Florida(52)

Of all the Guys she knows—the Parisian playboy who seduced rich society ladies, the obscene youth rowing and fucking on the Seine, the obsessed Mediterranean yachter chased from harbor to harbor by his madness—she truly loves only the Guy of the Alabaster Coast. He had been a hearty dark-haired Norman child here, running barefoot in the orchards and playing with the children of the fishermen. And she can imagine him on this beach as a very young man, walking into the waves for a dawn swim. Laughing, his moustaches dripping, red in the cheeks. This Guy who was as strong as a bull, not yet a bad man.

Atop the cliffs, there are emerald meadows of grass blown back by the wind like pompadours. There are tiny white specks that she squints to see. Cows or sheep? she asks the boys, and they make fun of her terrible eyesight and finally say, Sheep, Mommy, jeez, definitely sheep.

She holds them in her arms and sniffs their necks and imagines one iconoclastic sheep, after a long life of envying the birds in their graceful rest above the sea, coming to a sudden decision. He’d take a step to turn gloriously bird. Then he’d meet the ocean, turn jellyfish.

When the boys finish their food and hers, they slide to the ground. Her dark green cardigan is stretched hopelessly out of shape, streaked in yellow with yolk.



* * *



—

The boys jump off a low stone wall in front of the casino into a bed of lavender orbited by golden bees. She thinks of herself as a mother who lets her children make their own mistakes. She doesn’t want the boys to be in pain, but she wouldn’t mind if they began to pay more attention to danger, and the world is full of far worse lessons than a bee sting.

Now a stocky sixty-year-old man is coming down the hill, hallooing. This can only be Jean-Paul. His face is windbattered. If he has eyes, they are so deep and hooded by his shaggy brows she can’t see them. His odor shakes her hand before his hand does, some combination of unwashed clothes, body, salt, breath. He smells like a lifelong bachelor.

He apologizes for being so late, says the house is ready, that they are going to be very happy there. He is surprised at her French, he says. It isn’t bad! He says he has a gift for her, that the guy who owns the house has told him that she was researching Guy de Maupassant, and . . . He pulls out a wad of paper from the back pocket of his jeans and unfolds it dramatically before giving it to her.

She looks at it. He’s printed out for her the French Wikipedia page for Guy de Maupassant: Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant, b. 5 August 1850, d. 6 July 1893, protégé of Flaubert, failed suicide, Naturalist writer of short stories and novels, et cetera. Jean-Paul waits. She swallows her laugh, says it is very nice of him to do that, and that he shouldn’t have, and thanks very much. This is apparently insufficient. He frowns and squints at her, then turns and takes the boys’ hands. The older boy lets him hold his for just long enough to not be rude, then takes it away, but the little one keeps holding the hand and chats with Jean-Paul, despite the odor and mutual incomprehension. They start up a very long flight of stairs, seventy-four steps, she’ll count later, carved into the steep hillside. The mother carries all three of the bags, which are heavy.

The older boy hangs back with her and says quietly that he doesn’t like that man, that he is stinky and there is something weird about him.

Oh, he’s not so bad, she tells him. She is wheezing a little. At the top, Jean-Paul and the little boy have turned around and are watching her power upward, step by step.

Jean-Paul laughs and calls down that she reminds him of a she-goat.

Changed my mind, Monkey, she murmurs to her older boy, I don’t like him, either.

Atop the hill, the streets are nervous, haphazard, full of short jogs up a half step and quick alleys. Everything is made of stone. In the sun, out of the wind, it is quite warm. Red geraniums spill everywhere.

At last, Jean-Paul drops the little boy’s hand, pulls out a key with a flourish, opens a door in a wall beside other doors, and steps in. He says that here they are, here’s home. Inside, it is sparse, which suits her, all rock and wood and white plaster, three rooms stacked atop one another, connected by a spiral staircase. Someone’s grandmother’s furniture. There is a fatty, rotting smell that she recognizes from an apartment in Boston when she was young, a few weeks of low-level anguish after a rat died in the walls. There is a table, chairs, a couch and television downstairs, a trundle bed and a bathroom on the next floor, and at the top her tiny white room with only a queen-sized bed in it. There is dirt on the windowsills, long hairs and sand in the drains.

The two skylights in her own bare white room at the top are open, and she sticks her head through. On one side, she sees only sky, the daydreaming sheep above the cliffs. But the other is full of slate rooftops shining like damp skin. Everything she sees from here is striped: the red-and-tan clock tower at the center of town, the roofs of the blue-and-white tin cabanas on the beach, the creamy cliffs with their veins of flint, the ocean’s navy with whitecaps, the tiny people walking the boardwalk in their mariner’s shirts. The wind is raw on her cheeks.

She brings her head back in. Jean-Paul is standing very close. His scent is strong, and it combines with the dead-animal smell from the kitchen to become somehow an unpleasant film in her mouth.

He wants to show her how to use the television, the wifi, the stovetop, but she says, No, no. Thank you! No, no, no, no. She goes down the stairs, over and over thanking Jean-Paul, who is following her. From the front door, she calls up for the boys, who are leaping off the bed and making the house shake as they land. They come down grumblingly. She has to go grocery shopping, she says; it is imperative. If there are problems, she’ll get in touch with the owner. It is great to meet Jean-Paul. She opens the door. He hangs back. She says goodbye three different ways. He slinks out. She opens all the windows and waits for ten minutes as the wind blows the last of him out, then when she is sure he is gone, she makes the boys put their sandals on again.