A Heart Bent Out of Shape (25 page)

Hadley laughed, and the mountains threw it back. They hung on to one another for steadiness. They held each other up.

New Year’s Day brought a snowstorm that wasn’t forecast. On waking they peeped at the outside world and saw nothing but whitewash: swathes of mist and falling snow.

‘Shall we stay inside today?’ said Joel. ‘I’m a little stiff. I thought I got away with that fall, but I guess not.’

She looked at him. His eyes were rimmed red and his sun-gold tan had paled to nothing.

‘Nothing to do with your hangover?’ she said.

He smiled, and crinkles appeared at the edges of his lips and the corner of his eyes.

‘And you feel fine, I suppose?’ he said.

‘No, I feel awful too.’

They disappeared under the covers and stayed there for most of the day, drowsing and happy. Once he woke her, and twice she woke him, their bodies remembering the shapes they’d made before. She cried out his name and he whispered hers, across her collarbone, and into the nape of her neck. The day passed, and they saw only one another.

In the early evening, as Joel slept on, Hadley took a bath. She lit a single candle and it guttered beside her, an unfelt breeze twisting the flame. ‘So this is what a new year feels like?’ she said out loud, a smile at her lips. In the dark water she lay quite still. Her body felt exhausted; scattered, yet more whole. She thought of how before, she used to prize Joel’s slightest touch – the brief tap of his finger on her arm, a small squeeze of her shoulder. Every contact, no matter how light, how passing, had felt like a promise, or something just less perhaps, a whispered intention. Then came the grazed patch on her chin, all that was left of their kiss in the car, and she remembered how the physical mark had pleased her, its eventual fading feeling like a loss. Now, Joel knew her inside and out, no part remained untraced, no place untouched, and she wanted him more than ever. She smiled again, and in the bath she drifted.

Against her wishes, her mind turned to Luca and the night before, and she groaned at the intrusion. Deliberately, the day had been about closed curtains, the retreat to bed, and never any talk of the night before. What would Luca think if he could see them now? Caroline Dubois? Even Hugo? She felt the combined weight of their disapproving looks and slipped beneath the water, closing her eyes, dismissing everybody. The only person she ever wanted to tell about Joel was Kristina. She imagined them back at Les Ormes, perched on the balcony wall, legs dangling, swapping stories of Riviera romance; Hadley’s made of frost-licked palms and boats moored in ice-water and mountains silently watching. She’d say how once Joel had spelt out her name in kisses, from the tips of her fingers to the crook of her elbow. She’d talk about the creases in his smile, and how sometimes when she looked at him, she wanted to cry, for a very long time, and was that real happiness, that intolerable, heart-snapping knowledge that nothing could last forever? She imagined what Kristina would say back: that she’d felt the very same with Jacques. She heard her voice and the peal of her laughter and it was unbearably, beautifully close. Hadley leant towards the candle and blew it out, plunging into black.

Hadley spent a restless night, and in its depths she woke. She had been dreaming but as soon as she opened her eyes it was gone, only an uneasy taste remaining. She rolled on to her side and reached out for Joel. He lay with his back to her and she moved up close to him. She wrapped her arms around him and pushed her cheek against his back. She listened for the shallow, steady breathing of the sleeper, but his breath came unevenly.

‘Joel,’ she whispered, ‘are you awake?’

She kissed the ridge of his bruised shoulder blade.

‘I had a bad dream,’ she said quietly, her lips against his skin, but he didn’t stir.

She slowed her breathing to match his, but it wouldn’t work. She was too restless. She rolled back over to her side of the bed and it felt like another country.

Morning finally came, and the low winter sun split the room in two. It was a welcome return after yesterday’s whiteout. She squinted, and rubbed her temples. Joel turned in his sleep and grunted as she kissed his shoulder again.

‘Morning,’ she whispered, ‘I’m going to get us some breakfast. Croissants?’

He murmured assent.

‘I feel like a walk,’ she said, ‘it’s the cabin fever. Literally. I’ll be right back.’

They would be back in Lausanne by lunchtime and the spell of their winter retreat would be broken. Luca might already have started telling people. Loretta would know and then Bruno, and before long Chase and Jenny. And what if it didn’t stop there? You could shut up a secret in Les Ormes, but it would soon find its way along the corridors of the English department, down the lecture halls, into the staffroom and out on to the campus. She had never been
that girl
before, the one that people talked about.

Hadley looked in her purse and saw that she had only a few coins. She went back into the bedroom, and bent close to Joel, whispering gently.

‘Joel, have you got any cash? I haven’t enough for breakfast.’

He rolled over.

‘Joel?’ she insisted, as quietly as she could.

‘My ski pants,’ he grunted, ‘there should be twenty bucks.’

‘Thanks. Go back to sleep.’

