They climbed to a main square that spilled down from a central axis, as if the earth had shrugged. They stopped at a café, and bellied up to the cool zinc of the bar, and sipped syrupy limonades. A street photographer took a snapshot. Caught Nick doomy and glamorous in the amber light, she with her broad cheeks and almond eyes he called her “Khirgiz eyes.” Wearing her smile, the smile of a woman with all the luck. On the way to the car, they saw the German schoolkids troop across the square into a patisserie. Lolita, the champion kisser, was not among them.
Nick’s moods were an old story (and pain in the ass), part of the package; maybe a mild form of the taint that he claimed marked his family, the whole tribe an argument against inbreeding. I’m a moody bastard, he’d say afterward and apologize extravagantly. Experience had taught her to lay back. The funk would work its way out of him like a splinter.
She could absorb a patch of funk, they had much to celebrate, she and Nick. Friends were getting downsized and put out to pasture, losing mates to a rogue cell or a ski instructor, getting plucked too early from the party. She and Nick were both at the top of their game; Nick’s imprint a holdout against the dumbing-down of publishing, she with her dual act of pianist and arts reporter. And darling Laila: spooky wise, her angelic nature the envy of friends whose children were mall rats or slackers. She’d even skipped the storms of adolescence—except for a deep sulk when Nick came on board. Maddy had loved him in some fashion since her twenties, and found him again years later through a blessed alignment of stars in the shimmering isles off Virgin Gorda. If something happened with her and Nick, she would not be all right.
SATURDAY NIGHT HAD brought an influx of guests to the terrace. An elderly woman with a dachshund; a foursome of English tourists, nattering away in the patois of upper-class Brits. In a corner under the eaves, a young French couple fed each other bits of cheese in slow motion.
The carrot-haired waiter arrived to take their order. He recommended the poulet en barbouille, a regional specialty.
The evening glow lingered and beat at them and they sipped the local Pouilly Fumé in a luxury of silence. Only with Laila did she feel so easy. She pondered the best way to bring up the art colony. Nick’s sister co-owned the estate, but lived abroad and showed zero interest in it. Any mention of his sister, though, and Nick went medieval. Violet was a topic they tacitly agreed never to touch. They each had their reasons. Transparency, she’d decided, was much overrated.
“I’m thinking, it’s a sad thing I never had a child,” Nick said abruptly.
She held her wine glass aloft, unsure she had heard what she had heard; tried for a composed expression above the ice in her heart.
“A baby? At our age?” Her mind raced. What madness, impossible. Not for Nick, it wasn’t. “Is that your creative thought for the evening? Darling, I just don’t see you pushing a stroller around Washington Square. Like the altecockers strong-armed by their trophy wives into having a kid. Did I tell you? Sophie’s ex was featured in an article in New York Magazine on second-time dads. He seems to have forgotten his first-time daughter is living in the jungle with guerillas.”
“It’s not Lester’s fault she’s run amok.”
She tilted back her Pouilly Fumé. The alcohol felt dangerous, combustible in her blood. Babies? What was he talking about.
The orange-haired waiter sashayed over with their poulet en barbouille. “Is this sauce special to the region?” Nick asked. His manners impeccable, polished by years of putting the help at ease.
“Oui, Monsieur. The chicken is cooked in its own blood.”
Maddy looked at the chicken smothered in a rich chestnut sauce. Why was there so much violence? The waiter’s teeth, she noticed, were sawed-off greyish stumps. She watched Nick wield fork and knife, boarding-school graceful.
“Mmm, delicious, the waiter was right,” Nick said between mouthfuls.
She moved the tortured bird around the plate with her fork, like an insect palpating air with its antennae. From the next table the woman with the dachshund, its leash tangled in her chair, shot them a look of naked envy. The French couple had progressed to nibbling each other’s fingers.
Don’t get sucked in, “take a chill,” Laila would say. She would humor him, a fussy child with a fever. Above all, don’t dignify the thing with serious discussion. Because if she did, a small voice might cry, But what about me? and that she wouldn’t permit.
Nick set down his fork across the plate. “You’re not eating. Christ, look what I’ve done, I’m sorry. I’m so terribly confused. I needed to tell you what I’d been thinking.”
“Oh, Nicky, I’m glad you did. I mean, you’ve always gone on about not wanting children.” Discussing it. He’d cited his own family as the best deterrent. Though what could have kept her from Laila?
“At times I feel you can’t live purely for your own pleasure,” he said, sheepish.
“You sound like a character in a Russian novel.” She always made him laugh. He didn’t laugh. “And what about Laila?”
“What about her,” Nick said testily.
“Well, you have been a sort of surrogate dad for eight years.” And where the fuck do I fit in? Did he plan on knocking up a surrogate mother? No, don’t touch that.
Nick put his hand to his forehead and rubbed his eyebrow. “Oh, it’s absurd, I know—”
“When we want to travel,” she put in a bit quickly. “Ireland in August.” A bike trip—though she hoped to make liberal use of the sweep van—and a ticklish topic: they’d had to lever in the trip between her concert dates. She remembered how that morning Nick had mocked, she now thought, her busyness. At some point, needing to do your work was bound to piss off someone. Gingerly, she forked a morsel of chicken.
“What do you think of poulet en barbouille?”
“Not exactly kosher—but tasty.”
“How do you put up with me?”
“Beats me.”
He brought her hand to his mouth and kissed her wrist. “Mmm, jasmine.” A moment. “I wish we could stay longer. We never got to Bourges.”
“I wish we could, too,” she said. Yet her fingers itched for a keyboard; she’d caught herself scratching on surfaces. And she needed to fax the office—before leaving New York, she’d picked up ominous rumblings.
“Gotta chase down my writer and hope he makes George Sand country hot for the ’90s. The rural heart of France as the next Provence. Christ, I hate what publishing’s become.” He sighed; settled lower in his chair in his loose-limbed way. “And then it’s back to the shop to brainstorm with Nessa.”
“Nessa?”
“Yeah, Nessa Trent-Jones, my new hire. Our new publicity director,” he prompted. “Remember? I told you.”
Why was no one named Marilyn or Arlene anymore.
“Alison was doing a perfectly fine job, but she made the mistake of getting involved with the CEO of Richterverlag,” Nick said. “Then she insisted he leave his wife, and he fired her.”
