“Assuming,” Eleanor told him as he hung up and sighed, “that Fifi LaPue over there lets me out of the lease. She had a little hankering for Sid, by the way, would have been my bet. What the drug people call a jones? Though I don’t know her position vis-à-vis the African-American dead.”
“Perhaps, then, she’ll be glad to see you go, now that you’re on your own. I am so sorry,” he said. “Forgive me. Sidney—”
Eleanor nodded. She didn’t know what else to do with her face, so she put her hands over it. Sidney and I, she nearly said to his cousin, would not have made it from the June we are in to the start of autumn. They’d been a middle-aged couple in a second marriage for each that was going as sour as the wine their landlady’s husband produced in what was little more than a very large old stone garage. Now Eleanor was a middle-aged widow whose husband had died of what the very sweet young doctor, who smelled of a citrus soap Eleanor had thought clean and sexy at once, called une attaque—a stroke.
Then the doctor had added, not hesitantly at all, for she was a sophisticated woman of France, after all, “Les neiges . . .” She did pause on Eleanor’s behalf to say “Do you know this word of ours for, er, the Negroes, madame?”
Eleanor took a deep breath in order to shout at her, to screech, she realized, about her experience as a teacher of French at the sixth-snootiest prep school for girls in the city of New York. She was going to scream in impeccable French. But the woman’s kind, tired light green eyes, her obvious concern for the dead man’s wife, silenced her. She touched the doctor’s forearm with the fingers of her right hand, and she nodded.
She let her breath out, and she said, “D’accord.”
“Eh, bien,” the doctor said. “Donc. Les nègres, il sont tres vulnérable des attaques. Je regrette, madame.”
It had seemed to her before he died, and it seemed to her afterward, that they had remained in love. The sorriest part, she was beginning to believe, was that love did not necessarily make it possible to live, together or alone. And a desire to live, something beyond the animal drive to not be killed off, she had reluctantly come to think, was the most necessary and most elusive of feelings. Thinking of the size of Sid’s mistake and hers in marrying, she wondered if Eugene suspected something of the great error in which Sidney and she had courted and married and traveled abroad. Here he was, because he thought it right to come to the aid of his nephew’s white wife, this gentle, vast, and elegant pear-shaped cousin from Baltimore, sweating through his white duck trousers and his dark blue long-sleeved shirt, waving his white, broad-brimmed straw hat as a fan between them while they sat at the kitchen table and checked their little list of what to do after a husband’s death in a rural rental house among the rows of the Panifiettes’ sauvignon blanc vines at the end of a very warm June. She knew that Bertha’s whiteness could be all or some of an explanation, but she doubted it. His hairless café-au-lait head shone from the heat, and she thought she could feel it, like his decency, radiate from him across the yard or so of polished pine.
“I’m sorry the weather’s so uncomfortable,” Eleanor said. “And I’m so glad you’re here, you and Bertha, that I feel treacherous about my relief—on account of your discomfort. But thank goodness.”
“You’re a cousin. A cousin-in-law. I do not know what you are, in legal definitions, Eleanor. You are our family. If you want to be. If you do, then you are. If you don’t, consider us a very, very large pain in the ass until we see you safely home.”
She took his beefy, moist hand, the one that rested on the table near his coffee cup, and she set it against the side of her head.
“Dear girl,” he said.
Bertha walked in, moving as gracefully in spite of her size as Eugene did, whether it was to lift a cup of coffee or cross a room. Eleanor could imagine them as they somehow, helping each other quite cordially, made their slow, breathless way up the stairs of the Très Grand Vitesse and stowed the bags at the end of the first-class carriage. She could imagine them murmuring to one another—“Are you all right, dear? If you’d give me your hand ...”—and could envision them as they faced each other across the little table of their compartment, stomachs folded doughily over the table’s edge, great arms flattening on its top, arranging bottles of Evian and sandwiches, wedges of cheese, perhaps, and chunks of fruit that Eugene cut for them with a folding wooden-handled picnic knife while the train gathered speed. She saw his vast hands manage with delicacy the division of a Cavaillon melon or a crescent of Brie, saw hers distribute napkins and plastic cups.
