Fair Warning

by Robert Olen Butler

  “I do see.”

  “You understand the French language very well, yes?”

  “Not so well, I think.”

  “I think you do, my darling,” he said. “It is difficult for a Frenchman, you know, about his language. We are instructed in school very harshly. Like in many of my businesses, there is always intimidation. We are made to feel very stupid from a young age if we do not grasp the nuances of this very complex language. Your language is complex, as well, but you are very tolerant of the usage, I think. Your intellectuals even delight in taking up the language of the barefooted ones, so to speak.”

  “Isn’t language mostly a matter of naming things?” I said. “We like names in English, the more the better.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, and the waiter returned now with a bouillabaisse-couscous and lamb chops with poached eggs on top and lying on a bed of tomatoes and eggplant. “The name of this is chouchouka,” Alain said, lifting a chop onto my plate.

  I ate and Alain spoke of his language some more—the fear it strikes in the hearts even of Frenchmen. “I often disagreed with the man’s politics,” Alain said, “but I greatly admired François Mitterrand as a man, particularly as a man who was not afraid to use the imperfect subjunctive mood in public. Even, how you say, off the cuff. This takes courage, my darling.”

  He laughed softly at his own observation and offered his hand across the table. I took it. The lamb was very nice. The wine, too, though my mind had drifted when he’d told me what it was and I hadn’t had the courage to ask again. It was red. I was growing sleepy once more.

  “I remember his mistress and their daughter at his funeral,” I said.

  Alain nodded and let my hand go. “It was very passionate and dignified all at once,” he said.

  I suppose. Mitterrand felt like a collector to me, somehow.

  “And he kept his cancer from the public all through his presidency,” Alain said.

  “Would it have taken more courage to speak of the cancer than in the imperfect subjunctive?” I said.

  Alain laughed. “No. Less so. By far. He would have had our sympathy from the disease. To speak the language incorrectly, too many of us would have expected his knuckles to be rapped.”

  Alain leaned back in his chair and spread his hands, which spread his shoulders, which showed the fountain pen in his shirt pocket.

  “May I see your pen?” I asked.

  The non sequitur—and perhaps all the talk of language—made him mutter in French, a thing he’d rarely done with me. “Mais oui,” he said and he plucked the pen from his pocket and handed it across the table.

  I knew about fountain pens from an auction a couple of years ago. This was a large, handsome pen from 1930, a Waterman Patrician—arguably the finest Waterman marque. It was a color they’d called onyx, a dark cream with burgundy marbling and burgundy tips at either end, and there was a gold art deco band at the base of the cap—a multitude of tight little vertical cutouts with pin-dots at top and bottom. Alain’s pen was in fine condition, though its cap was a few shades darker than the barrel, quite common for these pens.

  “I write with the pens I collect,” Alain said, as if completing the thought in my head. It was use that darkened the caps. He said, “I like to find excellent examples but I also rather like a trace of the dead man who valued the thing before me.”

  “Provenance,” I said.

  “Even not quite so worked out as that. I don’t know who he was, the man who bought that pen seventy years ago, but I am content with the darkening of the pen from all the words he wrote.”

  Some tightness in me let go at this sentiment. I liked this in Alain.

  I gently unscrewed the cap and the gold nib was enormous, flaring wide and then arrowing down to a fine point. I pressed the tip against my thumbnail and the nib flared, leaving a spot of burgundy ink.

  “I love flexible nibs,” he said.

  I realized I was focusing intently on this object now and I felt calm at last—this was who I was after all—and I hoped the weirdness that had begun on the plane and had carried through the Ritz and this meal was at an end. I circled back to the thought of signing my papers beside him in the bed. This was the perfect object for the task. I angled the nib into the light. I knew the words I’d find engraved there—I’d sold a turquoise-and-gold Patrician pen and pencil set for three thousand dollars in the auction—and I saw the familiar “Patrician” etched into the gold, and “Waterman’s Ideal.”

