His words hung in the air between us. I stopped to lean against the side of a building in the shade.
“So what does that mean for us?” I said. “It’s okay, I don’t need to be married. I’ve never really been the kind of person who wanted to get married. My mother harasses me about it all the time, actually.”
Rousseau put his hands in his pockets. “Well . . . what do you want then?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been happy with the way things have been between us these last few months. Can it just stay like this?”
“Really?” He eyed me skeptically. “You’ll be happy with that?”
“I think so.”
“I can do that,” he said.
We headed back up the Croissette, under palm trees, in the direction of the car. And there, watching a sidewalk artist spray paint a neon landscape on the side of a wakeboard, were Lauren and Max. I grabbed Rousseau’s hand and pulled him backward at the same moment that Lauren glanced in our direction. I couldn’t tell if she saw us.
“What’s happening?” Rousseau murmured.
We crossed the street and turned down an alley. “Max and Lauren,” I said. I pulled him behind a dumpster that filled our nostrils with the tang of wet, rotten meat. Rousseau crouched down behind me as I peered around the corner. Lauren pulled Max by the hand, through traffic and toward our alley. We were toast.
“They didn’t see us,” Rousseau said. “They were twenty meters away.”
“Shh. They’re coming.”
At the end of the alley Max huffed. “What in the hell is going on, Lauren?”
Lauren hummed and sucked in a breath. “I could’ve sworn I saw Halley with . . .” She looked around.
“With who?”
Rousseau moved his foot and it scratched loudly against the concrete at the same time that a car went by. I glanced back at him, wide-eyed, and he gave me an apologetic frown.
“Thomas Rousseau,” Lauren said.
“As in, the Thomas Rousseau?” Max guffawed. “In her dreams!”
“Seriously, I swear I saw them.”
“If you said you saw her with Gus I might believe you.”
“Jesus, will you get off that already? She is not hooking up with Gus.”
“How do you know?”
My ankles started to ache, and I considered standing up and “outing” us just to see the look on Max’s face.
“Because,” Lauren said, “I can just tell.”
Max clapped his hands together. “Come on, let’s get some gelato . . .”
They walked away. After a beat, Rousseau and I stood upright and dusted ourselves off.
“Sorry,” I said, not looking at him. I wanted to say something that would erase what he’d just heard, but I couldn’t think of what. I felt my Level 2 status more strongly than ever. Did he feel it too? I moved toward the mouth of the alley to examine the street. “Let’s go. I think they’re gone.”
Rousseau took my hand, and we walked to the car.
It was our last night together for who-knows-how-long, and I tried not to think about it. I lay on my stomach in the dark and soaked up every delicious sensation of him, my adoration only increased by his complete acceptance of it. He ran his fingers in an achingly slow line down my back, across my hips and into dark places. The warmth of his mouth made my skin tingle. My body, which had always been sort of grotesque and untidy to me, with all its odd and improper parts, seemed to finally belong in the world. Every boy I’d ever known had expected women to be as flawless and accommodating as an airbrushed centerfold. But Rousseau loved the ugly things. Every fold and freckle. He loved smelling me. We defiled one another for hours. And every touch amplified my urge to take this day, this night, and pin its wings down for all eternity. I would have happily expired right then and there. Impermanence. It was a gut punch. I tried reminding myself that everything ends. I tried reminding myself that even if Rousseau was a permanent fixture in my life, our lives were still made up of seconds and minutes. That people never truly possess each other, they only possess the minutes, and some of Rousseau’s minutes were mine and that should be enough. I tried reminding myself of all these things, but it didn’t work. I wanted him so badly I was blind with it.
I looked over at him and said, “When you’re really happy, do you ever wonder if someday you’ll look back at this moment and it will have been the pinnacle of your life?”
He seemed to ponder this for a while, and gradually his features changed in a way I couldn’t pinpoint, as if he’d just lost hold of the world’s last remaining mystery. It was the first thing I’d ever said to him that I wanted to unsay.
