A Woman, In Bed. Anne Finger
drafts, trying to match her tone to his. In one version she wrote, I am sorry to hear that your home life is difficult, but then thought that sounded too remote. In another draft, written late at night, she made explicit reference to their lovemaking, but when she read it over in the morning she was so ashamed she ripped the paper into tiny squares. In the end, her letter contained reports of the local weather and listings of her son’s latest doings, with a scrawled P.S. I am somewhat cowed, writing to a literary man like you, I fear I don’t express myself at all well, I do miss you, and underlined the word “do.”
Over the course of the next months, letters traveled back and forth between Simone and Jacques. Simone remained in her mother’s home, since Luc had determined that the political situation in Turkey was so precarious she ought not to return. He continued to promise to visit her, but circumstances arose, one after the other, preventing this from occurring. If the letters between Simone and Jacques never grew any more intimate, neither did they grow any less so. Simone lived, as she had during her twelfth year, the year after her father’s death, in a world removed from the physical.
The word “purgatory” had eluded the net of definition. She had leafed through a copy of The Divine Comedy illustrated by Gustav Doré and seen the souls in Purgatory, depicted in shades of gray—lead and slate—abject figures, draped in robes that resembled both burial shrouds and the habits of Mohammedan women, bearing boulders as they moved along a rock-strewn path that wended its way above stark cliffs and fog-shrouded crags. She tried to paste her father’s face into the hollows of those cloaks. The ordinary world—the smell of the ocean, her mother’s whistling as she washed the dishes, her sister Elise’s guffaws—was at best an irritant. The world made sense only when it gestured to what lay beyond: the air in the church, thick with incense, the crucifix on the wall above her bed.
Now the path to the gate was the path down which Jacques had walked. The chair in the parlor was the chair in which he had sat. Even her own son was the infant he had lifted into his arms.
A thick letter from Luc arrived by special post containing a ticket for a steamship departing four days hence. Cecile and her mother packed Simone’s trunks with the same roll-up-your-sleeves, get-on-with-it fervor they applied to spring cleaning. They could not wait to rid the house of the squalling child, Simone’s moodiness. As for Simone, she wanted to be freed from her mother’s house, but she dreaded seeing Luc again, could not imagine receiving his caresses. She thought of pheasants being flushed from fields by hounds, taking wing to escape, easy shots against the sky above.
A week later she was in Istanbul. Luc seemed hardly to notice her diffidence, or if he did put it down to the whims of female nature: skittish, like a horse in a new barn. Give the gal a chance to get settled, and all would be fine. He was fascinated by the child, showing not only the expected paternal pride, but curiosity about the child’s mental and physical processes, his rudimentary acquisition of language—“Do you see, he knows his name. Marcel, Marcel,” and the child looked in his direction—“and when I put the block behind my back—Where did it go? Where did it go?” This interest was not to be confused with indulgence: he was upset that Simone had not yet begun toilet training, making her aware of the latest scientific studies which proved, quite incontrovertibly, that the foundations of a disciplined and well-ordered life were laid down by the regular excretory habits established in infancy.
The first night they were together, Luc thought it best not to press himself on her: no doubt she was tired from the journey and required some time to readjust to his presence. He did want to let her know that his—he formed the word reluctantly, even in his own mind—his love for her had not waned, and so when they lay down next to another in bed that night, he clasped her hands tenderly, and covered them with a series of minute kisses. She shocked him by becoming quite forward, initiating the marital act. At its conclusion, as in the past, he rose and washed himself, and then she did the same, even squatting down a bit—the washbasin was behind a screen—and twisting the flannel around her finger, shoving it inside her, doing her best to remove every trace of him.
When she was having sex with Luc, she imagined Jacques’ presence—not that Jacques was moving in and out of her, but that he was watching them couple with a look of amused contempt.
She spent her days reading novels and staring at the blue sea and blue sky. The servants washed and rewashed the floor (they were horrified that their master and mistress wore shoes indoors) and occasionally brought her child to her.
One day, standing at the balustrade staring at the horizon, she felt a sharp queasiness and realized she was pregnant. She would be sent back to France for her parturition.
For the first time since her return to Istanbul, she smiled a smile that was not forced.
Lumbering, flat-footed, great with child, Simone returned to Juan-les-Pins.
A letter from Jacques, penned many months before, waited for her. (She had written before she left telling him she was returning to Istanbul, that their correspondence must, at least for a while, cease.)
She sat down at the table in her room, without even removing her coat, and wrote to him. She wrote of the blue of the sea and sky in Istanbul and her disgust at her husband’s body. And that, once again, another creature was within her.
The trunks unpacked, silk underthings, thin skirts, waiting for the time when her body would be her own again.
She spread her legs in front of her bedroom mirror to see her sex, swollen with the hormonal wash of pregnancy.
A girl: Odette. Weaned at six weeks. She couldn’t stand the needy, tugging mouth at her breast. She did not want her breasts to once again become an obscene fountain when she was with Jacques.
She would be with Jacques again, she would.
And then, on August 1st of 1923, Simone received a letter from him, telling her he was coming south—that he would, as soon as he heard back from her with her assent to his visit, send a telegram to her mother, booking a room for a few days. From Juan-les-Pins, he would once again go to see Joë.
Her letter in response would have been delivered into the hands of M. Dupont, who would have slipped it into his satchel to jostle against the other letters therein. It could have found itself trapped between the pages of a magazine or dropped behind a desk by the slovenly postmistress in town. If those things failed to happen, it would have been put in a sack and carried from Juan-les-Pins to Aix to Paris. But the train could derail, the mail car cracking open like an egg, white letters slithering down a hillside. It was much safer to send a telegram, her words transubstantiated into dots and dashes, a series of pulses racing along black wires, arriving in Paris within minutes.
She passed the blank across the counter with the words, “Yes, come, Simone.”
In a separate, larger envelope, Jacques had sent a chapbook of Joë’s poems. Simone ran her hands over the rough, deep blue cover: she touched the words spine, marrow, blood, scarf, circle, delirium as if she were a blind woman reading Braille.
“I had a telegram from your paramour,” her mother said.
“My paramour?”
“You know very well who I mean. He’ll be here in three days. I hope he doesn’t expect me to knock five francs off the price like I did for Albert.”
Jacques found it more than a bit embarrassing: Simone’s flushing and fluttering at the supper table, the way she kept suppressing the smile creeping over the corners of her mouth, gazing at him and then quickly averting her eyes. In response to Mme. Vidal’s questions—And how is Albert? Why hasn’t he joined you on this trip? And what have you been up to?—he offered, Fine. He’s busy in Paris. Finishing my manuscript. To make up for his curtness, Simone blathered about Marcel’s latest doings,