BETTER NOVELS AND BETTER CHEESE, and more annoying men, or so I had decided, until I revised this assessment, happy to have been wrong.
I was leaving Le Moulin one evening when René, the woodshop manager, approached me as I walked toward my car.
“Mademoiselle,” he said in his low voice, emitting little puffs of cigarette smoke as he spoke, “pardonnez-moi, mademoiselle.”
Where had they gotten this guy?
“Mademoiselle?” I said back, in light mockery. “I’m not your schoolteacher. It’s Sadie.”
His beautiful eyes narrowed. “Yes,” he said. “Not a schoolteacher. No. A girl with things to learn.”
“Is that right.”
“Yes.”
We locked eyes. When it was clear that neither of us was going to look away first, something shifted in his features. He dropped the cigarette. Stepped on it, smiled, and said I should get in my car and go to the lake. That I should park at the lake.
I was amused by this forward behavior, his stern manner, which added to his considerable sex appeal. I’d sized him up right away, that first moment in the woodshop. Perhaps by ignoring me he’d sized me up too.
He was, according to Nadia, different from the others. Could he be turned against Pascal? I weighed risks. Pascal had gone to Paris for a few days, supposedly to see his children. Le Moulin was having a “work party” tonight, to shell beans. It was a Monday, and there was a town festival in Sazerac on summer Monday evenings that the locals all went to. The lake of Vantôme would be deserted.
Dusk was coming on when I got to the parking lot. There was one old guy, fishing with a rod as long as a felled utility pole. The fisherman’s little Citroën, an old-fashioned Deux Chevaux, was the only car in the lot. I got out of the Škoda and sat on a park bench.
I was there a long time, watching this old man watch the lake. Periodically, orange-bellied fish flipped up out of the water, and then slapped back down, as if the lake were speaking in a language of splashes and ripples. Two cars passed on the D79. Dusk deepened, turning the water surface silver. The fisherman sat in his lawn chair sipping from a thermos, his pole out over the silver lid of the lake. The fish kept jumping to eat insects. The man was still, with no tug on his line.
How much of fishing was fishing and how much was something else, a way to empty the mind, to stop time.
I heard the rough idle of an old truck, recognized the utility vehicle shared by the commune. René was behind the wheel.
He parked, walked over, sat down next to me on the bench.
We watched the old man.
“It’s for carp,” René said of the very long fishing pole. “They catch fish this big.” He held his hands out.
“Do you fish?” I asked.
“Black bass.” He said this in English.
René, I was aware, didn’t speak a word of English, and something about the way he said “black bass” made me laugh.
“Why do you laugh?” he asked.
“No reason,” I said.
He reached over and put his hand on my shoulder, and then he brushed my hair back and stroked my exposed neck with his fingers. He was staring at me as he moved his hand to the back of my head and neck and pushed a little. And like that, he guided me down toward his lap.
Wow, I thought. This is how it goes? I just service him, right here on this bench?
That was what I did, while keeping an eye on the old fisherman, who never once looked back, as if his job were to face the lake no matter what. As if he would turn to salt if he looked away from the water, if he glanced back to where I was giving René an unhurried blow job on a bench in the grassy field behind him.
René made no sound, not even a sigh. His hand stayed on the back of my head, not rough or forceful, just lightly placed there, as I used my mouth and my hand, surplus spit. I liked his body, his directness. I liked his silence. He wasn’t going to lose himself. He stayed in character, his breathing even and controlled, a slight increase in weight from his hand on the back of my neck when he came, filling my mouth.
We watched as the old man packed up his gear. That pole was telescopic. He compacted it and rolled his cooler and chair to his little car. He loaded his gear and drove off, the dim halogen bulbs of his Deux Chevaux barely illuminating the road.
“The old guys around here all want to go to America to fish,” René said. “They want to go to Oklahoma.”
“What’s in Oklahoma?”
“Catfish you catch with your hand. They trap the fish like this,” he said. He made a fist and held it up. “They put their hand in a hole and wait, and these enormous catfish think your hand is food. They lock on, and you let them, grab their gills from inside and pull them out of the water. I saw a video. I would not have believed it.”
He moved that fist down and rubbed it over my jeans. We kissed. He tasted like someone who lived on cigarettes and beer.
He unzipped my jeans, and I shifted my weight so he could pull them down. He put me on his lap, facing forward, my back against his chest. He reached around, his hand between my legs.
With that fisherman gone, and just us here, it was my job, now, to face the lake, to watch the lake, which had lost its reflective power in the oncoming dark. I did not turn around to get a look at René, not because I would turn to salt but because I didn’t need to see him, I could feel his fingers, and he was doing his job, doing it well, surprisingly skilled for someone so gruff, and since I had no stoic’s role to maintain, I was plenty audible.
I HAD BECOME USEFUL TO NADIA, by bringing provisions up to the abandoned château, a miserable place where she was more or less camping, she and her pig, while they prepared for truffle-hunting season. We had a rapport (me and Nadia that is; I stayed away from the pig). I was hopeful I might cultivate her for something.
The gate of the Château de Gaume had no lock, just as Nadia had indicated, but the road leading up to it was not maintained. While I didn’t care about the Škoda, rented under an assumed name, I didn’t like the feeling of branches flopping against its windshield and pressing along the sides of the car. Thwacking the exterior, as if to say, You’re not wanted here.
At the top of that rough road was a flat promenade, bounded on one side by the castle, a mean-looking fortress with four tall towers ending in spires sharp as meat skewers. The towers were of thick gray stone, their proportions ugly and crude. The castle looked like a military armament, not any kind of home, even for a feudal lord. Its windows were all broken, curtained by spiderwebs, the interior bare and open to the elements through its rotten roof.
In one of his letters, Bruno had said that before their retreat in 1944, the Germans had attempted to burn the castle down, but the cold damp stones of the Château de Gaume had refused to catch fire.
Opposite the castle was a little chapel, in similar disrepair, with old vines like tangles of barbed wire smothering its facade. A reflecting pool occupied the center of the promontory, with spouts at either end. The spouts were the tiny penises of marble cherubs, facing each other as if they were meant to piss in an eternal loop. The cherubs were headless. The reflecting pool was dry.
Nadia was camped in a maintenance shed next to the greenhouse, where she had a makeshift pen for Bernadette. I brought her subsistence provisions: rice, cooking oil, canned tuna—dry goods, as I knew that she got produce and eggs at the open-air markets, whatever she could beg off the sellers as they packed up.
