The suicide of Marie-Claire surprised many in town, perhaps even his wife, but not John. Marie-Claire was not strung together for a long life, John knew, something was bound to snap. He knew, too, he had had a part in it, he and hinky-dinky, but as usual John, whom some blessed and some did not, had no regrets. It would be like regretting the way the cosmos worked. If anything, he felt a vague sense of relief. Sex with Marie-Claire was like grappling with a wild thing: there could not be two survivors, something had to die. And, finally, John being who he was, it was her turn. Which was Bruce’s take on it as well, she having become their paradigmatic heroine of all such stories. One of Marie-Claire’s lovers, a young art student she’d known prior to Yale, had thrown himself under the Metro before her very eyes, and she had driven a married man, a friend of her father’s, completely mad. A psychiatrist, if the story could be entirely believed, not always the case, for even melodrama Marie-Claire melodramatized. These were the ones he knew about, no doubt there were other casualties in Marie-Claire’s passion wars, not including the ones he and Bruce had made up. Even Yale’s death, apparently so remote, seemed to John linked somehow to the way love and death got fused in that crazy furnace inside her, and indeed Yale’s last letters, sent from the combat zone, hinted at his own awareness of such a connection. He spoke not of “death’s embrace,” but of “embracing death,” as though it were some sort of compulsion (though his imperfect French might have been at fault here), and he described his army patrol’s search-and-destroy missions into the jungle’s “perilously erotic hot green thighs” as “lustful plunges into sweet extinction.” Of course, Yale always did relish the double entendre, all that may have been, even if a bit dark, just a joke. As was hinky-dinky at first. Apparently, at their wedding reception, the old Ford dealer had recited some verses from “Mademoiselle from Armentières” to Marie-Claire. Probably his idea of being friendly to a foreign visitor. All she could remember, as she told John and his wife one night in a Paris bistro during their second honeymoon three years later (they had just come from watching a troupe of “Troglodytes” perform a “Scène d’amour” in the airless underground cabaret beneath their garret flat), was something about four wheels and a truck — John could easily supply the missing rhyme — and the refrain line which, she said, had been puzzling her ever since. “Wut ees hainqui-dainqui?” she asked, smiling her mischievous smile. “Ees like hainqui-painqui?” “It’s the same thing,” laughed John, squeezing his wife’s hand beside him, “only you use your dinky, not your pinky.” Two days later, his wife went shopping for presents for their two sets of parents back home, planning to meet Marie-Claire at a gallery cafe in Saint-Germain-des-Prés for lunch, and an hour before that luncheon date, Marie-Claire turned up at the garret, where John, in his briefs, was shaving at the paint-stained sink. This in itself was not unusual. Marie-Claire often turned up, unannounced, at odd moments. Whenever she did, she always seemed to need to use the facilities, squatting quickly there behind the refrigerator, chattering gaily all the while over the splash of her pee, her head peeking out around the refrigerator door, telling them about things that had happened to her on the way over, a bit earthy, yet quite delicate, too, something John knew he could never carry off, he was very impressed. On this occasion, however, she stepped up behind him at the sink, ran her hands into his briefs as though crawling into the cellar, and, her smoldering dark eyes reflected in the scalloped mirror over his bare shoulder, whispered: “I am so lonely, dear Zhahn. Yell, he ees so far. May you help me? I am so much needing ze … ze hainqui-dainqui… Parlez-vous?” And so it became a kind of gentle joke between them, and a kind of bond, and when the news came through a couple of days later about Yale’s death in action, that bond was, in tears and frenzy, hotly yet somehow mournfully sealed, and thus Marie-Claire’s unhappy fate as well, forging thereby in John’s mind an indelible link between horror and compassion, compassion and horror.
