Silent Bird Page 3

  Jeannot began explaining something else, and I recognized the words “matin” and “nuit”—morning and night—and non beaucoup. He gestured toward his head as if telling me not to forget. After that he either told me to keep the area clean or keep it proper.

  That was the last thing I heard before conking out on this kind man’s couch.

  IX

  When I awoke, the night was over. Luckily, so was the pain in my head.

  The swelling in my toe had gone down; the sun had come up. Jeannot had draped himself on the armchair across from me. He was drinking from a doll-sized coffee cup, staring out the window. He looked tired. His dark blond stubble was longer. What an interesting face, I thought. Aquiline nose. And those warm dark brown eyes, not so common with such blond hair.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Bonjour,” he said softly, smiling. “Ca va?”

  This “ça va” thing seemed both a question and an answer, so I repeated“ça va” and that satisfied him. Then I riffled through the dictionary and said “bon,” which meant “good.”

  That seemed to work too. French!

  Jeannot grinned happily. I handed him the book and he took his turn riffling pages. After a moment he asked, “Have hunger—you?”

  “Oui.”

  It was practically a conference.

  We made breakfast of a day-old baguette with yummy homemade jam. After that I used the room with the bathtub to put on my toe cream, and the room with the toilet for the rest. And when I’d finished, I kissed his cheek thank you and picked up my purse. Jeannot rose to escort me to the door.

  “Play?” I asked as we passed the piano.

  As a response, he ran his fingers—those long, capable-looking fingers I’d attributed to a sculptor or painter—across the keys. The notes were both a song and not a song… not yet. Somehow I knew it was an original composition. I leaned my elbows on the piano, listening to the fluttering sounds of birdsong; the drumming of rain driving the birds away.

  He was good. Very good.

  “Like?” Jeannot asked in English.

  I nodded. “Like very much.”

  We were about three feet away from each other, eyes locked. I thought again of last night, of driving through the tunnel of trees to a stranger’s village before coming to this apartment to sleep. He had not even tried to touch me. Why? And why did that lack of pushiness intrigue me, maybe even bother me?

  With Jeannot still staring, I suddenly pulled off my shirt and placed it on the piano bench.

  He blinked. Didn’t speak. In fact, he seemed like a figure in a painting: a lovely image come to life.

  I wanted this. I wanted him.

  And that’s the crazy part, you see. I wanted him because he was a stranger and a joy to look at and because he had not assumed anything. Because when I disrobed and held out my arms I saw his disbelief…and pleasure.

  Jeannot smelled faintly of soap and musk and that green apple shampoo. I responded to his scent and touch the way some people respond to home and love and familiarity. I made myself comfortable the simplest way I knew how; maybe the only way.

  I did make a joke in English, something about wanting to thank him for driving me all over the place and maybe this was the best way to do it. But I had the definite sense that he understood I wasn’t joking. He was a musician, and this was a song we were creating: honest and raw. Songs may be beautiful, but they do come to an end. There is safety in that.

  His lips were soft. His breath smelled faintly of peppermint—had he secretly popped in a breath mint? His arms felt strong yet lean; his torso long. A small noise rose from his throat. Then, to my surprise, Jeannot let me go.

  He peered questioningly into my face. Down to my bra and panties—and back into my eyes as if asking: You mean this, right?

  I gave a quick nod. Yes. Oui!

  With the oddest caution and reverence, he caressed me with one hand: the same hand that had made the piano sing. And when he put both arms around me, I could feel his struggle between arousal and the weight of his mind…between erotic impulses and kind good sense.

  He was thinking too much. Like me.

  I reached my hand down; he was hard. He definitely was hard.

  We walked down a narrow hallway to another room, his bedroom, where more French doors opened to a private balcony heady with the scent of mimosa. He sat on the neatly made bed and pulled me onto his lap. He brushed hair from my eyes and asked me something else, probably if I was really, really sure…and we both ended up laughing, because I was already doing this and how could we discuss anything even if we wanted to?

