“Well, let’s not keep banging the phone around,” said Adele. “I’ll unplug it,” she said. She found the small square plug on the side and disconnected the cord from the phone.
“Here’s the problem,” Jerry said, backing away on his knees from the refrigerator.
“What is it?” Bess asked, smiling at him.
He held up a yellowed newspaper clipping. “Sam Bolton Hits Seventy-five, Still a High Scorer on his Hockey Team” was the headline.
“Oh, my goodness,” said Bess, holding out her hand for it. She shook her head. “I guess I wondered where that was. We had it up on the door, stuck on with a magnet. And that’s what was making all that noise?”
“Yep,” Jerry said. He was back inside the black hole again, replacing everything.
“Look at this, Sam,” Bess said.
The telephone rang, but for some reason not the one in the kitchen. It sounded shrilly in the living room. Sam ignored it, still licking the white circles, then pasting them on the bottom of the base.
“Excuse me, Daddy,” Adele said. She tried to take the telephone from him to answer it, but Sam, who had not heard it ring, looked up at her in irritation and would not release it. “Excuse me, Daddy,” she said again, “the phone is ringing.” They wrestled briefly.
“The phone is ringing,” Bess said loudly to Sam.
Sam relinquished it, and after the second ring Adele picked up the receiver.
“Hello?” she said. The line was dead. The phone rang for the third time, still in the living room, and Adele remembered that she had unplugged the cord. She looked for it, but it was no longer on the table. She realized that it must have been knocked to the floor, and, rather than scramble for it and try to fit it back into the tiny aperture before the caller hung up, she decided to answer the phone in the living room.
As Adele stood up, Bess said to the room in general, “Would somebody please answer the phone?”
“I’m working on it,” Sam said rebukingly. On the fourth ring Adele was making for the door, feeling panicky at the telephone’s repeated demand. As she ran past the refrigerator, Jerry stood up, and Adele made a sudden intimate acquaintance with the flowing script over his pocket.
“Sorry,” she said, flustered but still moving.
“It’s okay,” said Jerry.
“Do you think someone could answer the phone?” Bess said loudly.
In the living room Adele reached the phone on the fifth ring and at last lifted the receiver.
“Hello?” she said, breathless.
“This is 911,” a man said.
“911?” Adele repeated.
“You called for help,” he said, his voice stern.
“No, I don’t think so,” said Adele.
“Ma’am, I am required to ask you certain questions. You may be forced to say things against your will.”
Wildly, Adele looked around, wondering for a bewildered moment if there were something she didn’t know about, if she were in fact being held fast by a hard-armed terrorist, a gun at her head, alien forces in command.
“No,” she said. “We’re fine.”
“Who is it?” Bess called in from the kitchen.
“Ma’am,” said the man, “I must ask you further questions.”
“We didn’t call, really,” said Adele, trying to sound convincing. “There’s nothing wrong. It was a mistake.”
“Who is on the phone?” Bess called louder.
“It’s 911,” shouted Adele.
“If you don’t give the appropriate response to my questions,” said the man, “then we will send out a car regardless of what you say.”
“Who?” Bess asked, mystified.
“911,” Adele shouted. “Go ahead,” she told the man.
“911,” Bess said to Sam.
“What do they want?” Sam said to Bess.
“Can you tell me what your mother’s maiden name is?” asked the man.
“My mother’s maiden name?” Adele repeated. “Hogarth.”
There was a pause. “All right, ma’am,” the man said quietly. “We’re going to send you some assistance.”
“No!” said Adele, struggling to think. “It is Hogarth! That’s my mother’s maiden name. I promise you we’re all right. What name do you want?”
“Are you Mrs. Samuel Bolton?” asked the man.
“What do they want?” Sam shouted. “Why are they calling?”
“They called because you called them,” Adele shouted back. To the 911 man she said, “No. I’m her daughter. You want my grandmother’s maiden name.”