  I looked up at Alain. His eyes were on my hands, one of which held the cap of his pen, the other the barrel. After a moment he lifted his eyes to mine but I drew him back to my hands. I angled the cap slightly upward, showing the dark opening of it, and I worked the barrel forward between my fingers so that it seemed to emerge there from my hand, the lovely marbled barrel, and I drew it close to the cap and it went gently in. I turned it once, twice, a third time and it held tight.

  I looked at Alain and he was fixed intently on the joined pen held at either end in my two hands. And he was wide-eyed. I felt like giggling. But I kept my face straight and I let go with the cap hand and with my fingertips at the very end of the barrel I let the pen turn upward, slowly, until it was upright before his face. This was Paris, after all, and so I softened my voice into an après-amour purr. “Nice pen,” I said.

  It was dark. It was past ten. We stepped out of the restaurant and immediately into the limousine. We slid away and this was starting to feel very familiar, too, making out with Alain in a car behind black-tinted windows. Only now, the distant scroll of lights and shadows was Paris.

  The making out was nice, though. I thought of Alain’s fountain pen—that is, how he liked the signs of some unknown, long-dead man writing with it—a businessman, likely, for the Patrician had been an expensive pen—and as I touched Alain’s tongue with mine, his lips with mine, this was the focus of my ardor, his regard for the faintest traces of a past human life found on a beautiful object.

  His hand went eventually to my breast and we kissed some more as he stroked me into life there, and with the hand he also posed a question that finally we paused for him to ask. He did it indirectly. “Are you interested in a bistro or such tonight?” It was clear from his voice that he wasn’t.

  As for me, I was still weary. And I was, frankly, wet. I was ready to make love at last to Alain Bouchard. “Not tonight,” I said.

  “Good,” he said, and his strong left arm drew me tightly to him as he pushed the intercom button and said to the chauffeur, “The Ritz.”

  This surprised me a little, the assumption that we’d do this at my hotel. I pulled away slightly from his embrace to explore this. “The hotel?” I said.

  “Yes? Isn’t it good, the room?”

  “Of course. But it’s so neutral.”

  “It’s the Ritz, n’est-ce pas?”

  “I’d love to go where you live,” I said.

  “It’s not so nice as the Ritz.”

  “But it’s you.”

  He thought this over for a moment, looking at me carefully. We were passing through residential streets and the spill of light into the car was meager. I could not see his face to read it. Then he said, “Of course. I must become accustomed to this. You know exactly the right thing to do.”

  Which was more or less the right thing to say. He touched the intercom button and he spoke low and quickly to the chauffeur, but I heard a quai address, and then I returned to my place in the crook of his arm. We rode in silence. There’d been no sarcasm in his voice—none that I could detect—when he’d complimented my sense of the right thing, but I was vaguely troubled by having to persuade him to take me to the place where he lived in Paris.

  “Are you sure this is all right?” I said.

  He drew me closer. “Of course. I’m sorry I didn’t think to invite you at first. I’m not so very much at home there anymore. It has certain associations. Do you understand?”

  I suddenly did. Past lives. He preferred his fountain pen’s lo
ng-dead anonymous businessman to the wife—or wives—who’d shared the apartment. “Listen …” I began.

  He cut me off. “No. You’re right. You will make my own apartment new for me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  I burrowed in and the silence now was a sweet silence, a placid waiting for the time and the place of our first deep intimacy.

  And drifting by through these blackened windows were lamplight and tree shadow and a dark sense of an unbroken four-story run of facades. I reminded myself this was Paris. Perhaps I didn’t know exactly the right thing to do. Perhaps we needed Paris first, Alain and I. But I’d heard the preference in his voice, driven by his desire for me. It was my preference too.

  I turned my eyes from the window. I touched his hand.

  Paris could wait.

