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Carolyn Cooke's stories have been featured in several volumes of PRIZE STORIES: THE O. HENRY AWARDS and THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES. Her highly anticipated debut collection tells hilarious and often savage truths about people struggling within the confines of history, society, and class.
Mr. Sargent, the aging Brahmin aesthete of the title story, scribbles his epiphanies on cocktail napkins and covers them up with his drinks. A Maine innkeeper shoots his wife, who remains bitterly loyal to him until the death of their son. A whole family conspires to keep the birth of yet another dirt-poor relation a secret from his grandmother. On the icy cobblestone streets of Boston and the rockbound coast of Maine, these vividly realized characters try to reconcile habits of obedience and self-reliance with the urgent desire to capture the wild core of life. The result is an explosion of exquisitely tuned voices, as authentic as they are unforgettable.
Mr. Sargent, the aging Brahmin aesthete of the title story, scribbles his epiphanies on cocktail napkins and covers them up with his drinks. A Maine innkeeper shoots his wife, who remains bitterly loyal to him until the death of their son. A whole family conspires to keep the birth of yet another dirt-poor relation a secret from his grandmother. On the icy cobblestone streets of Boston and the rockbound coast of Maine, these vividly realized characters try to reconcile habits of obedience and self-reliance with the urgent desire to capture the wild core of life. The result is an explosion of exquisitely tuned voices, as authentic as they are unforgettable.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
CAROLYN COOKE’s stories have been featured in The Best American Short Stories and twice in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. A graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program, Cooke has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Yaddo. Born in Maine and raised in Boston, she has been a staff writer for Penthouse and reviewed fiction for The Nation. She lives in northern California with her husband and two children.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Bob Darling
Bob darling spent the day and the evening on the fastest train in Europe. At first the train lugged slowly through yellow towns, then it began to pull together its force and go. The landscape slid past. In one stroke the train braced and broke through the air into a river of dinning sound. It climaxed at 380 kmh. Darling heard this news from a German across the aisle, but he’d already sensed the speed in a deeper bone. His body was attuned to the subtle flux of high speed, the jazz pulse, the fizz.
He closed his eyes, registered the scrape of the antimacassar against his brittle hairs, and dozed. Dying tired him, so did the drugs he took to keep from urinating on the seat. But he never let himself go that far, to close his eyes, unless the buzz of speed was in him, the drone of engines, the zhzhzh of jets.
On the seat beside him lounged a beautiful young woman named Carla. She was a baby, vague on facts and ahistorical; she talked too much, she pouted when she didn’t get her way, she disliked opera, and she drank. But she had not given him too many terrible disappointments, and overall Darling felt they had been compatible. Paris, coming up, would be the last leg of their trip. Darling planned the Tuileries, the Orangerie, an afternoon at the Louvre, couscous in the Latin Quarter, two nights at the Hôtel Angleterre.
That would be the end of it. Back home he would see her occasionally in the cafés he had first shown her and they would exchange shrill pleasantries. Sometime, perhaps, in the future, he could take her out for dinner and liquor at one of those subterranean French restaurants in Cambridge and afterward press himself on her. But one day she would move, get a job, find a lover, change her life. She would look at her calendar and think she had not seen him in months, or years. But she wouldn’t call him until she was sure that he was dead.
(What would that be like? What if he didn’t know, if the end of it was not-knowing, if not-knowing was the surprise? What if there was nothing afterward? Where would the information go he had put into his head over the years — the names of kings, the taste of food, the memory of his mother and his father, the fact that louvre is early French for “leper,” that lava is mainly water, loose facts, what Thoreau said: “Our molting season, like that of fowls, must be a crisis in our lives,” the names of women, the names of small hotels? Would the contents of his busy head be wasted, lost?) He opened his eyes. A crowd of old men on bicycles crashed by outside the window and were gone. Carla leaned into the Michelin guide; the lemony point of her nose and the book vibrated perceptibly to the motion of the train. Her eyes were puffy, from sleep maybe. She still had on her dress from the evening before — a strapless — and some cosmetic residue sparkled on her neck. Her sharp perfume hung on the air. She could sit for hours that way, a packet of French cigarettes and a bottle of Perrier balanced on the seat beside her, her bare feet crossed in her lap. She read any trash for hours and ignored the view. Travel, Darling thought irritably, was a vacation for her.