In the kitchen Jerry said, “I’m all through now, Mrs. Bolton. Is there anything else you need?”
“No,” Bess said weakly.
“I did not,” Sam called in energetically to Adele. “What a ridiculous thing to say.”
“You did too,” Adele said resentfully, putting her hand over the receiver. “You kept banging at the phone while you were pasting those things on it.”
The 911 man paused cautiously. “We have to be very careful here. If you are Mrs. Bolton’s daughter, then will you give me your grandmother’s maiden name?”
“I didn’t call 911,” Sam said loudly.
“Chase,” Adele said triumphantly. “You did,” she called back to her father.
There was another pause.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” The man sounded reluctant.
“I can promise you,” Adele said in a heartfelt voice.
Around her the air was singing, jingling, alive with disturbance. It was as though there were two languages here, and Adele could not forge a meaningful link between them. She was helpless, listening to the strange foreign tongue, even speaking in it, but hopelessly unable to transform it into known and useful speech, utterly unable to translate this world into her own.
She imagined the 911 vehicle arriving, armed men in sunglasses and black clothes creeping silently from it to surround the house.
“Everything here is fine,” she said, trying desperately to make herself understood. “It’s perfectly fine. Don’t send any assistance. Please.”
Choosing Sides
Wednesday is market day in Sainte-Cécile, and Amy and Walter spent the morning making their way slowly through the crowded streets. It was high summer in Provence, late July. The big sycamore trees, their trunks dappled like giraffes, were in full leaf, shading the boulevard that circled the center of the small town. The market was spread out in the big main square by the church, and in the quieter, shady one by the mairie, and along the main interior street.
Sainte-Cécile is in a farming region, near Arles, and the market was made up mostly of local offerings: neat bunches of dried lavender, handmade soaps, piles of loose fragrant herbs, rough pottery bowls and jugs, cheap clothes made from Provençal cotton prints, in blue and white, red and mustard yellow.
Amy walked in front. She could feel Walter behind her, losing patience with the heat, the crowds, the array. They were both tired from the trip here. Amy paused at a table covered with an oilskin Provençal cloth and set with bowls of white peaches.
“Madame?” The man behind the table smiled at her. He had a dark weathered face, grizzled hair, and a pirate’s gap between his front teeth. “Prenez-un.” He offered her a small bowl holding a spray of glistening slices. The flesh was cream-colored.
“If you take one, you’ll have to buy a peach,” Walter warned her.
Amy didn’t answer him. She smiled at the shopkeeper and reached out for the bowl.
“Merci,” she said. She took two slices and handed one to Walter. She watched him as they bit into the slices. The peach was succulent, luscious. Amy turned back to the shopkeeper, who stood back, cocking his head pleasantly.
“Cela vous plaît?” he asked, smiling. His eyes, in his dark sunburnt face, were surprisingly pale—blue, or anyway hazel.
“Oui, beaucoup,” Amy said, taking out her change purse.
She liked the question in French: “Does it p
lease you?” It seemed to suggest that the world was spread out before you for delight. Amy had been brought up in English, with a more austere and puritanical view, in which her being pleased was not paramount. “Deux pêches, monsieur, s’il vous plaît.”
The man bowed his head in response and leaned over to choose two fruits from the full bowl. He lingered, as though he were selecting jewelry.
Amy paid and thanked him. She handed a peach to Walter, turning away from the table. “Ninety cents,” she said to her husband. “How bad is that?”
Walter shrugged, taking his peach, and they turned back into the crowd. It picked them up and shouldered them along the narrow street, past a group of young South American men, street players: high cheekbones, dark skin, woven hatbands, a bright-covered CD in a basket at their feet.
“South America,” Amy said to Walter, after they’d passed. “How did they get here, to Sainte-Cécile, on market day?”
Amy and Walter had gotten to Sainte-Cécile by taking the night flight from New York to Nice, as they always did. They had arrived only yesterday and were here for two weeks. They were meant to be here on vacation, but what they were doing so far was arguing about their son.
