Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

Eleanor could imagine them, with their several heavy bags, their sacks from the duty-free, their great, damp slabs and mounds of muscle and fat shifting and trembling as they panted in and about the station and, finally, through the darkness of the garage beneath it where the rentals, les voitures , were parked. She imagined Eugene’s French, with its awful accent and its wonderful vocabulary, as he breathlessly sought to entertain the traveling salesman who, speaking French with native fluency and English with a transatlantic businessman’s ease, had offered to lead them to their car.

Now Eugene sat at the table in the kitchen of the rental house, which he called, quite properly, a gîte . They had never met, and her husband had never spoken of these enormous creatures who, it seemed, were kin. Eugene had embraced her on arriving in their sporty convertible, climbing out from behind the wheel with slow, laborious motions to hold her neck in a yoke of moist, thick fingers, kissing her head with the greatest delicacy until Bertha had pulled her away to smother Eleanor’s bowed face in those enormous breasts that shifted as if they were independent creatures trapped beneath the baggy tan traveling dress she matched with tan strap pumps and a tan leather handbag that looked as though it were weighted with stones.

“No la, no la-di-da, and surely no parked vultures, dear girl,” the cousin of Eleanor’s dead husband chanted. “The fellow knew we’d never find them. The Sino-French gentleman, a manufacturer’s agent for plastics , if you can believe it, unless he meant explosive plastique , now that you mention it, finally showed us where to go. He’d been there before, of course, and he was waiting in the corner of the rental office with that polite tranquility of theirs—”

“Not that my dear husband wishes to be mistaken for a racialist,” Bertha warned.

Eugene smiled damply at the table in the kitchen they had planned, she and Sid, to use during the rest of June and all of July. While Madame Panifiette, their landlady, took the advice of her husband and several friends in the area to consider whether — here she had made a number of faces involving downturned lips, raised brows, and a half a shake of the head — given the legalities involved, she could release Eleanor from the remainder, as she said it, of “your obligation to me.”

Eleanor had said to the tiny Madame Panifiette, with her alabaster complexion, in front of Eugene and Bertha, “You never liked me, did you?”

“Well, now,” Bertha had said, in sweet, slippery syllables, “we don’t want to necessarily accuse anyone of anything, do we?”

Between them, Bertha and Eugene weighed seven hundred and fifty pounds, Eleanor would have bet. On a better day, she’d have guessed it at six-fifty. But this was only a few days after Sid had looked up from the little corner table on which he leaned toward his white, lined pad with his fine-point fountain pen. She had been sitting at the pine dining table in the tile-paneled kitchen, writing postcards home at maybe eight in the morning. She looked up as Sid did. They caught each other’s eyes. She thought he was going to say something rueful about his work. She was ready to smile and cluck and go back to the cards that told what a fine time they were enjoying. But it stopped, inside his eyes, and they went out. He fell sideways from his chair. She went to him, she called to him, she blew her breath past his teeth and felt it going nowhere except back up at her mouth. That night, after following the ambulance to the regional hospital and after talking to a man from the gendarmerie who seemed too young to drive, much less take charge of her husband’s death, she used Sid’s address book and her own to call home and speak to eight or nine people. She did not call her daughter, Margo, and every day that she failed to, it seemed like a more impossible task. It was an overdue account, accruing a terrible interest. Of the people she did call, Sid’s cousins, whom she’d never met, insisted that they come to her. They flew from Baltimore to Roissy — Charles de Gaulle, they took the train to Bordeaux, and they navigated their rental car over the small roads of the wine country of southwestern France, and here they were, managing, among other elements, her grief. Over some days, the details of their journey emerged, and she came to think of them as her big, fat heroes.

They were probably sixty, she thought. Bertha was as tall as Eugene, with beefy shoulders and thick, rounded arms. She dyed her hair black as if to match it to the hair of her shaved moustache. She wore either dresses or skirts with matching tops, nothing tucked in, which was a vanity that Eleanor found moving. She could see the breadth of Bertha’s vast thighs as she walked briskly, in dressy high heels, through the echoing, cool, white or white-and-rose tiles of the floors and walls of the gîte . She “straightened things up,” she said. “Not that it isn’t as neat as a pin. But one tries,” she said, “to help. The best, the most useful help, they say, is order. So one picks up.”

Eugene, who ran a rare-books business in Baltimore, on one of the streets near the revived waterfront area, looked every day at the few French books Madame Panifiette had supplied, as well as the couple of stacks that had taken up too much of the space in Sam’s and Eleanor’s rolling duffel cases. When he wasn’t reading in books he clearly didn’t like, or looking at titles he didn’t want to open, Eugene spoke on the telephone, using his credit card, to arrange in his blatting but quite correct French for the passage home of three vertical Americans and one who would, as soon as his body was released by the authorities, travel prone.

“Assuming,” Eleanor told him as he hung up and sighed, “that Fifi LaPue over there lets me out of the lease. She had a little hankering for Sid, by the way, would have been my bet. What the drug people call a jones? Though I don’t know her position vis-à-vis the African-American dead.”

“Perhaps, then, she’ll be glad to see you go, now that you’re on your own. I am so sorry,” he said. “Forgive me. Sidney—”

Eleanor nodded. She didn’t know what else to do with her face, so she put her hands over it. Sidney and I, she nearly said to his cousin, would not have made it from the June we are in to the start of autumn. They’d been a middle-aged couple in a second marriage for each that was going as sour as the wine their landlady’s husband produced in what was little more than a very large old stone garage. Now Eleanor was a middle-aged widow whose husband had died of what the very sweet young doctor, who smelled of a citrus soap Eleanor had thought clean and sexy at once, called une attaque —a stroke.

Then the doctor had added, not hesitantly at all, for she was a sophisticated woman of France, after all, “ Les neiges . .” She did pause on Eleanor’s behalf to say “Do you know this word of ours for, er, the Negroes, madame?”

Eleanor took a deep breath in order to shout at her, to screech, she realized, about her experience as a teacher of French at the sixth-snootiest prep school for girls in the city of New York. She was going to scream in impeccable French. But the woman’s kind, tired light green eyes, her obvious concern for the dead man’s wife, silenced her. She touched the doctor’s forearm with the fingers of her right hand, and she nodded.

She let her breath out, and she said, “ D’accord .”

“ Eh, bien ,” the doctor said. “Donc. Les nègres, il sont tres vulnérable des attaques. Je regrette, madame.”

It had seemed to her before he died, and it seemed to her afterward, that they had remained in love. The sorriest part, she was beginning to believe, was that love did not necessarily make it possible to live, together or alone. And a desire to live, something beyond the animal drive to not be killed off, she had reluctantly come to think, was the most necessary and most elusive of feelings. Thinking of the size of Sid’s mistake and hers in marrying, she wondered if Eugene suspected something of the great error in which Sidney and she had courted and married and traveled abroad. Here he was, because he thought it right to come to the aid of his nephew’s white wife, this gentle, vast, and elegant pear-shaped cousin from Baltimore, sweating through his white duck trousers and his dark blue long-sleeved shirt, waving his white, broad-brimmed straw hat as a fan between them while they sat at the kitchen table and checked their little list of what to do after a husband’s death in a rural rental house among the rows of the Panifiettes’ sauvignon blanc vines at the end of a very warm June. She knew that Bertha’s whiteness could be all or some of an explanation, but she doubted it. His hairless café-au-lait head shone from the heat, and she thought she could feel it, like his decency, radiate from him across the yard or so of polished pine.