The Third Grace (17 page)

Lou led the way back to the street with the Givenchy bag in her hand to advertise her good taste to other wealthy shoppers. Despite Aglaia's objections, and maybe as an apology for her hideous behavior of the preceding night, Lou insisted on buying her some
eau de toilette
in a Belle Époque boutique along the way, paying an exorbitant amount for the miniscule bottle.

Aglaia willed herself to forget her misgivings about her travel partner, especially when Lou vowed that tonight, on returning from their shopping spree, she'd track down François by telephone. Aglaia didn't doubt Lou's ability to do that—just her will.

Later that evening, with a cup of
tisane
in hand, Aglaia curled up in an armchair beside Lou's in the hotel's quiet lobby. She was worn out from the afternoon of shopping but excitement knotted her throat; she expected to speak with François at any moment. Their corner was a private place to sit, all the more because the other occupants of the hotel weren't lined up tonight to check their e-mail on the courtesy computer, which was out of order according to the sticky note pasted to the screen:
hors service.
Lou's laptop was useless as well because wireless was unavailable in the budget hotel—a disagreeable fact Lou blamed on Aglaia's prepaid choice of lodgings. The shabby-chic establishment didn't allow for outgoing telephone calls from the rooms, either, but guests were permitted to use the phone in the lobby for local calls—for a fee, of course. The two-star circumstances had an obvious effect on Lou, whose mood deteriorated with each call she placed.

Lou had already spoken in smooth French to the occupants of five residences listed in the phone book borrowed from the front desk, solicitous in her tone and taking enough time with each household to explain why she was calling. With apparent ease, Lou connected with numbers in several different
arrondissements
of the city, and Aglaia was glad not to be bearing the burden alone beneath a street lamp in a public booth. But each failed call brought Lou's eyebrows closer together and produced a tightening in Aglaia's own chest.

“Run up to the room and see that you have the spelling of your boyfriend's name correct,” Lou ordered.

“I know I have the spelling right,” Aglaia said, bristling. As if she could make a mistake like that.

“I think ‘Vivier' may have an ‘s' at the end, like the city name. It will speed up the calling.”

Aglaia didn't want to toy with Lou's ferocity tonight. She acquiesced to the demand and, by the time she returned with proof of correct spelling, Lou was replacing the receiver with a pat of finality.

“Done.”

“What do you mean?” It was a stutter, and Aglaia picked up her pace across the lobby towards Lou.

“I located him. The number was right here all along, the first call I made after you left. Everything's set, then.” Lou gave a brisk nod. “You're to meet at the Louvre in front of the Three Graces at two o'clock on Friday—the day after tomorrow.”

Aglaia stopped dead on the area carpet that covered the grey masonry floor. At first, sheer delight flooded her, and then skepticism set in. How could Lou have introduced herself, explained to François all the details, and made the arrangements in the short time she was absent?

“Well, close your mouth and quit gawking,” Lou said. “You look like an imbecile and I hear somebody coming down the stairs—probably those gloomy crones from London.” She was organizing her research now, spreading papers out on the low table and slipping a pen from her briefcase. “This exercise of calling half of Paris took long enough and I need to review my notes for my stint at the Sorbonne, so if you'll excuse me… ?”

Lou held out the telephone book and Aglaia automatically reached for it to return it the clerk, disparaging herself at the same time for being so subservient.

“But Lou,” she blurted as if her physical motion reactivated her speech, “what did he sound like? Was he surprised? Shouldn't I have spoken with him?”

Lou peered over spectacles perched on the end of her nose, and her eyebrows twitched disagreeably. “He was going out and didn't have time for pleasantries.”

“But isn't Friday awfully late for me to meet him? I mean, it's our last day here.” She was flustered. Lou was making changes she couldn't keep straight in her head. “I thought we were spending tomorrow at the Louvre and then taking in Versailles on Friday.”

“I've reconsidered our schedule, Aglaia. Versailles is only a forty-minute train trip, perfect for Friday afternoon as soon as we're finished at the Louvre.” She sorted through the papers laid out before her. “Tomorrow I'll have enough to do here in the city with my research at the university.”

