A Sport and a Pastime

sure. He nods at the conversation which he only half understands. His flesh feels blue. Suddenly he realizes he must be getting sick, but then her mother rises to get a scarf. As she sits down again she remarks that it’s a little cold. The father shrugs. Dean has been unable to exchange a word with him. They sit like strangers. It is Anne-Marie who talks, mostly to her mother and quite gaily, as if only the two of them were there. Occasionally she asks Dean if he understands. He tells her yes. The father sits like an Arab. He has a lean face. A long nose. He’s wearing a cap. He looks at the table or out the window. At one point his wife reaches over to pat his hand. He appears not to notice.

Dean feels increasingly nervous. He is sitting all alone. He doesn’t like to look at the father whose eyes are pale and watery, a convict blue. As for the talk, it washes across him like water. He no longer even hears familiar words.

“Phillip, did you understand?” she says.

“Oui,” he replies sleepily.

“Oui?” the mother asks, her bright gaze on him. For a moment he is afraid they are going to question him.

“Quelquefois,” Anne-Marie says, “il comprend tres bien.”

The mother laughs. Dean lowers his head. He feels the unhurried gaze of the father on him. He tries to return it, is determined to, but involuntarily his eyes flicker away for an instant, and that is enough. It’s finished. He knows he has been measured. In revenge he begins to think of their daughter naked, images as unforgivable as slaps. The father lights a cigarette.

He tries once more to concentrate on what they are saying, but it’s all too fast. He hardly understands a word. Everything seems to have left him. He begins to count his forkfuls, then the wall tiles.

After lunch he is shown through the house. It’s clean and bare. Her room is upstairs, plain as a cell. Somehow he cannot associate all of this with her, it’s more like a school she has attended. He looks out of her window. Below, parked in the sunlight, is a long convertible, the seats of real leather. The whole town has seen it.

Her father hasn’t left the kitchen. He sits with the newspaper in a chair moved back against the wall and smokes a thick, workman’s cigarette, barely inhaling. When they come downstairs it’s as if he doesn’t hear them. He continues reading as they enter the room.

Dean is depressed and also angry. She tells him not to pay any attention, her stepfather is stupid. It doesn’t matter, everything has lengthened the day, made it desolate. The table is right beside the stove. The plates were set on it bare. Her mother made her drink a glass of milk. Somehow the afternoon has turned into their repossession of her, nor has she struggled at all to resist it. She has deserted him. The past has reclaimed her.

“My mother needs a television,” she comments as they drive. “All the others have one. It’s very lonely at night. She could look.”

“I guess so,” he says.

“Now she has nothing. It would be very nice, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” Dean says.

“She needs an automobile, too. A Renault. She bicycles into town, but she is too old for that. Every day. I must get her a Renault.”

“Why don’t you get her a Mercedes?” Dean says acidly.

“It’s too big.”

They come to a long, straight section of road, and he begins to accelerate. He seems absorbed in it. They go faster and faster. The gauge finally touches a hundred and sixty. Anne-Marie says nothing. She sits looking out the side.

I meet them for dinner in a restaurant near the square. It’s the weekend, a few people more than usual. Still, it’s far from being crowded. There’s a zinc bar, I think the only one in town. The waitress leans against it and waits to pick up dishes from the kitchen. Dean is drinking vin blanc. He’s very talkative. I sit there listening to his description of European life, drawing it forth by silence. Of course, he is speaking a special language, rich with deceptions. I brush away tobacco crumbs on the bar, nod, yes, agree. He is telling me about cheeses, architecture, the genuine, the profound intelligence of this civilization. Occasionally there are brief glimpses of cities, certain small hotels.

Anne-Marie sits quietly and as Dean talks, becoming drunker, his mouth wetting, I try to watch her, to isolate elements of that stunning sexuality, but it’s like memorizing the reflections of a diamond. The slightest movement and an entirely different brilliance appears. Of course, it is her face I am searching, her gestures, expression. I am interested in the visible. I know quite well what is the source of all her power, but I am trying to identify it by the most commonplace details.

In the pictures I have, she appears strangely grave, the Saturday when we all shopped in the open market. There are some of her sitting in the car, and some, too, in which there is a faint trace of gaiety, the kind reserved for companions one is loyal to forever. She liked to pose. I gave her prints, of course. She was very pleased. She sent them to her mother, Dean told me.

They are like a couple who’ve had an argument. As we talk, Dean’s eyes keep going past me to the waitress who is speaking, just a few words at a time, to the barman, and who, in between, gives little sighs of resignation.

“I’m nice than she is,” Anne-Marie says.

“Nicer than who?”

“Her.”

“Certainly you are.”

“She looks very well with her clothes,” Anne-Marie says, “but how does she look naked? What a shock that must be.”

“Shock?”

“Shock?” she repeats. “That’s right?”

“Yes, that’s good. That’s a new word for you.”

She shrugs.

“Where did you learn that?”

She makes a vague gesture.

“Well, you’re right,” he says, “it would probably be shocking. Do you think she makes love?”

A dry laugh. “Of course.”

I’m afraid to turn around. Perhaps she even understands what we’re saying.

“You’re sure?” Dean says.

“My God!”

“OK.”

“Look at her eyes,” Anne-Marie says. “There are dark rings under them.”

“So?”

“That’s a sure sign.”

That amuses Dean. He begins looking around the room.

“How about that girl sitting by the window?”

“Which one?” she says.

It’s early when we leave, not yet ten. We walk along together for a way and then, at a corner, part. I can follow them without thinking. I know how they will go, which shops they will pause in front of, how they will cut across the shamble of tiny streets. They are passing the photographer’s, the window Dean loves with its prints of wedding couples, its graduation classes. There is a certain ageless quality to the photos, a redolence of 1914, 1939. They are like old newspapers. Perhaps the shop has been here all that time. Still, there is not one face that could be Dean’s. I look carefully along the rows, even at those partly hidden. He will never be found among them. His face emanates a complete, almost a bitter intelligence that doesn’t exist here. When I look at his photos, the one that was taken eating an orange, glancing up, on that November day we first went to Beaune—looking at it I see the eyes of Lorca, of someone who is to be taken out of life and destroyed, we will never find the reason. I sit and stare at this picture which is vivid with its own instant, this photo taken before the war, before the revolution. We