A Woman, In Bed. Anne Finger
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 that followed was not a single “e,” the letters that followed were not “oë,” the letters that followed were “acques,” the word was “Jacques,” and the sentence as a whole read, “Jacques seems to have taken quite a shine to you, and requests permission to write to you.”
She didn’t care who saw her running up the path, racing up the stairs—not her mother or the lodgers who might later say My, it seemed as if the hounds of hell were after you and then lift an eyebrow, waiting for an explanation. Not Cecile, who would ensure that this tidbit of information got passed all over town: I don’t know what was going on, I just know that when M. DuPont came back, she was down at the end of the road, waiting for him with a letter, hailing him as if he were a taxicab. Simone didn’t even care that the letter she had written to Albert was so hastily scrawled her pen tore the paper, and her words were a quick jumble, telegraphic: Glad to hear that you are well. The baby and I are both fine. Tell Jacques that yes, he may write to me. I hope you will write to me, too. I will write you a longer letter soon. And then, because the letter seemed altogether too abrupt: The baby tires me out and I want to make the next post. I embrace you tenderly, Simone.
A month elapsed before the letter from Jacques arrived. Thank you for giving me permission to write to you. I hesitated only because I did not want to cause any difficulty between you and your relations—whether by blood or marriage. It has taken me so long to pen this missive that I fear by now you may have returned to Istanbul. I have been much involved in affairs here at home in Paris—the completion of a manuscript about my sojourn in Madagascar, for which my publisher is quite eager, and, also, if I can speak quite frankly, in difficulties in my household, which, alas, is not a happy one. My wife is pregnant again.
Simone read the letter over and over again: there was no reference to their—to what had transpired between the two of them—but then, again, Simone was quite uncertain how one would refer to—sexual congress—she had no other words save those. She felt a bit like a child trying to follow a discussion at the family dinner table, knowing that the arched eyebrows, the forced coughs, the allusive words were codes she could not decipher. Was this letter endeavoring to create greater intimacy between the two of them? Or was it merely