“But you're allowing only a few hours for the Louvre,” Aglaia said. She knew from her reading that the museum held an immense treasury of works that would require at least a day for even a cursory exploration. But, more to the point, the meeting Lou had coordinated with François would be very brief if they hoped to squeeze in an excursion to the
château
of the Sun King as well.

Lou's lips pinched together. “As far as I'm concerned, you've caused this time-constraint issue yourself. You should have planned a longer stay in Paris to begin with. And your decision to book such an early morning flight home necessitates our last night's stay in that generic airport hotel, though it'll be an improvement on this dump.”

Aglaia glanced up at the clerk, but he didn't react to the insult. Lou disregarded the feelings of others, Aglaia thought—hers in particular. Lou was right about her mistake in the timing of the return flight on Saturday; it meant they'd have to check out of the Caillou on Friday and drag their bags along with them for the day—first to the Louvre and then all the way out to Versailles and back to the airport. But that didn't mean Lou had to be so offensive. Whose trip was this, anyway?

“That doesn't leave a lot of time for a proper reunion with François,” Aglaia persisted.

“Listen,” Lou said, “if my provisions are unsatisfactory to you, I'll dial François up again right now and you can speak to him yourself.”

“No, I wouldn't know what to say.” Aglaia prickled at the other woman's condescension and her own lack of confidence.

“I thought not. Now, if you don't want to grovel before me in appreciation, at least let me get my preparatory work done. There's nothing more I can do for you tonight,” Lou said in dismissal.

“Well, thanks for phoning,” Aglaia muttered, out of habit rather than gratitude. She was uneasy as she left the lobby with her cup of herbal tea and headed again for their room. As tired and agitated as she was tonight, she wanted to spend some time in bed with the Bible notes, making her own final preparation before delivering the book.

O
nce she was under the covers, Aglaia paged through François's notations again to make sense of his thoughts and recapture the progression of memories. The last turned-down corner took her to Hosea, the story of the whore, where François had underlined a few words here and there—
sin
and
kiss
and
lovers
. But the words of the text itself pummeled her:
I will make her like a desert, turn her into a parched land, and slay her with thirst. I will wall her in so that she cannot find her way.
Aglaia didn't welcome the rebuke to her own parched and walled-in soul, and she turned the pages quickly.

A four-hundred-year silence separated the Old Testament from the New, she remembered—four centuries where no voice rang from the prophets to the people of Israel, though they sought their Messiah through ceremony and ritual. They didn't recognize him when he appeared because they hadn't harkened to that final voice crying in the desert—
Prepare the way for the Lord
—for their hearts were calloused and their eyes were closed.

Lou would return to the room shortly, so Aglaia sped up her reading. She skimmed another page to find herself at the birth of Christ, where François circled the words
angel
and
virgin
, and wrote in the margin the words
Les Trois Rois.

How could she have forgotten the night of the stars, the night he had called
her
an angel for touching him?

Mary Grace is thirsty. That'll be her excuse, anyway, if her parents catch her creeping by François's door at three in the morning in her skimpy nightwear. She finds him sleepless, as well—the air is too hot. So they tiptoe out to the dewy grass, closing the screen door gingerly behind them.

“It's called the Big Dipper in English,” she answers him, “and that one's Orion's Belt.”

“We say
Les Trois Rois
—the Three Kings.”

“Oh, like the Christmas story,” she says. “The Wise Men saw the star in the east and followed it to the place where Jesus was born, and worshipped Him there.”

“I worship you,” he says, and she's thankful the darkness hides from him the naked pleasure that must be glowing on her face. “But I prefer your English name of Orion's Belt.”

Then he tells her the tale of Orion, the giant huntsmen of the heavens born near Boeotia in Greece, the son of Poseidon who imparted to him the power to walk on water.

Orion met the nymph Merope and fell in love. He couldn't do otherwise, for she was attired in the raiment of the Graces—gossamer threads, diaphanous and flowing so that not a curve, not a dimple, was hidden from his lustful sight.

