How to Get Along with Women (10 page)

When she was eight, and they were still living in Genoa, she once saw her cousin suffocate a rabbit. He did it with a pair of socks, balled up the toe end of one by stuffing the other one deep inside it, and slipped the whole thing over the rabbit's head. It was a pet rabbit that belonged to a younger cousin. It lived in a cage on the floor of her bedroom. The suffocating took a long time, the rabbit beating its head against the metal of the cage, trying to release itself from the sock. Probably it would have survived if it hadn't spent so much energy on trying to get free.

They were playing hide and go seek. Carla was in the closet and her cousin came in with the socks. Then he left. She crouched on the closet floor, one hand on the doorknob. What should she do? If she nipped out for just a moment, she could free the rabbit's nostrils. But what if she were caught? Finally it lay down. Carla was relieved. It's always comfortable to have a decision, one way or another.

They talked about getting married. Or, Carla did. Nico refused to discuss a future tense with her so long as she refused to bring him to her family, and Carla wouldn't, so things stayed as they were. They would have had a long time to wait, anyway. His parents were the kind that believed in school. Everyone in Nico's family was a doctor or a professor. He had a cousin who lived in Corsica and studied nurse sharks. He was the leading expert on the Mediterranean nurse shark, and spent half his life in scuba gear. Nico liked the idea of the scuba gear part, but was unsettled on just what he might study while he was down there. He preferred fishing, but the good permits are all handed down between family members, fishing families, and who wants to work for nothing? He was one of those men who carry a salt taste on their skin. Even when he hadn't been swimming for days, there was a lick of brine on him. Just from living next to the sea all his life. You could run your tongue along his jaw and the salt would make it burn.

He stole some codeine from his work. On weekends he was the night janitor at a medical clinic in Noailles and wore those baggy blue pants and v-necked shirts they give to orderlies in hospitals. Keys on a chain that stretched from his pocket to the belt loop of the pants. Carla took the metro up there early on Saturday mornings, in time to catch him as he got off, and they stopped in the market next to the station and bought dates or honey pastries from an Algerian baker he knew.

Nico lived with his family in the quartier Panier, up the hill from the old port, in a house that used to be a convent in the middle ages. So said the mother. No one was home and they sat in armchairs by the window and Nico said, I didn't know you were coming over tonight. Over and over. He'd taken three of the codeine tablets, washed them down with a few beers. He let his head rest against the back of the chair. Carla sat with her legs crossed and one arm over her body, fingering her elbow. Her thin cardigan was too hot, even at night. He'd given her some beer in a glass, but no coaster. There was a ring of condensation on the windowsill where she set the glass.

In the doorway she had tried to kiss him, urgently she thought, pushing her tongue against his, but his legs were like jelly and he had to go and sit down. His feet stuck out over the carpet, cigarette ash falling from his hand and his laughing mouth as he smoked. Now she crawled over to him and undid his belt buckle and put her mouth on him and he laughed and laughed and told her he loved her, just like that. His penis lying there like a bit of old rag.

She went home, all the way to La Joliette, to her parents' new stucco home that smelled of garlic and bread, on the metro by herself, and wasn't afraid even when a pock-marked Arab followed her down the tunnel, yelling I can see your panties! Thinking of the damp piece of rag in his own pants. At home she told her mother she'd been to the cinema and nobody asked her what she'd seen, or with whom. She was eighteen. High school was over.

Her father was in training all week in Vitrolles. They have me on a treadmill day and night, he told Carla, and described to her the metal helmet he wore during these training sessions. To stimulate the brain, he said. Fried brains! I like them better with bacon. They sat outside in the garden, on a bench, so they could smoke. Carla liked to sneak in a little grappa in a flask, even though they gave the father some wine with his lunch and dinner. It was the least she could do. He seemed to have shrunk since the accident, the skin over his cheeks going grey the way you might expect hair to change colour. His hair was the only thing that remained the same, thick and black. He kept a fine-toothed silver comb the length of Carla's index finger in his shirt pocket, and a barber came into the clinique every three weeks and gave him a trim. He'd once had forearms like boards.

