by Jane Delury
Madame Léger sat down on a leather couch. “Tell me something,” she said.
Dominique set his glass on the desk. “Nothing has ever happened to me. So I don’t have much to tell.”
“I felt that way when I was your age,” Madame Léger said. “I was very poor, you know. To be poor in Paris is not pleasant. Mais j’étais déterminée.” She patted the couch. “I’ve seen you watch me at my husband’s parties. I’ve looked out the window and found your face in the bushes.”
Dominique thought of the swirl of Madame Léger’s hips as she danced by the window, her cheek crushed against a lapel, her bored mouth. He sat down next to her and put his hand on her knee. She knocked it off.
“Ne sois pas ridicule,” she said.
She got up and walked to the door. On the threshold, as Dominique hurried away, she caught his arm and whispered that he should sit in the branches of the big tree behind the house the next morning, at ten fifteen precisely.
Madame Léger’s eyes were open and unblinking. Her nose trembled with the breath that entered her body in a shudder and left in a sigh.
“I think she’s trying to say something,” Pierre said.
“Elle ne dit rien,” Yvette said. “She’s in that moment between life and death when there’s nothing to say.”
The rag in her hand had soaked her left knee through her dress. She couldn’t let it go. She stared at Madame Léger’s forehead and remembered how Gustave would turn his back to her as he undressed in the evening, the wiry hairs on his shoulders, the puckered skin of his waist. She hadn’t cried in so long that her tears were crusty with salt. Pierre reached over to take her hand. On the stones below, the blood from Madame Léger’s head was forking into a crimson tree.
As she stared past Pierre and Yvette at the liquid sky, Madame Léger had never felt so peaceful. The pain had lifted away, and now she floated in a bath that would never grow cold. She thought about the chore boy watching from the tree. One night, years from now, his wife would wake up to the sound of sobs. After she shook him out of his dream, he’d tell her about the beautiful woman whom he had once loved.
“Look,” Yvette said.
A shadow was spreading from the roof of the manor, blotting out the sky as it went.
When the sun disappeared, Monsieur Léger was at his desk, adding to his list. He got up from the chair and peeled back a curtain. He could barely make out the long run of the drive and the shaggy roof of the forest. He’d seen this happen once before, during his childhood. He was walking the wall between the manor and the trees when the world went black. He tried to climb down, but he couldn’t find a foothold and tumbled over the edge. His heart in a fist, he followed the line of trunks, twisting his ankle and falling twice into brambles until he came to the gate. As he stumbled over the lawn, his mother ran out of the manor. She crushed his head to her stomach and listed all of the horrible things that she thought had happened to him.
“Plus jamais,” she said. “Never vanish again.”
This was not long before she herself started to vanish. She would wander the rose garden without her hat, sit in the pergola for hours, never turning a page in her book, kiss him on the forehead rather than the cheek, until one morning she left for Switzerland to take the waters and didn’t come back.
Monsieur Léger inched through the darkness to the door of his study and out into the hall.
“Hello,” he called. “Where is everyone?”
On the stairs, he took the treads one by one. When his slippers slapped on the landing, he reached out for the wall and moved his hand across the cool surface until his fingers stubbed on the door trim of the dining room. Next to the lines of the butler’s pantry a light glowed from the kitchen. He pushed open the door. The cook sprawled in front of the stove, smoking a cigarette. Above his head, tendrils of gas licked the bottoms of shadowy pots. Monsieur Léger shuffled closer. The cook looked up, his face a circle marked by three splotches.
“A fine pickle.” He blew out a curl of smoke.
“C’est une éclipse,” Monsieur Léger said. “Nothing to worry about. I’m looking for my wife. Have you seen her?”
“I can’t say that I have. I can’t say that I haven’t. It is quite dark, vous savez, monsieur.”