“I have just been having another word with Madame Panifiette,” Bertha said. “She was most accommodating of my accent.” Her smile might have excused Madame or indicted her own French, but it was kind, somehow. “She expects to ‘achieve a resolution’ quite rapidly.”
“I’ll bet you money,” Eleanor said, “that it costs us extra money.”
“I will expect her to do better on our behalf,” Eugene said, with a little steel in his voice. “But some money might pleasantly change the equation. I could see that.”
Bertha asked, “Did Eugene tell you that we were cooking tonight?”
Eleanor shook her head.
“Well, we’re cooking,” Bertha said, “so you might prepare yourself.”
“Is that a stressful situation?”
“No, dear,” Eugene said. “It’s noisy, a little, and sometimes quite messy, but I wouldn’t call it stressful. You are in one of the superb culinary districts of the world, and not at all far from St. Émilion, such a great wine center, as I’m sure you know. We’re off to shop, and then, when we return with food and drink, you are invited to a meal prepared by relatives. Are we your in-laws?”
Eleanor shrugged. She tried to smile brightly.
“Outlaws, then,” Bertha said, and she laughed like a girl, though her eyes seemed sad as they slid toward Eleanor and then away.
“Outlaws it will be,” Eugene said.
Begging her pardon for seeming intrusive, they moved about the room, opening cupboards and inspecting the refrigerator, each naming items for a list while Eugene wrote down, on one of Sid’s green-lined white legal pads, what they would need to buy at the open-air stalls in the square of St. Macaire and at the supermarket in Langon.
Eleanor, who was tall and broad-shouldered and, according to Sid, “the slightly repressed all-American lifeguard at the country club pool,” was thinking of Margo, also tall, slender, and broad-shouldered, who suddenly, it seemed, was in graduate school for the study of some kind of cell physiology that her father, a medical doctor, seemed to understand while Eleanor could only decipher the meaning of “cell” and “physiology,” without formulating an intelligent sentence that used both words. She was remembering how, early that winter, Margo had come home from Madison, Wisconsin, to Eleanor’s place on West Ninth Street to stay the night and register her opinion about Sid and her mother before spending the weekend at their old apartment, now her father’s, uptown.
She said, “Mother, for Christ’s sake. Have an affair. It’s an itch, so scratch it. Get over the thrill of it. Then learn how to live alone like the rest of us, for Christ’s sake.”
“And have you considered that it could possibly be more than sex?”
“When a forty-five-year-old divorced white woman gets a jones for a slightly younger, fairly hot black man who writes books, one of which she happened to read before he picked her up at the Metropolitan Museum show of those Vienna Whoevers who did the highly sexualized paintings? Ma: duh-uh.”
“I don’t know where to begin,” Eleanor had said. She remembered stumping back and forth on the broad, painted planks of her little Village living room. “I don’t know whether to shout terrible things about your not knowing the Vienna Secession, or calling their paintings ‘sexualized,’ like you’re the Dean of Correctness at a second-rate college, or portraying me as this over-stimulated matron who just wants to get laid by the nearest black man, who, like all the rest of them, you know, you know, i
s a phallic engine who cannot stay away from dumb and oversexed white women. Margo: duh-uh. How could you? And why are you so lonely, handing out that living-alone stuff? And since whenever do you say I have a jones? I don’t know where to begin.”
“Don’t say anything I can’t forgive, Mother.”
Margo had called her Mother since the divorce, which they had conducted like a small war while their civilian casualty was in the eleventh grade. Eleanor said, “Margo? Are you really that alone? Are you saying that I am? Are you accusing me of being in despair? How desperate do you think I am?”
“How much do you weigh, Mother?”
“How much—”
“How much do you weigh?”
“One thirty-three.”
“I thought it was, like, a hundred and forty-five?”
