The Balcony

by Jane Delury

  “I think it was very kind of him,” Adèle said.

  Hélène looked confused. “Of whom?”

  “My great-grandfather Henri. Everyone says he was mean.” Emmanuel and Cécile called him a tyrant, and Hélène herself had once told Adèle that her great-grandfather Henri had a chestnut for a heart.

  “He was mean,” Hélène said. “And it wouldn’t have been kindness that made him take your grandfather home. Henri wanted to see himself as someone who would take an abandoned baby home. It’s different. Anyway, I meant what do you think about how your parents and your uncle will react to this news. Badly, no?”

  “Probably,” Adèle said, not sure what answer her grandmother wanted, exactly, but knowing by the way she picked up her purse and said they should get home that she had once again said the wrong thing.

  The islander helped the old man into the boat.

  “Maeva,” he said, using the Tahitian word for hello. “Forgive me for holding you up. I can’t be on a reef and not look.”

  “We noticed,” Cécile said. She smiled loosely.

  “Looks like you’re doing well,” the Belgian woman said. She’d tucked herself under her husband’s hairy arm, shifting back to avoid the streams of smoke from his mouth.

  “I found a couple good ones.” The old man sat down next to Adèle. He settled the bag between his ankles. His toenails were thick and hoary and grew over the edges of his toes. In the bag between his ankles, something clicked. A shape rose like a tensing muscle under the canvas, and then disappeared.

  “On y va,” the islander said. “Look for dolphins.” The island, he told them, pointing, was that line on the horizon.

  “Tell me if you see something,” Emmanuel said to Adèle.

  “I will,” Adèle said. But she wasn’t looking for dolphins. When the boat started to cut over the water and the adults on the other bench turned to watch, she said to the old man, “I saw you out there this morning, as well. You found something big.”

  The old man smiled. The skin pleated around his eyes.

  “Something big and extraordinary. Do you want to see?”

  Adèle nodded. He opened the bag. With both hands, he took out the shell. It was as full and heavy as a melon, the outside chalky, the inside a smooth and glistening pink. From the cliff it had resembled a ball of light.

  “They don’t get much rarer than this,” he said. “I’ve been coming here for years and years, longer than you’ve been alive. This is the first one I’ve found.”

  He dug a bent finger into the slit where the two sides of the shell came together. “The mollusk’s got its operculum closed. That’s its trapdoor.” He wiped his finger on the leg of his shorts.

  “Crazy that you can walk out there and find something like that,” Emmanuel said over the sound of the engine.

  “Je crois que c’est une espèce protégée,” the islander said.

  “No one minds,” the old man said. He lifted the shell out of Adèle’s hands and put it back in the bag.

  No dolphins had appeared on the way to the island, which was shaggy with palms, which gave way to beach, which gave way to ocean, which gave way to reef. They laid their towels on the sand. The islander took out a small grill and cooler from the boat. He cut open a mango and gave everyone a slice.

  “Let’s go in.” Emmanuel opened the bag of snorkeling gear.

  “Don’t feel like it yet.” Cécile pulled off her shirt and undid her bikini top.

  “Isn’t that why we did this? Pour voir des poissons?”

  “See the fish if you want,” Cécile said. “I’m not stopping you.”

  Emmanuel got that look on his face. Cécile sat down on her towel. Adèle saw the Belgian man gaze in her direction. Her mother had beautiful breasts, like the ones on the women in the paintings at the Louvre, as round and full as moons, with raspberry nipples.

  “Allez, Adèle,” Emmanuel said. “On y va.”

  “She just ate,” Cécile said. “You’re supposed to wait a half hour.”

  “She had one piece of mango.”

  “You’re her father. If you think it’s safe, I guess it is.”

  “Fine,” Emmanuel said, and then added to Adèle, “Come when you’re ready.”

