13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [32]
The house was sold to a Parisian couple much like themselves, except with a little more money. They use it as a summer getaway. The adjoining land was sold to the surrounding farmers, glad to extend their arable property. The farmhouse is a farmhouse no longer: on its truncated piece of land, it lies empty most of the year, and is rustic and picturesque when called to be so by its owners during warm and lazy months.
The key to this house is not rightfully hers, and it delights her to have it.
In the same compartment is folded a gossamer thing that is hers and hers alone. She takes this thing gingerly out of the small drawer and unfolds it slowly in her palm. She looks at it, puts it up to her face, smells it. It smells of nothing these days; it carries not a remnant of the man who gave it to her.
She wishes that she’d let him inside her that day. Yes, she wishes that he might have filled her with his seed that day, and that she might have borne a bastard child from her own cousin. From their intense, young, ill-advised love. It would have been a son, she is certain—a son with her own last name, her cousin’s name, her father’s name—a son so tightly bound to her by blood that she would not have been able to tell him apart from herself, from them all. She would have loved him so much, it would have made her ill. It would have fulfilled her womanhood utterly.
There was no way for her to know this, then—that this day was her one chance to make such a son. There was no way to predict a blank-shooting husband.
She presses the handkerchief against her heated face years later and breathes deeply. Years later, she wants to weep but does not.
*
Ma chère Muse bien-aimée
THE JEWELRY BOX HAS been shut up and put away. Louise decides to have scrambled eggs for lunch. The fresh eggs are cool to the touch, and their smoothness has something about it like skin. It must be the pinkish beige of their curved shells.
They are satisfying when cracked. Louise likes the crunch of the shell, the slight resistance of the film immediately beneath it when the egg is pried open, runny translucent flesh plopping and sizzling into the frying pan.
As the eggs cook, a wail rises in the distance, then another one closer, and a third closer still. Every first Wednesday of the month at noon, the air raid sirens in Paris are tested. This precaution seems appropriate, given the slippery shape of the world; one can never know what might come roaring over the horizon. The sirens scream in concert, obliterating all other sound, and Louise hums along with their one note22 of alarm deep in her throat, as if responding to their musical greeting.
LATER, LOUISE IS COMING home from the butcher’s, where she has just bought a chicken. She is pushing open the front door to her building when she hears someone calling her. “Madam!”
Louise looks up the narrow street, searching for the voice shouting, “Madam! Wait! Let me help you.”
She recognizes the dark-skinned young man immediately and inadvertently smiles. “Ah, it’s you again.”
“Yes, me again.” He stretches out his hands. “I help you?”
Today she has only one bag and doesn’t need the help. Still, she decides to humor the boy and hands it to him. If he repeats this game tomorrow, then she will refuse him. He follows her up the steps to her front door, quietly this time. When he hands her the bag, he looks solemn, and she is surprised. What of his request for the kiss on