The Clasp (27 page)

Victor coughed, the taste of blood on his tongue. His ears rang and his lip throbbed. Kneeing someone in the face > punching someone in the face.

“Hey!” Victor yelled as best he could.

Face Veins headed for the door, taking Victor's whole life's purpose with him.

The bartender gathered himself enough to speak. He gestured at Victor's prostrate body. He was, kindly and foolishly, trying to reason with a man who had just made his face bleed.

Scowling, Face Veins zipped open Victor's duffel and pocketed his wallet. He tossed the detritus onto the bar. Then he ran out and down the street.

Victor used the stool to help himself up. He could hear the TV again. Neither team had scored a goal yet. He was filled with a sudden distain for European football.

“You okay?” The bartender extended his hand down over the bar, a rope thrown over a steep cliff.

Victor nodded, even though it hurt to nod. His left eye felt like its own solar system. He ran his tongue over his front teeth, taking attendance. The bartender had exhausted his English and was now explaining, through a series of hand gestures, how he had reasoned with the man, that the cops would definitely get involved if they stole the passport of an American tourist and if the American tourist reported it. Or if they killed the American tourist.

“Merci.”

He handed Victor a wad of cocktail napkins and offered him ice from behind the bar. He kept pointing at Victor's nose, sug
gesting he stop the swelling there first. Victor didn't know how to say “it's just like this” in French.

The bartender asked him if he had a place to sleep for the night, putting his palms together and tilting his cheek against them. He showed Victor the back room, a stock room with a decent-looking sofa and liquor-branded cardboard boxes piled to the ceiling. That this man was not shocked by the course of events was perhaps the greatest shock of all. He gave Victor a musty crocheted afghan and twenty euros, which he shoved into Victor's palm despite his protests. Then he left for his own bed, located in a house behind the bar. Victor fell asleep on his back, duffel under his head, stained cocktail napkins in balls on the floor. He could hear two cats chasing mice along the gutters outside.

He had a heavy and dreamless sleep, followed by a morning panic at the sight of an unfamiliar ceiling. One turn of the head and a spasm in his neck snapped him to attention. He sat up. His lower back hurt in a way that mocked his neck pain. It hurt to press his glasses onto the bridge of his nose. The analog clock on the wall told him it was 9:00 a.m. He still had time to catch his bus to Dieppe. He thought mournfully of his wallet, which didn't have much in it aside from his mostofit ID card and a promise that he wouldn't have to go to the DMV anytime soon. Still.

The bar smelled terrible and looked worse, an affront to the new day. There were broken bottles and blood-splattered ashtrays. There wasn't as much blood as he would have thought. You had to know where to look. The register was open, a series of empty black troughs. The bartender must have cleared it out after he put Victor to bed last night.

He ripped the back page out of his Maupassant biography, an
index that stretched from Algiers to Zola, and scribbled in the margin.

Merci beaucoup pour le sofa. Au Revoir, L'Americain.

In the hazy light of day, the neighborhood didn't look so rough. It must have rained during the early hours of the morning and it felt like it might start up again at any minute. “Normandy is the chamber pot of France,” wrote Guy. Spoken like a person who has never lived in an alcove studio—one man's chamber pot is another's golden bowl. Victor slowly turned his neck. It was as if he were playing Operation on himself, sending jolts of electricity through his nerves.

He walked through town, gauging the pedestrian reaction to his face. It wasn't great. Men looked at him with bemused sympathy, glad they weren't him; women moved their purses to the other side of their bodies. He arrived at the Seine, which was treated with less fanfare than he imagined it would be in Paris. Here the river was more of a practice run with unadorned footbridges and traffic jams flanking each side. After a few wrong turns, he reached the bus station, across from the river. He sat with his head down until the lumbering vehicle arrived, casting a long shadow at his feet.

From his seat, he had a view of Rouen Cathedral. He squinted at the mass of stone and spires. Even from here, he could see how imposing it was, why someone would paint it three hundred times. Relieved as he was to be en route to the château, he wished he had gone in. Yesterday he had seen postcard racks, all including Monet's
The Portal of Rouen Cathedral in Morning Light
. Looking out through the cloudy bus window with his one good eye, the painting might as well have been a photograph.

H
er seat was stuck in a position meant for tall people. She gave up feeling for knobs and bars, frustrated by the futility of doing battle with an inanimate object. She would just have to sit slightly behind Nathaniel for the rest of the trip, the vehicular version of a geisha. Nathaniel's driving style gave her minor heart palpitations. He seemed to be under the classic male delusion that he knew where he was going and could get anywhere as long as he went there fast enough. She had already screamed at him twice. Then they missed two turns and had to circle around the Arc de Triomphe thrice.

