Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [48]
“Well. Color is not the issue. You can tell her I’ll come in June.”
Buster went into my bedroom. “I’m calling Ma,” he said. “I’m telling her June.”
Jewelle gently spat olive pits into her hand and shaped them into a neat pyramid on the coffee table.
I flew home with my new girlfriend, Claudine, and her little girl, Mirabelle. Claudine had business and a father in Boston, and a small hotel and me in Paris. She was lean as a boy and treated me with wry Parisian affection, as if all kisses were mildly amusing if one gave it any thought. Claudine’s consistent, insouciant aridity was easy on me; I’d come to prefer my lack of intimacy straight up. Mirabelle was my true sweetheart. I loved her orange cartoon curls, her red glasses, and her welterweight swagger. She was Ma Poupée and I was her Bel Homme.
Claudine’s father left a new black Crown Victoria for us at Logan, with chocolates and a Tintin comic on the backseat and Joan Sutherland in the CD player. Claudine folded up her black travel sweater and hung a white linen jacket on the back hook. There was five hundred dollars in the glove compartment, and I was apparently the only one who thought that if you were lucky enough to have a father, you might reasonably expect him to meet you at the airport after a two-year separation. My father would have been at that gate, drunk or sober. Mirabelle kicked the back of the driver’s seat all the way from the airport, singing what the little boy from Dallas had taught her on the flight over: “I’m gonna kick you. I’m gonna kick you. I’m gonna kick you. I’m gonna kick you, right in your big old heinie.” Claudine watched out the window until I pulled onto the turnpike, and then she closed her eyes. Anything in English was my department.
I recognized the new house right away. My mother had dreamed and sketched its front porch and its swing a hundred times during my childhood, on every telephone-book cover and notepad we ever had. For years my father talked big about a glass-and-steel house on the water, recording studio overlooking the ocean, wrap around deck for major partying and jam sessions, and for years I sat next to him on the couch while he read the paper and I read the funnies and we listened to my mother tuck my brother in: “Once upon a time, there were two handsome princes, Prince Fric, who was a little older, and Prince Frac, who was a little younger. They lived with their parents, the King and Queen, in a beautiful little cottage with a beautiful front porch looking out over the River Wilde. They lived in the little cottage because a big old castle with a wraparound deck and a million windows is simply more trouble than it’s worth.”
Julia stood before us on the porch, both arms upraised, her body pale and square in front of an old willow, its branches pooling on the lawn. Claudine pulled off her sunglasses and said, “You don’t resemble her,” and I explained, as I thought I had several times between rue de Birague and the Massachusetts border, that this was my stepmother, that my real mother had died when I was five and Julia had married my father and adopted me. “Ah,” said Claudine, “not your real mother.”
Mirabelle said, “Qu’est-ce que c’est, ca?”
“Tire swing,” I said.
Claudine said, “May I smoke?”
“I don’t know. She used to smoke.”
“Did she stop?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if she smokes or not, Claudine.”
She reached for her jacket. “Does your mother know I’m coming?”
“Here we are, Poupée,” I said to Mirabelle.
I stood by the car and watched my mother make a fuss over Mirabelle’s red hair (speaking pretty good French, which I had never heard) and turn Claudine around to admire the crispness of her jacket. She shepherded us up the steps, thanking us for the gigantic and unimaginative bottle of toilet water. Claudine went into the bathroom; Mirabelle went out to the swing. My mother and I stood in her big white kitchen. She hadn’t touched me.
“Bourbon?” she said.
“It’s midnight in Paris, too late for me.”
“Right,” my mother said. “Gin and tonic?”
We were just clinking