I see pictures because I don’t know as many words as Jérôme, said Lucie to herself, pleading inadequacy the way Gilles gave grounds for lateness.
Jérôme did not seem at all disturbed by the long wait. He stood looking over a window box of plastic geraniums at the traffic on quai Voltaire. Perhaps he was seeing only the pinpoint concentration of his thoughts, which Lucie imagined to be a minute ray of light in a dark curtain.
He is going to be all right this weekend, she said. The best signs were in place when he got up. Sun at the window. Breakfast. He seemed happy. The French coffee reminded him of something. Something pleasant, yes. His first cigarette. He showed me a map and explained about Burgundy. Only God could have known what he was thinking, but if you live with Jérôme you live without God, and so nobody knows anything.
Jérôme turned to speak to her (an excellent sign), but the traffic outside was like the purring of a monstrous cat. She had to close the parlor window — her gestures were gradual, calm — before she could hear. “About that advertisement in the Métro.”
“Yes, which one?”
“The one I pointed out to you, to show what they are selling in Paris now. ‘In Solitude, in Anguish, in Despair, call VAL 70–50. SOS Friendship.’ They used to sell soap, coffee, Dubonnet.”
“Jérôme, you won’t make sad remarks all weekend, will you?” said Lucie. “Or to Gilles while he’s driving?”
Of course, it was the worst thing she could have said. He would not speak to her again for hours, might even refuse to acknowledge Gilles’ greeting.
Every marriage is different, she said, and ours is like this. It can’t be helped. I don’t know of any that can be called better — only different.
Gilles had warned Lucie that he would not be allowed to park in front of their hotel. If he were to pause longer than it takes to shift gears the car would be hauled off to a motor graveyard, their passports would be impounded, and Lucie would be taken away by the police and shut up in a cage full of prostitutes. Gilles would slow down somewhere close to them, he had said, that was the best he could do, and the Girards would need to be poised, ready to leap like gazelles. And Lucie had promised that she and Jérôme would do that; they would leap like gazelles straight into Gilles’ car. At three o’clock Gilles announced, “Twenty minutes from now. Remember what I told you.” Jérôme and Lucie moved out to the edge of the pavement with their raincoats folded and their suitcase between them and stood without speaking until a quarter to four, at which time a blue bmw pulled out of the westbound flux on the quai and stopped dead. Gilles reached back and opened a door. “Hurry!” he said. He wore a tweed cap and 1910 goggles. Lucie started to get in until she saw a slavering black Labrador retriever sitting where she was meant to sit. She cried, “No, you go with him,” to Jérôme and she ran round the front of the car to climb in next to Gilles. Jérôme put the coats and suitcase between himself and the animal and immediately closed his eyes. The car stank of cigars. The radio was turned on to a concert. “Hurry!” said Gilles again. They moved off at a crawl into the stream of traffic flowing west, then south.
Lucie leaned close to Gilles and said in a low voice, “He will probably sleep most of the way. He gets tired in cars, unless he happens to be driving. The time change was bad for his sleep. For his appetite, too. He’ll say he’s hungry and then he won’t eat. I keep chocolate in my handbag. He is underweight for his height. He may seem indifferent sometimes. It is only tiredness. Pretend you don’t notice.”
Gilles said to himself, You would think he was her dog. You would think he was her infant. Christ, he must be what, now — thirty-nine? More?
Partly in French and sometimes in English, for he slid without hearing himself, Gilles began to speak as though Lucie had just recently interrupted him: “I don’t want you to think I’m boasting. I don’t need to boast. My first research grant was a personal one, one hundred thousand dollars.”
“What kind of dollars?” said Lucie.
“I’m over in the States about ten months of the year,” Gilles went on. “I was my own administrator when I got that first grant. No strings. I was about the age you are now. I’m a lot more sure of myself than when you remember me.”
“I think I was twelve,” said Lucie. “I didn’t much notice how people were.”
“I must be one of the top three or four in my field now,” said Gilles. “Not in the States. In the world. I’ve published in the Soviet Union. I keep the apartment in Paris just for the girls’ education. I want their French to be good. I don’t want them to have what we had. Anyway, Laure won’t live in the States. Our apartment is in Neuilly. André Maurois — you know? — used to have a place practically in the same building. Laure and the girls stay here most of the year. I’ve got this other beautiful place in New Haven built in 1728. Laure furnished it but she wouldn’t stay. I don’t insist. I believe in individual freedom. Laure feels she has more to contribute here. She wrote to the Prime Minister when they cut down the chestnut trees on place Saint-Sulpice. Got a nice answer, too. I don’t work over there just for the money. If that’s what you think, and if that’s what they think at home, well, you don’t know me. I’d take a lousy research-teaching job in a lousy French university any day if I thought it had real meaning. No, the reason why I’m there is because of my collections. Drawings, furniture. I’ve got these collections, they’re so valuable I can’t have them insured. Can’t afford to. And I could never bring anything out of the country. The Americans would never allow it. They would say it was part of the national heritage.”
“Do they say that about drawings?” said Lucie. “I thought heritage was just culture.”
“Paris is the right place for my daughters,” said Gilles. “They play with the Ruwenzori children, the little princesses. The Ruwenzoris send a car for them. Their mother was a Soplex, of the Soplex mineral water family. When the girls were in New Haven last year I had them tested. Sophie’s I.Q. was one-eighty, Chantal’s was one-seventy-five, and Diane’s in between. We have to watch what they read, who their friends are. I’m not boasting. They get their brains from Laure.”
All this was in English, of which Lucie understood a fair amount. She was a nurse; she had taken six months’ special training in the psychiatric wing of an American hospital. She did not mind English, but Jérôme did. He lived in his own climate; he had made language one of the elements. Sometimes he seemed to be drenched by sleet no one else felt, or else he could not see out for a curtain of snow. Jérôme was more intelligent than anyone Lucie had ever heard of. He had taken university degrees in France. Lucie wanted her cousin to appreciate this; she wanted Gilles to respect Jérôme, who was careless with people but was not afraid of the night or of dying.
She turned her head slowly. His eyes were shut; his breath moved slowly and evenly. “Jérôme is asleep,” she said to Gilles, who did not care one way or the other.
Jérôme was tuned to the radio, to a program of music by the composer End. The music was familiar, but who was End? It came to him as he saw a record sleeve with Jacqueline du Pré; he could see even her wedding ring. He opened his eyes and looked at Gilles’ long graying-reddish hair fanned over a suede collar. Gilles was on his way to Dijon for an antiquarians’ trade fair. He was to be the guest of famous professor somebody, a celebrated authority on medieval church carvings.