Interesting Women

by Andrea Lee

  We stand in the kitchen, where Gus is fixing lunch. She mixes hunks of day-old bread with grated Gruyère and slices of a cabbage we bought at the outdoor market this morning. Before putting it in the oven, she sluices it with homemade onion soup. Her hands have a deftness that seems a bit show-off. This is a peasant dish, she tells me. Her husband ate it when he was a boy in a hilltop village half destroyed by German bombs. She has spent two scorching summers there, mainly in a kitchen plucking fowl and pickling cucumbers among female in-laws dressed like lay sisters in black.

  Her kitchen is small and dark like all the other rooms in the house. In the living room hang a few watercolors of Maine islands. The kitchen looks out on rain and a wall covered with a vine whose leaves are turning the shiny yellow of children’s slickers. In a tiny driveway sits a battered but jaunty red MG. This car belongs to Gus’s husband, and she is not allowed to drive it when he is off leading tours. He is often away on long trips to Brazil, Yemen, Australia. Sometimes he flies with his mistress, who is a flight attendant he knew before he met Gus. Sometimes this woman, who has black hair and an ungenerous nature, parks outside their house in the middle of the night and screams insults.

  There is a hard jauntiness in Gus’s voice as she speaks of her troubles that makes me feel almost as young and insignificant as I did when she was a debutante. We’re not exactly friends, not like Edie and me; yet a nameless bond has grown between us. She is six months pregnant and, except for her swollen belly, impossibly thin. Her skin and hair look almost phosphorescent in the Parisian autumn gloom. One afternoon when we go mushroom hunting in a nearby wood, I look at her sharp profile and pipestem wrists and for some reason remember the French trick rhyme I was reading at the party when she laughed at my tights: Un petit d’un petit s’étonne aux Halles. On a hillside dotted with cowpats, she holds up the basket of mushrooms—cèpes and pieds de moutons—and we bend over to smell them. There is no real fragrance, just a breath of moisture and decay.

  * * *

  Three years later when I’m living in Rome, she comes to visit me for a weekend. By then I have a cushy job at the United States Information Service. I live on Via Giulia and have a terrace in crumbling buff-colored stone and am quite the girl about town, with an Italian boyfriend and a Siamese cat. I’ve learned how to dress, where chic Roman women buy their underwear and shoes. Gus arrives with her second daughter on her back. The first little girl is rusticating with her grandparents in the Vercors. This baby is a round-headed blond cherub of eleven months who sucks with Rabelaisian vigor at her mother’s huge pearly breast. Gus has pink cheeks now, and talks about nettle teas and herbal ointments for eczemas, and mothers in Africa who nurse children until they are five or six. She has let her hair grow out into limp fair wisps that cling to her head in an unbecoming way that makes me think of feathers on ducklings, and she wears an embroidered Afghan shirt, out of style in Rome right now. My boyfriend teases me about “the hippie mamma,” and I feel vaguely insulted that he is not falling in love with her.

  But that evening when we drive down Via Veneto in my little convertible, I see that Italians in nearby cars are turning to stare at us. Why is it that they are looking, that some wave, and somebody even honks? I turn around and see that Gus, like a woman casually shrugging on a wrap, has reassumed her old glamour. She and the gorgeous baby, both sitting tall and wearing big broad grins, are parading through the Roman night like a Hollywood Madonna and child.

  * * *

  We meet in Maine, after a space of several years. We are on an island in the Penobscot, a place ringed with granite boulders, where the locals speak in accents out of Sarah Orne Jewett, and the smell of woodsmoke carries for miles through the pines. There is a cove with three farmhouses that belong to Edie and Gus’s family, the same ancestral cove where in the long-ago film Gus and her cousin fed each other stones in perfect bliss. I am staying in the oldest farmhouse with my husband of one year. Speaking of bliss, we are at the accomplished stage in love when the sense of miracles has become triumphantly quotidian. There are the usual sea urchins and blueberries and gray mornings that become incandescent noons and hordes of freckled children in dinghies; and across the way is Edie with a dull husband, and somewhere around the edges is Gus, alone, in a cloud of rumor about the Frenchman. My husband wins a Fourth of July swimming race across the cove, and in the midst of the cheers and my own delirious pride, as he emerges from the icy water like a blue-lipped god, I glimpse Gus and note with surprise that she like everyone else is a small unimportant figure in the foreground of my idyll. A month later she surprises me again, with a letter that plunges in medias res. “Watching the two of you has shaken me, put a mark on me, knocked me out of my niche of cowardice. I know now what is possible, if I find the courage to go after it.” The letter is written in the exquisite spidery handwriting of all the women in their family, and a pine tree is sketched rather brilliantly at the top. But I forget to respond, busy as I am with marriage, with inhabiting another person.

