Thirst (2 page)

“Marie! Melanie! Stop!” Nula hissed. The young man (an Algerian? a Libyan?) approached, grinning. He had followed them into the museum and had been shadowing them through it. He had lurked near her in the dark of the astronomy exhibit, his bared teeth purple in the ultraviolet light. In the metallurgy hall, he had stared intently as she read to Marie the explanation of how an iron forge worked.

“Come here,” she now called to the children, but, embarrassed in his presence, she called too softly for them to hear, or at least softly enough for them to pretend not to hear.

“Well, you are a American?” the Algerian confidently asked in uncertain English. “You are a student maybe. I am a student. Do you know Vincennes?”

“No.” Her education had gone no further than her secondary school leaving certificate.

“My degree is almost finished,” he said. “I am two years at Jussieu, and now I am at Vincennes, at the Department of Sexology.”

Nula didn’t reply. She looked past him, at the children, who ignored her.

“Do you know the sexology field? Very fascinating field. We are the most foremost department in Europe and America. We include the study of anatomy, anthropology, mass culture, economy, philosophy, human
relations. The whole gamut, as it were. Every academic discipline must include a contemplation of human sex, don’t you agree?”

Marie and Melanie, having exhausted their interest in nineteenth-century engineering, took another run and, squealing, slid out of the hall. Nula shook her head at the Algerian and took off after them at a brisk trot, mentally compiling a list of punishments, through one coolly lit hall after another, past the minerals exhibit and the insects and through the computer room, whose collection of computing instruments began with a Chinese abacus and ended with a model of a large punched card
ordinateur
dating from the Fourth Republic. Every time she thought she had lost their trail, she heard the girls giggle and shriek, and they’d skitter through the door at the far end of the room.

But then, when she was sure they had gone as far as they could into the dim recesses of the building, Nula found herself in a large, bright, completely modern hall, with the girls standing right there before her, as quiet and attentive as a pair of dolls. The au pair’s face was moist. She could feel the wetness above her lips.

“Now you’ll catch it,” she said in English. She hunkered and roughly fastened a few buttons on Melanie’s blue school uniform that had come undone. “Mama will hear of this, I promise you. No television tonight. And don’t ask me to buy you cakes on the way home. You’ve been very, very naughty.”

But the girls weren’t listening. Nula turned, looked up at the object of their attention, and gasped. The opposite wall contained a floor-to-ceiling backlit color
transparency of a man and woman, standing shoulder to shoulder, completely naked. Their arms were at their sides, their private parts exposed. The couple were perched on a diving board and behind them were a range of forested hills and a rich blue sky. Their smiles were placid, as if they noticed neither each other nor the camera. Nula fell silent. The man’s penis seemed small in relation to the rest of him; the mossy equilateral between the woman’s legs was exceptionally black. Then Marie said something—Nula didn’t hear what—to Melanie, and they both giggled.

“Oh, this is
biology,”
Nula said, her mouth dry. “Come, let’s look at the rocket ships.”

“We want to stay,” Marie told her.

“We can’t.”

“Why not?”

“It’s boring,” Nula said.

Marie and Melanie remained where they were. Nula took a few steps toward the exit, and the girls, less tentatively, went in the other direction.

The entire hall was devoted to reproduction and sexuality. A film projection demonstrated amoebas splitting. A DNA spiral stairway climbed to the ceiling. Next to it, a plastic model the size of a school bus showed the pistil and stamens of an archetypical flower, accompanied by a softly buzzing mechanical bee suspended from wires. One display diagrammed the courtship dance of two hummingbirds; another the egg-laying strategies of frogs; a third showed two elephants mating.

Side by side were similar exhibits explaining human reproduction, as if men and women were no more than
rutting animals (they’re no
less,
Elizabeth would say). Across from the elephants was a diagram of the developing human fetus, along with a picture of the completely naked mother, her breasts splayed, her belly distended, at the corresponding stages of pregnancy. An actual fetus floated in an amber liquid in a display case below the diagram. Nula’s two charges stood by it, making little trilling sounds of awe. Nula herself stared for a moment, shivered, and then remembered the girls.

