Also, Florida in the summer is a slow hot drowning. The humidity grows spots on her skin, pink where she is pale, pale where she is tan. She feels like an unsexy cheetah under her clothes.
These reasons seem slight. Dread and heat. None of her family or friends would understand. Anyway, since winter, they, with their worries about schools and Scouts and tenure and yoga, have seemed so distant to her, halfway dissolved in the sunset. Her work is mysterious to them, but they can understand its necessity. So they nod knowingly when she tells them she has to do research on Guy de Maupassant.
It’s not untrue. For ten years, she has been stuck on a project about the writer. Or maybe Guy de Maupassant has been stuck in her, a fish bone lodged in her throat.
* * *
—
The problem of Guy de Maupassant is grave.
Once, during her darkest months, Guy de Maupassant had meant a great deal to her. She was eighteen and an exchange student in Nantes, France, for a year, and didn’t know the language as well as she’d believed. She had been put in a collège into la troisième, a class of fourteen-year-olds. In her misery, she grew fat on crêpes and cheese, poked at her stomach in the mirror and watched it jiggle. The salvation was the cheap paperback bookstore, five francs for a book, an education one dollar at a time. The first book she bought had been a thin pale edition of Guy de Maupassant’s Contes de la Bécasse. She skipped class to sit in the Japanese garden down by the river, where she could be hidden by a sort of grand and impersonal beauty. She loved the book, and the writer, because reading his warm voice made her feel less alone, less inept.
Slowly, through reading, she became aware of the way the demands of a language can change you. She became a different person in French: colder, more elegant, more restrained. She is most herself in French, she hopes.
With the Guy project, she wants to explode the writer or explore him, she doesn’t know which. It began as a translation project, but after she read more than three hundred of his stories and found a mere handful she loved, it then turned into a historical fiction. But reimagining another writer’s life in fiction has begun to seem tricksy to her, diversionary, like sleight of hand. The times are too troubled for such things. These urgent days she wants the truth, stark and cold.
* * *
—
Her boys take the news of going to France stoically. They do not even cry.
Her older son will be seven at the end of August. He is of a physical beauty so rare that sometimes she can’t believe he’d come out of her. He is muscular, very tall for his age, with a graceful large-eyed face like a fawn’s. His beauty is mitigated by painful shyness and extreme sensitivity.
He’s like a perfect, windless pond, her husband once said. You throw something in just to watch it sink, and you’re going to see it on the bottom staring back at you for the rest of your life.
The four-year-old is different. He is sunny, golden. He sucks his thumb, even though they paint a bitter polish on it. He carries around a cat puppet called Whoopie Pie. He makes friends with everyone. After the endless flight, during which he vibrated and did not sleep, on the train from De Gaulle to their rented apartment in the onzième he shows a big-boned German girl his tiny red backpack. The girl was crying, but when he climbs into her lap, sucking his thumb and reaching back to fondle the girl’s ear, she clutches him to her and puts her eyes in his hair. The mother worries that he smells rancid, his skin is still covered in the milk he spilled all over himself back in Orlando, in that other, Florida life that she already doesn’t regret having left behind them. But the German girl doesn’t seem to mind. The mother and her sons get off the train, the older boy holding the little one’s hand tightly and the mother carrying all their bags in her two strong arms. The mother looks back and sees that the solace was temporary, that the German girl has started weeping all over again.
* * *
—
They spend the first week in Paris because the mother is hoping the boys will pick up French the way they pick up dirt. She takes them every morning to the Poussin Vert playground in the Jardin du Luxembourg to play with French children and learn French by osmosis, but her sons keep to themselves, zip-lining over and over again, the little one trying to hold his brother’s hand, his brother too sweaty and focused to allow him. They eat lunch, a decent prix-fixe vegetarian at Le Restaurant Foyot, and though it’s only one o’clock, she gets buzzed on a half carafe of cold white wine and laughs too hard when she shows her boys how to eat crème br?lée.
It disconcerts her to find that Paris has become somehow Floridian, all humidity and pink stucco and cellulite rippling under the hems of shorts. It is ten degrees warmer than it should be, much brighter and louder than the Paris that lives in her memory. She had always thought this would be the place to be during the climate wars that she sees looming in the future. A city of water, surrounded by fields, temperate and contained. But maybe there is no place to be; maybe all places on a hotter planet will be equally bad, desert and hunger everywhere, even here. The mother takes her boys to do touristy things in the searing afternoons, puppet shows and Eiffel Towers and museums and picturesque early dinners on the Seine. They speak for five minutes a day with her husband over Skype, but he doesn’t really have time; August is when he works eighteen hours a day, and the boys sense his impatience and become resentful and less and less willing to come to the computer to chat. When she speaks to adults, it is only to order things, her French going gluey in her head.
At night the boys sleep ten hours in the same cramped room with her. The mother, in order to have some time alone, drinks wine and watches French sitcoms on her computer with earphones. She really should be rereading Guy, or taking his biographers into the bathtub, elegant Francis Steegmuller, lascivious Henri Troyat, but she’s too tired; she’ll get started tomorrow. Every evening she tells herself that the next day they will go to visit Dr. Esprit Blanche’s asylum, where Guy died at forty-two years old of tertiary syphilis. A century before it was a madhouse, it had been the Palais de Lamballe; the Princesse de Lamballe was Marie Antoinette’s dearest friend, and when the revolutionaries came for the princess, they raped her, lopped off her head, and paraded it on a spike before the queen’s window. When Guy was in his final throes of insanity, believing that there were precious jewels in his urine and that he was the son of God, the headless princess came through the walls to visit him.
Yet day after day, the mother doesn’t go to Guy’s last home: there would have been so much to explain to her children, what syphilis is, what insanity is, what revolutions are. Instead, every day, she wakes foggily with the boys at dawn, starving for pain au chocolat and coffee and fruit, and gets sucked into their life of playgrounds and joy. At last, before she can see where Guy ended his days, she runs out of time.
* * *
—
On the seventh day, they get up very early and take a train to Rouen, where, at the station, they rent a Mercedes for the drive west to the Alabaster Coast, in Normandy, where Maupassant was born and where he returned again and again. His mother, Laure, was from the area, a woman who gave her two sons their love of books, who went on walking tours in Europe alone as a younger woman, who dared to divorce back when divorce was not done, but who ended up a neurasthenic, sad and alone, both sons dead of syphilis, trying to strangle herself with her own long hair.