  * * *

  Life intervenes. The death of Edie and Gus’s mother, the remarriage of their father, Edie’s tumultuous divorce. The births of my children, my own divorce, my work, my life in Europe. All stories worth recounting. But on this peculiar path I am tracing, the next milestone comes in the form of a letter that contains an article clipped from the Times of a coastal town in Massachusetts. The article describes the opening of a French restaurant called Le Maquisard in a white elephant of a frame house in the town, and has a photograph of the proprietors: Gus and the Frenchman. The letter, from Edie, tells me that Gus grabbed her daughters and left France one morning, and that the Frenchman disappointed a number of women by following his wife. At present they are reconciled among the beurre noir and dried cèpes of this new mad venture, which is going great guns, at least with the summer people. I look at Gus’s face in the photograph: an oval of tiny gray dots that tells me nothing except that she is still beautiful. Her position at the side of the Frenchman has, to my mind, a provisional look. I reread the letter and ponder the wonderful seductiveness of action, of clean, defiant acts; and the tedium of consequences.

  * * *

  A number of years scurry past with the undignified haste of startled geese. Suddenly I hear gravel crackle under tires, and Gus pulls up the driveway in a tall blue Jeep and peers out at me with a quizzical tilt of the head that reminds me of our first meeting near the hockey field. This happens in Newport, where I’ve rented a house and am soaking up the American summer with an expatriate’s melancholy gusto. She looks the same—just sharper around the edges, the way we all do. And something completely unexpected has come out of hiding: a rueful good humor that signifies a talent for living. She’s not a glamour girl or a martyr anymore, and she has left behind the garlicky romantic dramas of the restaurant business. Of all the roles I never envisioned for her, she is a teacher, filling the occasionally receptive minds of high school students in her coastal town with irregular French verbs and tidbits of Pascal. Her eyes, under the unchanged long lashes, hold a proper pedagogical irony. She slams the car door and walks over to plant a kiss on the foot of my six-month-old son, who is propped on my shoulder. “We’re going to talk for twelve hours!” she announces.

  The forerunner of this visit was a wedding announcement that arrived months ago at my house in Northern Italy. A snapshot showed Gus in bone-colored satin beside a man whose expression of uncomplicated devotion was as American as the name engraved on the announcement. A fellow teacher, who courted her over a long bitter New England winter. Now, sitting in a wicker chair on my rented porch, she talks on about him, blushing and excited as she never was as a teenager. It’s love, of course, straightforward and divine, arrived at last according to its own mysterious timetable. She holds my son and tells me she longs to have a child with her new husband, but wonders if she’s too old, that they were so crazy about each other when they first met that her breasts filled with milk. We eat corn on the cob and blueberry pie and gradually dr
ift into that helium sphere of giggling late-night confidence where straight news takes on phantasmagoric color and exaggeration. Is it really possible that the Frenchman has been reborn in the Church of Christ and settled down contentedly beside a Vermont lake? Until past midnight we discuss our men. Mine is Italian, and faintly like the Frenchman, as hers is faintly like my American ex-husband. We exchange queasy smiles over this.

  Noontime next day finds us at Gooseberry Beach, surrounded by rich people in sensible bathing suits and canvas hats. In the cold Atlantic we jump and splash with exaggerated girlish gestures. Gus is wearing a black suit as shiny as a mussel shell, and we are engaged in the sly game of women over forty, covertly scanning each other’s bodies for signs of wear. She has the same startling white skin as ever, only twining over her chest and collarbone is a large vein I don’t remember, sinuous as a vine.