“Don’t you want to see the butterflies?”

But they had already moved on to the next exhibit, drawings of the human male and female at progressive ages, including labeled diagrams of their genitals. And, squatting by them, talking quickly and in earnest, was the Algerian! The tawny skin between the top of his jeans and the bottom of his shirt shone like the skin of a piece of fruit. Marie and Melanie listened attentively.

“Monsieur!” Nula cried. The girls snickered. “What are you doing? What do you want?”

He stood and offered her a warm smile as she approached. “My little friends were asking of me some few questions.”

“Their questions are not for you to answer,” she said. “Leave it to their mother.”

“Madame—” he began, allowing a question mark to bob in the pause.

But Nula said, “I’m not their mother,” turned to the children, and briskly told them, “Let’s go.”

Melanie danced away from under her arm. She joined her sister to stare into the next display case, their
faces pressed against it. The idea of the dirt squeezing into the pores of the girls’ skin disgusted Nula. She glanced inside the case. It contained a variety of devices, accompanied by a text and diagrams that described their uses. She didn’t recognize a single one.

“Look, here’s a playground!” she said desperately, glimpsing a patch of green outside an open door around the corner. “Don’t you want to play?”

The two girls ignored her. Nula cooed, pleaded, and demanded—and finally bribed them outside with the promise of a bag of chestnuts. They held out for ice cream, and even then had to be shoved out the door. As they left, the Algerian winked at her.

 

In the small park and sculpture garden adjacent to the museum, old men sitting on weathered benches gazed at the statuary; couples strolled arm and arm along the park’s paths. Nula bought the girls two chocolate
esquimaux
from a vendor. “We have a half hour,” she told them. “Have fun.”

She might as well have told them to do the following week’s homework. “Play,” she said, and finally they sulked off down a tightly manicured row of rose hedges, ice cream already dripping to their fists.

Nula was glad to be free of them for the moment. She could find a bench and relax, and perhaps enjoy an ice cream herself. The park was lovely. The flowers were in bloom, the day had turned fair. She wished they had come here from the start. The girls were too young for science.

She turned and glared at the Algerian standing beside her. He grinned.

“You’re a terrible man to fill their ears with such filth,” she told him.

“Filth?”

“The way you talk and they’re so young.”

“But sex is part of life.”

“I won’t have it,” Nula said, her temper rising.

“There’s a proper age for everything, and a proper way of learning about this.”

“What age, what way did you learn it?”

“Sexology. I don’t believe there is such a thing.”

“Are you a virgin?”

“Yes, I am,” she said.

The defiant admission made her flush. She had never told anyone this before. Yet she did not regret the confession: She enjoyed its recklessness. She had told the truth as if it didn’t matter.

The Algerian merely nodded his head in a professional manner.

“Have you a boyfriend?”

“Go away.”

“It is best,” he said pleasantly, “that the first time be with someone who understands the necessary gentleness and is also very expert.”

“The first time will be with someone I love.”

The Algerian’s shrug was nearly Gallic. “Why begin love with anxiety and frustration?”

“Where I come from, people look for romance. You don’t study that, do you?”

“On the contrary—”

“If you don’t go I’m calling the police. There’s a guard over there. Are your residency papers in order?”

Nula was looking directly into the Algerian’s face as she said this, but she missed the moment his expression changed. He still wore a smile, but his face had hardened around it, leaving his smile not too far from a grimace. The transformation revealed that he was hardly older than she was. The ridiculous cap on his head now looked like something he had to wear because he didn’t own another. The youth started to speak—a retort, a challenge, something fierce—but he interrupted himself to say, “I’m very regretful to have made a disturbance.”

He abruptly turned, passed through the door into the museum, and disappeared around an exhibit devoted to venereal disease.