“The Train r Grande Vitesse,” she said now, out of nowhere.
“The TGV, yes, that’s the train we’re on now,” he said.
“You called it the Trcs Grande Vitesse,” said Carla, looking up at him, frowning. “Actually it’s the Train r Grande Vitesse — train, not trcs.” “That’s what they call it informally, I guess,” he said, looking across Carla’s lap at the blur of France. “Very Great Speed.” “Informally they call it the TGV. And I know what trcs means, thank you.”
She was a little bantam, round face, skinny as a refugee, knees like knuckles. Long arms, down to her knees. Twenty, twenty-two. He was not an old man, Darling, but compared to her. In her eyes. From that first afternoon he thought he could get her into bed if he remembered to call her Carla, not Paula.
He had found her, funnily enough, unconscious on the T. There were two girls almost exactly alike. It was late afternoon, still hot; the strings of their bathing suits dangled down the backs of their necks, one suit red-checked, the other pale blue. Darling had his leather jacket with him in spite of the heat; he felt a constant chill.
The girls hung from the hand straps, limp as fringe. First, one collapsed. The shoes of interested citizens chattered like sets of teeth around the head. Then the second girl dropped, straight as a rope. They lay there on the floor of the car, completely vulnerable. But two girls fainting stank of conspiracy. No one besides Bob Darling wanted to be taken in.
He hiked his pants so they would not be damaged bby his knees and squatted to greet the girls when they woke. The first one opened her eyes, and he saw a flattening out of her pupils, her vision narrowing to familiar and unimaginative suspicions. “What did I, pass out?” she said.
“You seemed to fall,” Darling said.
The girl blinked at him. “My wallet still here?” Her hands flew up into the air, then lit on a leather pouch fastened at her waist. “Miracle,” she said.
“You want air,” he said, and stood her up.
She shook her head. “I’ve got to go to work.” It was a shame, Darling thought; the first girl had a little more shape to her.
“What do you do? I mean that respectfully,” Darling assured her, because he thought she might be a dancer, and Paula had been the most marvelously uninhibited dancer. His response to her dancing had always been sexual, but in the most respectful sense.
“Medical records,” said the girl.
The second girl opened her eyes and he looked away from the first girl into her face. She was a scrapper, but not bad-looking.
The first girl got off at Charles Street. Darling marveled at how she woke from a dead faint and bussed the other girl’s cheeks, then went off to record the claims of a swollen humanity to life and health. Sand still sparkling on the back of her neck. That pale blue string.
His prize was the second girl, Carla; she let him hold her birdy arm. He liked to think he knew the why and the how of the city. Did she know the Such-and-Such Café? The apple cake was the thing to eat. Did she like apple cake? He guided her down into the café, an empty room underground where all the waiters rushed toward him.
But Carla didn’t want apple cake. She said she was bored without drinks. She sat across a round table, behind a tumbler of booze.
She would not be shocked by the news of his death, or the idea of his illness. “Things break down,” she would think with a shrug. But Darling was still young enough — and the news was fresh enough — that it came to him as a shock, a surprise. Barely two hours before he found her, his doctor and old ally, Carnevali, had sighed deeply and told Darling, The game Is not Quite up But make your plan.
Appalled, Darling buttoned down his shirt, top to bottom, over his heart, his lungs, his appendicitis scar. Though the day was warm, he put on his leather jacket. He was about to hail a taxi when suddenly he wanted to live among as many people as possible. His eyes flailed like arms, grasping at the grays and browns and bricks of the little Puritan city. He went underground, and waited for the Red Line.
His apple cake lay in crumbs before him on a plate. “Let me show you something,” he said, throwing out a spark of spit. He removed a black leather book and a fountain pen from inside his jacket pocket. A lozenge flew out too and rolled under the table. He leaned over the book, showing it to her. “This is Ned Blodgett,” he said, and pointed to a list of numbers. “First-rate lawyer.” He looked at Carla. “This is his office, this is home — his wife’s name is Paula, you’ll like her, she’s very uninhibited. This is their number in Truro. Ned can get a message to me anytime. Now here is Jane Purbeck, she walks my dog when I’m away — you can call her. This is Jack Shortall, here’s his number. These are reliable people,” he said.
