The Pleasing Hour

by Lily King

  “Why?”

  Guillaume studied the priest’s face for motive: doubt, scorn, or ridicule? The flaccid mouth, the small eyes beneath doughy eyelids revealed nothing but an enormous capacity for waiting for a response to a blunt question. He lifted one leg over the other.

  Lola instantly hated the bob of his foot and, when Guillaume didn’t answer, she bought him some time. “He’s always wanted to, ever since I can remember. He feels something—something powerful.”

  He nodded at Lola, then asked, leaning closer to her, “What does he feel?”

  “I want to be a priest,” Guillaume said, his confidence back but having heard nothing of the last exchange, “because I want to serve God as best I can while on this earth.”

  The priest turned reluctantly toward Guillaume. “Do you like this earth? Is it a good place?” He said the word good as if it were a word between them, a word only they could understand.

  “It would be impossible for me to say if I truly liked it, as I know no other for comparison. As for it being a good or bad place, I think it is both.”

  Lola watched as Maman let her eyes drift toward Papa’s bewildered expression. To her, it was no shock; Guillaume always spoke like that when he discussed religion.

  “You have gone to a few masses, heard a few sermons—in Paris I’m sure they’re quite stimulating—felt something, a shiver, a stirring in your soul, or maybe the cleanest, whitest silence that felt something like truth. It felt like—”

  “Please, Frederí, he’s only a—”

  “No, Maman.” Guillaume held out an untrembling hand to her. In that moment he seemed more her father than her son. “Let him finish.”

  The priest brought his chin to rest in his hand and spoke gently. “Guillaume, do you have any idea what you will sacrifice if you pursue this goal?”

  “A lot.”

  “Yes, a lot.” His pause was just long enough to exasperate Maman. She politely alluded to the time, with a hand on a watchless wrist, and suggested to Papa that they mustn’t keep the priest from his duties.

  Père Lafond, ignoring the exchange, said, “I entered the priesthood at sixteen. Do you know that since then I have rarely seen my family, never played soccer, never held the hand of a girl?” He looked beseechingly at Lola. An unfamiliar, mealy feeling clung to her skin. She glanced at her parents. They were watching Guillaume. No one had noticed the priest’s attentions toward her.

  “But it was God’s will,” Guillaume said.

  “God’s will,” he snapped. “What does a sixteen-year-old boy know about God’s will? What does God ever reveal about his will? You are a child, Guillaume. Remain a child. Let yourself be loved and indulged.”

  “God’s love is the most powerful of all,” Guillaume said.

  “You’re wrong,” the priest said. His fat face had collapsed, and his gaze had fallen to Lola’s left hand, resting on the arm of the sofa. “It took me thirty-four years as a priest to learn that it isn’t.” He turned back to Guillaume. “Don’t waste that kind of time yourself.”

  Maman stood up and nudged Lola. Papa and Guillaume followed. The priest walked them to the door, and although Lola was first, he shook Papa’s hand, then Guillaume’s. She wanted to scoot by unnoticed, but he was waiting for her. She held her breath. As he leaned down to kiss her cheek, he whispered, “Looking at you, I can reach out and touch my past.”

  As Papa steered Guillaume swiftly away down the corridor, Lola lagged behind, trying to hear the exchange between Maman and the priest.

  He was talking about her. “It’s remarkable, isn’t it? Even from the back I would swear it was her. Will you come again? Or perhaps I could come to Paris?”

  “I don’t know,” Maman said. “Perhaps sometime.” Then she appeared, stepped sideways over the threshold, but was jerked to a stop, one arm held fast in the lit room.

  “Nicole, please, tell me a few more things about Marie-Jo. Anything. Tell me the names of her children.”

  Her mother shook her head.

  “Why? Why can’t you just tell me their names?”

  “I’m sorry, Frederí. I don’t know their names.”

  Her arm was released without another sound, and she turned toward Lola without seeing her in the dim hallway. For a moment, Lola saw pain on her mother’s face as she walked unsteadily from the priest’s room. But once she recognized Lola, her expression and her movements smoothed themselves over instantly.