“I can smell your caramel burning,” Monsieur Léger said. He turned and made his way back into the hall. He tried to conjure up what exactly the cook looked like, whether his eyes were as beady as he remembered and his eyebrows as high. He would fire the man tomorrow. Gisèle wouldn’t be happy about it, but the season was almost over. She could make onion soup and omelets like the ones she used to make him in her apartment on the Left Bank. “You are the only one for me now,” she would say as she fed him a bite.
He found the handle of the front door. Outside, the sky was cloudless, the birds silent, the forest a tangle of shadows. He walked down the steps, holding the metal railing. His right foot crunched on the gravel of the drive. Along the side of the manor, he called his wife’s name. Once he found her, he’d bring her into his study to show her his list: the scarf on the floor of the third-floor guestroom last month, the foggy stain of her naked shoulders against the French doors, the paper she’d used to slip a note into the pocket of a visiting duke at last week’s tea, the bisecting rings on the edge of his desk yesterday afternoon. Tonight, he would tell her, would not be so easy. Tonight there would be no trips to powder her nose just as the viscount of such and such went down the hall for his coat, no twenty-minute expeditions to the kitchen to ask for a raspberry to drop into her coupe de champagne. This time she’d be surrounded by the emptiness between the courtyard and the house, and she wouldn’t pass through it without him at her side.
From above, a shape slid out of a tree.
“I’m looking for my wife,” Monsieur Léger said. “Have you seen her?”
“An enormous bird rose from the forest and ate the sun.”
Monsieur Léger couldn’t see the boy’s face, but he could smell his fear.
“Imbécile,” he said. “The sun always returns.”
He called out again for his wife, louder this time, and continued through the courtyard, past the topiary, toward the rose garden. Something sharp grazed his heel. He cursed but didn’t stop. Behind the pergola, a wall of bushes grew at his side, barbed and shapeless, as if they had never been trimmed.
A Place in the Country
1980
It was their weekend in the country, which meant a weekend with Jacques’s parents in their cottage outside of Benneville. This was not exactly the country—Benneville had grown since Jacques was a boy, moving closer to Paris on a wave of concrete, and it would not be a true weekend but rather one day, split in two, and one night. At his job in Paris, Jacques did a lot of counting, “living life by spreadsheet,” as his wife, Hélène, liked to put it, and already, an hour into the visit, he had started the countdown to tomorrow morning at eleven, when the car would be packed with their bags and with a box of the vegetables he was currently helping his father to harvest from his garden. Jacques’s sons were in the garden as well: Alexis in the shallot bed and Emmanuel with the cabbages. Each boy had a basket, as Jacques did. He was in charge of the leeks, although the person truly in charge here was Jacques’s father, Henri.
“Don’t yank,” Henri said. “Pull.”
Six tufting rows of Batavia lettuce away, he was talking to Alexis, Jacques’s smallest son, and not only small because he was six to Emmanuel’s seven. Alexis had come out tiny, two point five kilos, and now, crouched as he was under Jacques’s father, he resembled a gargoyle under a church steeple. At almost seventy, Henri had maintained his schoolmaster posture; his gardening cloak swept toward the ground from 180-degree shoulders. He leaned over to show Alexis the proper twist-pull method for harvesting vegetables and began to lecture about roots, pointing to those on the shallot he had pulled, explaining capillaries, the importance of removing all parts of the plant from the soil. “Sans ses racines,” he said,
“a plant has nothing to connect it to the world.”
“But why do we need to take out the roots if we’re going to eat the shallots anyway?” Alexis asked innocently. Henri winced. Jacques and his brother, Guy, had grown up in the schoolmaster’s house behind the Benneville école de garçons, and during their primary years, their father had also been their teacher. Jacques had seen Henri wince like that often when a boy asked a seemingly obvious question, followed—here it came—by a quick, raspy laugh.
“It is true,” Henri told Alexis, “that we are going to eat them anyway. Yet is that a reason to do something à moitié?” He pointed at the ground. “Look at the mess you’ve left.”
“I think what your grandfather means,” Jacques called to Alexis, “is that it’s not a good idea to leave old roots in the dirt.”
