A Woman, In Bed. Anne Finger
behind.
She threw her arms around his neck. He wrapped his arms around her, lifting her off the ground, swinging her around: an embrace a brother might give his kid sister. He pressed himself against her, making her breasts, swollen with milk, ache.
Simone slipped her arm into Albert’s and, her head against his shoulder, they walked towards Jacques, who leaned against a boulder to await them.
When they were a couple of yards from him, a gust of wind caught her skirts, sending them up around her, as if she were drowning in that expanse of blue. Jacques glimpsed the dark triangle of her pubic hair, her legs.
“Oh,” she cried, tamping her skirts down with her hands. It seemed they might become a parachute, the wind billowing them into sails and lifting her into the air, buffeting her away. She’d drift over her mother’s house, calling down, “Le vent! The wind! Goodbye, Mama! Goodbye, Marcel!” Who knew where she might end up? The scirocco might die down as suddenly as it had sprung up, and she’d be sent on an earth-bound plummet. Or she might waft down, landing in Aix or Lyon, a wind fallen gift from the heavens.
It was only Albert, tethering her to earth, who kept her from rising.
Jacques had smoothed down his hair that morning with a cream and the resulting stiffness of his locks caused two tufts to rise on either side of his temples. This, combined with the shape of his face—an inverted triangle ending in a tapered chin—gave him a slightly diabolical mien. The irises of his eyes were so dark they were nearly indistinguishable from his pupils.
“Allow me to present my dear friend, Jacques Melville. Simone Vidal—”
“Clermont.”
“Ah, yes, she has broken my heart by marrying.”
Unlike Luc, who had clicked his heels—although of French stock, he had been raised in Alsace—and bent to kiss her proffered hand, Jacques extended his own hand in return. By this gesture, he showed himself as a modern man who had thrown off prewar fustiness.
It all happened in a fraction of a second:
His hand, in the empty air, a few centimeters from hers, waited. He allowed it to rest there, thereby forcing her to lean forward, to be the one who grasped hold of his hand. He returned almost no pressure. His hand was so soft that it reminded her of touching her husband’s genitals when he was unaroused. There was an air of ironic detachment in his manner, as if he were an anthropologist who had spent so long in the field he now viewed the customs of his own tribe as curiosities. Simone relaxed her hand. Just when it seemed it might slide away from Jacques’, he squeezed it, hard enough that the shadow of a wince passed across her face, while a wry half-smile crossed his.
And then it was over. The smooth waters of the everyday closed above them.
Linking arms with both of them, Simone chattered about the other guests—an Alsatian bird watcher who made bird calls at the table; a British major, a summer visitor of many years standing, who had become quite forward with Simone of late: “I suppose he’s heard married French women are known to take lovers and wants to put himself first in line. Oh, it’s quite sickening.”
“Ah, Simone, your gallants are here, to defend your honor!” Albert stepped backwards and made a mocking bow. “Aren’t we, old man?”
“Certainly,” Jacques said drily.
“You’ll have to indulge my friend. He’s a genius.”
“You flatter me,” Jacques said, not bantering, but flat out. He was not about to make his intellectual prowess a joking mater.
When Simone returned with Jacques and Albert, Cecile greeted her with, “Your mother’s got a headache, she’s lying down upstairs.”
Her mother, who’d risen when she heard their footsteps coming up the path, appeared in the doorway as Simone reached the top of the stairs. “Just because you got up on the wrong side of the bed, you needn’t slam the door and give us all headaches.”
Simone changed for dinner out of that ridiculous dress of Elise’s—really, what had she been thinking?—and into a silk hobble skirt the dressmaker in Constantinople had run up, copying a Poiret design from a fashion magazine—although she’d grown too stout to fasten the hooks and eyes. She tried to get into her pre-pregnancy corset, but even with all her tugging and pulling, it wouldn’t fasten.
Elise’s corset had to be around here somewhere. At twelve, Simone had watched her elder sister grappling with the hated contraption, with its sweat-yellowed laces and the tears in the satin where her fat had fought against it, rubbing the red marks it left on her flesh when she freed herself from it.
After her death, some of the townspeople had advised burning her bedding, her clothes, while others had expressed horror at the notion
—Oh, no, the smoke will carry it into the air, it will be everywhere.
—Better to bury her things.
—Ah, and have it get into the soil itself, we’ll never be free of it.
When she opened the top drawer of Elise’s bureau, the smell of her sister rushed out at her, and she slammed it shut.
She covered the gaping waistband with a tunic.
They gathered in the parlor before dinner and then went in, the gentlemen escorting the ladies. Albert was the one who took her arm. Jacques squired two giggling daughters from Lyon. It was a small enough thing, Albert being the one to take her into dinner. And yet—if only she could have slipped her hand through Jacques’ arm. Tears welled in her eyes—her innate moodiness no doubt exacerbated by the weather, her maternity. She swallowed hard, determined to keep her emotions in check.
Fifteen people were seated at a table meant, at most, for twelve. Throughout the dinner a chorus of pardons and excusez-mois was murmured as elbows butted against one another. Mme. Vidal frequently rang the bell which summoned Cecile and whispered to her to clear away whatever she could.
Present that night at table was, in addition to the families from Rouen and Lyon, the retired British major who had spent his summer holidays chez Vidal for over a decade—with an interruption, of course, for the Great War. He greeted each newcomer with the sentence, “Je parle tres bien le francais,” although he seemed to feel that correct pronunciation and intonation were affectations. Also, the female birdwatcher from Alsace, who carried on a monologue, “…at first I thought it was a peregrine falcon, but when it took wing I realized it lacked the requisite white throat. And then…” quite oblivious to the fact that no one paid her the slightest mind.
Mme. Vidal had been forced to take in lodgers when her husband, a commercial traveler for the wines of the Château Cabrières, had died unexpectedly. At first, she had trouble attracting customers—there was ample competition for paying guests, especially in the off-season, and it seemed that she might have to throw herself on the mercy of her peasant family. The laws of familial obligations would have required that they be taken in, but Mme. Vidal and her two daughters would have been expected to share a single bed in a room under the eaves, the girls to slop the hogs and feed the chickens, winnow the hay—the one who doesn’t work, doesn’t eat—their skin turning brown, their hands growing calloused and their prospects for marriage, save to some country bumpkin, dim. Elise, with her child-bearing hips and strong shoulders, would have been the more favored in that department.
But then Mme. Vidal let it get about that at her lodging there was a charming daughter, Simone. (The elder daughter, Elise, a good-hearted, flat-footed sort, was not mentioned.) Granted, Simone was no great beauty, but then again she had none of the haughtiness of those who saw themselves as a reincarnation of Venus. Comely and flirtatious, she was just the thing for the salesmen and railway inspectors and army officers on leave, far from home. And not just for them—when the summer holiday makers descended, Simone