serve the casserole or not. “It travels enormous distances, across Europe to northern India—”
Simone thought she might well go mad.
After lunch, Simone nursed Marcel. She slept (or tried to), went into the parlor and played a few hands of beloute, arranged and rearranged a bouquet of flowers, perched on a stool in the kitchen and polished the silver, nursed Marcel again, walked along the strand.
The table was again set for thirteen.
Mme. Vidal’s satisfaction was evident as she spoke. “Our rugged young men have plans to dine al fresco this evening—at some fisherman’s shack. Apparently the charms of my table can’t compete with those of perching on a boulder, eating fried fish off a cracked plate.”
“Ah, Madame,” said the father from Lyon, “any one who would shun your estimable table—”
“Hear, hear,” the major put in, in English.
“Perhaps they miss the trenches,” the father from Rouen said, and then guffawed, although no one else found humor in his remark.
The suppertime topics seem to have been set: discourtesies and slights delivered to hostesses, rude guests, fair weather friends. The conversation hopscotched around the table, each story followed by laughter or tut-tuts of disapproval and sympathy, and then by the next speaker telling a tale featuring even more loutish behavior.
Jacques and Albert returned, calling âllo from the passageway, refusing to enter the dining room—they were filthy and smelled of fried fish. They would wash and then retire: they had an early train to catch, “Farewell, to one and all,” Albert called. “I kiss the hands of all the ladies from afar, and warmly clasp the gentlemen’s hands.” Jacques nodded his head in agreement. Poor Cecile—before she’d even had a chance to clear the supper things—was swabbing their mucky footprints.
Simone lay awake all night. Despite the promise she’d extracted from Jacques—just for tonight—she hoped to hear his footsteps padding down the hallway, stopping outside her door.
At dawn, she heard the creaking hinges of a door being opened—slowly, slowly, so as not to awake the rest of the house—and the sound of bare feet creeping down the stairs. She raced after them.
“We were trying to be so quiet,” Albert whispered.
“I was—awake with the baby. Yes, yes, awake with the baby!”
Jacques squared his rucksack upon his shoulders, shifted his weight from one leg to the other. “The train.”
“I’ll walk to the gate with you.”
Albert raised an eyebrow. Although covered ankle to chin, wrist to wrist, she was nonetheless in her nightclothes. “Oh, no one will see me,” she said, and looped one of her arms through each of theirs.
At the gate, she said, “Maybe…” allowing her voice to trail off.
It was Albert who responded: “Yes, perhaps we’ll be able to stop back, after our visit to Carcassonne.”
“Oh,” Simone said. “Oh. But it would be quite out of your way.”
“Yes,” Jacques agreed, glancing at his watch. “We mustn’t make promises,” Jacques stopped himself from completing his sentence: we can’t possibly keep.
“No,” Albert said, kissing her hand with a flourish. “We are poets, and poets don’t make promises, they have dreams. Right, old man?”
“Right,” Jacques said, and then they were gone, leaving Simone standing at the gate.
A week later, she was so filled with his absence that she rose in the middle of the night and took the winter quilt down from the upper shelf of the wardrobe. She lay it on top of her, spreading her legs and wrapping them around it, but that didn’t satisfy her yearning for the weight of him. So she piled her pillows on top of the quilt, but the pale replication of the sensation only made her yearn for him all the more.
No wonder he doesn’t come back to me, she thought. Who would want a woman who pretends that a pile of bed linens is her lover?
She replayed the sensations of that night—his rough hand on her cheek, the thrust of his fingers inside her, the way he smelled at the beginning of their lovemaking, of bay rum and wine and onions. And how, as he sweated away on top of her, those smells gave way to something mustier and thicker, his own smell, as distinct as the whorls of his fingerprints. The way he said, “Simone, Simone.” His heartbeat.
At her father’s funeral, there had been prayer cards showing Mary’s heart, crowned and adorned with a chaplet of roses, hovering above her breast. It looked nothing like the hearts of pigs and goats and sheep set out for sale in the market, lumpy and dripping. Simone had thought of Mary keeping the gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh, pondering them in her heart. Mary must have had a doorway in her chest which she opened to take out her heart, and then reached into the gap for the stored gifts of the magi, which she removed to ponder—the French word is repassant, also used for the task of ironing—a physical action, rubbing the flasks and reliquaries, as her mother worked a dishtowel over an already dry glass or as Simone found her hand between her legs, rubbing the place for which she had no name.
“He isn’t coming back,” Simone’s mother said.
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“You know very well who I am talking about. Albert’s friend. You can sit there gazing down the road forever.”
“I’m not gazing down the road. I’ve got to look somewhere.” She turned her head and stared at the grove of olive trees on the hillside.
“You used to moon after your father in just the same way.” Her mother snapped the tablecloth as she shook the crumbs into the yard.
In the distance, the occasional dark splotch resolved itself into a wandering cow or M. duPont on his bicycle, bringing nothing more than a letter from Luc, or disappeared before it could be made out.
And then, one day, M. duPont waved, thumb and forefinger extended, to indicate he had two letters.
She opened the one from Albert before the one from Luc, skimmed through the letter greedily: Carcassonne was a marvel, we truly felt as if we weren’t in this century, or even the last…We had our dreams of returning to you, and if our purses and our circumstances had permitted we would have, but alas when we left Carcassonne we were penniless. Her eyes raced through the letter, searching again for the letter “J.” Joë refuses to have electric lights, he says the electricity jangles his damaged nerves…And then, at the end of the letter, in the very last paragraph, there it was again, the letter “J,” the curved triangle with the fish hook hanging from it, and the letter