But Orion was refused consent to marry her and so, in his passion and frustration, he raped her. The hunter, rendered blind in revenge by Merope's protector, was cured by the wonder-working rays of the sun to continue his amorous pursuits until he was punished again, this time stung to death and then placed in the heavens opposite his nemesis, Scorpius in the east, from whom he still perpetually flees beyond the western horizon.

And so Orion remains among the stars forever—a twinkling, cold, dead monument that bears witness to the wrath of the gods of Olympus.

She'd come so close to giving herself to François there on the dewy grass, but they heard someone open a window in the house and snuck back to their rooms unfulfilled. She couldn't fall asleep for hours on that long-ago night, shivering with the dark, divine sensations that threatened to snuff out the light of truth that had, till recently, so warmed her soul.

Aglaia shivered now beneath her sheets in the French hotel bed. She was sleepy but licked her finger and turned another page. She must be very near the end of François's notations, she thought. The youth group had been outlining the Gospels about the time the crops had ripened in the fields that summer—about the time François was forced to leave.

Yes, there it was in the margins of Matthew, where John the Baptist preached by the Jordan River. François had written a string of names—
Abraham, John, Jesus,
and then
Amphion
—with an arrow pointing to a line of text:
Out of these stones God can raise up children.
Aglaia stared at the names, trying to make sense of the quartet.

She strained to remember who Amphion might be—what god François might have inserted into this mix. She closed her eyes in concentration and finally it came to her: Amphion was the king of Thebes, who fortified the walls of his citadel without bodily exertion by charming the stones with music from his magical lyre, raising the stones up into place under the melodic direction of the Three Graces, those conductors of all charm.

Was François comparing Amphion's construction with Jesus' declaration that He would raise the stones of the temple—the flesh of His own body? And with God's promise to Abraham of progeny, numerous as grains of sand on the seashore?

The images were muddled in Aglaia's mind: sand on a beach; cobble on the Jordan's banks; the mighty walls of Thebes, long ago crumbled; the quarried bricks of Solomon's Temple, not remaining one on top of the other. And the broken and resurrected and instituted body of Christ, more lasting than fragile earth.

She knew her speculations tonight went beyond anything François could have intended. It was as though her thoughts were being directed by something outside of herself. She was curious in spite of her resolution not to be drawn into the Bible, and told herself it was the mystery of Amphion alone that held her spellbound. She closed her eyes to focus her deliberations but, try as she might, she couldn't take her thoughts captive and make them obedient to her memories of François.

Aglaia shook herself awake. Lou could enter the room at any moment and Aglaia wanted to finish her overview. She wasn't sure there was anything left to discover, but then she came to François's last handwritten note scribbled into that big, black Bible on the day before he fled home to France, next to the story of Jesus' temptation in the stony wilderness—the final Wednesday study he'd attended. She wasn't prepared for it:
Aglaia, quelle belle diablesse!

The words staggered her. François saw her as a “beautiful devil?” She was his
angel
, he'd said. And except for a hint or two that she hadn't even picked up at the time, François never directly referred to her as Aglaia; that hyperbole had been her own choice, a secret and subconscious conception given birth at Joel's funeral. But had she originated this name for herself, after all, or had it in reality been chosen by François without her acknowledgment? She'd been devilish all right, she recalled as she was pitched back to the youth group in the basement of the church that fated August evening a decade and a half ago.

“Flee youthful lust,” Pastor Reimer admonishes them. Mary Grace peeks from under her lowered lids at François, whose hand rests high on her upper leg, hidden beneath the open Bible.

“Read how Jesus dealt with temptation,” the minister goes on. “ ‘It is written' is what He said. When Satan told Him, ‘Turn these stones into bread,' Jesus replied with Scripture. When He stood on the highest pinnacle of the temple, tempted to leap off and prove the angels would stop Him from even bruising his toe on a stone, He had a ready answer. When Satan ordered Him to bow his head to the stony ground in worship, Jesus again quoted the words of the Bible. And so should you.”

She's never felt so convicted in her entire life, and she has no intention of repenting.

That very evening before the meeting, when François was changing from his work clothes, she crept into his room and wrapped her arms around him from behind, thinking of his kisses and his roaming hands. She couldn't look him in the eye; she was too scandalized at her own deliberate transgression of God's commands.

