Ellen in Pieces (11 page)

He had two children who lived up in Lyon with their mother. He turned to Ellen. “You are divorced too.”

“Who told you that?” Ellen asked.

“My mother,” he said.

Ellen could have said that there were three people sitting at the long table whose marriages had failed, or who had failed their marriages, though afterward she was glad she hadn’t, because it had been a perfect evening. Jean-François didn’t seem to want it to end. Ellen served lamb, massaged, kneaded, and spanked until the thyme she’d gathered on the trail had penetrated the flesh. Jean-François praised it, and while Celine ate only the lentils and the salad, she told Jean-François that Ellen was spoiling her with her cooking. And it seemed to Ellen that whenever she left the common room and went to the kitchen for another course, she
could feel Jean-François’s eyes, darkly framed by the glasses, following her.

She was wearing the green dress.

Eventually he looked at his watch, heaved a Gallic shrug, rose. Celine and Ellen walked him out to his Audi, where he kissed them each three times—left cheek, right cheek, left cheek.

To Ellen he said, very tenderly,
“Bonne nuit, Celine.”
And to Celine, “
Bonne nuit, Hélène
.”

Both women burst out laughing.

Going up to their room, Ellen stumbled. She would have screwed Jean-François if Celine hadn’t been there. If Celine had gone to bed instead of yawning on the floor of the common room with her long legs twisted into the lotus position. Why hadn’t she? Celine didn’t want to screw him anyway. She would have found it demeaning.

Ellen shook a Zopiclone out of the bottle, squinted at its turquoiseness.

“Are you sure you want to take that, Ellen? After all you drank? I can prepare you a remedy that will work just was well.”

S
URPRISE,
surprise, she was angry in the morning. Angry and hungover.

Celine was still in bed, sleeping holistically after her temperate evening, until Ellen asked, loudly, “Why do you have to tell everyone I’m divorced?”

Celine’s eyes flew open.

“It makes me feel like a failure,” Ellen said.

Celine sighed. “You’re not a failure, Ellen. Larry’s a failure.”

“Larry’s a failure? Larry is the most successful person you know.” She clutched her headache. Why did she defend him all the time?

“Ellen? I’ve said it before. Here I go again. Larry is a jerk. He screwed everyone. Forget about him.”

“Did he screw you?” Ellen asked.

“I wouldn’t let Larry near me.”

“Then what do you know about it?”

“You told me!” Celine said, throwing back the covers and springing up. “You’ve told me so many times!” She turned her bony back to Ellen, stripped off her pyjama top, struggled into her bra.

“You seem defensive,” Ellen said.

“Oh, shut up.”

“You are. You’re defensive. So did you sleep with Larry or not?”

Celine drove one leg, then the other, into tiny cotton panties. She yanked them over her enviably skinny ass.

“Why aren’t you answering me? Yes, or no?”

Celine grabbed her clothes and her yoga mat and walked out.

Angry, actually.

A
S
soon as Ellen got to town, she bought a postcard for Georgia. At the café, she wrote:
Sitting beside a reservoir. About to fling myself in.
Like her father had.
Then this holiday will be over!

She felt like it. She really did.

Instead, she opened Colette, dragged her eyes down the page. It didn’t make sense. Léa loses her young lover, her darling Chéri, to her rival’s daughter. Now she looks in the mirror and sees
an old woman, out of breath … what could she have in common with that crazy creature?

What crazy creature? Ellen turned the page.
The End?

She gathered up her things and went inside to pay. They would never come out. You could die at your table, your face on the plate, flies swarming above you, and they wouldn’t come out.

In the café bathroom, she combed her hair, which she had apparently neglected to do before leaving the
gîte
. She picked the grains of sleep out of her eyes.

The walk back helped. Twice, she dropped Colette because she had to keep hoisting her stretched-out skort. Each time she bent over to pick up the book from the dusty roadside, her mood relaxed its hold a little. By the time she reached the campground, it was dawning on her that she had behaved badly.

Surprise, surprise.

Celine was in the pool. It was unheated, too cold for Ellen, she had discovered the first day when she dipped her hand in. Celine, though, was made of stiffer stuff, and there stood Jean-François, watching her ply the waters. Ellen watched him watching her friend’s long lithe body glide the blue length of the pool, his glasses trained on her, magnifying her, bringing her closer. Who could blame him? Celine looked thirty under water.

