American Stranger Read online

  “Shouldn’t we get up?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Then tell me about being French.”

  “Franco.”

  “You come from French Canada?”

  “Not me. My ancestors did. I come from a small Franco parish in Providence, Rhode Island.”

  “A parish? What’s that? It sounds like a village far away and from a long, long time ago.”

  “It is. It’s where I was born and brought up.”

  “Do you go back?”

  “Every weekend. It’s where I should be now. I’ll be leaving here to go there by an early train.”

  “Your parents expect you?”

  “My mother does.”

  “She lives alone?”

  “She lives with my older, bachelor brother.”

  “Why haven’t I ever heard of Francos?”

  “We’re not known.” He held up his hands on either side of his face and grimaced. “We’re ghosts,” he said, and he dropped his hands and laughed.

  He was joking, but his joking startled Nancy. As if to assert her self-control against the loss of control she felt, she placed a hand between her breasts, she said, “I’m Jewish. I guess we’re well enough known for you to have heard of us.”

  “I’ve heard of you.”

  And with a reassuring thrill of pleasure, she thought again that never, ever before had she ever made love with someone whom she was so drawn to as Yvon.

  She felt that he was pulling her out to some area beyond the bed, beyond the room, out into the dark, as if what he was doing was more than having sex, but struggling with her to make a ghost of her, while still and silent people formed a circle about them and watched.

  He turned to lie slackly on her, and she felt his breath on her neck, she felt his heart beating. She kept her arms on either side of him, as though to hold him would be more than she could now bear of the weight of his body.

  He whispered, “Wonderful.”

  And she said, “Yes, wonderful.”

  While he was in the bathtub, she remained in bed, dozing. He came in dressed but with his hair still wet and said he had to go.

  “My mother will be waiting for me.”

  Nancy didn’t want to hear about Yvon’s mother, or why she was waiting for him.

  “Lie down beside me for a minute before you go,” she said.

  He did, gathering her up, she felt, in his large, warm, and, as she now thought, peasant hands.

  “When can I see you again?” she asked.

  “Well, during the week I’ve got my classes and my studies and I have a job.”

  All she wanted to know about him was when she would see him again. She said, “Come and have some dinner with me next Sunday.”

  He asked, “Is that possible?”

  “Why shouldn’t it be possible?”

  “I mean, you really want me to?”

  “I want you to.”

  He put on his sweater and parka and scarf and gloves, and Nancy got up and pulled a sheet from the bed and drew it about herself to go to the door of the apartment with him. She watched him go down the stairs to the street door, where, the door open onto the snow, he turned back to her for a moment.

  The bathroom smelled a little of what she took to be his smell, mingled in the scented steam that rose from the bath salts she had poured into the hot, deep water. His smell was like that of wood smoke.

  Over the week, the roses on the mantelpiece dried and withered and turned black. Nancy thought of keeping them, perhaps just the petals in a sachet bag, but reconsidered: she must not be sentimental about someone she’d just met. She threw the roses away.

  But Sunday afternoon she waited for him, from time to time looking out the window. Snow was falling. She was looking when the downstairs bell rang.

  He arrived with his little valise—an old, khaki military valise: he had come directly from the train station.

  “I hope I’m not imposing,” he said.

  She laughed and held out her arms to him. She wanted him to impose on her.

  He was covered in snow, his hair, his eyebrows and eyelashes, the shoulders and sleeves of his parka, and his shoes had become encased in larger shoes of impacted snow. She helped him off with his parka and shook it as he shook his head and stomped his shoes. Melted snow puddled on the wooden floor. She threw his parka on a chair and stood in the puddle to put her arms around him and kiss him.

  His body, in bed, seemed to her to exhale the freshness of snow, then, when the blood heated it, the muskiness of wood smoke.

  She cooked him a meal on the old gas stove, and, as they ate at the maplewood drop-leaf table in the kitchen, she asked about his parish, where he had just come from, which she thought of as far, far away, maybe deep in a snowbound forest. But he seemed not interested enough to tell her about his parish.

  From his valise he took out what looked like a huge, jagged crystal and held it out to her and said, “I brought this to give to you.”

  She took it in both hands and lifted it to her eyes. “What is it?”

  “It’s quartz, from my collection of rocks and minerals.”

  The quartz was in part opaque, in part with layers upon translucent layers.

  “You have a collection?”

  “I have a collection of all kinds of stones, from granite to quartz. I like the stones embedded with mica best, I guess, because the mica sparkles in the rough black stone.”

  Nancy said, “You love beautiful things.”

  He shook his head, as if she must not take him seriously, and yet he said, “I do, I do.”

  “Well, thank you.” She stared again into the quartz, and suddenly wondered why Yvon had given it to her. She said, a little surprised, “It really is beautiful.”

  “Even more so if you hold it up to the light.”

  She did, against the sudden winter bright rays through the dirty window, and it refracted the light.

