by Jo Maeder
There was a detail Liliane had left out.
“She would flash me a roll of cash and call it ‘dirty money.’ She couldn’t spend it fast enough. As I got older, on my own, I had the same feeling about money that came my way. And the more I made, the filthier I felt and the faster I spent it until I was penniless. I was arrested for nudity and institutionalized after I gave away all my clothes. It caused such a sensation, my books sold like mad and I became even richer.
He tasted the tomato salad and added a pinch of salt.
“I was deemed cured when I accepted I could not handle money and turned mine over to a reputable financial adviser. Here’s the good part. He embezzled every cent I gave him and disappeared.”
Pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle clicked into place for Alyce. How do you get over a betrayal like that?
He let Alyce try a bite of the tomato salad. The tang of the shallots and salt played off the sweetness of the local vine-ripened fruit. Jean-Luc had explained earlier that tomatoes were botanically a fruit, not a vegetable. These were so succulent there was no question he was right.
“It’s perfect. This could be the entire meal for me.”
“What about teaching?” Julien asked, after trying a sample for himself. “You would have a steady income.”
He winced. “I would either create false hope in those without talent or destroy it in those with it. I would have no time for my own writing.”
“Why not a grant? There are so—”
“A refined form of begging.”
“Surely a woman of wealth would take care of you.”
“Even more demeaning! In the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, of all of the seven deadly sins, pride is the deadliest.”
Alyce felt more than a little irritated at Jean-Luc. He could have whatever he wanted if he just let go of his ego. She was also starting to understand how hard it must be to be an artist, how a God-given gift could also feel like an incurable illness.
“I see why everyone wants you to write a memoir,” she commented. “Everything you just said is a lot more interesting to me than a guy falling in love with a horse.”
“Al-ees!” Julien scolded. However, he agreed a memoir was an excellent idea.
Jean-Luc’s eyes bore into her. She regretted what she’d said until he answered, “To write is to stand naked before the world. To write is to scavenge from every possible source, even from people you love, especially from people you love. No one is safe from a writer’s laser beam vision. But once you start thinking about what your wife, your kids, their teachers, their friends, their friends’ parents, your parents think about your writing, you lose integrity. And yet, what is the essence of true love? Caring about another person’s feelings. How do the two reconcile?”
Jean-Luc would not discuss the topic further, but said he would be glad to look at anything Julien had written. Julien was ecstatic. Alyce was impressed as well.
“And now let us move to a subject I want to discuss before dinner is on the table. The loirs.” Looking at Julien, “She is keeping several as pets.”
“Loirs? I have heard everything now.”
“Pauline insists they go, Al-ees. I am sorry.”
She knew this was coming. “Don’t worry. I purposely didn’t name them so I wouldn’t get too attached.”
Jean-Luc found her comment funny. He then launched into a discourse on exotic foods. A polar bear’s liver has such a high Vitamin A content it can kill a human, but its fat is perfect for pastries. Muskrat is a delicacy in Belgium—look for waterkonijn on the menu, which translates to water rabbit, but isn’t a rabbit at all.
Alyce yelled “Enough!” in the middle of a sentence about sheep vulva.
Julien gently, discreetly, ran his fingers around her lower spine. It felt good.
Jean-Luc said the French were not as accepting of trysts outside of marriage as is commonly believed. “We like to think about it, yes. Attraction is up here.” He tapped his head. “Where do you think the word voyeur comes from? Or frottage? The French.”
“I know voyeur, but what’s the other one?”
“Frottage is when you rub against someone, especially a stranger, and pretend it’s an accident.”
“Like what guys do in the subway? I thought that was called perverted.”
Jean-Luc held up both hands. “Silence.” He swayed to the song that was playing, a woman singing something about a rose. The life of a rose? It sounded familiar.
Julien took Alyce in his arms. As they slow danced around the large kitchen, she carefully guided them toward Jean-Luc, who was stirring dinner. She gave him a butt frottage.
“Pardon, monsieur.”
“Shhh!” he said, though he didn’t seem that upset.
When the song ended, he turned the stereo off. “I cannot listen to anything after Edith Piaf sings ‘La Vie en Rose.’”
She asked him what the words were in English.
“It is about looking at life through rose-colored glasses.”
No one said anything for awhile.
Two hours and two bottles of wine later, Julien and Alyce faced a mountain of dirty dishes in the kitchen. He took her hand and led her to the door toward her cottage. “I’ll do them later. It’s your birthday.”
She croaked, “I don’t feel so good.”
She felt much better after she threw up and brushed her teeth. Much.
Julien was suitably good-humored when she came to bed in her un-sexy pajamas. “That wonderful meal. What a waste.”
Wearing only his black briefs, he attempted to spoon behind her.
“I want to sleep, Julien.” She pulled away, then scooted back into his body. “Just sleep.”
“D’accord, Al-ees. D’accord.”
The cicadas hummed. At first they drove her crazy. Now they were comforting. Her mind drifted to all that Jean-Luc had revealed over the evening. Again she wondered about Colette.