“Look, kids,” he cackled over the steering wheel, “Big Ben, Parliament . . .”

Once on the road, they quickly established that neither of their phones felt like hosting a Wi-Fi connection. Text, yes, but the closest they came to the Internet was a spinning battery-sapping circle. They had a road atlas but they were going to have to find an Internet café if they wanted more information than that.

“No way.” Nathaniel shook his head. “No Internet cafés.”

“What could you possibly have against Internet cafés?”

“What could I—” Nathaniel was aghast. “What is this, Seattle 1994?”

“Fine. So how do you propose we plan the next few days of this trip?”

“You mean the trip we didn't plan for anyway? We play it by ear, baby.”

She stared out the window. One night, freshman year, she and Caroline stayed up speculating about what their lives would be like with every guy in their class. Of Nathaniel, Caroline said: “Oh well, it's obviously marry that kid or stab him in the eye.”

“We could always drive straight to the château,” she offered.

Nathaniel ignored the suggestion. The compromise for ruining Paris was that they'd take a couple of extra days (as Nathaniel pointed out, forty-eight hours wasn't going to
kill
anybody), driving along the northern coast of France, hitting some nude beaches before heading inland to see if this château was harboring their friend and his break with reality.

A few major roadways later and the Paris she knew was gone entirely. The buildings became plainer; the sidewalk trees less enshrined and more long-suffering. Every few minutes there was a coiffeur, a
tabac
, and an auto school. There were so many auto schools, Kezia couldn't believe it. Maybe Parisians knew they were bad drivers. Maybe the problem was being addressed on a national level.

As they passed through the northern outskirts of Paris, the road was flanked by squat houses and canopies of telephone wires. She had warned Rachel she might be out of touch (strategically inserting this warning after delivering Claude's good news) and handed over Sophie's cell number. This was meant to teach Sophie a lesson. But Kezia did not know the exact depths of Sophie's devotion. It would be just her luck that Sophie would relish the
4:00 a.m. phone calls from Tokyo, demanding that she open every e-mail in Rachel's in-box and read the contents over the phone so as to spare Rachel the eye strain.

“Can you read that sign?”

Nathaniel had decided to pay attention to the road, which had thinned to a strip of white gravel, shaded by a pipeline of trees. They were in the country now. He sped past a skinny arrow, italicized text with lots of dashes and accents, that dug into the corner of someone's farmland.

“I can't read that unless you slow down,” she said, looking at the road atlas. “But we're looking for Yvetot. Big font.”

To top it all off, Paul and Grey's new GPS wasn't working. Rather, it was working perfectly until Nathaniel got irritated with the way its British voice told him to “cross the roundabout,” hitting every syllable like a bouncing ball. He smacked it off and now neither of them could figure out how to turn it back on. Now it lived in the punishment cave that was the glove compartment.

“If I go any slower, we'll never get to the beach.”

She had a feeling that Nathaniel was in for a disappointment. The beaches of northern France would most likely be populated by fanny-pack-wearing WWII buffs from Nebraska.

“What's in Yvetot?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“Then why are we going there?”

He turned on the windshield wiper fluid by accident.

“Because it's halfway to the ocean and you're the one who wants to go to a beach. You have to stop treating me like I've been to Normandy before just because this was my idea. We can stop anywhere you want.”

“Really?”

“Yes, of course.”

He flicked on the turn signal, following signs for a Super U
supermarket. Before long they were in a massive gray strip-mall parking lot, across from a Home & Garden center. It could have been grafted from anywhere in America, the one giveaway being the smaller shopping carts, lined up nose to tail.

“Here?”

“What?” He shrugged. “I'm hungry.”

“We have the cutest countryside in the world at our disposal and you don't even want to find an inn or something? Or just some place where they've removed the food from the plastic and put it on a dish for you?”

“Nope,” he said, as they opened their doors. “I don't spend money during daylight hours. It's a waste.”

“You're such a freak.”

She was trying to eat healthy, to retain some vague consciousness that her thighs would go on existing after this trip. Unfortunately the French didn't do “portable healthy.” You boil a leek in your house or eat a bonbon on the street. She picked up two apples and a six-pack of yogurt. She was not accustomed to anyone else seeing what she brought home to eat. She stood in the cookie aisle, mystified by the array of orange- and blackberry-flavored biscuits.

“What'd you get?” Nathaniel came up behind her.

She stared at the cookies as if she were on safari, watching them from a Jeep.

“We're so church-and-state with our cookies. Cookies are for chocolate and peanut butter. Except for Fig Newtons. A fig we will tolerate. A fig has dual citizenship. But they have spearmint cookies here. Spearmint! This country is bonkers.”