“How much more of this do you want to see?” Walter asked from behind.
“I don’t care,” said Amy. “We can leave now if you want.”
Having won, Walter turned generous. “I don’t mind staying,” he said untruthfully, “I just want to know for how much longer.”
“I don’t care,” Amy repeated. “I’ve bought soap and lavender. That’s all I want. Let’s go back and have lunch.”
Sainte-Cécile was a small, pleasant, bustling town, its main streets lined with tall eighteenth-century houses. On the side streets were smaller buildings, their stuccoed walls painted in hot-country colors: ocher yellow, pale coral, dusty reddish brown. Geraniums cascaded luxuriantly from window boxes. The inner streets were so narrow that even the tiny European cars could barely get through, and only the locals tried.
Amy and Walter had first started coming there because of Claire, a French friend from Amy’s junior year abroad. For a decade they’d rented a house here for a month in the summer. Amy had hoped their son, Tim, would make friends with Claire’s son, Gilles, though this had never really happened—Tim had never learned as much French as Amy had hoped.
French was a language Amy loved. It was like a beloved country, the language beautiful in her mouth and her ear, liquid and supple, lyrical. It was more physically demanding, and required more muscular precision, than English, which could be spoken lazily, with the mouth half-closed, the lips nearly flat. In French, the mouth, the lips, the tongue all worked acrobatically to produce those exquisitely precise syllables and intonations. And it wasn’t just the sound of the language: in French, your mind was meant to work constantly as well. You were expected to have strong opinions, and to state them. You were expected to raise your voice, to disagree. Amy, who had been brought up, in English, to be tactful and diffident, her voice low and modulated, felt bold and potent in French.
Claire was Amy’s passport into that country; they spoke to each other only in French. The two women shared the same birthday, and, oddly, the same maiden name—Vincent—though it sounded very different in the two languages. They looked nothing at all alike—Claire had dark hair and eyes, honey-colored skin, and a narrow, intelligent Gallic face; Amy was fair and blue-eyed, with a broad forehead—but they called each other the Twin, “La Jumelle.” Amy liked this feeling of kinship. She felt that Claire was her French self—pragmatic, direct, forceful. Claire was living Amy’s alternate life for her. Here in this flat aromatic landscape, with its hot baking summers and cool mild winters, its bright colors and aromatic scents, Claire was doing everything Amy was not.
Claire and Amy had gotten married the same year, and three years later their sons were born, twenty-four hours apart. After that, their paths had diverged: Amy was still married (Walter a partner at Debevoy’s), but Claire, who taught French literature at the university at Aix-en-Provence, had divorced Jean-Louis, her architect husband, eight years ago. She took up then with handsome Daniel, who had narrow bright green eyes and a shock of thick reddish brown hair. He did not work, and spent most of his time riding his motorcycle. He had a slow, intimate smile, a flat, hard stomach, and was sixteen years younger than Claire. They had spent their first summer living amicably together with Jean-Louis, before they found a house.
Claire had told Amy about all this, easily, without a soupçon of embarrassment, without any shame at her divorce, or awkwardness at the age difference, or any hint that there was anything odd about the ménage à trois. Claire acted as though life was to be lived exactly as she wished it. Amy, who felt hemmed in by a jostling throng of rules and expectations, could not imagine telling her friends in New York that she had taken up with a jobless motorcycle rider more than a decade her junior, let alone asking Walter if they could all share a house after the divorce. She was proud of her jumelle, proud that her other self was so bold and unconventional. She loved hearing Claire’s glittering complicated stories—the stories of her own other life.
Walter and Amy had stopped renting their house when Tim stopped coming with them. They were staying this year at the Hôtel des Alpilles. This was a handsome old manor house just outside of town, at the end of a sycamore-lined drive, among wide green lawns. Inside it was cool and dim and pleasantly ancien: mirrors with faded gilt frames, a long dark wooden Provençal sideboard. The hotel was run by two middle-aged sisters, and when Amy and Walter came in, the plump one, with the thick square glasses and short brassy hair, sat at the desk.