Jean-François glanced up and, seeing Ellen, hurried over. “There was a dead mouse in the pool this morning. I didn’t have time to get it out. I came to tell her. But maybe I shouldn’t now. What she doesn’t know?
Ça ne la blessera pas.
”

He followed Ellen away from the pool. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“You are crying.”

She blinked through the sudden tears. She was ashamed of how she had goaded Celine that morning—Celine who was like a sister to her. “It’s nothing. It’s stupid.” Her skirt was hanging low on her hips. She yanked it up and Colette fell to the ground again. And Ellen remembered the last line of the book and her own harried face in the café mirror, uglier for never, ever being in the wrong.

“I finished my book,” she told Jean-François as she bent to pick it up. “I didn’t bring another.”

“We have books!” Jean-François guided her by the elbow toward the
gîte.
“English books. People leave them.”

In the common room where they had eaten the night before, he pulled something off the shelf. Dean Koontz. He squeezed her shoulders, ran his hands up and down her bare arms as she clasped both books to her chest. When he kissed her, it was full on the lips, not alternate cheeks, and for a long time. He tangoed her against the bookshelf and lapped inside her mouth. And Ellen kissed him back like she had nothing to lose, which was true.

Jean-François searched his pocket and came up with a scrap, a receipt it looked like. “Write your e-mail address. Here.” There was a jar on the shelf. “Here is a pen.”

When she’d written her address, he took the receipt. Then he took her book, kissing her wrist as payment. “I am going to read this book about Colette.”

“Actually, it’s about Chéri,” Ellen said.

“It will be good for my English. Now I have to go back to work. You’re not leaving yet? Will I see you later?”

“I sure hope so,” Ellen said.

Upstairs, the shower was running, meaning Celine had probably walked right past the open door of the common room. Ellen lay on her bed. She could still feel it, the ridge of the bookshelf impressing itself into the small of her back, the fullness of two tongues in her mouth.

The shower turned off. A few minutes later, Celine came in. Seeing Ellen, she made a sound. Disgust maybe. Or hurt.

“I’m sorry,” Ellen said.

“Oh, right,” Celine said.

“I am.”

Celine applied some kind of balm to her lips. When she finished, she asked, “Do you want to go or stay?”

“What do you want to do?” Ellen said.

“I don’t care either way.”

But Ellen could tell that she did.

“Let’s go then,” she said.

T
HE
last four days of the hike were on flatter terrain, much of it on roads. They felt almost merry, walking along, Ellen suffused with longing the whole way. She couldn’t stop thinking about the kiss and that maybe Jean-François would write. How glad she was that they’d left before she screwed him. Because sometimes a kiss was enough. The bittersweetness of it. He had picked her. Picked her like a fruit.

In Ellen’s experience, the promise of love was usually more pleasurable than its fulfillment.

She told Celine, “Thank you for bringing me here. I love it. I would come back in a second.”

On the roadside, frequent casualties
—les papillons
(another word she knew!), their wings a startling blue, or variations of orange and brown.
Flutter, flutter.
All along the way, she took pictures of the inch-high daffodils and the bizarre beetles they encountered on the trails. She used Celine’s hand as a frame of reference.

Otherwise no one would believe her.

T
ONY
got her postcard.

“I
kissed
someone,” she told him at her next appointment.
“Doesn’t that count? Against a bookcase. I almost slipped a disc. And Tony? It was a
French
kiss.”

Tony said,
“Oo-la-la!”

T
WO
weeks after they got back, Celine phoned to say that Jean-François had e-mailed.

“I didn’t realize you exchanged addresses,” Ellen said, perhaps in a give-away tone, because Celine clammed up after that.

“What did he say?”

“Nothing. Just hello. Anyway, I should go.”

“Thanks for telling me,” Ellen said. She was already checking her own e-mail. Nothing from Jean-François, just a long complaining message from Mimi in Toronto.

Georgia called fifteen minutes later. Ellen was still at her desk, rooted there in shock. “What happened on your trip that you didn’t tell me about, Ellen?”

