The Balcony Read online

  Olga had repaired and remodeled the interior of the manor as best she could. Later, she met Hugo at the Sorbonne, where she worked as a librarian, and once they were married, moved to his apartment on the rue Mouffetard, my favorite street in Paris. Summers, they spent in Benneville. “Hugo gets bored out here in the country,” Olga had said. “But it’s good for his focus. We don’t socialize. We are considered summer people, and I remain a Jew.”

  Having exchanged our goodbyes with Olga, Élodie and I headed along the courtyard, past a dry marble fountain shaped like an urn and circled by the pedestals of missing statues. We snaked through the maze of an overgrown topiary—where Élodie stopped to name the shapes she saw in the messy bushes (a cat, a dog, a castle), then passed by a muddle of vines and nettles that humped over horned and shriveled rosebushes. In the middle of the rose garden was the iron pergola, the design of which matched the balcony and which had been meant, originally, to resemble a cocoon. Now, dripping with ivy and ropes of wisteria, it looked instead like a sea monster, tentacles reaching every which way.

  At the front of the manor, we continued on toward the main road, hopping over the shadows of the plane trees that lined the drive. I made up stories that involved princesses, ogres, witches, and goblins. If the plot got too quiet—a princess locked in her tower too long, waiting for a prince—Élodie would prompt me. “Et donc,” she’d say, and I’d add in a knock at the door, a sudden storm, the hand of a giant raised to the window, offering escape.

  Where the drive met the main road, we turned around to go back to the manor, passing, again, the former servants’ cottage: a tight two-story house made of meaner stone than the manor, with a lichen-blotched roof and a lopsided chimney. The lawn in front ran to the road, broken up by beds of peonies. Out back, a well, closed with a sheet of metal, stood near a massive vegetable garden with a fence draped in raspberry vines. An old man and his wife, Monsieur and Madame Havre, lived in the cottage. During the war, Olga had told me, Monsieur Havre was the director of the boys’ school in Benneville and a leader of the local resistance. Now he was as slow and stiff as an automaton, often outside, hunched over a row of beans or training cucumber vines in the vegetable garden.

  By the second week of this calm routine, I was well over my jet lag and starting to feel stir crazy. Would they mind, I asked Hugo and Olga at breakfast, if I used the bicycle that I’d seen in the potting shed behind the pergola? I thought I’d go for a ride on one of the logging roads that cut through the forest.

  “What bicycle?” Hugo said. He was dunking a piece of baguette into his bowl of coffee as Olga cut toast into strips for Élodie to dip in the yolk of her soft-boiled egg.

  “Mine,” Olga said. She cracked the crown of the egg with a spoon. “It must be terribly rusted now.”

  “I didn’t notice,” I said.

  “Oh, to have the eyes of the young,” Hugo said. He looked over at Olga. “I didn’t know you could ride a bicycle.”

  “I used to take it to the village for bread, before the road became a nationale,” she said, scooping the egg off the shell. “Now you’d risk your life.”

  That afternoon, Élodie down for her nap, Olga helped me to clean the cobwebs from the bike, fill the tires with air, and drip oil on the chain. I headed off shakily over the blanket of grass and ivy to the gate that led to the forest. My father had taught me to ride a bike in the driveway of our rancher in the suburbs of Chicago, one hand on the back of the banana seat and another on my shoulder. Like other suburban kids in the 1970s, I rode without a helmet or supervision to the bowling alley and shopping mall. Chicago was flat, and it wasn’t until I was older, doing my undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley, that I discovered mountain biking and the excitement of hills. This bike, though, was the furthest you could imagine from a mountain bike, with narrow tires, a high frame, and no suspension. Still, it could go fast. By my second outing, I knew the trails that forked into thicker paths that forked into logging roads. I cranked the pedals, whipped around turns, braced myself when the front tire hit a rut or a tree root, maneuvered around the pyramids of felled logs.

