by Glenda Adams
Agnes was a plump young woman wearing, that evening, a voluminous paisley shift. Her face was certainly the face of the photograph Tom had shown Lark what seemed like years ago in the cafeteria in Sydney, heart-faced, with blond hair now falling straight and severe to her shoulders. It was a little face that did not belong to the large body. At least Lark was able to discern this. And she could also discern that Agnes was listening attentively to Tom, that her silence was caused not so much by bad temper or shyness, but by admiration of Tom, who was now gesturing exaggeratedly, fluently, pushing his lips forward to form his words well and to show that he was completely at home with this language and in these surroundings. Frequently he laughed, and even his laughter seemed to be in French, and incomprehensible. He reminded Lark of Donna Bird at dinner on the Avis Maris.
“He talks like one of us,” said Madame Comet to Agnes. “He could be French.”
Lark was working hard at remaining upright, moving her fork to her mouth, in order to stop herself from just lying down on the floor and never getting up.
Tom was telling jokes, anecdotes from his childhood. Since Lark knew most of his stories by now, having heard them dozens of times, intimate stories that he told to new acquaintances, using the same words, the same phrases, the same pauses each time, she even recognized some of them in their French versions and punctuated with mon vieux this and mon vieux that.
For some reason Madame Comet was turned toward Lark and was holding up her little finger, waggling it at her, a gesture Lark did not comprehend. Then in English, she said, “We French have a culture and a sense of history that no one else in Europe possesses, or even in the world. In the little finger of even the lowliest French grocer or laborer,” and here she grasped her little finger to emphasize her point, “there is more culture and more history than any American possesses in his entire body—or any colon, for that matter.”
“Brava!” cried Tom, clapping.
Lark had no idea what they had been talking about. Madame Comet turned back to Tom. “She will learn a lot this summer in France.”
“There are exceptions, of course,” said Madame Comet, softening a little, and she lapsed back into French and seemed to be saying that Tom, for instance, was très cosmopolitain, un citoyen du monde. Manfred Bird, too.
The gray began to descend again. Lark’s eyelids kept moving to a close, like a curtain, a portcullis.
“L’enfant est fatiguée,” said Madame Comet. “Vite, vite, allez au lit.” Lark got up. “And you don’t have to worry about leaving Tom with Agnes,” added Madame Comet in English, “I’ll see that they behave.”
The three of them laughed at the joke, and Lark fled from the room, escaped, and again fell onto the bed. But she had trouble sleeping. She lay heavily in bed, and when she did sleep she had dreams that woke her up. She dreamt of a field of cattle, all standing in rows, humming, a male chorus, and then the sound of her own voice, humming, awakened her. She could hear Agnes and Tom in the living room talking loudly and rapidly, Tom’s guffaws accompanied by Agnes’s prolonged giggling. Lark did not sleep again until the birds started to sing, just before dawn. When she awakened she could see clearly again. The gray had gone. Tom was there, beside her, his mouth straight and stern in sleep.
Lark slipped into the kitchen to sit and think. She turned the faucet on only a little way and let the water hit the side of the pot, as if she were pouring beer, so that the noise would not bring Agnes or Madame Comet bounding into the kitchen.
She sat quietly holding her eyes. She still had no plan, still did not know what to do.
“This is not the way we make coffee in France.” It was Madame Comet, taking the pot off the stove, substituting the espresso pot. “And we use the small electric coil, otherwise it wastes electricity.” Lark got up. “Stay there, I’ll do it.”
Some time later, when Tom wandered in scratching his chest with one hand and rubbing his hair with the other, he said, “It has all fallen into place. I must have been puzzling this out while I slept.” In the hand that was scratching his chest was also a sheet of paper, which he flung on the table.
“You mean you actually slept?” said Madame Comet, with a wink and a smile at Lark. “Agnes hasn’t even stirred yet. They talked all night, you know.”
“I wrote it down when I woke up, look,” said Tom, pushing the paper at Lark and at Madame Comet. Then he picked it up himself and read out loud, “What is neocolonialism?” He held up his hand in case they might try to answer. “It is the control of export industries. That’s it.”
