“That’s an interesting fashion statement.”
She giggles. She’d forgotten about the pyjamas. “Just doing my bit to start a trend, you know.”
“Ninja turtles?”
“Like I said, it’s not a trend yet, but soon. I can feel it’s going to catch on.”
Ray decides he likes this woman. She’s quick and pretty. “Hey, I have a couple beers, if you’d like a drink. They’re probably warm.”
“Yeah, I would love a drink.”
“Oh, yeah? Okay.” He hands her a bottle and she twists the cap.
“What should we drink to?” she says.
“To the snow,” he says, as if she is foolish for thinking a toast could be about any other thing. He holds up his bottle. “It’s everywhere and it’s beautiful and it can’t be avoided.”
“That’s a perfect toast,” she says.
“I come from a long line of toasters. Bread has always feared me.”
“What? Oh, bread. Oh, God that’s bad.” She scrunches her face.
“Years from now, when I’m telling the story of how we met to our kids, your utter confusion over my dumb joke will be one of the highlights.”
“Children?”
“Yes. You remember the future don’t you? A boy and two girls. Ned, Hannah and Ruth.”
“Hannah is born first,” she says. “Ned and Ruth are the twins.”
“Twins. Ouch.”
“Child birth is painful. Always,” she says.
“Twins, though.”
“Well, they don’t come out at the same time.”
“I know that,” he says. “I’ve seen kittens being born.”
“Where did Ned get his name? I can never remember.”
“Uncle Ned. My mom’s brother. When I was a kid, he made promises about things, and he never broke a promise.”
Time compresses and becomes a small blue thing with both of them inside. They sit near the piano and talk. They share themselves. He is pre-law, she is in Education. She has a sister named Alesha and her parents are divorced. He is an only child who was adopted. She loves Thai food. He was a vegetarian for a year because of a woman. She had a friend who died in a plane crash over the South China Sea. They share the absurdities of their lives, though they do not think of these details as absurd – they think they are the fascinating bits. She has always wanted to sing opera. He has a friend who is a singer in New York. He’s been to Europe three times to visit an aunt in Zurich. She’s been to Hawaii.
At around 4 a.m., Tulah is exhausted. “I like this,” she says. “I like you. You should come up to my room. We can keep talking… and see.”
Ray smiles. “I would love to accept that offer. But I like you enough that I want to take baby steps. Is that corny?”
“No. That’s not corny.” She stops. “Oh God, I’ve come off as a floozy.”
“Forget about judging yourself. I projected us into the future, with kids and the last time I checked, you can’t buy a baby – you have to make them. You have to have fleshy union. You know, coitus?”
“No, I’ve been too forward. I stepped over a line. It’s because I’ve been drinking.”
He giggles a little bit. “I’m not judging. It’s a really tempting offer. I’m just saying I’d like to go slow with you, because this has been, well, it’s been brilliant.”
“So, what would be the next slow step?”
“A goodnight kiss, a hug and a promise of more – breakfast maybe?” he says.
She leans in quickly and kisses him hard, but lets it soften, and it becomes a fine kiss. It becomes the kind of kiss that doesn’t want to end, the kind that ends up in only one place. She pulls away and takes ownership of her own desire.
Ray yields. Her scent is faint, but heady and unforgettable. Sometimes there is surrender inside a kiss, a softening of the idea of self. He realizes he can easily imagine a future with this woman. He wants more of her. He wants to devour.
It is still snowing as he walks her to her hotel. They are walking side-by-side along a dimly lit path and Tulah reaches across space and takes his hand in hers. She encloses his hand in her mittened hand and squeezes. She will remember how right this felt. She will never forget it. And he will remember feeling utterly smitten in that moment – as if his life was completely out of control and it was okay.
At the door, he hugs her. He holds her. She wants to kiss again but he smiles and shakes his head. She watches as he turns and starts his walk back to the Chateau. He has perhaps taken a dozen steps before Tulah stops him.