They both sat up at the sound of light knocking. Jean-Luc’s knock was harder. She tiptoed to the door with Julien behind her.
“Who is it?”
“Le Gentil Gendarme.”
“Philippe! How did you know where I lived?”
“Solange knows everything. Al-ees, I miss you so much.”
She opened the door, glanced at the main house to see if Jean-Luc had heard him. The light in his office on the second floor was still on.
“You must go now.”
“My ride dropped me off. I have no way home.”
Now she was pissed. “You just assumed I would—”
“Oh, you have company.” He took a closer look at Julien. “Are you a boy or a girl?”
“I’m Julien. Who the hell are you?”
“Philippe.” He bowed gallantly. “How old are you?”
“Get out of here! Can’t you see she is with me?”
“I cannot walk home from way out here.”
“I’ll take you home.”
“No, Julien, you’ve been drinking. Please don’t.”
She succeeded in parking Philippe on the lounger by the pool with a blanket over him and briskly commanded, “Stay there and be quiet.”
She climbed back into bed with Julien, eventually falling asleep.
She woke to the sound of chirping birds greeting the day. Still groggy, she snuggled up to Julien. He brought her hand to his hard-as-a-rock zizi.
She was wide awake now. Should she go on? She turned to look at him.
“Philippe!”
Julien sat bolt upright next to him. “Get out of our bed!”
Alyce jumped up. “GET OUT OF HERE!”
“The door was not locked. I was cold!” Philippe stood up in all his gorgeous aroused nakedness. “Let’s have some fun. Your friend is cute.”
With that, he grabbed himself with both hands and went to town.
Julien, who had mysteriously lost his briefs during the night and was also naked, dashed into the kitchen to grab the closest weapon: a metal spatula. “Get out of here you fu
cking—!”
Alyce couldn’t translate his insult.
He smacked Philippe, who then knocked the spatula out of Julien’s hand. Julien lunged. They hit the floor wrestling. Alyce was surprised at how well Julien fought, how passionately he defended her honor. She also wanted to laugh at the sight of them. But when he broke free, picked up a chair, and was about to break it over Philippe—
“Stop!” commanded a familiar voice.
The door swung open, freezing all of them in their respective positions like the dormice when they’d heard an odd sound.
“Are you all right, Al-ees?” Jean-Luc, still wearing last night’s clothes, took in what was going on. “Ah, you do know how to have fun.”
“I wasn’t doing anything!”
He took in her pajamas. “In what you are wearing, I can see why.”
Julien was mortified; Philippe was not.
Jean-Luc eyed the naked men and decreed, “For causing such a disturbance, you are to do the dishes now and fix me breakfast.”
They quickly dressed and dutifully followed him.
She pulled Julien back. “I understood everything you two said! But what did you call him? A fucking what?”
“Singe. S-i-n-g-e. Monkey. Did you see how he was jerking off?”
One thing was certain. She would never forget her 27th birthday.
Or the word singe.
14
The Offer
That night Jean-Luc studied the mural in the upstairs room. He reached for the bottle of red wine sitting on the floor. It was empty.
He was not.
It felt good to finally finish this project, years after he started it, even if he was drunk and it wasn’t his best work. He imagined how Colette would have enjoyed it.
Now he had to erase her and the past. He would beat this devil. He would.
He opened a fresh gallon of off-white paint, poured it into a metal tray, dipped a roller into it, and started applying it to the middle of the room. His stroke was tentative at first, then picked up speed.
Soon all traces of the mural were gone.
The Mansfield Express—Glorianna, her assistant Luther, and Nelson—was fast approaching, causing a nerve-wracked Alyce to toss and turn in her freshly washed sheets for a good hour before drifting off.
She was jolted awake by a pounding on her door and Jean-Luc bellowing, “We have important business to discuss!”
She grabbed her phone to see what time it was. Midnight!
While yanking on her robe, she bumped her thigh into the bedpost. “Merde.”
Jean-Luc and Didon had already made themselves at home at her dining table. Did she forget to lock her door again? Where was the New Yorker in her?
“I heard you swear in French.” He slammed his hand on the table, weaved a bit, and broke into a dopey grin. “That is a good sign.”
“Are you drunk?”
“I wrote a poem for you.” In a theatrical way he delivered:
“There once was a pale little sow
Who had herself a grand three-way plow
But the man whom she loved
Was none of the above
O, what does the poor girl do now?”
He waited for her response.
“Little sow?”
“Yes, little. Which makes it a term of endearment.”
“And what three-way plow? I didn’t have sex with either one of them!”
He leaned in, almost falling over. “Are you sure?”
“Yes!”
Wait, did she? No, she was sure she hadn’t.
“So?” he asked.
She looked at him, at Didon, and around the room. “So what?”
“What are you to do now?”
“Kick you the hell out, that’s what.”
“You need to rent a car,” he said. “You have not seen a thing. There is much beyond Marlaison. There is Avignon, Armagnac, the Pyrenees, Verdon Gorges, the Alps.”
