Why are you crying, silly? Genevieve said gently, touching Amanda’s hair. Twice in a day and you never used to cry. I once saw all four of your big old brothers sitting on you, one of them bouncing on your head, and you didn’t cry. You just fought like a wild thing.
Hormones, I think, Amanda said. I don’t know. It’s just that all those nights when Sophie would go out and leave Mina at our house, I would sing this to her until she went to sleep. For hours and hours. Everybody would be screaming downstairs, just awful things, and once in a while the cops would show up, and there would be flashing lights in the window. But in my bed, there’d be this sweet beautiful baby girl sucking her thumb and saying, Sing it again. And so I’d sing it again and again and again, and it was all I could do.
They listened to Mina’s beautiful, raspy voice over the monitor . . . Il dit à son tour— Ouvrez votre porte, pour le dieu d’amour.
Well, thank God for Madame Dupont, Genevieve said. Forcing us to learn it in seventh grade. She made us sing at school assembly, remember? I wanted to die.
Nobody looked at Manfred; they studied the knives, the bread. The moment passed.
Grant said, What’s she saying?
There were tears in his eyes, Amanda saw; she squeezed the back of his neck. She was moved. It had been so long since she had seen the side of him that would weep during movies about dolphin harvests. A different Grant had grown up over him, a harder one.
Manfred didn’t seem inclined to translate. Amanda listened for a minute to gather herself. It’s a story, she said. Harlequin wants to write a letter, but he doesn’t have a pen and his fire went out, and so he goes to his buddy Pierrot to borrow them. But Pierrot is in bed and won’t open the door, and he tells Harlequin to go to the neighbor’s to ask because he can hear someone making a fire in her kitchen. And then Harlequin and the neighbor fall in love. It’s silly, she said. A pretty lullaby.
But Manfred was looking at her from the shadows. He leaned forward. Dear Amanda, he said. The world must be hard for you. All substance, no nuance. Harlequin is on the prowl. He wants sex, pour l’amour de Dieu. When Pierrot turns him away, he goes to the neighbor to battre le briquet. Double entendre, you see. He is, in the end, fucking the neighbor.
Genevieve sat back slowly in the darkness.
Manfred smiled at Amanda, and there was a strange new electricity in the air; there was something here, announcing itself to Amanda, in the very back of her head. It had almost arrived, the understanding; it was almost here. She held her breath to let it step shyly forward into the light.
* * *
—
Mina watched the couples from the doorway, feeling as if she were still flying over the Atlantic, the ground distant and swift beneath. Nobody was speaking; they were not looking at one another. Something had soured since she’d left them half an hour ago. She had come from a house of conflict. She knew just by looking that there would be an argument breaking out in a moment and that it would be bad.
She took a step out to distract them. She started singing. She didn’t have a good voice, but she was loud and her singing sometimes would disarm a fight at home. The other four snapped their eyes up at her. She felt herself expanding into her body as she always did when she was watched. She was new tonight, strange. The champagne was all she’d consumed since leaving Orlando, and it made her feel languorous, like a cat.
Sometime between arrival and now, she’d finally decided what she’d been mulling over for the past few days; and now what she knew and what they didn’t filled her with a secret lift of joy. Internal helium. She wouldn’t board the plane at the end of the summer. School was so gray and useless compared to what waited for her in Paris, her life on hold in that hot place where she’d lived her childhood out. Florida. Well. She was finished with all of that. A whole continent in the past. She would go toward the glamour. She was only twenty-one. She was beautiful. She could do whatever she wanted to. She felt herself on the exhilarating upward climb in her life. As she walked toward them, she saw how these people at the table had stopped climbing, how they were teetering on the precipice (even Amanda, poor tired Amanda). That Manfred man was already hurtling down. He was a mere breath from the rocks.
This sky huge with stars. Glorious, Mina thought, as she walked toward them. The cold in the air, the smell of cherries wafting up from the trees, the veal and endives cooking in the kitchen, the pool with its own moon, the stone house, the vines, the country full of velvet-eyed Frenchmen. Even the flicks of candlelight on those angry faces at the table was romantic. Everything was beautiful. Anything was possible. The whole world had been split open like a peach. And these poor people, these poor fucking people. Were they too old to see it? All they had to do was reach out and pluck it and raise it to their lips, and they would taste it, too.
SALVADOR
The apartment Helena rented in Salvador had high ceilings, marble floors, vast windows. It always looked cool, even when the blaze of a Brazilian summer crept inside in the late afternoon. If she leaned from her balcony, she could see the former convent that curved around her street’s cul-de-sac; she could see over the red tile roofs of the buildings across the way to where the harbor opened into ocean. She was so close she could smell faint littoral rot and taste the salt on the wind. For the first few mornings, she took her coffee out to the balcony in her cotton nightgown and watched the water sweeping greenly toward the horizon, ocean and sky faltering into haze where they met.
One morning when she was on the balcony enjoying the nightgown’s graze against her ankles and the sharp summer sunlight, she looked down to find the shopkeeper from the grocery across the street looking up at her. He had a broom in his hand, but he wasn’t sweeping. His round, dark face, always glistening as if just brushed with hot butter, was turned up toward her. His lips were open, and his tongue was pressing rapidly into the gap between his two front teeth, all pink and wet and lewd.
She went inside and shut the glass door hard and put her coffee cup down very carefully on the glass dining table. She felt ill. She went into the bedroom to look at herself. The same light that fell across the balcony was slicing through the windows in her room, and she stood in the pool of it to see what he’d seen. In the mirror, all was apparent, literally: she could see her entire body—legs, dark pubis, round brown nipples—as if her nightgown were only a pale shadow of her own skin. Helena thought of the man’s view from below, the pink soles of her feet pressing through the keyhole shapes in the balcony’s floor, the taper of her legs to her bust, her head topped with dyed yellow hair brazenly unbrushed.
Jesus Christ, I look like a whore, she said. Helena laughed at herself, and the laugh broke the spell, and she showered and dressed and went out for the day. As she passed the grocery, she stared straight ahead, unwilling to give the shopkeeper the satisfaction of seeing her look into the dark recesses of his store.
* * *
—