“Since when?” Hervé turns to me. “He’s completely prejudiced against blacks. Blacks and Arabs.”
Right away he puts an embarrassed hand to his mouth, and we all turn to look at Roksana — myself included, which makes me ashamed — who has no idea of what’s been said and continues calmly to eat her asparagus and bread, eyes to her plate. While Monsieur Heugel protests that he has known several Arabs who were very worthwhile fellows and, it must be said, skilled businessmen, and Hervésnorts and puts away fistfuls of shrimp, I push back my chair.
Our table is spread in the grassy clos between two of the estate’s several houses. On my right is an ivy-covered stone building with a turret, five chimneys, and fabulous eaves — the house of Hervé’s family; on my left, across the lawn, is one of the larger outbuildings, a brown barn that has been converted into a guesthouse. All around our table are bees and butterflies and giant oaks, the air smells lightly of manure and salt, and across from me, in the distance behind Monsieur Heugel, is the bay, filled with sails. I watch Roksana chew, closed, dark, mute, immovable, and I think: I am a fool.
“Oh, the little American,” says Madame Heugel, pointing delicately with her fork at my plate. “He will not eat the heads!”
They laugh, and Roksana looks up.
“In America,” I say, “it’s unlucky to eat them.” I fold another buttery stalk of asparagus into my mouth. The Heugels shoot another round of glances at my staring wife.
“Monsieur Heugel,” I say, “how many centuries has this manor been in your family?”
“Hervé’s grandfather purchased the manor in 1948,” says Madame Heugel.
Everyone laughs much louder this time. Roksana looks up again, her face blank, her jaw working, and for one moment, and for the first time, I feel like striking her.
I excuse myself, leaving Roksana to sit at their table, to suck up all their joy and conversation like a black hole. I hate all of them.
Upstairs, I sit in the tub and hold the hand nozzle over my head for a few minutes, showering off the train ride and the strange conversation, which, after all, I may have misunderstood. Then I go back into the bedroom the Heugels have given us, which smells of cedar. With a towel on my head I step over to one of the lozenge-shaped windows and look outside, onto the yard, where the table is still covered with the wreckage of lunch and where Hervé and his father drink Calvados from little glasses. Roksana and Hervé’s mother have disappeared, perhaps into the house, and I have this brief, stupid, happy fantasy of the two of them doing the dishes together, working in smooth and wordless concert.
When I take from my suitcase the new dress shirt, white with coral pinstripes, that I bought specially at an outlet store in the rue du Commerce, because Hervé had promised to take us to a Breton club where the women would go wild over my accent, the shirt is wrinkled and my shaving cream has exploded all across the collar. I sit down on the bed, looking for a long time at the pale blue smear of foam and trying to remember the word for clothes iron.
The stairs creak. Roksana’s face is in the doorway for half a second, and I think she’s coming into the bedroom. I toss aside the spoiled shirt, but she turns and I hear her start to creak back downstairs. I shut my eyes. “Roksana.”
Plates in the kitchen, laughter outside.
“I need to be alone.”
“Please come here.”
When I open my eyes she’s in the doorway again. This time I see the anger on her face, and before the words come out of her mouth I know, with a rush of bent happiness, that we’re going to have a fight, after a year and a half of wedlock as empty and quiet as a dark theater.
“I want to leave,” she says, coming into the room and slamming the door behind her. “I’m not welcome here. You stay. They like you.”
“You’re as welcome as you choose to be.”
“No. Bullshit. They were laughing. They were laughing at me. I could tell. You were laughing at me, you bastard.”
“You bitch.”
I’m still sitting down, and Roksana steps so close to me now that the tips of her pointed black shoes come down, hard, on my toes. She throws a shadow across me.
“Please, don’t,” I say.
“I don’t know why I’m here.”
“You’re here because it’s Bastille Day. You’re here to have fun. Ouch! Can’t you ever have fun?”
Roksana looks down upon me, her eyes perfectly dry and black, and says that she hates fun more than anything else in this world, and I see that I misunderstood her when she said she didn’t know why she was here, because I thought that by “here” she just meant in Brittany.
“You sound like Khomeini,” I say, trying to slide my pinched feet out from under her shoes, and reeling somehow offended, as though I were responsible for all of us, and for the fireworks and feast days and surfeits of the entire fun hemisphere. I manage to free my feet, but now she grabs me by the ears and pulls, and it hurts.
“What do you know about Khomeini? What do you know about me? I am not fun. Do you think to run away from Iran was fun? From my mother? From the bodies of my family?”
“I’m sorry,” I say, still angry. “Fine. Go. Go back. All I have to do is say the word to Mr. Immigration and you can go right back to the land of seriousness.”
“You won’t.”
“I might,” I say, and think, well, I could. But I can’t stand the frightened, stubborn way she has narrowed her eyes or the way the room and the air between us seems filled with the cheesy smell of blackmail. I look down and my gaze falls upon the blue on my shirt collar. “You said I should have charged you. I’m charging you now.”
There is no human sound from downstairs, which means, I suppose, that the Heugels have been listening to our raised foreign voices. Roksana sits down beside me, rubbing softly now at the sides of my head. Her shoulders droop, and her little pink earrings swing back and forth like the clappers of two invisible bells.
“What is Bastille Day, anyway?”
“It’s like the Fourth of July.”
“Beer and noise,” says my wife, the ayatollah of love, remembering last year in Texas with an unanswerable frown. This year, for us, there was no Fourth of July. I woke up on the fifth, feeling guilty and strange for having forgotten, and went alone to the Burger King on the Champs-Elysées.
“I’m sorry, Brian Blumenthal,” she says at last. “I can’t do it.”
Dinner, from discussion to drinks to preparation, from further drinks to further discussion to eating, from the time we passed around five kinds of cheese for dessert to the time we wearily threw down our napkins and drank a bit more, took five hours, and now, stunned by food, I’m drifting with Hervé and his family along the heights of the cliff town of Kerguen, where we’ve come to see the fireworks. Roksana has stayed behind. The last orange light of the day flows across the houses and across the faces of the Heugels, and in the coolness, the clouds of gnats and fireflies and the smell of the nearby farms grow denser. I’ve drunk too much brandy, understood too little talk, and, as night falls around us, I feel deaf and blind. Only my nose is alive, with mown fields, livestock, low tide.
The townspeople are all out-of-doors, strolling from the place to the cliff’s edge and back, shaking hands, waiting for the display to begin; and the children and careful fathers fill the wait with match flares, loud firecracker pops and whistles and laughter, just as in the United States. But there’s that difference I always feel in French crowds, a lack of excitement that is not exactly boredom, but like an air of age, of deep habit, even among the children, as though these same five hundred people have been coming to stand and talk together forever and ever. A platform for dancing has been built, and it stands empty and brightly lighted at one end of the place, surrounded by loudspeakers and tricolors.