Silent Bird (23 page)

To access the property in question we opened a yard door that shrieked
Eeeeeee
like something in a Halloween Fun House. Monique hung behind me, muttering, “
Merdemerdemerde
” as if expecting to encounter monsters and witches and flesh-eating snakes.

O
n the other side of the door there were no monsters, though. Also no garden, table or chairs: just a flat dusty square with a dead tree in front of a boring modern edifice built by someone with no imagination. Faint radio voices emanated from one of the windows. Gingham curtains billowed like vertical picnic blankets from an upstairs balcony.

“
Louis hates gingham,” Monique murmured into my ear, sounding strangely triumphant.

She turned to the doorway
and recoiled from a spider hanging low from its web. Monique was clean to the point of obsessiveness. She ironed bed sheets. She ironed denim jeans so tiny they seemed to be more creases than fabric. Cobwebs did not form inside her world.

“
Hurry,” she said. “Before I lose courage.”

Maybe he won’t be here
, I thought as we climbed. The stairway was dim and cool, but my hands were already sweating. My heart tripped and hammered so hard I thought:
Another panic attack!
I didn’t have time for that, though, not with Monique like this. I wiped my palms on my jeans and knocked.

The door opened. And there stood Louis Fontaine
, terrycloth bathrobe untied, shorts flashing. No shirt.

“
Pilar.” Then he looked over my shoulder at Monique. “
Non
,” he said.

From behind him a
female voice pealed. “Louis, who is there?”

When he did
n’t respond, the owner of the voice peered out and scowled.

She was young.
Oh so painfully young! Not that Monique was old. But this person—definitely girl more than woman—had no lines on her face; she hadn’t discovered life yet. She had no wisdom. Nothing that shone from Monique's anchored place in the world. The young woman did have hair the same beige as Monique's, cut into a short fluff. She wore shorts and an oversized T-shirt that probably belonged to the man himself.

She turned to Louis.
“So! Is this the wife?”

Monique
stared, mouth in a grim line.

“
Isn’t she going to talk?” the girl demanded.

“
Merde,” muttered Louis. “Merde, merde, merde.”

Finding my tongue, I said to Louis,
“You don’t know what you have”—but Monique’s voice overrode mine.

“
Please ask this”—her voice broke—“this
person
to excuse us. I prefer to speak to you without her listening.”

There was a small pause.
Monique’s fingers dug like talons into the flesh of my arm. The girl exhaled loudly, tossed her head, and with a withering glare at both Monique and Louis, stalked off.

We were alone, the three of us.
And I stuck in there like a third wheel because I knew damn well that my friend wanted me to. Monique had been helping me since I first set foot in Montpellier. Now I had the chance to reciprocate.

With visible effort, she
lifted her chin. Her gray eyes looked watery, squinting; almost myopic. But her voice came out as dignified steel.

“
Louis, we have been married for…for five years.” She paused to compose herself; to painstakingly compose her words while Louis just gaped at her. He reminded me of those mug shots you see on TV, the personality gone flat, all hope gone, mouth gone stupid.

She said, “
We have a baby together. I have always been there for you. It is—
unconscionable
—that you should seek intimacy elsewhere. And...deceive me and risk…our new, precious family.”

She took another breath, eyes blinking rapidly.
The mug shot of her husband did not change.

“
That baby has required sacrifice. You think I don’t know that. He brings us worry and boredom and fatigue along with the joy. Yet”—another crack in her voice—“instead of holding my hand on this journey, you want to be free? And you find this freedom by
lying
to me? By having
sex
with someone else…?”

Finally she stopped.
The talons of her hand loosened. I took another breath. Now the anger was coming; the real anger.

And with anger comes strength…

“
I have lost respect for you, Louis-Marie Fontaine, you son of a bitch!”

Marie?
That was the second part of his first name?

“
And perhaps a small amount of love, too. You are…a very small man.”

Ouch. He was, too. Small.

“And petty. And selfish.”

Double ouch.

“
If you wish to talk, you may call me at home. Maybe I’ll be there to listen, maybe not. But don’t you dare call until you are ready. I have no desire to speak to
this
Louis!"

She turned on her heel and descended the staircase, leaving me to stare
at her petty, selfish, and very small husband.

Funny, but
the deadness of his expression seemed to melt before my eyes. And with tears rolling down his cheeks, he didn’t look free at all. He looked trapped and defeated, as if the illicit sex meant nothing to him after all: certainly much less than he had originally imagined.

This man, like so many other
s, needed the power and thrill of sex to sustain him…and now sex was destroying his life.

Triple ouch.

There is, I’ve always believed, a change in the atmosphere of a house when a loved one has left it even temporarily. And I don’t mean a shift in energy fields, an aura fading or vanishing, a vibe psychically extenuated or communicated.

Rather, the house and all its belongings just
know
that something has changed. The clock ticks differently, a deliberated
thwock
resonating through abandoned rooms. Dust motes are stiller as they cluster in sun stripes from over-cheerful windows. The refrigerator sighs fitfully. Couch cushions hold their breath; the tap in the bathroom
thump-thumps
like an anxious, palpitating heart.

Years later this idea
would return to me in the form of my first published children’s book:
The House That Sneezed
—which included a big old house in the spasm of a huge
ker-chooo
! and a little girl wandering through the house trying gallantly to make it healthy again despite her broken family.

Typical of me, right?
Not exactly a cheerful story. No singing dinosaurs. Yet school psychologists and social workers and counselors did buy that book at the time of publication, and they buy it still. I guess they use it to discuss divorce or death and emptiness and change with little kids who know when their house is forever altered but can’t really talk about it.

