The House at Belle Fontaine

by Lily Tuck

  Instead of answering, Claire began to imitate the greedy singsong sound of women counting: Yii-sip-et, yii-sip-sawng, yii-sip-sam, yii-sip-sii, yii-sip-ha.

  Tow rai?—How much? Claire knew the cost of the samlaw ride from her house to the Royal Bangkok Sports Club, where she went to wash her hair—no more than fifteen baht. She was also used to how the driver sat catty-corner in his seat and drove out of their lane onto the larger avenue without looking.

  Bow bow—Slow down—she shouted to him from the backseat.

  Cha cha—which meant the same thing but made no difference.

  James drove a Land Rover. He charged the Bangkok traffic, the cars, the samlaws, the bicycles—and all but one got out of his way. Lucky for James. The man he hit was an Indian, an Indian delivering ghee from a bucket dangling from his handlebars—the ghee had splashed all over the Land Rover’s windshield. No matter that it was not James’s fault—the Indian had turned without signaling—had he been a Thai, James would have gone straight to prison. Or he would have had to bribe someone.

  Siri would have known. Siri was James’s Thai partner. Siri knew whom to give a thousand baht and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red to so James and Claire could exchange their tourist visas for resident ones, he knew whom to give another thousand baht and another bottle of whiskey to so that they could get their Thai driver’s licenses without having to take the test. Siri knew all the officials and he could help James get around the red tape and do business in Thailand. And Thailand, James liked to maintain, had never been a Communist country or colonized and was still unspoiled. He could make a lot of money in Thailand and, at the same time, travel, explore, have a good time.

  Sitting around his pool after swimming her laps, Claire complained to Frank about Siri and how she did not trust him.

  “Siri is using James. Using James for his money,” she said.

  But Frank had his own problems. A medic in Vientiane had told him to breathe inside a brown paper bag.

  “Yeah, well . . .” Shrugging, Frank pointed to the two planes flying overhead.

  “You know what that reminds me of?” he asked. “The time I was twelve and me and my brother were walking home from school. We were still living in South Carolina then, and I happened to look up at the sky. Two jets were flying toward each other—one plane going east to west, the other south to north—and I said to my brother: ‘Hey, Tim, look at those jets up there. Wouldn’t it be funny if they collided?’ And you know what? They did.”

  “God. What about the passengers?”

  “They were Air Force jets. The pilots managed to eject and parachute down, although I don’t remember exactly. But the real funny thing is when I mention the two planes colliding to Tim, he swears that he never saw such a thing happen and that I made it up. Or dreamt it. And maybe I did.”

  “Let’s go and play golf,” Claire said.

  The night before Frank was to go home on leave, they had dinner at an outdoor Chinese restaurant off Sukhumvit Road. James ordered beers, Claire lit a cigarette—she still smoked then—and Frank carefully placed his brown paper bag on the table in front of him.

  “You just need to go home and rest for a while,” James said.

  Not looking at James, Frank said, “Yeah, and guess what? I get to see my dog—my folks’ dog now more likely. A border collie. Belle. You should see her, she’s a real beauty. She likes to herd people, she’s always circling, she can drive you a little nuts, too.”

  Halfway through the meal, a ripe coconut fell out of a tree next to their table, knocking over bottles and glasses, breaking their dish of sweet and sour prawns, and sending Frank, arms raised to protect his head, out of his chair and under the table.

  Once seated again, Frank said, “Sorry about that,” and reached for his paper bag.

  “Scared the hell out of me, too,” James said.

  “Take a look at my dress,” Claire said, rubbing at the sweet and sour sauce stains.

  A week later, Claire received a postcard from Frank. The picture on the postcard was of two white poodle puppies against a bright blue background. Frank had written Meow meow meow all over the message part. James, when he read it, said the postcard was a sure sign that Frank was feeling better, and Claire said she missed Frank and she was going to write him a long letter in Thai from Queen Sirikit.

