by Susan Conley
I put my hand out so it cuts through the wall of wind, which whips my hair around my face and up above my head. Another hour passes. Paris feels far behind. The fields are bigger now. Each plowed into a different-sized rectangle and conjoined into a patchwork of light brown soil and darker soil and chartreuse leaves. It’s just after eleven in the morning and the greenish-white tips of the trees sparkle in the sun and everything is within reach. Love. Sex. Belonging. It’s all always just within reach. Loneliness is vanquished. The bass of the song travels to my stomach and feels so good. Exhilarating even. Gone is that feeling of being just a foreigner watching. Of one step removed. “Did you listen to music growing up in Canada?” I peel another tangerine.
“Estonian folk songs.” He says this with a straight face.
“Hah.”
“My mother played albums on a gramophone.”
“How could you miss one of the most important women singers of the 1980s?”
“Willie. I think I am a lot older than you. Either that, or I’m too busy constructing court cases.”
I put my bare feet up on the dashboard and press my knees together. “Do you think you’ve got a case built for Gita? Do you have enough material? Do you have enough facts?”
“That is work, and this trip is play. You are considerate to worry. But that is my job. I take it very seriously. I will do everything I can.”
“Gita isn’t work, Macon. Gita is our friend.”
“Your friend. Your student. My client. Yes, of course I am working on it.” He can shut off like this and sit in the quiet. Me, I’m trained to fill empty spaces. Maybe Macon doesn’t subscribe to small lies out of convenience to please people. My mother was like that, too. She didn’t believe in half-truths. She would have never called Luelle at the academy to say she was coming down with the pip. She would have said she was going away to the beach. Who knows with my mother?
“God, I never knew how much farming went on in this small country.” I stretch my arms out and almost touch his shoulder with my left hand.
“France is surprisingly self-sufficient and proud. Very proud. I love this country.”
Every five miles or so there’s a wooden farmhouse in between the fields and barns and equipment sheds. Then, every twenty miles, there’s a village built from coffee-colored stone. Rows of leggy trees stand in a green boundary line at the town’s edge before the fields begin again. From here the villages look happy to be left behind by the highway. The flat roofs create a line in the sky that remains in my mind long after we’ve passed by, asking, What would it be like to live here? What is your old life that you could leave it behind?
We drive south and slightly west so we miss Dijon. I nap sitting up, but I don’t have any memory of napping. I look at my watch when I wake, and four hours have passed since we left Paris. My lips are chapped. There’s that twang again of being the outsider. Just one string of it but it’s there while I’m still half-asleep. We’re far from Paris now. I hope it’s good. The kissing. The beach. The fields give way to thick forests of pine trees and bigger towns way off in the distance, built along steep hills and ravines.
There are signs for Beaune. Then Chalon-sur-Saône. Newer towns appear, rippling in concentric circles from a center I can’t see. I can only make out the farthest subdivisions—rows of small, square, stucco houses and red tin roofs. It feels like we’re driving across the whole country in one day. The truck eats up the miles. “France is so small,” I say. “So incredibly small.” Everything in the truck now seems to be about the mediated space on the seat between us and the kissing and his collarbones. Where will we sleep? Am I crazed? Maybe I shouldn’t have come. Talking helps, but he doesn’t mind long silences, and I can only talk so much. It’s ridiculous—driving away from my job. I like that job. I need it. I’ve worked there for six months almost to the day.
Five hours pass, and we get to a puzzle of off-ramps and small highways circling Lyon. It’s a bigger, industrial city with snarls of traffic and long lines of French trucks with canvas tarps covering their loads. Then the road opens up again and winds through orchards and over small sloping hills. It’s past two. I slip in a tape by Los Lobos and Macon puts his hand on my knee. I want to sing now but I don’t know any of the words, so I hum, confined to body language. Willing his hand to stay on my knee where it is burning an imprint.
I’m ready for whatever happens between us. But how do I say this? He pulls me closer with his free arm. “Spanish lyrics.” He laughs. “You’re humming in Spanish.” We come up quickly on a white Peugeot, and before we incorporate it into our grille, Macon takes his hand off my leg and pulls out to pass.
“That was close.” I will the hand back. “Name two places in the world you most want to go.”
“Tartu.” He needs both hands on the steering wheel now.
“Tar—what?”
“In Estonia. Near the Baltic Sea. Tartu. It’s the city my family comes from.”
I cross one leg under the other. “Do they speak Russian? Estonian? Or what language there?”
“It’s Russian, yes, and French.” He passes a large black truck on the hill. “I’ll get there. There’s still a house my parents own.” He’s quiet now. “They had to leave quickly.”
“Who did?” I know so little about him.
“The Jews in Tartu did. I started to tell you this the other night at the bar. The leaving of the house. The defining moment of the century for my family.”
“Oh God, what year are we in now?”
“Nineteen forty-four. The story still goes that Stalin’s tanks were on their way. For my father it’s as if he left yesterday. He walked away from his bedroom and his model airplanes and his books about flight. He wanted to be a pilot.”
“He’s haunted?”