  * * *

  She is telling me about her teenage daughters, beautiful bilingual girls who divide their year between New England and France. How creative they are, and how patient with the quirks of father and stepfather; how one is learning to fly, and another will study soil conservation in Madagascar. She shows a picture of a small Cape Cod house on a pastoral road. With vegetables and chickens in the back, and a tent permanently pitched for visitors from Boston and France. We scoop holes in the sand and our talk assumes a desperate velocity as the hour draws near for Gus to drive back to Massachusetts. As if finishing up a complicated board game, we attempt to comment on every single person we both know. Mercurial Edie; friends from Paris; my brothers; her raft of handsome tragic cousins; the boy who owned the guitar Gus played at that New Year’s party. And me, of course. “I always thought you were incredibly interesting,” she says, sifting a fistful of sand.

  This is untrue, but she seems to believe it. And for a minute the array of past scenes we share undergoes a drastic shift in perspective. As if the effulgent young goddess who sat wreathed with admirers, playing the guitar badly in a New Year’s blizzard, had actually been trying to impress me with her clowning. The funny thing is how little the truth matters now, just as it doesn’t matter whether we are really friends. Now we are simply a pair of women, not yet old, each trying in vain to create something useful out of her memories: something protective, perhaps, like foul-weather gear.

  With clothes in mind, I tell her about wearing her green dress to the dance. “You’re kidding,” she says. “That Jackie Kennedy thing? That was one of the ugliest dresses I ever had.”

  “I know,” I say. “It looked terrible on me.”

  At four o’clock Gus climbs into her Jeep and backs up, swearing softly in French as she struggles with the clutch. She calls out to me to keep my pecker up, and I shout something bawdy in return. Then, through the windshield, I watch her bright head catch the afternoon sunlight, flare up and fade as she disappears down the street, past lofty elms and Victorian houses. I pause for a minute in the driveway, wondering where and when we’ll see each other next, and as I do it occurs to me for absolutely the first time to wonder whether there is a hidden logic to this sparse set of encounters across oceans and years. Like a science fiction story, where isolated flashes from space turn out to be parts of a coded dispatch. And even if there is no interstellar communiqué, I think, there certainly exists some dull celestial chamber of protocol where the number of my meetings with Gus has already been fixed. Standing in the deep summer shade, I try, for a few heartbeats, to guess how many we have left.

  Dancing with Josefina

  “Thanks, I’d love to.” So, if I recall correctly, begins a Dorothy Parker monologue, set in similar circumstances. But what I actually say is “Sí, gracias.” Adding a coy dip of the eyelashes that any film director would nix as being over the top, but which to my mind gives me the authentic air of belonging to the local population of nubile señoritas. There is no need to move to the center of the dance floor, since we are already there, already molten with the heat, crushed in the pullulating Friday night crowd at Bobby’s, a harbor club where the jump-ups get so packed and wild that the pilings shudder like an earthquake, and eels and remoras swarm to devour the beer vomit in the spotlit sea below. We’re in the Bay Islands of Honduras, which are the usual Caribbean crucible of races. The mob of dancers swirls with teak- and amber-colored faces, legacy of Hispanic sailors, English pirates, Maroon slaves, Mosquito Indians. Over the alternating beats of salsa and reggae rises the buzz of Spanish and the lilt of island English. Adrift in the whole mad brew are a few Americans. Me, for example, an unabashed tourist. And my husband, Rory, and our expatriate friend Mitch, who are presently hailing me with Dos Equis bottles out of the sweltering press at the bar. And also this gentleman, quite a senior gentleman, who left his little cluster of friends—gray-haired fellows with a lot of rum under their belts, yachtsmen’s brick complexions, and the look of timid but relentless hunger that marks the sex tourist—to squeeze up next to me. He put a large pinkish paw on my elbow—respectfully, it must be said—and, in halting phrasebook Spanish, asked me to dance.

