“Bless your mother,” Liz said, inhaling the aroma of espresso and steamed milk.
The pretty face frowned. “It was my idea.”
“Of course it was. What a doll.” Liz patted the bed. “Sit down and share it with me.”
Ingrid made a face as she settled herself. “Too bitter.”
Liz took a long sip. “I think I was born craving coffee with my mother’s milk.” Not that Dorothy Shepherd had nursed her only child. What a ridiculous thought that was.
“Mom says the first time you guys went to Europe mostly all you did was sit in cafés and drink coffee. She said Aunt Jeanne did a bunch of stuff on her own ‘cause she was mad at you for wasting time.”
“Here’s a word of godmotherly advice, Ingrid. You can tour any time, you can even do it on the Net; but you’re only young in Paris for a moment. One hallowed moment.”
Between their sophomore and junior years in college she and Hannah and Jeanne had spent a week in Paris bars and bistros, staying up late every night, walking through the neighborhoods, soaking up Paris.
I’ll live in the Latin Quarter someday.
Who would you sleep with, Picasso or Hemingway? What about Yves Montand?
French men have sexy eyes.
Simone Signoret must have slept with every good-looking man in Paris.
Frenchwomen are sexy even when they’re old.
Liz had wanted to live in France since grammar school when she read
Our Hearts Were Young and Gay
and even more in high school when she struggled through
Swann’s Way.
The day after she graduated from San Jose State she was on a plane with a B.A. in French, a minor in Art History, and her parents’ distracted blessing
“I’m not even sure I want to go to college. Not right away.” The bed creaked as Ingrid got off. Liz watched her roam the bedroom, saw her cast a critical look at her chin in the mirror and try to flatten her long fair curls. Not as curly as Hannah’s. More like the ripples in a heat mirage. She flung herself down on the window seat. “I just know I don’t want to have an ordinary life. I’ll die if I stay in Rinconada. Remember when me and Mom met you in New York last year? Didn’t you love it? Don’t you wish you lived there?”
“I enjoyed it because I was with you.”
“You don’t know how awful it is around here. In my high school most of the kids are just so . . . crass. You know? Half the guys are computer nerds and the rest want to own a Ferrari dealership. Can you believe that? Can you imagine your highest aim being to sell cars for a living?”
She groaned and looked so miserable Liz didn’t know whether to weep for her or laugh.
“I’d just wither up and blow away if I had to live out my life in this hole.”
Liz remembered being sure of the same thing.
“Sometimes Paco and I talk about moving to New York.” Ingrid looked over at the bed—quickly, shyly, Liz thought—to see if she was being taken seriously. “He’s a terrific writer. Not poetry and all but analytical stuff. Someday he’s going to write books about politics. That’s what he wants to do.”
“What about you?”
Ingrid looked down at her toes painted blue-black. “Promise you won’t say anything? I can never talk about stuff like this with Mom and Dad, especially Mom. She would just totally freak if I told her I think I want to be a model. Not like Cindy Crawford because obviously I’m too short and my boobs are too big, but shoes and nylons and stuff.” Ingrid stretched one bare leg and foot toward the bed. “This guy’s who’s a photographer told me my feet are perfect for modeling because they’re narrow and the arch is perfect and I’ve got great ankles. See this toe?” She pointed to the one next to the big toe. “Shoe designers like it if this toe’s longest. Kids used to tease me about my toes but now I see it’s an advantage. Plus, I’ve got good legs, which is absolutely essential if you’re gonna model shoes.”
Liz saw only a foot, the kind that would probably do all the mundane and essential things expected of it for eighty or ninety years. She wanted to tell Ingrid she could do so much more with her life than pose, but she remembered being seventeen. It was a time all about posing.
“If Mom knew I was thinking about not going to Stanford, she’d go ballistic. She wants me to do everything just the way she did.”
“I think she wants you to be happy.”
“Right.” Ingrid rolled her eyes. “When she thinks about me at all.”
She resumed her prowl of the bedroom.
What do you mean,
when she thinks of you at all?
Ingrid sighed and sprawled on a little upholstered armchair across the room. “See, the thing is, I don’t want her in my stuff all the time. I don’t want her asking me questions or picking through my drawers, you know?”
Liz nodded.
“But I’d like to think . . .” Another deep sigh. “Well, she just doesn’t care much anymore. You know what I mean, Aunt Liz. We never talk. She never asks me what I think. She’s always either busy or depressed or talking about that crack baby.”
“She cares, Ingrid. When you were born—”
“I know, I know. But I’m not a baby anymore. I’m a grown-up. And grown-ups don’t really interest my mom all that much. She thinks she knows me, but she hardly does.”
Liz sipped her coffee, burned her lips buying time.
Ingrid began to prowl again. After some moments she said, “Can I ask you a personal question, Aunt Liz? I mean, this is the kind of thing I would, like, never ask Mom and if you don’t want to answer, you don’t have to. Okay?”
Everything else had been preamble; it was for this Ingrid had come in bearing coffee. Liz pushed her pillow against the headboard and leaned back.
“You won’t say anything to Mom?”
Liz crossed her heart.
Ingrid traced the cloisonné mosaic on the back of Liz’s hairbrush. “This is pretty. Where’d you get it?”
“Gerard gave it to me.”
Ingrid dug a big toe into the carpet. “What’s he like?”
“Is that what you wanted to ask me?”
“It’s sorta hard.”
Under the bedclothes Liz brought her knees to her chin and wrapped her arms around them to contain a burst of silly joy.
“Do you like sex?”
Liz must have looked surprised.
