by Lauren Groff
Grant couldn’t think, quite, what to say to this. The silence became edged, and Manfred said with a small smile, More than you do, perhaps.
Oh, no, Grant said. Amanda’s great.
Manfred waited, and Grant said, feeling as if he should have more enthusiasm, I mean, she’s so kind. And so smart, too. She’s the best.
But, Manfred said.
No. No, Grant said. No buts. She is. It’s just that I got into law school in Ann Arbor and she doesn’t know yet. That I’m going.
He did not say that Amanda would never go with him, couldn’t leave her insane battered mother behind in Florida. Or that as soon as he realized he would go up to Michigan alone, leaving behind the incontinent old cat he hated, the shitty linoleum, the scrimping, the buying of bad toilet paper with coupons, Florida and its soul-sucking heat, he felt light. A week ago, when they drove up to the ancient stone house framed in all of those grapevines, he knew that this was what he wanted: history, old linen and crystal, Europe, beauty. Amanda didn’t fit. By now, she was so far away from him, he could barely see her.
He felt a pain somewhere around his lungs; dismay. What he did say was so small but still a betrayal of its kind.
I’m waiting for the right time to tell Amanda, so don’t say anything, please, he said.
Manfred’s hands held each other. His face was blank. He was watching the wall of rain out the windshield.
Grant took a breath and said, I’m sorry. You weren’t even listening.
Manfred flicked his eyes in Grant’s direction. So leave. What does it matter. Everyone leaves. It is not the big story in the end.
Like that, the stone that had pressed on his shoulders had been lifted. Grant began to smile. Grade-A wisdom there, buddy, he said. Lightning sizzled far off in the sky. They watched.
Except there is one thing you must tell me, Manfred said suddenly. Who is this Ann Arbor woman? And, when Grant looked startled, Manfred gave another small smile and said, That was also a joke, and Grant laughed in relief and said, Seriously, please don’t tell Amanda, and Manfred inclined his head.
Grant felt uncomfortably intimate with Manfred so close in the tiny car. There had been something he’d wanted to say since Genevieve’s wedding in Sarasota ten years ago, during what was in retrospect clearly a manic swing of Manfred’s pendulum. There had been peacocks running around the gardens; the guest favors were silver bowls. Grant had watched, making little comments about the excess that Amanda lobbed back with extra bitter spin. He saw things differently now.
Forgive me for saying this, Grant said. But sometimes you even look like an Austrian count. You have a certain nobility to you.
But I am only a Swiss baron, Manfred said. It means nothing.
It means something to me, Grant said.
It would, Manfred said. You are very American. You are all secretly royalists.
In the distance, the clouds cracked and slabs of light fell to the ground. Manfred sighed. He said, We have had a pleasant talk. But I believe you may drive.
Grant turned the car on and pushed up the hill, home.
* * *
—
The women gave out little yodels of surprise when they arrived to find the men in the kitchen in aprons, chopping vegetables. The men looked at Mina when she came out of the car, and Leo felt power turning and beginning to flow in her direction, like the stream at the bottom of the hillside when he shifted rocks in its bed. Outside smelled like rich earth, like cows. Manfred had poured them all champagne and brought the flutes out on a platter, and they drank it on the wet white gravel, looking at the way the vines sparked with late light, the green and purple tinge to the edge of sky. To Mina, they all said. Even Leo got an inch of champagne, which he had always loved like cola. He downed it. His mother was watching his father carefully over her drink, and it was true his father had a dangerous pink in his cheeks. Badness moved in Leo. He stole into the kitchen, now dim with dusk, and to the fireplace, the small ceramic box that had Allumettes written on it, or so Manda had said a few days earlier with her shy French. Leo had to wait for Grant to come in, bouncing Mina’s suitcases up the stairs. His mother and Mina followed behind, his mother explaining the wonky shower, Leo’s schedule, how Leo couldn’t swim yet so everyone had to be careful with the pool. Leo’s father gravely handed him a purple macaron and turned back to cook, and Leo put the sweet thing up the chimney for the pigeons to eat. He hated macarons. He came out on the grass, past the pool, down into the cool