In Genoa, he built a living room playhouse for Carla from scrap lumber he dragged home from his work on construction sites, while the mother lodged a loud complaint with Mary and the Holy Trinity in the next room: he was taking up half the apartment! The playhouse was quite small, with just enough room for Carla to climb in and peep out the window he'd left her, and he gave her an espresso cup from the cabinet (porcelain! wailed the mother) out of which she drank apricot juice or tiny amounts of raspberry syrup stirred into soda water. They passed the cup between them through the window, the father adding spoonfuls of syrup and water from the siphon on the kitchen table. The heads of the nails he'd used were embossed with a triangle pattern, the logo of the nail company. By pressing very hard, Carla could force the triangle to come up red on the soft flesh of her thumbs.

Her job was at a nursery school not far from the Vieux Port. Wiping noses and bums, the mother said, but Carla liked the scent the children carried with them, all of them smelling slightly of spoilt milk, or yeast. They were warm and growing, like dough held beneath a cloth. The hair on their heads a little damp from play. Together they squished clay, or spread paint with their fingers. She let them play with dry macaroni—better than sand, because it doesn't matter if they put it in their mouths.

Three year old Agnès cried every morning when her mother left. There was something in the crying that Carla found furtively enjoyable, a feeling she got in her teeth, her gumline, when the child wailed. In the afternoon, if she were feeling sleepy, Carla would say things to Agnès to make her cry again: I'm going to lock you in the closet with the brooms until the dustman comes and finds you, or, If you can't go pee in the toilet right now I'm going to pinch you. Afterwards she felt guilty. But it was so good to comfort, to make it better.

Nico's house was like water to her. Even her eyes felt cool and slick. Couldn't I just live here? she asked him. She wanted to know when his parents would be going away for the summer. Would they go to Paris in August, or further? Bruges? Geneva?

What will you tell your family? Nico asked her. Where will you say you are going?

Carla wrapped herself in his mother's towels, tied his mother's scarves around her neck.

You look like a stewardess, Nico said. They were talking in the front hall of the house before going out. If Carla stood in just the right place, she could face him and still see herself reflected in the dark pane of the window. She told him Agnès was no longer coming to the little school. She'd been in a car accident with her mother, and her collarbone was broken. This was the truth. Nico crouched down to lace his boots. In the window, the reflected Carla watched him suck on the frayed ends of the laces and then thread them through each hole. He tied them in double knots. She watched herself standing over him. Agnès had been in an accident. Carla had seen the doctor's letter herself, where it was tucked away in the filing cabinet, but somehow she couldn't shake the feeling that the mother was covering for her, that Carla herself had hurt the girl. That once, in a state of unawareness, she really had pinched her, too hard, and now Agnès couldn't come back to school because Carla could not be trusted.

They drove along the coast to Cannes and then north, in the white Renault. Taking country roads so they wouldn't have to pay tolls. Nico shifting down to take the curves. Instead of the brake, he said. Like this. His hand now over Carla's. Up onto the Moyenne Corniche, tight against the cliffs, half way up the mountain. Moyenne. Half way. On the lower roads: keen, white church steeples sticking up out of villages. Way down, the sea, and then only that. Whitecaps like trails of dust in the sunlight.

He stopped the car on the runoff and they walked back to the roadside and stood on the edge, the backs of their knees pressed against the barrier and the trucks speeding around the bend and skimming their bodies. I can't fight the wind, Carla said.

See the face on that one! Nico's own broad face, chipped tooth showing, yelling and shouting at Carla. The sudden terror in the drivers' eyes as they came around the curve and saw Nico and Carla standing there on the painted line at the edge of the road. Carla with her fingertips resting on her thighs, eyes closed, hair drifting across her face. The insides of her eyelids brilliant, shadows like birds or angels speeding through them.

The cars were coming down off the Grande Corniche, higher and more serpentine above. We could keep going, Nico said.