She found his ski pants discarded, lying in a heap. She searched the pockets and could find only a scattering of coins. She tiptoed back into the bedroom but Joel was asleep again, a rumble of a snore at his lips. She saw then that his jeans were hanging over a chair, and his wallet peeped from a pocket. She glanced again at his sleeping form, and deciding that he wouldn’t mind, she took his wallet. She ran her fingers over its old brown leather. She loved everything that belonged to him, no matter how banal a possession: a striped sock strewn across the room, a ballpoint pen, its end chewed boyishly.

Inside, the wallet was lean and well kept, without any of the usual detritus of crumpled receipts and old bus tickets. She drew out a twenty-franc note, and then hesitated. She had a sudden fancy that she would find a picture of herself in there, a Polaroid perhaps, snapped when she wasn’t looking, her eyes cast down coquettishly, or a passport photo, taken in an automatic booth, the pair of them crowding in for the shot, their faces pushed together. It didn’t matter that they had never posed like that, or that she couldn’t recollect Joel ever having had a camera in his hand; against all reason she could imagine it.

She delved deeper, but there were only the essentials: folded notes, a clutch of cards, a driving licence. And then she saw it. Tucked into the bottom, a small white strip of paper.
Kristina Hartmann
, written in a black, typewritten font. The creases from when he had screwed it up and stuffed it in his pocket had been smoothed out, not the work of an accident, but rather a deliberate and repetitive press of the thumb. He was supposed to have thrown it away, to stop it from reminding her of sad things, he’d said, but instead he had kept it. It hadn’t simply been forgotten, balled at the bottom of his pocket with his loose change; he had expressly moved it to his wallet. He’d smoothed it. Kept it.

twenty-nine

After the storm, the mountains were
doing their best
to
show the world as newly washed. The snow was dimpled where it had started to melt, and the sun threw jagged blue shadows beneath the fir trees. The snow-cloaked streets were tranquil, for it was early and the ski lifts were yet to crank into motion. As Hadley walked to the village her mind turned, wondering at how easily she could be snapped back and forth. Yesterday, she’d been ready for the New Year; it had held all of the promise of brightness.

At the
boulangerie
Hadley asked for a baguette and two croissants in English, forgetting the simplest of French words. She tucked her purchases under her arm, and wandered slowly back to the cabin with her head down. She wanted to see Joel and hear him say normal things, have him kiss her first on the side of her cheek and then on the lips, and yet an uneasy feeling persisted. It was such a small, insignificant thing, a name on a piece of paper, and yet somehow it seemed like more than that. Just as lovers might slip trinkets and pictures into their wallets, Joel had smoothed and kept Kristina’s name.

Back at the cabin, Joel was standing in his boxer shorts, waving at her from the door. His face was cracked with a grin, his hair sleep-tousled. It was such a simple image that she fell into a smile. He ran a few steps into the snow in his bare feet and swept her into a kiss.

‘Are you mad? You’ll freeze!’

‘I watched you walking all the way up the hill. You looked like you were concentrating so hard, one foot in front of the other. Come on, give me that hand of yours.’

Inside the cabin he took the bread from her. ‘I’m ravenous,’ he said, tearing the end off a baguette and chewing it loosely. The creases appeared at the edges of his eyes, giving him a knavish look. ‘And I missed you, of course. If you’re gone for five minutes, I miss you.’

‘How will you cope when we’re back in Lausanne, then?’ she said. She perched on the edge of the table and swung her legs. It made her look breezy.

‘Don’t even talk about Lausanne,’ he said. ‘It’s five worlds away.’

‘But maybe we do need to think about it. I’m in your class again next week. Should I sit at the back? Hide?’

On the countertop she could see his wallet, as innocuous as a pair of folded glasses or a paperback novel. She tried not to look at it.

‘How good are you at hiding things?’ he said.

She watched him. ‘Pretty good,’ she said.

‘Well, I’m terrible.’ He took her chin between his finger and thumb and searched her eyes. ‘I don’t want to cover anything up any more than you do,’ he said.

‘But what if it’s not even a case of covering it up?’ she said. ‘What if Luca tells everyone? What if it gets out that way?’

‘Then we deal with it.’

‘You’re not worried,’ she said, ‘are you?’

‘Because, you know what? Some kid seeing me kiss you really isn’t the end of the world. If the Faculty raps me over the knuckles I can take it. If I get dismissed . . .’

‘You wouldn’t, would you? Not for a little thing like that?’

‘A little thing?’

She laughed, and it was a relief. ‘You’re right, maybe none of it matters.’ She decided to say nothing more.

