breeze.
“Let’s go to Provence,” she says.
“For a French lesson?” Nico asks, smiling.
“Yes,” Josie says. “Run away with me.”
Nico orders for the two of them, though he glances at Josie to make sure she agrees. She nods her approval.
“Today?” Nico asks when the waitress leaves. “On the next train?”
“Why not?”
They clink glasses.
“Maybe I shouldn’t drink,” Josie says. “The baby.”
“In France they say a glass or two of wine is good for the baby.”
She feels giddy, as if the wine has already made her lightheaded. Maybe it’s the words that echo in her head:
“There is no friend at the art galleries today?”
“Whitney doesn’t approve of affairs and she can’t stand contemporary art. She’s at home in San Francisco, thinking I got what I deserved.”
“Leave her there,” Nico says. “I’m glad we won’t have to bring her to Provence with us.”
“And there is no one expecting you home for dinner tonight?” Josie asks. They are flirting-it’s a game, a life raft, a way out of the mess she’s in. She is talking again, she’s crying, she’s even laughing. What could be wrong with this? She sips her wine and leans close.
“Sometimes I meet two other tutors for drinks in the Marais. We complain about our students and drink too much. Sometimes we go home and have sex with each other.”
“All three of you?” Josie’s eyes open wide.
“No,” Nico says. “I’m not very interested in the other man. It’s his girlfriend I love.”
“My God,” Josie says. “We’re a mess. All of us. Why is love so complicated?”
“Today isn’t complicated,” Nico says, raising his glass. “This is the first day I have enjoyed myself in a very long time.”
They clink glasses again. The waitress arrives and places bowls of mussels in front of them. She tucks tall glasses packed with
“I haven’t eaten in a very long time,” Josie says.
The first time Josie met Simon, alone, the day after Brady’s rehearsal, they sat for a short time at a restaurant in a town far from where they both lived. They ordered drinks-martini for Simon, white wine for Josie-and then ordered dinner: steak for Simon, grilled salmon for Josie. The food sat there, untouched, while they leaned toward each other and talked. Simon asked questions-Who are you? Where do you come from? Why do you teach?-as if he were feasting on her rather than mere food. And Josie talked, as if she had never talked before, never told her story. When she said her mother died, he didn’t skip on to the next subject the way her boyfriends had. He asked her about her mother’s final week, about her father’s sadness, about the gold wishbone she wore around her neck that had belonged to her mother. The waiter asked them if there was anything wrong with their dinners.
“No, no,” they both said. “We’re fine. Everything’s wonderful.”
And still, they barely touched their food.
“What do you do on a perfect day?” Simon asked.
“I hike into the hills,” she told him. “I pack a picnic lunch and book and find a place to read by the river.”
“Take me,” he said.
He told her about flying, about the remarkable feeling of space and lightness and speed. He told her how he felt both reckless and safe at the same time-as if he could go anywhere, do anything, and yet he was master of his universe, completely in control.
“Take me,” she said.
But the only place they ever went was to bed-her bed, hotel beds, motel beds, a futon bed he carried to the middle of a field in the hills of West Marin. That first night they left the food on the table and too much money thrown onto the check and they drove for a long time. They found a country cabin, one of a small group of log cabins for rent on the side of a lake. Josie stayed in the car while Simon went into the office, but she could see the woman peering at her through the window. Josie looked away, fiddled with the radio, worried that her body would never stop trembling from so much desire.
When Simon returned to the car with a key in hand he said, “She asked if I was traveling with my daughter.”
“What did you say?”
“I said no. I don’t want to get arrested for what I’m going to do to you tonight.”
“She’ll never know.”
“She’ll know. The whole world will know.”
Josie was never loud in bed. She once bit the neck of a boyfriend in college. Better that than scream. She liked sex-it was a kind of game, a kind of athleticism that she was good at. But she didn’t know what it was to give herself to someone, to abandon herself, to take someone in.
That night she made enough noise for the woman to ask Simon in the morning: “Was everything all right in there?”
“Fine,” Simon said. “Everything was perfect.”
“How did you know?” she asked Simon weeks later. “That first time. How did you know what would happen when we made love that night?”
“I couldn’t stop trembling,” he said. “All through dinner. While we drove to the cabin. My body was electrified. I had never felt anything like it.”
“That never happened to you before?” Josie asked.
“You never happened to me before.”
Josie and Nico feast on mussels and fries. They lick their fingers, they toss shells into the bowl, they sop sauce with the hearty crusts of bread. When they are done the waitress brings a tangy green salad and a cheese plate, and more bread, this time filled with walnuts and cranberries.
Nico tells Josie about his childhood in Normandy, on a small farm, how once he got drunk on Calvados and fell asleep in the root cellar until morning. When he woke up he saw the police were everywhere, combing the grounds of the house, talking to neighbors, leading dogs into the woods.
He hid for a day, and at night he sneaked out and back into the woods. He wandered home minutes later and his parents rushed to embrace him.
“Where were you? What happened? Did someone take you?” they asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
They determined that he had blocked out some terrible memory and for years after that, his parents, his friends, the neighbors, all treated him as if he carried some dark secret within him. His secret was his shame, that he had fallen asleep in a dark corner and that he had caused so much commotion over nothing.
“Did you ever tell them?” Josie asks. “Wouldn’t they now rather know that nothing bad happened to you?”
Nico shakes his head. “I’ve written a series of poems about that night,” he says. “Eventually they’ll read the poems. But even then, there’s no true story. I can’t undo the lie.”
They eat three kinds of cheeses-a runny, pungent Camembert, an aged chevre that tastes like the earth, and a Roquefort that reminds Josie of her father, a man who eats bland food and sprinkles his salad with blue cheese.
“Our parents don’t know us,” Josie says. “They can’t know us. We hide ourselves from them. Once they knew everything about us and in order to escape them we keep our secrets, our private selves.”
“Did you escape your parents?” Nico asks.
“I had to. I was desperate to. They wanted me to go to San Jose State College and live at home. But I wanted to be a continent away from them. I thought they were old-fashioned and uneducated and-
