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CHAPTER 1

Plaire

PLAIRE IS NOT A WEALTHY TOWN. IT IS NOT ONE OF THOSE IMMACULATE, ROMANTIC villages described in books about the south of France. Its streets are not made of cobblestones or clogged with visitors in the hot months. It does not have red cliffs, or châteaux, or the carapace of a fortress. The churches are unremarkable, the café terraces viewless. In the afternoon the narrow streets grow sinister, blackened by enormous shadows with clawed edges that slowly scale the pitted stucco walls. Half-dead ivy creeps down to meet them. Even at two o'clock on a bright spring day, you can turn down one of those streets and all light and heat will be gone. You will have to wait until your eyes have adjusted to move on. Through the slats of closed green shutters above, you can hear music or the sound of water in a basin or heavy plates being stacked or unstacked. The grocery bags will start to cut into your fingers, and the two miles back will seem, from that dark street, unachievable. But once you reach the valley, and Lucie Quenelle's farmhouse appears on the next rise, there seem to be seven suns stretching across the sky, each one celebrating your return.

She is waiting for me in the garden. I can see her straw hat twitching as she swats at something. At the sound of my sandals through the grass, a smile appears just below the hat's brim. It does not feel like penitence to be here with this old woman, though I know it should.

Once she sets me to work on the table grapes with her, it doesn't take her long to start in with more questions. She has so many, mostly about Nicole.

"She was very careful as a child, deliberate. Is she still?" "Yes." I try to be curt, entirely uninterested.

"And so equable."

"Yes."

"Perhaps you are too young to know exactly what I mean."

"Perhaps," I say, feeling too old to argue.

She's teaching me how to rewire the trunks of the vines to their posts. Beside her quick spotted hands, mine work clumsily.

"Would you say she's happy, Nicole? Would you say she married the right man?"

"I don't know." But she wants more. She will not stop until she's wrung me dry. "He's not a man I would have married," I add.

"Why not?"

I can't think of one word to throw her off.

"It's hard to pinpoint, isn't it?" she says, furrowing her entire face. "But there's something about this Marc Tivot. A man should never make you feel old."

"She looks half her age," I say, deliberately misunderstanding, veering away. "She's in good shape. She's healthy, nimble —"

"Nimble! Where did you learn a word like nimble? Sometimes you surprise me with the words you know. How is it that you can have such an extensive vocabulary but absolutely no memory for the definite articles?"

"I don't know. It's just a block I have," I say, embarrassed my errors have been noticed already.

Nicole's daughter, Lola, always insisted it was obvious. Look, she said, running to the table she had just set, a knife is masculine and a spoon is feminine. Look at them. You can just tell. Look at this plate. It's a girl's face. And this glass, it's a man. Can't you see it? Lola had bangs and a birthmark on her ring finger and pronounced my name, Rosie, with the best unrolled r in the family.

"Here. Not so tight. Please," she says with sudden impatience. "You're strangling the poor thing. And look down here. His roots are being pulled up."

"Sorry." I let go the vine.

"I love this earth." She squeezes a fistful and, when she releases it, it keeps the hollows of her fingers and the sharp peaks between them. I feel her smiling, waiting for me to look up. But I can't receive her at times: her pale eyes, her pressed white collar and the triangle of scaled skin it reveals, her nimble hands working the earth. Leste. All my words lead back to that family.

Marc called me nimble during my first week in Paris when I caught the glass at dinner. Their son had knocked it hard off the edge, reaching for the lemon syrup, and I caught it, a full glass of water falling from the table. Marc called me leste and the whole family looked at me, everyone but Nicole, like I might work miracles.

"Look at you. You're freezing," she says, leaving a hand on my bare leg. "The body is so beautiful when it's young. Enjoy it, Rosie."

But I can't feel anything — not her withered hand or the earth she loves or the suns that are still blazing above us — and I know if there's one thing I ache to abandon it is my body.

"You are eighteen, nineteen?"

"Nineteen."

"What on earth could make a child of nineteen so ..." She studies me for a word that thankfully never comes. "When I was nineteen," she continues, "we moved here, to Plaire. Nicole's family lived right up there, through those trees, which in those days weren't so high. You could see their house, from here, and the sun, as it fell below those mountains. But everything's higher now. Or maybe I've shrunk. I don't know what's different today about the sun and the air, but then the sky would go purple sometimes — not purple, exactly, but mauve. That's what Nicole's mother called it."

"You knew her mother?" It is an odd image, Nicole as a child.

"She was seventeen years younger than me, but she ended up being the closest friend I ever had. She told me that when she was a little girl she'd sit on her grandfather's porch in Roussillon and have tea and cakes during the mauve hour. I never hear the word mauve without thinking of her, but the light's changed since then. Anyway, I think it's probably time."