“No comment.”
“Right. So I’d call you roughly a hundred and forty-five pounds of desperate. That’s how desperate I think you are.”
Margo sat in silence, then, and watched her wander in the living room, from the wall of bookshelves to the long sofa to one of the windows onto Ninth Street. Finally, Eleanor let a long sigh slide between her lips and she said, “I’ve been holding my breath. I’ve gotten so strung out by you, I forgot to breathe.”
“Then you know the principle of blowing dope. Hold it and hold it and then let it go. I could roll us a joint.”
“Of marijuana?”
“What did you think it involved, Mother?”
“I don’t want to know.”
“All right.”
“Do you smoke it a lot?”
Margo looked at her with the pity of the young. Eleanor had seen it on her students’ faces. That it was undisguised made it cruel, as if they had never considered the possibility of an elder understanding the gulf between them. You decayed before their eyes, it said, and you didn’t know how close to dead you were.
“I think you’re learning to value yourself is all,” Eleanor had said when they told each other goodnight. “It’s not easy. I know.”
“And do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Mother, do you value yourself?”
“Of course. And I know that Sid values me. Oh,” Eleanor had said, “not a great answer, is it?”
“You’re still learning, too.”
“Life is long,” Eleanor remembered telling her.
“It better be,” Margo had said, about to go inside the guest room, “because you are one slow learner.”
Which apparently was true, Eleanor thought as, in the French rental, Sid’s great cousins prepared to drive into St. Macaire to purchase butter and cream and duck breasts and two kinds of mushrooms. “We can bake in those little ramekins instead of metal molds,” he said. “Absolutely no harm done. And that’s a reminder,” he instructed Bertha, “about milk for the timbales. We cannot forget the milk.”
“You’re making the list, dear.”
“Yes, I am,” he said. He told Eleanor, “The preparation of food, you will not be surprised to learn, excites me. I get forgetful.”
“He can also be dictatorial and quite like a master chef—decidedly cruel,” Bertha said, smiling. “It gets quite dangerous when we cook.”
“The danger,” Eugene chanted, as if from memory, “lies in running short of reliable duck confit, not in any slightly bruised feelings among the sous-chefs.”
“Who said that?” Bertha asked.
“I did, of course.”
“You can see,” she told Eleanor, “he grows brutal.”
There was a rustling of linen clothing, a seizing of lists, and a counting of currency, and then they were off in their black convertible, down the stony drive to turn left onto the little connector road, then right onto the paved secondary, and then to wander the turns past vineyards and the sheds that sheltered stainless steel storage tanks and the descent into St. Macaire with its ramparts and its small, plain cathedral, and its narrow streets. She thought for a moment of the cousins as they loomed over the small, taut French while they inspected the wares of the seller of Basque sausages and cheeses, or the local man so proud of his harsh Armagnac, and the butcher who always seemed to sneer over his duck legs, his unplucked chickens, his thick loins of pork. She could hear their murmurs to each other and their charmed, polite replies.
In the master bedroom, which like the dining area opened into the vineyard, she moved folded clothing about and tried to pack. There were two large bags and two small ones for carrying books and bottles of water onto the plane; they hadn’t brought more than thin summer clothing and a cotton sweater apiece for a cool night, but there seemed to her to be too little room in their luggage. It felt important that she leave nothing of his behind, although she suspected that, eventually, she would give it all away in New York. For now, though, she wanted to bring him home with everything he’d carried abroad.
Did that include her? She wondered if they would have returned together, assuming the small matter of his not having died of an explosion of blood in the brain.
“Probably,” she said to the chugging of insects outside, the slow droning of fat bees in the waist-high pots of rosemary next to the house.
“Of course,” she said.
Looking at the herbs and thinking of the cousins at their list-making, she thought of the preparation of food. She remembered the first formal date with Sid, who had taken her for dinner to Jarnac, the restaurant in the West Village. He had insisted that they order the cassoulet, which was better, he said, than the cassoulet, with white beans and duck and pork sausage, that he had eaten in the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris the previous year. A stocky, jolly, but tough-looking woman came out of the kitchen while they ate, and she circulated through the small room. She and Sid embraced, she patted Eleanor on the shoulder, and she moved on.