In the morning, I woke up before he did, alone with my thoughts. I knew I would be lying in the same place the next morning, trying to conjure the warm feeling of his arms around me, the earthy smell of his breath on my cheek, the domestic sound of his light snore. A hot tear ran down my temple. A few short hours later, I watched from the curb as he pulled his black roller bag through the sliding glass airport doors. It would be okay, I told myself. Rousseau and I were going to stay in touch, and when I made it to Level 3, I could stay in France and it could be like this always. It would be okay. It would be okay.
I meant to keep the stub of his plane ticket, the one I’d taken from his jeans pocket two nights before. I’d taken it intending to tuck it away where I could always find it and remember. But I left it in the pocket of my capris by accident, and after I washed them I found the paper had disintegrated to nothing.
23
I shifted uncomfortably on Gus’s couch.
“Wine?” he asked.
It was ten o’clock in the morning. “I’m fine, thanks,” I said.
“Well, I think I’m going to have a cappuccino.” He disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a cup, put it under the nozzle, toggled through the options and pushed the button. As the machine worked its magic, Gus looked around jadedly, as if it was completely normal to make yourself a cappuccino and not offer one to the person sitting on your couch.
“So,” he said, balancing his cup as he sat, “how are launch preparations going? All set for my booth announcement?”
I’d been thinking about it for the last two hours. Should I tell Gus we still didn’t have a theme? Should I tell him that Anthony had trumped him on the booth announcement? Would he consider me weak? Would he demand that I go back and talk to Jamie again? Or, worse, would he be so exasperated by my lack of effective “management” that he would ask Max or Lauren to take over? Would this impact his decision to give me the promotion? Would I get sent back to Dayton next year and never see Rousseau again? I decided to respond in the way that any other sane person would respond. I lied.
“Yes,” I said. “All set.”
A slightly amused smirk flashed across Gus’s mouth, which unsettled me. Did he know something? “Good,” he said. “I heard a rumor that Anthony the Wanker wanted to make the announcement. So, if he asks you to boot me, you tell him that this is my project and I’m making the announcement, no matter what.”
I smiled politely and made a note about the announcement in my binder, dreading the proxy war that was about to happen between Jamie and me.
“I don’t suppose you’ve heard from Thomas Rousseau lately?” Gus said with a twinkle. Now I was sure he knew something.
Rousseau. A montage of our last night together ran through my head like an acid, corrupting everything.
“No,” I almost-shouted. “Why would I?” One of my eyes began to twitch.
“I put in a request for him to give one of our podium talks at DEVO. I told him to get in touch with you and let you know if he could do it.”
“Oh,” I said, visibly relieved. Jesus, Halley, settle down. “Sure, I’ll watch for his call.”
“Great,” Gus said. He looked at me expectantly, like he was waiting for me to say som
ething. I hoped he didn’t notice my eye twitching. I wasn’t built for all this skulduggery. “Is something wrong?” Gus said. “You look a little pale.”
“No. Should there be?”
“Okay,” he said. “I want to tell you about an idea I have. I think you’re going to like it.”
The idea was this: we would buy a few cases of local French wine, slap a custom-made label on each bottle, and deliver one to every person involved in the Tantalus launch, from early product research, engineering, and production all the way to execution, to celebrate our hard work. Naturally, it would be my responsibility to find the wine, buy it, coordinate with Molly to create the custom labels, and get the right quantities shipped to each of the three company offices. Gus even knew which wine he wanted. He had tried a fabulous rosé in Marseilles a few weeks ago, in a restaurant whose name and location he couldn’t remember, from a vineyard whose name and location he couldn’t remember, with a label the look of which he couldn’t remember. He did remember that the wine was tasty and French and came in a square-shaped bottle. So, it was my new mission to find said tasty square rosé. Oh and, by the way, it might take a while to get the labels printed, so I should probably find the wine ASAP.
