The older boy hangs back with her and says quietly that he doesn’t like that man, that he is stinky and there is something weird about him.
Oh, he’s not so bad, she tells him. She is wheezing a little. At the top, Jean-Paul and the little boy have turned around and are watching her power upward, step by step.
Jean-Paul laughs and calls down that she reminds him of a she-goat.
Changed my mind, Monkey, she murmurs to her older boy, I don’t like him, either.
Atop the hill, the streets are nervous, haphazard, full of short jogs up a half step and quick alleys. Everything is made of stone. In the sun, out of the wind, it is quite warm. Red geraniums spill everywhere.
At last, Jean-Paul drops the little boy’s hand, pulls out a key with a flourish, opens a door in a wall beside other doors, and steps in. He says that here they are, here’s home. Inside, it is sparse, which suits her, all rock and wood and white plaster, three rooms stacked atop one another, connected by a spiral staircase. Someone’s grandmother’s furniture. There is a fatty, rotting smell that she recognizes from an apartment in Boston when she was young, a few weeks of low-level anguish after a rat died in the walls. There is a table, chairs, a couch and television downstairs, a trundle bed and a bathroom on the next floor, and at the top her tiny white room with only a queen-sized bed in it. There is dirt on the windowsills, long hairs and sand in the drains.
The two skylights in her own bare white room at the top are open, and she sticks her head through. On one side, she sees only sky, the daydreaming sheep above the cliffs. But the other is full of slate rooftops shining like damp skin. Everything she sees from here is striped: the red-and-tan clock tower at the center of town, the roofs of the blue-and-white tin cabanas on the beach, the creamy cliffs with their veins of flint, the ocean’s navy with whitecaps, the tiny people walking the boardwalk in their mariner’s shirts. The wind is raw on her cheeks.
She brings her head back in. Jean-Paul is standing very close. His scent is strong, and it combines with the dead-animal smell from the kitchen to become somehow an unpleasant film in her mouth.
He wants to show her how to use the television, the wifi, the stovetop, but she says, No, no. Thank you! No, no, no, no. She goes down the stairs, over and over thanking Jean-Paul, who is following her. From the front door, she calls up for the boys, who are leaping off the bed and making the house shake as they land. They come down grumblingly. She has to go grocery shopping, she says; it is imperative. If there are problems, she’ll get in touch with the owner. It is great to meet Jean-Paul. She opens the door. He hangs back. She says goodbye three different ways. He slinks out. She opens all the windows and waits for ten minutes as the wind blows the last of him out, then when she is sure he is gone, she makes the boys put their sandals on again.
* * *
—
The mean-mouthed woman at the town’s only épicerie laughs at the mother when she tries to fit all the groceries into the reusable bag she brought from Florida. The mother feels ashamed: she saw an excellent burgundy at an astonishing price, one fifteenth of what the wine would have cost in the United States, and bought all four bottles on the shelf. They make the cardboard box the woman gives her heavy.
The boys pass the bakery slowly, sniffing. They speed by the butcher shop because the window is gruesome with dead flesh. They are vegetarians, though only when it comes to creatures with faces.
It was simple to get to the center of town, but now the mother appears to have lost her way. The streets were silent and eerie with drizzle when they arrived in the morning but are now thronging with visitors. The boys run ahead; she yells to prevent them from being hit by the cars sliding along in the tight roads between the houses. They look back at her blankly.
She asks someone where their street is, but the man, clearly a fisherman, responds in an impossible French, a French that makes her fear she has somehow lost her French entirely. Yportais, she’ll learn later, is its own dialect, as knotty as old rope.
At last she puts down the groceries and rubs her arms. She won’t cry, she tells herself firmly. The older boy has found a tall round pole beside a set of stairs leading up to a bricked-in front door. He is showing his little brother how to climb up, slide down. Dark hair, gold hair, dark, then gold.
Guy was also the beloved older brother of someone smaller and blonder, Hervé. But Hervé was the even more tragic mirror of his tragic brother, and the parallel feels like a curse on her own boys, and she rushes it out of her mind.
The littlest playground in the world! her sons shout, sliding.
She watches, feeling each slide in her own body. She had a battery-operated toy when she was little, a set of penguins that marched up a staircase only to launch down a curvy slide and start the march again. The thrill was vicarious, the adrenaline outsourced. Good training, the mother thinks, for a life in books.
She comes up the sidewalk, pushing the box with her feet.
What’s wrong, Mommy? the little one says.
I think we’re lost, she says. Don’t worry. I’ll figure it out.
He makes a pinched face as if he’d sucked a lemon, then slides down the pole and runs up the stairs again.
The older boy comes over and stands on her feet, pressing his head into her sternum. He looks up at her face questioningly. Isn’t that it? he says, pointing to a great cracked terra-cotta pot with red geraniums, beside which is the gap in the houses that leads into their narrow street. He knew where they were for a while but was being careful of her feelings, she sees. Sweet child. Or not so sweet, because when they arrive at the house, while she fumbles with the key, the older boy either pushes his little brother off the step or doesn’t mean to knock him off, it is hard to tell; he has gone watchful in his graceful predator’s body, but the little one’s wails are echoing in the close street and his knee has a dab of blood on it, and she hustles all three inside as quickly as she can and shuts the door against their noise, for fear of the neighbors.
* * *
—
She cleans the house while the boys play with Legos, though the place was supposed to have been already cleaned before they arrived; this is why they had to wait until the afternoon to see it. There is nothing she can do about the smell but keep the windows open and hope for a speedy decay. They eat pasta and carrots, and go for a walk before bed, and on the way home there are cooking odors, people just beginning their evenings in vacationland, the sun still bright overhead.
She sings the boys the Magnetic Fields’ “Book of Love” and reads to them from The Little Prince, and they fall asleep quickly in their sleeping bags because they can’t understand French and she might as well have been singing whalesong. Oh, but she loves the language in her mouth, the silk and bone of it, the bright vowels and the beautiful shapes a mouth makes to speak it.