“This just in: I like you a lot.”
And they were about to kiss again when heavy Owen and skinny Carlo sloshed up from the fairway’s water hazard to the left, wearing miner’s lamped helmets and weedy hip waders, garden rakes and full gunnysacks in their hands.
“Ill met by moonlight,” Carlo muttered.
Owen hefted a gunnysack high and shouted, “You guys want any golf balls?” Pierre and Iona jolted up and straightened themselves. Owen said, “We got plenty.” When he only got hard stares from them, he said, “I guess we’ll be going.”
Sloshing away, Carlo’s jealousy overcame him and he yelled, “Don’t let him speak French to ya!”
Smiling, Iona got up. “Too late!”
16
At eleven P.M. Dick Tupper was standing in his silk pajamas in the night of his fancy new kitchen, the sole dull light that of the interior of the freezer as he leaned against its opened door and ate spoonful after spoonful of chocolate-chip-cookie-dough ice cream straight out of the carton. When he’d disposed of all but an inch of the pint, he finally found the discipline to lid the carton, hide it behind the hamburger patties, and shut the freezer door. Wiping his mustache dry with his hand, he then ambled to his living room in the darkened house, singing aloud in a good voice an old country-western song by Hank Williams Sr.: “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Wrestling was on the television. He finished the Falstaff that was next to his Eames lounge chair, fumbled through three remotes until he found the one for the television, and switched it off, still singing. Entering his bedroom, he flicked on the Corbu lamp. Arrayed on an Ikea dresser were half a dozen silver-framed pictures of friends, relatives, and holiday good times. In one of them a grinning, fifteen-year-old Iona was squeezed into a photo booth with him, her sunburnt cheek against his, and sticking out her tongue as he made a gruesome face for the camera. Dick got into his wide, hard-mattressed bed and told himself, You’re so lonesome you could cry.”
17
Shambling through the first floor of the rooming house and clapping off lamps, Mrs. Christiansen encountered a pensive Natalie at the kitchen table, one hand supporting her head as the other fetched popcorn from a salad bowl. The girl wore red satin pajamas that did not do enough, Marvyl thought, to defeat her female features, but she could just hear Iona hissing Oh for gosh sakes it’s the fashion these days, so she let it go. She said, “I guess it’s awfully hard to sleep with so much going on.”
Mademoiselle Clairvaux glanced up and forced a smile. “Yes. I have much on my mind.”
“Well, you leave the food preparations to Opal and me.” Mrs. Christiansen pulled out a kitchen chair and heavily sat, with an “Oof.” She chose and rejected popcorn kernels until she found one just right. She munched with delicacy and asked, “Anything else we can do, dear?”
Natalie told her, “I was flirting just to make him jealous. And now Carlo says he’s flirting, too, and I have no idea if he means it or not. And my heart is torn over another and he’s such a wonderful man; he deserves a good wife; and I feel like I’m using him.”
Mrs. Christiansen was having trouble with pronoun antecedents. She got back to basics. “Well, the course of true love never did run smooth. You do love Pierre, don’t you?”
“Yes, I think so. And he loves me. Women will always try to have him for themselves, but in his own way he’s faithful; he’s as loyal as a shadow; and he’d do anything for me: fly here from Paris, sleep in a garage, flirt in order to make me jealous.”
Mrs. Christiansen smiled and said, “We have a great deal in common, Natalie. My Bill was like that.”
“And we’ve had so many good times together,” Natalie said. “Pierre heating caramel for a crème brûlée with a blowtorch and burning off his left eyebrow. Skidding naked down the giant dunes by the sea at Arcachon. Or just quiet evenings in the bathtub together laughing over the English descriptions he read in Wine Spectator.”
Mrs. Christiansen seemed lost in a reverie for a moment, and then said, “I feel the need to retract my last statement.”
Shoeless Iona entered the kitchen in her jean shorts and green mechanic’s workshirt.
“Oh, hello dear,” Marvyl said. “How was your evening?”
She felt uneasy with Natalie there, so she just said, “Pretty good.”
“We were just talking about the fun that Mademoiselle has with blowtorches and spectators when she’s undressed.”
Natalie flushed. “Well, not exactly.”
Iona ironically told her, “Don’t worry. We do that a lot around here. You’re gonna feel right at home.”
Mrs. Christiansen got up. “Well, now that you’re home, I think I’ll go to bed.” She headed for the kitchen staircase. “You two can stay up and chat if you like.”
Iona and Natalie just stared at each other, not saying anything, and then they both frantically hurried upstairs.
A half-hour later Iona was lying upstairs on her girlhood bed, still in her jean shorts and Owen’s green shirt, and listening to Edith Piaf stirringly singing “Non, je ne regrette rien” on her boom box. No, she translated, I regret nothing.
Natalie was lying upstairs in her red satin pajamas, unasleep and wondering if marriage would tame Pierre or just make him that much worse. She heard Edith Piaf singing down the hall. Crickets chirred in the trees. She got up and poignantly went to a screenless opened window, slightly parting the swelling drapes.
She heard a grunting noise and looked down, seeing the trellis shaking and shuddering until Pierre hove into view just below Natalie’s windowsill. Shocked, she leaned out on her hands and whispered, “What are you doing?”
Pierre got a purchase on the window frame with his left forearm and asked, “Tu vas bien?” (Are you all right?)