  Finally he stood and unbuttoned his pants.

  “You…beautiful,” he began in English. “Très, très beautiful.”

  It was nice of him to say it though his words did not really move me. Words rarely did, in any language. What got to me, what really moved me, was how he had all the time in the world, first to trace my face with his fingertips, then to kiss me, then to massage my muscles and look and smile at me.

  At last we pressed ourselves together, sweaty skin to sweaty skin, and we had sex with all the fury the word implies.

  Oddly, with him inside me, I felt not only relieved but generous, as if I was giving the rewards again. Afterward we lay together not talking, just listening to the café outside and the birds overhead and the scooters zipping by. Maybe an hour passed. Then I propped myself up and told him in crystal clear English that I needed to go home to unpack.

  I doubt he understood me in detail, but he got my drift. We said goodbye affectionately, almost nostalgically. Although we were neighbors, who knew when we would see each other again? After all, getting involved with a man was not my reason for being in France.

  I did not intend to write “sex” on my blank slate.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I

  June of that year turned out to be very hot.

  First, the temperature. It soared, a dry heat with no thunderstorms. Going outside felt like sticking my head in the oven. Though my toe felt less swollen, less painful, less of a handicap for trekking back and forth to toilets, walking still hurt. So I stayed in. I applied my toe medicine faithfully twice a day, leaving the tube on the side of the tub as a reminder for the next dose. After short fitful naps on the narrow, lumpy, hand-me-down bed, I’d wake up to sketch within the glory of those new windows. I’d study French or read American paperbacks by lamplight. The dress code was easy: shorts, tank tops and no shoes. I drank lots of water and stayed put until my bladder urged me to travel again. (For that hourly odyssey, I used slippers. No way was I going to frequent the communal bathroom without shielding my poor feet against whatever other “mushrooms” might lurk there.)

  Slowly, slowly, I was adapting to my new home. The old loneliness still swooped in and out, a quiet empty abatement—what am I doing here?—but now I had an answer: Ah yes, the light. The light. It still drew me, and I drew it.

  Focusing on the fanfare of elms bordering the far edge of the plaza, I created pastel leaves skittering in every flavor of green, playing childish games with shadow. Using charcoal, I drew people at cafes dawdling over coffee longer than most people spend over a Thanksgiving turkey. I drew gypsies sashaying across cobblestones, sleeves and skirts and belts as bright as any exotic bird. In smudges of color and black swirls against white, I detailed teenagers smoking, children scampering at the spray of water in the cherub-laden fountain; dogs perched expectantly in café chairs.

  To my delight, the drawing grew deeper. I entered the artist’s beloved “Zone,” turning to images inside my own eyes instead of merely glimpsed through windows. Long Island, an empty beach, a forest peeking out of the sand…

  Not a bathtub; I didn’t want to envision that old bathtub.

  Time for the potty again.

  Slowly down the staircase I inched, leaning on the banister, sweating from exertion and heat. The soft toilet paper I’d provided for the building had walked away after only a few days of living here.
Not exactly a shock yet disconcerting since what else would anyone want to do with toilet paper except the obvious? Still, I got the message. Hoard thy toilet paper! Far better to trek up and down stairs clutching a roll of soft stuff than get stuck on the dungeon potty with either no paper or the sandpaper that someone else had ever-so-cheaply provided.

  At least the exercise kept my blood circulating.

  One evening, while making the bed, I bonked it against a slight rise in the wood-plank floor and actually rolled around exercising my newfound French expletives. And so the next trip to the toilet had to be taken “au derrière,” sweeping the floor with the seat of my shorts. Which would be a pain to wash, by the way, since I was not up to finding a Laundromat and had to rely on the water-in-the-sink method. I’d been wearing crumpled clothes for days. Truth was: I had turned into some kind of dirty mad hermit with useless feet. But did I regret coming to France?

  No. Not one bit.

  I only wished I could phone Jeannot. Too bad I’d made it clear to him that I preferred to be alone. And he was just considerate enough to give me what I wanted.