Ingrid’s hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. I mean, I just assumed . . . I mean, you do have sex? Don’t you? I know you do. Of course you do. Oh, shit.” Her round face was scarlet, more seven than seventeen. “Mom and Dad do it. I’m not an idiot who thinks her parents are, like, . . . celibate. But Mom’s in the middle of The Change. Dad says that’s what’s making her so weird. So I’m pretty sure she isn’t interested.”
Liz could interrupt, take the girl out of her misery; but it was fascinating to watch this display of youth. She had forgotten the importance of sex. Once it was all she thought about.
“I gotta say, you seem a lot younger than Mom. And I thought because you and Gerard aren’t married—”
We have sex constantly.
She mustn’t smile. It would be so easy to offend Ingrid’s dignity.
“Fifty isn’t so old, Ingrid.”
“I wasn’t saying you were old-old. Shit, I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.”
“And you certainly haven’t done that.” Liz patted a space beside her on the bed. “Tell me what you want to know. Sex is one of the few subjects I can speak on as an expert.”
Ingrid blushed a deeper red.
I love you. You will never know or even guess how much.
Ingrid asked, “Do you really like it?”
“More now than when I was young, actually. Although it doesn’t seem nearly as important as it did then. It’s not exciting in the same way.” An interesting question and difficult to answer candidly. What would Hannah think of all this candor? Maybe Liz should extract a promise of silence from her goddaughter. “The first time—”
“That’s what I really want to know.” Ingrid leaned toward her. “What was it like for you? The first time?”
The beauty of Ingrid’s innocence struck Liz hard where she hadn’t been hit before, in a protected place between her head and her heart and she felt a kind of lurch inside. A seventeen-year-old virgin. A maiden.
Why doesn’t anyone tell girls to pause and pay attention. Why are we all so eager to be broken?
“He was a sculptor in Brittany. Young like me and very stormy-minded.” Willy.
A bullet to the brain. If he had not died she would never have met Gerard. And gotten pregnant. Couldn’t she forget for five minutes?
“I don’t want to disappoint you, Ingrid, but not all Frenchmen are great lovers. Sex with Willy wasn’t very good. He was learning just as I was, and we weren’t either of us any good at it. I think he enjoyed himself, he appeared to; but I basically felt let down about the whole business.”
“You didn’t love him.”
“Oh, I did. Madly.”
“Then how could it be . . . a letdown?”
“Because sometimes it is.” Liz shrugged. “Sex is a big deal, I’m not saying otherwise. And sometimes love can help make it a
really
big deal. But sex, the basic in and out, it can be tedious.”
She watched Ingrid’s face as she tried to make sense of this.
“What happened to him?”
“Life, I guess.” She shrugged the truth away. “I don’t quite remember.”
Liar.
She remembered everything about Willy and about Guy who took her from him to Paris. “My next lover was older. He came to Brittany looking for new artists for his gallery. Sex was better with him, but I didn’t love him. I loved Willy. Bad sex and all.”
Liz felt jaded and parched. “Word of advice, Ingrid: don’t settle for less than love.”
“You love Gerard, right?”
Liz nodded.
“Then why don’t you get married? Mom says—” The blush again.
“Yes?”
“She says you don’t think you’re lovable, which is totally not true because—”
Liz rested her index finger on Ingrid’s lips. “She didn’t say I wasn’t lovable, honey. She said
I
don’t
think
I am. For some people it’s easier to give love than to take it. I think that’s what Hannah means.” Gerard sang the same tune. Lately it was his favorite ditty. “I’m not saying it’s true, Ingrid, but if it is then I’ve come to the right place, haven’t I? Like all those poor dogs and cats and that horse down at the barn? Isn’t this the place we all come to feel loved?”
“We
all
love you. Not just
her.
”
“Well, thank goodness for that or I’d have to stay at the Holiday Inn.”
“Rinconada doesn’t have one. They won’t let you build a motel or hotel in the city limits.”
“Now I’m doubly grateful.” Time to end this before Ingrid saw how she had gotten to Liz. “Let me get out of this bed before I grow roots. We’d see how lovable I’d be with roots growing out of my butt.”
Ingrid laughed uncertainly. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Aunt Liz. Honest.”
Damn. The girl saw things.
“You didn’t hurt them. Not a bit.” Liz waved her off. “Now, scoot. Tell your mom I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
Liz lay back and pulled the bedcovers up to her chin. A crowd of images and memories filled the room and she ducked her head under the blanket to escape them. Silly girl—there in the darkness was Willy, reaching for her with calloused hands smelling of clay. He had adored her in his young clumsy way and had expected her to wrap his love around her and wear it like a Dior. No wonder she’d left him. Guy made love with the hands and body of a man attuned to female chemistry; and when he touched her, she flew into a thousand vibrating pieces. He had understood what Hannah did, what Ingrid could not believe; Liz didn’t think she had love coming to her. Guy knew she would give whatever he asked of her; and the pittance return she would accept with gratitude and surprise. They parted after a year and she did not really care. There were other men, other buses up and down the avenues of Paris, London, Rome. After a long time there was Gerard.
Willy’s mother had written to Liz in Avignon to say that Willy was dead. A bullet to the brain. The funeral was scheduled for the next Saturday.
Come if you can, Elizabeth. He would be pleased.
Liz doubted this but she knew it would please Madame with whom she had maintained a Christmastime correspondence since leaving Rennes. Still, she did not decide to go at once. Her life in Avignon was comfortably settled in those days. She had sufficient translating work to earn a decent living. Income from her parents’ estate gave her luxuries like a condominium with a view of the Rhone and a late model BMW, which at the time Willy died was in the garage having its brakes replaced. Not that she would ever have chosen to drive to Brittany. Despite her years in France, she had never learned to drive ninety kilometers an hour rain or shine, day or night.