The Little French Bistro

by Nina George

  “They do move, it’s just that no one sees it. There’s a place in America,” Sidonie went on, “called Death Valley. Boulders roam across the sand. No one pulls them, but the tracks are visible. They’re hundreds of yards long. Stones move.”

  “They move when we’re not looking?” asked Colette. Are we really discussing stones? she thought.

  “Yes,” whispered Sidonie. “Nobody sees them moving.”

  “I thought we had a fixed position,” said Colette.

  “We?” asked Sidonie.

  “We stones.”

  For the first time, Sidonie turned to look at Colette. “They say that standing stones in Brittany move on Christmas Eve when the clock is striking twelve, heading toward the sea to drink. But it’s not enough for us stones to do what we want only once. We move because we’re searching for the object of our desire,” she said, and Colette didn’t dare to blink for fear of missing a single moment of Sidonie looking at her.

  “But what do stones desire?” she asked, staring straight at Sidonie, although she could already sense what it was. She sensed that she had always known what Sidonie was trying to express. Something inside her snapped in half. It burst apart like a rock, and she could taste powdered stone on her tongue.

  —

  Marianne cleared the tables, even rescuing several empty cider glasses from the flowerpots. She glanced over at Yann, who was sitting on a folding chair next to the stage, his pencil flying across the thick pages of a drawing pad. His eyes kept seeking Marianne amid the crowd, and every time they met hers across the intervening gap, time seemed to skip a beat. She felt something in her chest explode like a tear splashing on someone’s hand. The next moment her view was again blocked by a dancing couple. Marianne loved the instants when she took a few steps to one side and watched Yann scanning the throng for her. He’s looking for me.

  She took a deep breath and then exhaled all the air from her lungs. Perfume, barbecue aromas, salt water, sea air. A night steeped in celebration and laughter.

  He wants to find me.

  She lifted her tray and spied some tartrate crystals in the glasses.

  I’m in love.

  She imagined what it would be like to sleep with Yann Gamé. Yet she soon forgot about it when she caught sight of Laurine, who was balancing two trays and was therefore unable to protect herself from the persistent groping of a drunken guest. Marianne strode toward the man and pushed him away. The stunned man spun around.

  “Try that again,” she announced, “and I’ll chop your mitts off.” The man turned pale and vanished into the swirling crowd.

  —

  Paul spun Rozenn out of her rapid dance step to face him. It was just as it had always been: their bodies understood each other blindly; there was no need for their limbs to negotiate.

  Initially, though, Rozenn had been completely defensive.

  “One last dance, the last of our lives. I love you, Rozenn, but I’m going to let you go. Let this be my kenavo.”

  Only then had she stepped into his arms. Paul had asked the musicians to play her favorite song, discreetly slipping them a few banknotes to encourage them to do so immediately.

  Rozenn was a cat, egotistical and devoted and yet wolf-like, brazen in her ingenuous passion and as elegant as a queen.

  “Does he treat you well?” asked Paul, when she had completed a twist and two locksteps and was once more spinning within his ambit.

  “He treats me like a lady.”

  “Oh, and how did I treat you? Like an Indian elephant?”

  A surge of rage made her strut even more proudly and outrageously around Paul. She pushed him away; he pulled her to him.

  “I felt like a heap of nothing after our divorce,” he hissed into her hair as he steered her mercilessly backward through the other dancing couples.

  “Then it served its purpose,” growled Rozenn, slipping from his grip and scissoring her legs to the left and right of his thighs. He evaded them with a quick sideways movement and snapped her body backward until she lay in his arms with her head dangling.

  “Is divorce forever?” he said, allowing himself to be sucked into the dark tunnels of her eyes. “Like marriage, until death saves you from one another?”

  Rozenn flicked herself upright again, and Paul pulled her so tight that their lips were only a butterfly’s wingbeat apart. He could smell her perfume, the soap she always laid in her underwear pile, and the cider that was the last thing she had drunk. Her fingernails impaled themselves into the flesh of his back. “You good-for-nothing bastard,” she spat.