“Wait,” she says. “I’m available. I just thought you should know.”
“What?”
“I’m available. I’m not involved with anybody else. I’m not married or anything.”
“Oh,” he says. “Good. I’m also available. My heart is unencumbered.”
“Good,” she says. “I’m glad we cleared that up.”
“Me too.”
They look at each other through the falling snow. It’s as if they don’t want this to end, as if tomorrow is not certain. “Did you know that cranes mate for life?”
“What?”
“Cranes. They mate for life. It’s true. It was on the National Geographic channel. It was all about Sandhill cranes and how they mate for life.”
“Okay,” he says. “Good to know. Are you going to be okay getting to your room? Or do you need a crane?”
“100 percent fine. No problemo.”
Oh my god, she thinks. Shut the fuck up. You sound like an idiot.
She watches as he disappears into the snow. He becomes a ghost and then he vanishes. When Tulah puts her head on the pillow, she’s dizzy and she can’t decide if it’s the booze she consumed or the man. Or both. She glances at the clock on her bedside table and realizes she has promised to go skiing in a few hours. She starts to drift off but her eyes pop open. He didn’t ask about whether or not she was married, or with someone. She brought it up. As if he didn’t care, or maybe he was just as tired as she was. He said his heart was un-something. Unencumbered? Who says stuff like that? She heard ‘free.’ Maybe he trusted that if she were married or involved she would not have tried to sleep with him. That’s too much trust, she thinks. She doesn’t deserve that much trust.
* * *
“Ms. Roberts?” It is one of the young, overly polite men at the front desk. “This was left for you,” he says, handing her a folded piece of paper. Tulah stops and recognizes the excitement in her chest. His note reads: I had to leave. A family thing. I want to keep learning to know you. Cranes are beautiful, and mildly illogical birds, aren’t they? This is followed by a couple phone numbers and an email address.
Tulah tells Brenda and Justine she had a late night and asks if they would mind not skiing. They are not disappointed. They are sitting in the window of the dining room looking at Mt Fairview, though it is hardly a fair view of the mountain. It’s still snowing and the mountain is a ghost that drifts in and out of existence behind a veil of hazy white.
Brenda is confused. “What do you mean you had a late night? You went to bed the same time we did.”
“Well, you had a late night and I had a very late night.”
Justine is trying to figure out the shading of this statement. “But you went to your room.”
“Yes. I went to my room.”
“And?”
“And you would have been waking up in some accountant’s room if it wasn’t for us,” Tulah says. “We saved you from Bruce the accountant.”
“You’re changing the subject. What happened last night?”
“Nothing. I met a guy.”
“You met a guy?” Justine says.
“Yes, a guy.”
Justine places her mimosa on the table and turns toward Tulah. “Where? Was he walking around in your room? Was he hiding in the ba
throom?”
“I went for a walk. It was snowing and I wanted to be out in it. I cut through the Chateau on the way back and he was there.”
“In the lobby?” Brenda says.
“No, he was playing a piano, in a ballroom, in the dark.”
Their waitress is approaching the table with a bottle of prosecco wrapped in a napkin, hoping to top-up their mimosas.
“Bring a new bottle,” Brenda says to the waitress. “Please.” She looks at Tulah. “Go on.”
* * *
She does not call him. She emails a pithy “missed you at breakfast” and they go back and forth a bit. She’s swamped at school and he’s taking care of an ailing mother, which impresses Tulah. The mother was the reason he went home early from the mountains. They set a date to meet for wine in three weeks. Despite the fact nothing happened between them sexually, apart from a bit of kissing, they’re both feeling a bit sheepish about their night in the mountains.
Two weeks later, she runs into him at a book launch in an Irish pub. Brenda’s boyfriend, Brad, has published his first novel, a book written in second person about vampires living on a space station, and Ray shows up with two women.
