As the mother reads, she can almost see Guy’s square young face in the open window; it is 1881, étretat, a relatively warm day in early March. There are carriage and seabird sounds coming into the room. Papers breathe under the stone weight. Guy touches his moustache nervously with his tiny callused hand, dreaming a fiction into life, a farm girl lying back in her damp hollow, sex stirring in her body. Inside Guy, the imagined girl is being made real; in the mother’s imagining of him, Guy is also being made real.
Now the boys run over to her because Tintin has ended. The little boy farts, then raises a finger into the air like a gun and says, Un pistolet!
When they finally go down to the beach, they find the tide all the way withdrawn, a wasteland of black and green, and the older boy says, in Captain Haddock’s voice, Mille milliards de mille sabords.
They sit anyway, out of the wind at the pop-up free library. The teenager who watches them, day after day, lets them be. The mother finds Marguerite Duras and Michel Houellebecq and J. M. G. Le Clézio, and the boys flip through bandes dessinées, and she reads and ignores the shelf of Maupassant staring down at her.
She starts Moderato Cantabile, a book that has always struck her as contemptible, too cynical to be believed. There is no love in the book, not even in the mother character for her smart and naughty son.
From time to time, she looks up at the tiny figures picking at the edges of the receding tide, then back at her book to read.
The sun grows warmer. She takes off her jacket.
There is something beating louder in her, behind her thoughts and the book’s taut words, something terrible, but she can’t look at it, she needs to look away; if she looks at it, it will come even closer to her, rub up against her, and she can’t let it, all alone in this cold place with her two small boys to care for.
The big boy sits on her feet and leans his dark head against her knees. The wind plays with his hair, but he won’t let her touch him. After a while, she feels his body stiffen. The little boy says, It’s my friend!
She sees the galoshes in front of her, the jeans patched at the knees, the belly jutting over the belt. Jean-Paul. He is grinning and his teeth are thick at the gum with tartar. The little boy is waving Whoopie Pie at him.
Alors! Jean-Paul says. He thought it was them from way out, he came in to say hi, to see how the researches were going, how the boys liked this little town, if the house was treating them right, if all was well, if there was anything he could do to make her more comfortable.
She says it is all fine, fine, fine. She thinks of the broken wifi, but doesn’t want Jean-Paul in the house and stays silent about it.
He stares at her, or she thinks he does, his eyes so sunken. He shows the boys his bucket. There are shells moving slowly in it. He tells her they’re bulots.
At first, she translates this in her head as jobs, boulots, which makes no sense. Then she understands the creatures to be whelks. Sea snails. Escargot from the sea.
The little one dandles his hand in the bucket happily, but the older one makes a polite noise and leans harder into his mother’s legs.
There is not much left to say. Jean-Paul offers them some whelks, and she tells him no thanks! and then he makes jokes with the boys that they don’t understand, and when the silence goes on too long, he crunches away. They watch him pick over the black mottled rock.
Were those alive? the older boy says.
Yes, she says. People eat them with garlic and butter.
Oh, the little boy says, then, Why?
I think it’s because they’re delicious, she says.
Snails? he says, making a face. She watches him think. He is thinking, she can see, of the snail who would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join the dance in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The snail who refused to be thrown into the sea. It’s marvelous to know another person’s entire literary canon by heart. It’s like knowing their secret personal language.
Later, at the restaurant with the excellent lunchtime prix fixe, the older boy is made jealous by the little one’s adroit handling of his mussels, plucking out one fat bite after the other, and he leans forward and says, Those were alive, too. But now they’re dead. You’re eating dead things. Dead little mussels sitting in your belly.
The little one puts down the shell he was using as picker and says, No!
Yup, the older boy says, eating calmly. Pleasure flicks over his face as he watches the little one crumble, then he laughs when the mother shoots him a furious look. He is not a sociopath, she hopes. Just an older brother. She has an older brother who has turned into a fine person, a kind doctor who takes care of veterans and has become a feminist with the arrival of daughters, but who was endlessly cruel to her as a child. Her older son is only rarely cruel.
The little boy climbs into the mother’s lap and cries into her chest.
Oh, Little Bear, it’s okay, she says, stroking his head. The older boy eats his little brother’s french fries, another thing they never get at home.
It’s not okay, the little one says. It’s really not okay to eat alive things.
You don’t have to if you don’t want to, she says.
After some time, he calms. She carries him back home for naptime, and when she puts him into his sleeping bag, he pushes her face to one side and whispers hot and sticky in her ear, What if someone wants to eat me? And she can’t tell him nobody would want to eat him, because it’s not the truth; sometimes she herself wants to eat him, bite into his perfect soft sweetness as if he were a brioche.
Guy had three children with a woman named Joséphine Litzelmann, none of whom he recognized, all of whom died bastards without his name. How sad for those little children to be unclaimed by their father. How terribly sad for Guy, to not know how to love, not even his children. She smooths her son’s hair until he naps.
* * *
—
She is asleep. The moon is out, the room pale. She was too tired to close the windows; she wanted the cold air. Something falls into her dream, into the middle of the floor.
It is enormous. It is the biggest seagull. He is looking at her.
She makes her body heavy and still. She barely breathes.
The bird doesn’t move, just stands in the silvery light.
She wonders if it is about to speak, because that’s what birds do in stories, and the language she is most fluent in is story. It would have a deep male voice. Even now, even after all she knows and has read, the default voice of stories is male. But the bird just stands there, mute.
Eventually, her eyes grow heavy and she drifts out again.
In the morning the boys creep in, their limbs cold. They stay quiet. The little boy sucks his thumb, sighing contentedly. She unpeels her eyelids with tremendous effort.
I had a dream last night, she says. An enormous bird came into the room through the skylight and stood in the middle of the floor just staring at me.
Your breath stinks, the older boy says. It’s like something died in your mouth.
Can we watch Tintin? the little one says.
She pulls her feet under the duvet and warms them on her children’s legs, and they shriek at the ice in her bones. Why the hell not, she says.
When she can gather her body enough to move, she stands. She narrowly misses stepping in a huge jellied bird poop in the middle of the floor, shining and bloodshot like an eye.
* * *
—
The waitress said to the mother’s question that it was true, Fécamp was heavily bombed during the war.
She sounded cheerful, but must have been offended because she never came back after she delivered their food. All the mother asked was why there were almost no old buildings by the harbor; though, it’s true, it may have been evident in her voice that she’d never seen such an ugly city as this one.
The day is tannic in color. The beach’s curve between the cliffs is much larger here, dwarfing the cliffs themselves so they seem an afterthought. On one end of the boardwalk, they had seen a carnival covered in tarps. The carnies smoked cigarettes moodily in their plastic chairs.