“C’est vrai,” said Madame Comet. “He knows, that one, he could be French. I must rush. I must visit Fernand this morning and tell him the good news, how much money we have.”
For the next few days, while Tom and Agnes finished their fund-raising, Lark went for walks through Paris, deliberately not noticing which way she turned, seeing if she would find the way back to the flat or get lost.
Tom laughed when she told him this. “You should take pebbles, or breadcrumbs. I’m really sorry I can’t show you the Paris I know so well. Next time. Maybe on the way back, when we return the car.”
“Don’t leave,” Madame Comet begged them. “We won’t be able to manage. You are part of the family. Agnes really needs you.”
“We’ll be back,” said Tom.
“How can she say that, about Agnes, in front of me?” Lark said as she packed the last of their things. She thought she sounded like a nagging wife and regretted her question.
“I told you,” said Tom irritably, “I keep Agnes stable. She relies on me. I told you what happened once before when I left.” He passed his finger across his throat.
“Why didn’t you marry Agnes?”
“She has a first-rate mind,” said Tom.
“I’ve hardly even seen her since we’ve been here. She only seems to come out at night, when I’m in bed already.” And again Lark regretted her tone of voice, the whining quality.
After Tom had pulled the car up in front of the building, Lark still sat in the passenger seat while he went in to get their luggage. She did not want to see Madame Comet or plump Agnes. She wanted to watch the two women and Tom haul the luggage out, without her help. She wanted to stay in the car as if she were at a drive-in movie. But when Tom said, “Lark?” and motioned to her to get out, she did so, and she shook hands and said, “Au revoir, madame, au revoir, Agnes.”
While Tom ran inside to check that they had left nothing behind, Madame Comet put her arm around Agnes and shook her head. “It’s not right, you should have had him, you are the one for Tom. It’s a joke. That young colon only pretends innocence. She has tricked him.” She spoke in French, but Lark suddenly knew she had understood every word.
Lark read the road signs as they drove south and then east, chemin de fer, chute de pierres, and so on. She kept a list of the towns they passed through: Corbeil, Fontainebleau, Montereau, Sens, Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, Joigny, Auxerre, Courson, Coulenge, Clamecy, Varzy, Premens, Nevers, Moulins, Riom, Clermont-Ferrand, le Mont-Dore, Besse en Chandess, Murat, Aurillac, Entraygues, Estaing, Espalion, Mende, Gorge des Tarnes, Gorges de l’Ardèche.
Tom kept a list of the photographs he took: Clermont-Ferrand from Puy-de-Dôme, Puy-de-Dôme from Clermont-Ferrand; cathedral tower; Basilique de Notre Dame du Port; Romanesque tower; gargoyles; Romanesque doorway; statue over Murat; Entraygues, center; Entraygues, thirteenth-century bridge; Gorges des Tarnes; Gorges de l’Ardèche.
That summer the wasps were particularly bad. Every morning when Lark slipped and clattered down the cobbled lane to the bakery, several wasps followed her, attracted to her yellow dress and drawn along in her wake. If she ran from them, they teemed after her and bumped into her when she stopped. They terrified her.
Lark was hating this summer in France. She now thought she might be pregnant. It was one more thing she had to tell Tom. Tom was always reading or talking animatedly to Elizabeth or Jean-Claude, taking turns with them holding the baby. And while he
no longer seemed to talk to Lark or look at her, he often sat with his arm around her or his hand resting on her knee, and she had the feeling she was somehow essential to him, like the paper that is wrapped around a bowl and tucked into the crevices when the bowl is packed in a box.
If Lark listened, beyond Giscard d’Estaing this and Pompidou that and Mitterrand something else, she sometimes learned new things about Tom. She learned that he loved the fireside scene between the two naked men in Women in Love and the novels of Hermann Hesse.
