The Balcony

by Jane Delury

  The atelier lay at the end of the contemporary wing with a view of the jardin de sculptures, where caterers were setting up tables under the steel wings of a Calder for yet another wedding reception. The atelier hosted school groups every Tuesday morning, and the glue sticks were ready on the tables, the words Bienvenue dans le Monde de Picasso written on the whiteboard. Kate sat in one of the small chairs and, for the next hour, made fliers out of lime green and peacock blue paper, gluing the photographs of the dog that she’d photocopied on her lunch break. By six, when a guard came by for a final sweep, she’d finished ten identical collages with the dog at the center, looking somewhat corpse-like, and the words CHIEN PERDU cut from Le Dauphiné Libéré staggered across the top.

  “Merveilleux,” Georgia said of the fliers that evening. Kate had come home to find her and her boyfriend, Oliver, sharing a bottle of vodka on the couch, under a poster of Georges de La Tour’s Saint Jérôme being flagellated by angels. The house, one of a few stand-alones in the neighborhood, had a nice view of the Isère River, which ran by the Bastille, but the foundation, as in most of the homes in the quartier italien, was steeped in floodwater, leaving the air musty and damp. The plaster cracked and fell in chunks from the walls, so Kate had masked the holes with posters from the museum gift shop. The living room—a Grecian urn here, a nude by Ingres there—provided a visual crash course in Western art history.

  “Thanks,” Kate said.

  “No, I mean it.”

  “Très cubiste,” Oliver said.

  “That’s what I was going for.”

  “We’ll help you put them up.” Georgia poked Oliver on the temple. “Come on. It’ll be fun.”

  “Whatever you want, chicken,” Oliver said. For an unpleasant moment, Kate saw Georgia on the floor of his apartment, blindfolded and handcuffed to his radiator as he dripped candle wax on her inner thighs, a moment that Georgia had told Kate gave her an orgasm so intense she almost passed out.

  “Great,” Kate said, and went upstairs to change. She didn’t like Oliver, and not only for the way he’d made fun of her fliers. She’d dated guys like him: one of them gave her chlamydia. He had dirty-looking hair, tattoos up his neck, and the casual, dangerous gaze of someone who slept around. He cultivated his working-class London accent and ran with a set of Grenoble hipsters from small European countries who self-published chapbooks of Oulipo poetry, dressed up as clowns for readings, held Ping-Pong tournaments, and played the accordion ironically.

  They went out into the night, over the bridge, Georgia staggering, Oliver loping, Kate following with the posters. The smell of pizza from the quais mixed with the smell of sewers—Grenoble’s perfume. Kate found blank areas of wall between the kebab restaurants, pharmacies, and nightclubs where she could tape the posters. Georgia and Oliver ran into one of their friends almost immediately and Kate said she’d meet up with them at Le Couche Tard. When she got there an hour later, Oliver was behind the bar with the bartender on duty—a dreadlocked Finnish woman—and Georgia was drunk, on a stool, eating a bowl of popcorn. Oliver said he would make Kate her drink, a margarita, which, like the popcorn, was sweetened, rimmed with sugar rather than salt.

  Techno music blared from the next room. Bodies moved together and came apart. Kate felt, as she did more often lately, that she was getting too old to be at a bar like this and doing a job like her job. In the euphoria of moving abroad and learning French and going to college, she’d neglected to think over the obvious question of what one did with a degree in art history. As her father had put it when she told her parents her major, “There aren’t a lot of jobs for professional thinkers.”

  By the second margarita, she could feel herself sliding into a rut of self-pity. She told Georgia, who was encouraging Oliver to go dance with her when he was done mixing that TGV, that she was heading home.

  “Cheers,” Georgia said. “See you in the morning.”

  “Cheers,” Oliver called, and Kate waved to him primly. That was the kind of man that Alexis had saved her from. She felt both grateful and lonely. She wanted to put her feet in Alexis’s lap, and she told him so in the email she sent when she got home.

  “I miss you, too,” his response read the next morning. “I’m not jealous, but I don’t like to think of you at a bar. Not saying you shouldn’t go, of course. I hope the signs work. If not there is always the animal shelter. You can drop off Georgia while you’re there.”