“Oh God, that’s him,” Tulah says to Brenda. Ray is across the room, holding a drink, his arm around a tall, slender brunette with severe bangs and a slightly shorter blonde woman in a skimpy black dress, her arm in his. He’s laughing about something. He sees Tulah and smiles as if he is delighted.
“Who?”
Tulah hisses. “The piano guy. The kiss. The snow. The mountains.”
Brenda squints. “He’s not at all how I imagined him. He’s tall. He’s with someone. He’s with two someones.”
“I can see he’s with someone. I’m not blind…”
“…He’s coming over.” Brenda turns and slips into the crowd.
“Let me see,” Ray says, “The last time we met, it was snowing and you could hear the German howitzers at the edge of the city.”
Tulah tries hard not to be amused, but she knows he’s riffing on Casablanca.
“You remembered, how lovely,” she says. “But, of course, that was the night the Germans marched into Paris.”
“Not an easy night to forget.”
“No,” she says.
“I remember almost every detail,” he says. “The Germans wore grey, you wore blue.”
She shakes her head at him. “How are you, really?”
“I’m good,” he says.
“Really? Because if you’re Rick from Casablanca and I’m Ilsa, then you’re not good at all. You’re actually damaged beyond compare. And we don’t wind up together.”
“Shit. Is that what happens at the end of Casablanca?”
“You didn’t know?”
“I always fall asleep before the end. You mean Rick and Ilsa…”
“…Nope. Doesn’t happen. But they’ll always have Paris.”
“I’m happy to see you,” he says.
“I noticed you brought two dates. That’s impressive.”
“Dates? Oh, yeah. They’re together. I came with them. They’re models – both of them. They’re a couple. Want an introduction? They’re lovely.”
“Maybe later.”
“Hey, does this meeting – which is great, by the way – in any way interfere with our planned date next week? Because I’ll cancel the jet.”
“What?”
“The jet,” he says. “I’ll cancel it.”
“Oh, we’ll see how this night goes,” she says. He’s joking about having arranged a jet, she thinks. He must be joking.
“No pressure then.”
“None whatsoever.”
The MC blurts a ‘testing-one, two, three’ and then starts a long and rambling introduction of the novelist. They stand side-by-side, sipping their drinks and Tulah wants to slip her hand into his. She wants touch. She wants more than this standing and listening. She moves her forefinger slightly in the direction of his hand – more a soft twitch than anything. Ray smiles and pushes back with his hand. They listen to the author read a passage from his book. He thanks everyone and then Ray’s dates find him and pull him to the far corner of the room. Brenda finds Tulah and starts to ask her a thousand questions about Ray, and about her feelings for him, and what did she think of Brad’s reading, and wasn’t Brad a wonderful writer.
Tulah is in a stall peeing, and she’s weighing her options. She’s supposed to go with Brenda and Brad, and a gaggle of other friends, to some bistro on 8th Street. She’s afraid Brad will corner her and ask her for her honest opinion of the book and she’ll say something stupid. Brenda had given Tulah an advance reading copy of the book a month ago and she’d breezed through it. She thought the idea was brilliant but it wasn’t well executed. There were jagged edges of missing logic and that was usually fatal for a book. Would she have stopped reading it if she didn’t know Brad? Probably. She was afraid she’d have a couple more drinks and then all of this would come spilling out – Brad would be hurt, Brenda would be angry, and she’d be deeply embarrassed.
She could go back into the pub and look for Ray. This would be a slightly safer course but also dangerous because she wants to sleep with him and she’s not ready for that tonight. Her pubic hair has gone mad, her legs are bristly and she feels bloated.
She decides she will feign a headache and go home and watch guilty pleasure TV – something mind-numbing and stupid.
* * *
Ray did not have an airplane booked for their date, as he’d threatened, and she never expected it. She thought it was lovely and whimsical. Instead of flying somewhere, they went to a concert in a church, a string quartet. Béla Bartók, Schubert, and Górecki were on the program and afterwards, they go for dinner. He made her laugh. And she could make him laugh. This is important to Tulah.
