The World at Night

Murmurs of agreement around the table, but they knew their history all too well. Paris was occupied in 1814, after the loss at Waterloo. The Germans had built themselves an encampment in the Tuileries, and when they left it had taken two years to clean up after them. Then they’d occupied a second time, in 1870, after that idiot Napoleon III lost an entire army at Sedan. In 1914 it had been a close thing-you could drive to the battlefields of the Marne from Paris in less than an hour.

“What are the Americans saying?” asked Madame Arnaud. But nobody seemed to know, and Marie-Claire shooed the conversation over into sunnier climes.

They laughed and smoked and drank enough so that, by midnight, they really didn’t care what the Germans did. Bibi rested two fingers on Casson’s thigh when he filled her glass. The vacherin was spooned out onto glass plates-a smelly, runny, delicious success. Made by a natural fermentation process from cow’s milk, it killed a few gourmets every year and greatly delighted everyone else. Some sort of a lesson there, Casson thought. At midnight, time for cake and coffee, the maid appeared in consternation and Marie-Claire hurried off to the kitchen.

“Well,” she sighed when she reappeared, “life apparently will go on its own particular way.”

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 Gerard.”

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 Gerard,’ ” 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 Veronique home-Veronique 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 hall: “Play nicely, les enfants. We are all going to the cafe 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.