Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [89]
He made her sit at the blue table. It was the table he would take away from that small farmhouse some years later, and it became the dearest possession in his life. She sat on his right, and he spread out the bill of sale in front of them. He went over all the clauses, reading them, explaining them. It was something other than shock when she noticed her name. She’d been given nothing in her life, on even the slightest scale.
Then, a few minutes later, only halfway through the document, she relaxed, and he sensed it immediately.
What is it? he asked. She shook her head and kept reading the paper before her. There’d been no gasp of breath or gesture, but he was so familiar with her nature he’d recognized the sudden lightness. What is it? he said again.
She watched him, smiling. Nothing, she said.
It was not connected with this grand gesture and the gift of property, but some realization by her that made the acceptance of it possible. They were old allies. And only she knew why, when they sat down side by side at the table, she had known automatically which of the two chairs to sit in. It was so his good eye would be next to her and could share the page they read together, while the other eye—his blindness, at all their differences in this life—was far from this intimacy.
She made a sparrow’s dinner for them, and needing something to praise, he praised the freshness of her well water until she was laughing at him. He was always too shy and tentative to speak about his own work. Instead they discussed her plans for the fields, and that night, when he returned home, he took down the military pamphlet from his library shelf. He could sense her excitement about the farm’s possibilities, now that she owned the land. At one point during their meal he even said what had crossed her mind already—that she was now entering the world of the grower of the black tulip. She nodded. They were as close as that.
And though she spoke that night far more than he did, she knew in essence all about him, the range of his successes, his two daughters, his wife. Then, just before he left, as he stood up she asked him to sit down again, and she told him about the miscarriage, and how she could not stand it. She could not stand it. She could not stand it.
One solitary light in the room over the blue table. And him putting his hands out to reach for her thin fingers that had nothing in them.
Thinking
As close as she was to Lucien, the idea of physical passion between them had not existed in her mind. Her frolic of a dance with him at his wedding had been just that, a bookend to signal the end of their youth. They had been taught the steps of a waltz by his mother in the barnyard, who had stated that, if they were reading about life in Paris and Fontainebleau, they needed to practice their social skills, and that the three essential areas of training for a musketeer were horsemanship, swordsmanship, and dancing. Lucien’s interpretation of a dance, confirmed by his studying of engravings, had been that it was an act where you pushed the shoulders of your partner until you both reached the far end of a room, while the girl suspected dancing meant simply intermingling for a period of time under the spell of musicians. His mother had needed to educate them both.
Still, the two of them were cautious around each other. In spite of their proximity, they had their own lives and separate beliefs. When Marie-Neige reconsidered his accident with the dog, she felt as if that partial blindness must have already been there in him. For someone so intuitive and empathetic, he was, for instance, unknowing of the true nature of his wife, believing that if there were errors in