  Outside, the sun now bleached only the tips of the wild grasses in the church meadow, while below, closer to earth, remained dark and churning like sea reeds. Heavy clouds still clung to the hills.

  Maman could not be comforted by a hug, at least not Lola’s. Guillaume’s might have been different, but even to him she did not show weakness or need, not like Francine’s mother, who relied on her daughter’s excessive affection on bad days. You could not hurt Maman and you could not relieve her. With Papa it was just the opposite. You could offend him by simply walking past him in a room; you could bolster him with the most absent hug.

  Lola lingered on the stone steps, observing the world that lay before her: her father reaching in his coat pocket for the clump of keys he carried; Guillaume stamping in the cold, lifting the silver handle over and over yet knowing the car was still locked; and the whole depressed town beyond this street where there was no work and no words to soothe them.

  She felt her mother’s hand on her shoulder too late, just after she’d launched herself from the steps. She felt it, but it was too late and too cold to stop.

  In the car they clenched every muscle and rubbed themselves warm. When the engine started up, cold air blasted through the vents and her mother slammed the heat off violently. Lola willed the silence to continue, needing room to think about all she had witnessed. But her father ruined it.

  “Now there was a truly uplifting fellow. One of the chosen few—”

  “Don’t make things worse, Marc,” her mother said. “Just drive us away from here.”

  Her father asked what the priest had said to her, but she just shook her head.

  “Why did he want to know so much about Marie-Jo?” Lola said, hoping to help. “Did he love her?”

  “Yes,” her mother said.

  “A lot?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she didn’t love him?”

  “No.”

  “Who did she love?”

  “The man she married.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “A little.”

  “Do I really look like her?”

  “No.”

  It was always like this, trying to find out about her past. It was nearly impossible to get any information. Maman didn’t like to talk about things that had already happened, even recent events. Papa could think back fondly to a ham sandwich, but Maman only looked in one direction: straight ahead.

  After a few minutes, Guillaume asked, “When can we visit again?”

  No one answered him. When a blue sign for Paris appeared, Lola thought she heard her mother let out a whimper of relief.

  “When, Maman?” he persisted. “When?” And though he stopped asking after that, his voice seemed to linger in the car.

  Little bubbles of life cluttered the two lanes going south. Lola peered into the cars on the right as her father picked up speed. There were several families returning to the city. In one, the mother drove with one hand while everyone else slept. In another, the mother was leaning over into the back, trying to slap a child and missing, as her other children laughed. They passed a carload of teenagers smoking, then a man carefully picking his ear while a woman dozed on his shoulder, then an elderly couple staring straight ahead.

  When Guillaume began to read aloud, first in a whisper, then, as he lost himself in the words, louder, she was forced back into her own bubble. He was reading from the Book of Job, a part toward the end when Job is pleading for an answer and is given only silence from God.

  At the sound of the words, her father�
�s hands clenched the wheels tighter. He was angry now, angry at the day, the priest, and Guillaume’s relentless faith. But he was most angry, Lola guessed, at her mother, who had not been behind him when he marched to the car and who would not now answer him when he asked what had been said.

  Guillaume carefully turned a thin gilt-edged page.

  “Stop, Guillaume, please,” her father said.

  But he did not stop. He simply lowered his voice and read on doggedly, through God’s remaining speeches, Job’s repentance, and the part where he is given double what he had before and lives to see the birth of four generations of his family, to the end.

  “‘Then Job died,’” Guillaume said with satisfaction, “‘old and full of years.’”

  Lola vowed to remember this day, and every day that came after it. She would recall Guillaume’s powdered cheeks and his stubborn voice. Years from now, she would tell him how it was through her eyes. And when her children asked about her childhood in Paris, she would have hours of detail for them, great reels of film to project onto their imaginations. She would remember everything about Maman, but she would not be like her: she would never bury a part of her life in a silent grave.