  Their dance was a battle, in which passion deployed its full arsenal of weapons: humiliation and spite, yearning and torture, a faint echo of tenderness that caused equal offense.

  Rozenn noticed Paul’s manhood pressing against her hip. She gazed into his eyes, and he saw triumph, desire and deep despair in that look. They were like two magnets that switched poles as they clashed, and were forced apart before gathering for the charge, colliding again and again, recklessly, shamelessly, obsessively. It was lust. They wanted each other so badly.

  Paul didn’t need to look at Serge for confirmation that the younger man didn’t like what he saw. Serge could see how Paul shook something deep inside Rozenn that he himself would never be able to touch. He was clasping his hands together so tightly that his knuckles went white. He couldn’t stand up, even as Paul danced away from the breakwater with Rozenn and into the night; he just couldn’t.

  —

  Colette couldn’t tear her eyes from Sidonie’s face. She felt like a pinball balancing on the quivering tip of the final flippers above the drain.

  “What is it?” she had asked, and with those three words she had thrown everything into question, including her life. Especially her life. It could have all been so different.

  “Do you still not know?” Sidonie said, waves breaking in her eyes. Tears.

  “Is it too late?” said Colette.

  Before Sidonie could answer, she was startled by the sound of glasses shattering on the asphalt, followed by shrieks and a furious man’s voice. Serge had upended the table after watching Paul lead Rozenn off the dance floor and into the sheltering shadows.

  Jean-Rémy, Simon and Laurent the butcher wrestled the raging man to the ground and locked him into the cooler with the cold-eyed mullets and half-baked baguettes.

  The musicians onstage urged all the dancers to join in with a gavotte, the Breton circle dance, which only worked when everyone danced with everyone else: a grandfather with his niece, sporting copious piercings; the mayor with the village’s scandalous widow; her lover with the vicar’s wife, only joined by their little fingers. The men skipped on the spot as the women circled them with a mixture of flirtatiousness and diffidence.

  Pascale found herself next to a boat mechanic from Raguenez, who asked her if she couldn’t lend him the white witch she was obviously training, just this once for his garden. Pascale presumed that he must be talking about her rake, and accepted, although of course she would have to ask her husband first. From behind the bar, Padrig was handing out miniature bottles of chouchen, while Jean-Rémy watched Laurine bending down to talk to one of the Parisians who spent every July lounging in their expensive holiday homes in Port Manec’h. A civil servant in ironed jeans. The chef could hardly bear to watch her smiling and nodding while the eyes of the Parisian in his smart jacket bored into every part of her anatomy. He nudged Padrig. “Go and ask that ugly Parisian what he wants to drink.”

  “The only one I can see is very cute,” murmured Padrig, as he minced away.

  Jean-Rémy thought of all the flowers he had secretly bought for Laurine. They were lying in the cooler alongside the letters he had written her and the compliments that had never made it past his lips.

  —

  Colette laid her hand on Sidonie’s, and the latter’s fingers enclosed her old friend’s. The sight of the two women, whose faces expressed what their lips had never uttered, deterred Simon from
asking Colette for a dance. He carried the present he had wanted to offer her, along with his feelings, onto the Gwen II, which was nearby. He now knew with desperate certainty that Colette would never be his. His heart shattered like an anchor chain snagged on the rocks.

  —

  The ball broke up soon after the midnight firework display. The breakwater lay there like an exhausted lover who cannot decide whether to pull the sheets over her repeatedly caressed skin. Marianne scoured the bushes and the quayside for abandoned glasses. Yann had helped to put away the chairs and was now sitting in the kitchen having a glass of Calvados with Jean-Rémy.

  She found the last glasses on the empty stage. She set down the tray, then stepped out into the middle of the stage. The song she had played to the sea rose inside her—the song about the son of the moon. She began to hum the tune, and imagined that she was wearing a red dress, and that, at the end of the song, flushed, laughing faces turned to her and applause broke out. She opened her eyes, embarrassed: it was an unattainable dream.

