Dreams of Bread and Fire (3 page)

Sydney carefully wiped the maple syrup from the corners of her mouth with a napkin. Ani saw a flicker of disdain pass across the child’s otherwise impassive face.

“
Je t’ai demandée une question,
” he snapped.

Sydney pulled at a thread on her robe’s cuff.

Ani sat frozen in her chair, hoping that the man she had instantaneously christened Le Con wouldn’t address her again. The father’s face grew redder and the child looked more miserable and obstinate by the second.

Ani had envied the kids she knew with the good fortune of having a father. When they made Father’s Day cards in elementary school, Ani addressed hers to her grandfather. Occasionally there were father-daughter events at school or at church, but Ani felt self-conscious about Baba’s filling in so she stayed home. Now, watching Sydney and The Asshole, Ani knew there were worse things than having lost your dad at a young age.

“What are they teaching you at that school?” John Barton demanded. “At your age you should be speaking French like a native.”

“Starting so early in the day, John?” Tacey appeared, puffy and pale in her yellow dressing gown. “Go take your run. The driver will be here in two hours.”

Tacey poured herself a cup of coffee and washed down an assortment of vitamins and pills. “I’m going up to put my face on.” As she reached the kitchen door, Tacey turned and said, “By the way, Ani, you should sleep in the guest room while we’re gone. Also, it would be a big favor if you ironed a few of John’s shirts. The housekeeper uses too much starch and I scorch them. Be careful if you run the washing machine. It’s overflowed three times and the Comédie Française Library is below us. They’re suing us for zillions of francs.”

Later in the day Ani took Sydney to the Tuileries Gardens for a ride on the carousel. After watching a puppet show they bought sandwiches and Orangina from a kiosk. An old woman with a grizzled lapdog about the size of a loaf of sandwich bread sat down next to them on the bench. The old woman struck up a conversation with Sydney, who chatted in flawless French.

In the late afternoon, Ani and Sydney made their way back to the Palais-Royal garden.

“I’m bored,” Sydney whined. She was dragging her feet across the gravel, intentionally scuffing the toes of her red leather shoes.

The muscles in Ani’s neck tightened in response to the pitch of Sydney’s voice, but she made an effort to be pleasant. “If you could do anything in the world, what would it be?”

Sydney replied, “I don’t know. Go to a ski resort. Or go on one of those big cruise ships. There are stores and lots of kids around. And swimming pools. And a movie theater.”

“Do you want to pretend we’re on a cruise ship?” Ani asked.

Sydney brightened. “Okay. We’re on a cruise. And I’m the princess and you’re my maid. I yell at you because you’re stupid and never do anything right.”

Ani forced a smile. “I have a better idea, Syd. How about we pretend I’m the evil stepmother who forces you to scrub the ship’s deck with a toothbrush and then locks you in a broom closet for the night?”

“I don’t think I like that game,” Sydney said doubtfully.

“Oh, no,” Ani said, “I promise you’re going to love it.”

In the kitchen that evening from a cabinet lined with all manner of American canned goods, Sydney selected SpaghettiOs for supper.

“You know, Sydney,” Ani said, as she stirred the congealed mass in the pan, “if my grandmother saw this stuff she’d say, ‘Food not fit for no dog.’”

“I guess your grandmother can’t speak English very well, can she?” Sydney sneered.

“Geez, Syd,” Ani said, “we’ve managed to have a pretty nice time here today. Why do you want to go and say something rotten like that?”

“You’re the one who insulted my dinner,” Sydney said defensively.

At bedtime Ani offered to read Sydney a book, but the girl said she wanted a story.

“What kind of story?” Ani asked.

“A true story. About when you were a little girl,” Sydney said.

She was lying in her bed with her newly brushed hair gleaming on the white pillow. She was sleepy and the pinched look was finally gone from her face.

“Okay,” said Ani. “Let me think.” She paused and shuffled through her catalog of memories. “My Rabbit Mr. Babbit” was the one she chose.