“Do you put that ridiculous face on every time you want something from a woman? I’m not spending money—”
“You are a cliché.”
“You are an ass.”
“I’ve been called worse.” He took out a pack of cigarettes. She snatched them away. He snatched them back. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” he said as he lit up. A long exhalation followed as he waited for a response. “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done. Have you no idea what I am quoting?”
“What is this, a quiz show? Like I don’t get tested enough all day long.”
The next shot of smoke was right in her face. “The first and last lines of A Tale of Two Cities, one of the greatest novels ever written! It is about London and Paris during the French revolution.”
“Of course I’ve heard of it.”
“Who wrote it?”
“Ummm.” Damn. She knew it was somewhere in her fuzzy sleep-deprived brain.
“Charles Dickens!”
In his drunken gesturing, his cigarette fell from his fingers and onto the old wooden plank floor. She quickly picked it up and tossed it in the sink. He was more ornery than ever without Isabella.
“Just for the record, Mr. Elegance, I took a lot of math and business courses at college. Ask me anything about numbers.”
“To hell with numbers. What do they teach in American schools? How to read the television guide?” His expression darkened further as another thought came to him. “You live in New York City. There is culture everywhere.”
She made it clear she only worked in New York. She lived in Hoboken, which was in another state, New Jersey, across the Hudson River. Try leaving your house at 7 a.m., returning at 7 p.m. or later, and see how much culture you get. Occasionally a client treated her to a Broadway show.
He looked like he had smelled rotten food. “That is an existence, not a life.”
He was right about that.
“Here is what I will do for you. You procure a car and I will teach you culture. A small price to pay for learning how to be sophisticated.” As usual when he was worked up, he poked the air with his finger like a woodpecker attacking a tree. “There are thousands of women who would jump at the chance to be my student!”
She woodpeckered right back. “Then go find one! And you teach me sophistication? You look like hell and your dog smells like rotting fish.”
“And who called Isabella a twat?”
“You thought that was hilarious.”
“Never mind.” He switched to banging the table for emphasis. “I have the riches of the intellect, my little sow. I have dined with kings, made love to princesses, been quoted by the president of France!”
“Not that line about the five hundred cheeses. And stop calling me that.”
He brightened. “You know that quote? What is it? All of it, please.”
What had her dad said?
“It was de Gaulle who said it and the exact quote is, ‘How can you be expected to govern a country that has 246 kinds of cheese.’”
“Right.”
Warming to his new plan, “I will teach you to cook, to enjoy good food so you will never eat crap again.” Glancing at her refrigerator, “You may as well be living in a toxic waste dump.”
Wait a minute. Maybe this wasn’t so crazy. Why was she here? To work on her. She had a lot further to go than cutting out Cheez Whiz.
“Would you teach me about wine?”
He gleefully held up his glass as if to toast her. “With pleasure!” She responded in kind as he said, “To Beaujolais, Pomerol, St. Emilion, Graves, Viognier, and many more. I will even teach you French.” They took their respective sips. “Mornings at the school are not enough. You cheat. You find people who speak English.”
“I try to speak French. They get impatient.”
“They feel sorry for you. And please stop saying get or got so much. They become impatient is better. I detest when someone is recalling a conversation and says ‘Then he goes’ or ‘Then she went.’ It i
s wrong.”
“But everyone does it.”
“Everyone is wrong. You should strive to be right.”
He mapped out what he called his Pygmalion Plan, after telling her what that meant. It was vaguely familiar and she guessed it was a disease. He said Pygmalion was a sculptor in a poem by Ovid. He had sworn off women, then fell in love with a statue of a woman he created.
“It is also a play by George Bernard Shaw that the movie My Fair Lady was based on.”
There was Audrey Hepburn again. Sabrina, Eliza Doolittle. Was she any different?
She was getting stir crazy. With a car she wouldn’t have to bike to school in the heat or occasional rain. It would also make it easier to shop for groceries. And yes, just go and explore. Why stay in this one little area after traveling so far?
“I’ll see if Nelson will rent me a car after he leaves.”
“No, now! I will pay you back. I paid back Isabella and Mazuki didn’t I? Even more than what they spent.”
“Jean-Luc, I don’t have it. I lost my job, remember.”
“You are receiving unemployment checks.”
“No, I’m not. You have to be actively seeking employment to get those. I used all of my severance to do this!”
“You are renting your apartment.”
At a slight profit. Still. What condition would it be in when she returned?
She gave in to him out of exhaustion and because, after witnessing it with her own eyes, she trusted him to reimburse her. And there was her bad case of vacationitis that made the reasonable part of her brain disappear.
“It will be our secret, Jean-Luc. Okay?”
“But of course.”
She thought he would leave. Instead he jumped to another subject.
“Tell me about this mother of Nuisance. I mean, Nelson.”
Alyce was glad to have someone to share this with, even if the recipient was toasted.
“Glorianna’s father made a fortune in asbestos when she was a child,” she said, “then another fortune in asbestos removal when it was found to cause lung cancer.”