The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [72]
There was one bright side to the day: since it still felt like the middle of the night for Larry and Mitchell, there was no reason not to start drinking immediately. By early afternoon they were in the Luxembourg Gardens, sharing a bottle of vin de table. The sky had grown cloudy, casting the flowers and yellow gravel paths in a sharp gray light. Old men were playing boules nearby, bending at the knee and releasing silver balls from their fingertips. The balls made pleasant clicks when they struck one another. The sound of satisfactory, social democratic retirement.
Claire had changed into a sundress and a pair of sandals. She didn’t shave her legs, and the hair on them was slight and blond, tapering out at her thighs. She seemed to have forgiven Mitchell. He, in turn, was doing his best to be likeable.
Under the influence of the wine Mitchell began to feel happier, his jet lag in temporary remission. They walked down to the Seine, across the Louvre and the Tuileries Gardens. Sanitation workers were sweeping the parks and sweeping the curbs, their uniforms impossibly clean.
Larry said that he wanted to cook dinner, so Claire, who no longer kept kosher, took them to an outdoor market near her building. Larry plunged in among the stalls, ogling produce, sniffing cheeses. He bought carrots, fennel, and potatoes, conversing with the farmers. The poultry stand made him stop and put a hand to his chest. “Oh my God, poularde de Bresse! That’s what I’m making!”
Back at Claire’s apartment, Larry unwrapped the chicken with a flourish. “Poulet bleu. See? They’ve got these blue feet. That’s how you know they come from Bresse. We used to roast these at the restaurant. They’re fabulous.”
He set to work in the tiny kitchen, chopping and salting, melting butter, three pans going at once.
“I’m sleeping with Julia Child,” Claire said.
“More like the Galloping Gourmet,” Mitchell said.
She laughed. “Honey?” she said, kissing Larry’s cheek. “I’m going to go read while you obsess over your little chicken.”
Claire settled on the bed with her anthology. Hit by a new surge of fatigue, Mitchell wished he could lie down, too. Instead, he unzipped his backpack, digging under his clothes for the books he’d brought along. Mitchell had tried to travel as light as possible, packing two of everything, shirts, pants, socks, underwear, plus a sweater. But when it came time to winnow the stack of reading material, he’d failed to be stringent, bringing with him a cache that included The Imitation of Christ, The Confessions of St. Augustine, Saint Teresa’s Interior Castle, Merton’s Dark Night of the Soul, Tolstoy’s A Confession and Other Religious Writings, and a sizeable paperback of Pynchon’s V., along with a hardback edition of God Biology: Toward a Theistic Understanding of Evolution. Finally, before leaving New York, Mitchell picked up a copy of A Moveable Feast at St. Mark’s Bookshop. His plan was to send each book back home when he finished it, or to give it away to anyone who was interested.
He took the Hemingway out now, sitting down at the dining table, and read from where he’d left off:
The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener with the shavings curling into the saucer under my drink.
I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
He tried to imagine what it had been like to be Hemingway, in Paris, in the 1920s. To write those clear, seemingly unadorned, yet complex sentences that would change forever the way Americans wrote prose. To do all that and then go out to dinner where you knew how to order the perfect seasonal wine to go with your huîtres. To be an American in Paris back when it was O.K.