  He stalked off, toward the water. They did this to her all the time, whether they were living together or not. Adèle had been a vegetarian for a while because her mother looked so pained when she ate meat with Emmanuel, and then she’d started to eat meat again, because he said it was no fun having a charcuterie plate on your own. They’d go to museums together, and he’d say he liked the modernists, whereas Cécile would say she liked the more contemporary art, and then they’d both look at Adèle. This trip had started out that way too. Emmanuel wanted to go to Tahiti and Cécile wanted to go to Martinique. They’d made Adèle decide. “You have the right to as much of an opinion as we do,” they were always saying, but she always felt as if she were choosing incorrectly.

  Adèle watched Emmanuel fade down the line of turquoise water as the air sharpened with the smell of the heating coals from the grill. The old man was farther down the beach. Behind him, the sky stretched like a sheet of rubber pulled tight, light on top, dark at the bottom.

  “Where’s Manu going?” Adèle said.

  “You know him,” Cécile said. “He needs to stomp a little.” She turned to the Belgian man. “Je le punis. He shouldn’t have told me to relax.”

  The Belgian man smiled. “I can tell you keep him on his toes.”

  He dug his elbows into the sand. His wife had fallen asleep on her towel, the cover of her book on her face. Adèle lay back on her towel and closed her eyes. Sometimes it was easier to play dead. Her face felt warm and nice in the sun, and the beach cradled her back. She heard the rustle of sand as the Belgian man shifted closer to Cécile. His body was thicker than Emmanuel’s. Adèle had seen her father naked often in the bathroom and on the beach, although he’d stopped walking around that way since he’d caught her staring at that strange elephant trunk that was a penis. When Adèle had turned ten, Cécile told her everything, about a man putting his penis into you, how it got hard, about how men and women used their tongues and stuck fingers into each other, and when Adèle said, “Even in their butt holes?” Cécile took a puff of her pipe and said yes, and gay men put their penises there as well. There was no reason to be puritanical about sex. It was fun and natural, though you did need to take some precautions. Girls needed to know what was what, she said. And Adèle shouldn’t let any man touch her until she was ready. If a man tried to do that, she must tell Cécile. Some men thought they had a right to take anything they wanted. It was a problème d’évolution. While the men had been off hunting animals, the women had been in the caves, thinking. That was why women were more evolved intellectually and emotionally, and why men still acted like hunters.

  “We aren’t great at doing nothing together,” Cécile said. “And the resort is a little too pretty for me.”

  “It used to be a leper colony, you know,” the Belgian man said.

  “Sérieusement?”

  “Says so on a plaque by the tennis courts. It’s their dirty secret. Play a match with me. I’ll show you.”

  “I haven’t in years, not since I was a kid. We live in Trocadéro now. Not many courts around there.”

  “It’s not something you forget how to do. I’d like a new partner. The resort pro beats me every time.”

  “I’d beat you too. Don’t underestimate me.”

  Adèle opened her eyes and got up from the towel. “I think it’s okay to go in now,” she said.

  “D’accord,” Cécile said. “I’ll be in soon. Did you put on sunscreen?”

  “Yes,” Adèle said. “This morning while I was waiting for you and Manu.”

  “Don’t be pouty,” Cécile said.

  Adèle walked out of the tobacco smell and into the smell of roasting meat from the grill. Her eyes stung and she blinked hard until the sky and the ocean came back into
focus. The islander was in the boat, hauling out the cooler. Emmanuel was still walking down the beach.

  The old man had opened his bag on the sand and was sorting through the shells. When one of them trundled away, he grabbed it and put it on its back in the pile. Inside the slit, claws wiggled and churned.

  “How do you get the animal out of the shell?” Adèle asked.

  “Come by my hut later. I’ll show you.”

  “I don’t know if I can.”

  “You seem resourceful.”

  “Where is it?” she said, and he told her. “D’accord,” she said. “I’ll try.”