“Great idea,” I said. “I’ll start first thing tomorrow morning.”
I went to visit a local wine shop owner whom Gus, in his zeal to keep his cabinets stocked with good wine, had recently befriended. He gave me a list of every vineyard in Provence he knew of that used square bottles. I mapped them all out on my computer and programmed the addresses into my GPS. Soon I was driving down the A8 in the summer sunshine, the bright blue Mediterranean sparkling on my left and a montage of craggy hills and periwinkle-shuttered towns on my right. Ferraris and Maseratis sped by, racing toward Aix-en-Provence. I put the windows down and breathed in the grassy air.
I was no wine expert, so I decided that the best way to tackle the project was this: upon arriving at the chateau and tasting the wine, if it didn’t make me gag, I’d buy two bottles, take a photo of the label, get ordering and shipping instructions, and move on to the next destination. Taste, buy, photograph, drive. Taste, buy, photograph, drive.
“Bonjour,” I would say to each empty tasting room, a bell hanging on the doorknob announcing my entry. The air inside them would smell deliciously similar: musty old oak and cold earth. Eventually, someone would saunter out of a back room. “Bonjour,” I would repeat. “Vous parlez Anglais?”
“Oui, un petit peu,” they would say. “How may I help?”
“I am looking for a rosé wine in a square bottle.” I would stand squinty-eyed, hoping they didn’t laugh at the absurdity of my request or ask me any difficult wine trivia questions.
“Yes, I will show you what I have,” they would say. “Would you like a taste?”
“Sure,” I would say.
After a few tastings I became a little more relaxed about all this, and by the end of the day I was downright merry. Level 2 had its perks. I drove back toward Biot, a little drunk, with twelve square bottles clanging around in the back seat and six photos on my phone. I emailed the photos to Gus in hopes that one of them would spark his memory, but none of them did. He replied that I should just pick my favorite, and I swallowed the small disappointment of having failed to deliver precisely his heart’s desire.
On the way home I took an exit toward Sainte-Maxime in search of a place to have dinner. Dusk was about an hour away, and the sun-burned sky was just beginning to glisten. I wound through dense forest in the direction of the coast until I passed a painted sign along the road that said “Restaurant Les Petits Poissons.” I did a three-point turn and backtracked. The driveway was lined with trees like stone giants. A two-story manoir stood elegantly at the end, iron gates open. Around to the left there were seven café tables on a gravel patio, all of them rusty and patinaed. Downy white dandelion seeds floated across the path in front of my feet. The place felt a little strange, abandoned, but the remnants of a wine buzz were just heady enough to make it all seem like an adventure.
I sat on a rusty folding chair. Fat bees circled galvanized buckets of lavender, and I thought of Rousseau and wished he was here. I dug my phone out of my bag to send him a text, and as I typed I heard gravelly footsteps and a woman’s voice say “bonsoir Madame!”
The woman was small and chestnut-haired with a plain, tan face. She carried a folded tablecloth, a small baguette and a drinking glass containing cutlery, which she arranged on the table in front of me.
“Bonsoir,” she repeated.
“Bonsoir,” I replied. I looked around, feeling another twinge of strangeness. I liked the idea of informally dining in someone’s French country house, being invited in from the road and cared for like a pilgrim in an old novel where people in villages did that sort of thing. In practice though, in our post-Texas Chainsaw Massacre world, that kind of intimacy with strangers was a little nerve-racking.
“Blah blah blah, n’est-ce pas?” the woman said.
“Um . . .” I replied, digging through my bag for my dictionary. I understood part of what she said, but not all of it.
“You are American?” the woman said.
Thank god she spoke English.
“Yes,” I replied.
“For the dinner, would you like fish or chicken?”
I chose fish.
