The Balcony

by Jane Delury

  This feeling of alienation continued the next morning at breakfast as she ate one of the pains au chocolat that Hélène had picked up in town. Adèle was gone to play with a girl who lived up the drive in what everyone referred to as “the manor.” Jacques came to the table with a basket of raspberries.

  “Fresh from the fence,” he said to Kate. “Try one. I don’t use sprays.”

  “And to think how little he liked gardening once,” Hélène said, laughing. “He’s going to plant peas in the spring and lots of spinach. I’ll make jars and jars of purée for the baby.” She looked at Kate. “Alexis has told you the exciting news?”

  “Let’s not talk about it,” Emmanuel said.

  “Je ne peux pas résister,” she said.

  “Résiste, Maman,” Emmanuel said sharply.

  “We need to tell you something,” Cécile said. She was smoking a pipe, and looked more annoyed than upset.

  “I think I’ll go take a walk in the forest,” Kate said.

  “You can stay,” Alexis said.

  “Ça va,” she said. “I’ll give you all privacy.”

  She hurried toward the drive that ran by the cottage, not wanting to hear any of the conversation. She could see the manor in the distance. On a spill of overgrown grass, Adèle sat with a girl of twelve or so who, after Kate said hello, introduced herself as Élodie.

  “Elle est américaine comme toi,” Adèle said.

  “Really?” Kate asked.

  “Yes,” Élodie said, in perfect English. “I live in Syracuse. We spend the summers here, though.”

  She was a pretty girl, tiny, as if she would float away on a gust of wind. She and Adèle were weaving dandelion chains.

  “You live in that big house?” Kate said.

  Élodie nodded.

  “Lucky.”

  Élodie shrugged. “It’s a little boring here. There aren’t any kids. I like when Adèle visits. This might be our last summer, though. We have to rent it out. It costs too much to keep up.”

  Kate said goodbye. She never quite knew how to talk to children. She wondered what Cécile had announced about the baby. A miscarriage, maybe. Or maybe she and Emmanuel were moving away from Paris with Adèle. Hélène would have to ship her homemade baby food via La Poste. That kind of news, she was sure, would devastate Hélène. Kate’s mother, on the other hand, had only been to visit twice from Florida since Kate moved to Grenoble. Her father had met her in Paris with her stepmother several times on their way to other parts of Europe. He didn’t like the French. He found them snotty. “I don’t understand how you ended up here,” he said, as Kate asked the waiter for ketchup for his pommes frites, and requested that the chef put the sauce à la crème on the side for her stepmother. Alexis would not like her parents. And when would he meet them? Maybe never? She picked up her pace until her heart went faster. Exercise always made her feel better, and by the time she returned to the drive a half hour later, she had relaxed. The girls were gone from the grass. Behind the cottage, Hélène and Jacques sat alone at the table.

  “I’m sorry, dear,” Hélène said to Kate. “We are a bit overcome. I’m afraid that Cécile lost the baby.”

  “Je suis désolée,” Kate stammered.

  Jacques rubbed Hélène’s arm. “Life is very complicated.”

  “Emmanuel and Cécile had to head back home.” Hélène’s smile was strained. “They said to tell you goodbye. Alexis is out front packing the car. We’ll walk you out.” She stood up. “It’s been such a pleasure, dear.”

  “I thought we were leaving after lunch,” Kate said as she and Alexis drove away from the cottage. Alexis had barely looked at his parents when he kissed them goodbye.

  “I wanted to get out of there fast.”

  “Your mother told me about the baby. I’m sorry.”

  “She told you that Cécile miscarried, didn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s not what happened.” He pulled onto the main road. “Cécile had an abortion two days ago. The pregnancy was an accident. Emmanuel wasn’t supposed to tell us until she decided what she wanted to do.” They were driving along the Seine now, past factories and apartment towers. “You missed World War Three. My mother cried. My father looked like he was going to have a stroke. Then after Manu and Cécile left, my mother said I should tell you it was a miscarriage. I said I wouldn’t. She got upset again, and I went inside to pack.”

  “Maybe she was trying to protect me,” Kate said.