  Although Alexis and Georgia had spent little time in each other’s presence—when he was in Grenoble, Kate mostly slept at his apartment—he had a strong opinion about her being exceedingly vulgaire and found her fascination with S&M distasteful.

  “I can’t get rid of her,” Kate emailed back, “mais ne t’inquiètes pas. I’ll get rid of the dog.”

  Later that day, the phone rang in the kitchen.

  “Madame Kate Anderson?” a man said.

  “Mademoiselle,” she said.

  “C’est la gendarmerie du centre-ville.”

  Kate, it seemed, had disobeyed un arrêté with her posters. One was not allowed to post des affiches without a permit.

  “Désolée,” she said. “Je suis américaine.”

  “Et alors,” the man continued. Being American was no excuse for ignoring the law. There were clear procedures for lost animals. She should contact the proper agency at the town hall, as well as the city’s animal refuges to see if a listing had been made. If these attempts yielded nothing, she should bring the dog to the fourrière communale, where it would be kept for eight days before being sent to a refuge or, in the case of serious illness, euthanized. The posters, it went without saying, had been removed and Kate était priée to remove any others or she would be charged with a fine of three hundred francs.

  A week went by. Alexis registered a patch of radiation in a forest in Finland. Kate opened the dishwasher and found a dildo in the top rack among the coffee bowls. An Ingres exhibit opened at the museum and she stayed late arranging pencil cases and coasters. The dog still hulked under the bench, head on its paws. She held on the phone for fifteen minutes with the town hall before hanging up.

  “That’s it,” she told Georgia. “Off to the fourrière communale.”

  It took both of them to coax the dog into Kate’s Clio with the leash that Georgia provided. The dog trembled in the back seat, the seat belts clanking. To calm him down, Kate put on France Inter, which was playing “le best de Michael Jackson.” The depot stood in Île Verte, halfway between downtown and the university, a suburb of sprawling concrete towers built during Grenoble’s postwar, post-1968-Olympics boom. Most of the city looked this way. Just as the gift shop was a poor imitation of the museum, Grenoble, Kate often thought, was a poor imitation of Paris.

  “He’ll be euthanized, I’m afraid,” the woman at the front desk said after she’d seen the dog. “We’ll keep him for the eight days, but I can tell from here that he needs serious veterinary attention.”

  That night, six hundred francs of vet bills later, Kate returned home with the dog and walked him up to the house on his bandaged leg. She tugged at the leash. The dog didn’t move. She unhooked the leash and he limped over to his usual place.

  “I knew it,” Georgia said when Kate came inside. “You couldn’t.” She was on the couch in a T-shirt, painting her toenails.

  Kate explained what the vet had told her. The dog showed signs of malnutrition, fleas, tooth decay, conjunctivitis, and maggots, which had to be flushed out with alcohol from the hole in his leg. A hole made by teeth. “Something gnawed him,” Kate said. “Rats probably.”

  Georgia dabbed at her pinkie toe. “You’re a sweetheart at heart,” she said.

  “She says we should keep him inside, but he doesn’t want to come in.”

  “Watch the use of we, please,” Georgia said. “I am only the kindly aunt.”

  “The pound was going to kill the dog,” Kate wrote to Alexis that night. “I draw the line at murder.”

  Suddenly, then, the dog was he
r dog. After an initial email asking her if she could afford a pet, Alexis was supportive enough. Kate removed the dog’s bandage and put on another, as instructed by the vet. She bought him a flea collar and a bag of enriched kibble. She started to prepare for Alexis’s arrival, cleaned her bedroom and got a Brazilian wax. She was getting excited.

  “You must be,” Georgia said. “I don’t know how you manage celibacy. I’d rather try cannibalism.”

  The dog refused to enter the house. When Kate, at the insistence of the vet during another visit, dragged him into the kitchen by his leash, he whined and pawed at the door. This would be a problem when temperatures dropped and the mountains around the city were capped with snow. For now, Kate was pleased by his preference. The dog might be her dog, at least for the moment, but she didn’t enjoy him. He didn’t cuddle or lick her feet or do the things dogs were supposed to do and that she wouldn’t want anyway. She didn’t like his gamey smell, and she didn’t like bagging his shit. If anything, rather than falling in love with the dog, she felt a bit more in love with herself. She didn’t know that she could be so generous. She thought of what her mother had said when her father broke his leg years before and Kate flew home to help. “This is the kind of endless sacrifice you save yourself from when you leave a marriage.”

