by Corine Gantz
Her teeth clenching hard enough to break a molar, she measured three cups full of flour and threw them in a heap onto the table, glad to see a small cloud of flour invade Lucas’s space. He waved the cloud away as she dug a hole in the center of her preparation and chucked spoonfuls of soft butter onto the mixture.
“C’est beaucoup de beurre, non?” Lucas offered.
“I have tons of choices, myriads of choices in fact,” she said as she cracked egg after egg and dropped them into the mixture from high up, plop, plop, making a mess with determination.
“Please sit down for a minute. Stop with those eggs,” he pleaded.
“It’s the eggs or your skull, Lucas. And taxes are due! And electricity!” She practically yelled. “And I am keeping the fucking house!”
“Your monthly grocery expenditure alone,” Lucas began, “which, by the way, is quite extravagant.”
Was Lucas still talking? It came to her like a vision, right there, at six thirty in the morning. All of it came together: the perfect little crescents of dough on the countertop, Lucas in his designer suit, moving his mouth, the children still asleep upstairs, the Mickey Mouse mug, the open cookbook, the gooey mess on the wooden table. She raised her dough-coated hands and held them in mid air. She had flour in her hair, a wayward expression on her face.
Lucas looked at her. “What?”
“I’m having an idea, that’s what.” Annie said, wide eyed, and at the same time white as a sheet and looking ill.
Her mind was made up that same instant.
Chapter 2
Somewhere up rue de Cambronne, a truck blocked both lanes. Deliverymen unloaded boxes methodically, indifferent to the honking and the wrath of drivers. Jared watched from the window of his apartment, his forehead glued to the cold window as he tried to wake up and piece together the source of his headache and hangover. He was pretty sure he had not spent the night alone but there was no sign of a woman anywhere. This would make things difficult if and when he saw her again. Merde, he thought.
He peeled little bits of red oil paint off his forearm. Obviously he had painted last night. It was two in the afternoon, and he doubted he’d get any hot water whatsoever, only the lukewarm trickle that would leave him with a sense of being punished for the previous night’s excesses. He remembered that his last razor blade had died on him in mid shave and that he was out of cigarettes. The shower and the shave would have to wait. The red paint was sprinkled all over his hair, face, and even his chest like he had been playing paintball in the nude. He tried to scrub it off but the water was too cold. He found last night’s clothes scattered around the bedroom, which confirmed that there had been a woman, ran wet fingers through his hair, and walked out of his apartment.
The building manager, in her robe and slippers, was already onto him, her diminutive body creating a barrier in front of the elevator. “Bonjour Madame Dumont!” he called out merrily as he made a rapid 180-degree turn towards the stairs. The furious steps of the old lady’s slippers on the wood floor pursued him. “Mais c’est l’aprés midi! You think it’s morning? Well it isn’t. And you think it’s still December maybe, but this is January and the owner wants her January rent.”
“Not the morning? I thought, since you’re wearing slippers?” he added with a flirtatious smile. “I like this color on you, by the way.”
The building manager almost blushed, giggled, and then came back to her senses. “The rent! La propriétaire wants her rent!”
“Bien sûr, Madame Dumont. Demain,” he said as he zoomed down three sets of stairs.
Jared slowed down the instant he came out on the street. He stepped into the corner Café Des Artistes where he stood at the zinc counter, foraging his pockets for money.
“Salut, Jared,” Maurice grunted. He noticed the red paint on Jared’s face. “Did you slit someone’s throat this morning?”
“Salut, Maurice. The usual.” Jared counted his money. “Hold the croissant,” he said. “Oh, and one pack of Gitanes.”
“Pas de croissant?”
“Not hungry,” he lied.
Maurice would have had a dignified look to him if it weren’t for old acne scars on his cheeks. Unhurried, he wiped the liquor bottles and replaced them on the shelves behind him one by one: Alcohol de Framboise, Grand Marnier, Courvoisier. There was nobility to the repetition of this task and Maurice was in no rush to serve Jared, or anyone. He finally pushed a pack of Gitanes in front of him like a reward for good behavior. Jared opened his first pack of the day, put a cigarette to his mouth, and clicked open his Zippo lighter that smelled of airplane fuel. Maurice placed a café au lait and three paper-wrapped sugar cubes in front of him. The cigarette smoke slowly made its way above his fingers as he sipped coffee amidst the sounds of the coffeemaker, orange juicer, and furious honking outside. He jumped when he realized Maurice had been talking to him.