He closed the book and slid it across the table. “You take it. I know all these numbers.” Her hand flickered on the table. “Please,” he said. “Even if you don’t want to leave a message, I will know you can leave a message.” “See your pen?” she said. He handed it over. She opened the address book to a blank page near the Ws and rolled the pen across it experimentally. Then she drew an outline of the couple at the next table, and the table, and a vase with a few flowers in it.
Darling jiggled his leg. “You’re an artist,” he told her.
“Nope.” He watched her bear down on the nib and smiled, sipped his coffee. “That’s a hundred-year-old pen,” he said.
Her face emptied. She slipped the cap on the pen and laid it on the table.
“No,” he said gently. “Take it — use it.” “Thanks,” she said.
Darling scraped his chair on the floor, hobbled it toward her, and told her his name. “You can call me Bob, or you can call me Darling. I mean that respectfully. People call me Darling. Not just women. Men.” “Darling,” she said. “Like the girl in Peter Pan.” “What? Peter Pan?” Darling said excitedly.
“The girl’s name — the one who goes to Never-Never Land with Peter.” “Not Mary Martin?” “No — I meant — the Disney,” she said.
Darling sniffed. “Life is too short to talk about Walter Disney,” he said.
“Fine,” she said. She picked up his pen and twirled it in her fingers.
It was their first frisson. Darling savored it with coffee. Together they watched the couple she had drawn eat chicken. The man ate delicately, pulling the underdone meat away from the bone with the point of his knife and actually feeding himself with the blade. His thin white shirt strained to girdle him, and through the fabric the white loops of his undershirt were legible. The woman ate quickly, as if other duties called her. She wore a transparent blouse, which magnified her white arms and the vastness of her brassiere. Once she stopped chewing, she looked up at him and said something. The man didn’t look at her, but barked out a laugh. “I’m not feeling flush tonight,” he said.
They buttered their bread and rolled it up so more fit into their mouths in one bite. When all the food was gone they wiped their lips with napkins and waited with all their attention until the waiter came and cleared the plates away.
When the waiter came back with pie and coffee on a tray their hands flew up to make room for the dishes, their fingers like birds’ wings. They took turns using the cream and sugar. The woman stirred her coffee and smiled. “Everything I’ve dreamed of for forty years, it’s coming true,” she said loudly.
Darling squeezed Carla’s hand. “Are you hungry?” he asked.
“Oh God, no,” she said. “I never eat at night.” * And yet — he felt this was somehow a contradiction, about eating — she lived above a busy Indian restaurant in Central Square, in one room of Chinese paper lanterns, museum posters and a futon on the floor battened down with sheets and a quilt and ropes of lingerie and clothes. They sat on the futon — it was the only furniture. There was an old coal fireplace with a flue out one side, but the blue rug ran into it. She served him a glass of yellow wine, a ripe tomato. Everything she had, she offered.
She played Stravinsky’s Firebird on her boom box and rolled pink lipstick over her lips. When she sprang the checkered brassiere of her bathing suit and called him to her bed, he realized he was already there. The slug of strong sensations — desire, hope, virility — brought tears to his eyes, which Carla mistook for gratitude.
He hoped to keep his bag of sensations light. Only the most intense sensations interested him. He had looked forward to this train because it was the fastest train. He had been very clear with Carla about this from the start. He wanted to ride the fastest train in Europe. That was one. Two was, he wanted them to eat the wonderful six-course dinner they served on the train. He asked her all about it before they left town, while they were still in the planning stages.
“Fine, Bob, whatever,” Carla said when he asked.
Some afternoons they sat under a sun umbrella at the Such-and-Such Café. Darling spread out the map like a tablecloth under their cups and crumbs and napkins and brought out sheets of onionskin encoded with train routes and the names and telephone numbers and addresses of hotels which he tapped out palely on his manual, having forgone the pleasures of his pen. Carla gradually warmed to the idea of the trip. She brushed his cake crumbs from the countries on the map.