“There was once a little girl named Ani Silver. That was me. My grandfather came home one afternoon near Easter with a ball of fur hidden in his jacket pocket. It was a small white and brown rabbit with a pink nose. I named him Mr. Babbit. Baba built a cage—”

Sydney interrupted. “Who’s Baba?”

“My grandfather,” Ani said. “He built a cage out of wire mesh and wood and put it next to the garage. Baba would help me take Mr. Babbit to the basement, where we let him hop around. He liked to sniff everything, just to see if it might be delicious. I tried to get him to chase a marble, but once he found out you couldn’t eat it he didn’t want to have anything to do with it. He liked to hide behind the furnace and sit on old newspapers. Wherever he went he left a little trail of poops behind him.”

“That’s disgusting,” said Sydney.

“That’s a rabbit. One morning a girl from across the street came over to play. Her name was Brenda O’Malley. She brought some carrots for Mr. Babbit. I told her not to open the cage because Mr. Babbit wasn’t allowed out in the yard. She could drop the carrots through a hole in the top. But Brenda O’Malley was stubborn and she opened the door. Mr. Babbit shot out and rocketed across the garden. We chased him around and around until he bellied under the hedge into the neighbor’s yard. I called for Baba and my mother, but it was too late. The neighbors’ dog growled and then I heard a weird scream. Not a person’s scream. I didn’t even know rabbits could make a sound like that. My grandfather pushed through a gap in the bushes and then he yelled, ‘Ani, go to the house
now
.’ I shouted at Brenda, ‘Murderer!’ Then I ran into the house and slammed my bedroom door.” Ani paused.

“Is that the end of the story?” Sydney asked.

“There’s a little more. Baba hammered together a wooden box and put Mr. Babbit inside. He nailed the cover down so I never saw the blood. But even without seeing it I knew poor Mr. Babbit was in wet scraps of fur. I hated that dog. His name was Wolfie and he had great big teeth. My grandmother’s cousin and her grandson were at the house for the funeral. Van and I—”

“Who’s Van?”

“The grandson. He was a friend of mine. We dug a grave behind the garage with a big spade. Baba played ‘Taps’ on his harmonica. Van and I painted a sign on a piece of plywood. It said,
HERE LIES MR. BABBIT. A GOOD RABBIT. WE SHALL MISS HIM
.”

Sydney yawned and rubbed her eyes. Ani turned out the light.

Classes at Jussieu, the university’s science division, met for the first time on the day of the Bartons’ return. Ani was enrolled in the Department of the Science of Texts and Documents, but her afternoon started with a modern dance class in a drafty gymnasium. In the locker room after class she changed quickly and dashed to a building a few blocks from the central campus. She slid into a seat in a large amphitheater filled with long benches and tables anchored to the floor.

Professor Sofia Zed, the world-famous semiologist, swept into the hall wearing a voluminous black cape. She stood at the lab table searching through a black leather bag from which she pulled a compact and a gold tube of lipstick. The entire class watched in rapt attention as Zed applied a coat of lacquer red to her mouth.

Then the lecture began. While Ani scribbled notes on the social context of Mallarmé’s work, the students around her unwrapped sandwiches and candy bars. Someone threw a paper airplane across the aisle to get a friend’s attention. Several women in the back row were carrying on an animated discussion, and a student seated a few feet away from Ani fell asleep with his head on his arms. Ani was surprised that Zed didn’t reprimand the class.

At the end of the lecture, Ani rushed to the campus for a seminar with Michel Sondage. The professor sat at a small table in the front of the classroom shuffling through yellowing lecture notes, his gray wirelike hair a stiff wreath around his head. The room was crowded with pale thin students dressed in black. Everyone was smoking, including the professor, who lit each cigarette from the butt of its predecessor in a long train of nicotine and smoke. Sondage let the ashes droop on the end of his cigarette until gravity pulled them to the desktop. Then he brushed the ashes from his papers to the floor.

