Interesting Women

by Andrea Lee

  When they have finished the larks and the young men are eating Kit Kat bars and drinking whiskey, they complete the fraternal atmosphere by launching into a canzone goliarda, a bawdy student song. This one has nearly twenty verses and is about a monk who confesses women on a stormy night and the various obscene penances he has them perform:

  Con questa pioggia, questo vento,

  Chi è chi bussa a mio convento?

  Between verses Edo looks at her without remorse. He’s thinking, She’s tough, she holds up—which is one of his highest compliments. “You look like a wild animal when you get angry,” he tells her, and she hates herself for the way her heart leaps. Just before midnight she lies in bed wondering whether he will come down to her. She will not go to him; she wants him to come to her room so she can treat him badly. She lies there feeling vengeful and willfully passive, imagining herself a Victorian servant girl waiting for the master to descend like Jove; at any minute she expects the doorknob to turn. But he doesn’t come, and she falls asleep with the light on. At breakfast the next morning he greets her with great tenderness and tells her that he sat up till dawn with Nestor, discussing fishing rights on a family property in Spain.

  4. HALLOWEEN

  Bent double, Edo and Elizabeth creep through a stand of spindly larch and bilberry toward the pond where the wild geese are settling for the night. It is after four on a cold, clear afternoon, with the sun already behind the hills and a concentrated essence of leaf meal and wet earth rising headily at their footsteps—an elixir of autumn. Edo moves silently ahead of Elizabeth, never breaking a twig. His white head is drawn down into the collar of his green jacket, and his body is relaxed and intent, the way he has held it stalking game over the last fifty years in Yugoslavia, Tanzania, Persia.

  Even before they could see the pond, when they were still in the Land Rover, chivying stolid Hertfordshire cows, and then on foot working open a gate that the tenant farmer had secured sloppily with a clothesline and a piece of iron bedstead—even then the air reverberated with the voices and wingbeats of the geese. The sound created a live force around the two of them, as if invisible spirits were bustling by in the wind. Now, from the corner of the grove, Edo and Elizabeth spy on two or three hundred geese in a crowd as thick and raucous as bathers on a city beach: preening, socializing, some pulling at sedges in the water of the murky little pond, others arriving from the sky in unraveling skeins, calling, wheeling, landing. Sometimes during the great fall and spring migrations, over two thousand at a time stop at Edo’s pond.

  He brought them here himself, using his encyclopedic knowledge of waterfowl to create a landscape he knew would attract them. He selected the unprepossessing, scrubby countryside after observation of topography and migratory patterns, and enlarged the weedy pond to fit an exact mental image of the shape and disposition needed to work together in a kind of sorcery to pull the lovely winged transients, pair by pair, out of the sky. After three years, the visiting geese have become a county curiosity. Local crofters have lodged repeated complaints. Edo doesn’t shoot the geese; he watches them. This passion for the nobler game birds is the purest, most durable emotion he has known in his life; it was the same when he used to lie in wait for hours in order to kill them. Now he’s had enough shooting, but the passion remains.

  He grips Elizabeth’s arm as he points out a pair of greylags in the garrulous crowd on the water. His hand on her arm is like stone, and Elizabeth, who loves going to watch the geese, nevertheless finds something brittle and old-maidish in the fixity of his interest. Crouching beside him, she experiences an arid sense of hopelessness, of jealousy—she isn’t sure of what. Casting about, she thinks of his ex-lovers who sometimes call or visit—European women near his own age who seem to have absorbed some terrible erotic truth that they express in throaty laughter and an inhuman poise in the smoking of cigarettes and in the crossing of their still beautiful legs. They are possessive of Edo, and they make her feel raw as a nursery child brought out on display. But she knows they aren’t the real reason that she feels cold around the heart.

  “You’re not interested in getting married, are you?” He says it abruptly, once they have returned to the Land Rover. He says it in French, his language for problems, reasoning, and resolution. He hears his own terror and looks irritably away from her. It is six months since they met.

