by Jane Delury
You stand at the head of the table to carve. The chicken sits on a silver plate (a wedding present? You’ve been married almost as long as I’ve existed). Your index finger rides the dull edge of the knife. Not long ago, you parted skin and split breastbone to reveal a pulsing heart. With tools sized for fairies, you funneled through arteries. You created new routes around the dead ends of blockages. Now your hand holds the leg bone while the other hand slices. You keep your face to the side so that you can see better.
“Who wants the wishbone?” you ask in French, and I know you mean that it’s for me. Everything I say tonight will be for you, too.
Your wife asks me about the work I’m doing on the manor. I talk about flooring, about the oak boards I am trying to find of the same width that the Légers would have walked years before my grandparents did. I tell her about the old photographs I’ve found in the village archives. A beautiful woman in a billowing dress, standing on the front steps next to a man with a mustache. A gardener with a wide hat, pruning the roses.
“I knew what to do with the pergola based on that photograph,” I explain. And I knew to look for a lion head knocker based on the photograph of the couple. “Mostly, though, it’s a lot of guesswork.”
“We want to return the manor to its original splendor,” my husband says, “before it was plundered,” as if the memory of that splendor were in his blood, not mine. “We want our own grandchildren to live there one day.”
I see you listening to him politely and I know you are thinking what he doesn’t know, though he should, because he’s almost forty. Things go wrong. A car runs off the road into a tree. A train derails. The macula degenerates. A cell in your bloodstream forks the wrong way. My husband’s sureness, which I once loved, now embarrasses me. Sitting back, he tells you the story of the set of nesting dolls that my mother found in the manor, back when it was a ruin. He explains how he told me if one object had survived, there must be others. “I sent her off looking,” he says. “I told her to find her grandparents’ furniture and to buy it all back.” He describes how I found their clock in the village hall. And an armchair in someone’s attic. The green silk cover had been eaten away by bugs, and it had to be restuffed. “Inside the pillow had been filled with her grandparents’ money.”
I’ve already told you this story, and I watch your face open as if you are hearing it for the first time.
“Incroyable,” your wife says.
“It was worth nothing now,” I say.
“But you must have been glad that no one had found it,” you say, as you’ve said before on a path by the pond.
Now your wife is asking how we met, and my husband is telling you both his version of the story, with the jokes. He went to the U.S. wanting an American business degree and ended up with an American wife, “although not a real one.” You don’t laugh along with your wife, because you know the feeling of not being quite this or that. I think you can tell that I’m being put down, although in my husband’s teasing way. And now he is being tender again. He switches so quickly, it’s hard to see. “When we got married,” he says, “the manor was being rented out. Her parents couldn’t afford to keep it up anymore, but they held on to it for years by the skin of their teeth. We’re going to fly them here to stay for a summer once the work is done. We want to surprise them.”
“First we’ll have to empty the liquor cabinet,” I add, and then say to your wife, because you already know: “My father is an alcoholic.”
“I’d love to see what you’ve done,” your wife says. I say, “Bien sûr,” but that the rooms are a mess right now, because the painters are prepping the trim. I can barely stand to be in your house, and I don’t want your wife in mine. She serves me another slice of meat and hands me the bowl of sauce. Those are trompettes de la mort, she says, mixed into the gravy. “He found them yesterday on one of his walks.”
But your walks are our walks, and we found them together, under a tussle of oak leaves. I say it’s a good thing you know what you’re doing, since usually Americans can’t tell a poisonous mushroom from a button mushroom. You laugh and ask if I’m any better. This is our first mutual lie.
“Don’t even attempt it,” my husband tells me, and I laugh too.
She turns to you as you pour more wine into her glass. Do you remember, she asks, the time that the two of you ate wild mushrooms on that walk in the Alps and spent the rest of the day in bed?
“A nurse and a doctor,” she says, “and we couldn’t do anything for ourselves.”
I try to think of you and her lying in bed, throwing up, although I’m not sure if that’s what she means. She looks so intently at you that I wonder whether in fact she’s looking at me.
Or
And why would you notice? He’s twenty years older than we are and he can barely see. If you’d met him some years ago, when he implanted the world’s first artificial heart at a hospital in Paris, you would have paid attention. Now, though, he’s nothing to you. After they bought the cottage from Madame Havre’s sons, you wanted to be sure that they knew about the historical zoning. Once his wife reassured you there’d be no additions, you were done with both of them. I had to tell you his name three times when I brought him up the next day. “Stephen came by for the name of a plumber.”
“Who?” you said. “Oh, him. The American neighbor.”
I can look through your eyes and take in his gray hair and the stoop to his shoulders that I find endearing. He has the posture of a less accomplished man, the result of so much leaning.
