Driving through the Rhone valley, passing a party-cake castle in the distance, rushing to make a reservation at a four-star restaurant, still hours away, Margaret leaned her forehead against the cool glass of the window and thought, This is the last phase of my long, long childhood. This is the last time I will sit in a car, still drunk from lunch, staring at fairy castles while someone else drives and worries and frets and checks the road map and the odometer. It's the first time, too, but I know what I mean.
Rows of poplars lined the road. The sun had come out from the clouds, which now glowed and reddened. This is bliss, Margaret thought. No wonder Edward likes Juliette and Jean-Claude. No wonder people drink wine, so red and velvety, rolling on your tongue. Margaret let her head fall back. She closed her eyes.
"Tu baves, ma chérie" Edward said gently, patting her knee.
"I'm what?" Margaret said.
"Drooling, darling."
The restaurant was dark and quiet and seriously comfortable. Yum, yum, Margaret thought, gazing lazily at the menu. Yum, yum. Little lambs and little bunny rabbits and little fluttery quail—all manner of gentle, innocent beasts. I will have pork, the forbidden flesh scorned by centuries of my ancestors, but big and ugly. Yum, yum, yum. Medallions of pork with chestnuts.
"Too many pets on the menu," she said. "If I ran this joint, I would offer boeuf sous rature. Get it, Edward?" She heard herself laughing.
"Yes, Margaret, I get it," Edward said.
He was not laughing, but looking at her rather dryly. Still, she could not stop herself. What was the point of having read so much incomprehensible Derrida if one could not make philistine deconstruction puns? "Sous rature" she continued. "'Under erasure.' And then they'd serve you—nothing! They'd take the beef off the plate!"
"Is this what they teach you poor children in graduate school these days?"
"And then on the menu you could draw that line through the word boeuf, as the deconstructionists do in order to denote when a word is, well, when a word is whatever it is that makes them draw that line through it..."
As she rambled on, drunk and delighted with her erudition, Edward ignored her and ordered the wine, which was even better than what they'd drunk at lunch. She held the glass to her lips and drank slowly. If she was not mistaken, Edward was talking to the waiter about medieval husbandry. She could see the lights in the dim restaurant reflected in her wine glass, in the wine-dark wine. Wine-dark wine. She giggled. She could see the lights twinkling there, like stars, like stars on a dark night. Oh, how banal. Oh, how sublime.
She staggered to bed that night and lay staring at the ceiling as Edward untied her shoes and recited in Latin a Catullus poem about a stolen napkin, and she thought she would marry him, would have to marry him, that it was a necessity, a rule of nature, like gravity. If, of course, he would have her.
"'Give back my napkin!'" he shouted, straddling her, pinning her arms to the bed. "'Or await three hundred hendecasyllables!'"
The next day they drove to Les Baux, the cliff-top ruins of a castle where some medieval nobleman had grilled the heart of a poet and served it to his wife for dinner. When that lady had finished her meal and was told the ingredients, she said the dish had been so sweet that she never wanted anything else to pass her lips, and jumped off the cliff.
"Ah, the goyim," Edward said.
They drove to Vaucluse, where Petrarch had written his love poems to Laura, and to Avignon, where Margaret came down with a fever and stayed sweating and shivering in the little low-ceilinged hotel room within the city's high walls; and from her damp, febrile pillow she wondered if she would die right now, right here, dissipated with drink and lovemaking and museum-visiting.
When she recovered, they drove to the Italian Alps and spent the night in an almost empty ski resort where she read while Edward held a long, quiet, serious discussion that Margaret could not understand with the Austrian chef's eight-year-old son. Edward knew seven languages, and accepted only with the poorest grace that he could speak just one of them at a time. The others were always waiting, eager and impatient, shifting from foot to foot like children, until, at last, one of them would be allowed to thunder out, full speed ahead. Edward spoke with resonant, distinct enjoyment, loud and clear, savoring each word, as if the different languages tasted good. He was a show-off, talking, laughing, sometimes singing loudly, without fear, sharing his own wonder of himself. Margaret was so fully in love with him now that she never knew if the flushed confusion she was experiencing was from the wine or her boisterous companion.
"For our honeymoon," he said the next morning as Margaret drove the left-handed English car on the right-handed Italian road, "I propose—"
"But you never have proposed, you know."
"I propose Sri Lanka—Ceylon, as we old stick-in-the-mud imperialists prefer to call it. We shall discover the meaning of life on the scented isle. When bored with copulation, we can go up to Kandy and regard the Buddha's tooth."