  Odile

  ABOVE HER, THE SOUND OF ALEXANDRE’S SOLES ON THE DECK QUICKENED ODILE’S hands at her dressing table. Do the shadow first, Maman always told her, though all of Odile’s friends and all the magazines advised doing it last. The bell rang, his two short jabs at the button, and her mother was in motion, feet sweeping across the kitchen, the coatroom, and up the stairs before Odile could put a sound to the breath she had caught to tell someone to answer it. There was an initial swell of greeting (they sounded, at this distance, in all their enthusiasm, like four or five old friends meeting haphazardly on the street), then the pair of voices and the two pairs of shoes spilled overlappingly back down the stairs and into the living room. She picked up the small baton and heard, as she always did with this gesture and this faint silvery smell, shadow first.

  The voices were clearer now, separate, each waiting politely for its turn. They exchange words like money, she thought, with no further reflection. Instead, she berated herself for running late, for allowing these noises in the living room to occur without her.

  When she had finished her eyes, she stood before the long mirror that hung on the inside of the closet door, and though there was no part of her that wasn’t contained within its parameters, she had the sense that she couldn’t see all of what others saw when she stood before them. Some essential thing was missing. She looked down at her shoes, then back up, but a true focus eluded her. She stepped closer. She had seen this face too much. It was neither pretty nor ugly. It did not exist as other faces existed. There was a cheek, an eye, a lip—but unintegrated, pulled apart, rearranged: one of Picasso’s Mesdamoiselles. The familiar urge to smash the mirror seized, then released her. She took a deep breath, forced a polite smile, and shut the closet door.

  She found them on the sofa, Maman sitting sideways with her legs curled beneath her and her shoes dropped on the carpet below, and Alexandre at the other end, an arm draped along the top edge, more comfortable than Papa ever seemed upon his own furniture.

  “Alexandre was just telling me about Paul’s accident. I can’t believe it.” What she meant was, I can’t believe you haven’t told me.

  “Have you seen him today?” Odile asked Alexandre. They were both looking at her without full approval. The dress was unflattering. The square neck didn’t suit her. Or perhaps it was the high waist. She waited for their insincere compliments.

  “No. I’ll go tomorrow morning.” He felt guilty about this. He turned away from her, to his thumb on the seam of the cushion.

  She stood hovering above them in the new dress, which now felt like a wooden barrel. Weren’t they going to say anything at all? “Apparently his mind is not very clear yet,” she said to her mother, unwilling to speak of Paul in his hospital room, clutching his sheets.

  But Maman wouldn’t ask for more detail. “How awful.” She said this as she might say “How splendid” or “How peculiar,” the potential tragedy of it glancing off her easily. “Do you cycle too, Alexandre?” She didn’t want them to leave.

  “I don’t even own a bike.” He lifted his hand off the couch in mock depravity. He was completely relaxed in her house, not tortured the way she was when talking to his parents. He enjoyed being around her mother’s beauty, as if she were a vista or a shimmering body of water. She was beautiful, even now, curled up like a child in one of the long denim shirts she wore around the house. But the skin around the corners of her mouth had begun to sag, and her neck was ringed with three imprecise creases. The jewels of age, she had said once in a dressing room, tracing them in the mirror.

  “That’s just as well,” Maman said.

  The time had passed for compliments. “We should be off.”

  “You don’t want to be the first to arrive.”

  “There’ll be traffic.” Odile shot Alexandre a look to pry him off the sofa.

  He responded slowly, rising like an older man, shaking one pant leg and then the other from where they had caught on the rim of his socks.

  Her mother walked them to the stairs and reached in the closet for a coat.

  “The gray one, Maman.”

  “Not the white?”

  “All right, the white.”

  The coat was handed to Alexandre, who opened it for her to step into. Maman smiled greedily at them. “You look beautiful,” she said to Odile.

  Too late, too late, Odile thought, to the rhythm of their feet going up the stairs.

  In the car, Alexandre reached for his seat belt, careful to smooth down his lapel as he slid the strap over his chest.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I think we should wear these. Put yours on too.” He didn’t look at her as he fished around for her clasp, buried deep between their seats.