"Yes."

"But we've done quite a lot today. Thank you."

She is giving me room, board, and two hundred francs a week, but she has thanked me every evening of the three weeks that I've been here.

We put the tools and the wire back in the broken basket and follow the path through the roses to the back door. She takes my arm on the steps for balance. "Ah," she says. "Can't you smell the stew? You were right to put in that extra basil." She gives my arm a good tug as if she might be falling, then casts off from me altogether as we enter the house.

After dinner I will write my sister a one-sentence postcard with no return address: Walked the path van Gogh walked with his bloody ear. It's a lie — a place Lucie Quenelle has told me about farther south.

In the New Hampshire house with the red door — and the gold slot into which these cards are dropped — live my sister, her husband, and the baby I gave them. All I can hope is when that child has words he will tell them the things I cannot. Perhaps my whole life here in France will spill out of his mouth.

La Rentrée

I SHOWED UP LAST FALL AT 121 PORT DE SUFFREN THE DAY BEFORE THE RENTRÉE, THE day that all French children return to school. Perhaps in Paris alone that day there were ten or eleven thousand other young foreign women showing up on doorsteps, buzzing intercoms, calling from phone booths for the door code they were not given, taking the place and the room of the summer girl who had just vacated. I never became part of that network of women, but I saw them everywhere: at tennis lessons, in doctors' offices, beneath the wide arches of private schools. Wherever I was sent, so were they.

They worked in clusters, met at parks, flicked their cigarettes into the sandbox, kept a loose eye on the kids. They went out at night. They ordered jugs of sangria in small bars packed with foreign women and the men who wanted to meet them. They complained about the families and traded stories of the condescension, the false accusations, the humiliation. They laughed and laughed. They dated Frenchmen and rolled their eyes. Then they fell in love. They told each other everything, rarely in their own language. Sometimes they quit their jobs and got new ones through their agencies. Always broke, they lent each other money. They missed their boyfriends back home. They broke up with their boyfriends back home, succinctly on the phone, digressively through the mail. They sneaked men back to their maids' rooms on the top floor of their buildings, then couldn't get rid of them. They spoke French better and better, with the intent of becoming translators, hotel managers, tour guides, diplomats. French was their third or fourth language. They read Proust or de Beauvoir or Duras and decorated their rooms with prints of Manet, Pissaro, and Gauguin. They mocked tourists who tried to speak French and helped the ones who didn't. They went home for the holidays, then returned to find the Panthéon buried in snow. They studied more French. They were perpetually studying French. By spring, there was nothing left about the kids that was endearing, nothing left about the parents that was a mystery. But they had gotten what they wanted: the words, the vowels and the consonants, the idioms and the intonations that could be gotten only in Paris. They had ripped the tongues from these families and wanted nothing more. They were glad it was nearly time to go. They detached themselves easily at the end of their year, a precise Parisian fluency accomplished, lives ahead of them. If they remembered, they sent a Christmas card each year until they knew their face had lost its definition in the long parade of other foreign girls who had shown up on that doorstep on the eve of the rentrée.

I should have been one of them: guarded, flinchless. I should have wanted only a tongue, not safety, not solace. A family will rarely give you those — not your own, not anybody's.

No one had told me it was a houseboat. I approached the long string of them from the stern, reading each name loudly in my head as I passed. Vanesa was a forest of squat pines planted in boxes, so many you couldn't see any part of the boat within. La Liberté was utterly bare with every window boarded up. La Chienne was painted fire-engine red and its deck cluttered with several pairs of shoes, a few rusted bicycles, and an overcrowded clothesline that stretched bow to stern, the middle sagging on the roof of the cabin and on the backs of the two dogs sleeping there.

On La Sequana, which was sleek and spare, Nicole stood in the black bottom of a bikini.

I was not used to seeing other breasts. At school, girls had changed facing their lockers, and on overnights they slipped their bras off beneath a nightgown. My sister's breasts were the only ones I knew, and they were the same as mine. But Nicole's were utterly different: perfectly conical and nearly wholly enveloped by dark brown areolas.

She stood on deck, brushing Odile's hair, which rose magically in the breezeless air each time it was released from the bristles. At sixteen, Odile was already a head taller than her mother and had to bend her knees while bracing herself on the railing and grimacing to the rhythm of the hard strokes. She wore a neon-green one-piece. I saw them before they saw me: Nicole jockey-like, quick, and deliberate, her small body in perfect proportion; Odile more languid and willowy but erratic. She flung an arm back toward her mother for hurting her.