The woman nodded and turned toward the house, emerging a minute later with a wooden plate of food. There was a thick slice of what she described as cheese made with the milk of her own goats. Next to the cheese was a handful of fresh figs from her own tree and a little pot of honey from her own hives. I spread things and dipped things and forgot momentarily about finishing my text to Rousseau amid hunks of crusty bread and mouthfuls of earthy rich cheese. There was a carafe of cold grenache blanc that tasted like fresh dill on my tongue. I felt brave, sitting there alone. I had time to think and breathe the air.
The woman returned again, this time with a plate of just-picked asparagus. The thin stalks had been tossed on the grill for a few seconds until they just barely tasted of smoke. Beside them she wordlessly set a bowl of dark green olive oil, half a lemon, and a box of salt.
After that, the woman was gone for a long time.
For a while the silence was pleasant. To be able to focus singularly on the tastes of the food and the warm breeze. I watched the sky behind the trees turn purple. I finished my text to Rousseau, attempting to describe the day and how much I wished he was there. He responded a minute later.
“I wish I was there too,” he wrote.
I finished the last crisp spear of asparagus and drank the rest of the wine.
“You know you could actually be here, right?” I replied. “Just a short plane ride away.”
“You make it sound so easy,” he wrote.
I allowed myself to imagine for a moment what it would be like to see him whenever I wanted. “Do you think we could be happy together?” I wrote.
“Without a doubt,” he replied.
“Do you ever think about it? Do you think about how it could be?” I asked. As dusk set in, my table began to feel rather lonely. I heard the high-pitched whine of mosquitoes in my ears, felt the delicate pain of their bites on my ankles.
“Yes, I think about how it could be,” he wrote. “I mean, I try to. I’m so used to my life the way it is, I have a hard time imagining it being different. Maybe I’m too literal-minded.”
“How do you imagine me then?”
He didn’t reply for a long time. I waited, staring at the phone’s screen, a flutter in my belly, as if his response would be the culmination of everything we were to one another.
“Last year, right before Christmas,” he wrote, “I spent a day with my kids. They were looking at the packages under the tree and guessing what was inside each one, and they were so excited. Like, pure anticipation. And I was envious. I hadn’t felt tha
t kind of excitement about anything for a long time. Not until I met you. That’s what you are to me. You’re the thing I look forward to every day.”
It was one of those responses that was simultaneously nice and not what I wanted to hear.
“So,” he wrote, changing the subject, “have your worst fears been realized? Did anyone suspect?”
“Suspect what?”
“You know, us. Did Max and Lauren see us?”
I’d been trying not to think about it, but now that he brought it up, I noticed the coil of fear inside me like a waking serpent. All at once my wine buzz wore off, and I felt a little sick.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I hope not.”
“Could add some spice to your life. Pretend we’re in a spy movie.”
“My life is spicy enough right now. But I’m glad this is fun for you.”
“Oh, it is,” he wrote.
I looked around the dark patio and began to wonder if my hostess had forgotten me. I didn’t want to violate whatever social code existed in that place, but I went to look for her. The big wooden door to the kitchen was unlocked and I walked inside. The place was charmingly French. A huge garlic braid hung on a hook in the burgundy wall above blue and white tile countertops overflowing with piles of fruit. A clay pitcher held olive oil, next to a stack of well-worn linens. No one was there. I came back out to the patio and walked around the back of the house, feeling the curly crunch of fallen tree bark underfoot. The back patio was vacant too. Maybe I’d have to just leave some money on the table and go.
But as I turned I heard the petite footsteps, and then the woman emerged from the trees carrying a fishing pole in one hand and a wriggling fish in the other. She approached the smoking grill and slapped the fish down, eyeballs and all. I could only guess at what kind of bloodbath would have transpired back here if I’d requested the chicken instead.
I went back to my seat again and the woman brought me another carafe of wine and a few candles. The sun was long set and the patio glowed with fireflies. I mused that a long dinner like this would have been unthinkable in Ohio. My dad would have been up asking to speak to the manager a long time ago. He would’ve definitely given this place “the axe.”
The Insatiables Page 15