Thomas and Beal in the Midi

by Christopher Tilghman

  Touré’s apartment was off a small courtyard; from the street, the arched entrance looked like the mouth of a tunnel. Just like the last time, there were dogs sitting in the stony shade, chewing on things stolen or retrieved from the markets. “Shoo,” she said warily, but they didn’t look up. In the courtyard there was a bit of light, but it was an unforgiving place, a sort of prison yard just big enough for an execution. The only door opened into an airless stairwell. She climbed the stairs, and when he opened the door, he behaved exactly as she’d expected. Charming. Feigning slight surprise to see her at his door, delighted to show her in. “Mademoiselle Beal,” he said. “You have accepted my invitation at last.”

  She walked past him without a word, stood in front of the mirror over the fireplace to withdraw her hatpins and take off her hat. Through the triangles of her arms she saw him appraising her in a questioning manner; he had no idea how she was going to behave, mostly because she herself didn’t know. Everything about him was obvious; everything about her was concealed, dimly sensible.

  She turned around after she had finished. He was in his suit; she’d never seen him in anything but. Both the waistcoat and frock coat were a little short for his long torso. If he ever wore a top hat, he’d look like one of those stick figures in a Bosch painting, but he never did. She was satisfied with her own dress, so proper, so unfeminine, nothing to reveal the state of her body.

  “I have made tea,” he said. He pointed toward the pot on the table, with two cups arranged. “In case you came.”

  Still, she said nothing. It seemed strangely unnecessary because she knew now that she would allow this man to make love to her this once, and just this once, God help her.

  He knew this as soon as she did. Not the “just once,” but the “now,” which was all that mattered to him. He pulled out a chair, and she sat, and then he poured the tea and for a few minutes they drank. She still didn’t like tea, but took it to be polite and also to give her some time, because now there was a lot going through her head, a jumble, shards of memory vitalized by the flashes of desire. She remembered swimming on the river shore at the Retreat with Thomas and Randall, remembered how much more beautiful Randall’s body seemed, with its velvet shine, compared with Thomas’s freckled paleness. Yes, she thought, she would need to make love once with a man of her race in a way that Thomas would not need to make love with a woman of his, because … well, because a man could do pretty much what he wanted anyway, white or black didn’t make much difference. Wasn’t that the way of it? Or because Touré had said that she could never be sure that her womanliness was being honored and treasured, not just taken. Because in America that was all white men cared about.

  She took a sip of tea and looked at him. Expectant, yes, but not a hint of triumph. That would close this thing down right quick if he looked smug, looked as if he had won over anybody, starting with Beal herself. He hadn’t won over anything, but his arguments had; she didn’t need or want him the way he wanted her. Any random black man would do, she told herself. He was content to let her gaze at him neutrally, to cast her eye lazily around the bare apartment. In a few weeks he would be in Africa and she would be in Languedoc, wherever that was, and all this—her apartment on the avenue Bosquet, this flat, Arthur’s squalid room, yellow omnibuses and theaters and cafés, walks along the Seine, the Louvre, and the Bon Marché—all would be memory, some of it good, some of it bad, but all of it gone.

  “I’ve come to say goodbye,” she said. They were the first words out of her mouth.

  “Ah,” he said. He did not try to debate this.

  “You will not need to tell your wives to set up a suite for me in Dakar.”

  “Too bad. So beautiful in my country.”

  “I have also come to thank you.”

  This did surprise him, she was pleased to observe. He raised his eyebrows: For what?

  “You have helped me understand questions about myself that I never imagined. You were right about me. I am an ignorant American girl. I wish it had been possible for you to meet my brother. You would have liked him, but also, you would have met your equal with him. Not for one second would Randall have been willing to renounce America. Not for one second. If he had lived, he would have changed it.”

  “You have listened to my words. I am a politician, a diplomat. Having someone listen is all that I can ask.”

  She had run out of things to say. She hadn’t planned to say any of it, but she meant every word.

  “And now?” he asked.

  She nodded. He stood up, walked to the door of his room, and opened his arm into it. She remembered the last time, when that arm had been placed across her path and she had ducked under it. She followed his gesture into the room and saw the fresh lavender on his dresser; she’d been aware of a fragrance from the moment she entered the flat but had been too distracted to note what it was. She was unbuttoning her jacket as she passed. He had set up a chair for her to put her clothes on, and while she undressed, he was in the main room doing the same. She turned, and there he was, naked in the doorway. She glanced down his body. He was slender but not frail; his shoulders, his joints seemed powerfully structured. His chest and stomach were taut, and his penis was partly erect.

  As she looked at him, he was looking at her, and finally he came over to her. “Turn around,” he said gently, and she did, and he came up behind her, closed upon her almost, it seemed, worshipfully. He rubbed her shoulders, massaged her jaw and cheeks, then dropped his hands to her breasts.

  “Ooh,” she said, an escape of sensation.

