by Mary Fleming
“Maybe I saw it once at the cinema on Long Island, but I certainly didn’t grow up on it.”
She cocked her head with a smile. “That’s right. You’re not a real American.”
“I’m not a real anything.” I shrugged and handed her the bottle of red wine I’d brought.
“Who is?” She looked at the label. “Thank you. It looks better than what I’ve got. Shall we drink it?”
“Sure. I’ll open it,” I said. The kitchen was very narrow and lined with shelves that were crowded with herbs and oils and pots and pans. “Now you really look moved in.”
“Most of this stuff isn’t mine. It’s what people leave behind. I guess no one ever cleans it out. The other day I was rooting around for some sage, and I found a pot of crystallized honey that looked as though it had been there since before the war.” After handing me a heavy brass corkscrew, Béa lifted up on her toes and reached for two glasses. The sleeve of her pale-green silk shirt slid up her graceful arm, right in front of my face, and I could see blonde hair shooting up in all directions. The sliding silk and Béa Fairbank’s gently curving, somehow vulnerable arm, made my heart give a little leap that it wasn’t supposed to give. I quickly took the glasses from her hand and returned to the larger space of the studio. She followed me out, saying: “It’s a little early for really good basil, but I’ve made pesto. Today felt so much like summer.”
“It smells good.” I walked to the window. Under a shady tree stood a chair and a small table. I could hear what sounded like a small party from some part of the garden I couldn’t see. “Your landlords must have a nice life.”
“I guess, though sometimes I wonder. I mean, they always seem a bit sad, disappointed, and I wonder if it’s because neither of them had a real profession. Their antique dealing seems more like a hobby.”
“You’re sounding like Viviane, with her True Purpose talk. It seems to me they’re lucky to live in a beautiful place and not have to worry about the next month’s phone bill. Or to spend their time doing something they don’t like.”
“You mean like running a bicycle shop?”
“Sort of. I guess. It’s not that bad.”
“I’m not sure I believe you,” she said. “Anyway, I need a reason to get up in the morning, and work gives it to me.” She laughed. “I can say that today, after a decent sketching session in the garden this afternoon.”
“Do I get to see some of that work this time?”
“Hmm,” she said, taking a sip of wine, unfolding her legs from the sofa before going over to the wall and rummaging through a portfolio and the canvases. “Here are two I’m quite pleased with.” She propped them up on chairs and stood back to reevaluate them herself. One was an ink drawing of a tree that reminded me of one of my photos, with its gnarled, arthritic branches.
“Did you do this at Hautebranche? I think I photographed the same tree.”
“No.” She laughed. “I did it in England last autumn.”
“I like this,” I said, now looking at an oil painting of a nude, a young woman with long, black hair. She was leaning on one arm, slightly off-center, on the sofa I had just left. The expression on her face was miles away.
“Here we have Connie’s predecessor,” she said tartly. “As a model, that is. She was a Portuguese waitress in a café I used to go to.”
“You have a nice touch,” I said.
“Thank you.” She suddenly jumped up. “Damn. I forgot the pasta water.” And she ran on her small, bare feet to the kitchen.
While she was gone, I peeked at a few more paintings against the wall. I saw a lush white flower, with one petal curled and ready to fall. A seemingly peaceful Paris rooftop scene, except the brick chimney was badly cracked. A bucolic landscape with one cloud painted a sickly, threatening yellow. Every one of them quietly found a way to remind the viewer of the dark side, of mortality.
“I’m not sure I want you digging that deeply into my work. There’s too much junk.” I hadn’t heard her come back in. I was looking at a drawing of the wisteria over the door. The penciling was wild and loopy. A bit like her handwriting.
“If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t bother. I think you got the weight of the flowers even without the color,” I said as she walked over and looked from my side.
“Thank you,” she said. “The pasta will be ready in ten minutes. Can you help me lay the table?”