  “Non. She was making things seem nicer than they are. That’s what she does. And my father lets her.”

  As they drove out of Benneville, Alexis talked, more than he’d ever talked to her at one time. He told her about his uncle, Guy, a schizophrenic whom he’d only mentioned before in passing. “He’s been in and out of institutions all his life. Once, when I was eleven and he’d just been released again, my parents let him stay with us for a night. My mother put a mattress on the floor of the room Emmanuel and I shared. After everyone was asleep, Guy woke me up and told me to come with him to the bathroom. He made me sit on the toilet and said not to move. He kneeled down in front of me and rolled up his sleeve. He took a razor out of his shirt pocket. I started to cry. I thought he was going to kill me. He told me to be quiet, ‘quiet as a lamb,’ he said. Then he cut the skin of his arm from the wrist to the elbow. He did it again. And again. I was so scared, I wet myself. He made five cuts, deep enough that his arm bled. Then he kissed me on the forehead and told me to go back to bed. I didn’t change out of my pajamas. I was awake all night, waiting for the bedroom door to open. But he didn’t come back. He slept on the couch. The next morning, I told my mother I’d wet the bed and gave her the pajamas. Guy was in the kitchen, having breakfast with my father. It was as if it hadn’t happened.”

  “And you never said anything to your parents?”

  “No, but they should have figured it out. I was a mess after that for months. I kept waking up with nightmares. Anyway, who lets someone that screwed up stay alone with their kid?” Alexis looked over at her. “This is the first time I’ve told anyone about it.”

  “I’ll never repeat it,” Kate said, taking his hand.

  And that had been the sign that she’d needed.

  Alexis arrived at the Lyon airport a week later.

  “We’re so glad to see each other,” he said after they kissed in the terminal and again in the parking lot. “On est ridicule.”

  “We love each other,” Kate said. “That’s why we’re ridiculous.”

  “Ce chien est super triste,” he said when they got to the house. That is one sad dog.

  “I told you,” Kate said.

  They spent the next two hours in bed, making love, and then both fell asleep.

  When Kate woke up, the windows were dark. She went downstairs to the bathroom. Georgia sat on the edge of the tub, crying.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was trying not to make any noise.” She and Oliver, she explained, had a fight.

  “He’s been shagging that bartender at Le Couche Tard. He said he thought we had an open relationship.”

  Kate smelled that acidic tang in the air. She sat down next to Georgia and put her arm around her shoulders.

  “I thought you didn’t believe in monogamy.”

  “I don’t, but that’s different from saying we had an open relationship.” Georgia started to cry again. “Bollocks. I’m sorry. Drama queen. I can leave. Your first night with Monsieur Havre.”

  “Stay,” Kate said. “We were going to order a pizza.”

  “It’s okay,” Alexis said when she told him that Georgia was home. “I’m glad we’re spending our first night with your smelly dog and your fucked-up roommate. That’s how much I’ve missed you.”

  She laughed. “Try to be nice, please.”

  He did try. Downstairs, he said hello to Georgia and pretended not to notice her runny nose and smudged eyeliner. He opened a bottle of wine. Kate put on David Bowie. The pizza arrived on the ba
ck of a moped. Georgia picked off the lardons and ate them first, then the cheese, then the crust, as she asked Alexis polite, unflirty questions about his research. Kate moved her foot against Alexis’s under the table and he pressed back.

  They’d just finished eating when someone knocked on the front door. Georgia went to the window. “It’s Oliver,” she said. “He’ll go away.” She opened the freezer and took out a container of ice cream. “So kind of like what you use to find old coins in the ground?” she asked Alexis, who had been explaining radiation detectors. The knocking slowed.

  “Fucking hell,” Oliver shouted. There was a yelp.

  “That’s the dog.” Kate ran to the door.

  Outside, the dog was under the bench, and Oliver was holding his leg.

  “What happened?” she said.

  “Fucker bit me.” Oliver looked past her, at Georgia. “I’m so sorry, chicken,” he said. “You’re the only good thing in my life and now I’ve messed that up too.”