orchard with its sticky smell. It appeared that the falcon had grown while he’d gone. It was huge with the shadows that had fallen on it. He stood over the bird on its nest and said words in German, then English, then French. He made some magic words up and said them. In one of his father’s old books, back at home in the castle in the Alps, there had been a drawing of an old bird set aflame, and in the next illustration, it turned into a glorious new bird. Leo thought with longing of his own bed there, his own books and his own toys, and the mountain in his window when he awoke. He struck the match on a stone. The flame sizzled then took. The sticks were wet but not right under the bird, and those dry twigs caught just before the flame touched his hand. The bird’s feathers, burning, let off a reek that he hadn’t foreseen. He stepped back, crouching on his heels, to watch. Black roil of smoke. When he looked up again, it was much later; shadows around him deepened. The bird was a charred, ugly thing now, half feathered, half flesh. The fire had gone out entirely; there was no more red in the embers. Someone was calling for him, Leo, Leo! He stood and ran up the hill, feeling weariness in his legs and all along the back of his neck. It was Mina calling for him with the sunset bright in her hair, with another glass of champagne shining in her hand. Someone is burning something awful, she said, sniffing. An orange-faced boy rode by on a tractor that looked like a leggy animal; he stood up and shouted something gleeful that neither of them caught over the noise. Mina waved, smiled with her teeth. She looked at Leo’s dirty face, his dirty hands. She said, laughing, Wash yourself, eat your dinner fast, and I’ll give you a bath and put you to bed. His heart could hardly bear all that he was feeling. It was either expanding to the sky or contracting to a pin, hard to say. Leo, his mother called, come give me a kiss. Die, he thought, but kissed her anyway on her soft and powdery cheek. He kissed Manda up the giraffe’s neck on her neck, and she blushed and laughed. His father he would not. Let the boy be, his father murmured to his mother. The gleam on Mina’s legs up the stairs. He would eat her if he could. He let her wash him with warm water and she put him in clean pajamas and he petted her soft cheek and smelled her while she sang him to sleep.
* * *
—
It was chilly outside on the veranda. Amanda wore a fleece, Genevieve wore a brocaded shawl. They waited for the food to cook and ate terrine on baguettes and drank champagne, listening on the monitor to Leo’s little piping voice and Mina’s gravelly one answering him. There was light coming from the kitchen and on the table one candle in a pewter candlestick that looked ancient. Manfred had put on Peter and the Wolf, which was Leo’s CD, but all of the other music in the house was his sister’s and all of it was 1990s grunge. There was some kind of newborn glitter in Manfred’s eyes that Amanda was having a difficult time looking at directly. Something had shifted between Grant and Manfred; there was a humming line between them there had never been before.
Yesterday, Manfred said suddenly, I poisoned the rats in the kitchen. I forgot to say. Do not eat the cheese you will find in the corners.
Poor little rats, said Genevieve. I wish you had told me. I would have found a humane trap somewhere. It’s an awful thing to die of thirst. She pulled the shawl tighter to her.
Oh! That explains the falcon, Amanda said. The others looked at her.
Leo saw a falcon fall dead out of the sky this morning, she said. It was huge. It was in the driveway. I don’t know how you all missed it. I bet it ate a poiso
ned rat and croaked in midair.
No, Genevieve said, too quickly.
It seems likely, doesn’t it, Manfred said. Oh, dear. It is terrible luck to kill a raptor. It signifies the end of days.
I mean, the thing probably just had a heart attack, Amanda said, but rested her head on her husband’s shoulder, and it took him a moment to slide his chair over and put his arm around her.
The wind restrained itself, the treetops shushed. The moon came from behind a cloud and looked at itself in the pool.
Now Mina was singing in the monitor, and Amanda said, Listen! “Au Clair de la Lune.” She sang along for a stanza, then had to stop.
Why are you crying, silly? Genevieve said gently, touching Amanda’s hair. Twice in a day and you never used to cry. I once saw all four of your big old brothers sitting on you, one of them bouncing on your head, and you didn’t cry. You just fought like a wild thing.