  He palmed my elbow and we were across the pavement and I glanced over my shoulder at the hunkered back end of Notre Dame, lit bright down the Seine, and we crossed Alain’s lobby and entered an ironwork elevator. The door clanked shut and we began to creak upward. Abruptly his hands were on my shoulders and he turned me around to face him and he pressed me close and kissed me and I had my own associations, I realized—in this case, with elevators—and it soured the moment for me. But he expected no more from me for now; we simply pressed and kissed until the car heaved to a halt. He let go and drew the iron door back and then we were at his apartment door with a scrolled brass knob in the center.

  I went in before him.

  As who, exactly?

  I stopped in his foyer. All about me were objects of rarity and provenance, and of course the usual me was ready to read them. But I held back from that.

  There was the me of my body, of my sexuality—I found I was holding her back, too, in spite of the after-touch tremolo on my lips, my tongue, my throat, my eyelids. She was here to determine a value as well, for herself and for this man. But not yet. Not quite yet.

  And there was the me I’d bid up and won that afternoon in East Hampton. Her intent in this place was less clear, though I sensed that she was the one who’d actually brought us here. I would let her lead us forward now, but she did not know what step to take.

  The touch of Alain’s hand was on the small of my back. And the gentlest pressure to go ahead.

  I did.

  I emerged into a wide living room. Before me was a wall of windows open to the night. I saw only a scattering of light in distant treetops and on dark angled roofs, but I knew there was some big thing just out of sight in between, and if I’d only take a step and another and more and cross this room, I could see it.

  But then it was Amy Dickerson in the window. A chandelier had flared and the room blazed around me and I could see her, caught in the plane of glass, distant, startled, standing alone in my black dress, my hair gilded with the light and falling about my face. And then there was movement near me in that distant image. A body crossing. I stiffened and gasped as if I were watching a horror movie and this Amy Dickerson on the screen was preoccupied and disoriented and unaware of the creature rushing at her. Alain. I made myself recognize him and he drew near and he was behind me, though I knew this only from the image before me. He put a hand on my shoulder, my right shoulder, and I started. It was the opposite shoulder from the one I’d expected from the image. I turned my face to him sharply.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

  “I gave us light.”

  And I looked away from him and I was abruptly aware of the room. It was the Ritz again. Louis XVI. Only more of it. Perhaps he’d assumed we’d make love at the hotel because he himself would have felt at home there. My eye went to a chair near to me, early Louis XVI, still not comfortable with what it was becoming. The chair had Louis XVI legs—straight-edged, fluted, tapering to a scroll foot—but its curved, heart-shaped back was strictly Rococo. I wrenched my mind away from the chair. I was uncomfortable, too, moving from lover to appraiser—or perhaps appraiser to lover—and I turned my face to the inner wall, to the marble fireplace, and there was Venus.

  She was as Alain had described her. She sat holding her lute beneath her naked breasts and her face was lifted and Cupid was leaning on her thigh. But there was more. She was a slightly fleshy, blandly pretty sixteenth-century girl—a real-seeming girl, a girl I felt I knew at once—and her face was raised—in song, as Alain had said? Perhaps. But I wasn’t seeing her that way. It wasn’t just her face that was lifted, so were her eyes, and her eyes had a sparkle in them as they yearned upward, and her lips were parted only slightly, not nearly enough for singing but just right for the feeling that was clearly present in her eyes—something like awe, like rapture. And Cupid was leaning against her but he was staring at the rose in the lute’s center. He stared quite lovingly at it and with a sense of naughty secretiveness, as if he were gazing upon his goddess’s luit, her very pussy.

  I moved toward her and angled my head slightly, just as hers was. Her hands were curved delicately, one around the neck of the instrument, the other—thumb and forefinger parted, about to pluck—just beneath the rose.

  Alain had followed me to her, for his hands were suddenly on my shoulders. “Come,” he said.

  He turned me with his hands, gently moved me forward to the corridor that began to the right of the fireplace. I let him direct me and my eyes came down from Venus and I stopped, resisted the press of him for a moment as my eyes fell on a lute.

  It was leaning against the fireplace jamb. It was the lute in the painting above. It was the lute leaning in almost exactly the same place in my own apartment.