  On my fourth ride, near a clearing wild with daisies, I found the pond Élodie had shown me from the balcony, the former stone quarry. It was about half the size of a football field with banks cut at jig-jag angles. On one side, willow trees spilled in a fluorescent blur. On the other side was a heap of quarried stone of the same creamy color as the manor, topped by a marble cross. Water lilies floated on the surface of the pond, dragonflies hovering, butterflies flitting, the willow trees shushing. The quiet was beautiful. I laid down the bike and, in one of those moments of youthful solitude when one is one’s own voyeur, took off my shorts and T-shirt and slipped down the bank. I dog-paddled between the water lilies until I noticed that my arms were coated in a layer of slime. The quiet suddenly felt foreboding. I swam back toward the shore. Maybe, I thought, during the German occupation, the bodies of partisans had been thrown into the quarry, thus the cross. Maybe I was floating in a burial ground. I swam faster, pulled myself up the bank, panicky now, then put on my clothes and rode back quickly to the manor, where I showered the slime from my skin.

  A week or so into my riding, I came out of the forest to find Hugo standing with Élodie near the rose garden, looking down at the grass, a cigarette between his thumb and middle finger.

  “A toad,” Élodie said. “We’re going to catch it.”

  “We’re trying to, anyway,” Hugo told me. “She woke up early from her nap. And Olga is at the butcher’s, pursuing a roast.”

  “I can take over if you need to work,” I said.

  “No. I’m stuck anyway. I’m writing with no idea of where I’m going. Pedaling with my eyes closed, as you seem to do.” He smiled. “You go fast on that old thing. I wouldn’t want to be on a trail when you come by.”

  “I like to go fast,” I said.

  Through the cigarette smoke, I smelled alcohol, that smell it takes on in a man when he’s had a lot to drink and it’s evaporating through the pores of his skin. I understood now why a bottle of mineral water accompanied our dinners rather than a bottle of wine, understood the lack of the traditional aperitif.

  “It’s a baby.” Élodie dropped to her hands and knees to study the toad.

  “Or maybe it’s a frog,” I said.

  As the three of us approached the toad, it jumped between my legs.

  Hugo tossed aside the cigarette. “I’ll get you, you little sneak.” He lunged at the toad and plucked it from the grass. “Victoire.” He looked at me as the toad writhed and batted its feet. “What have I been doing inside that house when there were delights like this right outside?”

  “Let it go, Papa.” Élodie said. “Please. It doesn’t like that. I don’t want to catch it anymore.”

  Hugo set the toad in the grass and it hopped away. He leaned over to kiss Élodie on the top of her head.

  “You’re right, ma bichette,” he said. “Pardonne-moi.”

  Élodie’s face looked thin and tight. I was afraid she would cry. “Let’s make crêpes, shall we?” I said. Olga had shown me how to mix the thin batter, and Élodie laughed at my attempts at flipping the crêpes into the air and catching them in the pan.

  “We will never have her goodness,” Hugo said as we followed Élodie back to the house. He looked chagrined. And he was definitely tipsy.

  “I certainly won’t,” I said.

  Élodie chattered away ahead of us, and we weren’t listening. Hugo pointed at the fountain. “Nine pedestals,” he said. “You know what that must mean.”

  I hadn’t seen this detail before. “Les Muses?”

  “Gone,” he said. “Every last one of them. I’ll have to find my inspiration elsewhere.” He smiled at me again. “I’ll tell you a secret. I don’t know how to ride a bicycle.”

  “I could teach you.”

  “I’m sure you could,” he said.

  That was when things shifted. I’d become more interesting to Hugo as I
flew out of the forest into his alcohol daze, and he became more interesting to me. He was an obsessive genius with an addiction. He was smart and tortured. I’d discovered his allure.

  At dinner that night, he asked if I’d heard of the Malagasy poet Rado Koto, the subject of his book. Well, I said, I’d read some of Koto’s poems in an anthology when my advisor told me about Hugo’s research. “In case you asked me that question.”

  “Perhaps I was waiting for you to ask,” he said.

  The four of us were eating bœuf bourguignon at a dining room table stacked with dishes waiting to be boxed.

  “Did you read his poem ‘Benneville’?” Hugo asked. “It’s about the village.”

