13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [11]
“Ah, no. When I have their full names, I’ve won. I don’t come back.”
Louise laughs uproariously, for a long time, until her stomach hurts and tears begin to well in her eyes. Garance laughs with her. It is so good to be alone together, without men, and to discuss such foolish things.
“Garance! You are the naughtiest girl in the world! I don’t believe you!”
“You never did things like this when you were a girl?”
“Lord, no! Why would I? Why would you?”
Garance shrugs to indicate her lack of an answer, and the two of them quiver helplessly with mirth in the sun-flooded living room.
LOUISE WATCHES HER HUSBAND undress for bed. He loosens his tie and takes it off without unknotting it, as one might slip off a noose, and tosses it onto the dresser.
“You look tired, Henri,” she says.
“I am. I had a rough day at work.” He unbuttons his shirt with weary slowness, from top to bottom.
“I can help with that,” she says, in a soft female exhalation.
“I’m fine.”
She thinks maybe he’s not getting the picture. So, she puts the book she is reading down on the nightstand without marking the page and flings the covers off her body. She wiggles her nightgown up over the torso and slips it off over her head. She wears nothing underneath. She is completely nude in the yellow light of the bedside lamp—her skin glows soft and warm. She rolls over onto her stomach and bends one leg up at the knee absentmindedly, like a schoolgirl reading a beauty magazine.
“I can help with that,” she repeats.
Her husband beholds her, his shirt now utterly undone but still on him. His hands hang limply at his sides. He sighs, and says: “You’re very kind, but not tonight. I’m really very tired.”
Suddenly Louise is quite cold. She plucks her nightgown off the floor and puts it back on. She gets back under the covers. She opens her book back up, but is doubly irritated because she cannot recall what page she was on. She flips around the area of the book that looks familiar, trying to remember.
As the rustle of Louise’s restless pages fills the silence, Henri finishes taking his clothes off and puts his pajamas on. He slides into bed next to his wife.
“Are you going to be reading for a while?” he asks her.
She does not look over at him as she puts her book away: “No, actually, I think I’m going to sleep now.”
“All right, then. Good night, darling.”
He reaches across her and flicks off the bedside lamp, leaving her there gazing into the darkness—her startled eyes must take a moment to adjust to this sudden obscurity.
Un jardin public
LOUISE SITS ALONE ON the metro, on her way to church. The one she is going to is nearly a cathedral: it is a great hulking Gothic beast on the edge of the city, not like the baroque candy dish near where she lives. The Baroque candy dish is called Eglise Saint-Roch. She got married there in February of 1919, at the nadir of winter, and has seldom been back inside since.
The wooden slats of the metro seats feel hard against her aching lower back; she is still a bit sore there because of her waning menses. The slight cramping in her lower front will be gone tomorrow, along with the last spots of blood.
The train stops at a station, and Louise sees the lever on the door nearest her swing up as someone yanks it open from the outside. Three men enter the car through the sprung double doors. They are dressed tidily. They settle in the quadrant of seats across the aisle from Louise. She watches them. They are speaking animatedly about some business she does not understand; she can merely feel the abstract flow of money beneath their words. She watches their mouths. Since it is an unseasonably temperate day, the underground is close and warm. The men are wearing wool suits, well cut: brown, gray, and black. The blast of their collective colognes wafts to her—yet the civilized scent of it wilts slightly beneath the heat of their contained bodies: Louise can smell the tang of sweat.
She likes their fashionable high collars, starched to painful stiffness and rounded at the corners. All three of