Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 12

Morning at the hotel was nothing like the night before. Louis remembered this fact from last summer, when he found the previous night’s comedians and revelers creeping around the dining table at ten, drinking co?ee, surveying the tartines and croissants, assiduously avoiding intercourse with any early bird hanging about in the room.

Since  he’d  been  canoeing,  Louis  had  become  a  dawn  riser,  and  it  took  every  bit  of discipline he could command not to launch into cheery banter with his mates. It wasn’t a terrible sacri?ce. He took his volume of Don Quixote and wandered into the woods, where he could read in the presence of pines.

By eleven, when he returned, he saw that the guests of the inn had divided into tribes. The painters were strung along the banks of the Loing, eyeing the old stone bridge that spanned the river. Close to the small pier where the inn’s wide canoes were tied up among the bulrushes, Bob, Fanny, Belle, and others sat beneath white umbrellas, a few feet apart, dabbing at their canvases. If he strolled too close, he could ?nd himself a motive of some painter’s work. “Motive” was the word the painter types used to describe that day’s subject. A motive could be a boat or a bridge or the river, or him, if he weren’t careful. Louis walked up the long, narrow lawn toward the ragtag little group of writers and poets gathered on the inn’s terrace.

What a merry mess the whole lot of them were, dressed in wooden sabots, blue ?sherman shirts,  waistcoats,  scarves,  berets,  fezes,  tam-o’-shanters,  and  wide-awake  hats.  They smoked cheroots, cigarettes, meerschaums. Men, mostly, they were—a mélange of English speakers from Britain and America, mixed with some French and Scandinavians, plus a Spanish fellow, a German and an Italian. Two colorful women, mistresses, lounged with the writers  while  their  lovers  painted.  A  woman  journalist  from  America  scribbled  in  her notebook. Many of the artists were fashionably cynical, yet he could see the truth: They were giddy as little children to be here, playing with one another.

Louis suspected each  of  them,  in  his or  her  own  way,  was an  exile—from bourgeois values, family crests, unhappy love a?airs, childhoods too long spent in church pews. He wondered if they had started as social outcasts who found the artist’s life an acceptable way to be in the world; or if their passions for painting or sculpting or writing had shaped them into outsiders. He had never been quite sure how the chicken-versus-egg question played

out in his own life.

It seemed he had spent half his childhood in bed with a hacking cough. It was the stories read to him, and those that he eventually read himself, that had saved him from the worst of  the  loneliness. God,  how pale  and  thin  I was—a glasshouse  seedling. Just  di?erent.  His illnesses had cut him o? from the society of other children. But the stories had made him di?erent, too. They had shaped his appetite, his moral prejudices, who he was. Those sick days when he had listened to the joyful sounds of football on the street below, he’d longed to be an ordinary kid. But at eleven or twelve, when he went out into the neighborhood dressed in pants too short and hair too long, his appearance set o? taunts among other children—oh, he could hear them now, Hauf a laddie, hauf a lassie, hauf a yellow yite!—Louis knew he might as well be tattooed all over. The question of how he got that way was moot. It was around then that he began using his tongue as his sword, as small, fragile boys tend to do.

He waded among the wooden tables where the writers leaned on their elbows, immersed in conversation. “There he is,” William Henley declared, pulling up a chair next to him. “Sit down, my good man, and tell us if Zola is taking us all to the dogs.”

Louis drew on his cigarette and grinned at the Londoner, whose disheveled, bearded head was as large and friendly as an otterhound’s. “He don’t ?nd much to like in humanity,” he said in a wry tone.

“All that ugly realism not to your taste?” Henley asked, shifting his stump to get a better purchase on his seat.

“Give me a rousing romance. Entertain me.”

“Who’ve we got with us this mornin’?” Henley turned his friend’s book face-up to see the title. “Cervantes … ha! I should have known.”

“I wanted to look at his style again. To try it on.”

“Comment?” A French  writer, who was recovering  from the previous night’s excesses, raised his head from the tabletop where it had been resting next to a potted red geranium. “No man is a writer if he imitates!” he exclaimed, pulling himself upright.
“I  have  taught  myself  the  writing  craft  in  just  that  way,”  Louis  said,  “by  aping  the greats.”