What I’m getting at is this: when Monique and I returned to my apartment, when I turned
the key in the lock and called softly, “Jeannot?”—I already knew he was gone.

Several of my own heartbeats later I found his note.
It was stuck on the fridge with a magnet screaming
Radio Fun!
in googly-eyed yellow letters.

Remember, this was in the days before cell phones.
So when I read that Jeannot had gone to Villefranche sur Lez to talk to his parents about his new plans, I couldn’t just call and stop him. That is, unless I wanted to get through
them
on the phone first.

Which I did
n’t.

All I could do was show the note to Monique,
explain what was wrong, and beg to borrow her car so I could follow him and deal with it in person. Because I was
not
going to let Jeannot trash his dreams and ruin his life. I was
not
going to watch his father wreak havoc on the man I loved.

I
was not going to let him make the same mistake I had made so many times in my twenty-something years…

“Oh, you know how to drive on French roads?”
Monique asked me doubtfully.

I told her yes, I knew how to drive, and she handed
over the keys without asking how long I’d be gone. She just gave me her bright yellow midget of a car. And she set off for town on foot, to fetch her child from her mother’s and face her own emptiness while I faced mine.

The only problem was: Monique’s car had a manual transmission. I didn’t know how to drive a manual transmission though I’d always intended to.

No time like the present.

Settling behind the wheel of the Mini Cooper, I tried to figure things out. I had two feet; there were three pedals. Do the math; it doesn’t work.

Fortunately I’d watched Jeannot and Monique drive often enough
to realize that you had to release one pedal—the left one, the clutch—while yanking and twisting the gearshift, depending on what speed you were going or wanted to go. Except…when during all that activity did a person use the gas pedal? God forbid I wreck Monique’s car!

Make your own luck.

Pushing both the clutch and brake pedals to the floor, I turned the key. The engine started with a rattling snarl.

So far so good…Now what?

Unable to decide, I lifted both feet.
The Mini lunged and jerked to a crawl, muttered, shook, died.

The gas!
I was supposed to move one foot to the
accelerator
pedal.

Oh crap.
Merde. Whatever.
I pushed the clutch and brake pedals down again and restarted the engine. Lifted my feet and immediately slammed the right one onto the gas pedal.

The car erupted forward, accelerating with a tinny scream.
I jerked the wheel to stay on the road and succeeded, sort of. The Mini was moving at a brisk jog. But despite the shrieking of the engine, it refused to go any faster.

Oh, yes.
That’s what the shifter is for! Leave the brake alone. Push in the clutch. Jerk the shift knob down, the way Jeannot does. Release the damn clutch.

My head snapped back as the car leaped forward.
Faster now, bumping over cobblestones, swerving maniacally out of the city onto a bridge that looked like a toy.

Stop thinking—just drive!

I slammed on the brake and jerked the little car around a curve, tires squealing. Speed dropped away as I put my foot back on the gas. Except now the bucking engine grumbled like a crabby old man.

Before it could die I shoved the clutch back in.
The engine sighed with relief.

I shifted back into the first position.
Clutch out. Another lunge.
Why aren’t these gear positions labeled?
And why the hell didn’t the French put bumpers on the sides of their roads? I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t drive worth a damn.

After
I jerked the shifter around furiously for a few seconds, it crashed into a different slot. I let the clutch out. The Mini groaned forward and finally gathered speed. Not a lot, but enough. I'd creep all the way to Villefranche sur Lez if necessary.

Instead
, I stumbled upon the proverbial fork in the road. Damn it, I knew this fork—didn’t I?

Yes.
A sign reading “Villefranche sur Lez” pointed vaguely toward the center of the fork.

Oh.

Headlights flashed angrily in my rearview mirror. Then I heard a blast of noise—
bleeeee
t
!—as a white car zoomed at me like a spaceship about to fly over.

Merdemerdemerde!
I yanked on the wheel and ended up on one of the roads; who knew which one? The village was certainly nowhere in sight. There weren’t any mountains either; I had to be going the wrong way.

A moment later I heard
the cry of gulls. The beach?

Had to be a mistake. Then I spotted a sign that said
“
Les Plages
” and there was no doubt. How did I get here?

Hurtling down a two-lane strip of road toward seagulls and swamps, nary an e
xit in sight, Monique’s car moved like a pinball shot straight and hard. Shit.
Shit!
Maybe we’d land somewhere good. Maybe not, but we had to land eventually, right?

Bagels,
I thought. Had to think about something other than crashing and death or Jeannot or Monique. Bagels and the beach.
She cometh full circle.

The pinball stopped, finally, at the entrance to
Carnot. This spread of flat, silvery marshland was where flamingos flocked on one foot. After lurching to a halt, I shut down the Mini’s engine, managed to put both
my
feet on the side of the road, and walk in a straight line. My knees shook with relief.

I had seen
the flocking flamingos many times before, but today everything seemed different, more vivid; more symbolic. So, on a bridge whose name I had never learned, I paid nostalgic tribute to what was, to me, the quintessential France: the land unspoiled, the air humid, the scattering of pink and peach on the turn of a wing, a poignant promise. Flamingos clamored and swooped onto the shimmering surface of the bright grassy marshes. I knew what their little flamingo feet were doing under the water: picking at a banquet of algae on the swamp floor like folks picked at pig’s feet and calf brains and horsemeat and snails, or whatever else people ate around here.
Bon apetit.

Foreigners themselves,
visitors from the distant south, these fascinating creatures had rooted themselves in France. In a way I envied them. They were now an indistinguishable part of the local scenery while I was not.

When
I’d had enough of admiring the flamingos I returned to Monique’s car and jerkily departed the beach. I was crying as I drove, but there was no one nearby to witness.

Just me and the birds.