 

The au pair strolled alone through the labyrinth of hedges and abstract statuary. She was angry at herself and embarrassed by her shrillness. She wished she hadn’t made the remark about the Algerian’s residence permit. There were many people in Paris who didn’t have the proper papers, yet had nowhere else to go. And in the end, the Algerian had been harmless, even flattering. When was the last time (she imagined Madame Reynourd asking her) a man had courted her with such persistence? Of course, she had no choice but to ask him to leave (she imagined telling Elizabeth), but (she admitted) she needn’t have been unkind.

Nula turned a corner and found Marie and Melanie studying a statue, smiles of delight and discovery playing on their faces. This cheered her. No matter what ugliness
and corruption there was in this world, Paris’s beauty was fair compensation. She stepped beside the girls, gently running a hand through Melanie’s long hair, and examined the unusual, centaurlike mass of bronze. It suddenly resolved: a man behind a woman, both on their knees, his hands firmly gripping her hips.

“It’s bad!” she cried, pulling the girls away. “Bad! We’re leaving
now!”

Nula raced Marie and Melanie, momentarily silenced by her vehemence, down one lane and then another, past a dozen statues that only now were recognizable. Nearly every one showed a man and woman in some position of copulation—and those that didn’t, well they were much worse.
Prière de ne pas laisser de détritus,
no littering, warned a sign along one path, and under the warning was the legend,
Musée de l’Histoire Naturelle: Jardin de la Sexualité.
“Don’t look,” Nula shrieked as they passed a grouping of marble figures demonstrating several forms of oral sex.

As soon as they reached the street, Nula furiously cleaned the girls’ ice cream-smeared hands and faces with the premoistened towelettes she always carried in her purse.

“You’re
hurting
me,” Marie whined.

“Being clean doesn’t hurt.”

“The woman was drinking the man’s pee-pee,” Melanie said.

Her sister started to explain, but Nula shouted,
“Shut your mouth!”

Marie replied with an obscenity.

Someone called from across the street. “Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle!” Nula, still on her haunches, didn’t need to look up.

“Bloody hell,” she muttered.

“Mademoiselle,” the Algerian called again, dodging traffic. He approached, breathing hard. “Accept my apology please for such misunderstanding that I made.”

He thrust a bouquet in her face.

Stunned, Nula rose and took the flowers, a clutch of white lilies, yellow peonies, tulips, and a single sunflower, wrapped in newspaper.

The Algerian said, “I too look for romance.”

Nula kept her lips pressed together, maintaining her expression of annoyance.

“I want that you should see,” the man added. He removed a black vinyl wallet from his jeans. In it was his
carte de séjour,
his resident permit. On the card, under his long, unpronounceable family name and his twentieth arrondissement address, was a line reserved for his profession:
étudiant.

“I have right in Paris like you,” he told her. There was less rancor in this statement than pride. Nula had come to France on the ferry from Rosslare; his journey had been much more difficult.

“So you do,” she said evenly.

Marie and Melanie stared at the Algerian and then at the flowers. Marie sniffed at the bouquet. “They’re nice,” she mumbled, dazed by his gallantry.

“Well then. I now say farewell ladies. Farewell.”

The Algerian, or perhaps he was a Libyan or even
a Tunisian, bowed and straightened, then turned on the heels of his Adidas and hurried down the street. He didn’t look back before he vanished around the corner. “Men like that,” Nula began to tell the girls, but she didn’t complete the sentence. She really didn’t know men like that at all.

 

By the time they reached home, by way of a crowded, overheated train, Nula, Marie, and Melanie were exhausted. Madame Reynourd met them in the flat’s foyer and asked if they enjoyed the museum. Marie said it was boring, and she and her sister trudged off to their bedroom unbuttoning their school uniforms.

“And how was your afternoon?” Elizabeth asked Nula.

“Marvelous,” Nula said.

It was then that Elizabeth noticed the flowers, still in Nula’s hands, unwilted and fragrant despite the crush of the metro. Elizabeth raised her eyebrows in an expression of curious amusement. But Nula, surprised by her own reply, didn’t wish to answer any more questions. She pushed past her, hurriedly explaining, “I must put these in some water.”