  “I’ll get some Betadine,” Georgia said.

  Kate kneeled next to the bench to see the dog.

  “Tu saignes?” Alexis asked Oliver.

  Oliver rolled up his pant leg. “Right. You’re a doctor.”

  “Not that kind of doctor,” Alexis said.

  The dog was trembling. “Did you kick him?” Kate asked.

  “I had to get him off me. Could that thing have rabies?”

  “He’s up to date with his shots.” Kate put her hand on the dog’s back.

  “You might need stitches,” Georgia said. She’d come back outside with the bottle of Betadine. “I’ll take you to the hospital. You’re too drunk to drive yourself.”

  “Georgy,” Oliver said. “Baby.”

  “Shut up and let me pour some of this on your leg,” she said.

  “Jesus,” Alexis said after they’d gone. “They are a nightmare.”

  “I’m worried he broke one of the dog’s ribs,” Kate said.

  As they did the dishes together, Kate kept thinking about the dog. He hadn’t wanted to come inside, so she’d put a blanket over him. When she went outside to check how he was, he’d stopped shaking. “That guy is an ass,” she said, petting his head. “I’m glad you bit him.”

  Back from the hospital, Georgia got a bottle of Chartreuse and three glasses from the cupboard, and they all sat on the couch.

  “I dropped Oliver off at the entrance to the urgences,” she said, after downing her drink. “I wasn’t going to sit around waiting. I told him to call here when he was done.”

  “You’re picking him up?” Alexis said.

  Georgia poured herself another Chartreuse. “He does seem sorry. Maybe the whole open relationship thing really was a misunderstanding.”

  “He’s manipulating you,” Alexis said. “You can’t trust a guy like that.”

  “A guy like that?” Georgia laughed. “Sorry, Alexis. You’re just a different kind of ‘guy like that.’ This is the first time you’ve even spent the night here.”

  “He can’t get off without tying you up.”

  “Don’t talk about things you don’t understand.”

  “Please don’t fight,” Kate said, her voice straining. She felt as if she were outside with the dog, watching the two of them through the window. Alexis’s face softened. “Sorry,” he said to Georgia. “My uncle did something fucked up to me when I was a kid. So I don’t like domination games.”

  “Who didn’t have someone do something fucked up to them as a kid?” Georgia said. “Me, it was my mom’s handyman. Had me sit on his lap and told me to wiggle.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” Alexis said. And then, before Kate could stop him, he was telling Georgia about the night in his parents’ apartment, with the same details he’d mentioned that day in his car, matter-of-factly, as if he’d said the words a thousand times.

  “Why did you tell her about Guy?” Kate asked him after Georgia had gone to bed.

  “I don’t know,” Alexis said. “Maybe talking to you about it opened me up. Maybe I’m changing.”

  She got the leash from next to the door. “I should walk the dog.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re angry.”

  “Try to figure it out while I’m gone.”

  The dog came out from under the blanket. She started to put on his leash, and instead left it on the bench. They walked out of the yard, up the street, to the Bastille. The night was hazy with smog. The dog stayed next to her on the path, and on the stairs fell a tread behind. Below, the boulevards of Grenoble flashed with veins of lights that ran out of the city and became the sprinkled lights of the pavilions, then the dark rise of the mountains. Kate waited as the dog urinated on a tree. Would Alexis understand why she was angry? If he didn’t, she couldn’t see staying with him. She joined the dog on the steps. They passed the rampart where, a few weeks before, she’d slowed her pace to fling the dead bird over the edge. She could picture what the skeleton had looked like as it fell, a ghost made of bones, winging over the city.

  The Pond

  1910

  The snow arrived in Benneville during the night, changing the meanest roof and horse cart into sparkling, magical objects. On the hill behind the school, the boys were using their satchels for sleds as the girls sculpted snowmen and castles. The postman plowed his bicycle down two streets of his route before giving up and going to the café, where the patron served hot chocolate on the house. Quelle merveille, people said as they shoveled the sidewalks and streets. Quelle surprise. But for Émile Vouette, who was following his sons out the door of his manor, the snow hadn’t been made new by the years spent away from his native village, which bridged a river in the Vosges Mountains. The boys’ exclamations, the astonishment on their faces, were reminders of what he couldn’t tell them. This snowfall was nothing compared to the snow he’d once known.