  “No, I’m not,” replies Elizabeth. She is embarrassed by the fatuous promptness with which the words bound out, like a grade-school recitation. Yet she hadn’t prepared them. She hadn’t prepared anything. They are bouncing across stubble, and to the west, where the evening light is stronger, a few green patches shine with weird intensity among the autumn browns: barley fields planted this month to be harvested in January or February. On the horizon, below a small, spiky gray cloud, a bright planet regards them equably. Without another word, Edo stops the motor and reaches over to unzip her jacket and unbutton her shirt. With the same rapt, careful movements he used in approaching the geese, he bends his head and kisses her breasts. Then he straightens up and looks at her and a strange thing happens: each understands that they’ve both been stealing pleasure. For a second they are standing face-to-face in a glass corridor; they see everything. It’s a minor miracle that is over before they can realize that it is the most they will have together. Instantly afterward, there is only the sense of a bright presence already departed, and the two of them faltering near the edge of an indefinable danger. As Elizabeth buttons her shirt and Edo turns the ignition key, they are already engaged in small, expert movements of denial and retreat. The jeep pulls out onto the darkening road, and neither finds a further word to say.

  * * *

  A tumult of wind and dogs greets them as they pull up ten minutes later to the house. Dervishes of leaves spin on the gravel beside the rented Suzuki that Nestor and his cousins used to get to that day’s shoot, near Guthrie. Both Elizabeth and Edo stare in surprise at the kitchen windows, where there is an unusual glow. It looks like something on fire, and for an instant Edo has the sensation of disaster—a conflagration not of his house, nothing so real, but a mirage of a burning city, a sign transplanted from a dream.

  “What have they gotten up to, the young jackasses?” he says, climbing hurriedly out of the jeep. But Elizabeth sees quite clearly what Nestor and his cousins have done and, with an odd sense of relief, starts to giggle. They’ve carved four pumpkins with horrible faces, put candles inside, and lined them up on the windowsills. She interprets it as a message to her, since yesterday she and Giangaleazzo, who went to Brown, had been talking about Halloween in New England. “It’s Halloween,” she says, in a voice pitched a shade too high. She feels a sudden defensive solidarity with the jumble of young men in the kitchen, who are drinking Guinness and snuffing like hungry retrievers under the lids of the saucepans.

  “Jackasses,” repeats Edo, who at the best of times defines as gross presumption any practical joke he hasn’t thought up himself. In this mood, his superstitious mind is shaken, and he can’t cast off that disastrous first vision. He hurries inside, telling her to follow him.

  Instead, Elizabeth lets the door close and lingers outside, looking at the glowing vegetable faces and feeling the cold wind shove her hair back from her forehead. She wills herself not to think of Edo. Instead she thinks of a Halloween in Dover when she was eight or nine and stood for a long time on the doorstep of her own house after her brothers and everyone else had gone inside. The two big elms leaned over the moon, and the jack-o’-lantern in the front window had a thick dribble of wax depending from its grin, and she had had to pee badly, but she had kept standing there, feeling the urine pressing down in her bladder, clutching a cold hand between her legs where the black cheesecloth of her witch costume bunched together. She’d stood there feeling excitement and terror at the small, dark world she had created around herself simply by holding back. It’s an erotic memory that she has always felt vaguely ashamed of, but at the moment it seems curiously appropriate, a pleas
ure she’d enjoyed without guessing its nature.

  Edo opens the kitchen door and calls her, and she comes toward him across the gravel. For a moment before he can see her clearly, he has the idea that there is a difference in the way she is moving, that her face may hold an expression that will change everything. Once, thirty years ago, in Persia, he and his brother Prospero saw a ball of dust coming toward them over the desert, a ball of dust that pulled up in front of them and turned into a Rolls-Royce, with a body made, impossibly, of wicker, and, inside, two young Persian noblemen, their friends, laughing, with falcons on their wrists. He and his brother and the gunbearers had stood there as if in front of something conjured up by djinns. He watches Elizabeth come with the same stilling of the senses as he had that afternoon in the desert. When she gets closer, though, the dust, as it were, settles, and his wavering perspective returns to normal, there on the doorstep of his last, his favorite house, in the cold October night. He thinks of the unspoken bargain she has kept so magnificently for a woman of her age, for any woman, and he says to himself, Very well. He has studied nature too long to denigrate necessity. Then why the word thudding inside him, first like an appeal, then a pronouncement: “Never, never, never”? Never, then.