“Soon,” she promised, standing on her tiptoes and wanting to lick his neck to taste his saltiness. “As soon as we can get alone again.”

So when the youth meeting is over, she and François slip out through the cloakroom door of the church. Her brother catches a ride with someone else, as if by answered prayer or luck of the gods, leaving her alone with François to take the pickup home.

They drive the back road over the fields and they park, half hidden in the standing grain beside the swather still toasty from the sun's rays, grasshoppers bouncing off the truck's chassis. One springs into the cab through the open window and she stomps it, the crunch beneath her sneaker making her queasy.

“Poor Tithonos,” François exclaims with a laugh, and launches into the tale of the mortal son of a water nymph, loved by the goddess Eos who asked Zeus to make the boy immortal but forgot to ask for his eternal youth.

So Tithonos aged into everlasting senility, wizening until he turned into a cicada dressed by the goddess Aglaia in a suit of vibrant green, and danced with by her sister Euphrosyne, and sumptuously fed by generous Thalia—a pet for the Three Graces.

Mary Grace shudders at his story, so François opens the glove box and removes a brown paper bag. “This will help,” he says. He unscrews the top from the bottle of gin and gives her the first swig, the unfamiliar liquid burning as it goes down.

He slides her over to him, dust puffing up from the seat fabric. A magpie scoffs at them from its cache of road kill as the evening wind dies down. François turns on the radio and kisses her, gently for a while and then with increasing urgency. She trembles as he undoes the buttons of her shirt one by one, exposing her bra and then removing it. He doesn't say anything and doesn't meet her eyes as he caresses her.

He's working on her zipper when they hear the whinny of Joel's horse.

In her hotel bed in Paris, Aglaia was immobilized with exhilaration or exhaustion—or maybe exhumation. Yes, that was it; she was being dug up by the spade of her memory and subjected to an autopsy that should have been performed years ago. She opened her eyes; she tried to put the recollections out of her mind, but they were coming to her in real time now and she couldn't prettify this one.

Joel had been enraged that night, and he wrestled François from the truck onto the ground, yelling at him to get the hell off their farm while she fumbled for her top to cover up.

“Not with this girl, you don't!” Joel shouted, and she heard the thump of flesh on flesh, and a French curse. They tumbled in the tall grain, grunting, while she cried and begged Joel not to hurt him, damned Joel for being mean, promised Joel anything if only François could stay.

But François was gone the next morning without a word of good-bye, stolen away in the night by her brother, she assumed, and likely dropped at the Greyhound stop on the highway, with his guitar and his airline ticket and maybe enough of Joel's cash to get him to the airport in Denver.

At breakfast time, Mom took the biscuits out of the oven and asked, “Is François still sleeping? Can't he smell the
Schnetje
baking?”

Joel shot a hollow-eyed glance at Dad, who gave a slight shake to his head to silence him.

“Mary Grace,” her mom said, “are you sick this morning?” She placed a hand on her forehead but Aglaia shied away. “Well then, please get the butter from the fridge. Henry, where's that boy?”

Harvest was in full swing and Mom would have expected François to do his fair share.

Her dad cleared his throat. “Tina, Joel tells me he's gone back to France.” Dad looked right at Aglaia then—right through her—and she was ashamed. He said, “I guess that's what happens when we invite a city kid to the country.” Her mother began to fret but Dad shushed her. “Don't worry about it, Tina. It's all taken care of.”

The despicable subject was never addressed from that day forward although, sitting at the kitchen table that morning, Aglaia knew in her heart that her father fully comprehended her indiscretion, and she wanted to kill Joel for telling what she and François had been up to.

She waited in vain for Dad to bring it up but he never did, and their relationship changed for good at that moment.

Then again, that was the day Joel died and everyone else forgot about François.

Lou finished up her paperwork well after midnight, the clerk having long since shut off the lobby's main lights and, shooting her a reproving frown, gone to his own bed. Aglaia was sleeping as Lou entered the room but breathed erratically, mumbling a few indiscernible words as she rolled towards the wall. The Bible was open on her blankets and slid to the floor with a thud. Lou shook her head in disgust. What did Aglaia hope to find in its pages?