Things were quiet in town that early summer, so many years ago, of the second honeymoon in Paris, almost like in the old days, for the place seemed to have a way of slowing down when John and his wife were gone. Or maybe it was just the warm season, school out, business slow, a time for taking it easy. And it wasn’t completely lifeless. The two cinemas, the Palace downtown and the Night Sky drive-in, both destined soon to disappear, still drew good crowds, the country club links and pool were busy, likewise the gun club and the driving range, beer sales were up, youngsters gathered as always at the bus station pinball machines, there was Little League baseball and softball for the fathers and the highway was slowly getting built, you couldn’t say nothing was happening. The town was growing, too, or so they said. But it was just quieter somehow, Opal thought, more easygoing, gentler, more like times past when this town was all there was and could set its own pace, and except for the turnover of births and deaths, the people within it were always the same. The war had changed all that, and then airplanes, TV, the new highways, the atom bomb, her restless son had. But the TVs, with the networks into their summer reruns and full of little else but depressing war news anyway, were mostly turned off now, the new war itself was far away, the streets and skies were quiet, her son and his young wife were on the other side of an ocean: it felt… it felt like those lazy summer days, not so long ago, when John was away at camp, Mitch frequently off at the same time on some trip or another, fishing or business or politics, and she was free to drift quietly for a couple of weeks through a life of her own, read a book from the library maybe, clean out John’s bedroom, sun awhile on a park bench as she was doing now, have lunch with friends (she was waiting for Kate and Harriet) and nothing she had to rush home for, nothing she had to think about. These last three years since the wedding had not been easy for Opal, adjusting to the life of an older in-law. Her son, toughened into manhood, was still recognizably her son, yet she felt increasingly estranged from him, and even from her memories of him as a boy, and that made her feel edgy all the time. She was fond of Barnaby’s daughter, always had been, steady as they come, that child, but she seemed to know her less well now than she had before the marriage. Fond of Barnaby, too, though as for Audrey, the less said the better. Certainly, give her credit, Audrey had adjusted to in-lawhood better than Opal had, she and John couldn’t be cozier. Free with her money, that always made a big impression on John, free with her flattery, too. Audrey seemed to share in the young couple’s lives as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Opal always felt intrusive if she stopped by to visit them, uncaring if she didn’t, she never knew what to do. And always when she visited, she couldn’t put her finger on it, but always she sensed there was something missing in that house. John’s room maybe. That house had been Barnaby’s house, still was really, she could feel her son’s discomfort there, so meanwhile, Mitch ridiculing her for it, she kept John’s old room at her house just as he’d last lived in it, not having any other use for it anyway. She sighed, distressed that she was spoiling this nice day with such thoughts (though she had once written an “I Remember” column for Ellsworth’s paper about the park, which she had always loved, saying that it was a place where one could bring one’s heavy thoughts and leave them behind, like an old newspaper left on a bench), and nodded politely at the young police officer who had tipped his hat at her, passing by on the park path. One of John’s school-friends probably. Oh yes, the one whose father… A disturbed family, as was true of so many of the poor. One wondered if it was wise to make policemen out of them. She started to point out to him the obscenity of the cast-off man’s sheath lying like a squashed grubworm by the steps of the bandstand, but thought better of it. He might think it vulgar of her to know what it was. On the other hand, as uninhibited as the young were nowadays, it might have been part of a public performance, she would just reveal, once again, what an old fuddy-duddy she was. It was true, she was, and she was proud of it. It wasn’t that she thought that people shouldn’t use such things, only that they shouldn’t display them rudely. She had always been a permissive mother, had she not, yet she had insisted always on a certain public decency. How can we bear one another without it? When Oxford, who sold those items openly in his drugstore, had proclaimed loudly one night out at the country club that dispensers of the things ought to be as common as gumball machines, she had responded that she had been pleased to notice that gumball machines were in fact disappearing and that soon therefore she might be able to agree with him, a reply that had earned her general approval, and even John seemed favorably amused. It was hard to tell what his wife thought, but of course that was always the case. She saw Harriet, all alone, coming down the leafy path from the direction of the library, where Kate worked. She didn’t look well. The rumors, alas, were probably true. Harriet and Alf had had three children, all of whom had long since flown the coop, at least Opal could be grateful that John had decided to make his life here at home. There were grandchildren, too, their latest photos an obligatory lunchtime ritual. Maybe that, she thought, not for the first time, was what was missing in her son’s house: three years and still waiting. Harriet seemed paler than usual and, as she drew nearer, Opal saw that she was crying. Oh dear. Opal rose in alarm and anticipation, smoothing down her skirt, mustering that reassuring stoic reserve for which she was, justly, so well known and appreciated.