Hormones, I think, Amanda said. I don’t know. It’s just that all those nights when Sophie would go out and leave Mina at our house, I would sing this to her until she went to sleep. For hours and hours. Everybody would be screaming downstairs, just awful things, and once in a while the cops would show up, and there would be flashing lights in the window. But in my bed, there’d be this sweet beautiful baby girl sucking her thumb and saying, Sing it again. And so I’d sing it again and again and again, and it was all I could do.
They listened to Mina’s beautiful, raspy voice over the monitor . . . Il dit à son tour— Ouvrez votre porte, pour le dieu d’amour.
Well, thank God for Madame Dupont, Genevieve said. Forcing us to learn it in seventh grade. She made us sing at school assembly, remember? I wanted to die.
Nobody looked at Manfred; they studied the knives, the bread. The moment passed.
Grant said, What’s she saying?
There were tears in his eyes, Amanda saw; she squeezed the back of his neck. She was moved. It had been so long since she had seen the side of him that would weep during movies about dolphin harvests. A different Grant had grown up over him, a harder one.
Manfred didn’t seem inclined to translate. Amanda listened for a minute to gather herself. It’s a story, she said. Harlequin wants to write a letter, but he doesn’t have a pen and his fire went out, and so he goes to his buddy Pierrot to borrow them. But Pierrot is in bed and won’t open the door, and he tells Harlequin to go to the neighbor’s to ask because he can hear someone making a fire in her kitchen. And then Harlequin and the neighbor fall in love. It’s silly, she said. A pretty lullaby.
But Manfred was looking at her from the shadows. He leaned forward. Dear Amanda, he said. The world must be hard for you. All substance, no nuance. Harlequin is on the prowl. He wants sex, pour l’amour de Dieu. When Pierrot turns him away, he goes to the neighbor to battre le briquet. Double entendre, you see. He is, in the end, fucking the neighbor.
Genevieve sat back slowly in the darkness.
Manfred smiled at Amanda, and there was a strange new electricity in the air; there was something here, announcing itself to Amanda, in the very back of her head. It had almost arrived, the understanding; it was almost here. She held her breath to let it step shyly forward into the light.
* * *
—
Mina watched the couples from the doorway, feeling as if she were still flying over the Atlantic, the ground distant and swift beneath. Nobody was speaking; they were not looking at one another. Something had soured since she’d left them half an hour ago. She had come from a house of conflict. She knew just by looking that there would be an argument breaking out in a moment and that it would be bad.
She took a step out to distract them. She started singing. She didn’t have a good voice, but she was loud and her singing sometimes would disarm a fight at home. The other four snapped their eyes up at her. She felt herself expanding into her body as she always did when she was watched. She was new tonight, strange. The champagne was all she’d consumed since leaving Orlando, and it made her feel languorous, like a cat.
Sometime between arrival and now, she’d finally decided what she’d been mulling over for the past few days; and now what she knew and what they didn’t filled her with a secret lift of joy. Internal helium. She wouldn’t board the plane at the end of the summer. School was so gray and useless compared to what waited for her in Paris, her life on hold in that hot place where she’d lived her childhood out. Florida. Well. She was finished with all of that. A whole continent in the past. She would go toward the glamour. She was only twenty-one. She was beautiful. She could do whatever she wanted to. She felt herself on the exhilarating upward climb in her life. As she walked toward them, she saw how these people at the table had stopped climbing, how they were teetering on the precipice (even Amanda, poor tired Amanda). That Manfred man was already hurtling down. He was a mere breath from the rocks.
This sky huge with stars. Glorious, Mina thought, as she walked toward them. The cold in the air, the smell of cherries wafting up from the trees, the veal and endives cooking in the kitchen, the pool with its own moon, the stone house, the vines, the country full of velvet-eyed Frenchmen. Even the flicks of candlelight on those angry faces at the table was romantic. Everything was beautiful. Anything was possible. The whole world had been split open like a peach. And these poor people, these poor fucking people. Were they too old to see it? All they had to do was reach out and pluck it and raise it to their lips, and they would taste it, too.
