A Sport and a Pastime

“Oui,” she says. “Huit jours avant, huit jours apres.”

He is silent. The formula is from her mother. He counts to himself.

“It’s over eight days.”

“No.”

“Yes, it is,” he says.

“No.”

Mechanical love. Senseless love. She is dry, and that makes it worse. Afterwards she tells him she knew exactly how it would be. First he says that he doesn’t feel well. Dean listens unhappily. Then, she says, he suggests they go home, but not together. Finally he wants to know whether it’s safe or not.

“I know you perfectly,” she says.

“Do you?”

“Perfectly. Yes.”

He doesn’t answer. He recognizes himself.

“Poor Phillip, I want to hurt you.”

“You’re not hurting me,” he says.

“Yes. I want to.”

He is watching her in the dark.

“I want you to remember,” she says.

He says nothing.

“Could you ever imagine me not?”

“Pardon?”

“Do you think I won’t?”

She shrugs.

There is an interlude. They lie near each other like two sick children, exhausted. The last light has gone. After a while she sits up and puts on her panties. Then she unlocks the door. The light from the hall shows her clearly.

“Hey,” Dean says, “what are you doing? You can’t go like that.”

“Nobody is here,” she says.

“Put something on.”

She looks down at herself for a moment.

“There are people next door,” he says.

“Nobody sees.”

She slips out as she is, barefoot, her breasts bare.

“Come here!” he whispers. “Put something on!”

He can hear her enter the malodorous little compartment at the end of the hallway and afterwards, faintly, her cough. When she comes back, she slips off her panties again before getting into bed.

“I’m cold,” she says.

Her feet are dirty, he thinks.

“Is it true the women in the United States have something to keep them safe all month long?” she asks.

“Sure.”

“They don’t have it in France,” she says. She is caressing him.

“They have a number of things.”

“I love it when it’s soft and small,” she says. She feels his thighs. “I love your body.”

Her hand returns to his prick which is swelling with blood.

“Allo,” she says.

Far off the trains are switching and being assembled. The cars come together with great, metal claps.

“I believe I know him better than you do,” she says.

“Yes?”

“I have felt him more.”

“Have you ever thought of going to America?” Dean asks. He is working his prick into her slowly.

Silence.

“Annie…”

“Yes.”

“Have you?”

“Yes,” she admits. “Sometimes…”

They begin an Olympian act as the freights slam together in the distance. She leaves herself completely. She moves and cries out like a woman of forty with her lover for the last time. Afterwards she lies strewn across him.

“You are bread and salt,” he tells her.

“Oh, Phillip,” she says. They are lost in the darkness.

“Oui…”

She does not continue. Finally, in a soft voice,

“You are good for me.”

The last bells are sounding. The pigeons sleep. In a moonlight like milk, beneath the worn facades, the Delage is parked close to a few Renaults and an old, boxlike Citroen. Yes, Dean thinks, America. They will live in a studio downtown with a small garden, a terrace perhaps, and a few good friends.

[21]

PALE END OF DAY and the station empty. In the cafes the lights are not yet on. Dean sits outside at one of the iron tables. Along the tree-lined street which comes down from the square, small, almost alone, Anne-Marie descends. She turns the corner. One can almost hear her footsteps. The pigeons hurry away from her, uncertain where to go, cross back, flutter and finally burst upwards on creaking wings. When they are gone the quiet returns, the quiet of a hospital.

It is curious how I have begun to discern patterns, motifs that somehow had no significance for me at the time. As I view once more the many fragments of this encounter, as I touch them, turn them around, I find myself subject to sudden, illuminated moments. Meeting at the station, for instance. I had never really considered that. But then I remember that Dean, having left college the first time, spent six months in travel, driving to Mexico and then on to California, the legendary coast. And I think of the very symbol of his existence which continually appears and reappears to me, emerging from behind the trees in the dusk, its lights floating out, its dark shape fleeing along the road, that great, spectral car which haunts the villages, its tires worn, the chrome on its wheels beginning to speckle with rust. Journeys and intimations of journeys—I see now that he has always kept himself close to the life that flows, is transient, borne away. And I see his whole appearance differently. He is joined to the brevity of things. He has apprehended at least one great law.

She comes along the sidewalk to join him, a cheap, metallic blouse over her slacks. She looks like a tramp. Dean adores her. She says something as she sits down, a vanished word, and he nods. And now the waiter appears in a soiled, white coat.

Around the Champ de Mars a green Oldsmobile is turning, black soldiers inside. They are wearing sunglasses. My blood jumps. I can see them as they go by, very slowly, not talking, taking it all in. They are going to recognize me, suddenly I’m certain of it. I can’t look at them. The negro lover who has been seeking her for months has finally arrived. The car is going to stop across the street from the cafe and three men step out, lazily slamming the doors. The fourth remains in the back seat. My mind is racing. Is it him? Is he the one to whom she will be delivered? Dean is pushing someone. There’s a scuffle among the chairs.

Of course, it never happens. I have invented it all, their vengeance, their slow, deliberate walk. Instead, they drive slowly around the square, turning, turning. I become calm as I see them stop near the direction signs, read, and then head off on the road to Dijon.