  “Do you like it?” Yvon asked.

  “I do.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “I’m not imposing it on you?”

  “Imposing it on me?”

  “I worry that I’m imposing on you. Am I? Am I demanding too much?”

  “You don’t seem to me to demand anything,” she said.

  She didn’t know where to put the quartz crystal: she felt it needed a special place, one he would recognize as special, one he would recognize as her finding him special. She looked about the room, and, drawn through the rays of late sunlight, went to the window and set the quartz on the lower windowsill, where it refracted the light brilliantly. She returned to where Yvon stood and together they looked at the brilliantly refracted light. She reached out an arm and placed it over his shoulders, and this gave him all the permission he needed to pull her closer to him, raise the palm of her hand to his lips so that it contorted her arm with a flash of pain, but the pain gave her a sense of the reality of his passion. He bit into the flesh of her palm under her thumb, then he said, “I want so much.”

  Nancy drew her hand away, apprehensive about what Yvon wanted from her, and to deflect him from whatever that was she asked, “How’s your mother?”

  “Oh,” he said, and shrugged, and she understood that he didn’t want to talk about his mother.

  “And your brother?”

  “He’s taking care of my mother.”

  Pressing him, she asked, “Your mother needs to be taken care of?”

  He wouldn’t be pressed beyond saying, “I go every weekend to help my brother do just that.”

  All right, she thought, he wouldn’t talk about his mother. She asked, “That’s everything he does, he takes care of your mother?”

  “He has a small printing business in the parish.”

  “What’
s his name?”

  “Cyriac.”

  “Is that a Franco name?”

  Yvon laughed. “It isn’t Irish or Italian or Polish.”

  “Well,” she said, “tell me something about your parish.”

  “A story?”

  “I’d like a story.”

  “Let me think.” He put a hand over his forehead while he thought, and, thinking, seemed to try to laugh. “I want to tell you a funny story, a story that’ll make you laugh.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Here’s one,” he said, “a story my grandmother used to tell me. She made medicine from sumac berries she collected, and, without her knowing it, once the medicine fermented it became really potent, and everyone in the parish, even the pastor of the parish church, kept coming to her for a bottle to cure illnesses none of them had.”

  “Where did your grandmother learn to make a medicine from sumac berries?”

  “From her mother. My grandmother was an Indian, Micmac.”

  “So you’re part Indian.”

  “Most Francos are.”

  “So are the people in your parish a kind of tribe?”

  “A kind of, I suppose.”

  “It sounds far away.”

  “Oh,” he said, “very far away.”

  But she knew it wasn’t really that far if it was in Providence, a short train ride away.

  Before he came to bed that night, he stood by the window and looked out. He looked out, she thought, at the gas lamp on the street and the snow wheeling around it. She lay quietly, waiting for him to turn and come. He was wearing only a tee shirt, so half his buttocks were exposed. Getting into bed, he reached out to her.

  He tickled her, licked her ears, played with her hair, and interlaced her fingers in complicated ways with his. And then, as if love making were everything in the world he must have, he became passionate.

  At night the steam heat in the apartment was turned off, and, asleep, they held each other. When at times she awoke because she was cold and found him, in the light from the streetlamp through the window, lying apart from her, his eyes open, she’d look at him for a while before moving over to him and putting her arm about his waist, and he’d close his eyes.

  Through November and December, during which the snow deepened, froze over, and deepened more, he came to her every Sunday afternoon on his return by train from Providence to Boston. They didn’t see each other over the week. Even though they were at the same university, he was an undergraduate majoring in French and she a graduate studying for a master’s in English, and that made a big difference between them. Nancy thought, also, that maybe she preferred seeing him only on Sunday afternoons, right from his parish. Maybe she preferred having him separate from the rest of her life, in which she went out with friends for a meal or for drinks at a place called My Place Or Your Place. All week, she looked forward to Sunday, the earlier the better.

  The next time she asked about his parish he told her a story about an old woman named Eva Lajoie who visited everyone in the parish, just walked in on them. She had bulging breasts and hair on her chin, and she was known for farting fits that she tried to control by holding her breath and going rigid. Everyone knew she was having a fit when she stopped talking and held her breath and went rigid. She always had a lot to tell, about the sick and dying, about wakes and funerals. Madame LeBlanc’s cancer was coming out all over her body in bleeding sores, Monsieur Levesque had sat up just before he died and shouted “Tabernacle!” at his wife.

  Nancy stopped him. What did “tabernacle” mean?

  It meant where the consecrated host was kept in church, and it was the worst, most blaspheming word you could say in Franco.

  She told him to go on.

  Madame Dandeneau’s son was drunk at her wake, and Madame Legrand had asked in her will for a High Mass for her funeral but her daughters paid for only a Low Mass. It wasn’t for this gossip that Eva Lajoie was welcomed by everyone, but for the fits and the fart, which always came after she had thought the fit was over and she breathed out and relaxed. Yvon remembered her talking about her premonitions—people in the parish were always having premonitions—of her own death.