They left the mountains by the same road they had come in on but it looked completely different in the full blaze of the winter sun. It was an unseasonably mild day for January and the bonnet of the car pinged with drips from overhanging branches. Hadley wore a pair of face-swamping sunglasses. She felt glamorous, and loosened. She was glad she hadn’t mentioned anything about the contents of his wallet; she’d had no point to make, she didn’t know what she would even have wanted to say. They’d made love in the cabin for the last time; his skin was cool from the outside air but his touch was feverish and full of want. Afterwards they had lain tangled, their chests rising and falling in a rhythm that she had no desire to break.

On the drive home it seemed as though Joel did everything he could to delay their return. He pulled over in the crook of a bend, just so that they could watch a tumultuous river flash through banks of old grey snow, the valley falling away behind them. He stopped at a roadside shrine, a display of Catholic devotion with an ancient-looking cross made from blackened wood. Such shrines dotted the mountain roads, and Joel told her they were erected by god-fearing alpine folk in the dead of harshest winter, praying for a beam of white light.

‘I didn’t think you were religious?’ said Hadley.

‘Why not?’ said Joel. He ran his hand over the knotted wood. Patted it. ‘You’re right. I’m not. But I’m glad that some people are.’

They climbed back into the car and she caught him glancing in the rear mirror.

‘You know, Kristina was religious, I think,’ she said.

‘What made you suddenly think of that?’

‘She always wore this tiny gold cross around her neck. I just thought it was jewellery, but maybe not.’

‘So perhaps she wasn’t afraid of dying.’

‘I don’t think that equates to being ready to stop living,’ said Hadley quickly. She sank down in her seat. ‘I don’t know, Jacques was married, wasn’t he? She wasn’t exactly pious.’

‘She only told you he was married.’

‘But why would she bother making that up? It didn’t particularly make her look good.’

‘Maybe it made her look exciting.’

‘I didn’t find it exciting. I found it sad. You know, it’s funny that you said that about her. Sometimes I do wonder if she always told the truth.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about recently. I always believed every tiny thing she told me, without question.’

‘That’s what friends do, Hadley.’

‘Maybe. I know she held things back about Jacques. I think she felt guilty about it, but when I was trying to piece it all together afterwards – where she was that Friday night, who she was with, why she was late – it never really occurred to me that she might not have been telling me the whole truth. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m really saying.’

‘That kind of thinking is a sure-fire way to go crazy.’

‘Yeah, that I know.’ Hadley turned her head to the window. ‘What about you? Do you always believe what everyone tells you?’

‘Unless they give me a reason not to.’

‘That’s the thing,’ said Hadley, ‘isn’t it?’

They drove on, the car humming through the otherwise silence of a white-blanket world.

By the time they hit the
autoroute
, joining the lines of traffic bound for Lausanne and Geneva, the sun had dwindled. The cool, soft brightness of the mountains seemed, just as Joel had said, five worlds away. In the bottom of Hadley’s stomach unease twitched and turned. She could already feel the questioning eyes of her Les Ormes friends turning on her, and hear the mounting babble of Luca’s gossip. And there was something else too; a feeling that was vaguer, indistinct, but no less unsettling.

She focused on Lausanne. She wanted to feel about it as she did in the beginning. She’d had an appreciation for all of the details then, making the city seem as if it was truly hers. They’d been the equivalent of the things that a lover might notice: a half-moon on a nail, a beauty spot, a lone hair on a man’s shoulder. But she couldn’t keep her mind where she wanted it. Her thoughts flitted back to this:
Kristina Hartmann
. A name. Sixteen letters. Her dear friend, reduced to the thinnest slip of paper. Smoothed and kept and guarded. Was it one of the reasons of which Joel spoke, sufficient motivation for doubting someone’s word? But to doubt
what
? It was such a harmless thing, yet it persisted in her imagination.

For the first time in days she thought of Hugo. She knew what he would say, and she could picture his face as he said it; his eyes darkening then brightening, a barely perceptible inclination of the head.
If we don’t ask the question we’ll never know the answer
. Had he said that once? Perhaps she had simply assigned the words to him, because they felt like Hugo, and they felt like last year’s Hadley, the one who tore about the city, with a photograph folded in her hand. She glanced across at Joel as he drove. His hands were resting lazily at the bottom of the steering wheel. He turned to look at her and smiled.

‘What are you thinking about?’ he said.

‘Just getting back to Lausanne. What this year’s going to be like.’

‘You don’t sound so very enthralled by it.’

‘Oh, I am. But I’m not sure I want this part to end.’

‘I’m with you on that.’

‘I like being driven around by you, you know.’

‘Well, let’s just keep on driving, then. On into France, the length and breadth of it, we’ll wind up on the Riviera, chasing the sun.’

‘The Riviera?’

‘You got it.
La France
. You’d fit right in there, Hadley, with your leggy legs and your boy-short hair and your sweet, sweet smile. With my arm around you I’d fit right in too.’