“The chef,” Sid said.
“I can’t help it,” she told him. “I’m impressed.”
“That was the idea.”
“It was?”
“Oh, yes. You’re who I’m determined to impress.”
His thin face, which she thought had as many muscles in it as an athlete’s arm, was a little darker, with a little more putty color, she thought now, than Eugene’s. Sid kept his coarse hair short, and she had enjoyed inspecting the beautiful shape of his head. She could imagine a mother holding her hand around the back of that head. She could imagine her own hand there. He saw her speculating, and he suddenly grinned, a big and boyish, happy smile.
“What?” he said.
“Never mind. Although I suspect you can figure it out.”
“I hope so,” he said.
“I’m considering matters,” she said. “So tell me something.”
“About what?”
“About anything besides me. Tell me something about your work.”
“You said you know my work. Now I’m disappointed.”
“What you are is like a boy about it.”
“I’m like a boy about everything else, too,” he said.
“Never mind. Tell me about what you do. I read the one about the women who robbed banks. Very cool, as my daughter might say. A bunch of right-on women, she’d say, except for the part about shooting people. Your detective cries. People seem to like that.”
“Margo. Your daughter.”
“Yes, Margo. So what are you working on now?”
“Why, you.”
He had never mentioned any relative except his mother. He had certainly never referred to his cousins, the vast Caucasian Bertha and Eugene, the giant brown purveyor of rare books who would return chirping to the house to prepare something involving magret de canard in order to nourish the widow. And here was the widow, trying to fit too many clothes into too few cubic inches of luggage that, a couple of weeks ago, had accommodated everything.
Eleanor slept among the stacks of neatly folded undershorts and T-shirts and olive-green cargo pants and the socks she had bought him at Brooks Brothers. She had been frightened while she slept. S
he had awakened herself by calling out, had looked about the room and closed her eyes and gone to sleep again. Now her mouth was gummy and foul, her face felt greasy, her left hand hurt from clenching it. She showered but put on the same clothing she’d worn—khaki shorts, a wrinkled white camp shirt. She brushed her teeth and worked her hair into a ragged bun. She went barefoot into the kitchen, where she drank iced spring water while watching the sun hang huge and orange over the hills at the far edge of the grape vines cultivated by Monsieur and Madame Panifiette. The sun appeared not to move, though the insects chirred louder, she thought, and the bees worked harder now, and the hills began to go dark, almost as if they were a silhouette, even though the brilliant orange sun appeared to be directly over them. You would think it would light them up, she thought.
“Stand by, Eleanor,” Eugene called. She heard the throbbing of the engine of their Saab, and then she heard the slamming of doors, the rustling of plastic sacks, and the panting of very fat people moving across the hot slate walk at the back of the house.
She and Sid had not slept together during the week before he died. They had agreed, though they’d said nothing aloud, to continue to sleep in the same bed, to kiss each other good morning and goodnight, to walk naked from the shower to their bedroom, to use the toilet without hesitation or shame, and to in every other way manifest their intimacy. The making love had stopped as though a mechanism had broken without any other symptoms. They had malfunctioned without a fight, only slightly acknowledging the increment of tension between them. Sid was making some progress with the book, his fourth, about a black detective of the upper middle class who solved crimes out of his affection for the victims, but never quite learned how to love the woman who, by the end of each book, loved him.
On the night of her learning about the breaking down, they lay in the dark in bed, he in pajama bottoms and she in sleeping shorts and a sleeveless, scoop-necked top, not touching, at the start of their sleeping this way every night.
“I keep wondering,” she said. “I mean, about how, where you are—at the start of it—you could go off to France for a couple of months and work on a book that depends on being in New York, where your people are—”
The Stories of Frederick Busch Page 45