Florida(51)
At night the boys sleep ten hours in the same cramped room with her. The mother, in order to have some time alone, drinks wine and watches French sitcoms on her computer with earphones. She really should be rereading Guy, or taking his biographers into the bathtub, elegant Francis Steegmuller, lascivious Henri Troyat, but she’s too tired; she’ll get started tomorrow. Every evening she tells herself that the next day they will go to visit Dr. Esprit Blanche’s asylum, where Guy died at forty-two years old of tertiary syphilis. A century before it was a madhouse, it had been the Palais de Lamballe; the Princesse de Lamballe was Marie Antoinette’s dearest friend, and when the revolutionaries came for the princess, they raped her, lopped off her head, and paraded it on a spike before the queen’s window. When Guy was in his final throes of insanity, believing that there were precious jewels in his urine and that he was the son of God, the headless princess came through the walls to visit him.
Yet day after day, the mother doesn’t go to Guy’s last home: there would have been so much to explain to her children, what syphilis is, what insanity is, what revolutions are. Instead, every day, she wakes foggily with the boys at dawn, starving for pain au chocolat and coffee and fruit, and gets sucked into their life of playgrounds and joy. At last, before she can see where Guy ended his days, she runs out of time.
* * *
—
On the seventh day, they get up very early and take a train to Rouen, where, at the station, they rent a Mercedes for the drive west to the Alabaster Coast, in Normandy, where Maupassant was born and where he returned again and again. His mother, Laure, was from the area, a woman who gave her two sons their love of books, who went on walking tours in Europe alone as a younger woman, who dared to divorce back when divorce was not done, but who ended up a neurasthenic, sad and alone, both sons dead of syphilis, trying to strangle herself with her own long hair.
The mother drives, feeling fat and wasteful and American in the Mercedes. She has never understood the purpose of luxury cars, but she couldn’t drive a stick shift on the tight cliffside roads or she would stall the car and kill them all.
The trip should take an hour, but they get lost in the twisty tiny villages, and the four-year-old pukes on Whoopie Pie, then falls asleep; and the six-year-old cries quietly to himself when she yells at him to stop whining about the smell, and she has to crack the window to settle her own stomach, and then drizzle whips incessantly into her eyes, and she pauses in Fécamp to ask directions of a man who pretends not to understand her French when she knows, irritatedly, that her French is, in fact, quite good. She is shaking when at last they swing down a steep hillside into Yport.
It is a fishing village, all silex and brick and stone streets and hills. There is a small curve of beach covered in fist-sized stones, bracketed by extreme cliffs that are disappointingly not white but creamy beige limestone with horizontal veins of gray flint. The air here, she thinks, has some kind of fizz to it, something thrilling, which makes you feel drunk, makes you want to dance and do wild things as soon as you arrive, as though you’ve just drunk a bottle of champagne. She’s pleased with herself until she recognizes her thought as a paraphrase from Guy’s best story, “Boule de Suif.” She parks in the lot at the casino to await a man named Jean-Paul, who is supposed to show them to the house at three. She feels heavy when she sees on the clock that it is only eleven.
We’re here! she says.
We’re where? the older boy says. They look together through the windshield at the empty gray beach, the gray ocean, the gray sky overhead.
Nowhere, he says darkly.
The little boy wakes with a start and says, Flags!
She hadn’t noticed, but it is true, there are two dozen flags on very tall poles lining the boardwalk, all frayed for the last foot or so at the whipping ends. Not one is American. This place is for the Swedes of the world, the Danes, the Brits, but certainly not the Americans. She is glad. When she steps out, the wind is chilly, the gulls scream overhead, but she feels a looseness in her joints, a wildness that she identifies as freedom from the doom that had waited for her just around the corner at home in Florida, that she’d even felt watching her in Paris. Yport is so small, so anonymous. It has gone downhill since Renoir painted it. Surely, her bad pet dread would never think to look for her here.
Down on the beach, the boys chunk rock after rock into the boiling waves. They like the rattle the stones make on the hard bottom in the troughs and the gulping sound the stones make in the crests. They climb into a cave in the cliff that is shaped like the nave in a church, but get spooked. She admires the way the wind tousles the older boy’s dark hair, and she doesn’t notice when the little one strips quickly to his underoos and runs into the rough waves. She sees only a flash of gold hair going under. She wades in and drags him out. His skin and lips are blue and his face is startled, but when the older brother laughs at him, he laughs, too.
* * *
—
It is so cold in the wind. Her skirt is wet and the little one is shuddering, but she is too tired to go back to the car to change their clothes. There is a small set of tin shacks on the beach for souvenirs, fried seafood, gelato. There, protected by a lufting sheet of clear plastic, she orders three buckwheat galettes with cheese and egg, and one salted caramel crêpe for dessert. At home they eat sugar only on holiday or in emergencies—she knows it is a poison; it can make you fat and crazy and eventually lose your memories when you are old, and she has a severe horror of being a stringy-haired cackler in the old-age home; she has boys, she’s not dumb, she knows that sad obsolescence will more than likely be her fate if humanity even lasts that long, as girls are the ones who change your diapers when you’ve lost control of your bodily functions, and no son wants to wet-wipe his mother’s vulva—but she wants her boys to love France and has discovered of herself that she isn’t above bribery. She holds the little son against her skin, under her shirt and cardigan, to warm him up. Then the bigger one says that it isn’t fair, that he is cold, too, and so she makes room on her lap and lets him into her cardigan. Like a bag of holding, it stretches to encompass them all. She isn’t hungry, so she drinks her local cider and lets the alcohol warm her. It has low notes of manure and grass, which nauseates her until she thinks of the taste as terroir. This is what Guy de Maupassant tasted long ago, she imagines, sitting in this same salty cold.