“I told him to go. I needed time to think.” Elise’s face is pale and makeup-less. A pimple by her nose.
As she chews, Denise takes a sidelong look at her daughter. “You all grown, now, aren’t you,” she points out. “You’re changed.”
Elise blushes.
“I’m serious!” Denise insists.
“I have no idea what I’m doing, Ma.”
“Look, I know I told you what to do before. But don’t go by nobody else’s ideas but your own.” She cackles, and sparks her Bic under a cigarette. She exhales. “Shit, I didn’t listen to my mother.”
Elise plays with rice. “Never?”
“Oh, you know that story, El. Her head wasn’t right. But I got to say—when she wasn’t howlin’ in the gutter? She treated every single day like the day. Every hour is the hour. You don’t have nothing else. You pick the meat off the bone gets handed to you. She—she had problems…” Denise rubs her bottom lip with the back of her thumb. “But her soul, when it was lit up, man, it was ablaze.”
Unearthly mauve twilight. A broad-backed masseur arrives for Annie, who giddily leads him to her room.
Jamey sits outside, smokes an unfiltered cigarette he bummed off the cook.
In her room, Tory looks out long glass doors onto a wet land, a place of rabbits and cottages, roses, of new growth and old families, stars, the pool shining deeply, and sees none of it, nor her son, who is a dark form among the sculpted hedges.
She closes the doors, pulls her robe, and looks once more at her reflection. She paces, takes a magazine into the bed, and puts it down and stares at nothing.
Why did it take him until this trip, this evening, to realize his mother was bankrupted in the divorce in more ways than one? That Annie takes care of her? He knew she was bitter, but didn’t understand she lives on hate, that it’s her sugar and meat and oxygen, and she’ll never recover. She’s destroyed.
Beautiful morning. When Jamey wakes, he decides to leave.
He walks along the sunny road and steps into the high grass each time he hears a car growling and screeching through the turns and hills. Others walk this route: a man with a baguette under one arm, teenage boys (shirts tucked into high-waisted jeans) who talk very obviously about Jamey but without menace. An old lady converses with herself, face animated under a straw hat.
He looks into a cottage whose door is open, and terrible French rock sizzles from a radio. A baby cries in the darkness of those rooms, and food is cooking.
He’s in love with the sky, which is tart and robust and ever-changing, the clouds pulling, swelling, bursting. Everything is in motion, the lilac branches trembling with wrens, flowers spitting pollen. Chipmunks and field mice leap in the air, and butterflies swirl around his head, the farm cat winking as he goes by, like the countryside is a Hanna-Barbera scene. It’s a diabolically merry afternoon.
His feet are bleeding and he doesn’t notice.
He waves at a housewife hanging laundry in her yard.
It’s four in the afternoon, and he’s done swimming in a pond, and is drying in the faint sun and feeling alarmingly cold and lost, when the chauffeur, driving slowly around the village, finally finds him. The driver can’t speak English, so he motions Jamey into the car without hiding his antipathy.
Jamey doesn’t speak to Annie or Tory when he gets to the house. Instead he takes a bubble bath like an old diva, and falls asleep early, naked, exhausted. He can’t remember his dream when he wakes, but he knows he was terrified. He smells of gardenia from some face cream he found last night and smeared on his bloody feet.
Denise sleeps in bed with Elise, like old times. She snores louder now, the bed sagging under her mountainous body. After the light is out, she still makes raunchy jokes and tender observations, playing with Elise’s hair.
“You’re gonna be the best mother, hon.”
“You were.”
Denise laughs raucously. “Yeah right! I did good at times, and I definitely fucked up.”
“It was Angel who screwed us up.”
Denise is quiet. Then she says: “Yeah, babe, but I asked him in the door, you know?”
“You slept for what, six months after he got sent upstate. You were like Sleeping Beauty.”
Elise can see the gleam of her mom’s eyes as she stares at the ceiling. “Yeah well. It had to go like that,” Denise says quietly.
And suddenly Elise knows her mother turned Angel in, to regain order, so the family could survive.
How didn’t she figure that out till tonight?
Jamey packs his stuff, staring at his clothes in the suitcase as if they belonged to someone else. Morning makes the room glitter and shine, everything is golden. After a while, he realizes someone is watching him.
He turns to see Tory in the door, her face ashen. He sighs. What now? He just wants to be on the plane, this continent shrinking beneath them.
“Yes?” he says antagonistically.
She shrugs weakly. “I just want to know…”
He waits. “Want to know what?”
“How you justify what you’re doing to her.” And she turns, vanishes into the dark hallway.
When Elise wakes up, her mother is gone. There’s a box tied with curling ribbons, and a Hallmark card: Congratulations! It’s the christening gown Elise wore as a baby.
He carries off the plane a Le Figaro with a flower pressed in its pages for every day he was gone. He also brings a baker’s package of lemon tarts. In the airport bathroom’s mirror, he combs his oily hair with his fingers. He looks more like a man coming back from a year of shooting drugs with bohemians in Marrakesh than a movie star’s son who vacationed in the patrician French countryside.
He’d made a formal bow as a goodbye to Annie and Tory. “And thank you, Annie, for what I know were good intentions.”
From the taxi window, he stares at the city, so forced, menacing, and crowded after the hills of Provence. When he opens the apartment door, he hides his mood, tells himself it’s jet lag. He looks sick.
Elise hugs him and won’t let go. “I’m so glad you’re home,” she says.
“I still can’t believe you sent me away.”
“I didn’t!” she says in a playful voice, because she did.
He gives her a look. Then: “God, I missed you.” He’s thinking about telling her all the fucked-up things his mother said.
“I have your birthday present,” she says, climbing into the bed, nervous. She’s wearing a wife beater, and her gold necklaces fall to the side.
Jamey gets under the covers, looking skinny in his boxers. “Oh yeah? What.”
They lie facing each other, and prop cheeks on hands.
“Guess,” she tells him.
He looks from one of her gray eyes to the other. “I’m not good at guessing.”
“It’s right in front of you.”
Jamey looks around the room, then falls back dramatically to look at the ceiling. “Ummmm…where?”
“Use your imagination.”
“Hmmmm, I—”
Elise pulls his hand to her belly.
He looks from her tummy to her face. He can’t speak.