“The job interview!” Maurice said with unexplained animosity. “How did that work out?”
“Didn’t go.”
“You didn’t go? It was almost a sure thing!”
“I’m not desperate enough to serve appetizers in a tux at one in the afternoon,” he said, then noticed Maurice’s fitted white shirt and bow tie.
Maurice murdered him with one look. “Maybe you should have kept that rich girlfriend, the one that bought all kinds of stuff.”
“She wasn’t rich, just well dressed.”
“If she was still your girlfriend you’d be ordering a croissant right now,” Maurice shrugged. “Imbeciles in tuxedos have a sense about those things.”
Jared tossed crumpled Euros on the counter, took a last draw of his cigarette, dropped it to the floor, and crushed it with his foot before walking out.
Maurice stepped from behind the counter with a broom and began sweeping the dozen or so cigarette butts that littered the café’s tiled floor. “Connard!” he whistled between his teeth.
“Crétin!” Jared mumbled as he walked towards the métro station.
On the street, old people’s eyes widened at the sight of the scarlet paint on Jared’s hands, hair, and unshaven jaws. Schoolgirls giggled, and women steadied their gazes. Jared walked for a long time. He left the smell of spices and exhaust pipes of his neighborhood, and walked down boulevards in wide steps. A half hour later, he was moving through the pristine streets and imposing architecture of the seventeenth arrondissement and came to a halt on rue Montsouri in front of a stately three-story building. He rang one of the three buttons of the intercom. Lucas D’Arbanville. He pushed the button over and over until he heard Lucas’s cry over the intercom.
“Who in the world is making this awful racket?”
“It’s me.”
“Will you please remove your finger from the bell? I’ll let you in!”
Lucas opened his apartment door wearing pressed jeans and a Lacoste shirt in a rare shade of mango. Lucas who was in his mid forties and compared to him looked the picture of health and self-grooming, took one look at him and burst into laughter. “You look absolutely revolting! And what is that smell?”
Jared turned back and started down the stairs.
“Please come on in, Jared, I was just being humorous.”
“I’m not in the mood.”
“Oh and does it show!” Lucas said, still laughing. Jared turned to leave again.
“No, no, come on, my boy.” Lucas grabbed Jared’s arm and pulled him inside his apartment. They kissed each other on both cheeks. “I’ll make us some coffee.”
Jared took in the apartment. Lucas collected Empire furniture, a style that fitted him. He had inherited most of the pieces, but those he had purchased were just as exquisite. There was a watercolor by Henry Miller on the wall opposite his couch, a wild choice for Lucas, maybe an indication that Annie was having a positive impact on him. On the other walls, some very old school paintings, and then, of course, the three large canvases Lucas had bought from him, from the time Jared’s oil abstract paintings sold before they dried. O
n the mahogany desk laced with delicate gold incrustations, an open laptop, a few sheets of fine stationery, and an uncapped Mont Blanc pen were the only signs of human activity. Jared went to sit in the kitchen out of respect for Lucas’s prized furniture. He put his hand to his pocket to retrieve his Gitanes but changed his mind.
“I need a cigarette,” he said as he dropped into a chair.
Lucas followed him into the kitchen. “I’m working on quitting. I don’t have any.”
Jared gave him a desperate look.
“All right then, I do have a few packs strictly for emergency,” Lucas sighed. “This is an emergency, right?”
“Merde, it is.”
Lucas turned on the espresso machine and foraged in a kitchen drawer. He retrieved a brand new pack of cigarettes, and handed it to Jared.
“Marlboro? Light? You’re buying the American dream and its bullshit in one fell swoop. She’s got you brainwashed.”
