Finally he says, “I wish you hadn’t gone for a walk while I was sleeping.” Lee sits up slightly so that she can look at him, but he has his eyes closed.
“Why on earth not?”
“We’re in a strange town. I didn’t know where you were. And you alone—it worries me. I don’t like to think about other men seeing you.”
“Other men seeing me?” He can’t be serious. “So the entire time you were napping, I was just supposed to sit here waiting for you to wake up?”
Man opens his eyes and looks at her. “I guess when you put it that way, it sounds a bit ridiculous. I just… I need you, Lee.” And then, more softly, he says, “Don’t ever leave me.” He pulls her down so that she is lying on his chest again, and strokes her hair.
The words are not what she wanted him to say. Still, there is something thrilling about them. The vulnerability. The power he is giving to her. She wants to reciprocate, to show him that she knows he’s revealing something of himself, so she rests her head on his shoulder and says, “I won’t.”
If by staying with him she can always feel as happy as she has felt on this trip, then it will be an easy promise to keep. “Can we come back here every year?” she asks him.
“Nothing would make me happier.”
Lee imagines it, a ritual they will create together, and thinks of how it will be in twenty years. His hair the silver that right now dusts his temples, the creases in his face more pronounced, his eyes deeper set. He’ll have old man complaints, and Lee will be the type of woman who finds them endearing, who carries his tonics in her handbag. He will make her into that woman by loving her.
Man squeezes her closer and they lie in silence until Lee begins to overheat. It is stifling inside the shelter. She pulls away, sits up and adjusts her clothes, and ties open the doors again, staring out at the blurred line where the ocean meets the horizon, admiring the way the doorway frames the view.
SAINT-MALO,
AUGUST 1944
The rumble and whine of the planes fill the air before Lee sees them nose-diving toward the citadel. In perfect unison, they straighten, and the engine growl is replaced by the hiss and scream of bombs. In an instant everything is chaos, the citadel exploding with fire. Lee gets a shot of a bomb dropping, and one of a soldier against the haze, his body a silhouette of flame. After the war she’ll find out this was the Americans’ first use of napalm—explaining not only why they censored her photos but also the way the fire seemed to stick like syrup to the soldiers’ skin.
The attack doesn’t last long. Ears ringing, Lee makes her way down the fort’s steps and back toward headquarters, but the gunfire follows her, and when shots go off so close she can feel their reverberations, she ducks into an underground vault and cowers there, crouched down and clutching her camera against her chest. The vault stinks of war and decay; the walls are covered with what might be blood. When Lee takes a step forward, her heel lands on something fleshy, and she panics and heads back up to the street and begins to run. Her ears ring so loudly she can barely focus, so when someone shouts at her at first she doesn’t realize she’s being asked a question. She turns to find four GIs staring at her.
“Are you a… dame?” one of them asks.
Lee is surprised he noticed. She knows what she looks like, so grimy she can flake the dirt off her skin with her fingernails. But these men are delighted to be near a bona fide female, and one from New York to boot. Keep talking, they beg her. We miss the sound of our girls’ voices. More gunfire rings out and they take cover in what turns out to be a nearby wine cellar. Crates of wine bottles line the walls: sauternes, Languedoc, Riesling. When the gunfire stops, the soldiers take as much as they can carry, and back at the hotel later that night, during the blackout, Lee and the men drink it out of stolen crystal polished to a shine on dusty sheets.
“What’s a girl from Poughkeepsie doing in a place like this?” one soldier slurs, pointing in Lee’s direction so that liquid from the glass in his hand sloshes out on his pants. Razor burn and pimples cover his cheeks; his jacket has the single chevron of a private first class.
“Didn’t think you should have all the fun,” Lee responds. The other soldiers laugh. Lee keeps her eyes on the private. “You killed any Krauts yet?” she asks him.
“I was at Anzio.”
“But did you kill any? Yourself.”
The other men’s conversation has moved on, so Lee scoots closer to him. He nods, not looking at her. “I shot one fella, a sniper. He killed my friend, sitting right next to me. So I shot him.”
“What did it feel like?”
“Didn’t feel like nothing.” The boy’s voice is thick with wine. “But I keep thinking about him. He had real blond hair, like white hair. I don’t know why, but I keep thinking about how his momma must miss him.”
The sick soup of hatred rises out of Lee’s stomach. “His momma is a monster. They’re all monsters. I wish I could’ve shot him.”
The private gives her a curious look, and then from across the room another soldier tells Lee he wants to show her a picture of his girl back home, so she leaves the boy and goes over to him. In the photo, the girl wears a demure pearl necklace and has a trusting smile, and Lee hates her too, clean and coddled and safe at home in Indiana.
The bottle goes around and around, and they stay up all night, drinking and talking. As the morning sun makes a bright line on the seam of the blackout curtains, the other soldiers start to yawn. Some bed down in borrowed blankets or sleep sitting slumped against the wall. Lee pours herself another drink, stares for a while at her reflection, fish-eyed on the surface of the wineglass. Then she stands, and on unsteady feet she walks over to where the private with the razor burn has fallen asleep, his mouth open like a child’s. Lee kicks gently at his leg with her boot until he wakes up, a confused smile on his face as if she’s part of the dream he’s having. “C’mere,” Lee whispers, and he follows her down the hall to an empty hotel room. She pulls him inside and then pushes him so that he is sitting on the edge of the bed, where he looks up at her with surprise and expectation. He must be fifteen years her junior.
“Ma’am?” he says.
“Shh.” Lee takes off his boots and then while she’s undoing the laces of her own he shimmies out of his uniform and lies back naked on the bed, his skin so pale it’s almost translucent. His chest is smooth and hairless. Lee wants to punch him. She crawls onto the mattress on her hands and knees and motions for him to move behind her, and when he is in the right position she reaches her hand around to help him slide inside her.
“Do it,” she says, her voice in the quiet room like an angry stranger’s. Adrenaline courses through her, and she conjures the image of the blond soldier this man has killed and lets the hate boil her blood. Lee doesn’t know when she became this person, fueled by rage, but she loves how it feels not to hold back, to let her emotions judder out of her uncontrolled.
“Harder,” she says.
The boy is happy to oblige, but it’s over before it’s hardly begun, and when he rolls away from her on the mattress and whispers that he’s sorry, she can barely stand to look at him.
When Lee gets outside again a few hours later the sun is hot in the cloudless sky. With all that smoke from yesterday, it doesn’t seem possible that it could be so bright. Around her the whole city is a crater, the buildings empty shells of rubble. Lee is empty too. She walks for miles to get back to her convoy. Nothing she passes seems to have been spared the bombs’ destruction.