  He led her to the bed and turned her around. She felt like a puppet grateful for its strings, for what its strings were making it do. When she was stretched out, he kneeled on the floor and leaned over her body. He seemed in no hurry to enter her, as Thomas usually was, and each new way his fingertips grazed her skin made her shudder. He could do this forever. She thought of him pleasing his wives and maybe many other women—yes! another shudder—and she guessed he had learned many caresses because each woman liked to be touched differently. It seemed to her that this knowledge was the price he paid for his own gratification and that he was very willing to pay it. Many minutes passed, rising and falling, and when at last he climbed on top of her, she was more than ready, and his penis seemed no different from Thomas’s, just right in fact, but this time she was so aroused, so loose, so wet, that the moment he was fully inside she reached a point she had never reached before. She held on as long as she could.

  * * *

  M. Fauberge had sent Thomas a note earlier in the day that the owners, Belgians as it turned out, had accepted Thomas’s final offer. If convenient, he should come to M. Fauberge’s office on the Quai de Lorraine at three o’clock to meet with the banker who was serving as intermediary. Thomas was beginning to doubt that this was ever going to work, although, in the end, two weeks of negotiation, at such great distance, did not seem so bad. He had been out to St. Adelelmus twice, had met M. Murat, the manager, and his family. M. Murat did not seem much impressed by Thomas, which was fine; Thomas had always preferred to lead from behind. His wife was rather hostile, but that was beginning to seem the way Frenchwomen acted. The rest of the names of the laborers and tradespeople of the estate would take a while to master, since most of them spoke only Occitan. Thomas had gone on two complete tours of the vineyards, the pressing rooms, the cellars; there seemed plenty of space to expand, even to set up a bottling room, if that’s where this all went. His sister, Mary, was now in the process of setting up an operation very similar on the Retreat—for milk. Pure milk for babes. It began to seem to Thomas like a small, undeclared competition, their two very different beverages, their two enterprises. Mary’s looked into the future, toward modern standards of sanitation and purification; this was a business their father would understand, and Mary had always been her father’s daughter. Thomas’s project reached deep into the past, to the terrors of superstition, out of which ancient processes had developed over a millennium�
�sulfur candles, sprinklings of bentonite, the blood of black hens—all of them revolving around a singularly mysterious plant, the grapevine. Perhaps, for the second time in his life, that made him his mother’s son, caught in the inexplicable mysteries of her Catholicism. About the other time, when each of them, for their private reasons, renounced the Retreat, there was no mystery at all.

  Even though Thomas was not yet the owner and might never be, he asked that the house be completely cleaned, the furniture polished, the linens washed. On the first day, he followed the women from room to room as they made their first pass, tramped through the dust, disposed of the dead birds and mouse droppings, threw open the shutters; on one exposure there was a fiery mountain brook that feathered out into pasturage and a vegetable garden; on another exposure he saw nothing but white chalk rubble with lines of grapes that seemed almost biblical, drinking their water out of the stones. At one end of the house was a gravel terrace bounded by a low, semicircular stone parapet, with a fig arbor on one side and on the other a large horse chestnut tree, at this time heavy with white blossoms. It was under the welcome shade of the chestnut, on a stone table, that he wrote a letter to Beal describing the place as best he could. On one side the terrace seemed to hang over the village; beyond it, the broad valley ran all the way to the Pyrenees. The other side of the terrace looked over the domaine, the tangle of stone buildings and clay roofs that seemed completely without plan but had certainly evolved out of current needs. Some of the farms Thomas had visited with M. Fauberge were tightly packed into urbanlike warrens, but St. Adelelmus, on its hilltop, was more spread out, more like an American farm, more light and more air.

  An enormous, friendly Basque woman was revealed as the cook, and pantomiming in several languages, she brought forward her family to be introduced. She and her stick-thin husband made a comical pair; their daughter Gabriella, Thomas could not help but notice, was the pretty girl of the estate. There was always a pretty girl on these farms, even when and if she wasn’t all that beautiful, but in this case, she was très, très belle. Work stopped in the farmyard, in the vineyards, when she appeared.

  One night M. Fauberge had arranged for him to meet a couple not that much older than himself, the Milhauds, Theo and Léonie, who owned a vineyard the next ridge over on the mountain. They were, like Thomas, not of the region: his father was a lawyer in Marseille who twenty years earlier had bought the property in Languedoc as a sort of investment, an investment in prestige among his fellow notables more than anything; apparently this had been a fad for a while before the arrival of the beast. Theo and Léonie had met when they were students at the university in Montpellier, and for whatever reason, they wanted to take over the task of rebuilding La Fontaine, which Theo’s father was more than happy to let them do. Mme Milhaud was a stylish woman with luxuriant brown hair and a slightly arch manner; she immediately asked Thomas to call her by her first name, which surprised and charmed him. The husband offered no such gesture, which struck Thomas as equally appurtenant. They were both quite short. Beal would dwarf her. Who knew what they would make of her?

  “M. Fauberge says you and your wife make an exotic couple,” said Léonie suggestively. They were dining at the hotel in the village, but it was hot now and they were outside in the garden under the plane trees.

  “M. Fauberge hasn’t met my wife,” said Thomas. “But that was handsome of him to say. If he meant it nicely.” It was clear that M. Fauberge had told them that Beal was black.

