A Sport and a Pastime (14 page)

[23]

A
SPLENDID NOON, THE SKY
flooded with light. They drive along the canal. St. Léger seems quiet and the house itself, as they approach it, empty. Anne-Marie jumps out. She’s seen her cat. She picks it up and carries it in her arms.

The meal is served in the kitchen. It begins with a kind of cheese pie. They watch to see if Dean will like it. It’s very chill in the room even though the day is warm. Perhaps it’s the tile floor, he thinks, or the walls–he isn’t sure. He nods at the conversation which he only half understands. His flesh feels blue. Suddenly he realizes he must be getting sick, but then her mother rises to get a scarf. As she sits down again she remarks that it’s a little cold. The father shrugs. Dean has been unable to exchange a word with him. They sit like strangers. It is Anne-Marie who talks, mostly to her mother and quite gaily, as if only the two of them were there. Occasionally she asks Dean if he understands. He tells her yes. The father sits like an Arab. He has a lean face. A long nose. He’s wearing a cap. He looks at the table or out the window. At one point his wife reaches over to pat his hand. He appears not to notice.

Dean feels increasingly nervous. He is sitting all alone. He doesn’t like to look at the father whose eyes are pale and watery, a convict blue. As for the talk, it washes across him like water. He no longer even hears familiar words.

“Phillip, did you understand?” she says.

“
Oui
,” he replies sleepily.

“
Oui?
” the mother asks, her bright gaze on him. For a moment he is afraid they are going to question him.

“
Quelquefois
,” Anne-Marie says, “
il comprend très bien
.”

The mother laughs. Dean lowers his head. He feels the unhurried gaze of the father on him. He tries to return it, is determined to, but involuntarily his eyes flicker away for an instant, and that is enough. It’s finished. He knows he has been measured. In revenge he begins to think of their daughter naked, images as unforgivable as slaps. The father lights a cigarette.

He tries once more to concentrate on what they are saying, but it’s all too fast. He hardly understands a word. Everything seems to have left him. He begins to count his forkfuls, then the wall tiles.

After lunch he is shown through the house. It’s clean and bare. Her room is upstairs, plain as a cell. Somehow he cannot associate all of this with her, it’s more like a school she has attended. He looks out of her window. Below, parked in the sunlight, is a long convertible, the seats of real leather. The whole town has seen it.

Her father hasn’t left the kitchen. He sits with the newspaper in a chair moved back against the wall and smokes a thick, workman’s cigarette, barely inhaling. When they come downstairs it’s as if he doesn’t hear them. He continues reading as they enter the room.

Dean is depressed and also angry. She tells him not to pay any attention, her stepfather is stupid. It doesn’t matter, everything has lengthened the day, made it desolate. The table is right beside the stove. The plates were set on it bare. Her mother made her drink a glass of milk. Somehow the afternoon has turned into their repossession of her, nor has she struggled at all to resist it. She has deserted him. The past has reclaimed her.

“My mother needs a television,” she comments as they drive. “All the others have one. It’s very lonely at night. She could look.”

“I guess so,” he says.

“Now she has nothing. It would be very nice, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” Dean says.

“She needs an automobile, too. A Renault. She bicycles into town, but she is too old for that. Every day. I must get her a Renault.”

“Why don’t you get her a Mercedes?” Dean says acidly.

“It’s too big.”

They come to a long, straight section of road, and he begins to accelerate. He seems absorbed in it. They go faster and faster. The gauge finally touches a hundred and sixty. Anne-Marie says nothing. She sits looking out the side.

I meet them for dinner in a restaurant near the square. It’s the weekend, a few people more than usual. Still, it’s far from being crowded. There’s a zinc bar, I think the only one in town. The waitress leans against it and waits to pick up dishes from the kitchen. Dean is drinking
vin blanc
. He’s very talkative. I sit there listening to his description of European life, drawing it forth by silence. Of course, he is speaking a special language, rich with deceptions. I brush away tobacco crumbs on the bar, nod, yes, agree. He is telling me about cheeses, architecture, the genuine, the profound intelligence of this civilization. Occasionally there are brief glimpses of cities, certain small hotels.