So I sat down with Béa Fairbank at a round wooden table, adorned with three wine bottles, heavy flows of white wax already caked to their sides, just like at Hautebranche in the pre-baby days. What was hers and what others had left behind in the studio wasn’t clear, and the uncertainty disturbed my usual system of observation and analysis. How many of the wax layers, for example, were formed during her evenings and how many had been left by others? Was the kitsch poster hanging in the entry passage hers or some previous tenant’s? And what about these flowery plates, or the simple blue vase on the mantle? The pieces were impossible to fit together, and I was forced to abandon my usual critical self to the fading light of her studio, the food, and the wine.
The warm spring air wafted on us from time to time through the open panes of the skylight. Béa lit the candles. Whether it was this house that had survived all the razing and rebuilding of two centuries, or Béa’s company, I didn’t know, but I had a peculiar sensation. I felt safe.
She told me about growing up in a large house in Devon. There were five children; they’d had a very traditional upbringing. Though she remained close to her family, she’d always felt different. “Maybe I was just born that way. Or sometimes I think it has to do with my family history. My grandfather, you see, was a humble farmer who turned to business and made quite a lot of money. And my mother had grown up in Kenya. Her father was a gentleman farmer, but the colonial thing made her a bit different. I always think that made me feel a bit off kilter.”
“What about your brothers and sisters?” I asked.
“I have one brother and one sister who are fiercely traditional,” she said. “And then two brothers who are a bit like me. One’s a filmmaker, the other a musician.”
“Do you get along with them?”
“I do, actually. All of them. Obviously there are some personality clashes from time to time, different ideas about how to approach this or that, but we seem to get over it. Except for a time in our late teens, early twenties, when we were all establishing our identities, we’ve always stayed in touch. I count on them, in a funny way, even the two traditional ones.” She paused, cocking her head. “There’s a lot to be said for the no-questions-asked recipe for living, if you can manage it. I mean, wondering who you are every five minutes can be both exhausting and counterproductive.” She paused. “Anyway, enough about me. Do you want some coffee or tisane?”
“No, thanks, but let’s clear up.”
I helped Béa take out the bowls and started washing the dishes.
“You really don’t have to do the washing up,” she said, putting a dented brass kettle on the gas.
“It’s good to get it done.”
I washed the dishes while she dried and made herself a verbena tisane. We settled on the sheet-covered sofas, the coffee table between us. Béa was sitting cross-legged and holding her mug between both hands, blowing on the hot liquid.
“How about your parents. Do you get on with them too?” I asked.
“Yes, even though it’s all very English. We don’t argue, but neither do we have deep discussions about feelings and the meaning of life.” She sighed. “I don’t know. For some reason I feel happier living at a distance from it all. In another country, in fact. As I said, I always felt different. From a very early age, and it only got worse as I got older. It didn’t help that when I was a teenager I got, you know,” and she blew up her cheeks, making her arms into a fat circle. She couldn’t utter the word and she was all red, looking away, as if in having been overweight she had committed a crime.
“Cédric thinks you’re the prettiest woman he
knows,” I said.
“Well,” she said, even redder, “all I’m trying to say is that I’m one of those people who feels more at home away from home. But what about you? Where do you feel at home? Where is your home? It’s hard for me to imagine having two bona fide cultures.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Here, I guess. It’s where I live.”
“That’s not much of an endorsement.”
“I can’t really imagine living anywhere else.”
She nodded, thinking. “But do you feel French?”
“In some ways, yes. In others not.”
“Do you feel American?”
“I tried very hard to, for most of my childhood. But when I went there to college for a year, I felt like a total freak.” I paused. “I don’t feel one thing or another because I don’t really feel comfortable anywhere.”
“How old again were you when you moved here?”
“Eight.”
“And you said your father had died the year before?”
“Yes. Which means I don’t remember much.”
“But you’ve had your mother to help fill in the blanks.”
“Oh, no.”
“What do you mean?”
“We never talk about my father. Or anything else about our life then.”
“Ever?”
“Never.”