  If I had, I said, I didn’t remember. Hugo went to his study for Koto’s first book, which had won the Prix Guillaume Apollinaire and had been translated by the American poet John Ashbery to great acclaim in the U.S. Like most French books, this one was of simple design, without author photo or biography. In “Benneville,” a woman returns to her “village of ashes,” and walks, barefoot, down “streets still snowing black.” She leaves having found nothing, “not even the memory of what she sought.”

  “Tell it to me, Brigitte,” Élodie said. She’d come around to the back of my chair.

  “C’est pour les grands, Élodie,” Olga told her, and brought her gently back to her lap. Her overprotectiveness irritated me more and more.

  “Did he live here?” I asked Hugo.

  “No,” Hugo said. To his knowledge Koto had never even seen the village. He wrote the poem before he’d stepped foot in France. He’d been living in Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital, making his living as a tutor and writing poems in an apartment without electricity or running water. “I suppose he read about Benneville’s destruction or someone told him about it.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, wishing I had something deeper to add.

  “Beautiful poems, maybe,” Olga said, “but a miserable, short life.”

  Koto, she said, had become addicted to heroin, “and then,” she whispered over Élodie’s head, “a belt and a chandelier in a room at the Ritz. And he was so young. Such a waste.”

  “What Koto did not have was the love of a woman like you, ma chérie,” Hugo said. Koto, he told me, had been at the height of his creative powers when he succumbed to addiction—“forty-two, which I suppose to you seems ancient.” The very boundaries of Malagasy culture that Koto protested in his later poems, written once he’d moved to Paris—taboos, ritual, pagan worship—had nonetheless provided him with a girding he’d lost when he immigrated to France and found what he called in one poem “messy liberty.”

  “He had an affair with your Andy Warhol,” Olga said. “It ended badly.”

  “Olga is not a romantic,” Hugo said. “For instance, she refutes the theory that this estate is cursed.”

  She didn’t like to talk about it, he continued, but it was not only Madame Léger who had died tragically. One of the other inhabitants had drowned in the pond, thus the cross on the bank. “Who was it, again?” he asked Olga.

  “Not in front of Élodie,” Olga said. She shook her head. “I don’t believe in curses. I believe that life is difficult and that people can be stupid and cruel.” She went back to cutting Élodie’s meat.

  Although I didn’t believe in curses either, I believed that a place could feel cursed. I was fourteen when my father’s heart stopped while he was walking the dog in our neighborhood. “Must be a fire,” my mother said of the sirens we heard from the backyard. Then the dog showed up at the fence, trailing its leash. That was the end of my childhood, and the beginning of my wanting to leave. I’d never much liked my landscape of tract housing and mini-malls. After my father died, that landscape became sinister.

  “Olga talks around things,” Hugo said. “I shall confess to you as well. I fear that I strayed this afternoon in my pledge of sobriety. Olga found me out immediately. She has the nose of a mouse.”

  “Tomorrow is another day,” Olga said. “Isn’t that the American expression?”

  I nodded and kept my face blank, feeling that I was trespassing on their intimacy, and also feeling culpable. That afternoon, before I came across him and Élodie on the lawn, Hugo had driven to the café and had a beer or a glass of wine, probably several. This he’d revealed to Olga. That afternoon, too, he had taken me in as I rode out of the woods, opened his gaze to me, said I could teach him to ride a bike. This he’d kept between us.

  In mid-July, I went to Paris for a weekend. I sat in Les Deux Magots, taking notes in a journal with the plume pen I’d bought at a papeterie. At a table by the window, I changed my signature, which I found too looping and girlish. I wrote my name over and over on a page until the letters shrank, tightened, became almost unintelligible. I walked the Marais, where I wanted to live, drank mint tea in the mosque of Paris, and bought macarons at Ladurée. At Shakespeare and Company, I left my CV with George Whitman, the store’s celebrated founder, who offered to put me up when I returned at the end of the summer. On the terrace of a café, standing in the pastel haze of Monet’s water lilies at the Jeu de Paume, mounting the steps of Sacré Cœur, I felt the gaze of men drift over me and linger. I’d had sex for the first time at eighteen with my high school boyfriend, and two partners since: with condoms and in the missionary position. My masturbatory fantasy life, however, was rich and varied, my imaginary lovers bold and adventurous. William Hurt in Body Heat. Richard Gere in American Gigolo. Of late, when I came, I thought about Hugo.