  At the next visit, the vet said that with the dog’s leg healed, Kate should start to take him for walks. She replaced Georgia’s leash with a Starry Night leash from the gift shop, and one evening, a week before Alexis arrived, she and the dog headed along the path that climbed the hill of the Bastille. Once they’d come to the set of stairs that moved through tunnels and fortifications, the dog didn’t hesitate. He tugged on the leash.

  “You remember this place, don’t you?” Kate said. “Tu t’en souviens.” The dog pulled her through a fortification covered in graffiti and smelling of urine. They came to a viewpoint where the homeless encampment had been. Below, in the dusk, the tile rooftops of Grenoble glowed, as the rest of the city rolled toward the mountains. The bulles—translucent gondolas that carried visitors to the restaurant on top of the Bastille—hung motionless and empty over the river. From this height, the city was beautiful.

  Kate undid the dog’s leash. “Go on,” she said. “Explore a little.”

  The dog limped into the trees. Kate stood by the opening of the tunnel. Used condoms, like jellyfish, lay on the ground. She could hear the dog burrowing in fallen leaves. It occurred to her that he might wander off. The Bastille was not a place for women to be alone at nightfall. She could be murdered, raped. Would Alexis be devastated? She called out for the dog. “Chien?” She walked off the trail, toward the sound of dry leaves. Under an oak tree, the dog was digging. She moved closer. The dog picked up something in his mouth and she saw that it was a dead bird, all bones and scraggly feathers. He dropped it at her feet.

  A few months before he left for Sweden, Alexis had suggested that Kate meet his parents, Jacques and Hélène, who lived in a village now absorbed by the Parisian suburbs. The invitation came about after Kate said during dinner that Alexis might meet someone else when he was away in Stockholm. She herself would not, she said. “I’m not looking, and when I don’t look I don’t see.”

  “Je ne cherche pas non plus,” he said.

  “I think we have to discuss it.” Her voice was calm, her face composed, but her heart skidded. She hated this feeling of vulnerability. They were having dinner at À Confesse, a crêperie decorated with pews and statues from a Catholic church. It seemed an appropriate place for the conversation. “Even people like us need a sign of commitment sometimes,” she added. “You’re leaving for a year.”

  “How about you come with me this weekend to meet my parents?” Alexis said. “My mother’s been asking forever and my brother will be visiting with his family.”

  The drive to Benneville was the longest road trip that Kate had ever taken with a boyfriend, seven hours, not including a stop at a McDonald’s in Clermont-Ferrand.

  “Don’t expect to see anything charming,” Alexis said as they exited the autoroute. “Benneville, c’est un trou.”

  Kate saw what he meant as they drove over the Seine on an ugly chunk of a bridge, then wound between roundabouts past centres commerciaux and warehouses. “There are a lot of car dealerships,” she said.

  “Because everyone wants to get out of here. We’ll go somewhere more interesting next time.”

  Kate tried to spot the Seine between the gaps in the buildings. Next time, Alexis had said. They hadn’t discussed the possibility of Kate visiting him in Stockholm. He hadn’t asked, so she hadn’t asked. This trip felt like a test. Everything was a test once you told someone that you loved them. Her nervousness grew as Alexis turned off the nationale onto a thinner road, into a forest. What if Alexis’s parents didn’t like her? What if she didn’t like them? What if they really were as boring as Alexis had described, and in seeing him with them she found him boring? What if, like her boyfriend the first year of college, Alexis reverted with his parents, became annoyingly childish? She didn’t want to fall out of love with Alexis, and as he pulled into the drive of a small house, Kate wanted to tell him to take her back home.

  “Voilà Maman,” he said. A thin blond woman in breezy capris and a white blouse was walking out of the cottage.

  “Mon chou,” she said to Alexis when he and Kate got out of the car. She pinched Alexis’s cheeks and kissed him on the forehead.

  “Arrête, Maman,” he said. “She still thinks I’m ten,” he added to Kate.