Lucas ignored the comment. He labored over the complicated machine and then retrieved a wooden box filled with delicate espresso samplers that looked like designer chocolates. “Blow the smoke away from me,” Lucas said. “If Annie smells cigarettes on me, she’ll never believe I am really quitting.”
They sat facing each other at the kitchen table, sipping espresso out of tiny coffee cups without a word. Jared pretended not to notice that Lucas was smiling fondly at him, as Lucas always did when Jared was working his hardest at being a jerk. For a moment, there was only the sound of spoons stirring coffee. Then Jared tried to make amends.
“So how’s your love life going? Gotten into Annie’s pants yet?”
“Jared, I love you, but you are getting on my nerves. You barge in here rudely, smelling terrible, you demolish my doorbell, steal my last pack of cigarettes, then you insult Annie, and you insult me.”
“I’m having a bad day,” Jared shrugged.
“So it seems.”
“I’m hungry. I need money. I need an exhibition. I need a place to stay. I need a shower that works. I need a girl.”
“As a thirty-year-old heartthrob, that last item shouldn’t pose too much trouble.”
“I mean I want a real girl. Someone who matters.” Jared had to confront Lucas’s blatant amusement. “I know, I know. That’s a first,” he said before Lucas could.
Lucas got up, took butter, strawberry compote, and organic orange juice out of the refrigerator, and brought all this plus half a baguette and a serrated knife to the kitchen table.
“Am I really hearing my godson beg me for advice on matters of the heart?”
“Oh please.”
“May I at least, feed you breakfast then?”
Jared accepted, wondering again why Lucas, a man so unlike him, so unlike anyone in his life, still persisted in not giving up on him.
Annie sat at the ten-foot-long table in the center of her Parisian kitchen feeling sick to her stomach at the thought of what she was about to do. She had been sitting like this the entire morning while the kids were in school, and now it was time to pick them up for lunch, only she had not prepared lunch. The cold soup on the stove had undoubtedly become a giant Petri dish by now and the baked sea bass was no more than a faint idea from a distant past. The decision was made and that was that. She felt the nausea of someone about to plunge into the void.
She got up and turned on the heat under the soup pot. She’d boil it; hopefully bacteria would get the message. She desperately needed to ingest something liquid, thick, warm and salty like amniotic fluid before she could give birth to her action. Her subconscious must have known she should prepare chicken soup for her future nauseated self.
She loved her kitchen most. It was built some two hundred years ago, when aristocrats seldom ventured into the servants’ quarters. For this reason, it didn’t have the formality of the rest of the house. A glass door opened to a small garden with a beautiful stone fountain in the center, and remained open all through spring and summer, making the garden a natural extension of the kitchen. In the warm season, Annie grew every type of herb and the best tomatoes this side of the Seine River. Raspberries climbed wildly along the south-facing wall and an ancient apple tree trained as an espalier produced the sweetest apples of a variety not found in markets. She needed only to step outside her kitchen to help herself. Her own private Garden of Eden. Even now in January, when the plants were dormant and the door to the garden was closed, light flooded in through the glass panes making the kitchen the brightest and most inviting room in the house.
This decision was so unlike her. Or was it? The thing was, there was a before and there was an after to who she was, and she did not know in which category to fit this decision. The person she had been before Johnny’s death might have been capable of handling such a decision, but what about the new self, the one that had settled in lately, the one she did not like very much? What was the new self capable of? But really, wasn’t the new self, the darker, angrier, more mistrusting self more real, more true to who or what she really was?
She had made terrifying decisions before. The last twelve years of her life, for example, had been the consequence of a single word uttered at the end of a single meal. She had been twenty-three then, and Johnny twenty-eight. He was about to finish grad school and she had three years to go. They were having dinner in a rather seedy Italian restaurant near the campus. Her foot gently rubbed his crotch under the red-and-white-checkered plastic tablecloth. He looked more than ever like Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Gorgeous and mischievous. Impossible and irresistible. Outside, the Indian summer was ablaze. They had met at a party. She had made him laugh. Her old self had been silly and free. There had been several months of wild lovemaking and very little studying. They were as physically compatible as two people could be. Two days into what was not yet a relationship, she had known that she was helplessly in love with Johnny, but boy had she worked valiantly not to show it. She was no nitwit; Johnny was an academic star, captain of the Lacrosse team, and voted most likely to weaken ladies’ knees. She was wise enough to know he was only hers temporarily. They had been dating for six months, and they never talked about the future. She had never broached the subject of the future, never planned one.