“That’s more English than the English,” she said. “Surely your father’s not an unpleasant subject just because he died.”
I looked up at Béa, whose cheeks were no longer red in embarrassment but just a bit flushed from the wine, whose eyes were sparkling in the candlelight. I thought of her graceful arm and the chaotic hair it sprouted and of her own adjustment problems. “The circumstances were unusual.” I stood up, walked to the table, and filled our glasses with the rest of the wine. Considered the risk. Telling Jacqueline had left me feeling stripped naked.
I put her glass on the coffee table, took a sip from mine, and walked toward the windows. Outside, the tree rustled and the early summer sky still had a glimmer of light to it. The chair underneath was now a forlorn silhouette, as were the vines. In the dim light they almost looked like huddled figures, old men crouching over the stony ground at their feet.
“A year before my father died,” I finally said, “my sister died.”
“Oh,” Béa said, from behind me.
“She was run over by a car.”
“Aie.”
“The official story of my father’s death,” I said, “is that he went up to the roof one night to fix the television antenna. That he lost his footing and fell to the ground.”
“It sounds plausible, though I guess it’s a bit strange to be up on the roof in the middle of the night.”
“Exactly.”
“He didn’t leave a note or anything?”
“No. I don’t think so, anyway. I never understood it. It wasn’t his fault.”
“What do you mean?”
“My sister’s accident. It wasn’t his fault.”
“What do you mean it wasn’t your father’s fault?”
“It was my mother who was with her. After dropping me off at a friend’s house, she went shopping in the town, and while they were walking down the street, my sister pulled away from her hand and jumped in the street just as a car was passing.”
“Ooh.” Béa shuddered.
“That was the last time I saw Franny, when my mother dropped me off. I remember her waving at me from the back seat of the car while I rushed off. I was so anxious to try my friend’s new trampoline, I didn’t wave back.”
“You hardly could have known what was going to happen.”
“I know. But that’s what you remember. What you didn’t do, what you might have done differently. I guess that’s why my father couldn’t live with her death, even though he wasn’t there either.” I paused, shifted my weight, and felt as if I were on the edge of a high dive. I took a long breath. “When he died, we were at our house in Connecticut. I always got up early and loved the morning time before everyone else woke up. I was getting ready to go exploring. From my bedroom window, I’d seen a deer at the edge of the woods, and I was going to try and follow it. As I ran out on the front porch, I saw my father facedown on the gravel driveway, dressed in nothing but his pajamas. He was lying in a strange position, and even though I was only seven, I knew that lying on the gravel driveway meant something must be wrong. There didn’t seem to be blood everywhere, and just as I was beginning to think I was mistaken—for some strange reason my father had decided to lie down in the driveway, half naked—I came to his face, which was twisted unnaturally to the side. It had three flies walking over it. Out of his mouth, there was a trickle of blood that made a path in the gravel.”
“God.” Béa’s low voice was right next to me. I nodded, sickened all over again by the memory of my father’s twisted neck, of those flies walking over his face, and that brook of blood. “It must have been terrifying,” she said, both of us in front of the window looking out into the dark garden.
“It was. But the guilt was almost worse than the panic and fear. Terrible, irreconcilable guilt. For not coming sooner, for not having somehow prevented it.”
“Your mother didn’t wake up?”
“No. Often that year after Franny died, she didn’t get up until late. Maybe she was taking sleeping pills.” I shook my head. “Until I was fifteen or so, I believed my father’s fall was an accident because that was the story I’d been told somewhere along the line. The truth came to me in a flash one day, unwittingly through Cédric. He was telling me a story his father had told him, about a friend who had always believed his mother had tried to slit her wrists by accident, until one day he realized that wasn’t possible— wrists don’t slit by accident. I felt as if I’d just been slapped in the face—the truth about my own father was suddenly so obvious. How could I have been so stupid, so gullible?”
“Because you were a child.”
“I guess.” The sky was now dark enough to allow a few insistent stars to penetrate the glowing orb of city lights. “In any case, I’ve spent most of my life angry and resentful.”
