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

embrace, neither sleeping nor talking, until Étienne moves his legs restlessly and complains of a stomach ache. It was the fish, perhaps, he opines, in a way that Anna doesn’t yet know is very Gallic. My father has something for an upset stomach. I should go and ask him. I’ll just pull on some clothes. Étienne sits up in bed, his pink muscular shoulders looking as new as those of a plastic doll against the lamplight. He swings his legs out of the bed. But then he pauses and looks for an instant back over his shoulder at Anna. There is no expression at all in his round blue eyes. Non, je ne vais pas, he says. I won’t go. I’d wake him. He wouldn’t mind, of course, but—He breaks off, and Anna can clearly picture the melon-shaped head of Paul the soldier, with his smudge of shaved hair and preposterous eyelashes. The steadfast tin soldier, she thinks for some reason, and for a moment she feels sorry for Étienne. He slowly gets back into bed, and there is nothing for the two of them to do but make love again, which they do without any pretense of tenderness until Anna feels scraped raw. Afterward, though, she sleeps so soundly that even a summer storm over the lake barely disturbs her.

Sunday morning they awaken late, and then eat a huge breakfast, naked, at the window overlooking the lake, which lies flat under a newly washed sky as church bells resound from the mountain villages. Things are wonderful again. Étienne shows Anna how to sip her chocolate through a lump of sugar, and she piles her bread with a half-inch layer of butter that has an elusively fresh taste, like pastures, a taste she can’t get enough of. She just has to gobble it and gobble it. She thinks it is the best breakfast she has ever had, and the taste is sharpened by regret because they have to dress and go. Étienne makes her a present of the jeans, and she privately vows not to wash them for the rest of the summer. Then they leave the room and go down to meet Olivier, who is sitting alone reading Les Nouvelles Littéraires. He is impeccably brushed and shaved and cheerful, dressed this morning in moleskin trousers and yet another handsome sweater. Et voici les enfants, he says, with a real look of pleasure at the sight of them. Fresh from your honeymoon. There is no sign and no mention made of Paul. Anna, smiling forgiveness at Olivier, can almost believe that the soldier was only a ghost, perhaps a figure from the Prior’s Room who had stepped out of a painting in the night and vanished at sunrise.

They get into the car, a large shining sedan delivered reverently to them by the hotel attendant. And swaddled in the scent of leather they head over the mountains toward Lausanne and her student life. She and Étienne sit in the backseat—Olivier makes a half-serious complaint about having to play chauffeur—and kiss. All at once, she feels madly in love. Below them, the Lac d’Annecy is getting smaller. Étienne quotes yet another terrible American rock song and begs her—as his father’s head twitches skeptically in the driver’s seat—to come and live with him in Paris once she has finished her summer course. Though she knows that it won’t happen, this proposal puts the cap on Anna’s satisfaction: she imagines a garret in twilight, a glittering net of boulevards, and a lover at her side who is not exactly Étienne but just as French. And with this new image in her mind she strains her neck to look back at the lake for the last time for approximately twenty years.

After that time passes, she’ll come back to Clos Saint Barthélemy and even sleep in the Prior’s Room. She will come back with a European husband—one might almost call him the product of this earlier visit: a kind, conservative man who is still enough in love with her to sulk when she tells him that she actually spent a night here once before. She will come back fully educated, well employed and well dressed—if not as well as the woman in pink—familiar with the regional wines and cuisine, the goût de terroir. She’ll be able to distinguish between the different gradations of prosperous Frenchmen and Germans and Italians, and will understand what red-cheeked soldiers and young American girls mean to them. And as a mother herself she’ll give a private shudder at the chance she took so many years before, throwing her lot in so unquestioningly with that curious father and son. The singular pair she never heard from again, who for all their crotchets turned out to be generous and benevolent gate-keepers to the world that has become hers.

And only at night, when the shutters are closed—the hangings in the Chambre de Prieur have been changed from ocher to leaf-green, the frescoes expertly restored, the bathroom remodeled, and a minibar added—will she admit to herself how dreadfully dull the room is now. She’ll glance at the painted saints around her and remember—not for long, because otherwise it becomes depressing—how she once had a body so perfect that they leaned out of the walls to look at it. And how she lay under the decorated beams with legs and mouth open to take in the foreignness and the mystery, her appetite the measure of her ignorance; alive in the glory, possible only then, of being hungry, hungry, hungry.

For inspiration and moral support, I would like to thank Amanda Urban, Lee Boudreaux, Courtney Hodell, Dan Menaker, Alice Quinn, Bill Buford, Hilton Als, Helen Garner, Elinor Schiele, Catharine Lencíone, Susie Ropolo, Laura Anderson, Sherry Davis, Sarah Parsons, Kit Parsons, Michael Chisholm, Nancy Wilson and many others of the Baldwin School, Mabel Rooks Taylor, Lucy Rooks Hall, Mabel Lee Revaleon, and the rest of the Lee-Jacob-Bartolomeo-Taylor clan.

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