13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [45]
THAT EVENING, LOUISE AND Henri Brunet sit across from Xavier and Pauline Langlais at a small rectangular table covered in white linen, in the fine (but not overly pretentious) restaurant Le Poquelin. It is named after the playwright better known as Molière. The establishment has a theatrical theme: burgundy velvet curtains and banquettes, etchings on the wall from productions of Le Misanthrope and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. The pictures depict men in wigs arguing with one another and women wearing heavy, voluminous dresses and fainting into chairs, one hand artfully arranged on their forehead—all those parted lips, in paroxysms of emotion, gasping at the edge of consciousness. Xavier comments that he likes the décor.
The owner himself serves them their first course: a house-made goose foie gras with wedges of toast, and four small salads. They share a bottle of red wine, except for Pauline Langlais, who has put one of her gloves in her wineglass in a touchingly dated ladylike gesture signifying that she will be abstaining from alcohol tonight. Louise was not aware that anyone still did this; such a thing is a remnant of the past century. It occurs to her that her own mother might have done this when she was pregnant with her brother.
This image pains her, and though she wants to let it slip away, she cannot, and asks Pauline directly, “Do you have a name picked out for the child?”
Henri looks at his wife with bewilderment, then glances at her still-full wineglass, perhaps wondering if she has been drinking more than she has let on. Pauline doesn’t look surprised at this bold question, and answers placidly, “We were thinking of François if it’s a boy, and Odile if it’s a girl. We are hoping for a girl, this time. Boys are wonderful, but too many of them can run a mother ragged!”
“Well, to a girl, then,” Louise toasts, and takes a sip of her wine.
The two men make eye contact across the table, as if asking each other how their wives have acquired such a level of intimacy.
“We had a good chat when we met the other day,” Pauline explains to her husband.
“Ah, well, that is good,” Xavier answers. “It seems we’ll all get along famously as neighbors. How long have you lived in this building?”
“Since our marriage, nine years ago.”
Louise hopes that they do not ask about children (the lack of children). It would be an indelicate question. Pauline might ask it, but certainly not the exquisitely polite Xavier, Xavier who dabs at his lips with his napkin in a slow and dreamy gesture, as if he is not entirely in the room.
His gaze is so curiously clear and blank, and Louise is inflamed by it: he is a hermetic man and she is dying to breach him. There is some hidden thing in him she wants to get to, and her desire to pull this thing from his flesh spins and flares in her like some spontaneously created sun, extant for no reason that she can fathom, but indestructible.
The conversation flows easily despite the febrile buzz rising in Louise, and before long they are on their second course and their second bottle of wine. They are talking about travel. Xavier, before he married, was seized by wanderlust and spent time meandering in the United States before the war.
“It is a queer and primitive place,” he says. “It is fascinating.”
“How so, primitive?” Henri queries.
“I am thinking mostly of the state of Florida, that ill and gorgeous swamp. I was there… Well, I was trying to make money like a lot of young men. Land speculation, you see. There are alligators there bigger than a man, sunning themselves by the side of the road. They hardly fear us. They do not run away; they move only when they are hungry, and when they are hungry it is best for you to run away. I wager the armor of scales they have on their bodies could deflect a small-caliber bullet.”
Louise imagines a bullet grazing the huge sinewy back, leaving the animal unharmed. She sees the triangular reptilian head turning slowly to investigate where