Isn't It Romantic? (2 page)

She imitated Madame. “Railway. In America?”

“Madame is as crazy as you are. She told me planes do not fly to Omaha. She said this while she watered her plants. And then she watered my head.”

With a meaningful glare, Natalie said, “She knew.”

“Ariel? That was just a kiss! On her birthday!”

“And Isabelle?”

“Weeks and weeks ago, before we were engaged.”

“And that girl in the Luxembourg Gardens?”

“But I'm French!”

“You're English.”

“A hundred years ago! And only on my grandfather's side of the family!”

“So you're a mere product of your socialization in the city of romance.”

“Through and through! It's like an illness!” A hand raked back his wild blond hair as he shook his head in shame. “Oh,” he moaned, “how I wish there were a cure!”

The crazy old coot with binoculars asked in English, “Are you two speaking Spanish?”

Pierre glowered and flicked a hand at him, and he scurried.

Natalie asked, “Are you intending to join me now?”

“I have a ticket.”

“We'll share the bus. That is all.”

The hydraulic doors of the See America bus shushed open and people commenced pushing inside as if sale prices had been slashed. And for the first time Pierre observed the group he'd be joining on their tour, seeing a guy dribble the last of his Coca-Cola on the sidewalk and then smash the empty can against his forehead. Pierre turned to his fiancée and objected in French, “But they are
peasants
!”

With irritation she shoved ahead of him and got into a window seat near the front of the bus, shifting away from Pierre when he took the aisle seat next to her. Two high school boys in street clothes got on with scuba masks and fins in their hands and scuba tanks on their backs. An enormous man who'd joined the tour in Cleveland huffed after the boys, carrying a long something that was wetly dripping through its butcher paper wrapping. Clive averted his eyes as he sidled down the aisle. And then there was an old shawled woman towing along a son in his fifties whose name tag read “Seymour” and who was holding a plastic bag with a goldfish floating in it. They were followed by a hugely overweight woman in a raccoon coat with a cake box in her hands. She squinted at Pierre and his aisle seat and with annoyance said, “You. Skedaddle.”

Pierre glanced up, “
Quoi, Madame?
” (Pardon me?)

“Don't start with me.”

Helplessly looking to Natalie, he asked, “
Qu'est-ce qu'elle dit?
” (What's she saying?)

The woman with the cake box informed him, “I am not the milk of human kindness!”

Natalie told Pierre in English, “She is not milk.” And then she looked out the window again.

Sheepishly getting up, Pierre headed down the aisle, and the woman haughtily sat, saying to Natalie as she opened the cake box, “And you can just keep your hands to yourself.” She then lifted out a three-layer coconut cake that she held up in front of her mouth like a sandwich. She took a bite and coconut flakes snowed down her front.

Scanning the seats behind her, Natalie found her fiancé huddled down in the rearmost booth seat and squeezed between the old shawled woman and the son with the goldfish. As the tour bus rolled forward, he looked plaintively at her as if he were a schoolchild being unjustly punished.

She smiled.

4

M
uch later on a gray two-lane highway that was branched with tar, she looked over her shoulder to find her dolorous fiancé cradling the plastic bag of goldfish in his lap as Seymour held out a Nebraska road map and prattled on about sites. Sympathetically, she wrestled past the fat woman and walked back to Pierre.

Seymour was saying, “Another roadside attraction you'll want to show your girlfriend is Harold Warp's Pioneer Village. About twenty miles southeast of Kearney. In Minden, Nebraska. Two of my favorite displays are the monkey wrench exhibit in the agricultural building and a living diorama of all seven native Nebraska grasses. Warp, as you may know, made his loot in Chicago, with plastics. Flex-O-Glass, Glass-O-Net, and Red-O-Tex. If you haven't heard of any of them, then you're obviously not a Midwestern chicken farmer.”

Pierre seemed sunken and yoked with a great weight as he eyed Natalie pensively and said, “
On a besoin de parler.
” (We need to talk.)

“We are in America,” she said. “We should speak English.”