  Hélène kissed Kate on the cheeks and said she was so glad to meet her. “You don’t look like an American at all.”

  “What does an American look like?” Alexis asked.

  “Bigger,” Hélène said.

  Alexis’s father appeared from around the side of the cottage in a cardigan and rubber boots.

  “We have heard much about you,” he said to Kate in stilted English. Kate supposed this was an exaggeration. She didn’t care. Already she was starting to relax. No one was paying too much attention to her. No one seemed to have expectations. The cottage, which had belonged to Alexis’s grandparents, had been tastefully remodeled with light gray walls and white trim, and a stucco addition that housed a spacious kitchen. Hélène said that Kate and Alexis would sleep in the upstairs guestroom. “You’ll be the first.”

  Alexis’s brother, Emmanuel, drove up in a Deux Chevaux soon after, with his girlfriend, Cécile, and their four-year-old, Adèle. Cécile looked as Kate had expected, a French baba cool wearing a sundress, with unshaven armpits. She was newly pregnant. The week before, Emmanuel had told his mother, who had told Alexis. “That’s how things work in my family,” Alexis had explained to Kate. “Like your American game of telephone. But they haven’t told Adèle yet, so don’t bring it up.”

  Cécile kissed Kate close to the mouth. She smelled like patchouli. “I always thought Alexis’s girlfriends were pretend. Manu says you’re American. The good kind or the bad kind?”

  “I’ve lived in France for eight years,” Kate said. “Doesn’t that make me the good kind?”

  “Belle et intelligente.” Cécile winked at Alexis. She called to Adèle, who was plump, with a frizzy nest of hair. “Come meet your uncle’s grand amour.”

  Later, during the aperitif, Cécile talked about the women that she helped in the Paris suburbs, who came from Muslim countries. A mosque had been desecrated with graffiti, and she and her group were organizing a silent march and trying to keep the teenage boys of the quartier from burning cars at night in protest.

  “The mayor is sure to send in the police,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “This time next week, I’ll probably be arrested.”

  “I’ll break you out, chérie,” Emmanuel said, and blew her a kiss. He was scruffily handsome with a beard and ponytail, a chain-smoker like Cécile. He’d spent the previous week camped out on the site of a proposed hydrologic dam. As the adults talked, Adèle wandered around the lawn barefoot, building te
pees out of pine needles and trying to whistle through blades of grass. She called her parents by their first names, because, Cécile explained to Kate, she and Emmanuel didn’t believe in the traditional family hierarchy.

  “Why should children automatically defer to their parents when so many parents are assholes?” she said.

  “You got the one with the head on his shoulders,” Hélène told Kate.

  They were sitting near Jacques’s vegetable garden, which fluffed and flopped over the fence. He’d gone to find forest mushrooms earlier with Adèle, and Hélène had baked the chanterelles into bite-size quiches. Kate had drunk two kir royals and the conversation came easy.

  “Ready to go yet?” Alexis asked her later in bed, in the guestroom, under a skylight that showed the Big Dipper.

  “I like them,” Kate said.

  “You can’t tell that my mother and Cécile detest each other?”

  “I picked up on a little tension.”

  For dinner Hélène had made vegetables from the garden—poireaux à la crème, and lentilles—with the roast. After taking a bite, Cécile asked what the lentils had been cooked in. When Hélène had said duck fat, Cécile spit the bite into her napkin and said she’d stick to baguette.

  “Cécile thinks my mother is too bourgeois, and my mother thinks she’s a flake and terrible for Manu.”

  “Mais elle semble m’aimer,” Kate said.

  Alexis rolled over and kissed her. “She likes you, but I wouldn’t care if she didn’t. I’m glad you’re here.”

  After he fell asleep, Kate lay next to him, staring up at the Big Dipper, feeling as though she might cry. At some moment in all of her relationships, generally after a few months, she experienced the impossibility of being understood or of understanding the other person. She knew why she didn’t want to get married or have children. Why didn’t Alexis? If you were loved the way he was clearly loved by his parents and brother, you should want to repeat the experience. You should be like the couples in the museum courtyard with their dreamy eyes and big plans, their vows of eternal love exchanged in the shade of the Calder. It wasn’t as if she wanted all that, but why didn’t Alexis want it with her?