“We had to go on a carnival bus!”
The old shawled woman beside him patted his wrist and said, “Life is sometimes a rocky road.”
And then they heard a blowout and the bus jounced violently. Natalie saw crows of tire rubber flying onto the highway, and then she saw Pierre scowling up at her.
“C’est un complot,” he said. (This is a plot.)
5
They were stalled in an out-of-the-way section of Nebraska prairie where, as some citizens put it, the east and west peter out. Waving grasses, hot zephyrs in the mid-eighties, a certain crankiness to the trees, skies of a Windex blue. Worried and impatient tourists were milling about outside the bus or lounging dissolutely on their luggage, and the See America driver was hunched next to a rear wheel well, his hands on his knees, trying to fix the flat just by staring at it.
Waiting tranquilly on a hillside of wildflowers, a red suitcase on rollers beside her, Natalie tilted her head back against a cattle fence so her face could catch the noontime sun as Pierre scrupulously examined the sleeves and cuffs of his Italian suit and cursed each time he picked a sticker or cocklebur from it. Wide Hereford cows were six feet away, their ears twitching tenacious flies, their mouths moving sideways as they chewed, their soft brown eyes watching him without curiosity. “Look at my clothings,” he said. “We are supposed to be on the happy vacation, but instead one is being addicted.”
“Afflicted.”
“Oui.”
“And last August?”
Pierre loomed gigantically over her but there was a littleness to him as he evaluated whether this were a trick question. Without certainty he answered, “Cap d’Antibes.”
“In Cap d’Antibes you stared at everyone’s breasts but mine.”
“Yours always had books over them.”
“In Saint Laurent you took those long walks. Alone.”
“How many times can you watch Shame?”
“Shane,” Natalie corrected.
“Cowboys,” he said, and made a gun of his hand. “Bang bang.”
“In Strasbourg . . .,” she said.
“. . . you are in the library all the times.”
She looked at him with sarcasm. “Perhaps I was researching the problem of male lust.”
Pierre was stumped. “What is this word loost?”
“Plein de désir sexuel.”
“Well, that is the difference between us. You research; I . . . fais des expériences?”
“Experiment.”
“C’est juste. I experiment.”
“And what does one do when the experiment is over?”
Each considered the other for a long time. In a city far away someone dropped a pin.
“Today is Wednesday,” Natalie said.
“Mercredi,” Pierre insisted.
“We have until Sunday to decide if we are to finally marry.”