  Yann stepped out of Ar Mor’s doorway, from where he had been observing her, took her by the hand and helped her down from the stage. With the strength she found so delightful in him, he pulled her close. Very close. His body was radiating a warmth that worked its way under her skin. Then he gently took her face in his hands. His mouth moved nearer. She didn’t want to evade it, and even if she had, he wouldn’t have allowed it. He kissed her.

  Marianne shut her eyes, opened them, closed them again and let him kiss her, kissing him back, drowning in desire. She immediately succumbed to this rapture. Only when it grew cold did they stop embracing and seeking each other’s lips, again and again. It was good beyond compare, and when she searched Yann’s eyes for something that might prove the contrary, she found only desire.

  Yann carried her tray into the kitchen.

  When Marianne looked in the mirror behind the counter, she caught a fleeting glimpse of the young girl she had once been. Her lips were red from kissing.

  “I have to paint you,” whispered Yann, stepping up behind her. Insistent yet apologetic, as if alarmed by his own urges. “I have to.”

  Yann and Marianne didn’t say a word as they made their way, closely entwined, up the stairs to the Shell Room.

  The July day had left its warmth under the eaves. Yann lit the seven candles that Marianne had placed on the windowsill.

  “I see you,” he whispered.

  “It’s too dark for you to see me properly,” replied Marianne. Her mind was empty. She wanted—oh how she wanted!—to sleep with this man, and yet she was scared.

  Lothar’s face appeared. She drove it away, locked it into an empty room and swallowed the key. Tonight would divorce her from everything associated with her former life.

  “I see you with my heart,” said Yann, and took off his glasses before picking up his drawing pad and a piece of charcoal. “Please.”

  She sat down on the floor by the window and leaned against the wall. Yann’s charcoal chirruped on the paper. He didn’t see her, and yet still he saw her. He drew her face. He moved closer. She closed her eyes, imagining that he would kiss her, his lips melding themselves to hers, and she would devour him.

  Yann used up twenty sheets. Everything about her was unique, deep and authentic. He drew Marianne as he felt her.

  She blew out the candles. Now she was on the island—her personal Avalon. Nothing mattered anymore: not time, not space, not place. She undid the top buttons of her blouse. Yann leaned forward to switch on the small art nouveau lamp on the bedside table. Marianne held her blouse together. Slowly he took her fingers in his and pushed them to one side. His hands were warm on her skin as they eased open her top. He breathed in, gazing steadfastly into her eyes. She was so scared.

  “Mon amour,” he whispered, moving even closer, and his hungry fingers helped her to open the remaining buttons. As their hands met, a tempest struck her island, sweeping her fears away. She was gripped with uncontainable impatience.

  “Maintenant,” she moaned. “Now!”

  There was more tearing than undressing, more clumsiness than gradual exploration, and Marianne looked and kissed and touched as everything offered itself up for her to experience and savor at once. Looking at Yann, watching Yann, kissing Yann, pulling Yann to her, running her fingers through his hair, over his face, pressing his hands to her body, smelling him. It was clear that he wanted her naked. That he wanted her. As she lay on the bed before him, solemnity and serenity returned to her island.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said, laying his hand on her birthmark. “That’s your soul: fire, love and strength. You are a woman born of fire.”

  This time he traced her with his fingers and his mouth. He sculpted her body with his desire, and to her it seemed as if her body became more feminine, more beautiful, more erotic under his caresses.

  Marianne bit the pillow with lust. She laughed and she moaned, she called Yann’s name into the night, and still he didn’t enter her. He touched her with great concentration, her passion and well-being his only concern.

  She lost interest in herself, and felt as if she were jumping from a bridge a second time. She ran her hands over his skin, which was soft and supple, taut over firm muscles and less firm ones. She sensed that Yann too was fearful about showing himself to her. That reassured her.

  They laughed and embraced, clinging to each other and kissing without end. They were filled with joyous abandon, affection and desire.