She had never heard of Pcre-Lachaise. She knew only vaguely of Jim Morrison. Her ignorance was vast, ecumenical. He drew on the paper cloth with a yellow pencil. He sketched dreamily, from memory.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“It’s a baguette, a kind of long French bread.” “I know what a baguette is, for God’s sake, Bob.” But he could never predict what she knew. He was impressed, for example, by her seamless demand for caffc macchiato. But she shrugged and said she didn’t know what it meant — she just liked bitter coffee. He wondered whether she had broken his pen, bearing down on the nib, or sold it. He would have liked to show her how the ink went in so that if the pen stopped working she would not worry that she was to blame. His heart ached, imagining her humiliation and shy gratitude.
“You have to speak up — it won’t be any good unless we do things you want to do,” he told her. “We have to plan everything together. You have to tell me where you want to go, what you want to see.” Carla had never been to Europe. “I don’t know,” she said.
But I know! I know! Her white dress was ancient to a charming transparency. He would take her — he would show her.
He had read that the dinners on the train were sometimes oversubscribed. You could eat a croque monsieur in the bar car, but the thing to do was to get the dinner on the train.
“Fine, whatever,” Carla said. “I don’t care what I eat.” He leaned across the table, angry, closed his fingers around Carla’s wrist, and squeezed.
She ripped his fingers apart, a smooth strong gesture which surprised him. She laid her hands on her lap. “I eat anything. Scraps,” she said.
He sat up late that night at home, walled in by forty years’ worth of Michelin guides, tax returns, Boston Globes, Playbills, Symphony programs, creased hotel brochures. He called her at two o’clock in the morning. “Do you want to go to the Sabine Hills or the Villa d’Este at Tivoli? Tell me what you want to do.” There was a pause on the line, a certain flattening out in the expectant air. “Who is this, please?” she said.
And yet, in Europe, it turned out Carla had a terrible talent for knowing exactly what she wanted to do. Right away, in Venice, she saw the Lido from a speedboat. “What is it?” she said, and he told her.
“Oh, I want to go and spend a day,” she said.
The next morning she brought it up again — she wanted to go to the Lido and rent a beach chair. But she had agreed already, he reminded her, buttoning his shirt, to walk with him through the Collezione Peggy Guggenheim, and to take a vaporetto to the cathedral at Torcello. Anyway, the last time he had been to the Lido the water was full of white fuzzballs and nobody could swim.
“But I just want to be there,” she told him. She jumped up and down on the bed, then jumped off and ran to the window, and pulled back the heavy curtain.
“I thought we could sit in the Piazza San Marco and eat some calamari,” he said.
“I don’t want to eat!” Carla said. “I could just go out on the boat taxi and meet you later.” They stood barefoot on the rug, facing each other across the unmade bed.
“If that’s what you would like to do,” he said.
“It is, it is,” she said.
And it was done.
He spent the day moving through the crowds at the Piazza...
Bob darling spent the day and the evening on the fastest train in Europe. At first the train lugged slowly through yellow towns, then it began to pull together its force and go. The landscape slid past. In one stroke the train braced and broke through the air into a river of dinning sound. It climaxed at 380 kmh. Darling heard this news from a German across the aisle, but he’d already sensed the speed in a deeper bone. His body was attuned to the subtle flux of high speed, the jazz pulse, the fizz.
He closed his eyes, registered the scrape of the antimacassar against his brittle hairs, and dozed. Dying tired him, so did the drugs he took to keep from urinating on the seat. But he never let himself go that far, to close his eyes, unless the buzz of speed was in him, the drone of engines, the zhzhzh of jets.
On the seat beside him lounged a beautiful young woman named Carla. She was a baby, vague on facts and ahistorical; she talked too much, she pouted when she didn’t get her way, she disliked opera, and she drank. But she had not given him too many terrible disappointments, and overall Darling felt they had been compatible. Paris, coming up, would be the last leg of their trip. Darling planned the Tuileries, the Orangerie, an afternoon at the Louvre, couscous in the Latin Quarter, two nights at the Hôtel Angleterre.