  “Oh. He’s very excited about you,” said M. Milhaud. “The de Bergs were not a good turn for Domaine de St. Adelelmus.”

  “No one seems to have liked them very much.”

  “Well,” said Léonie, glancing at her husband for some sort of go-ahead, “they had no idea what they were getting into.”

  “It was her,” Theo said. “She was the problem.”

  Thomas listened while they debated this: M. de Berg had been unrealistic about the work required; Mme de Berg was unprepared for the rudeness of the life in the garrigue. If that idiot had listened a little more carefully, been a little more alert to her struggles, Madame never would have done what she did; no husband, however doltish, should have to endure such scandale. Thomas pieced together that she had run off with an Italian who came ashore from a yacht at Sète. The Milhauds thought this denouement was funny, the Italian and the yacht, but Thomas didn’t love much of the story: a naive husband overwhelmed, a beautiful wife bolting.

  “Forgive us,” said Léonie. She had noticed that Thomas’s attention seemed to have turned inward.

  “Oh,” said Thomas. “I don’t know how prepared I am for any of this. It’s really quite mad, my buying this property. Both my wife and I grew up on a farm, on an orchard, but we are many miles away from there now. I pulled the name Languedoc out of a text in Galignani’s reading room in Paris. It’s because of a librarian that I am here.”

  There was a flicker of alarm between the Milhauds. “M. Fauberge spoke very highly of you,” said M. Milhaud, attempting to reassure himself as much as Thomas. “He said you were remarkably knowledgeable. He believes you are a serious man.”

  “Too serious, in fact, or so he said to me on the night before my first look at the farm.”

  “I wouldn’t pay too much attention to him,” said Léonie.

  Thomas turned to her; she was lovely in a sharp, angular French way, and deeply tanned; he wondered how deep into the daily labors of farm and household she got. “I think I have been very lucky on this trip. In a way I am coming home here. I am an exile, really, but a willing one. It’s a long story. I won’t bore you.”

  “No,” she said. “You wouldn’t have to worry about that. Tell us.”

  So Thomas told them a little about his life. About parents who were mismatched in every way, who lived apart on separate shores of the Chesapeake Bay, the mother with the daughter on the left-hand shore, the father with the son on the right. About the aftermath of the Civil War and the end of slavery and his father’s dream of peaches. About the boom and then the tragic disaster of the disease known as the peach yellows. “There is still no solution to our blight,” he said. He told them about his love for Beal that grew out of childhood and had driven him, had driven them, finally, to this place and time.

  “This is like a novel,” said Léonie.

  Thomas had never spoken about himself in this way. He had never imagined that one would, or could, talk this way for any reason except egotism. That his life made a story. Once started, he couldn’t stop, not that Léonie would have let him. He realized as he spoke that his life really had been unusual, that this story was uniquely his own, that the classmates at the University of Pennsylvania who so bored him had lived no life at all, had never been tested as he had. He realized as well that all those painters in Paris were running from similarly boring lives. The revelations poured into Thomas’s brain as he spoke: I am not the person I have always thought I am. He would go back to Paris, reclaim Beal, and over time she would see that the adventure being offered to them here was real, was even—at this point the wine must have been clouding both his thoughts and his speech—epic. By the time he was done, they were very much the last diners in the garden; the Milhauds’ carriage had been brought around, and the horse, a beast of enormous size, was asleep on its hooves.

  Theo bid Thomas good night and went off to pay the stableman. Léonie stayed behind. She gave him her small hand, a gesture that surprised him and meant more to him than he could then imagine. “The garrigue is not for everyone, but I feel it will be right for you. I will do everything I can to make your wife feel at home here.” She laid down her napkin, and when she stood, Thomas realized that she was quite pregnant. She followed his eyes to her stomach. “Oh yes,” she said. “Our third.”

  Thomas reddened; he didn’t know what to say, and she seemed to enjoy his discomfort. “Beal and I hope to begin our family very soon,” he said finally.

  “Good,” she said. “Playmates next door. All the c
ousins are in Marseille.”

  He thanked her again, gave her an arm into her carriage, and watched them depart down the winding main street. The moon was full, and in that light the stone of the buildings and the streets glowed. The stream in the gulley roared; Thomas assumed that by August it would be little more than a trickle, and as he reflected on this, he realized it was fed by the mountain torrent that ran through his property.

  The next day, he returned to Narbonne, and at three o’clock on Friday, the ninth of June, 1893, he walked into M. Fauberge’s office on the Quai de Lorraine, met the banker and the lawyer M. Fauberge had hired for him, presented the bank draft that had been wired to him from Baltimore, and emerged the owner of the Domaine de St. Adelelmus. Up and down the quai the casks were piled three high; the canal boats, in this slack time of the wine year, bobbed in the slight ripples. Thomas was in this business now; its challenges and complexities awaited him. Back at his hotel, he arranged a wire to Beal: DOMAINE DE ST. ADELELMUS PURCHASED. BACK TO YOU ON SATURDAY. OUR NEXT STEP AWAITS.