That morning I was in the rose garden, pruning, while the nanny watched the girls run around in the topiary and the baby slept in the shade. I felt that restlessness I’d been feeling since I finished restoring the garden and moved on to the house, maybe because I know when the house is finished there’ll be nothing left to do. The garden is exactly as I wanted it to be, and it’s a disappointment. I miss the fungus on the chestnut tree, now hidden by the tree house ladder. The topiary was more interesting when I didn’t recognize the shapes and could see what I wanted in the bushes. The roses were more beautiful when they flared from a storm of vines and nettles, and with the wisteria clipped, the creepers and ivy cut away, the pergola looks like a cage. I haven’t told you, but I’ve stopped looking for the missing statues of the muses. I prefer to think of them in desert gardens, by a more interesting fountain, on the steps to a beach. Anywhere but here.
“Bonjour,” he called from the side of the house, and I knew the accent.
“Hello,” I said. I lifted my sunglasses off my face so as not to be rude. He kept his on, because he needs them.
“Bad eyes,” he explained. And then: Where are you from? How long have you lived here? He said that he didn’t hear a hint of an accent when I spoke English, and I said that he would hear it if I spoke French.
“You can’t be perfect in two languages,” I told him. “Or at least, I can’t be.”
After I got him the plumber’s number, I asked if he wanted a Coke float.
“You’re kidding,” he said.
“Le Coca et glace à la vanille,” I said. “I was going to make them for the girls. I even have the straws.”
We sat in the courtyard while the girls drank their floats in the tree house and the nanny took the baby for a walk on the drive. He grew up in 1970s San Francisco to my 1990s upstate New York, but over here the coasts blend, as does time.
“What did you miss most when you moved to France?” I asked, and he said, “Cheesecake.”
“For me it’s pickles,” I said. “Cornichons are not the same thing.”
I explained how I’d grown up between two countries, wanting to feel more French because my parents were French, wanting to be American because that’s what I was. I told him about the American au pair, Brigitte, who taught me English the year that I was sick, and about the stories she invented that took place in the forest. “So my first words in English were fairytale words, like ogre and witch.”
“Good place
to start,” he said.
I described that year of my illness, and how my mother got me through it, and how, all those years when I was growing up, she would sit on the sidelines of my soccer games and go to PTA meetings. “She tried to be American for me,” I said. “And then I ended up marrying a Frenchman and living in France.”
He said his sons spoke English, but it was British English they’d learned in school.
“The ou instead of o,” he said. “Lorry instead of bus.”
“I don’t even bother speaking English to my daughters,” I told him. “They’ll be one hundred percent French, like their father.”
He said, as he left, looking up at the balcony, “I bet you’re doing wonders to that house.” He made it a wonder, the thing I am doing, to take something bland and make it beautiful again. He knew what I needed after an hour of conversation, whereas you don’t understand even when I tell you flat out.
Hear me again: This isn’t enough. And I don’t care anymore that it should be. You talk often about the complexity of systems. A good businessman has to see through chaos to make a decision. Why, then, have you made me so simple? And why, for so long, have I accepted your theory?
Here’s all it is, though it feels like everything. Afternoons, when you’re gone, I leave the children with the nanny. I turn my back to the house. The forest parts for me as a rib cage once parted for him. My body is mine. I can feel every tendon. My mind is as big as the sky, only suggested by glimpses. I understand nothing and I understand everything. And there he is, at the edge of the pond, always first, never late. It isn’t me going to him, you see: it’s us coming together. We circulate from separate trails.
Two and a half billion times the human heart beats in an average lifetime, pushing blood through the arteries. Connected together, the veins that receive this blood could be wrapped twice around Earth. The heart, contrary to popular belief, is not located on the left side of the body but in the middle of the chest. I know these facts because I looked them up on your computer. When you want to restore a historic house correctly, you need to learn about what it once was. And when you want to know a person, you need to understand what they love.
And
I can’t stand this yearning.
Or
Do you remember yearning?
And
Everything you say is interesting, even when it isn’t. Everything is soap opera dialogue. Like you: There are millions of stars here at night. And me: In Paris you can’t see anything. And you: They’re there, though, even if you can’t see them. Our conversation is like the trim of the manor that the painters are scraping. Layer upon layer beneath the visible surface. Today, as we head out on a logging road, you tell me that your son has broken up with his girlfriend and is miserable.
“Love hurts,” I say, and you say, “Tell me about it.”
My body moves casually next to yours, but my brain orders my adrenal gland to secrete adrenaline, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. My heart beats faster than it should at this pace.
We’re cutting through pine trees and oak trees and there’s no one but us. There’s no country, no time, no spouses. We could be walking a forest in Massachusetts, China, or Lapland. The world is the same in the end, when you boil it down to this: two people talking on a trail. And that unnecessary hand you held out today when I jumped down from a log. I was okay but I took it.
You’ve told me that there are hearts that go bad for clear reasons, and hearts that go bad for reasons no one can explain. There is no clear reason why in that small exchange behind my house, I attached myself to you. Was it hearing my other language and being able to speak it? Was it the way you knew how to use a straw? Was it because I’d felt since the first workman pulled up the first vinyl tile in the kitchen that it was I who owned that house, that forest, that pond, those trails? And so, when you wandered in, I owned you?
