A Woman, In Bed. Anne Finger

      That night, he heard the soft pad of bare feet heading down the hallway, pausing outside his room, the barely perceptible rap of her knuckles against his door. He did not immediately rise from his bed, where he was stretched out naked in the summer heat, reading the latest version of a hastily-printed surrealist journal.

      Simone, standing on the other side of the door, her heart dithering in her chest, seeing the faint light from under the doorway—surely, he must have heard me knock, if I knock any more loudly I may wake Mother or Cecile. She heard the creak of the bedsprings as his weight shifted.

      She bit her lip, rapped again, glanced to the left and the right: no door was opening, no one was peering into the hallway.

      “Knock, knock, knock. Knock, knock, knock.” He stood in the doorway, keeping her from entering.

      Her eyes filled with tears.

      “Come, come.” He stepped back from the door, shut the door behind her, opened his arms to her.

      “Ah, you poor girl,” he said as she was riding him. “You poor starved child.” And later, “What a fool this husband of yours is. To leave you so bereft.”

      In the morning she stank of him and, not daring go down to breakfast before she washed, she called out to Cecile when she heard her passing in the hallway, asking her to bring her some hot water.

      A few minutes later, her mother was outside Simone’s closed door, calling in, “Come down for breakfast and then have your wash. Poor Cecile is worn out already and it isn’t yet eight o’clock.” And when Simone did not deign to respond, “Did you hear me?”

      Simone opened the door a crack, her body tucked behind it, and hissed, “I’m indisposed.”

      “Indisposed? But you can’t have started your flow again already.”

      “Mother! You sound like a peasant, discussing this sort of thing—and in the hallway! Whatever will the guests think.”

      “Well, I only…” Simone’s mother said, to the door that had been closed in her face.

      Mme. Vidal’s sour mood settled over the breakfast table, despite the fact that she smiled as she passed the butter and the jam—This is from the apricot tree you can see right out that window—and inquired politely over the guests’ plans for the day, averring that the morning mist—a much better word than fog—would soon lift, making this the perfect day for a hike in the hills, and yes, also, a perfect day for the beach.

      “Has our Parisian intellectual headed out already?” one of the guests asked.

      “No sign of him yet this morning,” Cecile put in, although Mme. Vidal had spoken to her several times about not jumping into the conversation. She was, after all, to remember her place. Not only that, but it didn’t do to grumble about one guest in front of the others—they were sure to start wondering what was said when their backs were turned.

      Simone, having handed Marcel off to Cecile, appeared at the breakfast table as the last dawdling guests were helping themselves to just a bit more coffee and the morning’s first cigarette.

      “You needn’t wolf down your food, dear.”

      Simone wanted to depart the table before the last guest did, so that her mother couldn’t take advantage of the two of them being alone to tell her she looked peaked, to ask pointedly if she had gotten enough sleep.

      A floorboard creaked overhead, and Simone looked upwards, which Mme. Vidal did not fail to notice.

      “M. Melville’s still abed. He must be worn out—from his travels.”

      “I’m going for a walk,” Simone announced, standing up abruptly.

      “Do you think the fog is burning off?” the last lodger at the table asked, dabbing the ends of his greying mustache with his napkin. Simone feared he was working himself up to saying, “I don’t mean to be forward, but do you think we might walk together—perhaps your mother and your son might join us?”

      She bolted from the table before he had a chance to do so, stopping in the kitchen to give Marcel in his high chair a quick kiss. Marcel lifted his arms to her, pleaded, “With you, Mama. With you!”

      She shut the door on his sobs. After all, it was for the best, she didn’t want to spoil him. She hoped that Jacques, having heard she’d gone down to the strand, would set out after her.

      At the gate, she realized she had forgotten her hat, but she didn’t want to go back for it and risk getting waylaid by her mother. As she walked down to the shore, the wind caught in the tendrils of her hair. She could imagine her mother’s reprimands: The sun and wind will parch your hair. Your 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.