  Charles and François ignored the path the driver had made to the carriage and instead waded, calf-deep, through the drifts.

  “Can you believe it, monsieur?” Charles called to the driver, who shook his head. “C’est un miracle.”

  “We can build a fort.” François tossed a handful of snow into the air. “Or even a fortress.”

  “It must be trillions of flakes,” Charles said, “and every one is different.”

  “Venez.” Émile climbed into the barouche. “You will be soaked.”

  He laid the fur rug over his knees, giving the other edge to the boys once they’d sat down. The driver clucked at the horses, and the wheels creaked down the drive, past the crystalized forest. As Charles told François about snowflakes, Émile thought the words he couldn’t say. It isn’t as I’ve told you. I wasn’t born in Paris. I was born on the other side of the country, where this miracle took place all the time, where my sisters and I skied to school with coals in our pockets, wishing that what our grandmother said was true: The snow was the molting feathers of the storks that had abandoned their nests until the next spring.

  In the parlor of the manor, Émile’s wife, Geneviève, sat down at the piano. She set a battered copy of Leçons pour débutant on the music rack and clipped her pince-nez on her nose. With the doors shut, the walls of the room closed around her like a silk glove. A fire crackled calmly in the chimney. Upstairs, the maids were making the beds and emptying the chamber pots. In the kitchen, the cook was rolling out a pâte brisée for the almond tarte that Geneviève had requested for lunch. The household, Geneviève knew, would run very well without her. All she needed to do was to point and to make lists.

  She opened the book to the C-major scale. When she’d woken up in her room and the housekeeper told her as she opened the shutters, “Regardez, madame. Everything is white,” Geneviève had worried that the boys and Émile would be unable to leave. The carriage, though, was long gone down the drive, and her body was loose with guilty relief. Straightening her back, she rested her fingers on the keys, two octaves down from middle C. She locked her gaze on the black notes and began. Her hands felt u
nwieldy. The hesitant notes didn’t match the sure notes in her head.

  The piano, though old, was in perfect tune. Since her marriage to Émile, it had stood here by the window, as it once stood in the home Geneviève shared with her father, dusted and waxed by the servants, tuned every year, not to be touched, a monument to Geneviève’s mother, who had died in childbirth. A few months ago, Geneviève had opened the seat, as she’d done often before, to look through her mother’s scribbles on the pages of the primers and sheet music: notes about resting, circled sharps, the doodle of an exasperated face. This time, she sat down. Since, she’d come to the piano every morning once the boys and Émile had left for Benneville, the doors shut on the servants. She’d told the housekeeper that she’d rather Monsieur not know. Why trouble him with her silly pastime when he had so much on his mind? She hit the A major instead of the C major. She started again.

  Charles watched from the front of the classroom as the maître d’école lowered the map to trace the path of the winds that had met over their heads.

  “What you find astonishing,” the schoolmaster said, “science does not.”

  From the north, east, and west, ocean mixed with glaciers, Normandy with the Vosges and the Vendée, but more than this, Charles thought as the pointer moved across the map, the igloos of Eskimos, the volcanoes of the Azores. The snow was a promise made to him by the world beyond the world he knew. You fell asleep in your same bed to the same sound of your brother’s breathing, under the same window with the same view of the forest and gardens, and during the night, behind the shutters, everything changed. Even his father, when he kissed their cheeks in front of the school before heading to the mill, seemed another father, with lively cheeks and glistening eyes. And François had listened at full attention as Charles explained the perfect geometry of snowflakes, which he’d read about that morning in his encyclopedia. Each flake, he told François, was the same hexagonal prism built around a dust mote that swept up water vapor as it fell, sprouting feathered arms. Now, a row of desks away, François stared away from the map and out the window, thinking, Charles knew, of the weight of the rifle against his shoulder, the way the sky would shrink to one small arrow.