  “What happened to her?” Nancy asked.

  “Her premonitions were fulfilled,” he said. “She died.”

  Nancy didn’t know if she should laugh at this or not, and only did when Yvon did.

  He came back from Providence one late afternoon and said nothing about the parish, maybe because he thought she’d heard enough. She hadn’t heard enough. She thought that maybe he felt his stories were no longer funny, and unless he could make them funny he shouldn’t tell them. Or, she thought, maybe he was low and felt he couldn’t tell her anything that would make her laugh. She wanted him to be spirited, as he always was when his enthusiasm about what he was saying animated his face, his hands, all his body.

  While they were eating, she asked him, “Don’t you have a story for me?” She wanted to raise his spirits and also to find out more about him, because, for all the stories he told her about his parish, she still had no idea, no idea at all, where he came from or who he was.

  He sighed, then said, “I went to a wake on Friday evening and a funeral Saturday morning.”

  “Oh.”

  “What about your weekend?”

  “I saw Manos,” she said.

  “He gave a party?”

  “He took me to a party given by a friend of his, in Brookline, where I didn’t know anyone.”

  “I didn’t think not knowing anyone would stop you from knowing anyone you wanted to know.”

  She smiled. “I didn’t want to know anyone.”

  She washed the dishes and he dried, both silent, and both thinking. She was thinking of him, but she had no idea what he was thinking.

  She asked, “Are there any Jews in your parish, any at all?”

  “Jews in the parish?” he exclaimed. “I didn’t even know there were Jews in Providence, or Boston, or all of New England. Jews live only in New York.”

  “That’s me—a Jew from New York.”

  He laughed. “That’s what you are—a Jew from New York.”

  “And what does that mean to you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  As she was clearing the table, he took from her the two plates she held and placed them back on the table and put his arms around her.

  “Please,” he asked, “can we go to bed?”

  She smiled. “You’re tired?”

  Smiling back, he said, “No, not tired, not in any way tired.”

  “Lonely?” He pressed his forehead against hers.

  In bed, he grabbed her and pulled her to him and almost chanted, “Oh, I want, I want, I want—”

  He was hurting her so she dug her nails into his shoulders and he let go. He rolled away onto his side. She reached out and held him. He pressed his face into the side of her neck, and she rocked him a little in her arms.

  They began to meet during the week on campus between classes, and she sometimes cut a class to meet him. He would not cut a class; his duty to his studies would not allow him even though she tried to make fun of him for just this: his sense of duty. She knew, absolutely, that he did not date anyone else, and would have been shocked if she did. She didn’t. She might make fun, lightly, about his sense of duty, but she liked it for the reassurance it gave her. She had no doubts about him, none.

  He always waited for her to invite him to her apartment; he wouldn’t presume to take going there for granted. Leaving her on campus to return to his room to study—he must go to his room to study—she would say, “See you later,” which was not quite enough of an invitation; he’d ask, “What time?” and, as always, he rang her bell at just that time. Again, she’d joke with him that he was, oh, so very polite, and should appear whenever he wanted, but she wa
s also reassured by this politeness, this courteousness. She joked about his chivalrousness—opening a door for her, carrying her books, walking on the outside on the sidewalk, bringing small gifts of postcard reproductions of works of art—but all this also reassured her. And in her apartment he respected her private life; she knew he would never ask who telephoned her while they were together, who were the friends whom she saw on her own, whom she had slept with, though he must have known about Manos.

  But for all this reserve, when they were together making love he was, amazingly, without reserve. Their love making could start up suddenly, as if the potential of it were a constant in the slightly steamy heat of the apartment, and his smallest gesture—yanking off his tie and unbuttoning his collar, pulling her hair back from her face and letting it fall, a smile—would provoke larger, violent gestures of their whole bodies.

  She was preparing tomato sauce for pasta. He came into the kitchen. He sucked sauce from her fingers, and, leaving the sauce in the pot, they spent the evening and night and dawn in bed, and all her body was tinglingly chafed by his light beard.

  He always left in the morning to return to his room, especially if he were studying for an exam.

  At the beginning of Christmas break, she drove him to Providence on her way to New York. Though she said she would take him all the way to his parish, he insisted no, she shouldn’t, he could take a bus from the train station.

  “Where is your parish?” she asked. “Is it far from downtown?”

  “It’s far enough that you’d go at least an hour out of your way.”

  “That’s all right with me.”

  “No,” he repeated.

  He probably didn’t want her to see his parish, and she assumed he didn’t because it was a poor place, because he knew she came from a wealthier place. But he seemed unaware of the signs that marked him as poor: his frayed plaid shirts, a sweater with a hole in the elbow, his old army valise. Whatever it was he didn’t want her to see, which had to be more than that the parish was poor, she couldn’t insist on going there, she couldn’t make him show her what he didn’t want to.