  In the Land Rover, on their way to visit Siri and his wife, Sunny, at their weekend bungalow in Pattaya, Claire was doing her imitation of birdcalls. Her favorites, she told James, were the striated woodpecker’s and the immature bufflehead’s. The road was full of potholes and the day was hot and humid. All of a sudden it began to rain. The rain came down hard and fast and the windshield wipers on the Land Rover were stuck—stuck with ghee, Claire guessed—and James had to work them by hand through the open window.

  Claire persisted: Pawk, pawk, pawk.

  “Can you be serious,” James said.

  “Can you be quiet,” James also said.

  Claire loved to swim but, in Pattaya, she worried about sharks. The Gulf of Siam, she had heard say, was a breeding ground for them, and she did not dare swim her usual crawl, nor did she dare swim out far. She kept her head out of the water and kept an eye out for a shark fin. Claire also kept looking back at James, who was closer to shore. Once a camp counselor, James was teaching Siri’s wife, Sunny, how to swim. Sunny was slim and pretty. She was wearing a white bathing suit. James had his arms around her and each time a small wave came, Sunny tried to stand up—she did not want to get her hair wet. She was laughing. James, too, was laughing and although Claire could never swear to this—perhaps she imagined it—it looked to her as if each time Sunny raised her head out of the water, James bent his to give Sunny a kiss.

  Siri hardly left the bungalow. He liked to cook, he said. Dressed in a chef’s tall hat and a long white apron, Siri stayed in the kitchen, cleaning, cutting, chopping food. He was, he told James and Claire, making them the same special Thai dish his mother made for him—a red snapper steamed in coconut husks. Later, at dinner, to show Siri how much he was enjoying the meal, James sucked noisily on the fish bones. He also went on to tell Siri how, in Thailand, he prided himself on his ability to eat everything. Siri then said how he bet he could offer James at least one dish that James would refuse to eat.

  “You’re on, Siri.” James reached across the table with his hand and said, “How much?”

  During the meal, Claire asked, “How did you like learning how to swim, Sunny?”

  Smiling, Sunny answered that for her cooking and swimming were very much alike and she probably would never learn how to do either one. Then she told Claire how although she had never traveled outside of Thailand, sixty years ago, her grandfather had gone to study in the United States. It took him three months to cross the Pacific Ocean by ship and he stayed away for three years. During that time, his family never once heard from him and they assumed he had drowned.

  A month went by and Frank had not returned to Thailand nor had Claire and James heard from him again.

  “I am going to telephone someone,” Claire said.

  “Telephone who?” James said.

  “I don’t know. A five-star general,” Claire answered.

  Claire took a samlaw to Frank’s house. She had to ring the bell several times before the houseboy opened the gate. Dressed in a dirty sarong and still buttoning his shirt, the houseboy barely looked at Claire.

  Mai mi, mai mi—Not here—he said.

  Glancing past him, Claire could see Frank’s swimming pool. The water was a dark green, nearly black, with stuff floating in it. A woman with long untidy hair stood in the doorway of Frank’s house staring out at Claire. Claire heard a baby crying.

  “What did you expect?” James said after Claire told him what she had seen, “Probably the houseboy’s entire family and the houseboy’s entire village have
moved in while Frank’s away. As for the pool, they can clean it up in no time when Frank comes back.”

  At a cocktail party celebrating the promotion of one of Frank’s fellow officers, James and Claire were told how, two weeks after he got home, Frank was taken to the nearest veterans’ hospital in Ohio, where his folks lived. Frank, the officer said, had to have electroshock treatment. For morale’s sake, the officer had been advised not to mention this, although he felt sure that Frank would be getting an honorable discharge. He would get James and Claire the address of the V.A. hospital, he said. By then Claire had written Frank several letters. In one, she had included her golf scorecard but Frank had not answered.

  The golf course was where Claire first noticed the ­monkeys—how the foursome ahead of her on the fifth hole, the water hole, appeared to be walking on their hands. Claire had to look again. Perhaps one of the men playing had leaned down to pick up a golf ball or had leaned down to retie his shoelace, only it happened a second time. Also Claire noticed something waving in the air that could only be a tail. The tail was not a golf club—not even a slender nine iron. Later, when she went into the women’s locker room to wash her hair, the same sort of thing happened there. Noi, the attendant who always handed Claire a clean towel, had for perhaps only a fraction of a second chattered her teeth at her.