  So be it.

  One morning I awoke with a piercing headache. I staggered into the bath for a shower and groggily began to brush my teeth. It wasn’t until after I had the toothbrush inside my mouth— foamy stuff tasting like the underside of a rock—that I realized I’d used the tube on the edge of the bathtub instead of the sink.

  The toe medicine. In my mouth.

  I vomited. Afterward, I leaned out the window inhaling deeply. The café below had “Radio Fun” printed on its yellow umbrellas, over and over again, like a demented mantra. You’re in France. Have Fun! In a fit of childish pique, I pushed the vile tube of medicine off my window sill, and it tumbled to its death on the cobblestones below.

  To my surprise, Jeannot Courbois suddenly rose into view from under a Radio Fun umbrella. He was wearing jeans and a yellow shirt that matched his hair, and he carried a rolled-up magazine. He glanced down at the ground and back up at me with a strange mix of amusement, relief, and apprehension. “Ca va?” he called.

  I stuck out my tongue at the offending tube of faux-toothpaste. He laughed. Then I said the first authentic sounding French phrase since arriving in Montpellier: “Ca va pas,” I said.

  That goes NOT.

  He raised his eyebrows and headed in my direction. Three minutes later he was at my door, his magazine in one hand, my tube of medicine in the other.

  He said something cheerful and I nodded and let him in. I had no idea what he’d said, of course. Didn’t matter anyway. The point is: I opened the door wide and invited him back into my life, and he walked in with more confidence than I could ever fake.

  Which brings me back to the topic of heat. I accepted my one-time lover into my home, and after brushing my teeth with real toothpaste and rinsing with some killer mouthwash, we ended up in bed again.

  Heat.

  II

  Our shared language was physicality and sensation. Sunshine. Smells of food, sounds of community and nature. Warm skin. Sweat. Damp hair. Guitar music downstairs. French with different accents as gypsies fluttered past.

  Over the next series of indistinguishable days, Jeannot and I had sex on the floor under the shuttered windows. We had sex on my stingy bed. We had sex in the bathroom, against the sink. We had sex wet and we had sex dry.

  We did not have sex in his apartment, though he’d asked me—or maybe he asked me. Not knowing was part of the freedom: my freedom. The joy of Tabula Rasa.

  You can’t get overly involved if you can’t communicate, right?

  Like a small creature in a shell, I wore my house on my back and did not venture far without it. That worked for me.

  For a while.

  III

  The rains arrived on the second Sunday in June, changing everything.

  I woke up late and alone—Jeannot had gone to run errands. Moisture came down in sheets, a symphony of raindrops. Like the heroine in a musical, I nearly soared to the window and leaned out as far as possible, relishing every fresh clean lick, every reflection and hue of shiny cobblestones and gray skies and pattering drops colliding with all those Radio Fun umbrellas.

  Down below, the café’s owner busily dragged chairs to tables. Her hair looked black and stringy, her profile exquisite and Arabian. I called a greeting—that “ça va” bit came in handy—and she flashed a gap-toothed smile. This was all the encouragement I needed to throw on some clothes, grab my sketchpad, and venture downstairs to the driest table in the corner.

  The lady in charge sidled up to greet me. “I am Madame Nony. You live upstairs, yes?” she said in a guttural accent as heavy as the clouds scudding overhead.

  I introduced myself and ordered a café “avec au lait.”

  “With milk?” she echoed, smile fading.

  I wasn’t sure what I’d said wrong. She brought what I requested except with the milk steamed and inside the cup already. I was sipping it when a different woman approached to hand me a menu. She was younger, with long curly wheat-colored hair and gray eyes, and she didn’t look like a waitress; more like a model from a small town, humble and wholesome and quite accidentally gorgeous.

  “Hello, Mademoiselle. I am your serve person,” she said in musical-sounding English. “I can help you? You have hunger, perhaps?”

