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

then, after they had exchanged phone numbers, he annoyed her by trying to kiss her, an attempt she thwarted with an expert but not unfriendly shove.

She forgot all about him in the bustle of arrival, of settling into the program in Lausanne: the criminally dull classes in a Calvinist-gray building; the hikes straight out of Scout camp, punctuated with hearty choruses of “Chevaliers de la Table Ronde”; the cookouts with veal sausages from Migros supermarket; the excursions to Ouchy and the Château de Chillon; the dawning realization that she was still just an American in a mass of Americans, and that Europe was somewhere else. Until this morning, when her roommate Sarah, from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, yelled to her that she had a call, and she held the smooth, heavy receiver and found that it was not her parents or her jealous boyfriend. Instead, it was a voice speaking French, and sounding far more attractive than it had on the plane. Hello, hello, the boy said. We are near you—my father and I. We are at the most beautiful place for the weekend, just across the mountains. Will you join us? Please!

Anna giggled into the phone—her French acquiring a sudden fluency that had eluded her in her classes—that she had no way of getting there, whereupon he said, quite matter-of-factly, Well, take a taxi. He meant, she realized, take a taxi over the mountains and across the border into France.

And after that began a sustained act of nerve. A string of decisions in which Anna was more absolutely alone than she had ever been—even in the spring semester of her junior year, when she used to tell all those lies about dentist visits so that she could spend long afternoons in the back of Mark Florio’s van. Saying nothing to her roommates, she brushed her hair until it shone, washed her face, and tossed a pair of underpants, her birth-control pills, her passport, and all the money she had into an Indian shoulder bag printed with elephants. Then she left the dreary dormitory, with its cramped steel balconies and scanty fringe of pines, and walked down to the train station, where in the lineup of taxis she located a driver who didn’t look as if he would rape and abandon her in the middle of the Alps. Instinctively, she knew what to do. She gave the directions in a tone that she hoped sounded like that of someone used to casual international taxi trips of an hour or two, and kept her spine straight and her chin up in the backseat, as the taxi wound up and down high passes and through tunnels, and the landscape became more desolate and glorious. She tried not to imagine what would happen if the French boy didn’t pay the fare that was mounting so alarmingly on the meter; if it were all a practical joke and the taxi driver never found the small lakeside village and hotel whose names she’d scribbled on a piece of paper; what her mother—tiny and fragile but nicknamed the Enforcer by her daughters—would say, crackling furiously over long-distance lines, when she found out that Anna had squandered three weeks’ worth of traveler’s checks on a taxi ride. As they raced past vineyards and geranium-bedecked villages, Anna sat mentally counting the cash she had and wondering whether the driver would take her watch and Eurail pass and the diamond-stud earrings she had been given for graduation.

Then, suddenly, it was over: the taxi pulled up in front of a hotel, in a cobblestoned courtyard with an old well and clipped golden trees, the lake a jewel in the background, so different from Lake Geneva. And the tall blond boy was there, eagerly opening the car door, and the small father wafted the driver and her terror away with a fistful of francs. She had arrived where she was meant to be, where she had been heading all her life. And though they winced at her clothes, they were immediately complimentary. Ravishing, the father said, clapping his son on the back as if they had settled a bet. Very American, as you said, but with something more. He made a rectangle with the fingers and thumbs of both hands and peered through it as if through a camera. A very definite something, he added.

Now, at lunch, they even praise Anna for her good appetite, as if eating were somehow a rare talent. Eating course after extraordinary course with flavors intensified by their incantatory names: feuillantine d’escargots à l’achillée et pimprenelle; rissoles de poires aux fruits secs et sabayon. And wines: Chignin-Bergeron, Mondeuse. And coffee, and a plate of little squashy pastries that she wants to snatch and stuff into her elephant bag. She devours them and the chocolate truffles that follow, taking fewer than she’d like, forcing herself for the sake of decency to pause between each one. She tries an old liqueur from a bottle with spidery writing on the label, and it gives her throat a hot glazed feeling as she listens to the father talk about politics. There has been an election, an important one, and he has had something to do with it. It doesn’t interest Anna, but it gives resonance to the cloud of language around her, gives her the sense that she has stepped into a realm where high deeds are performed by grave men in dark ambassadorial suits, and the fates of nations decided.

When the father sees her straining to look attentive, he immediately stops talking about politics and switches back to compliments. How small her wrists are; how instinctively well she chose her food; what a wonderful university she will attend next fall—yes, he knows the name; who does not?—how remarkable that she speaks French with such ease and can even recognize a reference to Mallarmé: le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui. The son says little, staring at both his father and Anna. Occasionally he shows off by speaking in stilted