“It got decided quickly: either you were going or not. My grandfather was a scientist who figured out a way to process black-and-white film in a lab in Estonia. He took my grandmother and my father with him.”
“So there’s still a house?”
“That no one has seen in forty years. But yes, my family owns it.”
“Your family has lost a house.”
“We lost a house, but we re-created it in Toronto. Down to the brick walkway.”
“So you and Gita are both exiles in Paris.”
“I am French, Willie. My mother was born in Paris. Gita is from India, and it will be hard for her to make a life here. You know that, yes?”
“But even harder for her if she’s forced to go back.”
“I understand your willingness to help Gita. I’ve had that need, too. Then it settled down into a job that I do every day. You will settle, too. Not because you will stand for anything less than what’s right, but because life is long and it’s hard to keep up the energy you have now. It’s impossible, for example, for me to form special ties with each of my clients.” He pauses. “The second place I’d go if I could is Joshua Tree. In California.”
“I think you are the most unsentimental person I know.” I smile.
“Then you do not know me very well yet. I cry at the movies, even comedies. I am what you call a sap. I have fallen heedlessly for you. Don’t you see that? It’s perhaps the most sentimental thing I’ve ever done. I’m shamelessly courting you because I have a need to see your face every day and the mole above your lip and this hair, this long red hair.” His face is very serious. Then he looks back at the road. “So have you been to this desert?”
The things he’s said are symphonic in my head. They keep playing there. I hear myself say, “I’ve been to Joshua Tree. The trees look like old men. There are whole fields of them.” Why did I wear these jeans? It’s so warm now, and they stick to my legs. He has a need to see me every day. My face. My hair. “My brother and I camped there in college.”
“My mother has always wanted to go to California.”
“She’s in France now?” Courting. “Courting” is a pleasing word when I say it to myself silently in the truck.
He rubs his eyes with his right hand while he drives and looks over at me. “But you are from this golden land called California.” Another black truck filled with apples slows on the hill in front of us. Macon glances over his left shoulder and pulls out to pass. It’s been almost two hours since Lyon, and I’m starving. I pull a baguette and a small jar of Nutella from my bag. “It’s a circus act. What else are you hiding in that bag?”
I’m tired and hungry and overcome by this lassitude that the drive’s brought on. A deep, physical sleepiness. My mind thick and dreamy and associative. I walked into the asylum center on Rue de Metz and I met six girls and a lawyer and everything began to change. When will we see the ocean? I can almost smell it now. Signs for Avignon. I long for the ocean like a person. Like my mother. The closer we get to the water, the deeper my longing is. My brother’s probably taking a nap in his apartment, and I miss him. I’m almost asleep. Is there a way to find a pay phone to call Luke? He’s my family. He’s how I make sense of Paris and of moving away from my father and the open-ended sadness I felt in California after my mother died. I look out the window at the brown hills and the wiry trees—olive trees? My mother is gone. I feel quieter about her death here. In California all I wanted to do was yell. I’m grieving for her here in a way I couldn’t before.
“Where are your parents now, Willie?”
“We lived on the coast in a town called Sausalito. My father’s still there—at least, I think he is. I haven’t talked to him since last spring.”
“Do you mean your parents are divorced?”
I miss my mother so much then. It’s a longing I can’t speak of to him. “My mother is dead.”
“Ouch. I’m so sorry.”
“Right after my mother died, my father designed this bench for her in the cemetery. Granite. Way too shiny, because that’s the only way he said they came. He asked me to help with the wording of the engraving on the bench. But I couldn’t. It was too removed from her—a bench in a strange town in Montana where all her family was buried. She didn’t know anyone in that state except her sisters and cousins. Her life condensed to a sentence.”
Macon just nods and listens. He’s good at listening. “Once”—I rip the bread into smaller pieces and prop the Nutella on my knees—“it was impossible to live without my dad. But then my mom died and it was crazy to try to live near him. He’s still my connection to her, though. He’s more than that. But it’s better here without him.”
I try to hand Macon bread dipped in chocolate but he opens his mouth, so I lean over and feed him and get Nutella on his chin. We laugh, and he wipes the chocolate with his thumb. “It’s better that you’re in Paris. Better that I met you. But I am sorry. Sorry it has come at the price of your mother.” An hour after Avignon we pull into a service station in a town called Aix-en-Provence. It’s a one-story blue concrete shop with a concrete parking lot. Two red gas pumps sit out front in the bright sun. Macon pulls up to the first one. I get a metal key on a dirty string from a teenage boy in a mechanic’s suit and find a smelly bathroom behind.
When I step back into the sun, a huge flock of birds is passing over—thousands of them. The sky darkens with birds until it looks like rain. I jog back to the truck and jump in. Macon bangs the gas nozzle down and slides in beside me. The birds turn the inside of the cab darker too, so that it feels almost like night. He takes my hand and kisses it quickly. The birds fly hard, as if they’re straining to pull something—a black blanket?—over the sky.