“You sound like Grey. Just pick.”

Nathaniel put his basket on the ground. He had done better than her. It was filled with Camembert, prosciutto, salami, and a
large jar of Nutella. She feared she'd get bored in the passenger seat and eat the entire jar.

“
I took her to a supermarket
,” he sang. “
I don't know why but I had
to start it somewhere
,
so it started . . . there
.”

“Funny.”

“
I said pretend you've got no money
,” he belted. “
Oh
,
but she just laughed and said, Oh you're so funny. I said, Yeah? Well, I can't see anyone else smiling in here. Are you sure—
”

He got on one knee, taking her hand, smiling like a wolf.

“
You want to live like common people!
” he belted. “
You want to see
whatever common people see!
”

“People are looking.”

Actually, no one was looking. It was the middle of the afternoon on a weekday. But she imagined someone coming down the aisle, assuming he was proposing. It made her blush. She grabbed his basket and headed for the checkout, knowing he would follow a basket of meat anywhere.

She had reserved them a room at an auberge in Yvetot. Or possibly reserved. She got cell service just long enough to speak with a woman whose only words were “oui” or “non” and who became exasperated when Kezia pushed for more. Between the language barrier and the shoddy reception, it was tough to say whose fault this was. When they arrived, sometime before sunset, they ducked under a small archway of vines and knocked on a wooden door. A bearded garden gnome grinned up at them. Nathaniel peered into a window.

“Looks like Frodo isn't home.”

“This is the right place. It has to be. Otherwise we're sleeping in the car.”

She couldn't handle looking at the map again. This place was difficult enough to find, requiring multiple roundabouts and debates with Nathaniel about taking road D5 or road D55 ending in a “just fucking pick one.” Finally, an older woman in loose floral pants opened the door. She seemed shocked to see them, despite the rack of room keys and pile of brochures on the table behind her. She clutched her cardigan around her chest.

“Oui?”
she asked, looking at them as if they were Jehovah's Witnesses.

“
Bonsoir
,” said Kezia.
“Je suis la personne qui—”

“Ah
,
oui oui.”
She grabbed a set of keys. “Please, this way.”

“I feel like we're Mary and Joseph,” Nathaniel whispered, “minus the sex.”

“Mary and Joseph didn't have sex. That's the point.”

“No, that's
my
point.”

“And there
is
room at the inn, so the analogy doesn't work anyway.”

“I wonder which one of us is Jesus.”

“Why are boys so dumb?” Kezia hissed.

“Pardon?”
The Frenchwoman turned around.

“Rien.”
Kezia waved in the dark.
“Désolée.”

The room was at the top of a narrow, unlit stairwell, accessed via a door in the floor. They were greeted with a slanted ceiling supported by beams. A window in the roof was too high to open. Nathaniel coughed. This room was losing the battle of pretending it wasn't an attic.

“I feel like I should be wearing paisley.”

Kezia stared at the walls. “It's toile.”

Everything was covered in blue-and-white pastoral scenes. Had they been confined to the wallpaper, that would have been one thing. But the same farmers and dancing peasant girls that patterned the ceiling also farmed and danced on the bedspreads,
the pillowcases, and the pleated dust ruffles that circled the twin beds. They even covered the television stand, turning it into an oversized cupcake.

“Oui?”
The woman flicked a switch beneath a toile lampshade, the light of which only made the room feel more childlike.

The twin beds were no more than a foot apart but at least they were separate.

“
Oui
,” said Nathaniel, “
c'est bon. Merci beaucoup
.”

“Oui.”
The woman nodded. “And if you have not eaten food, I have made the anchovies
avec
cream. Unless you are not eating the fish?”

She was looking at Kezia.

“Oh, that's so nice.” She tried not to visualize the dish. “But we ate.”

The attic door closed above her head as the woman disappeared between the creaking floorboards.

“Did we ask her where the bathroom was?” he said.

Kezia held up a toile-covered Bible. “Umm, maybe hold it?”

Nathaniel sniffed a dusty decanter of sherry and immediately put it back down. He had been wearing the same navy Henley since yesterday but she just now noticed how it fit him. He really had streamlined his whole body. His arms were sinewy. She was disgusted for both of them, him for his vanity, her for being attracted to it.

“Guess there's a fine line between damp and quaint.” He shrugged.

“Maybe we can find you an underground strip club in town.”

“Yeah.” He dumped his bag on one of the twin beds, where it bounced on the mattress. “I think I'd have an easier time getting you to strip for me.”

“Ha! Totally!”

“What is wrong with you?”