“To write is to give the soul,” the man objected. “Truth comes from this place.” He jabbed his chest with a forefinger. “No French writer says, ‘I ape this man. I ape that man …’”

“Perhaps he does not admit it.” Louis grinned. “Come now, what does it matter? Let us hear what your souls are saying today.”

Laughter, followed by silence. Then the sound of paper unfolding, as one after another of the  writers  took  a  turn  reading  aloud  his  verses  and  paragraphs  to  the  others  on  the terrace.

Henley leaned over and spoke softly in his ear. “Have you been wandering in the forest pitying yourself?”

“No.” Louis smiled. “Well, maybe. Actually, I am thinking about starting a story.” “You are going to abandon your essays?”

“It’s the law I want to abandon.” Louis sighed. “I’m simply in the mood to try something different, and fiction … “

“Magazines buy essays,” Henley said. “An adventure story.…”

“I don’t begrudge you your adventures, lad. Why don’t you write a  little story about setting out in a canoe?”

“Better still,” Louis said, his voice growing dark with conspiracy, “set out with me in one of the canoes after lunch.”

Henley glanced dolefully at his abbreviated limb.

“Forget the game leg,” Louis said, “you’ve got a mighty pair of arms on you, man.” He turned to the others in the group. “Gentlemen and ladies, I propose we writer types take on the painter types in a friendly boating contest this afternoon. What say you?”
“Yes! Yes!” the cry went up.

Later in the day, when the canoe wars had been waged and the paddlers had retired to their rooms to nap before dinner, Louis paced his bedroom. Something had come over him when Fanny Osbourne had emerged from the inn wearing her bathing costume. More than the magni?cent form she made in her black cotton suit, it was the red espadrilles with laces tied around her ankles that nearly undid him. When he saw her, he’d wrapped his towel around his waist and tried to think about the Napoleonic code. Now the red shoes batted around in his brain like ?ies. He was a fool for footwear and he knew it. But could a pair of scarlet shoes render him so hopelessly smitten? Or was it the way Fanny’s somber focus on her paddle broke under his teasing? How she screamed helplessly when he tipped her over, then  emerged from the water slick as a  seal and, grabbing  on  to the bow of his boat,

upended him with the power of a man. The scene as it replayed in his mind was almost perfect, except for the part where Bob lifted her wet and lovely body into his own canoe.
Louis could not bear it any longer. He poked his head out into the hall and found it empty. He stepped over to Bob’s door, knocked, then entered when he heard his cousin’s steady snore. “Bob … Bob.” Louis shook his shoulders.

“What is it?” The voice—a frog’s—croaked his annoyance. “We need to talk.”

“Can’t it wait?”

“Here,” Louis said, and handed him a glass of water. “Wake up.”

Bob sat up in bed, yawned. His hair was wet and ?attened on one side. “Did somebody die?”

“Are you in love with her?” “Who?”

“Fanny Osbourne.”

Bob yawned. “Hell, no.” He scratched at his head. “She’s fetching, all right, and … “ “Because I am,” Louis said.

“You’re daft, Lou.”

“I knew you would find humor in it.” “Well, her name is Fanny—”

“Of course you would have to say that.”

“She is married, and she is a good twelve years older than you.” “Ten and a half. And she’s separated from her husband.” “So was Fanny Sitwell, but that didn’t get you into her pantalets.”

“I know, I know.” Louis’s voice was low and urgent. “But this is di?erent. I swear it, Bob, she’s the one.”

“Christ’s sake, Lou. You’ve known her for how long, a day and a half? Must you always fall so hard? Can’t you just play?”

“You two are together a lot, and I assumed you had something started.” “Naw.” Bob laughed. “I must own she has a mischievous wit, but the daughter”—he let go
a soft, admiring whistle—”the daughter is a minx.”

“So you don’t mind if I …”

Bob shrugged. “Have a try at it.”

Louis leaned over and grabbed his cousin’s arm. “Will you talk to Fanny, then? Not yet, of course. But when the time is right, will you make my case?”

“I’ll try,” Bob said, “but the woman appears to have a mind of her own.” Louis lit a cigarette and waited for his comeuppance.

“Don’t you already have a perfectly fine mother?” Bob asked.

Louis dropped his cigarette into the water glass, sprang onto his cousin, and put him in a headlock. Ever the superior specimen, Bob flopped him around like a fish.