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

the foreground of my idyll. A month later she surprises me again, with a letter that plunges in medias res. “Watching the two of you has shaken me, put a mark on me, knocked me out of my niche of cowardice. I know now what is possible, if I find the courage to go after it.” The letter is written in the exquisite spidery handwriting of all the women in their family, and a pine tree is sketched rather brilliantly at the top. But I forget to respond, busy as I am with marriage, with inhabiting another person.

Life intervenes. The death of Edie and Gus’s mother, the remarriage of their father, Edie’s tumultuous divorce. The births of my children, my own divorce, my work, my life in Europe. All stories worth recounting. But on this peculiar path I am tracing, the next milestone comes in the form of a letter that contains an article clipped from the Times of a coastal town in Massachusetts. The article describes the opening of a French restaurant called Le Maquisard in a white elephant of a frame house in the town, and has a photograph of the proprietors: Gus and the Frenchman. The letter, from Edie, tells me that Gus grabbed her daughters and left France one morning, and that the Frenchman disappointed a number of women by following his wife. At present they are reconciled among the beurre noir and dried cèpes of this new mad venture, which is going great guns, at least with the summer people. I look at Gus’s face in the photograph: an oval of tiny gray dots that tells me nothing except that she is still beautiful. Her position at the side of the Frenchman has, to my mind, a provisional look. I reread the letter and ponder the wonderful seductiveness of action, of clean, defiant acts; and the tedium of consequences.

A number of years scurry past with the undignified haste of startled geese. Suddenly I hear gravel crackle under tires, and Gus pulls up the driveway in a tall blue Jeep and peers out at me with a quizzical tilt of the head that reminds me of our first meeting near the hockey field. This happens in Newport, where I’ve rented a house and am soaking up the American summer with an expatriate’s melancholy gusto. She looks the same—just sharper around the edges, the way we all do. And something completely unexpected has come out of hiding: a rueful good humor that signifies a talent for living. She’s not a glamour girl or a martyr anymore, and she has left behind the garlicky romantic dramas of the restaurant business. Of all the roles I never envisioned for her, she is a teacher, filling the occasionally receptive minds of high school students in her coastal town with irregular French verbs and tidbits of Pascal. Her eyes, under the unchanged long lashes, hold a proper pedagogical irony. She slams the car door and walks over to plant a kiss on the foot of my six-month-old son, who is propped on my shoulder. “We’re going to talk for twelve hours!” she announces.

The forerunner of this visit was a wedding announcement that arrived months ago at my house in Northern Italy. A snapshot showed Gus in bone-colored satin beside a man whose expression of uncomplicated devotion was as American as the name engraved on the announcement. A fellow teacher, who courted her over a long bitter New England winter. Now, sitting in a wicker chair on my rented porch, she talks on about him, blushing and excited as she never was as a teenager. It’s love, of course, straightforward and divine, arrived at last according to its own mysterious timetable. She holds my son and tells me she longs to have a child with her new husband, but wonders if she’s too old, that they were so crazy about each other when they first met that her breasts filled with milk. We eat corn on the cob and blueberry pie and gradually drift into that helium sphere of giggling late-night confidence where straight news takes on phantasmagoric color and exaggeration. Is it really possible that the Frenchman has been reborn in the Church of Christ and settled down contentedly beside a Vermont lake? Until past midnight we discuss our men. Mine is Italian, and faintly like the Frenchman, as hers is faintly like my American ex-husband. We exchange queasy smiles over this.

Noontime next day finds us at Gooseberry Beach, surrounded by rich people in sensible bathing suits and canvas hats. In the cold Atlantic we jump and splash with exaggerated girlish gestures. Gus is wearing a black suit as shiny as a mussel shell, and we are engaged in the sly game of women over forty, covertly scanning each other’s bodies for signs of wear. She has the same startling white skin as ever, only twining over her chest and collarbone is a large vein I don’t remember, sinuous as a vine.

She is telling me about her teenage daughters, beautiful bilingual girls who divide their year between New England and France. How creative they are, and how patient with the quirks of father and stepfather; how one is learning to fly, and another will study soil conservation in Madagascar. She shows a picture of a small Cape Cod house on a pastoral road. With vegetables and chickens in the back, and a tent permanently pitched for visitors from Boston and France. We scoop holes in the sand and our talk assumes a desperate velocity as the hour draws near for Gus to drive back to Massachusetts. As if finishing up a complicated board game, we attempt to comment on every single person we both know. Mercurial Edie; friends from Paris; my brothers; her raft of handsome tragic cousins; the boy who owned the guitar Gus played at that New Year’s party. And me, of course. “I always thought you were incredibly interesting,” she says, sifting a fistful of