Guy had invented this technique: la diversion. When one of them got in trouble with their father, the other one would create a bigger problem. If Guy did poorly on a school assignment, Jacques would make sure to fail the next day’s test d’orthographe. If one of them asked to do something that was against their father’s principles—like join the Boy Scouts—the other would ask to do something worse, like become an altar boy. Once, after Jacques broke a glass in the kitchen, Guy threw a pétanque ball through the front window.
“No,” Henri said to Jacques. “That is not what I mean.”
“I could use a shovel,” Alexis said.
“It’s called a trowel,” Jacques’s father said. “And one should not need to use one.”
“C’est l’heure du goûter, anyway,” Jacques said. La diversion hadn’t worked. It was time for a dispersion.
“Didn’t they just have lunch?” Henri said. “Eh ben.” He sighed. “Yes, you boys go in. Your father and I will finish up here.” He looked over at Emmanuel. “That one isn’t getting anything done anyway.” Emmanuel had wandered away from the cabbages and was pursuing a butterfly in the brussels sprouts, tightrope walking one of the wooden planks that lined the beds. Jacques called to him that it was time for a snack, and he whooped off toward the gate, yelling at Alexis to come.
“Go on with your brother,” Jacques said to Alexis.
“I can finish this row first.”
“Clearly, you cannot.” Jacques’s father took his basket. “You missed three shallots right over there.”
Alexis watched his grandfather stride away with the basket. His chin trembled. When Henri had suggested that the boys come with them to the garden, Jacques had feared a moment like this one.
“Vite,” he said. “Run away while he’s gone.”
Alexis pushed up his glasses. “D’accord,” he said mournfully. He slumped off toward the gate, where Emmanuel waited. He hadn’t understood that Jacques was making a joke, and he wouldn’t have understood the joke anyway. Alexis, like Jacques, didn’t have much of a sense of humor. Il n’a aucun sens de l’humour, Jacques had heard Hélène say on the phone to one of her friends, years ago, and Jacques knew that she was talking about him. He found jokes difficult, and most conversation exhausting; this was one of the reasons that he and Hélène were good together, because she was adept at the art of small talk, of asking questions that got people talking instead of looking at you oddly, wondering what you’d meant. Her anger was deep, her laughter deep, and when she was sad, as she’d been the year her mother died, she sobbed all of a sudden, anywhere—the bank line, the market, the cinema. “So what if people know I’m crying,” she would snap when Jacques gave her a tissue. “Better to be overly emotional than to have no emotions.” When they were first dating, she had made Jacques talk about his feelings all the time, to the point that it felt like a persecution. “It isn’t that I don’t feel what you feel,” he’d said. “It’s only that I feel it more quietly.”
Jacques finished the leeks while his father sprayed the endives with something called Rotenone—he was generous with pesticides and considered organic gardening a luxury of the bourgeoisie. Then they took the baskets along the perfectly graveled pathway, past the perfectly sculpted rows, stopped to drop the spent husks and withered leaves into the steaming compost pile (“Forty degrees,” his father said. “It’s the new worms.”), went through the gate and over the perfectly mowed grass. When Jacques’s father had retired to the cottage, Jacques wondered what he would do with his time, after all those years spent running the school in Benneville, being on the village council, coaching the boys’ équipe de foot. The answer came that first spring, when his father’s patch of watercress became a plot of watercress and lettuce, mâche, and strawberries. Over the years, the garden had essentially turned into a small farm, with crops rotated by season, tepees for the cucumbers and tomatoes, trellises for the green beans, raised beds, flat beds, rare species such as the potiron turban and melon noir des Carmes, and pieces of slate from a broken chalkboard marking the name of each plant.
At the back of the cottage, they took the baskets to the vegetable room, a onetime coal room that Jacques’s father had converted into his workspace.
“How did those boys manage to trail dirt on the landing?” his father asked.
He pointed at a crumbly trail that led over the tiles toward the hall and the rest of the house. Jacques didn’t answer. Henri went through the world commenting on what didn’t work, and Jacques had learned to ignore most of what he said. It was a technique he had developed with Guy, when his brother started to speak nonsensically.