  It’s rare to have the opportunity to make mischief with such ease. So simple to break off eye contact with husband and friend across the room. To give that little falsely modest flicker of the lashes and make a simpering reply in the few words of Spanish I know, and begin moving thorax and pelvis in a way that suggests that I pulled on my scanty cotton dress in one of the shacks that stand on stilts out in the water, in the town named after a buccaneer who holed up there to feast and fornicate. Easy to pretend that I am not a coddled North American black woman, aged thirty-one, the kind of young woman this man might encounter in an investment bank, or see on the podium at an academic conference. That I am much younger and poorer, that the genes for my dark skin arrived from Africa along the thoroughfares opened by the conquistadors, rather than the more northerly Protestant channels of the Georgian slavers. That the boundaries of my education were marked not by a graduate degree but by the dusty walls of the island elementary school, where geckos scuttle and boards hide the windows the hurricane shattered. That I’m not married to Rory, a white lawyer from Delaware, who might be this man’s nephew, or son. And that perhaps I’d be just desperate enough to trade a few blow jobs for a charm bracelet, or a pair of running shoes, or even the fata morgana of a U.S. passport.

  “Sí, gracias. Bailamos.”

  It would be too easy to detest him immediately, so I’ll take my time. Dispassionately I observe how he starts to wag his buttocks, in innocent khaki shorts, to the truly wonderful music, which the deejay has magicked into a weird dub fusion: a Caribbean male voice intoning salacious directives over a Latin beat. It’s hot muscular sound that you have to obey, and, packed around us, gorgeous Honduran kids, their faces incandescent with sweat, are humping away as if their lives depended on it. My partner makes it clear that he would like to hump me too—his friends, after all, are watching. They loosed a faint cheer and raised their glasses when we started dancing. But I keep myself a hygienic inch from his soaked polo shirt and make it look like seductive teasing. I improvise an undulating mishmash of bumps and grinds with a sort of samba-limbo-macarena flavor. I’ve never been a good dancer, but I once had a Puerto Rican boyfriend who made me appear to have rhythm. The guy in front of me, of course, belongs to a whole different category of bad dancing: the juggernaut school. I haven’t looked at him closely yet. Except to note that he’s large and red and old.

  “Cómo te llamas?” Shouted over the music.

  What’s that? Oh, a name, a name. Maria would be too absurd, and for some reason, all the other names that spring to mind are unequivocally Nordic. Helga—no. Although Frieda brings to mind magnificent Kahlo, Mexican icon with her baroque costumes and Byzantine monobrow. Gabriela—no. Erendira? Let’s stay away from magic realism.

  “Josefina,” I reply. Congratulating myself on a good serviceable choice, with an imperial resonance to it—Napoleon’s consort was, after all, a Caribbean girl. And as I announce my alias, I begin—with my lashes
still modestly lowered—my inventory. Age: mid-sixties. Genre: American Anglo-Saxon or Celt. Accent: from what I can gather, mid-Atlantic. Feet: large, size twelve at least, in battered blue-and-white Top-Siders—an upper-middle-class indicator, like the khakis and the shirt with the midget alligator and the diver’s watch. Sunburnt freckled arms and legs with the muscle mass of a former team player: football or hockey. And a belly that on a woman would mean pregnancy of about seven months.

  I get irritated as I observe this belly jiggling insouciantly to the beat. What whacking arrogance it takes for the possessor of a Brobdingnagian gut like this even to dream of aspiring to dancing with a pretty girl thirty years younger. Yet wherever I’ve traveled in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, I’ve seen similar woeful sights. Dropsical bellies, spindling shanks, speckled pates, wistful salt-and-pepper attempts at Hemingway beards, Frank Zappa ponytails made up of a few white hairs. All displayed by visiting men—tourists not interested in antiquities, because they’re in ruins themselves. These cruel signs of sovereign time would be touching if they weren’t always exhibited at the sides of dewy local beauties—young goddesses, in fact, whose skin is black or brown or yellow. My honeymoon flight from Frankfurt to Bangkok was packed with Frenchmen, Americans, Germans, Italians. All of them well over fifty. All of them with the same expression of complacent anticipation—consumer anticipation, like housewives headed for a reliable supermarket. I was tempted to get up and make a speech. What a sight that would have been: Susanna lecturing the elders. But what would one say but “Shame”? And shame, it is well known, is in the eye of the beholder.