That would be the end of it. Back home he would see her occasionally in the cafés he had first shown her and they would exchange shrill pleasantries. Sometime, perhaps, in the future, he could take her out for dinner and liquor at one of those subterranean French restaurants in Cambridge and afterward press himself on her. But one day she would move, get a job, find a lover, change her life. She would look at her calendar and think she had not seen him in months, or years. But she wouldn’t call him until she was sure that he was dead.
(What would that be like? What if he didn’t know, if the end of it was not-knowing, if not-knowing was the surprise? What if there was nothing afterward? Where would the information go he had put into his head over the years — the names of kings, the taste of food, the memory of his mother and his father, the fact that louvre is early French for “leper,” that lava is mainly water, loose facts, what Thoreau said: “Our molting season, like that of fowls, must be a crisis in our lives,” the names of women, the names of small hotels? Would the contents of his busy head be wasted, lost?) He opened his eyes. A crowd of old men on bicycles crashed by outside the window and were gone. Carla leaned into the Michelin guide; the lemony point of her nose and the book vibrated perceptibly to the motion of the train. Her eyes were puffy, from sleep maybe. She still had on her dress from the evening before — a strapless — and some cosmetic residue sparkled on her neck. Her sharp perfume hung on the air. She could sit for hours that way, a packet of French cigarettes and a bottle of Perrier balanced on the seat beside her, her bare feet crossed in her lap. She read any trash for hours and ignored the view. Travel, Darling thought irritably, was a vacation for her.
“The Train r Grande Vitesse,” she said now, out of nowhere.
“The TGV, yes, that’s the train we’re on now,” he said.
“You called it the Trcs Grande Vitesse,” said Carla, looking up at him, frowning. “Actually it’s the Train r Grande Vitesse — train, not trcs.” “That’s what they call it informally, I guess,” he said, looking across Carla’s lap at the blur of France. “Very Great Speed.” “Informally they call it the TGV. And I know what trcs means, thank you.”
She was a little bantam, round face, skinny as a refugee, knees like knuckles. Long arms, down to her knees. Twenty, twenty-two. He was not an old man, Darling, but compared to her. In her eyes. From that first afternoon he thought he could get her into bed if he remembered to call her Carla, not Paula.
He had found her, funnily enough, unconscious on the T. There were two girls almost exactly alike. It was late afternoon, still hot; the strings of their bathing suits dangled down the backs of their necks, one suit red-checked, the other pale blue. Darling had his leather jacket with him in spite of the heat; he felt a constant chill.
The girls hung from the hand straps, limp as fringe. First, one collapsed. The shoes of interested citizens chattered like sets of teeth around the head. Then the second girl dropped, straight as a rope. They lay there on the floor of the car, completely vulnerable. But two girls fainting stank of conspiracy. No one besides Bob Darling wanted to be taken in.
He hiked his pants so they would not be damaged bby his knees and squatted to greet the girls when they woke. The first one opened her eyes, and he saw a flattening out of her pupils, her vision narrowing to familiar and unimaginative suspicions. “What did I, pass out?” she said.
“You seemed to fall,” Darling said.
The girl blinked at him. “My wallet still here?” Her hands flew up into the air, then lit on a leather pouch fastened at her waist. “Miracle,” she said.
“You want air,” he said, and stood her up.
She shook her head. “I’ve got to go to work.” It was a shame, Darling thought; the first girl had a little more shape to her.
“What do you do? I mean that respectfully,” Darling assured her, because he thought she might be a dancer, and Paula had been the most marvelously uninhibited dancer. His response to her dancing had always been sexual, but in the most respectful sense.
“Medical records,” said the girl.
The second girl opened her eyes and he looked away from the first girl into her face. She was a scrapper, but not bad-looking.
The first girl got off at Charles Street. Darling marveled at how she woke from a dead faint and bussed the other girl’s cheeks, then went off to record the claims of a swollen humanity to life and health. Sand still sparkling on the back of her neck. That pale blue string.
His prize was the second girl, Carla; she let him hold her birdy arm. He liked to think he knew the why and the how of the city. Did she know the Such-and-Such Café? The apple cake was the thing to eat. Did she like apple cake? He guided her down into the café, an empty room underground where all the waiters rushed toward him.
But Carla didn’t want apple cake. She said she was bored without drinks. She sat across a round table, behind a tumbler of booze.