They took off their boots, and Jacques put on his loafers—“city shoes,” his father called them—as his father hung his gardening cloak on a hook. They washed their hands at the utility sink with the plug of soap impaled on a rod. Braids of shallots and onions dangled from the ceiling. On the walls were shelves of reclaimed jam jars filled with the pickles and preserves Jacques’s mother made: cornichons, pearl onions, strawberry, blackberry, raspberry jam. In a corner, a deep freezer hummed. During the first years of the garden, Jacques and Hélène would return from their visits with boxes and boxes of beets, cabbages, heads of lettuce, turnips, and leeks, which Hélène called “vulgar onions.”
“How can one man produce this many vegetables?” she had said as they tried to make room in their refrigerator. “I feel like Sisyphus.”
Then, one Christmas, she had thought to buy his parents a deep freezer for the vegetable room. “Now nothing will go to waste,” she told Jacques’s father, who was delighted. It was Hélène’s genius to be able to get what she wanted and make everyone else think that they were getting what they wanted, even that she was being self-sacrificing.
“Amène ces poireaux à ta mère,” Jacques’s father said, handing Jacques two leeks. “She needed some for tonight’s dinner. I’ll put together a box of vegetables for you and one for your brother.”
“He won’t want it,” Jacques said.
“Your mother likes him to have it.”
“All right, then,” Jacques said. “If you say so.”
Tomorrow, he would call Guy and say that he had a box of vegetables that he could drop by. Guy would say that he didn’t like vegetables, and that Jacques was the one with a family to feed. Guy lived alone in a suburban apartment that looked out on a municipal dump. He worked in the kitchen of an Arche Cafétéria off the autoroute. He hadn’t been to see his parents in ten years. He’d never visited the cottage. Jacques had last seen Guy with his parents on a Christmas before the boys were born. Guy stayed in the house behind the school with Hélène and Jacques’s mother, smoking and watching TV, his arms hanging down the sides of the chair. He slurped up his oysters and ate his foie gras off his knife, took a walk to the Seine, kissed everyone goodbye, then got in his dinged-up car and drove away. These days, Jacques saw Guy twice a year, when he went to the Blimpy and bought him dinner. Over pommes frites and leathery escalope de dinde, he told Guy about the boys and his job. Guy would grunt occasionally, pour more water into his glass, dunk his frite in the gravy. He had sweat stains above his ears on the paper cap he left on his head and, when he wa
s having one of his reactions to his medication, amoeba-shaped hives on his neck.
Jacques left his father in the vegetable room and took the leeks down the hall. The cottage had only two bedrooms, upstairs, cut into triangles by the eaves, with a bathroom in the middle. Downstairs was a large sitting room with a stone fireplace and a blip of a kitchen that looked out on the garden. Jacques’s parents had painted the main room when they bought the cottage, but the soot and grease on the walls had bled through in splotches. After the pipes in the upstairs bathroom leaked, they’d installed a drop ceiling. There was a couch that converted for the boys to sleep on, a small TV, and, jammed against the window, the dining room table that had stood in the schoolmaster’s house. The kitchen still had its original ceramic sink and a hodgepodge of pipes that led outside to the well and brought back water that tasted of metal and stone. Jacques found the cottage dark and dingy and cramped, but Hélène said that with a thick coat of paint and recessed lights, the drop ceilings torn away to show the original beams, the rotted window frames replaced and the fireplace bricked, it would be charmante comme tout. She had pulled up a corner of carpet in the guestroom and found, to her delight, rough-hewn pine floors, which, finished and polished, would look very “chic.”
In the kitchen, Hélène and Jacques’s mother were at the Formica table, peeling carrots and potatoes onto a sheet of newspaper. Although she wore no makeup, Hélène looked as if she did, her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright, the lashes long and singularly defined. Sometimes, even now, Jacques would walk into a room and stop to look at her, amazed that he had ended up with this person.