Ellen had wanted to savour Jean-François a little longer, to keep him a secret, to see what might happen if she didn’t charge at a man for a change. But it had never been secret. Celine was in on it, though she hadn’t mentioned, or even hinted at, seeing Ellen and Jean-François kiss.

“Celine just phoned me,” Georgia said. “She’s got a thing going with some guy there.”

In the background, Gary called, “Get the details!”

Obviously, Jean-François had kissed Celine too, in between ogling her in the pool. He had wooed Ellen in town, then driven back to the
gîte
to woo Celine. That kiss, which Ellen had cherished as a rarity, a curiosity, a delicate and precious wonder, it meant nothing.

“He was nothing,” she told Georgia. “Just French. It made him seem more attractive than he really was. And you know what? I’m never travelling with Celine again. She has to have her way with everything. Where we stayed, where we ate. But she’s never up-front about it. You discuss it and, lo and behold, you’re doing what she wants every time. She’s the same here. All because of a dead baby.”

There. She had said it. And shuddered in triumph.

“Ellen,” Georgia said.

“You know it’s true. Even now when I mention Mimi or Yolanda, she tenses up. How dare I remind her of her loss! Unless it’s something bad. Mimi’s drug troubles? It was all Celine could do not to rub her hands together in glee.”

“What happened to Celine was awful.”

“And it was a long, long time ago. Enough is enough. What was it called? What it died of?” Ellen, still at the computer, tried to type it in.

Mr. Google said:
Did you mean
anencephaly?

“And Ellen?” Georgia said. “I got your postcard. What did you mean?”

A picture of an anencephalic baby popped up on the screen, a little saucer-eyed alien, its head flattened just above the eyebrows, staring out at Ellen. Ellen stared back, unable to close the window or turn away. Grotesque, piteous, the creature looked right into her empty place. And Ellen shuddered again to think what it saw there. Yet the body was normal and human. No, look. Oh, Christ! The poor little thing had no fingers. No fingers on its tiny little hands.

She pressed her forehead to the cold desk. “Georgia. I’m hanging up. I can’t talk about this anymore.”

“J
EAN
-F
RANçOIS
believes in destiny. Like I do,” Celine told Ellen later that summer.

“Oh, puke,” Ellen said. “You hardly know the guy.”

“We e-mail every day. Several times.”

“You should be careful,” Ellen said. “You can get cancer from too much screen time. Horrible tumours all over your face.”

“You’ll find someone too, Ellen. As soon as you renounce your negativity. So will you come, or will you stay home and pout?”

“I think I’ll come and pout,” Ellen said.

She goes to Celine’s dinner party even though she doesn’t like Celine’s food. Once Celine served three different potato dishes in the same meal, another time fried-tofu bologna. Anyway, Ellen is trying to keep off those eight pounds that she unexpectedly dropped on the trail in France, and the ten she lost after her father killed himself, so why not? She brings two bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

Jean-François leaps up from the couch when Ellen comes in the door, bestows the triple kiss—left cheek, right cheek, left cheek. Unfortunately, he looks better than she remembered, mostly because she’s been downplaying him in her mind all day. The unflattering glasses, the beige hair. Dean Koontz! In her imagination his hair had thinned more and more until his not-so-innocent scalp shone through, which only makes his hair seem thicker now. Also, his glasses are new, the frames smaller and rounder, she thinks. He looks so plaintive.

Georgia and Gary were invited too, so the conversation turns political. Luckily, Jean-François is a Green, which keeps the shouting to a bearable level. European politics—left, right, left—who can figure it out? Ellen sips her wine and smiles, pleased by how little she actually feels after her day-long snit. Every time her eyes and Jean-François’s cross paths, she forces herself to blink.

Before dessert, she comes out of the bathroom—”Ah!”—to find Jean-François lurking in the hall.

“Sorry,” Ellen tells him. “You should have knocked.”

“I was waiting,” he explains. “Waiting to speak with you.”

Ellen is a little drunk. In the bathroom, she was wondering whether, if she stopped drinking now, she could still drive home.

“I thought I was writing you,” he says.

He means
help me
, and glances back down the hall to the dining room where Celine is dishing out rubbery squares of tofu cheesecake.