“It’s just a yacht, I’m afraid. Isn’t that enough garlic?”
He slid the garlic off the board into a pan where it spat and sizzled in the hot oil.
“How’s Golo?” he said.
“Wonderful.”
Later, over the cheese, he said: “Don’t mind me saying this, old friend, but don’t leave a woman on her own for long.”
“God, I’m only away for one night. I had to see the trustees.”
“I’m not talking about now. Women get bored much faster than men.”
“Says who?”
“It’s a well-known medical fact. Try some of this quince jelly with the cheese. Just something an old lothario told me once.”
Golo is lying on her side, on the bed, naked. I stand in the doorway of the bathroom, showered, spent, happy. Propped on one elbow, she is reading a trashy Sunday paper and laughing to herself at its idiocies. At her elbow, on a faience plate I bought at Saint-Martin, is a triangle of honeyed toast. Through the window I see the sun on the bay and that obliging yacht attended by two or three seagulls. Without looking up Golo searches the bed with her right foot for the square of sunshine that was warming her flank a moment ago. She finds it and allows her foot a sunbath while she reads, reaches for her toast and bites.
“Why do you buy this rubbish? The stuff they say.”
“I only get it for the funnies.” I think I must be the happiest fellow in the world.
“A likely story.”
We traveled that first year. I let the house in Carlyle Square to a Brazilian diplomat and we went east to India, Ceylon, Thailand. We saw out the winter with Golo’s school chum Charlotte and her husband Didier Van Breuer in Sydney, Australia. Spring found us in a little house in Sausalito on another, larger bay. The exhibition of my Indian gouaches in a Broome Street gallery was a modest success. Golo developed a surprisingly effective, kicking second serve. We were never a night apart.
I felt a physical presence in my gut, like a stone lodged between my liver and my pancreas. I looked out over the dark trees of Carlyle Square and made all sorts of bargains with any number of deities.
Max came through the bedroom, running his hands through his hair, which was graying remarkably fast, I noticed, for some odd reason. He looks more tired than me, I thought.
“Relax,” he said. “I’m not a gynecologist, but I would say your wife is pregnant.”
I have a son. His name is Dominic. He bellows with rage, he screams, he howls. Odette, his nurse, takes him to his room. I touch Golo’s face with my knuckles.
“Welcome home,” I say, and from my pocket remove the ring I have had made from an emerald I bought in Bangkok. Golo slips it on her finger.
“She manages to say ‘I love you,’ before she dissolves in tears,” I gently mock her.
She hugs me to her. “You’re so sweet,” she says. “And I do love you.”
Didier Van Breuer to dinner at Carlyle Square. He tells us he is divorcing Charlotte. I leave the room when a messenger comes to the front door, and when I return Van Breuer is sitting hunched over his food, sobbing. It is all too terribly sad.
Summer came around again and we open up the house on the island. The new annex for Odette and Dominic blended perfectly with the rest of the house. Odette — a strong raw-boned girl, with many moles — proved to be a capable cook as well as a capable nurse. In one week we were served bouillabaisse, oursins à la provençale, marinated veal chops with ratatouille, poulet stuffed with roast garlic, pied de porc lyonnais, liver and onions. It was delicious, but too rich for me. I found myself feeling overstuffed and bilious, my throat salty and my sinal passages pungent and herby even the next morning. I fasted for twenty-four hours, drinking only distilled water, and endured a night sweat that drove Golo from the bed.
“We must smell like a tinker’s camp,” I said to her the day I began to feel better. “Tell Odette it’s salads for the rest of the summer.” By and large she complied, though from time to time a reeking stew or casserole would arrive at the table and the place would smell like a Neapolitan trattoria once again.
I found it hard to paint in the house now that its routines revolved around Dominic’s noisy needs rather than my own. I was trying to complete enough work for an exhibition that a friend, who owned a little gallery in the rue Jacob, was kindly arranging for me, and so, most days I would load the panniers on my bicycle with my paints and brushes and set off for various parts of the island that were not pestered with tourists or summer residents, returning home as evening began to approach. I found a place overlooking the salt pans which promised great refulgent expanses of sky and water. I loved the salt pans with their strange poetry of dessication, though the series of watercolors I produced there, well enough done, had a lonely simplicity that seemed a little repetitive.
So it was in search of some contrasting bustle and busyness that I reluctantly ventured into one of the little ports and set up my easel by the marina. But after the serenity of the salt pans I found the presence of curious sightseers peering over my shoulder off-putting and, to be frank, my technique was found wanting when I came to render the bobbing mass of yachts and powerboats, dinghies and cruisers, that were crowded in among the piers and the jetties.
I was sitting there one midmorning, having torn up my first attempt, wondering vaguely if it would be worth looking at some Dufys that I knew hung in a provincial gallery not more than half a day’s drive away, when my peripheral attention was caught by a half-glimpsed figure, male, slim in white khakis and a navy sweater, that I was convinced was familiar. You know the way your instinctive apprehension is often more sure and certain than something studied and sought for: the glance is often more accurate than the stare. I was oddly positive that I had seen someone I knew and, having nothing on the easel to detain me, I sauntered off to find out who it was.
Didier Van Breuer sat in the sunshine of the restaurant terrace with a small glass of brandy and a caffè latte on the table in front of him, shirtless with a navy blue cotton sweater. He had a small red bandanna at his throat. He looked changed since we had last seen him, older and more gaunt. He did not seem too surprised to see me (he knew I summered on the island, he said) but I was glad to discover that my instincts and my eyesight were as sharp and shrewd as they had always been. He was cordial, with none of that reserve I had always associated with him.
“Where are you staying?” I asked.
He pointed to the harbor, at a vast gin-palace of a motor yacht with a single tall funnel (yellow with a magenta stripe). Crew members swabbed down bleached teak decks; brown water was being pumped from bilges. He was alone, he told me, on an endless meandering summer cruise trying to forget Charlotte and her grotesque betrayal (she was living with Didier’s estranged son). I asked him to dinner that night (I had seen Odette empty almost an entire tin of cumin into a lobster stew) but he declined, saying they were setting sail for the Azores later. He finished his drink and we wandered around the quay to his boat (his trousers were pale blue, I noticed with a private smile; however vigilant, the corner of your eye cannot achieve 20/20 vision). He had changed the name from Charlotte III to Clymene, who, he told me, with harsh irony, was the mistress of the sun. He invited me on board and we strolled through the empty staterooms smoking cigars, the warm buttock of a brandy goblet cupped in my tight palm. I felt sad for him, with his pointless wealth and the cheerless luxury of his life, and felt sad myself as the boat reminded me of Pappi’s old schooner, the Vergissmeinnicht, and my lost childhood. He had a rather fine Dufy in the dining room and I took the opportunity to make a few quick notes and sketches while he went upstairs to make a telephone call.