13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [26]
“Why, thank you. This makes me glad.”
“I know! You are a corrupted woman like that.”
After Pierre utters this, he smiles widely at her, and once again she blushes. Henri shoots Pierre a sideways glance of faint disapproval: his friend is often unchecked this way when he is sated after a good meal. Being full loosens him.
Louise leaves the men to digest at the table and smoke cigarettes while she does the dishes. She is happy that she has given them all such pleasure with this lovely meal she crafted so carefully; it took her a good six hours to put everything together. This is all right, as truly this is her primary duty in life—the feeding of men. There is also housecleaning, but cleaning is very dull. Fortunately, she has the monetary means to order a maid to come in for a few hours and relieve her of this tedious womanly chore every once in a while.
The laundry is not too bad: she takes it in to a cleaner. All she has to do is take it home and put it away within the softly sliding drawers of her husband’s dresser, within the smoothly hinged doors of her armoire.
As her hands plunge mindlessly into the warm sudsy water, Louise thinks about her lone student, Garance. The girl is coming over on Thursday afternoon, and she is looking forward to it even more than usual. Thursday is the girl’s birthday, and Louise has gotten Garance a present she certainly will like. It might even earn Louise an ecstatic hug from her squealing, fluttering pupil—this pupil who has such bizarre and compelling relationships with her instructors.
Louise thinks of the disdain she herself had as a young girl for her teachers, always trying to mold her into something they had neither the courage nor the talent to be. She had not obliged them by being anything as crass and unsettling as a prodigy: banality is a cozy and comfortable place. These days, she has grown downright fond of teachers and teaching; she has to, having turned into an inadvertent teacher herself.
Also, Xavier Langlais is a teacher, and though she knows nothing of the man, she is convinced that he is as fascinating as he is handsome. She feels a vague itch to hear his thoughts on literature. She thinks it must be pleasant for Mrs. Langlais to be married to a teacher: they come home earlier than most other working men, being confined only to the school day.
Even so, they must have to bring their work home fairly often, and this might be a bother.
As Louise finishes splashing around with her dishware and begins wiping it dry on a clean, rough hand towel, she can hear the men talk peacefully from the dining room but cannot distinguish their actual words. She knows that they talk about different things when she is not in the room. She suspects that these things are more explicit than what they are compelled to say in front of her. She is so intrigued—she wants to know what they say when they are alone.
Maybe, one day, she will just get up the gumption to ask: Do you talk about women? Do you talk about love? Do you talk about sex? Graphically? Do you tell one another what we do that you like very much, what feels good to a man?
To imagine her father speaking of such things to her husband! Probably they do not. She is willing to wager that Pierre talks about these things with somebody, though, even if it is neither of her two men.
She wonders also: when men are alone and unafraid to hurt the delicate ears of tenderhearted ladies, do they talk about the war?
Paris
March 18th
Dear Sir,
I am much better. I can breathe freely. I can keep food down. I am almost entirely myself again, except that sometimes this liquid heat bursts into the pit of my chest and propagates outward into my whole body, down into my hands especially, down to the quivering tips of my fingers. It