She would not be shocked by the news of his death, or the idea of his illness. “Things break down,” she would think with a shrug. But Darling was still young enough — and the news was fresh enough — that it came to him as a shock, a surprise. Barely two hours before he found her, his doctor and old ally, Carnevali, had sighed deeply and told Darling, The game Is not Quite up But make your plan.
Appalled, Darling buttoned down his shirt, top to bottom, over his heart, his lungs, his appendicitis scar. Though the day was warm, he put on his leather jacket. He was about to hail a taxi when suddenly he wanted to live among as many people as possible. His eyes flailed like arms, grasping at the grays and browns and bricks of the little Puritan city. He went underground, and waited for the Red Line.
His apple cake lay in crumbs before him on a plate. “Let me show you something,” he said, throwing out a spark of spit. He removed a black leather book and a fountain pen from inside his jacket pocket. A lozenge flew out too and rolled under the table. He leaned over the book, showing it to her. “This is Ned Blodgett,” he said, and pointed to a list of numbers. “First-rate lawyer.” He looked at Carla. “This is his office, this is home — his wife’s name is Paula, you’ll like her, she’s very uninhibited. This is their number in Truro. Ned can get a message to me anytime. Now here is Jane Purbeck, she walks my dog when I’m away — you can call her. This is Jack Shortall, here’s his number. These are reliable people,” he said.
He closed the book and slid it across the table. “You take it. I know all these numbers.” Her hand flickered on the table. “Please,” he said. “Even if you don’t want to leave a message, I will know you can leave a message.” “See your pen?” she said. He handed it over. She opened the address book to a blank page near the Ws and rolled the pen across it experimentally. Then she drew an outline of the couple at the next table, and the table, and a vase with a few flowers in it.
Darling jiggled his leg. “You’re an artist,” he told her.
“Nope.” He watched her bear down on the nib and smiled, sipped his coffee. “That’s a hundred-year-old pen,” he said.
Her face emptied. She slipped the cap on the pen and laid it on the table.
“No,” he said gently. “Take it — use it.” “Thanks,” she said.
Darling scraped his chair on the floor, hobbled it toward her, and told her his name. “You can call me Bob, or you can call me Darling. I mean that respectfully. People call me Darling. Not just women. Men.” “Darling,” she said. “Like the girl in Peter Pan.” “What? Peter Pan?” Darling said excitedly.
“The girl’s name — the one who goes to Never-Never Land with Peter.” “Not Mary Martin?” “No — I meant — the Disney,” she said.
Darling sniffed. “Life is too short to talk about Walter Disney,” he said.
“Fine,” she said. She picked up his pen and twirled it in her fingers.
It was their first frisson. Darling savored it with coffee. Together they watched the couple she had drawn eat chicken. The man ate delicately, pulling the underdone meat away from the bone with the point of his knife and actually feeding himself with the blade. His thin white shirt strained to girdle him, and through the fabric the white loops of his undershirt were legible. The woman ate quickly, as if other duties called her. She wore a transparent blouse, which magnified her white arms and the vastness of her brassiere. Once she stopped chewing, she looked up at him and said something. The man didn’t look at her, but barked out a laugh. “I’m not feeling flush tonight,” he said.
They buttered their bread and rolled it up so more fit into their mouths in one bite. When all the food was gone they wiped their lips with napkins and waited with all their attention until the waiter came and cleared the plates away.
When the waiter came back with pie and coffee on a tray their hands flew up to make room for the dishes, their fingers like birds’ wings. They took turns using the cream and sugar. The woman stirred her coffee and smiled. “Everything I’ve dreamed of for forty years, it’s coming true,” she said loudly.
Darling squeezed Carla’s hand. “Are you hungry?” he asked.
“Oh God, no,” she said. “I never eat at night.” * And yet — he felt this was somehow a contradiction, about eating — she lived above a busy Indian restaurant in Central Square, in one room of Chinese paper lanterns, museum posters and a futon on the floor battened down with sheets and a quilt and ropes of lingerie and clothes. They sat on the futon — it was the only furniture. There was an old coal fireplace with a flue out one side, but the blue rug ran into it. She served him a glass of yellow wine, a ripe tomato. Everything she had, she offered.