  At home, she said to James, “Remember how tomorrow we were planning to go and sit around Frank’s pool and drink gin and orange juice and read Ulysses? Remember, too, how Frank said it was his turn to read all of Molly Bloom?”

  “Come on, Claire, you are talking as if Frank is dead,” James said.

  It was true. Frank had died by then only James and Claire would not hear about his death until later or hear how he had hung himself in his parents’ garage with Belle, his border collie’s choke chain.

  June 16 was also the day Siri had planned on making good on his bet. Siri gave James the address and the directions—the place was not a restaurant. It was someone’s house across the river in Thonburi. At first, Claire said she would not go, she would stay home. She was afraid, she said, that she and James would disappear the way Frank had, only it would be different.

  But, in the end, she did go, and James lost his bet. Siri broke even. The cost of the monkey, the special table with the hole in the middle, finding a place for the meal, bribing people, James said had come to at least a thousand baht—after all, the whole thing was highly illegal. Thank god was what Claire had said. Leaving the house, she had gone to sit by herself in the Land Rover. She had rolled up the car windows and put her fingers to her ears. Still she thought she could hear the whine of the electric saw.

  St. Guilhem-le-Désert

  The time Anne leaves her husband, she goes to France. She spends the first few days in Paris at an inexpensive hotel on rue Jacob. Her room is small and sparsely furnished; the bathroom, too, is small, the shower produces a tepid trickle. Instead of looking out onto the street, the single window in Anne’s room gives onto the back of the hotel, onto an empty courtyard where half a dozen cats lie sunning themselves—although late October and the days are getting shorter, darker. Right away Anne plans to visit museums, churches, cathedrals, but her first day in Paris she can hardly get out of bed. When finally she does, she stands at the window and watches the cats. She does not feel depressed so much as absent. She does not think about her husband, George, or about her daughters—what they might be doing. The only explanation, which was not an explanation Anne gave before she left, was that the two girls were old enough to look after themselves and that George would just have to cope with the groceries, the cooking, the washing and whatever Anne did all day. Making a vague fanning motion with her hand, Anne told George she needed air.

  The second day Anne rouses herself and walks from Sainte-Chapelle, to Notre-Dame, to the Louvre; the third day it rains and Anne buys a lot of expensive clothes: a dress, a suede jacket, a pair of trousers, two silk blouses; she charges them to George. She also starts to feel lonely. (Except for the man sitting at the next table in a restaurant who asks Anne if she recommends her canard à l’orange—not looking up from the magazine she is reading, Anne answers a barely audible oui—Anne has spoken to no one except to salespersons and waiters.) On the fourth day, a man follows Anne as she walks along the quays back to the hotel. Although her heart is pounding and she wants to run, she remembers a stupid joke she once heard about an American tourist who, instead of calling the man on the métro who pinches her cochon—pig—tells him couchons—let’s sleep together. Two hours later, when Anne leaves the hotel again to have dinner, the man is across the street, smoking a cigarette, waiting for her. Couchons!

  Standing at her window the next morning, looking down at the cats in the courtyard—by then, Anne has a favorite, a big marmalade cat who, except for an occasional impatient flick of his tail, lies motionless for hours—she decides to call her school friend Nina.

  At the Montpellier train station, Anne, her large suitcase at her feet, waits for Nina. As usual Nina is late, and Anne is reminded of all the times Nina has kept her waiting—in particular, the time that led to her meeting George, since she could not keep saving the seat at the sold-out Stéphane Grappelli concert for Nina indefinitely. At last Anne sees Nina.

  “You look just the same,” Anne says, kissing Nina, who is thinner. Her hair is streaked with gray.

  “So do you,” Nina answers breathlessly. “Always très chic.”

  In college, both Anne and Nina majored in French; after graduation, Nina went abroad to study music and fell in love with a musician.

  Anne shakes her head; suddenly she feels like crying. “Your children?” she asks instead.

  “At home, with Michel.” Michel, the musician, is already married to someone else, to a woman named Eliane, whom he cannot divorce; Nina and Michel have two small children, a girl and a boy. “Here, let me.” Nina reaches for Anne’s suitcase.