The evening her life changed forever they were, in fact, having what she believed to be their last week together. Johnny was moving to France to become a partner in his older brother’s import firm in Paris. Sitting across from him over greasy Eggplant Parmigiana, Annie was as heartbroken as she appeared nonchalant.
Johnny poured wine into her glass and handed it to her, waited for her to take a sip. “So?” he said, a half smile on his lips, “you want to get married?” She swallowed the wine and coughed, “Do you mean in general? I guess one day, with the right man, at the right time.”
“No, not in general. I mean the two of us. This week.”
Yes, her stomach dropped indeed. Sank down to her ankles, as a matter of fact. She felt her cheeks burn crimson, as sweat sprang from every pore of her skin. Her shaken response came from the heart. “Me?”
Johnny laughed at that one.
In the Italian restaurant, life moved at a different speed now. Johnny took her hand, placed something in it, and closed her fingers over it. What did she hope to find when she opened her hand?
“Is this some kind of sick joke?” she said, trying to contain the head-to-toe trembling.
She opened her hand. In her palm was a thin gold band.
Across from the table that was now the center of the universe, Johnny looked at her, a bemused expression on his face. “So, what’s it gonna be?” he said, tilting his head like a cocker spaniel. “Wanna get hitched and move to Paris with me?”
“I... I will have to get back to you on that,” Annie answered, her throat already constricted.
“All right, go ahead,” he said. And a second later, “so?”
She laughed, and the same time tried very hard not to cry. If this was a practical joke, she was a dead woman on camp
us. But she could not hold the tears. “You’re not serious.”
He had taken her hand, and slowly, incredibly, placed the ring on her finger. “Very serious. Come on, just say yes, don’t leave me hanging like this.”
And then came the single word that changed her entire life.
“Yes,” she sobbed.
They were married a week later so that they could move to France as Mr. and Mrs. Roland. No big wedding, and she couldn’t have cared less. The opportunity to work with his brother as soon as he graduated had to be grabbed. Johnny had learned French for years in preparation but Annie knew not a word of French except for bonbon and voulayvouparlay. Her parents disliked the France idea just as much as the Johnny idea. Her mom, especially, was frantic.
“You hardly know him!”
“Well, does one say no to winning the lottery?”
“You did not think this through. You’re willingly putting your hand down the meat grinder, that’s what you’re doing!”
“Oh come on mom, the French can’t be that bad.”
“I’m not talking about the French, dammit! This...adventurer...your education!”
This was the first time she had ever heard her mother curse.
It turned out that her mom and dad, who got most of their exercise from arguing about virtually everything, united beautifully in disliking Johnny. They insisted Johnny was self-involved, unreliable, and immature. Annie wondered if it had anything to do with the fact that Johnny was too handsome, and that a man who surpasses his wife in beauty has to be immediately suspicious. She wondered if she did not think that herself.
It was a whirlwind time of which she had little recollection. A promising (and expensive) education ended abruptly. She met Johnny’s parents for the first time the day of the civil wedding. Tearful goodbyes followed at the airport.
And overnight, or almost, she was a married woman living in Paris. Her sheltered and, up until now, mostly academic life transformed immediately into chaos, confusion, and very hard work. She had to learn an entirely alien language in a particularly alien culture. She had to figure it all out on her own, learn her baguette from her ficelle, her Roquefort from her Reblochon. She had to learn to live without her family. How she missed her family. Without friends. How she missed her friends. And how hard it was to make new ones when you suddenly found your ability to communicate reduced to that of a trained chimpanzee. She had to learn to take care of a husband who worked all the time. Then, so fast, she had to figure out how to raise one, two, and then three children. Heck, she had to learn to take care of herself. She had to learn to make beds, wash laundry, shop, cook, take sick babies to the doctor, and drive through Paris with a stick shift, the whole thing en Français!