  When, after a time, he entered her, infinitely slowly, Yann looked at her and whispered her name in that harmonious voice of his. Marianne. Marianne? Marianne!

  And then he was so deep inside her, she panted, “At last!” Her cry delighted him.

  At last. At last. At last.

  She felt every emotion at once—rejoicing and stunned horror that she had gone without this for so long.

  “Je t’aime,” whispered Yann.

  Marianne had abandoned herself to him and didn’t recognize her own body as it felt, moved, demanded, tempted and pressed against Yann. She wanted more, more, everything. Now, right now! She never wanted to forgo such pleasure again!

  She loved his moans, his abandon, his movements. It was as if his every slow, pleasurable thrust were meant to convey to her how desperately he had waited for this moment, and how he never wanted to stop. They gazed into each other’s eyes, and Yann smiled as he made love to her.

  Without warning, Marianne experienced an orgasm that seemed to originate all over her—deep inside her, inside her mouth, underneath her belly button. She felt as though someone were sucking her into a deep well. She lay completely still and allowed the waves to break over her. She moaned. It was lust and grief, relief and torment. It was heavenly.

  Yann stared unwaveringly at her and he didn’t stop. He didn’t stop.

  When the waves ebbed away, she began to laugh, quietly at first, then with increasing freedom. Yann looked at her, reined back his movements, smiled and asked, “What?” She didn’t know how to tell him in French that she realized this: that having orgasms gave a woman a sense of freedom and ease.

  She laughed, stroked Yann’s intelligent face and said in a voice she didn’t recognize as her own, “Encore.” Again. I want everything, Yann. Know my body. Know my soul. Start right away.

  —

  Marianne got up and opened the window. The silky, cool night air felt freshly rinsed and it hit her flushed skin like a soft flurry of feathery snowflakes. She took a long, deep breath.

  When Yann had come…Mon Dieu, she hadn’t known that men could come like that. It was incredible. It was a drug to see him in the throes of passion, to feel him discharge his energy and try to bury himself deeper in her, to dissolve and melt within her, followed by the moment he arrived, sought peace and found it. The way he had looked at her and gasped her name.

  “May I draw you again now?” he asked her from the bed.

  “Before and after?” she said in German, then, imitating t
he tone of a shopping channel: “Do you too want a change of look?”

  She handed him the tile whose depiction of Kerdruc harbor and a small red boat had brought her here. “That’s why I came. It’s as if your tile called me to your side.”

  He pulled her to him, enlacing her with his arms. “We take coincidences like that one very seriously here, very seriously indeed,” he said deliberately. “They are life’s signals to us.”

  “Those were precisely the kind of coincidences I was missing.”

  A man whom love has ignored must do something mindless until he is once more capable of lucid thought, which was why Simon spent hours sanding his old boat. Colette hadn’t wanted him.

  It was a steamy July day, the kind one wished would end with a thunderstorm; the kind that brought new insights, coolness and dreams, which it then poured into people’s hearts. Paul was sitting on a folding chair.

  “There are many mazy paths to love. Probably more paths than there are in the whole of Brittany.”

  Simon kept sanding.

  “I mean, look at that chef. He thinks no one knows he’s in love with Laurine, but everyone knows—apart from her. Maybe Laurine doesn’t know herself whether she’s in love with him.”

  “So you’re the great expert on women now, are you?” grunted Simon.

  “I divide women into three types—”

  “You’re always doing that.”

  “The first love being in love, the second love making people fall in love with them, and the third—”

  “Are you back together with Rozenn?”

  “Partly.”

  “I can imagine which part.” Simon stretched with a grimace.

  “I’m her lover.”

  “What? She’s staying with Serge?”

  “She likes him.”

  “And she sleeps with you.”

  “She likes that even more.”

  “Tell me, Paul, haven’t you learned anything in your life? Women don’t take seriously men who claim to be lovers. That’s just the way it is: every woman wants a man who says to her, ‘I want you entirely, or not at all.’ ”