What, to Italy? Carla turned around and locked her kneecaps against the concrete block. The side of the mountain ran down, broken, to Beaulieu below her. Its severity hidden beneath patches of scrub and sage. If I fell, thought Carla. The rock face like steps. It would be like a doll thrown from the second floor down to the first; I'd be like a doll. She grabbed at Nico's hand, his shoulder. It's not falling if you mean to do it.

The first time they had sex was not Carla's first time. They were in the damp grass in the Parc Valmer at night, Carla's stomach slapping as she fell onto him. Later she told him her first time had been in the front seat of a car the year before, in Italy. The boy hadn't known anything about condoms, but Carla insisted. She'd learned about them in school. He must have done something wrong, Carla said, because I found the condom three days later. It was riding around in me all that time. You could have been pregnant, Nico said. The idea was amusing to him. You would have a baby sucking on your tits right now! Maybe I still would have fucked you, though, and Carla hit him and hit him with her shoe: No! No you couldn't!

On the day her father came home and sat in his wheelchair by the window, sipping from Carla's flask, she and Nico went back to the same park. The treatments had failed. They lay down on the steps of the villa and listened to the gulls and the cars sweeping along on the road above them, Carla swelling up with a quiet rage that was like mud, heavy in all her joints. Nico had the chance to go to Corsica and work for his cousin as a diver. Carla could come along and live on an island. The town, Ajaccio, used to belong to the Genoese, Nico said. The French and the Genoese have been passing it back and forth for centuries. What could be more perfect?

They lay there on their backs and got cold. It was November. When she was sure that Nico was asleep, Carla went home. It was almost morning. She was sitting alone in the metro and stood up to look through the window into the next car, to see if there was anyone there or if she was the only one, maybe the only one on the whole train. But there were people there, a man and a woman. The woman was crying and bent at the waist, her arms wrapped around her stomach. Carla imagined that the place on her body where she was holding her stomach was a seam. If she let go, her body would fall away into two halves. The man was standing up. When he saw Carla he bent over the woman and put his hands on her face and twisted her head around to make her look at Carla, too. The woman stopped moving and sat there, with the man's hands, one on either side of her face, and stared at Carla with big, blank eyes. She stopped crying. It was like she couldn't believe anyone else could exist like that, watching her cry through a window. The next stop was Joliette and Carla got off. She walked home with just the beginning of light like a slit vein running along the horizon, bleeding up.

She went into the kitchen and sliced off big hunks of bread and ate them with butter and ham and cheese on a plate, just taking one bite after another, then more bread, this time with jam. She drank two glasses of wine. She'd been up all night. She was that hungry.

All this six years ago, the last time they were together. Carla left to work for her own cousin, waiting tables in Capri and came back to Marseille only when she was sure Nico had stopped looking for her, gone for good to Corsica. She brought a friend of a friend home with her and married him. He agreed to move, even though he didn't speak the language and didn't like to leave his mother.

Last month, Carla's friend Odile called to say she had seen Nico, asleep in his car, while on a business trip in Toulouse. She first recognized the car, the white Renault, splotches of rust along the driver's door panel covered over with duct tape to stop it spreading. I didn't think it could be him, she said. I mean, the same car? He was parked in a side street near her hotel with the window down and his seat leaning slightly back. His mouth hanging open as he slept.

That's when I knew, she said. His chipped tooth, right in front. Exactly the same.

It wasn't much of a chip, thought Carla. Sour that she hadn't been in Toulouse to see this, had instead been home hand-straining peas to feed the baby. He'd damaged the tooth when she knew him, playing soccer. It wasn't as bad as some she'd seen, front teeth broken in half and capped. The ball had bounced up hard and Nico tried to take it on his chin, but misjudged. His right front tooth. Just a sliver gone, a shard of glass, sharp against Carla's tongue. A pinch in her lip, or the tips of her nipples.

Everything Under Your Feet

For one whole year I did nothing but run up a mountain. In the morning I would get up, brush my teeth and put on my running shoes. I didn't even drink a cup of coffee. The mountain was right outside my back door, so I didn't have far to go to get to work. I didn't have to commute. What I did all day was commute.