Anne-Marie sits quietly and as Dean talks, becoming drunker, his mouth wetting, I try to watch her, to isolate elements of that stunning sexuality, but it’s like memorizing the reflections of a diamond. The slightest movement and an entirely different brilliance appears. Of course, it is her face I am searching, her gestures, expression. I am interested in the visible. I know quite well what is the source of all her power, but I am trying to identify it by the most commonplace details.

In the pictures I have, she appears strangely grave, the Saturday when we all shopped in the open market. There are some of her sitting in the car, and some, too, in which there is a faint trace of gaiety, the kind reserved for companions one is loyal to forever. She liked to pose. I gave her prints, of course. She was very pleased. She sent them to her mother, Dean told me.

They are like a couple who’ve had an argument. As we talk, Dean’s eyes keep going past me to the waitress who is speaking, just a few words at a time, to the barman, and who, in between, gives little sighs of resignation.

“I’m nice than she is,” Anne-Marie says.

“Nicer than who?”

“Her.”

“Certainly you are.”

“She looks very well with her clothes,” Anne-Marie says, “but how does she look naked? What a shock that must be.”

“Shock?”

“Shock?” she repeats. “That’s right?”

“Yes, that’s good. That’s a new word for you.”

She shrugs.

“Where did you learn that?”

She makes a vague gesture.

“Well, you’re right,” he says, “it would probably be shocking. Do you think she makes love?”

A dry laugh. “Of course.”

I’m afraid to turn around. Perhaps she even understands what we’re saying.

“You’re sure?” Dean says.

“My God!”

“OK.”

“Look at her eyes,” Anne-Marie says. “There are dark rings under them.”

“So?”

“That’s a sure sign.”

That amuses Dean. He begins looking around the room.

“How about that girl sitting by the window?”

“Which one?” she says.

It’s early when we leave, not yet ten. We walk along together for a way and then, at a corner, part. I can follow them without thinking. I know how they will go, which shops they will pause in front of, how they will cut across the shamble of tiny streets. They are passing the photographer’s, the window Dean loves with its prints of wedding couples, its graduation classes. There is a certain ageless quality to the photos, a redolence of 1914, 1939. They are like old newspapers. Perhaps the shop has been here all that time. Still, there is not one face that could be Dean’s. I look carefully along the rows, even at those partly hidden. He will never be found among them. His face emanates a complete, almost a bitter intelligence that doesn’t exist here. When I look at his photos, the one that was taken eating an orange, glancing up, on that November day we first went to Beaune–looking at it I see the eyes of Lorca, of someone who is to be taken out of life and destroyed, we will never find the reason. I sit and stare at this picture which is vivid with its own instant, this photo taken before the war, before the revolution. We stopped beneath the viaduct that day. He knew no one. He was going to be here for a week or two, not more.

[24]

P
RANGEY.
T
HE VILLAGE IS
poor. As they turn off the road, chickens scatter before them, and then a course of trees appears to indicate the way. They cross a little bridge and drive in, beneath the towers. A dark entry to a white court. On the far side, the huge country house where they will stay, a piece in the stone necklace that is strung across all of France, the piers upon which her history is founded. They have opened their doors to travelers, these
châteaux
. They have become hotels. The great rooms, eloquent in their calm, may be taken by anyone, rooms that have seen the light and darkness of centuries. People can now walk around them in underclothes, lie in the beds like drunken servants.

The door closes. They are alone. It’s a vast room with many mirrors. Anne-Marie looks in the bath. Enormous too, and beneath its windows a moat filled with frogs. She takes off her shoes. The carpeting is blue. No sound but the countryside. Birds. The hum of spring. On the wide bed they are soon at work, skillfully, silent as thieves. They are deep in a sumptuous dream in which they have discovered one another.

The sky is pale and drained of heat. In this silence like folded flags, Dean’s awareness of things seems extraordinary. He puts his prick into her slowly, guiding it with his hand. It sinks like an iron bar into water. Her eyes close. Her voice is cut adrift.