Five weeks after that date they take a leap of faith on their affections. They fly to France, to Nice, for a one-week vacation. Neither of them had much money but they made it work. Ray’s summer job was at his uncle’s greenhouse, and his uncle said, “Go. Go be young and in love in the south of France.” Tulah had been hired by a construction firm as a ‘traffic girl’. She would be holding a ‘slow’ sign for most of the summer, and that road project didn’t start until the first week of July. They fly last minute, looking for the best deal and they luck out. They find heavily discounted tickets for a flight that leaves at 2:30 a.m. Ray suggested Nice because on one of their dates Tulah mentioned she loved Marc Chagall and there was a Chagall museum in Nice.
They had planned to stay at a hostel but when they arrive, they find a dozen hotels that are inexpensive and fine. They book a room in the Garden Hotel and walk every day. They visit the Musée National Marc Chagall four times. They look at Chagall’s paintings, and his windows, and they are silent. They make a deal not to speak until they each have a glass of wine in a café, and only then do they bang their perceptions together. Only then do they talk about what they saw and felt.
On a Thursday, they buy wine and walk back to their hotel. They hold hands as they walk and it feels as natural as if they’d been holding hands for forty years. Ray does not think about the future – he is only interested in how it feels to hold hands with a beautiful woman, on a sunny day, in the south of France. Tulah wonders if they will always be able to hold hands like this, and if it will always feel this pure.
They sit in the courtyard of the Garden Hotel, in the bright 2 p.m. sun. The courtyard is an enclosed sanctuary with the hotel on three sides and high stone wall protecting it from the cacophony of Nice. Ray removes one of the bottles of wine from his bag and sets it on the table beside his journal and a book. He brought Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita with him because it was a book he’d skipped in his English 303 class and he’d been intrigued by the discussion. It was a catch-up read.
“I’ll see if I can find a corkscrew
and glasses,” he says. But before he can stand up, the maître d’hôtel, a man named François Houle, appears with two glasses. “Monsieur,” he says. “Please, allow me.” He looks at the wine, a Château de la Terriere Brouilly, without judgement, and proceeds to open it for them. Ray had picked the bottle off the shelf because he liked the heft of the word brouilly. And, it was inexpensive.
When the maître d’ first appeared, Tulah thought they were going to be told they couldn’t drink their own wine in the garden. She thought they’d broken some rule. She thought they would have to buy their wine from the hotel. But he seems delighted that they are there in the bright garden sharing a bottle. As if it’s natural to do so. He unfurls the umbrella beside their table so there is the option of shade and then he disappears – he ducks back into the hotel.
Tulah drops her sunglasses from her hairline into place, and smiles.
“Chagall and his blues,” she says. “Those blues are so deep and rich, I get lost when I look at that colour.”
“And those five paintings with that amazing red colour.”
“The Song of Songs cycle – those were for his wife.”
Tulah has decided she will smoke cigarettes on this trip, just a few, scattered throughout the day, and not out of desperation, but rather in concert with a desire for elegance. She loves the look and feel of a woman sneaking a cigarette. She thinks she looks European when she smokes and this pleases her. She does not admit any of this to Ray.
She limits her smoking because she loves the head rush of a first cigarette and does not want to abuse this feeling. Of course, she knows how terrible smoking is – the damage it does, but there is something reckless and romantic about it too. This moment seems like a good time to be elegant, so she takes out the package of Gauloises Blondes and pulls out a cigarette.
The maître d’, once again, shows up as if by magic, with a lighter. As she has seen in movies, Tulah touches his hand as she lights her cigarette.
He glances at the book on the table. “I can see Monsieur is a reader of distinction. Has Monsieur read Michel Houellebecq’s Les Particules élémentaires. It is an extraordinary book. I would recommend it…how is it in English? Vigoureusement.”
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