the goulash was marinating in paprika, but Pascale didn’t find it funny.

  “I thought this would happen sooner or later, but not so soon. The people saw you on television, and something must have gone ‘bang’ in their heads.”

  “Bang? What do you mean, bang?”

  “Laurent offered you hearts? That’s so typical. Next thing you know he’d have asked you to bless his new car in return, or give his children a magic spell for school, or brew him a potion capable of bringing his wife to commit affronts against demure conventions.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Nor do I, but it seems as if people here are hoping you’re a white witch.” Marianne noticed a new, more familiar tone in Pascale’s voice. “They’re going to start gazing after you at the market or trying to touch you quickly.”

  “What? But I haven’t done anything!”

  “Oh yes you have! You’re from another country. You live alone. You were on television. Television is overpowering magic. To them you’re a woman who has devoted her life to the goddesses of the sea and of love.”

  “Oh my word. And why do they think that?”

  “Because we’re friends. They think I’m teaching you to be like me, and I have specialized in love. But we both know that your powers lie elsewhere, right?”

  “Wrong.”

  “Your hands, Marianne. Didn’t you know you’re a healer? Why do you think you bear that birthmark? It means you’re special.”

  Marianne studied her fingers, which were kneading pasta dough to make macaroni with fried onions and cheese. “I don’t really know very much about myself,” she explained sheepishly.

  “Sometimes other people recognize us before we do.” Pascale laid her fingers gently on Marianne’s cheek. “Yann recognized you, as I did. Did you know that he can taste and hear colors? He’s a synaesthete. He senses things that none of us can see or feel, and then he paints them. You saw that on his tile. You understood what he saw without knowing that you did. You both feel in the same way.”

  “I hurt him.”

  “I know, Marianne, I know. When will you go to him?”

  When the details no longer make me so nervous, Marianne felt like saying, but she would then have had to explain everything else to Pascale. For example, why she couldn’t say, Yann, I love you. It was not because it wasn’t true. There was a simple answer to the question of whether she loved him: yes!

  In love there was only yes or no. No I-don’t-knows, no maybes; those were merely nos in disguise. But Marianne was incapable of saying “I love you.” It sounded like a phrase associated with inevitable decisions: Where do we go from here? Shall we move into yours or mine? Shall we buy a house? Let’s go to Rome this winter. And where shall I put the saucers?

  It sounded like a variation on what Marianne had left behind when she had decided not to speak to Lothar in Concarneau. She liked the woman she thought she was on her way to becoming, the one who was emerging from her shell, who slept in her own room and decided when she wanted to do what; someone who didn’t immediately hang up Yann’s wet towels or pick up his shirts while he was absorbed in his art, who didn’t even put a teacup in the sink for once; someone who didn’t start thinking three days in advance about what she was going to cook for dinner on Wednesday.

  As long as neither of them said “I love you,” neither had any duties or a routine. You and me forever: now let’s get down to the details. Love-begotten obligations were the last thing Marianne wanted. In every respect.

  All those damn details! She knew them all too well, and she suspected that she wouldn’t be sufficiently careful and would thus turn into such-and-such’s wife, becoming part of a “we” in which only the man decided. She couldn’t stand that part of herself.

  But Yann isn’t Lothar. No, Yann wasn’t Lothar, but she was still too much Marianne. She was afraid that she wouldn’t last for long when free.

  —

  When she got back to the guesthouse three hours later, she found a familiar and beloved face waiting for her: Grete Köster. She was holding a glass of champagne, and was fanning warm air toward herself with the postcard Marianne had sent on the day of her planned suicide.

  “It would have been a shame if it had ended with death and a drink in the afterlife,” said Marianne’s old neighbor, and the two women gave each other a warm hug.

  Grete Köster held Marianne at arm’s length. “Damn, you look good. What’s his name?”

  She resumed her early outings, but this time on the Vespa. Every morning she rode out to Tahiti Beach to practice the accordion by the light of the rising sun. Yet she still felt a lingering sense of unease and wariness. She looked up at every unexpected engine noise, fearing that Lothar might appear at any moment and force her to go back to Celle with him.

  The sun came up and set the sea sparkling. Marianne stood there clutching her accordion, and gazed out over the sea and its glittering reflections.

  Never again. Never again will I go without this, she thought.

  The sea’s voice whispered inside her: You’re finally awakening.

  The waves seemed hazy to her, as if some of Avalon’s mists had advanced over the swell. On their way back to the land, they would tell the stories they had gleaned on their travels.

  Do I love Yann in the same way as he seems to love me?

  The sea answered her, but this time Marianne didn’t understand its language. It was too mighty, and she felt small and irrelevant.

  Marianne loved Yann’s hands and his boyish manner when he painted. She loved his eyes, in which, had she been a seafare
r, she could have read the briny depths, the eddies and currents, the swirls and tides. She loved the fact that he never clammed up when they didn’t agree (a rare occurrence), and she loved him for the unwavering attention he paid her. As for the things they got up to when they were alone…He had a gift for making her feel beautiful, erotic and desirable with his gaze. His touch swept away all the comical aspects of age, the worries about not having perfectly smooth skin and having folds in which lurked the shadows of the years.

  Marianne loved the feeling of being wanted. As Marianne. As a woman.

  In my search for death I found life. How many deviations, side roads and senseless detours a woman can take before she finds her own path, and all because she falls into line too early, takes too early the paths of custom and convention, defended by doddering old men and their henchwomen—the mothers who only want the most dutiful outcome for their daughters. And then she wastes an immense amount of time ensuring that she fits the mold! How little time then remains to correct her fate.

  Marianne was suddenly scared that she would lose the courage to continue to search for her own path.

  And yet, life as an autonomous woman is not a song. It’s a scream, a war; it’s a daily struggle against the easy option of obeying. I could have obeyed, could have lived less dangerously, ventured nothing, failed at nothing.

  As she took in the wide expanse of the Atlantic, she remembered how she had felt on that bridge in Paris when life seen from the Pont Neuf had resembled a trickle, its opportunities dried up, its possibilities blocked with silt.

  That was wrong. It no longer held true. The longer a woman lived, the more she began to discover. If she could first set aside the conventional dreams of marriage, children, lifelong love and professional success, then a life would begin in which everything else was there to be conquered. There could only be meaning when every person found his or her proper place in the course of events. Life wasn’t too short: it was too long to waste unduly on non-love, non-laughter and non-decisions. And it began when you first took a risk, failed and realized that you’d survived the failure. With that knowledge, you could risk anything.

 

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