  Laughter comes from behind him. His nephews to summon him have launched into the ribald student song from the other night. When Elizabeth reaches him he doesn’t look anymore but takes her arm firmly, draws her inside, and shuts the door.

  The Prior’s Room

  This was the East of the ancient navigators, so old, so mysterious, resplendent and somber, living and unchanged, full of danger and promise.

  What next? I thought. Now, this is something like. This is great.

  —JOSEPH CONRAD, “Youth”

  Anna Meehan, an American girl seated at lunch with a French father and son, is basking in this common but blissful discovery: what happens sometimes, when you disobey your mother, is that the world turns inside out. She hasn’t specifically disobeyed—her mother, still asleep across the Atlantic in Rose Tree, Pennsylvania, never forbade her to take off from her summer language program with five minutes’ notice to join a Parisian boy she’s barely met at an Alpine resort—yet she knows that every parent on the planet would be opposed to the idea, including the Swiss surrogates who patrol her dormitory at the Cours d’Été of the University of Lausanne.

  Anna is a recent high school graduate with honors, bound in September for a college with a renowned department of Romance languages. She is also the youngest of three pretty sisters, each of whom displays a different striking conjunction of the traits of their mother’s part-Filipino family and their father’s Irish-and-Polish clan. So pretty is Anna and so ingenuous does she seem that her Rosales grandparents shied away from giving her a post-graduation summer in Paris and, instead, sent her to polish her French in tamer surroundings. She’s been bored silly in Switzerland, and now that she has kicked over the traces she wonders what took her so long. It was shockingly easy: she accepted a telephone invitation, and now she sits on the other side of the French border, the cynosure of a table glittering with crystal and heavy silver, with a galaxy of waiters hovering and a pair of well-dressed foreign men offering her highly detailed compliments as if they were choice hors d’oeuvres. Revelation has followed revelation: her freckles, for instance, which her hosts say they find seductive. Who would have guessed that the commonplace inscription in brown spots over the bridge of her nose could be subtitled as the gorgeously sibilant, the rich and strange taches de rousseur? Taches, she knows, means “stains”—a vague flavor of Lady Macbeth that only makes the translation more delectable.

  Another revelation is the restaurant around her: a three-star shrine on the shores of the Lac d’Annecy. It is about one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon at the end of August, and outside the panoramic windows a merciless late-summer sun illuminates the double blue of lake and sky around the bare peaks and pastures of the Savoy region; by contrast, the smoky air in the paneled, upholstered dining room filled with vacationing Europeans is like a bouillon of civilization, a concentrated essence. She will recall it, much later in her life, as Paradise—a standard by which sensual well-being will be measured forever afterward, stamped indelibly in her heart as she sips a house cocktail called Le Lac, a blue curaçao confection that through some casual triumph of artifice exactly reproduces the dominant color of the scene outside.

  Anna is no bumpkin: she and her sisters have been dragged thriftily around the capitals of Europe by their parents, a pair of academics who have always displayed the proper American reverence for garlic and old stones, and occasionally even sprung for a fancy meal. And she recognizes the setting from the half-dozen films that have formed part of the prolonged and expensive process of establishing in her soul a small outpost of French culture. She recalls one film in particular: a summer resort, cherry trees, bored men, beautiful neurasthenic women, a tantalizing hint of obsession. Now, suddenly, it is as if she had stepped into the film, as if all those years of conjugating irregular verbs within the excellent Rose Tree Media School District had been preparation for this moment—yes, this very moment, as she holds her blue drink and lifts her eighteen-year-old face to the older Frenchman, whose experienced eye and extravagant praise suggest a wealthy amateur horticulturalist admiring a prize bloom.