Minutes. The gravel of the court whispers. Raising up a little, Dean is able to see out the window which is partly open. There are voices. A large family has returned from walking in the gardens and now, amid laughter, begins to arrange itself at the tables while the waiter, in a white coat and black trousers, serves them. The women want Perrier. The men take wine. They are just below–the nearest ones can’t be seen. The talk, only a bit dissevered, rises up as if to include him. He withdraws somewhat to watch, taut, supported by his arms, just the tip of his prick inside her. He looks down along his belly to affirm it.

They fuck in lovers’ sunshine, in the midst of the party. Her flesh gleams like fabric, intermixed with glimpses of women in silk dresses grouped around the table, children, a friendly dog. The noon hours are drifting away. The waiter brings more ice. It seems to last for hours. They are united by a bloodstream which carries the same sensations. He is nourishing her, touching her heart. When he comes, it’s as if a marvelous deception has ended. Afterwards she kisses his prick. His balls. The people have gone. The waiter is alone in the court below, collecting the glasses.

That night they dance in Dijon, in the
boîte
where we saw her first. It’s her idea. I’m a little surprised by that. I cannot rid myself of the feeling that she would prefer not to encounter the past, but she seems not to mind. It means nothing to her. The sweat shines on their faces as they move. The armpits of her dress are stained. They drive back at midnight with the top down. It’s cool. The roads are empty. The great, worn front of the house is dark, and they park on the expiring gravel. Legs weary, they climb the stairs.

Dean is looking at himself in the mirror while she undresses. He is naked. He stands full on, his hands at his sides. He sees himself as a different person. He is delighted with his thinness, with his hair which is too long, and with the triumphant reflection of himself. He is aware of her moving about behind him, but it is his own nudity he is interested in, a nudity which the glimpses of her presence make thrilling. He discovers himself in her presence, that’s the thing. It is the reflection all others must play against. He is pleased with himself. His prick seems murderously large.

“How do we make love tonight?” she asks.

She waits. She is able to summon up all of the black countryside that surrounds them, silences in which every object, every form is at rest. The invisible leaves–the night is filled with them–brush one another lightly. The grasses are still. If one listens closely: the trickle of water below the windows, down a face of rock and into the green scum. The sound of a frog. In the heart of this, in a tall room with its curtains drawn against morning they lie, the faint acid of sweat dried on them and other wetness as well, clear, caking. They were too tired to rise afterwards. They sleep without moving, the blanket drawn over them against the chill of dawn.

[25]

T
HE RELICS OF LOVE
:
the title of a page in his notebook. Many entries make no sense. There’s a code, of course. Every diarist invents one.
When I die
, he writes,
I would like it to be in a city like Nancy
.

Under
Ideas
he has:

1. When to leave.

2. One meal at a time.

3. Three immortal things: virtue, words, deeds.

And there is a long list of towns, some with a star (Bourges, Montargis). After Malène is written:
long summer
. Names of many cheeses.

The relics of love. His phrases appear spontaneously among mine. Of course I am aware of it, but one must know when to appropriate. He doesn’t need them, and for me they are essential. Walls–I mean foundations–would literally crumble without them. For the want of them, entire structures might disappear.

They considered many summer towns. Eze and La Baule. Le Zoute. Arcachon. Finally they decide to drive the Loire. A hot afternoon. It is not yet dark. In the cool of her room they lie like fish in the shadows of a bank. Dean unfolds the map. The shutters are drawn. Some workmen are fixing the rain gutters outside. The sound of their tools, their casual voices close by, is alarming, as if they might suddenly open the room like a tin can and discover the occupants. Dean is completely dressed, but she is almost naked. Her flesh seems polished. The pale nipples look soft as
fraises des bois
.

Yes, the Loire. They are talking in whispers. He smooths out a crease in the map. The great
châteaux
loom blue as peaks along the silent river. They will go in May, late in the month. Chambord rises from its forest. Chenonceaux is a bridge of sun-filled rooms. One looks down from the iron balconies of Amboise a thousand feet above the town, balconies from which the Protestants were hung. They will drive to Angers and then on to the sea.