  At the Benneville train station, Olga waited on the quays in a shapeless dress and closed-toe sandals, shadows under her eyes. She asked where I’d gone in Paris and what I’d eaten. “I won’t miss the city,” she said. “It was too noisy and crowded and dirty. Cependant,” she added, as we walked to the car, for a girl like me, there was nothing like the capital. “Élodie wanted to come fetch you,” she said, “but she’s had a cough so I left her at the cottage with Madame Havre.” She was glad I was back, she said, because she still needed to finish the third floor of the manor before they left, and Hugo was “bloqué” with his book. He was at a conference in Pau for several days.

  At the cottage, Élodie came to the door with Madame Havre, the wife of the man in the vegetable garden, a woman in a housedress and apron with thick ankles and swollen knuckles. Élodie hugged my waist and said she’d missed me. “I thought you’d never return.”

  “Was she all right?” Olga asked, and Madame Havre said oui, Élodie hadn’t coughed once, and they’d played two games of peg solitaire.

  “The marbles come from Africa,” Élodie said.

  “My sons used to love that game,” Madame Havre said, so much, in fact, that the youngest had tried to eat one of the marbles. Her grandsons were visiting en ce moment, she added, and she’d convinced them to play too. “Ils sont gentils avec leur vieille peau de grand-mère,” she said—they are kind to their old grandmother. She called down the hall and a dreadlocked teenager waved to us vaguely from a doorway without lifting the earphones of his Walkman off his head.

  “Why don’t the two of you go read in the library?” Olga said when we were back in the manor. “Élodie needs a quiet afternoon to get over that cough.”

  Sometimes I wondered if Olga had Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Élodie’s cough was light and infrequent, the kind you might have with allergies. But then, I told myself, Olga must be anxious. She was about to leave her country, and her husband was at a conference most likely on a bender, maybe even sleeping around.

  He called that night after dinner. I heard the ripples of Olga’s voice from the parlor, where I sat reading next to a fan. The manor had been hot before I left. Now it felt muggy and musty. One wall of the parlor had a huge fireplace made from the same stone as the manor and carved with butterflies and bunches of grapes. I could hear an animal scurrying around in the chimney and hoped it was a squirrel, not a rat. Down the hall, Olga sat at a secretary, speaking into a hulking phone that seemed to date f
rom the 1950s. Her voice rose. The receiver clunked down. Instead of going up the stairs, she came into the parlor. She sat down on the couch and reached into the pocket of her robe.

  “Would you smoke this with me?” she said. “I bought it from Madame Havre’s grandson. He supplies me occasionally.”

  It seemed miraculous, that joint in her hand, like the pumpkin becoming a carriage.

  “Avec plaisir,” I said.

  “I’ve never been a drinker, though I liked a glass of wine with dinner. I stopped completely for Hugo. I only do this sometimes.”

  We passed the joint between us. She held it as Hugo held his cigarettes, between her thumb and middle finger.

  “Hugo slurred my name on the phone,” she said. “It isn’t that hard to say, is it?”

  “Olga.” I pronounced it slowly, already stoned. The lights had blurred and the cardboard boxes by the door bobbled. Olga curled into a corner of the couch, knees tucked under her arms. “Hugo won’t remember that conversation tomorrow,” she said. “He blacks out. He can lose an afternoon or an evening like that.” She snapped her fingers, soundlessly. “When I met him, he was writing his biography of Jacques Roumain. He’d sit at a desk in the library surrounded by books, ripping pieces of paper to mark chapters, and some of them would fall to the floor.” I offered her the joint. “Il était tellement concentré,” she said after taking another hit. “But his hands shook. I thought he had palsy. Eh ben, non. It was withdrawal. He was trying to stop drinking on his own. We started to date. We’d go to the cinema, have dinner. He said he found me refreshing. He’d always been with emotional, unsteady women like the one who jumped from the balcony of your room.”