  Only her clothes, Anna knows, are wrong. She is wearing a pair of heavy tights she uses for ballet, a denim skirt, a tank top, and a pair of sensible Bass sandals that her mother insisted she buy at Campus Corner before she left home. It is the late nineteen seventies, and the other girls and women in the restaurant are all exquisitely dressed in sweeping flowered skirts or elegant tight pants, and sandals or even summer boots with towering heels. When she got out of the taxi this morning, there was a perceptible wince on the part of father and son as they caught sight of her outfit. They are both wearing immaculate jeans and sports jackets, with pale cashmere sweaters thrown over their shoulders. The older man, whose name is Olivier, is at the age that to Anna is simply how old parents and teachers are. He is small and paunchy but strangely emphatic, with a round flat face, a pointed nose, bright green-brown eyes, and wispy colorless hair cut in a precise fringe across his forehead. The son, nineteen years old and much taller, is called Étienne, and he is flat-faced like his father but with a protruding Adam’s apple and blue eyes and a sheeplike tangle of fair curls that she found unattractive when they first met, a few weeks ago, on the flight from Newark to Geneva. At the back of the plane, near the toilets, they talked for twenty minutes in unoccupied seats, and then, after they had exchanged phone numbers, he annoyed her by trying to kiss her, an attempt she thwarted with an expert but not unfriendly shove.

  She forgot all about him in the bustle of arrival, of settling into the program in Lausanne: the criminally dull classes in a Calvinist-gray building; the hikes straight out of Scout camp, punctuated with hearty choruses of “Chevaliers de la Table Ronde”; the cookouts with veal sausages from Migros supermarket; the excursions to Ouchy and the Château de Chillon; the dawning realization that she was still just an American in a mass of Americans, and that Europe was somewhere else. Until this morning, when her roommate Sarah, from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, yelled to her that she had a call, and she held the smooth, heavy receiver and found that it was not her parents or her jealous boyfriend. Instead, it was a voice speaking French, and sounding far more attractive than it had on the plane. Hello, hello, the boy said. We are near you—my father and I. We are at the most beautiful place for the weekend, just across the mountains. Will you join us? Please!

  Anna giggled into the phone—her French acquiring a sudden fluency that had eluded her in her classes—that she had no way of getting there, whereupon he said, quite matter-of-factly, Well, take a taxi. He meant, she realized, take a taxi over the mountains and across the border into France.

  And after that began a sustained act of nerve. A string of decisions in which Anna was more absolutely alone than she had ever
been—even in the spring semester of her junior year, when she used to tell all those lies about dentist visits so that she could spend long afternoons in the back of Mark Florio’s van. Saying nothing to her roommates, she brushed her hair until it shone, washed her face, and tossed a pair of underpants, her birth-control pills, her passport, and all the money she had into an Indian shoulder bag printed with elephants. Then she left the dreary dormitory, with its cramped steel balconies and scanty fringe of pines, and walked down to the train station, where in the lineup of taxis she located a driver who didn’t look as if he would rape and abandon her in the middle of the Alps. Instinctively, she knew what to do. She gave the directions in a tone that she hoped sounded like that of someone used to casual international taxi trips of an hour or two, and kept her spine straight and her chin up in the backseat, as the taxi wound up and down high passes and through tunnels, and the landscape became more desolate and glorious. She tried not to imagine what would happen if the French boy didn’t pay the fare that was mounting so alarmingly on the meter; if it were all a practical joke and the taxi driver never found the small lakeside village and hotel whose names she’d scribbled on a piece of paper; what her mother—tiny and fragile but nicknamed the Enforcer by her daughters—would say, crackling furiously over long-distance lines, when she found out that Anna had squandered three weeks’ worth of traveler’s checks on a taxi ride. As they raced past vineyards and geranium-bedecked villages, Anna sat mentally counting the cash she had and wondering whether the driver would take her watch and Eurail pass and the diamond-stud earrings she had been given for graduation.