Elizabeth passed the newspapers on to Lark every day, but the stories Lark remembered were the fillers, the items about the Indiana woman who crawled and rolled through the snow with two broken legs after her car had run off the road, and the lady from Toledo, Ohio, who took a taxi to San Francisco. And now she was reading insect stories. That morning she had read of a man from Vienne who inhaled a wasp. The wasp stung his throat, the throat swelled, blocked off his windpipe, and the man died.
To get to the bakery she had to steel herself. She walked deliberately, with her hand over her mouth and nose, breathing slowly and quietly. Clustered about the bakery door were more wasps, and inside the display windows, crawling over the fruit tarts and the sugared bread, more. The girls behind the counter did not seem to care. They chatted and laughed, with their mouths wide open, moving the breads and cakes and flicking at the wasps. The first time she had gone in, one of the girls had cried, “Bonjour, madame,” and the other had said, “Il fait beau aujourd’hui, n’est-ce pas?”
“Oui, mais les insectes...” Lark had answered, wanting to say that the wasps bothered her but not able to find the words. “Mais ‘la campagne bourdonnait du chant des insectes,’” she said instead.
The girls had screamed, laughing. “Ooh, she speaks French so well,” one said, and the other agreed, “Oui, oui,” taking in her breath as she spoke, and to emphasize it she shook one hand in the air, as if she were drying nail polish. “Formidable.”
It was torture now to go there, but it would have been worse to have stayed in the house and confessed the reason. Lark remained outside in the square until the crowd of customers in the bakery had thinned. She watched the slate-green Rhône. In the middle was a flat rock, a miniature island, which once caught the fancy of a king, who had ordered a table and banquet to be set. He sat on the rock and feasted, with the water swirling by. And he watched while one of the servants bringing him food drowned.
“Good morning,” the girls behind the counter sang when she walked in. “What can we give you today?”
As if they did not know. Every morning she asked for eight rolls, two for each of them, and a long loaf for lunch.
Lark escorted the wasps back up the lane to the house. She could slam the door on them, but by the time breakfast had been set on the terrace at the back under the grapevine, the wasps had found their way up the front of the house and over the top and were swarming about them as they sat down.
If a wasp alighted on the butter or fell into the milk jug, Lark ate her roll without butter and took her coffee without milk. She had read that a startled wasp deposited its sting in fright, and that once deposited in food, the sting retained its poison for some time.
She spent most meals walking about the little terrace, turning away from the wasps and smuggling every piece of bread to her mouth. Tom and Jean-Claude laughed at her. Her behavior irritated them both.
“If you move they’ll follow you even more,” Jean-Claude said. He sat impervious, the brown and yellow striped bodies coasting about his head.
“You’ll get an ulcer if you spend every meal on your feet,” Tom informed her. “Relax. Enjoy yourself.”
“Women rarely get ulcers,” Elizabeth said.
There was nowhere for Lark to go to get away from the wasps. The fig trees and vegetable garden made the next terrace, set into the hillside above the house, impossible. Indoors was just as bad. With the shutters open, the wasps flew freely in and out, hovering over the fruit bowl, the sink, and even the bathroom fixtures.
Sometimes, when the others were busy outside, she could close the shutters and doors and stay in the house.
One morning, before the others awakened, Lark took ten empty beer bottles and placed an inch of sugar and water in the bottom of each. She stowed the bottles at intervals around the terrace, behind rocks and plants and other objects to keep them out of sight. Then, as she stood and watched, wasps flew to the bottles and crawled inside, then fell into the sweet water. She planned to empty out the dead wasps every morning and refill the bottles with sugar and water.
Lark was washing her hair over the stone sink in the kitchen. Tom and Jean-Claude sat outside and watched Elizabeth bathe the baby. She had cleared the breakfast things and placed a blue plastic bathtub on the table on the terrace.
From the kitchen Lark could overhear everything they said. She could see them if she raised her head. Tom watched Elizabeth wash the child in the tub. Then he stood up and wet his hands in the bath water and lathered them with soap and tickled the baby all over. Elizabeth ran inside to get her camera. Jean-Claude laughed.