“The Infinite, what is the Infinite?” moaned Sondage. He tugged mightily on his hair as though trying to pry the wreath from his head. His cigarette dangled from his mouth as he spoke through a blue haze. “We will see, my dear students, we will search together for the Infinite. We will define its lack of frontiers. Where will we find the Infinite? It is in the poetry of Baudelaire, this we know, and the work of ’Opkins. We will be reading these poems. But it is also in the films of Joseph Mankiewicz. All of you, I would like you to go see
Suddenly Last Summer.
There you will come face-to-face with the Infinite.”

As Ani left the classroom her clothes and hair reeked of smoke. On the WC door someone had scrawled,
We are all prisoners of the state.
In the pitch-dark bathroom—the lightbulb had burned out—Ani searched in vain for toilet paper. She thought wistfully of the white clapboard buildings at the college she had attended.

When Ani arrived back at the Bartons’ apartment, Tacey called for her to come upstairs. Sydney was at a friend’s house for a play date.

“Give me that sad little thing,” Tacey said, unknotting the handkerchief-sized cotton scarf at Ani’s throat. “You can’t do anything with that.” Tacey pulled open a dresser drawer that held a colorful array of neatly folded scarves. She extracted a scarlet one. “This is the perfect color for your dark hair and fair skin.”

As Tacey demonstrated eight different ways to tie the scarf, Ani tried to appear attentive although she had absolutely no intention of arranging a scarf even two different ways. Tacey Barton was a grown woman of reasonable intelligence who spent most of her days shopping, lunching, and doing tricks with scarves. Ani thought of Asa’ s mother, Peggy, who was a woman of the same social class as Tacey Barton but with different inclinations. Peggy wore a floppy straw hat and leather gardening gloves while pruning her prized roses.

One evening when Ani was visiting the Willards on Cape Cod, Peggy had invited Ani to join her in the garden. Seated amid the hydrangeas and wisteria vines they had discussed, among other things, Peggy’s decision to drop out of college in her junior year in order to marry Ben Willard, Asa’s father. She had explained. Ben’s five years older than I. He was done with law school and ready to settle down. If I hadn’t married him right then he would have found somebody else.

There it was again, the algebraic theory of love. It ran in Asa’s family.

Tacey was saying, “I insist that you keep this scarf, Ani. And take this lipstick. It’s just the right shade of red.”

“Thanks,” Ani said weakly.

Tacey gave Ani an appraising glance. “All you need is a bit of makeup, a haircut, and some new clothes.”

Asa’s first letter arrived the next day. Written on yellow paper with blue lines, it was full of news about law school, the weather in Seattle, his weekly tennis games with a new friend named May. He said he missed Ani and looked forward to seeing her in December. He wanted to take her to Le Meurice for dinner, a place he had stayed with his parents. He hoped she was being good. There was a little smiley face after this sentence. Because she loved him she pretended it was endearing. Then he had signed it,
I love you! Asa
.

Ani pored over the letter as though it were a coded document whose meaning resided in the gaps and spaces between the words. Roland Barthes had described the lover as a semiologist in his savage state. Who was May? What did she look like? At such a distance Ani’s advanced skills in ferreting out betrayal were of no use to her.

Asa had given her plenty of opportunity to hone those faculties. The way he flirted with that woman on the ski team for most of a term. The time when they were both home in Massachusetts on Christmas break and Asa had slept with an ex-girlfriend. It made her ill to think about it. He was at his family’s house in Cambridge in the sack with somebody else while she was less than two miles away in Watertown, all trusting and full of holiday cheer. But once they were back on campus he had dropped enough hints that she had rooted a confession out of him. When he went to India he had sex with three women, one of whom was a hooker. He explained, But I didn’t know she was a prostitute until afterward. Oh, please, Ani had said, spare me the details. Unfaithful
and
delusional.

From the beginning his feelings for her were like a pendulum on a grandfather clock. When she tried to walk away he chased after her. Then, when he had her full devotion, he turned his back. Come here, go away, come here, go away. It was a hopeless wrangle.

Ani thought, But I love him and he loves me.

He had invited Ani to come to Seattle with him for the summer before he started law school. At the end of the summer she had offered to stay on. She had told him, I don’t have to go to Paris, you know. I can give the fellowship money back. I could work full-time at a bookstore and apply for graduate school here.