A grand production from Ponthieu; feathery light, moist white cake, apricot-and-hazlenut filling, curlicues of pastry cream on top, and the message in blue icing: “Happy Birthday Little Gérard.”
A moment of shock, then Yvette Langlade started to laugh. Bernard was next, and the couple embraced as everyone else joined in. Madame Arnaud laughed so hard she actually had tears running down her cheeks. “I can’t help thinking of poor ‘Little Gérard,’ ” she gasped.
“Having his twentieth wedding anniversary!”
“And so young!”
“Can you imagine the parents?”
“Dreadful!”
“Truly—to call a child that on his very own birthday cake!”
“He’ll never recover—scarred for life.”
“My God it’s perfect,” Yvette Langlade panted. “The day of our twentieth anniversary; Germany invades the country and Ponthieu sends the wrong cake.”
Everything was arranged during the taxi ballet in front of the building at 2:30 in the morning. Bibi Lachette’s cousin was put in a cab and sent off to an obscure hotel near the Sorbonne. Then Casson took Bibi and Véronique home—Véronique first because she lived down in the 5th Arrondissement. Casson walked her to the door and they said good night. Back in the cab, it was kissing in the backseat and, at Bibi’s direction, off to the rue Chardin. “Mmm,” she said.
“It’s been a long time,” Casson said.
Bibi broke away in order to laugh. “Oh you are terrible, Jean-Claude.”
“What were we, twelve?”
“Yes.”
Tenderly, he pressed his lips against hers, dry and soft. “God, how I came.”
“You rubbed it.”
“You helped.”
“Mmm. Tell me, are you still a voyeur?”
“Oh yes. Did you mind?”
“Me? Jean-Claude, I strutted and danced and did the fucking cancan, how can you ask that?”
“I don’t know. I worried later.”
“That I’d tell?”
“Tell the details, yes.”
“I never told. I lay in the dark in the room with my sister and listened to her breathe. And when she was asleep, I put my hand down there and relived every moment of it.”
The cab turned the corner into the rue Chardin, the driver said “Monsieur?”
“On the right. The fourth house, just after the tree.”
Casson paid, the cab disappeared into the darkness. Casson and Bibi kissed once more, then, wound around each other like vines, they climbed the stairs together.
Suddenly, he was awake.
“Oh God, Bibi, forgive me. That damn Bruno and his damn Pomerol—”
“It was only a minute,” she said. “One snore.”
She lay on her side at the other end of the bed, her head propped on her hand, her feet by his ear—her toenails were painted red. Once in the apartment, they’d kissed and undressed, kissed and undressed, until they found themselves naked on the bed. Then she’d gone to use the bathroom and that was the last he remembered.
“What are you doing down there?”
She shrugged. Ran a lazy finger up and down his shinbone. “I don’t know. I got up this morning, alone in my big bed, and I thought . . .” Casually, she swung a knee across him, then sat up, straddling his chest, her bottom shining white in the dark bedroom, the rest of her perfectly tanned. She looked over her shoulder at him and bobbed up and down. “Don’t mind a fat girl sitting on you?”
“You’re not.” He stroked her skin. “Where did you find the sun?”
“Havana.” She clasped her hands behind her head and arched her back. “I always have my bathing suit on, no matter where I go.”
He raised his head, kissed her bottom; one side, the other side, the middle.
“You are a bad boy, Jean-Claude. It’s what everyone says.” She wriggled backward until she got comfortable, then bent over him, her head moving slowly up and down. He sighed. She touched him, her hands delicate and warm. At this rate, he thought, nothing’s going to last very long.
Worse yet, their childhood afternoons came tumbling back through his memory; skinny little dirty-minded Bibi, been at the picture books her parents hid on the top shelf. What an idiot he’d been, to believe the boys in the street: girls don’t like it but if you touch them in a certain place they go crazy—but it’s hard to find so probably you have to tie them up.
But then, what an earthquake in his tiny brain. She wants you to feel like this, she likes it when your thing sticks up in the air and quivers. Well. Life could never be the same after that. “Thursday we all go to the Lachettes,” his mother would say in Deauville. His father would groan, the Lachettes bored him. It was a big house, on the outskirts of the seaside town, away from the noisy crowds. A Norman house with a view of the sea from an attic window. With a laundry room that reeked of boiled linen. With a wine cellar ruled by a big spider. With a music room where a huge couch stood a foot from the wall and one could play behind it. “Pom, pom, pom, I have shot Geronimeau.”
“Ah, Monsieur le Colonel, I am dying. Tell my people—Jean-Claude!”
From the front halclass="underline" “Play nicely, les enfants. We are all going to the café for an hour.”
“Au revoir, Maman.”
“Au revoir, Madame Lachette.”
There were maids in the house, the floors creaked as they went about. Otherwise, a summer afternoon, cicadas whirred in the garden, the distant sea heard only if you held your breath.
“You mustn’t put your finger there.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to.”
“Oh.”
A maid approached, the Indian scout put his ear to the waxed parquet. “Pom, pom!”
“I die. Aarrghh.”
Aarrghh.
Bibi’s head moving up and down, a slow rhythm in the darkness. She was coaxing him—knew he was resisting, was about to prove that she could not be resisted. Only attack, he realized, could save him now. He circled her waist with his arms, worked himself a little further beneath her, put his mouth between her thighs. Women have taught me kindness, and this. She made a sound, he could feel it and hear it at once, like the motor in a cat. Now we’ll see, he thought, triumphant. Now we’ll just see who does what to who. Her hips began to move, rising, a moment’s pause, then down, and harder every time. At the other end of the bed, concentration wavered—he could feel it—then began to wane.
But she was proud, a fighter. Yes, he’d set her in motion, riding up and down on the swell of the wave, but he would not escape, no matter what happened to her. It was happening; she too remembered the afternoons at the house in Deauville, remembered the things that happened, remembered some things that could have happened but didn’t. She tensed, twisted, almost broke free, then shuddered, and shuddered again. Now, the conqueror thought, let’s roll you over, with your red toenails and your white ass and—
No. That wouldn’t happen.
The world floated away. She crawled back to meet him by the pillows, they kissed a few times as they fell asleep, warm on a spring night, a little drunk still, intending to do it again, this time in an even better way, then darkness.
A loud knock on the door, the voice of the concierge: “Monsieur Casson, s’il vous plaît.”
Half asleep, he pulled on his pants and an undershirt. It was just barely dawn, the first gray light touching the curtain. He unbolted the door and opened it. “Yes?”
Poor Madame Fitou, who worshiped propriety in every corner of the world. Clutching a robe at her throat, hair in a net, her old face baggy and creased with sleep. The man by her side wore a postal uniform. “A telegram, monsieur,” she said.