Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

is nature’s gift to bird or beast in the talons of the raptor. Dreamily, I am aware that her friends have paused in their talk to observe us. She is peering at my tights, a glistening silver pair on which I have spent my allowance in hope that, as I read in a teen glamour magazine, they will add the all-important touch of holiday sophistication.

“It’s sort of a style called the wet look,” I say, trying to fold up my poor silly legs and stick them out of sight.

Gus laughs with dreadful clarity, flashing her carnivore’s overbite, setting off ripples of laughter around us. “Wet!” she exclaims to her audience. “Looks more like slime!” It is a moment of debacle that strikes my idolatrous heart with a complicated mixture of pleasure and pain. And it leaves me strangely without bitterness—in memory merely becoming a static, faintly allegorical scene, like an engraving in an old pornographic book.

A few months afterward, I watch Gus in a movie that must still exist in some school archive. Shot by Edie for an art project, it’s a five-minute eight millimeter that shows Gus with a boyfriend, a cousin. There is a beach of egg-sized granite pebbles; the Maine sea crumpling like gray taffeta beyond; two improbably beautiful teenagers (who seem mature and sophisticated to me) in foul-weather jackets, mugging for the camera with the energy of a pair of healthy young setters. The whites of their eyes are as clear as skim milk. He feeds her a stone, she dumps seaweed on his head; even through the amateurish focus comes a sense of the aimless reciprocity of perfect happiness. Like any spectator I anticipate with relish the doom of that happiness, doom Edie tells me has existed from the start in the big shingled summer houses barely visible in the background of the film, houses full of aunts and uncles who play New England Montagues and Capulets. Edie’s film doesn’t show, but somehow implies, the endless family councils on inbreeding and the real-life medieval finish, in which Gus is packed off to college in France. The film earns Edie an A in art. I make her show it to me three times.

At about the same time I wear one of Gus’s old dresses to the May dance at school. As if by chance, not even admitting anything to myself, I’ve chosen it over an array of my own dresses, out of a mass of things from a closet at Edie’s house. The dress is apple green satin with silver buttons, too large for me in the bust and in every way so extremely unbecoming that it seems like a statement of some kind. There is a snapshot of me wearing it, standing in my garden before the dance, and my expression is both dreamy and stubborn.

Four years pass, and I attend a wedding in Rhode Island, in a small brown Episcopalian church with a view of Narragansett Bay. A cool clear July day, sunlight on the pearls of the Philadelphia and Providence aunts crowding the church, Gus in old lace and wildflowers in front of the altar. She has cropped her hair to an inch long and looks disturbingly fey, like a garlanded Peter Pan. The mascara on her lashes stands out against blanched cheeks. She wears a slightly demented look of joy. Beside her is a Frenchman, who exactly fits the image I carry in my brain under the heading “Frenchman”: dark, brachycephalic, handsome; with a short man’s swagger and a brilliant smile that makes a sudden white rift in a face tanned the color of walnuts. The intelligence circulating like a breeze through the groves of the aunts is that this is a choice far more imprudent than marrying a cousin. This ravishing niece from the poor end of the family might have recouped many things with a judicious marriage. But instead of being the kind of Frenchman she could well aspire to—a baron with rolling vineyards, a vulgar but fetchingly solvent property developer with half of the Côte d’Azur in his pocket—the man is a travel agent and tour leader, who first wooed Gus over the Atlantic, with champagne swiped from First Class. An accomplished charmer trailing an untidy string of ex-wives and girlfriends, he knows enough to disarm the aunts with boasts of his peasant roots. He is from the Vercors, the high plateau where the French resistance fighters hid in limestone caves.

Edie and I are photographing the wedding, and we have dressed like men, in white linen trousers and jackets and bow ties. We want to look original and decadent and hope to upstage the bride. I am in college now, my virginity long gone, sure of my looks and puffed up with the importance of my own romantic dramas. My schoolgirl crush seems as distant as chicken pox. This is confirmed after the cake and the toasts, when people are getting seriously drunk on a lawn that runs down to a private dock, and the bridegroom comes up to me. “That outfit doesn’t work,” he says in French. “You should show off your body.”

He looks me over with the matter-of-fact brazenness of a man who feels entitled to any woman at any time. And suddenly—the novelty of this feeling is breathtaking—I am afraid for Gus. The newlyweds sail off in a Herreshoff sloop that, like the sweeping lawns and the long gabled house sprawled above, seems to be part of Gus’s dowry but in reality belongs to yet another distant relative. Before leaving they stand on the dock, the groom’s arm tightly around her, swapping jokes in French with the crowd. Tipsy uncles are hollering colloquialisms. “He never calls me darling,” Gus complains gigglingly to her audience. “Il m’appelle sa boudin: he calls me his blood sausage.”

Now this tale skips years and continents and alights in the middle of a wet autumn in a working-class suburb of Paris near Orly Airport. Jets take off overhead,