“I want to kiss you the right way, not that way,” Austin said. He pulled her firmly to him again, taking hold of her soft waist and pushing his mouth toward hers. He kissed her as tenderly as he could with her back stiff and resistant, and her mouth not shaped to receive a kiss but ready to speak when the kiss ended. Austin held the kiss for a long moment, his eyes closed, his breath traveling out his nose, trying to feel his own wish for tenderness igniting an answering tenderness in her. But if there was tenderness, it was of an unexpected type — more like forbearance. And when he had pressed her lips for as many as six or eight seconds, until he had breathed her breath and she had relaxed her resistance, he stood back and looked at her — a woman he felt he might love — and took her chin between his thumb and index finger and said, “That's really all I wanted. That wasn't all that bad, was it?”
She shook her head in a perfunctory way and very softly, almost compliantly, said, “No.” Her eyes were cast down, though not in a way he felt confident of, more as if she were waiting for something. He felt he should let her go; that was the thing to do. He'd forced her to kiss him. She'd relented. Now she could be free to do anything she wanted.
Joséphine hurriedly turned back toward her purse on the couch, and Austin walked to the window and surveyed the vast chestnut trees of the Jardin du Luxembourg. The air was cool and soft, and the light seemed creamy and rich in the late afternoon. He heard music, guitar music from somewhere, and the faint sound of singing. He saw a jogger running through the park gate and out into the street below, and he wondered what anyone would think who saw him standing in this window — someone glancing up a moment out of the magnificent garden and seeing a man in an apartment. Would it be clear he was an American? Or would he possibly seem French? Would he seem rich? Would his look of satisfaction be visible? He thought almost certainly that would be visible.
“I have to go to the lawyer now,” Joséphine said behind him.
“Fine. Go,” Austin said. “Hurry back. I'll look after little Gene Krupa. Then we'll have a nice dinner.”
Joséphine had a thick sheaf of documents she was forcing into a plastic briefcase. “Maybe,” she said in a distracted voice.
Austin, for some reason, began picturing himself talking to Hank Bullard about the air-conditioning business. They were in a café on a sunny side street. Hank's news was good, full of promise about a partnership.
Joséphine hurried into the hall, her flat shoes scraping the boards. She opened the door to Léo's room and said something quick and very soft to him, something that did not have Austin's name in it. Then she closed the door and entered the WC and used the toilet without bothering to shut herself in. Austin couldn't see down the hall from where he stood by the window, but could hear her pissing, the small trickle of water hitting more water. Barbara always closed the door, and he did too — it was a sound he didn't like and usually tried to avoid hearing, a sound so inert, so factual, that hearing it threatened to take away a layer of his good feeling. He was sorry to hear it now, sorry Joséphine didn't bother to close the door.
In an instant, however, she was out and down the hallway, picking up her briefcase while water sighed through the pipes. She gave Austin a peculiar, fugitive look across the room, as if she was surprised he was there and wasn't sure why he should be. It was, he felt, the look you gave an unimportant employee who's just said something inexplicable.
“So. I am going now,” she said.
“I'll be right here,” Austin said, looking at her and feeling suddenly helpless. “Hurry back, okay?”
“Yeah, sure. Okay,” she said. “I hurry. I see you.”
“Great,” Austin said. She went out the door and quickly down the echoing steps toward the street.
FOR A WHILE Austin walked around the apartment, looking at things — things Joséphine Belliard liked or cherished or had kept when her husband cleared out. There was an entire wall of books across one side of the little sleeping alcove she'd constructed for her privacy, using fake Chinese rice-paper dividers. The books were the sleek French soft-covers, mostly on sociological subjects, though other books seemed to be in German. Her modest bed was covered with a clean, billowy white duvet and big fluffy white pillows — no headboard, just the frame, but very neat. A copy of her soon-to-be-ex-husband's scummy novel lay on the bed table, with several pages roughly bent down. Folding a page up, he read a sentence in which a character named Solange was performing an uninspired act of fellatio on someone named Albert. He recognized the charged words: Fellation. Lugubre. Albert was talking about having his car repaired the whole time it was happening to him. Un Amour Secret was the book's insipid title. Bernard's scowling, condescending visage was nowhere in evidence.
He wondered what Bernard knew that he didn't know. Plenty, of course, if the book was even half true. But the unknown was interesting; you had to face it one way or another, he thought. And the idea of fellatio with Joséphine — nothing, up to this moment, he'd even considered — inflamed him, and he began to realize there was something distinctly sexual about roaming around examining her private belongings and modest bedroom, a space and a bed he could easily imagine occupying in the near future. Before he moved away he laid the green paisley egg on her bed table, beside the copy of her husband's smutty book. It would create a contrast, he thought, a reminder that she had choices in the world.
He looked out the bedroom window onto the park. It was the same view as the living room — the easeful formal garden with great leafy horse chestnut trees and tonsured green lawns with topiaries and yew shrubs and pale crisscrossing gravel paths, and the old École Supérieure des Mines looming along the far side and the Luxembourg Palace to the left. Some hippies were sitting cross-legged in a tight little circle on one of the grass swards, sharing a joint around. No one else was in view, though the light was cool and smooth and inviting, with birds soaring through it. A clock chimed somewhere nearby. The guitar music had ceased.
It would be pleasant to walk there with Joséphine, Austin thought, to breathe the sweet air of chestnut trees and to stare off. Life was very different here. This apartment was very different from his house in Oak Grove. He felt different here. Life seemed to have improved remarkably in a short period. All it took, he thought, was the courage to take control of things and to live with the consequences.
He assumed Léo to be asleep down the hall and that he could simply leave well enough alone there. But when he'd sat leafing through French Vogue for perhaps twenty minutes he heard a door open, and seconds later Léo appeared at the corner of the hall, looking confused and drugged in his BIG-TIME AMERICAN LUXURY shirt with the big red Cadillac barging off the front. He still had his little shoes on.
Léo rubbed his eyes and looked pitiful. Possibly Joséphine had given him something to knock him out — the sort of thing that wouldn't happen in the States. But in France, he thought, adults treated children differently. More intelligently.
“Bon soir,” Austin said in a slightly ironic voice and smiled, setting the Vogue down.
Léo eyed him sullenly, still suspicious about hearing French spoken by this person who wasn't the least bit French. He scanned the room quickly for his mother's presence. Austin considered a plan of reintroducing the slightly discredited paisley egg but decided against it. He glanced at the clock on the bookcase: forty-five minutes would somehow need to be consumed before Joséphine returned. But how? How could the time be passed in a way to make Léo happy and possibly impress his mother? The Cubs idea wouldn't work — Léo was too young. Austin didn't know any games or tricks. He knew nothing about children, and, in fact, was sorry the boy was awake, sorry he was here at all.