American Stranger Read online

  “About my mother?”

  “About anything.”

  “No, she’s not dumb, my mother. She reads. Her favorite novel is Maria Chapdelaine.”

  “What is that?”

  “A novel by Louis Hémon.”

  “I’m sorry, I’ve never heard of him.”

  “Well, it’s a novel about us, or the way we used to be in Canada, a long time ago.”

  “A long time ago,” she repeated.

  And he repeated, “A long time ago.”

  Their talk seemed to her to drift, and all that mattered to her, and maybe to him, was the drift.

  “Tell me about the novel.”

  “The doctor doesn’t arrive to save the dying mother because of a snowstorm. Well, he wouldn’t arrive in time to save her, not in a novel about us, no, in a novel about us the mother would die.”

  Nancy let her hearing go, then she brought it back. “Tell me more about the long history of the French you speak with your mother.”

  “You want to know?”

  “I do, I want to know.”

  But he played with tangling and untangling her hair, as he would always do before he fell sleep.

  She raised her head a little and insisted, “I do want to know.”

  He placed the back of a hand on his forehead, thinking, then said, “It’s not interesting.”

  “It is to me.”

  He kept the back of his hand on his forehead to think of something interesting to tell her.

  Nancy knew there was in him always too much to say, and so his long silences, but then, suddenly, he would become talkative, and then, just as suddenly, he would stop talking and say, “I can’t,” as if there were no words for him to continue.

  He lowered his large hand onto her head and said, “Well,” and she said, “Tell me,” and she felt she was drifting off even more from what she asked him to tell her, what she wanted to hear from him, but there were no words for what he wanted to say, and none for what she wanted to hear. His hand moving in her hair, he said, “I can tell you there’s a lot of history in the pronunciation,” and she thought, what pronunciation? but she asked, “Oh?”

  He said, “We don’t say, in the French French way, ‘moi et toi’; no, we say, ‘mouépe’ toué,’ the way Le Roi Soleil” and he interrupted himself by raising his head from the pillow to ask, “You know who that was,” and she said, “I know,” and he lowered his head and continued, “Le Roi Soleil said, ‘Mouéje suis le Roué,’” and Yvon laughed a little and said, “It really doesn’t matter,” but, she tried to sound as though she meant it, “It does to me,” and for a long while she felt his hand rounding out her head under her hair, and there came to her again the sense of something that couldn’t be put into words, a sense she had never had with anyone but Yvon, with whom she was in bed, her head on his chest. “And then,” he said, “we say ‘j’avions’ instead of ‘j’ai,’ and that is what Molière uses when he wants his peasant to speak,” and Yvon laughed more, embarrassed perhaps that he should make such a reference, but also that he should class himself among peasants. He immediately said, “The French colonists never used the word ‘paysan,’ no, they said, ‘habitant,’ because they left the word ‘paysan’ in France.” He tugged at her hair and said, “So here we are in bed together, and you’ve learned a little about the long history of the French I speak with my mother.”

  “Tell me more about your mother,” she said.

  He said, “I can’t.”

  She lifted her head so her long hair slowly pulled away from his chest and kissed him and said, “I’ve learned something I didn’t know.”

  “There’s so much to learn.”

  “Now close your eyes and we’ll sleep,” she said.

  Which he did, and she thought, there is so much, there’s too much.

  Every Saturday morning, he left her for his parish, and as the weekend passed she felt more and more that he might not return. It was always a shock of relief to her to hear the doorbell on Sunday afternoon. Though he was now living with her, he would, as always, not presume to come in on her without first letting her know he was there. She ran down the stairs to meet him at the front door.

  He sat on the edge of the bed, silent. Nancy stood over him.

  She said, “It’s been some time since you’ve told me a funny story about your parish.”

  He looked up at her and tried to smile.

  Touching the tip of his nose, she said, “Tell me.”

  He took her hand in his, then leaned forward and pressed his nose and forehead into her stomach.

  “If you don’t have a funny story to tell me,” she said, “tell me what the matter is with your mother.”

  Yvon raised his head then lowered it so it swung on his neck and said, evasively, “Oh.”

  “Come on, tell me.”

  He sighed. “Well, my mother wants to give in.”

  “Give in to what?”

  “To what she wants more than anything in the world.”

  “What do you mean, Yvon?”

  He said, “My mother wants to die.”

  This made Nancy draw back, in her feelings and thoughts as well as in her body. She lowered her eyes, then, raising them, she said, simply, “I’ve made a stew—I know you like stew—for dinner.”

  “Can we eat after?” he asked.

  “After what?”

  She became used to Yvon’s impulses and was amused by them, as when, coming in from the cold so his red face appeared to be open with brightness that came more from within than without, he once said, his parka coat and gloves still on, “Let’s go away.”

  As he took off his gloves, she asked, “Go away?” She unzipped his parka and opened it so it fell off his shoulders and down his arms.

  “How much of America have you seen?” he asked her.

  “A lot,” she said.

  “I haven’t been anywheres,” he said, and he corrected himself, “anywhere.”

  She hoped he would take a little joke that would make him think he amused her. “Anywheres?”