“And now?”
“Not so much.” I shrugged. “Viviane has undoubtedly told you about my unforgivable deed.” She nodded. “That went a long way in humbling me, putting things into a different perspective. It made me able to see what all human beings, even my ever-so-superior self, are capable of doing.” I took my last sip of wine and put the glass on the table. “Now my mother’s dying of cancer, and all that anger is beginning to seem an unconscionable waste of time and effort.”
For several minutes we just stood there, very close together. So close together that by the time she was in my arms, it seemed that neither one of us had moved, that it had already been that way from the beginning of my story.
“This isn’t supposed to happen,” Béa said as our lips pulled apart.
“Huh,” was all I said, leading her back to the sofa. We lay there, stuck together, for a long time, talking in a whisper, though no one was around to hear us. I told her everything. About my mother and me. About my brother. About my banishment. About Mother’s illness and the reconciliation with my family. It was so easy, lying in the half dark with my arms around this small woman. But then, just after midnight, I remembered Cassie. I never wanted to move from this spot, but Cassie the spell-breaker beckoned.
I couldn’t ask her to come with me. I was afraid that she would say no, that in kissing me, she was only being kind and sympathetic. She had told me, after all, that she didn’t want any more relationships. And then I was afraid that even if she said yes, seeing my room would quickly change her mind. So I left Béa—who did indeed seem happy to stay—at her door, small and smiling, and made my way back down the hill, through the warren of Montmartre streets and the Saturday hordes at Clichy, back to the rue des Martyrs and Cassie. As I walked, I felt strangely light on my feet. Telling my story had been a relief, as if with each sentence I had phy
sically shed several grams. It hadn’t felt that way with Jacqueline, but that was a different time and she was a different woman. Jacqueline’s reaction had been to provide an analysis of my psyche, while Béa had responded with a kiss.
To reward Cassie for her long wait and because I wasn’t in the least bit sleepy, I took her for an extended walk. At the little park on the avenue de Trudaine, I paused. It was here that one night during the strike I had repeatedly tried to reteach myself to ride a bicycle so that I could get to Stephanie faster. Since then, every time I walked by the park I was reminded of that hopeless effort made for the wrong reasons and felt foolish, ashamed. Now standing in front of its low gate and brimming with thoughts of Béa, I viewed that winter night with a sort of beneficent sympathy for a poorer version of myself.
My father used to make breakfast for the family on Sunday mornings. I remember running into the kitchen with Franny, shouting: “What’s for breakfast?” He’d kneel down, grab one of us in each arm, and say: “Who knows but the nose?” and he wouldn’t tell us what he’d made until he put pancakes or eggs and bacon on the table. Later I came to think of those words as an omen. Who knows but the nose? Today your father’s making waffles; tomorrow he’s dead in the driveway. Who knows but the nose? Today your sister has sticky syrup all over her face; tomorrow she’s flattened in the street. It was the principle by which I’d lived my life: who knows when the next tragedy’s coming. Even though my mother’s illness could be viewed as further proof of my catastrophe theory, tonight, walking down the avenue de Trudaine, it occurred to me sometimes, something good might happen. Could happen. Even to me.
The next morning, I opened the shop late, but it didn’t matter. This was Pentecost weekend, with Monday a holiday, and les Parisiens were elsewhere, visiting friends in the provinces or gardening in their own country houses. Some tourists who needed directions came in; that was it.
Instead of repairing bicycles, I spent the whole morning at my desk daydreaming about Béa Fairbank. I couldn’t wait to see her again. I missed her already as I reran not just the previous evening but also all our encounters, even the first one with Jennifer. After all the women in my life, I wondered, what was responsible for these peculiarly urgent feelings? What was different, special about her? Shared friends and interests, a general unease with the world around us? The fact that I could talk to her forever? Or that she was gorgeous in an irresistibly discreet way? Of course she was also sensitive and funny and talented. Spirited, too.