When the sun reappears, I’m on Macon’s lap, one leg wrapped around either side of him. We make out in the truck—small kisses over each other’s faces and mouths, laughing. We kiss and kiss and the kissing is good and I’m connected to the truck and the birds and the green trees that flank the sides of the gas station driveway. It’s not often we receive what we want. Now he’s kissing my mouth harder. I want to bite his lower lip. To taste it. He kisses between my collarbones—that private hollow. Then down the center of my breastbone. He cups each of my breasts in his hands and I close my eyes. We stop kissing only because a car pulls in behind us.
Then we have to disentangle, and I’m laughing again. He puts the truck in first and second and third gear and accelerates onto the highway. I have this sense that everything is in reach—the drive, Luke’s health, the beach where we’ll camp.
The sign on the highway reads CANNES 140 KM. I place my head under the steering wheel on his thigh. I’m still sleepy, but it’s a warm, delicious tired now. “My mother was a psychologist. But then she closed her practice and became a different kind of therapist. My father’s a mapmaker. He started in the sixties, before computers. They bought a redwood house for nothing thirty years ago.” I close my eyes. “You would have liked it, I think—the houses are stacked on the hill with redwoods and eucalyptuses and open stretches down to the bay.”
After Aix-en-Provence the view widens again into dry fields and rows of the red poppies I’ve been hoping for. The air is salty now. The ocean must be close. “You haven’t named two places yet.”
“Game’s over.”
“No, really, Willie, where would you go if you could?”
“I’m not telling. Remember, you hardly know me.”
“Oh, but I do know you.” He traces the long creases that run across my forehead.
“I would go to India. In fact, I’m going to India. I got a research grant from the school where I teach. Two weeks in the northern mountains in July, tracking down the daughter of an Indian poet. I can’t wait.”
“That’s incredible.”
“You have to tell me if you think Gita will be awarded asylum and what tricks you’ve planned for the court.”
“No tricks. Only facts strung together to make a story.”
The Graceland album is playing when I wake up. I lift one sticky leg off the seat, then the other, trying to stretch the cramps in my calves. I finger a string bracelet on Macon’s wrist. “Pablo made it.” He looks down at me while he drives.
“Made what?” I squint in the light.
“The bracelet. Pablo beaded it.”
“Pablo who?” I hold Macon’s arm close to my face with both hands and look at the beads closely.
“Pablo Ventri.”
“Ventri. Your name, Ventri?”
“Pablo my son.”
“Your son.” Now I sit up.
“He made it in school.”
Something stings. I can hear Luke inside the truck: Don’t overreact. Don’t panic. You never know how he might explain it. But I always grow attached to people too quickly. I do this over and over. I’ve given Macon pieces of myself. Why did I do this? Why did I tell him about my mother? Why do I offer my parents up as if they’re only what they appear to be on the surface?
“How old?” I study the toenails on my left foot and force myself to sound casual. “How old is your son?”
“He is four. Merde. He is already four.”
“He lives where?”
“He lives with Delphine north of Paris, in a town called Chantilly. We all live there right now in an old stucco house I own.” He slows onto a narrower road and yields to an orange VW van.
“Delphine.” I repeat the name slowly and look out my window and try not to blink the tears.
“Delphine, my ex-wife.”
“Ex-wife?”
“Delphine, the woman I once was married to.”
“You have an ex-wife and a son.�
� I thought he was opening his life to me.
“I do.”
I sit on top of my hands. Luke will love this. He had no idea there would be drama. Go slow, Luke would say. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. He and I went through a heavy Monopoly phase in middle school.
“Chantilly is the best thing for Pablo right now, and it’s a way for us both to live with him. I’ve been divorced for two years.”
I pretend to be busy finding lip balm in my bag. Then I redo the elastic in my hair. “It’s hot in here.” I turn the fan up on the dashboard and roll the window down. Then I move as close as possible to the passenger-side door. Whenever I choose badly in love, I only blame myself. I sit and stare out the window, and that familiar sense of disappointment creeps in.
“Have I lost you to the scenery?”
“I’m thinking about how much I don’t know you.”
“But also how much you want to kiss me.” He reaches far over and puts his right hand around my neck and massages it. I feel a tingling in my thighs again, which I can’t believe.
“That may be true.” But it’s more complicated now.
“The fact that you still want to kiss me makes everything easier.”
“You have a son.”
“I have a son.” Macon doesn’t seem put off by my logic, or the next long silence that follows. Ladysmith Black Mambazo sings along with Paul Simon. There’s a smell of gasoline and sweat in the cab.
“Why are we even camping on the beach? Is it allowed?” The son and the ex-wife rain in my head.
“Because I want you to see the mountains from the beach at night.” Is he crazy? Is he just stringing lies? The beach at night? I want him to stop the truck. I want to get out. I should go home. I should call Luke and go home.
We come down to the coastline in Fréjus on a narrow winding stretch just above St. Raphaël. There’s no music because Paul Simon shut off north of Cuers—just the whir of the truck’s engine when Macon downshifts. In St. Raphaël, he turns east toward La Napoule and there’s the click of the blinker and I still feel unsure. Why hasn’t he mentioned his wife before? Why hasn’t he mentioned his son? The road tightens through a small range of dry, brown mountains, which mark the final descent to the beach.