  I did indeed have hunger. I asked for any kind of sandwich, and she brought it nesting inside a basket: ham and cheese slapped inside a baguette. “Mm,” I said, thinking: Where is the tomato? The lettuce? The mayonnaise? The pickle?

  “Enjoy your meal.” She leaned companionably against an adjacent table to watch the rain. “You are American, yes?”

  I told her I was from Long Island. She said her name was Monique and she normally worked in the American Library, on the other side of the Esplanade Charles-De-Gaulle near the medieval medical school. Today she was helping her friend Madame Nony in the café. I explained that I was an artist and enjoying a prolonged stay in Provence. She explained that she was a mother and wife and librarian and that she felt more than happy to live in the loveliest city in the world.

  After that we stopped talking. I ate and sketched and she stood nibbling on a sandwich. It seemed so peaceful eating together—and natural, as if our meeting had been fated, if you believe in that sort of thing. I mean: do we recognize when we’ve met for the first time one of the best friends we will make in this life? Do we sense when an unimaginable—and in this case, unwanted—change is about to occur?

  As I drank more faux-pas coffee, Jeannot emerged from his building. He glanced at the sky, tucked his still-closed umbrella under one arm and the ever-present magazine into a pocket, and strode into the drizzle. He didn’t notice me. Maybe he didn’t expect to find me anywhere other than inside my studio, in some state of undress.

  “Jeannot!” I waved.

  He quickly changed directions. “Ah, Pilar,” he said warmly, and kissed my cheeks: one, two, three times…then one more kiss on the lips. “It is fantastic to see you outside! You feel better, yes?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  He ordered a coffee as noir as mine was not. Then he gestured at my sketchbook. “May I see what you are doing?”

  At that point in my life, I rarely shared my work. An odd tendency, I know, for someone who always longed to create children’s books. But if I was gun-shy about how people might react, it had little to do with criticism. When I was small my drawings seemed to upset my mother. Like the time I drew the three of us—me, Mom and Dad—standing on an empty beach: no houses, no beach umbrellas, just dunes and seashells. You didn’t give us faces, she said, alarm in her voice. And: Your Daddy is upside down.

  I probably wouldn’t even be in France if she had accepted those empty faces and upside-down Daddy. Instead she turned away, and I never explained. I never knew how to explain, but it would have been good to try. It would have helped, I think. I would have felt protected, even if I wasn’t.

  Anyway, Je
annot was not my mother. I handed him the sketchpad, feeling a little…yes, proud to show my work. The other part of me was embarrassed, though…and maybe afraid. As if only now was I revealing my body to this man I’d been rolling around on the floor with.

  Head bent, he turned pages. His small French sounds seemed to indicate approval. Monique, still enjoying the rain and lack of customers, wandered over again, peered down too, and asked if she could pull up a chair. My heart hammered like I was doing something crazy (like moving to a foreign country without the language?), but I showed them my art.

  Finally Jeannot looked at me. The corners of his lips turned up. “Magnifique!”

  Monique pointed at one of the cartoons. “This is funny, yes? You draw the toilets?”

  “I guess I’ve gone a little crazy on that subject,” I said. “My cartoons tend to be…I guess you could say a little autobiographical.”

  She looked at me blankly.

  I tried again. “The toilet is downstairs. In my building. It’s a group project.”

  Jeannot asked her something, and she smiled and said something back. On the next page they both studied a drawing of Montpellier’s Hôtel de la Gare, and the park with the swans and men in trench coats. Then Monique turned the last page to a silly little story I’d just completed. It featured El Señor Gato, a mustached gypsy cat who could not find a home.

  Señor Gato wore a bandanna around his ears to keep them warm, due to a terrible experience he’d had as a kitten. He was a guest in his first French residence when the lady of the house, Madame Pompadour, told her young maid, Rosarita, to put the “gâteau” in the refrigerator. Now, “gâteau” means “cake” in French but sounds an awful lot like “gato,” which is “cat” in Spanish. So it was only natural that poor Rosarita got confused and put El Señor Gato in the refrigerator where he spent the next several hours shivering near the cheese.