‘I didn’t know you’d been to the Riviera.’

‘I’m an American Lit. scholar, Hadley. Fitzgerald practically invented the place. Hemingway wrote
The Garden of Eden
 . . .’

‘Eden?’

‘I suppose it is a kind of paradise, in a twisted sort of way.’

She didn’t know where her next words came from. When she thought about it later, she supposed they had been threatening all day, shining at the lake’s tip, certain but slippery as a mirage.

‘Joel,’ she said, ‘this is going to sound strange, I know. But when I looked for the money for breakfast, in your ski suit like you told me to, I couldn’t find it so I took it from your wallet instead.’

‘That’s fine, honey, nothing strange about that.’

‘I found something in there. That was the strange bit. Sort of strange, anyway.’

‘You did? And what was that?’

‘The piece of paper from Kristina’s door.’

‘From Kristina’s door?’

‘You know, at Les Ormes. You said it was morbid to keep her name up there and you took it down. You were going to throw it away.’

He didn’t flinch. ‘Okay, sure.’

‘Well, I found it in your wallet. You didn’t throw it away.’

‘Okay. So what?’

‘It was all smoothed out and tucked in there, like it was, I don’t know, like someone might keep a ferryboat ticket or a photograph. Like a souvenir.’

‘A ferryboat ticket? Hadley, what are you talking about?’

‘I don’t know, I just thought it was odd that you kept it. You made such a big deal about taking it down. You said you didn’t want me to be sad any more.’

‘I don’t want you to be sad any more.’

‘And you said that I didn’t need reminding of Kristina at every turn. So you took it down.’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘So why did you keep it?’

‘Hell, Hadley, I don’t know. I just hadn’t gotten around to throwing it away yet.’

‘But how did it get from your pocket to your wallet? That’s a conscious thing. You must have taken it out and thought, “I know, I’ll keep this”.’

‘
I know, I’ll keep this?
Hadley, have you gone completely crazy?’

‘Yes. I think I have. I’m sorry. Forget I spoke.’

‘Hadley, what the hell?’

‘For a crazy moment I thought . . . I don’t know. Why would you keep it? That’s all.’

‘That’s crazy.’

‘But . . .’

‘If you want to know, I kept it for you. I felt stupid for insisting it came down. That’s it. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Hadley, I didn’t think that was you . . . going through my stuff, hatching theories . . .’

‘I’m not hatching theories, really, I’m not. I’m sorry. I’m an idiot. Can we just wind back the clock?’

‘How far? How long have you been fretting about this sort of stuff? How far do we have to rewind? Hours? Days?’

‘Minutes, only minutes. Hours, tops.’

‘I’m playing it safe. I’m taking it all the way back.’

‘Joel, honestly, it’s only since today. When I took the money, and I saw the paper. I was just . . . thrown by it.’

‘We’re starting over,’ he said, with resolution.

‘So where are we?’ she said.

‘Remember my very first class? When I asked Hadley Dunn to stand, and up you got? All embarrassed but kind of pleased.’

‘Yes. I mean,
no
. Okay.’

‘Well, we’re back there.’

He was serious. His hands were no longer lazy on the wheel.

‘So all the things that have happened with us . . . that’s all wiped?’

‘Yeah.’

‘We haven’t even kissed yet?’

‘Nope.’

‘So, what, we’re literally starting all over again?’

‘Right at the very beginning.’

She sank down in her seat and leant her head against his shoulder.

‘That’s a little forward,’ he said, ‘considering we only just met.’

They drove like that all the way back to Lausanne.

Despite what Joel had said, the silt of their argument lingered into their goodbye. It was there at all the edges, marring them. He stopped to drop her off at the bottom of the steep hill that ran up to Les Ormes. Outside it was twilight, and the city had fallen to cold again; all snow streaks and glistening pavements.

‘What, you’re going to make me walk?’ she said.

‘I can’t risk parking outside. Everyone’s returning from vacation, it’s not worth it. Unless your friend Luca has already spread the word, in which case, well, I guess none of it matters.’

‘Well, why don’t we presume the latter? At least then I get a ride to the door.’

‘It’s safer this way.’

‘Right. Safer. Whatever. It’s fine, I’ll get the bus up.’

Joel had pulled into the thin slice of car park by a small hotel. It looked all shut up, and the chalkboard with the day’s restaurant specials was wiped clean.

‘I thought perhaps you were taking me here,’ she said, her voice lighter, ‘one last night before reality hits.’

‘Too late, Hadley,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid it’s upon us.’ His tone was morose, all earlier spark fizzled out. He leant across and kissed her. Just once. Smartly.

‘So . . . what next?’ she said, her head tipped on one side, watching him.

‘I’ll see you soon. In class, I guess.’