  “You have a lute,” I said.

  “Perhaps one day we will play a duet,” he said.

  “Do you play?”

  “No,” he said, pressing me forward again.

  I yielded and we went into the dim plushness of the corridor and I heard a click behind me and the corridor abruptly darkened with the extinguishing of the living room lights. We passed an open door and I glanced into his office: a massive desk in shadow, a yellow puddle at its corner from a green-shaded library lamp.

  His hands felt heavy on me. The lute was propped up inside my head and I couldn’t put it aside. And Venus was in there, too, her mouth parted slightly as if she wanted to speak. Other doors passed. They were closed. There was a scrabbly thing going on somewhere in my chest. Too high up to be sexual. Unease, it was. I didn’t know why. But the dark heaviness of his office lingered in me. And it threw my mind back to the living room and its elaborate eighteenth-century dazzle. He’d been wrong, of course, when he’d said his place was not so nice as the Ritz. And he knew it. The fact was, he hadn’t wanted me here. Even now. He wanted to fuck me in my hotel room.

  We approached the bedroom door. There was a small, piss-yellow lamp going in there, as well. I could see the floral garlands of a footboard. Louis XVI again.

  I needed time to think.

  We were in the bedroom. It smelled the faintly mildewy smell of old wood. We were surrounded by furniture and I did not look at it. The headboard of the bed was massive, walnut and cane, edged in carved acanthus leaves and pinecones.

  Alain turned me at the foot of the bed and he embraced me, hard, and pressed his mouth onto mine. I kissed him and he did the hard and then soft and then hard again rhythm thing he seemed to like, and when he finally let our lips part, I drew back a little before he could leap in again.

  “Darling,” I said. He’d called me darling plenty already and I wanted his full and sympathetic attention. “Can we make love at first light? I’m very tired and we’ve waited this long and we’ve both wanted it to be perfect, haven’t we?”

  He hesitated for a moment, his brow furrowing faintly.

  “What’s the opposite of an aubade?” I said.

  He smiled.

  “Two lovers coming together for the first time at daybreak,” I said.

  “We will have to in
vent the word for ourselves,” he said.

  “Dawnfuck,” I said. “For violin and saxophone.”

  He laughed.

  “I’m very tired myself, my darling,” he said. “Let’s sleep beside each other first. Yes.” He let go of me and drew back a few steps.

  “Yes.”

  “But can we at least be naked?” he said.

  I hesitated, but he didn’t notice. Instantly his coat was off and his tie and his hands were working their way down the buttons on his shirt. He was facing me still, having only taken those two or three steps back and not turned away. I was struggling a little with a weird and uncharacteristic attack of shyness before a man I was determined to sleep with. I kicked off my shoes. That was a safe beginning. Alain’s shirt was off and then his sleeveless undershirt—odd, it struck me, for him to be wearing an undershirt in the heat—and his chest was bare and aswirl with dark hair. He was wrenching at his belt and still not turning and I figured he must have a big penis, since he was so anxious to be full-frontal naked for me.

  “You’re waiting,” he said. “Good.”

  I was waiting, as a matter of fact. But as hazy as its motive was for me, I didn’t think my hesitation was a good thing. Nor was it a good thing that he thought it was a good thing. I was expected to perform for him after he was naked.

  His pants were down but they were suddenly stuck. He’d forgotten his shoes and he toed them off and his pants were free and he kicked them aside and he hopped on one foot and then the other, rolling off his black dress socks, and without a pause he grabbed his boxer shorts at the waist and stripped them down.

  What is it in a collector that the passion focuses on one thing and not another? Silver teapots but not water pitchers. Pocket watches but not wristwatches. Tiffany lamps but not Handel. Or the other way around. I myself have always focused on the hands of the men I’ve been with. Penises are distinctive, certainly, and I daresay there’s many a woman who, in those special times of a collector’s reflection, sits in tranquility and examines the images in her head of her past lovers’ penises, the special wrinklings and bends and textures of them. I prefer hands.