  Now he assumed to correct her. “Anywhere.”

  She bit her lips so she wouldn’t laugh. He did amuse her, he did.

  He said, “I want to see, well, not the big things—you know, the Grand Canyon or the Old Faithful geyser or Yellowstone National Park—but the little things.”

  “What little things?”

  “That’d be for us to discover, but the little junky things that most make up America, maybe, like motels off the highway, or hotdog stands on a beach, or a high school baseball game, or pitchers of beer and country music in a town hall, or a hand-clapping-and-swaying church service.”

  She shook her head, not wanting to say that he was being unoriginal. He believed he was being entirely original.

  Yvon raised his arms wide. “Or just stopping in the middle of nowhere at night and getting out of the car to look up at the great big sky, the great big sky of America. Don’t you want to do that?”

  “I want to, but I won’t. And neither will you.”

  He laughed and she, relieved, thought: now he was joking. Or maybe he wasn’t, and she hoped he was.

  “You’re good for me,” he said. “You’re practical.”

  She suddenly said, “Not so practical that I’m with you.”

  “Does my being with you make you impractical?”

  “Wildly impractical. Still, if I’m good for you, you’re good for me,” she said. “You make me want to do something wild.”

  “But,” he said almost as if to mock her, “you know you won’t, and I won’t.”

  Her voice too high, she said, hugging him, “Let’s go out to a club and dance.”

  He didn’t hug her back, but said, “All right.” She couldn’t tell if he was agreeing just because she proposed dancing as
a way of making up for hurting him, a way of doing something, or because he himself wanted to.

  Whether or not he wanted to, in the strobe flashes from total darkness to momentary brilliance making him disappear and appear in different positions, he danced until sweat soaked his shirt. He danced as if in simply dancing he became possessed by a thrashing spirit. When he did appear in the flashes of light he seemed to be unaware of her, unaware of anyone; his ecstatic isolation awed her. If he couldn’t go away geographically, he would go away spiritually, and he would go far. When, in a brilliant white flash she saw him, his head back and his eyes fixed on her, she imagined that he was not seeing her, but someone else. He closed his eyes and hurled his body about as if trying to break out of a narrow space. And she wanted him to break out and be the Yvon Gendreau who would possess her. Hardly moving, but raising and lowering her arms, her knees, modestly swinging her shoulders, she stared at him. She anticipated being back in the apartment, in bed together, his body still hot and wet with sweat, both of them possessed with the spirit of sex.

  She had to sit, and she watched him.

  As wild as he was, sometimes verging on violence, she was never frightened of him. In him there was no evil, evil having to do with intended violence; his almost-violence was always unintended. That was it: he was an innocent. Nancy, who was frightened of violence, allowed him the innocence of his violence. He was a wild boy from the forest, smelling of wood smoke, and in bed with him she allowed herself to lose her own control, as if she became a wild girl, as if, in making love, they were spirits dancing wildly together.

  And if there was anything to give into, it was to give in to that spirit, though she knew that to give into that spirit was to fail in the world. Yvon was and would be a failure in the world, and would leave nothing behind for anyone to refer to, and everything he was and would be would be lost, as wild spirits were lost to the world, the only world there was, the only world to fail the spirits, the only world to fail the wild longings of the spirit, and Yvon knew, however much he would sacrifice this world for another, that there was no other, and that what he really longed for as he danced was to die.

  Nancy had drunk too much, was more drunk than she had ever been. Yvon drove them back to the apartment, where she fell onto the bed, dressed, and sensed only his helping her undress and, under the covers, too, his naked body warm against hers, him holding her.

  There was a thaw, and the ice melted in rivulets along the ground, the sun bright. And as if this revelation of the earth caused a revelation in Yvon, he came back early from his parish on a Sunday with what he called his rock-collecting kit in a canvas bag. He showed her its contents: a geological hammer with a blunt head and a pick behind the blunt head, two old chisels, one wide and the other pointed, a magnifying hand glass, clear plastic containers with blank labels, a utility knife, a notepad and pencil, absorbent paper, gloves, and tools that, he explained, were used to examine the rock specimens at home: bradawl, scraper, spatula, tweezers, dusting brushes, a bottle of diluted water, a pipette-topped vial of hydrochloric acid, and coins. If Nancy was only superficially interested in the explanation of all these—he used the coins to test the hardness of a stone—she was vividly attentive to Yvon’s own elated interest. She suddenly saw dimensions in him she hadn’t been aware of. The past gift of the quartz had seemed to her incidental, but to him, she now saw, it was essential—a dimension, maybe, of unexpected knowledge, of intelligence, of culture. She was impressed, as though a child were suddenly articulate about the solar system and beyond—outer space as a subject that had nothing to do with him personally but that required impersonal study of worlds far beyond his, a sign of maturity.

  To make up for having been too easy accepting his gift of the quartz, she asked him to tell her about its formation. As she listened to him say quartz was a mineral formed in rock at impossibly high temperatures at a time impossibly long past, and was made up of two atoms of oxygen and one of silicon, she was more aware of his earnest tone than of what he said, and she felt for him, for Yvon’s attempt to engage in an outside world made up of mineral and rocks.