  She walked into the water until she was up to her waist and the warmth was woven through with cold. She pulled the mask over her eyes. She started by floating, and then kicked her way out. She felt disappointed until she saw a clownfish, followed by another. She lifted her head out of the water. Cécile and the Belgian man were putting on snorkeling masks in the tide. She took a breath of rubber-flavored air and went under again. Inky urchins and bouquets of seaweed studded the ocean floor. A school of angelfish parted in front of her face. Their eyes were flat and black. So many pretty things weren’t pretty up close. She’d caught a butterfly once in her grandfather’s garden and found its face hideous. Now her grandfather was under a slab of marble, his hair and nails still growing, cheeks caving in. Once, he’d been a baby, and her great-grandfather Henri had taken him in his arms and brought him home and chosen to be his father. No matter what her grandmother Hélène said, or what Emmanuel and Cécile and her uncle, Alexis, and her aunt, Kate, said when they learned this story at Christmas, no matter what the story meant to anyone else about who Jacques had been or who they themselves were or thought they had been, Adèle knew one thing: her great-grandfather Henri had been kind. She had never even met him, and she might be the only person who understood this about him.

  A wave crashed over her back. Water poured into the snorkel. She lifted her head to spit. Cécile and the Belgian man bobbed nearby. Back under the surface, a cloud of parrot fish scattered in a fluorescent blur. After following them for a few strokes, she let her body go slack. She opened her arms as if she were flying. She turned. Cécile and the Belgian man floated over a turban of coral. He was pointing at a cluster of anemones, Adèle saw as she drew closer, flame-orange, tentacles fluttering. Cécile slipped deeper and swirled her index finger along the tentacles.

  Adèle pushed out the snorkel with her tongue. The sound of her own screaming came at her through the thud of the waves and the thick water. She kicked toward Cécile.

  “Requin,” she yelled.

  Above the jerking waves, Cécile grabbed her hand. The Belgian man had heard and was heading for the shore. Adèle and Cécile swam side by side, Cécile kicking, tugging at Adèle’s arm. The urchins appeared, then the seaweed. A pair of arms lifted Adèle from the water and she saw the islander’s legs and chest. He carried her out of the foam, set her down gently on her feet and, as she caught her breath, undid the seal on her mask with his thumbs.

  “Calme-toi, ma petite,” he said. “Sharks don’t come in that close. It must have been something else you saw.”

  The Belgian man kneeled in the sand, panting. Cécile had staggered up to them, welts from the mask on her forehead and cheeks. She kissed Adèle on the mouth.

  “Merde,” she said. “That was scary.”

  The Belgian woman stood next to her husband with her hand on his shoulder.

  “You’re a brave girl,” she said to Adèle. “Good thing you were out there with them.”

  The old man wasn’t back from combing the beach, but the rest of them ate the grilled pork wrapped in cassava leaves. Adèle sat next to Emmanuel, who had returned after they’d all dried off. Cécile wasn’t speaking to him, because she said he was supposed to have been in the water with Adèle. As they ate lunch, he kept reaching out to run his hand down the back of Adèle’s head.

  “If it was a shark, it was a leopard shark,” he said. “It wouldn’t have hurt you.”

  “Still,” Cécile said. “It was a shark.”

  “It bumped my leg, I think,” the Belgian man said.

  “You come to a place like this,” his wife said, “and you think nothing bad can happen.”

  When they’d finished eating, the Belgian man followed his wife to the boat as Adèle and Emmanuel collected their books and towels. Cécile was rinsing the sand off their snorkeling gear at the edge of the water.

  “Je suis désolé,” Emmanuel said. “Cécile’s right. I was pissed off. I should have been out there with you. Vacations are hard. Too many compromises to make. But it’s good for a couple to have differences, you know. You’ll see that as you get older.”

  Ahead, Cécile was climbing into the boat with the help of the Belgian man. When they returned to Paris, Adèle knew, she would move back to her apartment. Adèle would eat steak with Emmanuel one night and vegetable patties with Cécile the next. She’d go with him and his “friends” to jazz concerts and with her and her “friends” to protests at city hall. She’d sleep under the blanket at Emmanuel’s apartment one night and the duvet at Cécile’s apartment another. She’d get dressed before coming out of her bedroom for breakfast so that she wouldn’t meet whoever was in this kitchen or that kitchen in her pajamas. Things would be normal again.