SALVADOR
The apartment Helena rented in Salvador had high ceilings, marble floors, vast windows. It always looked cool, even when the blaze of a Brazilian summer crept inside in the late afternoon. If she leaned from her balcony, she could see the former convent that curved around her street’s cul-de-sac; she could see over the red tile roofs of the buildings across the way to where the harbor opened into ocean. She was so close she could smell faint littoral rot and taste the salt on the wind. For the first few mornings, she took her coffee out to the balcony in her cotton nightgown and watched the water sweeping greenly toward the horizon, ocean and sky faltering into haze where they met.
One morning when she was on the balcony enjoying the nightgown’s graze against her ankles and the sharp summer sunlight, she looked down to find the shopkeeper from the grocery across the street looking up at her. He had a broom in his hand, but he wasn’t sweeping. His round, dark face, always glistening as if just brushed with hot butter, was turned up toward her. His lips were open, and his tongue was pressing rapidly into the gap between his two front teeth, all pink and wet and lewd.
She went inside and shut the glass door hard and put her coffee cup down very carefully on the glass dining table. She felt ill. She went into the bedroom to look at herself. The same light that fell across the balcony was slicing through the windows in her room, and she stood in the pool of it to see what he’d seen. In the mirror, all was apparent, literally: she could see her entire body—legs, dark pubis, round brown nipples—as if her nightgown were only a pale shadow of her own skin. Helena thought of the man’s view from below, the pink soles of her feet pressing through the keyhole shapes in the balcony’s floor, the taper of her legs to her bust, her head topped with dyed yellow hair brazenly unbrushed.
Jesus Christ, I look like a whore, she said. Helena laughed at herself, and the laugh broke the spell, and she showered and dressed and went out for the day. As she passed the grocery, she stared straight ahead, unwilling to give the shopkeeper the satisfaction of seeing her look into the dark recesses of his store.
* * *
—
Helena was in that viscous pool of years in her late thirties when she could feel her beauty slowly departing from her. She had been lovely at one time, which slid into pretty, which slid into attractive, and now, if she didn’t do something major to halt the slide, she’d end up at handsomely middle-aged, which was no place at all to be. She was the youngest daughter of
a mother too perennially ill to live alone, and being the youngest and unmarried at the time of her mother’s first bloom of illness, Helena was the one to fall into the caretaking role. For the most part, her life with her mother was calm, even good, with whist and euchre and jigsaw puzzles and television programs, with all that church on Sundays, ferociously antedated, in Latin, with veils. Helena herself believed in no god but the one that moved in her mother’s face when she genuflected on the velvet and forgot how ill she was.
She was, on the whole, fine with the arrangement, fine with being her mother’s keeper. It had to be said, however, that love was impossible with a sick and saintly mother patiently bearing her insomnia in the room next door. There was no question of dating, either, because her mother needed help every few hours to go to the bathroom or remember a pill or a shot, for a lap to lay her head in and a hand to wipe away the moisture at her temples.
Helena’s sisters felt horribly guilty watching their beautiful sister fade in such dutiful servitude, and so they gave Helena a good chunk of money every year and came to spend two weeks apiece caring for their mother in Helena’s stead. For a month a year, Helena had the freedom and funds to spend her time wherever she wanted. She mostly chose to visit quiet places bedaubed with romance—Verona, Yalta, Davos, Aracataca—and to stretch her cash reserves, she rented a furnished apartment and ate only dinners out. She’d spend the days in museums and coffee shops and botanical gardens, and at night, more often than not, she’d come giggling back home with her pumps in one hand, exchanging sloppy kisses with a stranger in the elevator.
She had no trouble finding men, even if it was undeniable that her looks were slipping. If, at the restaurant she chose, a man didn’t approach her, she went to the bar of a nice hotel. If nothing happened at the bar, she went to a nightclub and brought home drunk boys half her age. She preferred blond businessmen above all, but there was a different and sometimes more intense pleasure in these young men, natives of the places she visited, something delicious in the way their languages slid past each other, only barely touching.