  He said, “I thought, the day is so beautiful, we could go to the Blue Hills outside Boston and I’d show you a little about rock collecting.”

  “Of course,” she said with tenderness, a slightly sad tenderness, which maybe underlay all her feelings for Yvon. But there was admiration, too.

  She followed him along a path through woods to a stream below Great Blue Hill. “You know your way,” she said.

  “I come often. I get off the bus at the last stop it makes outside Boston, and it’s only ten miles or so from there.”

  She watched him, with an ever-widening sense of his engagement—an ever-widening sense of tenderness, sadness, and admiration—as he, crouched by the stream, reached into the clear water and took out an irregular-shaped pebble, mottled rusty and gray-green, which he held in the palm of his hand to study. He placed it on a boulder and with the blunt head of the hammer tapped it. The sound of tapping appeared to make the surrounding woods go silent, as if invisible people there became silently attentive, and Nancy was in fact concerned that someone, a ranger, would emerge and arrest them both for Yvon doing something illegal in state park land, but Yvon seemed unconcerned, maybe assuming that he was in his interest outside even the law. The pebble fell apart into rough pieces, the largest of which he examined with his hand lens.

  “What is it?” Nancy asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  She thought: he can’t be so knowledgeable after all.

  And yet he took notes, wrapped the piece in absorbent paper and placed it in a plastic container, and wrote the place and date on the label. Before he stood to leave with Nancy, he threw the other fragments of the shattered pebble into the river.

  “Let’s climb to the top of the hill for the view,” he said.

  “You won’t do any more collecting?”

  “That was enough.”

  Did he think she wasn’t interested enough for him to continue, or did he feel embarrassed that he couldn’t identify the rock, having set himself up as an authority?—maybe both, and she wouldn’t press him because she was sure he would refuse all the more to continue. She wanted to tell him that, yes, she wasn’t all that interested in rock collecting, but she was in him. He slung his canvas bag over his shoulder and again she followed him.

  As they climbed the Great Blue Hill, there appeared outcroppings of blue rock emerging from melting snow, others from fallen leaves of the year before. Yvon had become silent in a way that made her feel she had caused the silence, though she knew that she hadn’t, not really, that the silence was one with the shape of his character.

  At the top of the hill was a tower of blue stone, its narrow door of thick planks, the heavy, rusted chain that was meant to lock it broken, and they climbed up. The view from the tower was of Boston, far off beyond pine trees bright in the late raking light.

  She asked him, “Why are you so interested in rocks?”

  He was terse. “You can’t get more basic than rocks.”

  Back in the apartment, at the kitchen table he spread out the equipment for examining the rock more carefully, and Nancy, wanting to reassure him that she was interested, stood over him. He studied the fragment of pebble with his hand lens. She waited, wanting him to identify it, mentally urging him to know.

  He looked up at her with an expression of amazement. “It’s a meteorite.”

  “A meteorite?”

  “My God,” he said, “a meteorite. Do you know how rare it is to find a meteorite? So rare I never ever have thought I’d find one. And I threw most of it away.”

  He again studied the fragment with his hand lens, bringing it close to his eyes. He said, “It’s a chondrite meteorite.” Holding it up to her, he gave the lens to Nancy to study it. “Can you see the tiny embedded dots? Those are chondrules, granules of cosmi
c dust that floated around space from before there were suns and planets.”

  “Amazing,” she said, trying to let him know she shared in his amazement.

  He gave it to her and said, “It’s yours.”

  She pressed it to her breasts and leaned over and kissed him, and he, now a boy growing into maturity, smiled at her appreciation.

  “Maybe,” she said, “I’ll start collecting,” and she stood it up against a wine bottle covered with dripped candle wax on the mantelpiece.

  He was pleased, he was very pleased to show her something he knew that she did not know. Nancy told herself: she must remember, with tenderness and sadness and admiration, that Yvon was growing up.

  In a continuing trance of awe, he repeated, “A meteorite, my God, a meteorite.”

  “If it is so rare,” she said, “shouldn’t you let some authority know?” and immediately she regretted the suggestion that he was not an authority.

  He was contrite. “You’re right, I’m not an authority. And I should let someone who is know. But I’m too ashamed.”

  Snow fell again when the Easter break came. She would go to New York to stay with her parents and he must go to Providence.

  Again, Nancy said she would, on her way to New York, leave Yvon off in Providence. As she had more to pack than he did, he went into the kitchen to set the table for breakfast. From the front room, the Indian blanket drawn aside, she saw him holding a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, trying to decide which went on what side of the plate. He placed the fork on the right, the knife on the left, and she closed her suitcase on her bed and joined him. She thought he had to leave his world, had to, if not enter a world where knives and forks were assigned their set places next to plates, enter a world he didn’t know, and he was ready.

  Impulsively, she asked, “Why don’t you come to New York with me?”

  Having realized he’d got the knife and fork the wrong way round, he quickly exchanged them before he asked, “Come to New York?”

  She laughed, asking, “Tell me the truth—have you ever been to New York?”

  He, too, laughed. “No.”