Florida(30)

Now Mina was singing in the monitor, and Amanda said, Listen! “Au Clair de la Lune.” She sang along for a stanza, then had to stop.

Why are you crying, silly? Genevieve said gently, touching Amanda’s hair. Twice in a day and you never used to cry. I once saw all four of your big old brothers sitting on you, one of them bouncing on your head, and you didn’t cry. You just fought like a wild thing.

Hormones, I think, Amanda said. I don’t know. It’s just that all those nights when Sophie would go out and leave Mina at our house, I would sing this to her until she went to sleep. For hours and hours. Everybody would be screaming downstairs, just awful things, and once in a while the cops would show up, and there would be flashing lights in the window. But in my bed, there’d be this sweet beautiful baby girl sucking her thumb and saying, Sing it again. And so I’d sing it again and again and again, and it was all I could do.

They listened to Mina’s beautiful, raspy voice over the monitor . . . Il dit à son tour— Ouvrez votre porte, pour le dieu d’amour.

Well, thank God for Madame Dupont, Genevieve said. Forcing us to learn it in seventh grade. She made us sing at school assembly, remember? I wanted to die.

Nobody looked at Manfred; they studied the knives, the bread. The moment passed.

Grant said, What’s she saying?

There were tears in his eyes, Amanda saw; she squeezed the back of his neck. She was moved. It had been so long since she had seen the side of him that would weep during movies about dolphin harvests. A different Grant had grown up over him, a harder one.

Manfred didn’t seem inclined to translate. Amanda listened for a minute to gather herself. It’s a story, she said. Harlequin wants to write a letter, but he doesn’t have a pen and his fire went out, and so he goes to his buddy Pierrot to borrow them. But Pierrot is in bed and won’t open the door, and he tells Harlequin to go to the neighbor’s to ask because he can hear someone making a fire in her kitchen. And then Harlequin and the neighbor fall in love. It’s silly, she said. A pretty lullaby.

But Manfred was looking at her from the shadows. He leaned forward. Dear Amanda, he said. The world must be hard for you. All substance, no nuance. Harlequin is on the prowl. He wants sex, pour l’amour de Dieu. When Pierrot turns him away, he goes to the neighbor to battre le briquet. Double entendre, you see. He is, in the end, fucking the neighbor.

Genevieve sat back slowly in the darkness.

Manfred smiled at Amanda, and there was a strange new electricity in the air; there was something here, announcing itself to Amanda, in the very back of her head. It had almost arrived, the understanding; it was almost here. She held her breath to let it step shyly forward into the light.



* * *



—

    Mina watched the couples from the doorway, feeling as if she were still flying over the Atlantic, the ground distant and swift beneath. Nobody was speaking; they were not looking at one another. Something had soured since she’d left them half an hour ago. She had come from a house of conflict. She knew just by looking that there would be an argument breaking out in a moment and that it would be bad.

She took a step out to distract them. She started singing. She didn’t have a good voice, but she was loud and her singing sometimes would disarm a fight at home. The other four snapped their eyes up at her. She felt herself expanding into her body as she always did when she was watched. She was new tonight, strange. The champagne was all she’d consumed since leaving Orlando, and it made her feel languorous, like a cat.

Sometime between arrival and now, she’d finally decided what she’d been mulling over for the past few days; and now what she knew and what they didn’t filled her with a secret lift of joy. Internal helium. She wouldn’t board the plane at the end of the summer. School was so gray and useless compared to what waited for her in Paris, her life on hold in that hot place where she’d lived her childhood out. Florida. Well. She was finished with all of that. A whole continent in the past. She would go toward the glamour. She was only twenty-one. She was beautiful. She could do whatever she wanted to. She felt herself on the exhilarating upward climb in her life. As she walked toward them, she saw how these people at the table had stopped climbing, how they were teetering on the precipice (even Amanda, poor tired Amanda). That Manfred man was already hurtling down. He was a mere breath from the rocks.

This sky huge with stars. Glorious, Mina thought, as she walked toward them. The cold in the air, the smell of cherries wafting up from the trees, the veal and endives cooking in the kitchen, the pool with its own moon, the stone house, the vines, the country full of velvet-eyed Frenchmen. Even the flicks of candlelight on those angry faces at the table was romantic. Everything was beautiful. Anything was possible. The whole world had been split open like a peach. And these poor people, these poor fucking people. Were they too old to see it? All they had to do was reach out and pluck it and raise it to their lips, and they would taste it, too.





SALVADOR





The apartment Helena rented in Salvador had high ceilings, marble floors, vast windows. It always looked cool, even when the blaze of a Brazilian summer crept inside in the late afternoon. If she leaned from her balcony, she could see the former convent that curved around her street’s cul-de-sac; she could see over the red tile roofs of the buildings across the way to where the harbor opened into ocean. She was so close she could smell faint littoral rot and taste the salt on the wind. For the first few mornings, she took her coffee out to the balcony in her cotton nightgown and watched the water sweeping greenly toward the horizon, ocean and sky faltering into haze where they met.