“Bonjour, monsieur-dame,” she said at once, with the automatic courtesy of the French. She smiled crisply.
“Bonjour, madame,” Amy answered. Walter nodded.
They started up the stairs; there were only two floors, and no elevator. Their room was on the corner, looking out toward the pool. This was rectangular, set abruptly into the lawn without paving. Beyond was a small patio and a snack bar, serving salads and sandwiches.
In their room, Amy took off her sandals. The sisal rug was scratchy against her bare feet. She put her peach on the desk by the window and folded her arms on her chest. She was tall, almost as tall as her husband, and lanky, with knobby knees and elbows. She had been blond as a child, but her hair was now fading to an indeterminate gray.
“The thing is,” she said, looking out at the pool. “The thing is.” She stopped.
“The thing is,” said Walter, “you think he should marry her and I don’t. And he doesn’t. If he doesn’t want to marry her, he shouldn’t. How can you tell him to marry someone he doesn’t love?” Walter was going through his pockets, putting his wallet and change and sunglasses onto the bureau. He turned around to her. “You sound like a nineteenth-century marriage broker. Or a priest. I can’t believe what you’re saying.”
Amy unfolded her arms and sat down on the bed. “I know,” she said. “I know you’re right, he shouldn’t marry her if he doesn’t love her. But then why did he stay with her for so long, if he didn’t love her? Three years,” she said, disapprovingly. “Living together. What was he thinking of? It was better in the nineteenth century. Trollope says, ‘One turn about the conservatory at a dance,’ that’s all you need, to know if you want to marry someone. Living with someone for three years—what does that tell you? About how Tim feels about her?”
Walter pulled his shirt off over his head. He’d been lean when they married; now his high firm chest seemed to have slid down to his waistline, and his shins seemed somehow more prominent, the bone now closely approaching the skin. The hair on his chest and legs was pale. It had been blond, now it was colorless.
“Are you coming down to the pool?” he asked.
Amy looked at him. “I mean, it’s sort of too late for him to say he doesn’t love her. In the nineteenth century they’d be married now.”
“In the nineteenth century people made miserabl
e marriages. That’s why divorce became legal.” Walter stood by the door, holding a towel.
“So, nowadays, everyone lives together beforehand for years, and then they still get divorced. What have we gained?”
Walter shook his head and opened the door.
“Go ahead,” said Amy. “I’ll be down in a minute.” He closed the door behind him. Amy sat without moving. The bedstead was dull brass, and against it, high lumpy pillows were piled under a woven white bedspread. The tall windows had interior shutters that could be folded shut against the midday heat. They hadn’t remembered to shut them before they went out that morning, which had been a mistake. The hot air had crowded into the room. Amy stared outside toward the lawn, though from here she could see only cypress trees.
The first time Amy had seen the baby had been on the sidewalk outside the hardware shop. She had known about it by then, of course. People had told her. Hilary had even called once, herself, but at a certain point Amy had stopped taking Hilary’s calls. Then Hilary’s mother, Elaine, had called; the conversation had not been a success.
“Amy? Elaine,” Elaine began briskly, like a supervisor. At the tone of her voice—officious—and at the way she said Amy’s name—peremptory—Amy’s blood began to pound, and suddenly her thoughtful, reasonable, understanding self vanished.
“Hello,” Amy said. Something chemical had happened, and she felt herself vibrating with antagonism—toward Elaine, her tone of voice, the fact that she’d had the audacity to call.
“I thought you and I should talk to each other,” said Elaine. “I think maybe we should deal with this directly.”
Elaine spoke with a nasal sort of Long Island drawl which Amy, who had grown up in Connecticut, found insufferable. Amy said nothing; there was a pause.
A Perfect Stranger Page 6