When Elizabeth had taken the photo and finished bathing the child, she wrapped him in a towel and handed him to Tom. Then Jean-Claude asked Tom why he and Lark did not settle down and have a family.
“Plenty of time,” said Tom and shrugged and laughed. “Things are fine as they are. Why change it?”
“You’d enjoy being a father,” Elizabeth said. She went and stood by Jean-Claude, her hand on his shoulder. Together they watched their child on Tom’s knee.
“Time enough for all that,” Tom said. He held the child above his head and made him laugh.
Lark watched Elizabeth take another photo.
They sat outdoors, in a small café by the river, and ate fried fish and fresh melon. In the dusk the wasps had thinned out, and those that still flew about had become more attracted to the street lamp behind them. The baby slept, covered with mosquito netting.
“If life could always be like this,” Elizabeth said. Jean-Claude rubbed the back of her neck.
Tom told a story. “This reminds me of the night I liberated myself.”
Jean-Claude leant back in his chair, Elizabeth leant forward toward Tom. Lark sat quietly and ate the little fish. She had heard this story several times.
“You’ve no idea what a simple gesture can do to free you from the pressures and hypocrisies of a lifetime,” Tom said. “There were eight of us. Two were young priests. We had cooked that steak over the open fire and eaten it with bread and salad and wine. We sat around the fire. Everyone was in a good mood. We sat or lay in the grass. A bit like now. Then suddenly I knew what I had to do. I stood up and took off my clothes, and I jumped over the fire. Then everyone stood up and threw off their clothes, and we held hands and danced around the fire. Those of us who dared jumped over it. Everyone except the priests. They just sat there, in their clothes, looking a bit uncomfortable. But they still sat there, watching, taking everything in. They could have walked away if they had wanted to. They didn’t have to watch. We had a ball. We jumped and ran and horsed around. It’s the most natural thing in the world, to go about naked. Here we all were, just jumping about and laughing. There’s nothing to it, just taking each other’s bodies for granted. The guys tried to jump on some blond and make it with her. She led everyone on, but she wasn’t having any.”
Elizabeth turned to Lark. “Where were you? Were you liberating yourself ?”
Lark shook her head. Tom laughed. “She was busy making tea in a teapot and putting on the tea cozy. Just joking. I didn’t know Lark yet. God, you’ll never know. It’s the most natural thing in the world. Everyone’s so hung up about nudity.”
“You’d better be careful back in New York, when you’re talking to Manfred Bird.” Elizabeth giggled. “Remember what he did to those statues.”
“Poor Manfred,” said Tom. “He must be off his gourd, with this arrest and trial coming up.”
Lark counted
the number of little fish heads left on her plate. She had eaten thirty-two while Tom told his story. Jean-Claude paid for the meal while Tom was still fumbling in his pocket for the money. Lark felt ill.
They decided to go swimming. There was a stream, a tributary of the river, some ten miles south of the house. Just before the stream joined the river it made a sharp turn. On one side of the turn the water ran deep and swift, swirling against a bank of sheer rock. On the other side the current was slow and edged its way around a deposit of sand, forming a small beach.
Lark put on her bathing suit and joined the others outside the house.
“Your swimsuit’s gotten too small for you,” Tom said. “It must be all these rolls and croissants and nothing to do.”
Elizabeth and Jean-Claude turned to look.
“Stop it, Tom. It’s fine,” Elizabeth said. “There won’t be many people at the beach, anyway.”
“It won’t hold,” said Tom. “The hook at the back will snap as soon as she starts to swim.”
He was right. And the suit was old. It had seen her through many Sydney summers at the beach.
“I could wear nothing if it snaps,” Lark said. “I’m not hung up about nudity.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Tom.
“I have a second suit I could lend you,” said Elizabeth, in a kind voice.”
“It wouldn’t fit her,” said Tom.
Lark shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I probably won’t go swimming, anyway. I have a book I want to read.”
Tom put his arm around her shoulders. “That’s solved, then. Let’s go.”
“You can read out loud to the baby,” said Elizabeth. “He loves women’s voices.”