I thought about you that week we first met, as I flipped through books of silk wallpaper samples, sent from the factory in Lyon that continues to make les soies Léger. They found the original order for the manor, and there were fleurs-de-lys on peacock blue for the parlor, the gold for the dining room, the red for the entryway.
Then the doorbell rang and your wife stood behind the door. It was raining, one of those downpours we’ve been caught in twice. When I asked her in, she said that she didn’t want to impose. She’d like to invite my husband and me to a cocktail party for a couple from Paris.
“My husband mentioned that you like painting,” she said. “Our friend teaches les arts plastiques.”
“We’d love to,” I said.
You see how we were using them already, though it didn’t yet feel wrong?
At that party, after we’d talked for a while, you introduced me to the guest of honor. He asked what I did, and I said raise children.
“She reads more than anyone I’ve ever met,” you added. You said you’d go get me a glass of wine. “And leave the high talk to the intellectuals.”
Your friend laughed, because he thought it was banter. But I knew what you were saying.
Or
In the early weeks of a fetus’s life, the heart occupies its middle. Then the heart moves high in the chest and down again. The stomach, the base of the throat: these places where the heart once beat remain the places that feel. I remember when they throbbed for you. When we first met, I’d follow you on streets and stare at the back of your head, memorizing the flesh ridge of your ears, the curl to your hair. But the ghost hearts go quiet after so many years. You can forget they even existed, as I suppose you do.
The other day, he and I passed a woodpile. “Listen,” he said, and held up a finger. “A woodpecker. Sounds different back home.”
Together, we made the cartoon sound. I’d never do something that silly with you.
“Quiz me,” he said last week. I’d been trying to choose the paint colors for the children’s rooms. I held out the splattered hem of my shirt. Green, blue, yellow. He got each one right.
“In a year,” he said, “I won’t know the difference.”
I told him something I’d learned once. The great impressionists had diseased eyes. “They only put a canvas at risk,” he said. He knew that sounded bitter, so he added that maybe he should take up painting.
“Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll take up ballet. And then I can be your subject.”
But now it’s the weekend. You’re back. And on the surface, things are fine, even good. The girls clamber up and down the stairs. The baby follows on his hands and knees. Everyone chases rabbits. We barbecue in the courtyard. You tell me that you love the gold wallpaper for the dining room. I update you on the roof. I tell you about the tile for the second-floor bathroom. I walk the line between faking and lying. I ask about your week, and the instant your mouth opens to reply, my mind is out the door.
“Super,” you say. It’s the same word in English and not the same word at all.
We sit outside and have a drink in the pergola. We talk about our dream house. Is that not what you called it when I first brought you here that summer when it still held renters, and we stood in the drive? Dream house, which translates into both languages? But what did I dream of, those years ago? I don’t even remember.
What is your father like? he asks me. What about your mother? Do you have a middle name? Stop, he said once when I was in a patch of sunlight. Is that a scar? I laughed. “How can you see that?” And he said, “Because your arm is so close and always right next to me.” So I told him about falling off my scooter when I was seven. I know you know the story, but I don’t think you see the scar anymore, like a patch of ruched velvet over my elbow. Then I showed him the other scar, below my left shoulder. I told him how my mother used to tell me that our family had suffering in our blood, and that was why I became sick.
“So I’m going blind because there’s something I can’t see?” he said.
You’ve told me often that what my mother said didn’t make sense. Why did i
t sound more true when he said it?
When I close my eyes as we make love, I’m looking at his face. As we fall asleep, that’s his back, not yours, against mine. But at breakfast, I smile at you over the table. I hand you the baby. I say yes, let’s go for a bike ride. There is nothing lonelier than being lonely with someone else.
And
Another dinner at the cottage. It’s raining, so my children eat with us. You’re quiet across the table. You missed a spot shaving, on the edge of your jaw. Why didn’t your wife tell you? She’s taken my baby on her lap so that I can eat and is feeding him pieces of baguette. I get up to help the children cut their meat, because I can’t sit here any longer. I don’t want to pretend anymore. Until I met you, I thought I’d only have the walls to stare back at me, as blank and solid as everything I can’t say. Like: Have I made a mistake? And: Is this it? A heap of ivy pulled from a bush. A strip of molding and a floorboard sample. A child’s mouth opening to take in food. Small hands in my hair and large hands on my breasts.
“How is the work on the house going?” you ask me during dessert, in French this time, so to the table, and I say, “Plutôt bien.”
“The wallpaper is up in the entryway,” my husband says. “It’s perfect.” He smiles at me, and here comes the guilt.
On my way to the bathroom, I pass you as you leave the kitchen. The knuckles of your hand graze the knuckles of mine.
“Sorry,” you whisper. “It’s dark.”
Upstairs in the bathroom, I close my eyes and put my forehead to the mirror. Out the door, you’re gone, but there is the hall that leads to your bedroom. I stand in the doorway. One of those pillows is yours. Every night, you pull back those covers.
“Wrong turn,” I say when your wife comes up behind me.