  “Because of what happened to Paul?”

  He gave no answer.

  They had visited Paul the day before, and though he seemed to recognize them when they came in, the longer they stayed, the more confused he got, their identities shifting from friends to cousins to parents and back again. At one point he had grabbed at his bedsheets frantically, gathering one part, then another, convinced they were papers, papers at his father’s law firm where he worked on Saturdays, that needed sorting. The impossible task had filled him with panic, and finally Odile took his hands and put them under the covers and smoothed the sheets back over his chest, assuring him that the papers were sorted and he could rest. Alexandre, through all of this, sat in a chair near the window. By the time they left, sweat had darkened his collar. But he wouldn’t talk about it on the way home.

  The dinner was across the city, near the Bastille. There was little traffic, and they arrived early. The Girards’ apartment was on the fifth floor, and from across the street she could see, through the three balcony doors, the dining room and the tops of the tall chairs, the tips of flower petals and candlesticks, and the teardrops of the chandelier’s cut glass, which held in thin spears the deep red of the dining room walls.

  Alexandre took her hand as they crossed the street, and still she felt unsteady and conspicuous, as if she were arriving at this dinner alone.

  The apartment was huge, the ceilings vaulted, the spaces between chairs and tables vast. Off to one side was a wide carpeted staircase. This was the kind of apartment Maman had always wanted, though she thought Mme. Girard tasteless. She had pastel slipcovers, striped and plaid in the same room. Beneath her chin tonight hung a heavy brooch in the shape of a cornucopia.

  “You two look stunning as usual,” she said, kissing them, ushering them in. “Micheline!” she called down the hall. “The royal couple is here!” They had been dubbed that by someone’s parents. The perfect pair, the magnificent match. They had heard it all. “Micheline!”

  Mme. Girard was exasperated by their early arrival and Micheline’s absence, but Al
exandre appeased her with lavish praise of the way she had decorated the apartment (they had moved in last summer) and, instantly mollified, she led them on a tour, forgetting she had already done so in September. When they came back down, the living room was half full of guests relinquishing coats and scarves to one maid or giving drink orders to another.

  They all stood chatting amid the striped and the plaid furniture. Although she was aware of facing it during the long conversation with Jeanne and Christine, Odile only glanced once in the mirror that hung over the fireplace. When she did, she caught herself unawares and for a split second was able to see herself as she might see another: a pale, pretty face, a wide, perhaps inappropriate smile, and strong shoulders that held the posture and poise of her mother, which pleased her. The square neck was fine. She turned back and spoke with more confidence about the absurdity of the baccalauréat, which Christine’s older sister had just failed for the third time.

  When she was beckoned into a conversation behind her, she noticed the threshold to the dining room, the symmetry of the two long rows of chair backs, the stretch of table with all its leaves in place and covered by a white linen cloth bordered with navy satin. The first course sprawled in colorful porcelain platters along the length of the table. Some sort of cold fish, Odile guessed. On the sideboards were stacked the plates and bowls for the following courses. The dark green curtains rustled slightly at the edges of the balcony doors, nearly black in the dim chandelier light, a light that smoldered orange within those blood-red walls. At the center of the table, the unlit candles waited like willowy divas preparing to perform. Something must be done, Odile thought, with a scene like that.

  Whenever she felt this urge to still and preserve a moment, every other scene within reach rushed toward her with the same kind of urgency: the kitchen, glimpsed briefly whenever the door was swung open, where Mme. Girard conducted her orchestra of hired help, and here in this living room where the boys and the girls had neatly divided, the girls near the hearth and the mirror and plaid, the boys among the stripes and the old foxed photograph of M. Girard’s grandfather on the day of his appointment to the Académie Française. She wanted to paint these boys in their creased coats and shaved napes, these girls in their stiff sleeves and steep heels, the slopes of their shoulders and the poses of their hands more and more similar each Saturday night to their parents’, which could be seen in some other living room in another huge apartment in Paris.