He got a mimeographed sheet of paper from inside his suit coat and shook it. “It is that I have read at last now our itinerary. Look at how we shall be eatings. Look at where we sleeps. What is cooking in your head?” He rattled the sheet again and scanned it. “We are to introduce ourselves to ‘Little Miss Middle-of-Nowhere.' And then corn detasseling, whatever is that. We go to Chester, the birthplace of six-man football. We dine at the Wednesday night meeting of the Nebraska Catfishing Club. Are you thinking this is amusing for I?”

She'd be the first to admit her voice was teeny as she answered, “It has its charms.”

“We could have gone to Avignon. But no. You do not want to go to Avignon. We could have gone to Aix. Again, you do not want to go to Aix. We are hearing good things from friends about Basel.
Mais non
, we could not go there. We had to go on . . .
un pèlerinage
!”

“A pilgrimage.”

“We had to go on a
carnival
bus!”

The old shawled woman beside him patted his wrist and said, “Life is sometimes a rocky road.”

And then they heard a blowout and the bus jounced violently. Natalie saw crows of tire rubber flying onto the highway, and then she saw Pierre scowling up at her.

“
C'est un complot
,” he said. (This is a plot.)

5

T
hey were stalled in an out-of-the-way section of Nebraska prairie where, as some citizens put it, the east and west peter out. Waving grasses, hot zephyrs in the mid-eighties, a certain crankiness to the trees, skies of a Windex blue. Worried and impatient tourists were milling about outside the bus or lounging dissolutely on their luggage, and the See America driver was hunched next to a rear wheel well, his hands on his knees, trying to fix the flat just by staring at it.

Waiting tranquilly on a hillside of wildflowers, a red suitcase on rollers beside her, Natalie tilted her head back against a cattle fence so her face could catch the noontime sun as Pierre scrupulously examined the sleeves and cuffs of his Italian suit and cursed each time he picked a sticker or cocklebur from it. Wide Hereford cows were six feet away, their ears twitching tenacious flies, their mouths moving sideways as they chewed, their soft brown eyes watching him without curiosity. “Look at my clothings,” he said. “We are supposed to be on the happy vacation, but instead one is being addicted.”

“Afflicted.”

“
Oui
.”

“And last August?”

Pierre loomed gigantically over her but there was a littleness to him as he evaluated whether this were a trick question. Without certainty he answered, “Cap d'Antibes.”

“In Cap d'Antibes you stared at everyone's breasts but mine.”

“Yours always had books over them.”

“In Saint Laurent you took those long walks. Alone.”

“How many times can you watch
Shame
?”

“
Shane
,” Natalie corrected.

“Cowboys,” he said, and made a gun of his hand. “Bang bang.”

“In Strasbourg . . .,” she said.

“. . . you are in the library all the times.”

She looked at him with sarcasm. “Perhaps I was researching the problem of male lust.”

Pierre was stumped. “What is this word loost?”

“
Plein de désir sexuel
.”

“Well, that is the difference between us. You research; I . . .
fais des expériences
?”

“Experiment.”

“
C'est juste
. I experiment.”

“And what does one do when the experiment is over?”

Each considered the other for a long time. In a city far away someone dropped a pin.

“Today is Wednesday,” Natalie said.

“
Mercredi
,” Pierre insisted.

“We have until Sunday to decide if we are to finally marry.”

“Make it Saturday!”

Natalie got up and confidently walked down the hillside with her red wheeled suitcase in tow.

And he yelled after her, “Noon!”

She did not go toward the still-disabled See America bus but toward the shade trees, houses, and water tower of a Nebraska farm town half a mile away.

Pierre forlornly looked at the loitering passengers and then at his fiancée, whose suitcase swerved on uneven ground and fell over. She righted it. Pierre shouted, “
Super! C'est ce qu'on appelle une aventure?
” (Great! Is this what you call an adventure?)

She didn't turn.

He shouted, “
On va rater le bus!
” (We're going to miss the bus!)

She called back, “
On prendra le prochain!
” (We'll catch the next one!)