  Embarrassed all of a sudden by the size and the weight of the suitcase, Anne hands Nina her new jacket instead. “Take this,” she says.

  “Oh, how beautiful.” Nina strokes the suede. “I’ll have to borrow it from you,” she says, smiling. They both know that Nina is referring to the many times in college when Nina borrowed Anne’s clothes. Often, without asking.

  “No, keep it,” Anne says. “I mean it,” she adds.

  As Anne opens the door to Nina’s car, a large white dog lying on the front seat raises its head.

  “Get, July! Get in the back,” Nina tells the dog. “She followed us from the beach last summer—the children insisted on keeping her. But don’t go near her, she sheds.” The backseat of Nina’s car is littered with toys, a discarded sweater, a child’s sandal, food wrappers. “Don’t mind the mess,” Nina also says.

  In addition to borrowing Anne’s clothes in college, Nina was incapable of putting her own clothes away. She left everything trailing on chairs or lying on the floor. But it was her sweetness more than anything else that attracted Anne, and Nina’s selflessness—she had a kind of otherworldliness, a total lack of ego, is how Anne always described her.

  “How many people live in however you pronounce the name of your village?” Anne asks as Nina starts up the car. The village is a few miles north of Montpellier.

  “St. Guilhem-le-Désert,” Nina enunciates the name for Anne. “About two hundred, except on weekends and holidays, then it is more like two million people, who come here to climb the Cévennes. Also, you would be surprised at the number of pilgrims.”

  “Pilgrims?”

  “Yes, they come to worship a three-inch piece of the True Cross, which Charlemagne is said to have given to one of his favorite knights, a man named Guilhem who built an abbey. You can visit it if you like. Now a community of Carmelite nuns lives—Oh, I don’t mean to go on about the local sights.” Nina reaches with one hand to touch Anne’s arm. “Tell me,” she says, “how�
��s George?”

  “I think I’ve left him,” Anne answers, turning to look out of the side window so that Nina cannot see her face. “Nothing is settled yet. But go on, I like hearing about where you live.”

  “There’s a castle. We can visit that too,” Nina tells Anne after a while.

  “Oh, what a pretty house!” Anne exclaims as Nina parks the car. “It looks as if it was built back in the Middle Ages.”

  “It was.” Nina laughs. “There’s practically no heat in winter and there’s just enough hot water to fill a teakettle.”

  “I’m so happy to see you,” Anne says, getting out of the car and brushing at her skirt, which is covered with dog hair.

  Nina’s children, Sophie and Paul, are sitting at the kitchen table coloring in a book. Michel, a big man in a red wool checked shirt, sits with them. He has on a headset and is listening to music; he does not hear Nina and Anne come in.

  “Hello, chéri!” Nina shouts.

  Anne stands at the door and smiles at the children, who are staring at her. July, the dog, trots past her and Sophie gets down from the chair and, kneeling, puts her arms around the dog’s neck.

  “Je t’aime,” she croons.

  Looking up, Michel turns off the music and takes off his headset.

  Her hand extended, Anne walks up to him. “Nice to meet you, Michel.”

  “How was your trip, Anne?” he asks, his English is heavily accented. Then, turning to the children, Michel says, “Anne, here, went to school with maman when maman was a girl.” Michel speaks as if this is the first time Anne’s name has ever been mentioned. “She lives in America, don’t you, Anne?”

  Anne nods.

  “Come, let me show you to your room,” Nina says.

  Anne’s room is Sophie’s, and Sophie has been moved into Paul’s room. The bed is a narrow child’s bed, and the quilt is covered with faded figures of Babar. Once Nina has gone back downstairs, Anne sets her suitcase at the foot of the bed and opens it; all her clothes—sweaters, skirts, jackets—are carefully wrapped in tissue to keep them from wrinkling. There is no closet in the room, only a few hangers dangle from a hook on the back of the door, and Anne decides not to unpack after all. Instead she takes out her flowered toilet kit and goes down the hall to the only bathroom. When she tries to lock the bathroom door, she finds that the lock does not turn.