  “Cécile wants to play tennis,” she told Emmanuel. “She said so while you were gone.”

  “Cécile plays tennis?”

  “She did when she was a kid.”

  “Then why don’t you two play? I was thinking I’d go see the volcano, and she doesn’t want to.”

  “I don’t know how.” Adèle pointed at the boat. “But he does.”

  The ocean hit the beach, drawing in grains of sand. The shark rose again, this time into the air, made of sand instead of seaweed, circling her mother and the Belgian man.

  The old man’s bungalow was easy to find, nestled in plumeria trees next to the tennis courts. He was on the porch, laying shells on their backs. He stood up as Adèle climbed the steps. Without his hat, under a thin veil of hair, his scalp was splotched and peeling.

  “You came,” he said. “I hoped you would.” He pointed at a shell. “Tu vois? They do the work for me.”

  Adèle kneeled down to look. Bits of flesh on their backs, the ants moved in a line from the inside of the shell, dropped off the side of the porch into the grass, and then filed back for more.

  The Mouth of the Ocean sat alone at the top of the stairs. “Can I hold it again?” she asked.

  “It’s not done yet.”

  “I don’t care.”

  The old man gave her the shell. The ants spilled over the sides and onto her arm in a tickling stream. The old man didn’t move his hand away. Slowly, he ran his finger along the edge of Adèle’s thumb.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said.

  Beyond his shoulder, on the lawn, Cécile and the Belgian man were walking toward the tennis courts with their rackets. The ants crept over the shallow of Adèle’s elbow, up into her armpit.

  “Oui,” she said.

  “Let’s go inside. There’s more I could show you.”

  Cécile and the Belgian man were almost at the tennis courts now. Adèle walked to the edge of the porch. She held up the shell.

  “Look!” she shouted. “Look what he gave me.”

  Between

  Is it always or?

  Is it never and?

  —Stephen Sondheim, Into the Woods

  And

  Tonight, we sit at a table in your cottage with my husband and your wife, passing the cornichons, the pâté, the butter that you and I use on our bread. Through the window, my daughters play in your garden. They swat cherries off the trees with badminton racquets and then dig them out of the grass. Your son, visiting from Provence, watches from a bench with his girlfriend, who is holding my baby in her lap. Your children, my children. His children. Her children.

  During the first course, your wife and my
husband speak French, as you and I slide into English. The four of us discuss the train that the two of them catch each Friday when they return to Benneville from Paris, which you and I—implanted here all summer—don’t need to escape.

  “You okay?” you ask as my husband helps your wife to bring in the main course. You say my name as my teachers in Syracuse used to say it, making Élodie sound like Melody. I nod, yes, yes, why wouldn’t I be? But my eyes tell your dimming eyes, No, I’m not. I hate your boots by the front door. I hate the foxgloves on the table arranged by your wife. I hate the soap in the bathroom worn down by four hands.

  You take a sip of wine. I lose your gaze behind the rim of the glass.

  “You’re quieter than usual,” you say. “Not used to that.”

  “Your cat has my tongue.” It’s been slinking between my feet since I sat down. “I didn’t think of you as a cat person.”

  The truth is, I’m hurt that you never mentioned you had one.

  “I’m not,” you say. “I like dogs.”

  And that’s all it takes. When they come back into the room, we’re talking about the dogs we had as children. A black Lab and a beagle, breeds that are uncommon here.

  He sets the roast chicken on the table. You say you’ll carve and go to the buffet for a knife. I see your wife hesitate.

  “The habits of surgeons die hard,” she says. She watches you navigate the room, past the white brick of the fireplace. You don’t put out your hand to follow the edge of the table. How long will that last? I want to give her a hug. I also want to strangle her.