She played Stravinsky’s Firebird on her boom box and rolled pink lipstick over her lips. When she sprang the checkered brassiere of her bathing suit and called him to her bed, he realized he was already there. The slug of strong sensations — desire, hope, virility — brought tears to his eyes, which Carla mistook for gratitude.
He hoped to keep his bag of sensations light. Only the most intense sensations interested him. He had looked forward to this train because it was the fastest train. He had been very clear with Carla about this from the start. He wanted to ride the fastest train in Europe. That was one. Two was, he wanted them to eat the wonderful six-course dinner they served on the train. He asked her all about it before they left town, while they were still in the planning stages.
“Fine, Bob, whatever,” Carla said when he asked.
Some afternoons they sat under a sun umbrella at the Such-and-Such Café. Darling spread out the map like a tablecloth under their cups and crumbs and napkins and brought out sheets of onionskin encoded with train routes and the names and telephone numbers and addresses of hotels which he tapped out palely on his manual, having forgone the pleasures of his pen. Carla gradually warmed to the idea of the trip. She brushed his cake crumbs from the countries on the map.
She had never heard of Pcre-Lachaise. She knew only vaguely of Jim Morrison. Her ignorance was vast, ecumenical. He drew on the paper cloth with a yellow pencil. He sketched dreamily, from memory.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“It’s a baguette, a kind of long French bread.” “I know what a baguette is, for God’s sake, Bob.” But he could never predict what she knew. He was impressed, for example, by her seamless demand for caffc macchiato. But she shrugged and said she didn’t know what it meant — she just liked bitter coffee. He wondered whether she had broken his pen, bearing down on the nib, or sold it. He would have liked to show her how the ink went in so that if the pen stopped working she would not worry that she was to blame. His heart ached, imagining her humiliation and shy gratitude.
“You have to speak up — it won’t be any good unless we do things you want to do,” he told her. “We have to plan everything together. You have to tell me where you want to go, what you want to see.” Carla had never been to Europe. “I don’t know,” she said.
But I know! I know! Her white dress was ancient to a charming transparency. He would take her — he would show her.
He had read that the dinners on the train were sometimes oversubscribed. You could eat a croque monsieur in the bar car, but the thing to do was to get the dinner on the train.
“Fine, whatever,” Carla said. “I don’t care what I eat.” He leaned across the table, angry, closed his fingers around Carla’s wrist, and squeezed.
She ripped his fingers apart, a smooth strong gesture which surprised him. She laid her hands on her lap. “I eat anything. Scraps,” she said.
He sat up late that night at home, walled in by forty years’ worth of Michelin guides, tax returns, Boston Globes, Playbills, Symphony programs, creased hotel brochures. He called her at two o’clock in the morning. “Do you want to go to the Sabine Hills or the Villa d’Este at Tivoli? Tell me what you want to do.” There was a pause on the line, a certain flattening out in the expectant air. “Who is this, please?” she said.
And yet, in Europe, it turned out Carla had a terrible talent for knowing exactly what she wanted to do. Right away, in Venice, she saw the Lido from a speedboat. “What is it?” she said, and he told her.
“Oh, I want to go and spend a day,” she said.
The next morning she brought it up again — she wanted to go to the Lido and rent a beach chair. But she had agreed already, he reminded her, buttoning his shirt, to walk with him through the Collezione Peggy Guggenheim, and to take a vaporetto to the cathedral at Torcello. Anyway, the last time he had been to the Lido the water was full of white fuzzballs and nobody could swim.
“But I just want to be there,” she told him. She jumped up and down on the bed, then jumped off and ran to the window, and pulled back the heavy curtain.
“I thought we could sit in the Piazza San Marco and eat some calamari,” he said.
“I don’t want to eat!” Carla said. “I could just go out on the boat taxi and meet you later.” They stood barefoot on the rug, facing each other across the unmade bed.
“If that’s what you would like to do,” he said.
“It is, it is,” she said.
And it was done.
He spent the day moving through the crowds at the Piazza...
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherSan Val
- Publication date2001
- ISBN 10 141771669X
- ISBN 13 9781417716692
- BindingHardcover
- Rating
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