Walking after her with his valise, Pierre yelled, “
C'est encore plus bête que de venir ici!
” (That is even more stupid than coming here in the first place!)

6

S
eldom, Nebraska. Population 395.

Natalie hauled her suitcase inside the Main Street Café in one of those
Bus Stop
entrances and she was surprised to notice a sudden silence settle on the diners there, to see farmers in their feed caps turn in their pink vinyl booths and stare, and truckers rotate on their pink and chrome counter stools, as if this were a
What the hell?
moment combined with a
Lo and behold
.

She was pretty enough that they'd have taken a gander anyway, but there was that hint of the exotic, too, like she hailed from east of Omaha and would brook no questioning about it. Owen Nelson was there, though, and Dick Tupper, naturally, and locals knew they'd appoint themselves as a welcoming party, full of interrogatories and a healthy concern for the lost lady's welfare.

Natalie felt the café's interest and with some embarrassment hauled her suitcase toward a booth where she oh so primly sat.

And then Pierre entered and the stares flew to him, the force of them tilting him a little off-balance. No one failed to notice he was holding a tasseled shoe in his hand. They did not consider it much of a weapon.

Carlo Bacon, the cook, called out from the kitchen, “Since when did Seldom become a
travel
destination?”

Pierre sought out Natalie and sat down across from her in the booth, setting his fancy and ruined Ferragamo loafer between them on the Formica. With fierce accusation, he said in English, “I have torned my favorite shoe.”

She ignored him.

Looking around the café above the hats of the still watching, he saw on the walls of whitewashed oak stuffed pheasants, an antlered rabbit, and old hanging heads of deer and moose that looked distraught and humorless. And next to the kitchen door was a locked gun case. His fears were confirmed. “
Regarde
,” he whispered.

She did. She was horrified.

The Wednesday installment of
The Young and the Restless
went to commercial, giving Iona Christiansen an opportunity to get two iced waters and two menus. She carried them to the booth. She was a beauty, a sultry blonde of twenty-three with a disappointed pout to her mouth and those overpowering attributes of the flesh that made men feel helpless, lovelorn, and pitifully adolescent. Pierre smiled oafishly at the waitress, just like so many before him, but Iona was immune to such appraisals and merely read the shoemaker's name inside the loafer.

Pierre presumed there was a fixed price three-course meal, and said in his unpracticed English, “It is that one would like the
prix fixe
.”

“The prefix?” Iona asked. “Oh, it's four oh two.”

Owen helpfully supplied the data that the area code changed to 308 a little farther west.

Pierre slightly turned in Owen's direction and nodded his thanks.

“You want coffee?” Iona asked.

Pierre agreeably smiled. Iona glanced at Natalie, who put up two fingers. Pierre put up two fingers, too.

“Two then,” Iona said and strolled back to the coffeemaker.

Pierre hunkered forward and said in a hushed voice, “
On va prendre racine ici
.” (We'll be stranded here.)

Natalie shrugged.

And in the booth north of them, Owen Nelson asked Dick Tupper, “Was that
French
?”

Dick lifted halfway from his seat, imitated a good stretch and yawn as he turned just so, and interestedly stared at them fuming silently in their booth. Returning to his seat, he told Owen, “Looks like they're having a tiff.”

Owen tilted out of the booth to watch Iona deliver the coffee, carefully placing the saucers and cups on each side of the tasseled loafer. Sitting up again, he said, “I say the shoe's involved.” A paper napkin was farmerishly stuffed under his green workshirt collar, and he patted his mouth with it. “You don't know 'em, do ya?”

“Oh now, don't go introducing yourself again.”

Owen got up. “That's how I met Slim Pickens that one time.”

Owen Nelson was in his thirties and a salt-of-the-earth guy whose height and girth were sufficient to make him a third-string offensive tackle for the famous University of Nebraska Cornhuskers, though he never lorded that fact over the locals but was a friend to all and sundry. Owen inherited his dearly departed father's gas station kitty-corner from the café, and townsfolk all thought the world of him, but he was frankly not much of a mechanic, so those who'd reached the age of reason generally just rented his hoist and tools.