Lola, younger by four years, sat waiting on the stoop of the short ramp, fully dressed. She had her head craned in the opposite direction, expecting me in a taxi. Then she heard my step and turned.

"Ah, elle est là!"

I didn't expect her French. Lola's face was so open and her mouth so wide and unpuckered that I didn't expect French to come out of it. It was always a surprise to me, every time, Lola's French.

Her little brother, Guillaume, in swimming trunks too long for his nine-year-old legs, launched himself from the chaise longue toward me. Immediately he was disappointed, which I knew from the expression of expectation that didn't change, as if I might turn into someone else if he could just get close enough. He'd bet his friend Arnaud that his American jeune fille would be prettier than Arnaud's new Norwegian one. But I was big and unspectacular, nothing like the cinema samples, and he'd have to give back Arnaud's fountain pen.

I disrupted everything briefly.

The family lined up to kiss me. With Guillaume and then Odile, I aimed for the wrong cheek and ended up butting noses with Guillaume and nearly kissing Odile on the lips, which seemed to horrify her and her profound sense of propriety. Before her turn, Lola told me, "Right cheek first," which clarified everything, and I was prepared for Nicole. No one else seemed to be bothered that Nicole wore no shirt. As we kissed, I smelled makeup and removers, nail polish and toothpaste, and the lingering odor of her younger children — sour milk and butter cookies. The heat had brought to the surface of her skin all of these scents that I never again smelled so strongly, though I never thought of Nicole again without them, just as I never forgot the shape of her breasts beneath her clothes.

Nicole found her silk shirt on Guillaume's chair mashed into a pillow and scolded him in a singsong voice that just made him grin at her. She asked me a few polite questions, which I answered with the simplest expressions I knew. There was something about Nicole, the swift strokes with Odile's brush and now the same movement with her hand to rid the silk of wrinkles, that told me immediately that she was not a person to tolerate mistakes, and I suspected that my four years of textbook French would not hold out for very long.

I had the feeling, from the moment Nicole glanced up and saw me, that I had either arrived too late or too early in the afternoon. There was something distinctly inconvenient about me, which turned out to be a feeling that persisted for several months. It could disappear for long stretches of time, then resurface inexplicably one day as I walked into the kitchen with her dry cleaning or into the living room to call her kids to dinner. She would look at me with that same vague surprise, that attempt to veil vexation. During those first months, no matter how close I came to feel to that family, that look of Nicole's could cast me straight back out to that initial moment on the deck when I wondered if I was too early or too late to begin my life with them.

I followed her down the steep stairs into the house. I'd never been on a houseboat before or been to Paris or spoken French outside a classroom. A house on a boat on a river in France. A house on a boat on a river in France. It took a tune in my head as we clomped down the steps and I thought someday I'd sing it to Lola, who liked me already, which I knew by the way she watched beside me with her seal face, her round brown eyes, and hopeful mouth, watching for my reaction to this new world, her world. I wondered if she knew any English, if she would understand house or boat or river. Already I felt that if I said those words — or any words — Lola would understand them all.

I was actually the only one who clomped. Lola bounced and Nicole trotted, gold thongs swatting her heels as she led me down a corridor and pointed without stopping to the children's rooms, bright with rugs, posters, and comforter covers. The beige hallway carpet bled into my room at the end, where there was no vestige of the many girls who'd come before me, only a single bed covered in a washed-out floral fabric that appeared more vividly beneath the glass of the dressing table and on the pillows of the ottoman in the corner. I glanced at this corner placidly, as if I'd often had an ottoman in my bedroom.

Nicole showed me how to open the window and told me I was not to spill in the room or use nails on the walls or eat meals anywhere but in the kitchen. Then she made me open the window myself and repeat back to her the negative commands she'd given. I couldn't remember some of the words she'd used. My comprehension was still way ahead of my recall. Nicole's face said she'd done this a thousand times with the same result. For her I was just another fille marking another year, another rentrée.

Lola pleaded my case. "Don't worry, Maman. She's understood you." But Nicole looked one last time at the room, as if she'd never recognize it again, and led Lola away to let me unpack.

But Lola and Guillaume were back in my room in a few minutes to model their back-to-school clothes. Lola's were boyish, mostly jeans and soft cotton shirts, while Guillaume's were for a child far younger: wool shorts with tall socks, a shirt with a scalloped collar, plaid overalls. I showed them the pieces of magenta and chartreuse paper I found in a dresser drawer, and they told me it was Sigrid's from two years ago. Because I couldn't understand all of their simultaneous explanations, they resorted to fingers that became scissors, then pulled me into each of their rooms to show me the framed cutouts on their walls.

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Excerpted from "The Pleasing Hour"
by .
Copyright © 1999 Lily King.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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