13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [46]
“Oh, how dreadful!” she says, her voice alive with delight.
“You know what is most dreadful about that place is the climate,” Xavier continues. “The heat and the humidity and the constant ruckus of thousands of disgusting insects—some cockroaches as big as the palm of the hand, Louise, and they fly. The first time I saw one was when I found it crawling in my cot. I screamed like a woman at the sight of it; it was shameful. Oh, that blasted animal-ridden heat—there were always glowing eyes at night. It was not possible to shine a light anywhere without it reflecting inside those eyes. I had bizarre nightmares about being trapped places and being watched—always this feeling of being watched by some vague malevolent sentience, as if Florida itself were alive. That jungle place. It gave me such night sweats.”
Xavier is looking straight at Louise now, some wavering emotion blasting off him like heat off black asphalt in a tropical sun. “How thrilling and terrible that place must be,” she says softly, looking back at him.
“You cannot imagine the lushness of the vegetation there, Louise. All this green and all these flowers, such bright and enormous flowers everywhere. They were lubricious and often shone with some viscous something, as if they were secreting some musk—and those yellow stamens heavily coated in pollen—oh, and those thick red petals as dark as blood, and some of them even had little curved sacs at the base. I’d never seen anything like those blooming obscenities. You cannot imagine an orchid in the wild, the plant winding through the brambles and that strange and evil flower hovering there. When you visit a hothouse, you have time to gird yourself for that wicked plant, but when you come upon it unexpectedly—what a shiver.”
Everyone at the table has stopped eating. Louise is not even breathing. She is transfixed by the flushed face of the man speaking to her. Certainly he is speaking to her alone because his gaze is fixed on her.
“You make it sound like an ecstatic experience,” she says.
“It was. It nearly wrecked my life. I was nearly eaten whole by that ghastly place and its fevers, you know. It is so fecund and so unkind, that florid Florida.”
“Oh, Xavier, you are drunk,” Pauline says good-naturedly.
“Orchids are comestible, you know,” Xavier feels compelled to add. “They taste almost like nothing. Just fresh and moist, like an ocean breeze.”
Louise turns and looks at her husband. He has an uncharacteristic tight and angry expression on face. There is something about the tense posture of his body that makes her think that he knows with all his soul that she is wilting with desire for this near stranger and his risqué stories about tropical vegetation. She suddenly visualizes him picking up his steak knife and lunging across the table for Xavier’s throat. What a strange idea, her even-tempered husband!
Still, she sees this. She sees her husband plant the blade with a swift sweep of the arm into the side of the man’s neck—the blade sticking there; the knife handle erect and grotesque in the new wound, just beginning to gush; the look of horrified surprise on Langlais’s face, unable to let out a scream as his blood flows thickly onto his white shirt collar. Why does she see this?
Her husband looks cross, but this cannot be. It must be her fanciful brain getting away with itself. Really, nothing has happened. Everything is jovial. The plates are taken away. They order dessert. Henri wants nothing. Xavier orders a chocolate mousse that he shares with his wife. Louise is surprisingly hungry; she eats a whole wedge of apple tart by herself. The crust is warm and flaky. The apple slices fall apart sweetly on her tongue, and she sings the praises of this heavenly confection. She offers it to her husband to taste, but he insists that he cannot eat another bite.
She wants to offer a piece to Xavier. She wants to see him lean across the table to take a sweet directly from her fork, to engulf with his mouth a place