Silent Bird (4 page)

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, swea
ting 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.

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 ca
n’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.

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
“
ç
a
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 was
n’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 would
n’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,
Jeannot 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 G
ato 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.

At the conclusion of my story, El Gato did indeed escape the fridge.
He was a survivor. But he never again managed to keep warm. Giving up all notions of lifelong companionship, he roamed the hills and villages of the Languedoc region, sleeping alone under the vines, old burlap bags and other scraps.

A dismal ending, I know.
I also knew that real children’s stories should have happy endings. Like Mr. El Gato meeting the future Mrs. El Gato inside the refrigerator and marrying near the butter dish, leaving the past behind, living happily ever after.

But I did
n’t believe it. And if I didn’t believe it, how could I draw it?

“
Will you publish this story?” Monique asked.

I told her no, it was not right for that.

“But I like,” she said.

Jeannot said he liked too.
Or maybe he said he was hungry. In any case, when he kept talking to Monique, and Monique began translating, I realized with dawning excitement that he and I were beginning our first real conversation—with her help, of course.

She said,
“He asks what you do in France.”

“
I’m traveling. Just like this, living quietly and working.”

A pattering of French.

“And in America? You have job?”

I said I was between jobs.
That I had worked for a short while creating ads for a magazine but didn’t like it.

“
He asks why Montpellier. You have family nearby, perhaps?”

“
No, it’s kind of a long story.” I mentioned my Mom living alone on Long Island and Grandma not remembering things since her stroke. I didn’t say that she was probably dying and that I’d left anyway because I was afraid I would die too if I stayed, just more slowly.

“
Will you go to university?” Monique asked. “Study French at
Fac de la Lettres
?”

“
No, I went to university already and got a useless degree in art.”

More blank looks.

I described my major at Stony Brook and my desire to see Europe, explore my roots a little.
Monique seemed to understand that, at least. She told me about her love of American literature and relishing her contact with American students and expatriates of all ages. I asked her where I could find this American Library. She promised to show me.

Jeannot cleared his throat.
He had one more question.

“
How many times will you stay in France?” Monique translated.

I said I did
n’t know.

“
You will work here?”

I could
n’t; didn’t have permission.

“
You like your flat, yes?” Monique asked after more consulting.

That was more than one question.
I said I loved my studio and this plaza but was rather tired of the commute to the toilet.

They laughed.
Jeannot’s dark eyes looked almost conspiratorial, as if he were recalling my private difficulties with toes and fungi and tubes of medicine that resembled toothpaste. On impulse I told Monique that story too, thus drawing her into our circle. And my reward was that before she left to wait on someone else, we set a date for the library.

Finally
Jeannot and I were alone. How sweet, I thought, to be sitting together as friends, not lovers. I closed the sketchbook, and he reached out to touch my cheek. “
Chérie
, come with me, please.” Dropping some francs on the table, he gently pulled me to my feet and led me in the direction of Centre Ville.

I asked
“
Ou
?”—”Where?”—but he put his finger to my lips.

A few skinny, cobblestoned alleys later we turned into the huge pedestrian
Place de la Comédie, which I’d read was the largest pedestrian plaza in Europe (it looked exactly like a small plaza, only bigger). We stopped at the window of a handsome restaurant with ornate iron tables out front. Through the window I could see a bar and luxurious seating and a grand piano in the dining room. The sign read: La Peña.

“Brésilien
,” Jeannot said with great satisfaction.

I nodded:
“
Oui.”

He unrolled his magazine and showed me
the cover: this very same restaurant entrance in shiny color. “
Je traivail ici
.” He pointed at his chest and at the restaurant and at the magazine.

Me, Tarzan.
Work Here.

“
Very nice,” I said in English. “Food
bon
?”

“
On y va?”
he said by way of answering, and I followed him away from the lovely Brazilian restaurant, though what I really wanted to do was pull him inside to play that magnificent piano.

Instead, we went back to my little studio and played there.
Funny, though: the time at the café with Monique and the walk to and from the Brazilian restaurant felt more intimate to me than anything Jeannot and I did the rest of that rainy afternoon.

Our relationship seemed to be changing, growing more charged, more intens
e, even if the sex was just…sex. Hot and empty at the same time.

As usual, at least for me.