Along one bank of the river was a limestone shelf about twenty feet up. The water underneath was deep, but opaque from mud. The shelf bulged as it neared the water. Moulinards—young men and women both, and older children—began climbing up to access the limestone shelf. They stood along it and jumped one by one, launching themselves from the ledge with gusto, in order to clear the rock and make it safely into the water below.
René went first. After him, the man and woman who ran the kitchen, and Jérôme, followed by Alexandre. Even Pascal jumped, in his camp shorts, a bit of a belly hanging over them, from his priestly work, which was sedentary. The only ones who didn’t jump were the women with small children. Alexandre and Jérôme both had partners in that set, young women who sat in the grass and let the kids cover themselves in river muck. René’s woman was among them. She was the mother I’d seen in the crèche with a toddler in her lap and another at her knee, crying, with food on its face. Those two children were René’s, and as he emerged after jumping, they splashed toward him, naked and screaming with delight, and clamped onto him like mollusks he’d collected from the depths.
“California, you’re next!”
It was Aurélie. “All Americans must jump!” she shouted. She was on a rock, squeezing water from her long hair.
I was standing on the riverbank. Burdmoore, my fellow American, was in the water on his back, his beer gut skyward like a flotation device.
I decided it would be best if I went along with Aurélie’s taunt and climbed up there and jumped. Even as the idea of pushing off and plummeting into that water was not at all tempting.
I took off my shoes, planning to swim in my shorts. I had acquired a deep tan by then, and without tan lines, because I sunbathed nude on a chaise lounge in front of the Dubois house. I enjoyed the way the sun emptied my thoughts and flattened my feelings to a lizard-like drip of the minutes as they passed. I had come to suspect that the woman in Marseille, the tannest of the tanners at the private swim club, who tanned even during a windstorm, had been onto something. Submitting to the sun and letting it cook my thoughts was soothing.
Here at the swim hole, I decided to leave on my shirt as well as my shorts. My breasts and flat stomach and narrow waist, these attributes were not right for this milieu. Some of the girls were pretty, they had cute bodies, it wasn’t all cellulite and faded tattoos, far from it, but my figure might be cause for disapproval—among the women, that is, while their partners, to avoid trouble, would claim not to have noticed my big firm breasts, as natural as my name. I had once overheard Jérôme vouching for me. “She’s really nice,” he’d said, to his girlfriend’s annoyance. This is how it works. If you please the men, you will not please the women.
But if you please the women, you will not necessarily displease the men, and so I made my way up the muddy riverbank in my T-shirt and baggy shorts, followed by Burdmoore, who was primed to show Aurélie what he was made of too.
I stepped over knobbed tree roots, the roughness of which forced me into the same tender-footed postures and slow pace as everyone else as they had climbed up barefoot to reach the limestone shelf. Behind me, Burdmoore breathed heavily and slipped twice in the mud.
What I don’t like about jumping from heights into water, including from diving boards—even low ones into clear water whose depth is known—is that once you’ve initiated your jump, you cannot change your mind. You can’t turn back. I don’t like irreversible decisions. I don’t see the point. I always want the option of doubling back, reversing course, changing plan.
From up on the ledge, the water was a long way down.
“Go ahead, California!” Aurélie hollered.
I sensed that if I opted out, edged along the rock shelf and climbed all the way back down, instead of jumping as everyone else had, I would prove I was worthy of her dislike.
Just do it, I told myself. You’re being tested. Like those kids who have to put on a bulletproof vest and be shot at point-blank range by the Camorra in order to join the Camorra. All I had to do was drop twenty feet into cold, muddy water.
I closed my eyes and leaped, hoping to clear the rock.
Because I had not wanted to jump, was stressed about jumping—I imagined hitting the rocks, not clearing the cliff—when I broke the surface, my body was stiff, my muscles tense. Water shot up into my brain as I was forced down into the river’s depths. My foot grazed a slimy log on the bottom.
I struggled to climb out of the water, my feet sinking into its thick mud, which made the squelching sound of overlubricated sex with each step I took up the riverbank.
I chose a spot in the sun, on a rock near Aurélie, who was still pressing water from her several linear feet of hair.
She put her thumb up and grinned. Her grin had a sarcastic edge to it.
“Feels good, doesn’t it?” she said.
“Yes,” I lied. Water sloshed inside my ears. My neck hurt like I’d sprained it.
“You didn’t want to jump.”
“I jumped,” I said, and smiled blandly, pulling at my T-shirt to de-paste it from my breasts.
“You were nervous. Your emotions come off you. They go like this,” and she made a wave gesture with her hand. “You think you hide from us, but we see you.”
I pretended not to understand her.
With some of them I could turn down the proficiency of my French like I was adjusting the heat on a stove, putting my language skills on medium heat instead of high, medium-low, and when I needed to, a simmer of incomprehension.
“I know you understand me,” she said.
“Ah, yes,” I said neutrally, as if too dumb to understand what it was I didn’t understand.
I pointed up and said a-grammatically that Burdmoore was going to jump, slopping up my French.
He was on the ledge. There were jeers from below.
“I will now show you pussies how this is done,” he shouted to them in English.
He turned and climbed up a series of footholds in the rock. He went up and up, and then disappeared from view. He reemerged at a much higher ledge, so far above the river it was hard to imagine it could be possible to make this jump. He was at least fifty feet above the water, higher than the entire tree from which that brazen boy had dropped, as Pascal told me about the scandal of his teacher and their affair.
Burdmoore was standing on a precipice, a tiny and treacherous outcropping of rock.
“I can’t believe he’s going to jump from there,” I said. “I almost could not jump from the very lowest ledge. You were right.” I was trying a new tactic to win over Aurélie, self-debasement instead of bravery. “I was afraid.”
“I know,” she said. “You should have seen your face.” She was laughing.
I laughed too, not liking whatever she was referring to.
“There was this accident a few years ago in the Alps,” she said, still laughing, “where a tram full of skiers plunged to the ground. It was because of an American military jet. You people wreck everything. The jet sliced the tram’s cable, and the newspaper said the faces of the dead were found ‘contorted in terror.’ It’s awful, but,” ha ha ha ha, “I thought of that description, watching you. You were like this.” She scrunched her face up tight.
Ha ha ha ha.
We both looked up. Burdmoore raised his arms above his head like he was going to dive, or maybe conduct an orchestra.
