Marie dressed quickly, pinning the purple cloth at the shoulder, and then hid her face in the corner, her head bowed and her shoulders heaving as though sobbing at the memories. The homunculus who lived in my belly raced across the lining, grumbling and cursing as he ran. I loosened the belt to my robe, yet found no relief to my growling stomach. My feet and my hands ached and seemed waterlogged, and when I lifted my fingers to my face, the skin at my cheeks was taut and tender to the touch. The more Marie cried, the fatter I got, and when I looked in the mirror, a blimp stared back at me. I had doubled in weight, my features diminished by the beachball of my head. My belly escaped from the confines of the robe whose seams strained to stay together. My fingers and toes felt as thick as sausages, and my legs as stout as totem poles. “I am becoming well rounded at last,” I joked to the old man, but the words came out in a helium squeak.
“You are a zeppelin,” he said. “Entirely too rotund to contain yourself.”
“I feel as if I shall pop.”
In one swift motion, he stepped away from me and spun Marie by the shoulders. An enormous yellow balloon, imprinted with a cartoon version of my face, was at her lips, and her cheeks were puffed to deliver the next, perhaps fatal, blow.
“Don’t you dare,” he told her. She sucked in her breath and pinched the stem between her fingers. The pressure hurt my brain, and I could scarcely bear to watch for fear that she might wield a sharp fingernail or a straight pin and burst me with a casual gesture. Instead she let out the air in one long raspberry, the latex blubbering in an obscene manner, and at the same time, I deflated, the air hissing from every orifice in the most embarrassing way, though I was relieved in the end to be back to my normal self. Holding out an insistent palm, the old man demanded that she hand over the balloon. They argued for a moment in furious French, the words zipping by so quickly that I could not make out a single one. Marie surrendered reluctantly, and the old man held up the balloon for my inspection. In addition to the caricatured face, there were two stubby arms and two legs molded into the shape. He wadded it into a ball and stuffed the balloon into his breast pocket. Chagrined, Marie joined the other three women on the edge of the bathtub perched like spectators consigned to the cheap bleacher seats.
“A word, monsieur, s’il vous pla?t?” I led him to the threshold and the illusion of privacy. “First of all, let me thank you for saving my life once again. Without you, I might have been clubbed or speared or blown into bits or who knows what.”
He tapped me twice on the meat of my arm. “I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you—”
“That’s awfully decent of you.”
“—before you finish the story of the performance of our friends in your parlor. I’d like to know how you got to where you are today.”
“You and me both, brother.”
Behind the glass of his spectacles, his bright eyes blinked back a film of moisture that could have been taken for the beginning of tears. His bottom lip quivered, but then he composed himself. I was growing quite fond of the old bugger. He winked at the girls. “What do you think of the most recent one?” He jerked his thumb in Marie’s direction. “Took every ounce of concentration to keep reading the words on her skin and not give in to distraction.”
“She is quite beautiful. Stunning, really. And that accent.”
“A Frenchwoman could make the shopping list sound sultry. Must be all that red wine and cigarettes.” In the bare light, he looked even more recognizable, tall and thin as a scarecrow, swept-back thatch of silver hair, the wire-rimmed glasses, and a face etched with wrinkles earned from ten thousand Gitanes and night after night of staring down a blank page. The famous French playwright.
“You remind me of someone.”
“Your father.”
“No, yes. Him, too, but someone else.”
“I am glad it is somebody else. I was getting concerned.”
“What was the name of the French fella who wrote that play? Waiting for Godot.”
He patted the pockets of his robe. Reaching in with two fingers, he pulled out the wrinkled balloon and considered it as though he had no memory of the object. A thought tickled his lips. “Do you have a cigarette?”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Now would be an odd time to start then. Still.”
“It is a very famous play. About nothing.”
“Nothing? Everything is about something.”
“Even this?”
“Especially this. Even silence has meaning and countless interpretations.”