skin will turn red like a boiled lobster. Some anti-fairy tale, golden tresses spun into straw, the princess’s mottled skin making her a toad.
The morning fog was settling in, not burning off. The cove was dotted with a few bathers, a small knot undertaking calisthenics in unison. Great cormorants were perched on boulders, drying their wings or rocking on the choppy waters offshore, waiting for their prey.
The wind drove grains of sand and salt into the crevice between her teeth and gums, the whorls of her ears. As in the year after her father’s death, when she had set penances for herself, offering them up to speed her father’s path through Purgatory—jagged pebbles in her shoes, kneeling on the cold stone floor of the church at early Mass each morning—these physical irritations were sources of pleasure as well as pain, making her body give up its secrets.
That same year, in fifth form, she’d had her first male teacher, M. Duprée, the science master. He’d brought his microscope to school, sealing grains of sand on a slide. Peering down the brass shaft, she saw miniature shells, wave-tumbled glass, fossilized sea sponges, broken claws from infinitesimal relatives of the crab and lobster, evidence of another, unseen world. The sea she so loved, for all its majesty, was also an open sewer, a grave to numberless beings.
Her father was in the ground, worms and grubs turning him into earth. She wondered if she dared ask Mr. Duprée if they might examine dirt, too. Media vita in morte sumus. “In the midst of life, we are in death” did not refer to a state of the soul, but to the body, earthy and gross.
There Jacques was. Coming towards her. Yes, it was him. She stopped dead in her tracks, her heart all a-flutter. The clichés of cheap romance novels were proving themselves real, although her bodily sensations weren’t solely cardiac. Other, less poetic systems were coming in to play, the outer manifestation of which was a pleasant dampness between her legs. The sea stank, fetid and amniotic.
He looked around before embracing her. “I hope I didn’t make your mother suspicious.”
“She can be as suspicious as she likes. My husband—well, he sends her a cheque every month. If she cooks my goose, she cooks her own. I suppose that isn’t a particularly elegant way of putting it—”
He was smiling fondly at her, and she saw that he was taken by her simplicity, that those letters she had written him, in which she had endeavored to offer him a well-turned phrase, an original observation, had enchanted him when she was most straightforward.
They bent their heads together, each forming a wind break for the other, as they followed the crude path down to the strand. They stopped at a tidal pool and watched a sea anemone, with its hundred of tentacles waving in the water, both phallic and fragile. When Marcel had been inside of her, his penis must have looked like those translucent fronds, only later filling with tissue and blood. A minnow darted by and the tentacles, as skillful as the fingers of a blind man, pulled it into the stout center of the organism.
What were these translucent bits of protoplasm floating past? Tadpoles, polliwogs, a just-born guppy or jellyfish?
They came to an outcropping of rock forming a half-cave. Without any preliminaries, Jacques took a blanket from his rucksack, spread it on the sand, seated himself, and unbuttoned his flies. He yanked up her skirt, pulled off her drawers, tucking them in the rucksack so they wouldn’t blow away, lowered her roughly onto him, facing away.
The world beyond them disappeared. Even her breasts, their limbs, their mouths, their smells were inconsequential. There was only his sex, her sex, the bare and frank conjunction of their movement. The God she’d worshipped all her life, the God of good and evil, of sin and virtue, was killed as they made love, murdered by his ancient mothers and fathers. The stout gods and goddesses of the barbarians reigned again, squatting around campfires, gnawing on the gristle of roasted bone, picking their teeth, farting—gods who did not know the meaning of the word shame.
And then the world came back.
The wind.
The fog.
The two of them.
The plash and funk of the ocean.
A sound, something between a honk and a bark, slowly distinguished itself from the rumble of the ocean, the cries of the gulls, the flap of the wind against their clothing.
“We aren’t the only lovers on the beach today,” Jacques whispered. Steadying herself with one hand against his hip, she turned.
A few feet beyond them, two monk seals were coupling lackadaisically on the strand. Their bodies, so graceful in water, were slug-like on land. The cow moaned as the bull flopped on top of her.
“Slowly, slowly,” Jacques’ whispered, as she pulled herself off of him. She sat on his lap, his arms wrapped around her, sheltering her. She whispered, “They can’t smell us?”
He shrugged, mouthed the words, “The wind—the wrong direction—”
The seals both bellowed, roars of pleasure, cries of pain echoing off the rocks and waves.
It was quite acceptable for a married woman to put her hand into the crook of the elbow of a man who was not her husband, who was a guest of the family, as the two of them walked through the streets of Juan-les-Pins, as this constituted an act of everyday masculine protection to the frail sex of which Simone was a member, although none of her family friends and acquaintances, passing them and offering a smile, a nod, a tip of the hat, could have known the pleasure it gave her to have her thin fingers wrapped around his arm, could have known she was thinking: I never before knew my hand, my very hand itself, could experience joy.
It was also quite within the realm of that which was proper for a young woman of a good bourgeois family to stand on the railway platform with said lodger, even though it might be observed that the smile upon her face revealed she was quite smitten. It was not quite acceptable, but still these things happen, it’s not comme il faut, but nonetheless, a shrug, a wink, for Simone to have her fling with Jacques. After all, women were weak, easily tempted, and men had desires that were like the engine of that train now entering the station.
But to step onto the train with this man with the brooding eyes and furrowed brow, to travel with him to Carcassonne to visit the poet Joë Bousquet, was to cast herself outside the bounds of decency.
Simone, right foot on the step, left on the platform, hesitated for a fraction of a second, not filled with second thoughts, but rather with the desire to prolong this moment, her break with the past.
She drew a deep breath, grabbed hold of the bar, and hoisted herself onto the train.
Chez Vidal, Odette was wailing: “Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama,” holding out her arms. “Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama, Mama.”
They were lucky enough to find a compartment alone.
“Did I ever tell you,” Simone said, leaning her head against Jacques’ shoulder, “that the first man I ever loved was wounded in the war?”
Did I ever tell you…she said, as if she had told
