“Marion, this is Daniel,” Vicky said once they’d embraced. Marion looked me over like a rental billed a notch or two above its class. “A pleasure,” she said. “Enchanté,” I said and felt immediately like the sort of seamy flirt who says “enchanté.” “Poor Daniel,” Vicky said. “He didn’t sleep on the flight over and now his bags are lost.” She rearranged my hair. “Mais non,” Marion said. She swept a hand across the scene. “They are all idiots here. Consanguin , you know? C’mon, we’ll give you Léo’s clothes.” My mood lifted as we drove beyond the outskirts of Clermont-Ferrand. Marion turned onto a rural highway and in a matter of minutes the land opened out into gorgeous hilly country. It may have been this beauty, or catching a second wind, realizing that I was okay and not teetering on the brink of inward collapse, or it may just have been one of those moments when, like a flipped switch, you go from thinking the world is conspiring against you to seeing that the world doesn’t care and you are free to find your own happiness or sorrow. “So what will we do while you’re here?” Marion said. “You’ll want to tour around, I suppose.” She sighed. “It’s funny, we live such isolated existences. I hardly know this place.” “That’s not possible,” Vicky said. “You’ve been here, what, five years? What about the kids, what do you guys do ?” “Yes, the poor kids,” Marion said. “They are too young to care. And we have a woman, Madame Lévesque. I play tennis in the city some days and Léo—who knows what Léo does.” We were passing fields cleared for crops, wild slivers of uncleared fields within the forests and hills. Fields with rocky outcroppings and stone farm houses, quaint and picturesque, with linens and dresses sailing from clotheslines. It was a windy day and at points the sun would find a hole in the clouds and unload its cache of warmth on the champagne hood of Marion’s BMW. “What do you mean?” Vicky said, her voice
vacant ocean passed beneath us. I was awake when the world began its too-early brightening.
We made our transfer in Paris and I finally sacked out on the domestic flight, only to be awoken what seemed minutes later by Vicky saying, “We’re here,” with annoying cheerfulness. For a minute I had no idea what “here” she meant. A pall of exhaustion and physical misery darkened my mood, and I thought suddenly that the trip had been a mistake, my fantasy of a warm friendship with Léon Descoteaux close to lunacy, and, most troubling of all, that I was following around a woman I barely knew and to whom, in the stark sobriety of daily life, I had almost made the mistake of proposing. I had these feelings about Vicky from time to time, and I think she must have had them about me too, because there were points at which we so thoroughly baffled each other that we were forced to confront the origin of our intimacy in college, when we were so young and drunk and hopeful that it was easy simply to adore other people as the mirror images of our own bright futures. There was more to me and Vicky than that, surely. But there was also a sense in which what held us together was having come to know each other before we knew ourselves and before, as a consequence, we knew how impossible it was going to be to know anybody else. I can be a bit moody, and I certainly have that male thing where my bad mood is the world’s problem. So a lot of what I was feeling just then, as I waited for my bags to not-arrive in Clermont-Ferrand Auvergne International, was dubious and melodramatic. I was trying to convince myself that new luggage was still being added to the carousel fifteen minutes later, when Marion showed up. “Victoria!” she said, spotting us and raising a hand. She was an impossibly pretty woman of some wonderful, indefinite European age who gave off an aggressive public comfort in her body that I took to be distinctly French.
107
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker