“Jimmy!” she called out, imperiously.
* * *
Now Brulard was looking out one of the chalet windows, toward the larches that rose almost to the roof. Monsieur Rotor and Jimmy were searching for something amid the stones and patches of snow, bending down, then cheerfully standing up again and heading into the blue shadows beneath the trees, while, from the edge of the woods, Madame Rotor urged them on with nods and grave little shouts, her hands in the pockets of her pale blue down coat, her long hair blowing free, graceful and golden.
These people are younger than we are, Brulard then told herself, with a pang in her heart.
Slowly she walked toward the front of the house and the opposite window, wearing the delicate red booties she’d been given, flat-heeled and a full size too small. Brulard thought she saw someone moving behind the Rotors’ SUV. She pressed her forehead to the glass. She was just turning away, having seen nothing, when a brief vision of the two dogs, the Great Dane straddling Jimmy’s mutt, brought her back to the window, alarmed. Jimmy’s dog was invisible beneath the Great Dane’s spine, which glistened as if coated with oil. Brulard saw her mangled shoe lying in front of the car.
She hurried away from the window and out the door to join Jimmy and the Rotors.
“You come look too,” Madame Rotor called to her, jolly and affable.
Brulard trotted obediently toward the tall pines. A small smile of feigned triumph on his blue lips, Jimmy was displaying a chocolate rabbit with a pink ribbon.
“We put together several Easter-egg hunts like this every year,” Monsieur Rotor was saying, visibly pleased with Jimmy. “What do you think, Loire?”
“It’s great,” said Jimmy. “I’m having a wonderful time.”
“You’re having a wonderful time?”asked Monsieur Rotor, at once gratified and vaguely dubious. “Looks to me like you’re freezing, Loire.”
“No,” said Jimmy, “not at all.”
“Well, your wife seems to be, Loire.”
“Brulard. Eve Brulard,” said Jimmy in a despairing voice. Monsieur Rotor grunted, then suddenly bent over to pull a large nougat egg from beneath a small mound of moss.
Surely a bit later, but after a span of time that Brulard, mechanically digging through the snow and the pine needles, was unable to gauge (an hour or an afternoon or a full day), the frantic reappearance of Madame Rotor, who had gone in to make tea, broke the single-minded silence that reigned over the hunt.
“It’s horrible,” she cried. “Come see. No, not you, Jimmy, and you neither, Madame Loire. It’s so horrible. Valentin’s never done such a thing.”
“Why, what did Valentin do?” Monsieur Rotor shot back, defensive.
“Your little dog, Jimmy. . Valentin’s torn him to pieces. That funny little dog of yours. He. . ohh. . he cut him in two!”
“I would never have expected that from Valentin,” said Monsieur Rotor.
He looked at Jimmy, offended and disappointed.
“Valentin’s so gentle,” said Madame Rotor, hurt. “He’s the most sensitive, loving animal I’ve ever known. Never had. . a better dog than Valentin.”
Brulard saw Jimmy’s eyes darting miserably this way and that. He blushed violently, and Brulard was moved to observe that he had the face of an alcoholic. Lost, Jimmy stammered incomprehensibly.
“It’s nothing,” he finally mumbled. “Oh, it’s nothing. He. . hadn’t been my dog all that long.”
He looked at Brulard with such anguish that she turned away, deeply pained, telling herself that from now on they were alone, apart, forever.
* * *
“You know what I’m craving? A nice fondue,” Madame Rotor had said.
She’d draped her long blue down coat over her chair, and now she was sitting up very straight, her back nestled in the cushiony heart of her rich angelic raiment, glowing with such indisputable health, self-assurance, and youth that Brulard was half blinded, punch drunk.
They were sitting in a restaurant the Rotors had chosen. The Great Dane lay under the table, and Brulard saw the corners of Jimmy’s dry lips twitch whenever Valentin licked his calf, which he did to Jimmy more than to anyone else.
Whisking her hair behind her neck with a silken toss of the head, Madame Rotor repeated in a very slightly authoritarian voice:
“Do you know what I’m craving?”
“A nice fondue,” Jimmy murmured.
Lulu came in.
At first Brulard paid her only a distracted and weary sort of mind, for was this not yet another new form adopted by Eve Brulard in an attempt to convey all manner of unintelligible things? This Lulu, her short hair dyed orange (Brulard had left behind a Lulu with a long mane untouched since childhood), was entering in the wake of a loud, oversized family Brulard recognized as the Alphonses. Brulard had scrupulously avoided all contact with the Alphonses for years. She lowered her eyes. But how likely was it that Eve Brulard could divide herself into so many replicas, and take on the appearance of four expansive, guffawing Alphonses? It wasn’t likely at all.
Lulu pulled out a chair and sat down with the same wondrous nonchalance as when she wore her hair long. Blinded and deafened by their own deafening racket, the Alphonses seemed not to have noticed Jimmy or Brulard. Then Lulu’s eyes coldly met Brulard’s, and Brulard realized that this was indeed her daughter Lulu, and not, by some miracle, herself as a girl.
Jimmy was very pale. He started to his feet, about to go talk to Lulu. Then he thought better of it and slowly turned away to hide from the Alphonses. Was he still thinking about his dog? Brulard wondered, deeply moved. Was he thinking about his dog with sadness and guilt?
Lulu was laughing with the Alphonses.The indecency of their laughter covered Brulard’s forehead with a delicate cold sweat. She sensed Lulu’s gaze, landing sometimes on her and sometimes on Jimmy, and that gaze, Brulard felt sure, was heavy with scorn and resentment. Were the four Alphonses, Lulu seemed to be saying, in their flawless camaraderie, in their full-hearted gaiety, not better than them, her inconstant, poisonous, penniless parents?
“Those people are very annoying,” said Madame Rotor aloud.
She went on, her square chin extended toward Jimmy:
“Aren’t those people annoying, incredibly annoying? Loire?”
Surely alerted, thought Brulard, by the use of his last name rather than the usual jocose “Jimmy!” and also, thought Brulard, by the very perceptible cooling, which he must have felt just as she did, of his newfound relationship with the Rotors in the wake of the dog incident, which the Rotors unmistakably blamed on him, Jimmy thought it best to exclaim, in a sharp little voice:
“They are indeed! Very annoying.”
Her parents were absolutely not to approach her, neither the one nor the other: that, Brulard realized, was what this young orange-haired Lulu was proclaiming, mutely but clearly, with her hard, vindictive gaze over the tables between them, protected by the beaming Alphonses, impregnable in their crassness. And also that her parents had betrayed her — and how was she supposed to get over that?
At the end of the meal, all through which Brulard felt only a vague awareness of her own silence, Madame Rotor picked up one of the many newspapers hung from wooden rods on the wall beside her. The wine had left her very merry and full of quips. As a joke, she read out the headlines, adopting a joyful tone when the news was grim, and a gloomy one when it was trivial. Brulard wasn’t listening, and heard none of the words that involved her. Nevertheless, she saw Jimmy staring at her with a sort of panic.