Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
There was a formidable storm overnight. Marlow got almost no sleep. She knew Sabine was safe in Neufchateau, but she worried about the newly painted shutters and masonry. The storm had better not rip all that to shreds, or she’d have stern words for the universe.
There was also the matter of a naked Luc sleeping next to her in her bed, spread on top of the sheets, every delicious part of him to drink in as she got up more than once to look at the roiling skies lit up by lightning.
Each time it went from dark to illuminated, she could see trees in the valley, branches and leaves pressed in one direction, then wildly in the other—and him, never waking despite the thunder, a scientific miracle unto itself.
He’d been athletic, creative, and full of stamina.
She hadn’t experienced a night like that in a very long time. Maybe ever.
And she loved losing herself like that. Letting go of all the things she was mentally juggling and just being in the moment. It was both relief and ecstasy. He was good for her brain—and lots of other parts of her too. Very good.
By morning, the storm was over, and Marlow had sobered.
She slipped out of bed, leaving Luc asleep.
Thank God Sabine wasn’t home. She grabbed her clothes and tiptoed downstairs, testing the lights.
The power was out. She got dressed in the living room and headed to the boulangerie.
She’d assess any damage caused by last night’s weather—and her sexual foolishness—on the way.
Two shutters had been torn off their hinges, and renovation detritus had been tossed against the side of the house. She’d clean it up later. She couldn’t risk Luc waking and wanting to talk.
The Mirabelle streets were littered with debris.
Lali’s flower boxes were on the cobblestones, earth and plants everywhere.
Marlow picked up what she could. She found Yakiv’s bicycle twisted down the street and returned it to where it belonged.
Madame Belleville was already awake, sweeping up glass from a window that had been smashed.
Marlow told her in broken French that she and Luc would have it repaired.
People in Nenier were cleaning up, too. Trees were down, branches strewn in the streets.
Marlow got an update at the boulangerie about who had suffered damage—you could always count on Corinne for a full report.
Marlow was thankful they had power, because starting the day with no bread or espresso would be tragic.
How quickly she’d become accustomed to that ritual.
While she still had service, Marlow texted Sabine to ask when she’d be home, and whether there was damage from the storm in Neufchateau.
No answer. She headed back for Mirabelle, getting to the important panic at hand.
What should she do about Luc, not to mention Guillaume?
It was late July. In under a month, she’d managed to get involved with not one but two men after a serious drought in the romance department.
A love triangle? Seriously? Although could she really call it a triangle if all she’d done was kiss Guillaume?
You kissed one guy. Then, shortly thereafter, you kissed another guy.
Who saw you kiss the first guy. And then you slept with the second guy.
Also, you work at the first guy’s house in the afternoons, and you’re the neighbor of the second guy, as well as, technically, his employer, even though you haven’t actually paid him anything yet.
Marlow resolved to head upstairs, stay in the bedroom doorway and resist being tempted by Luc, ready and no doubt willing, given the stamina he’d shown the night before.
She’d tell him that he needed to go home so that if Sabine returned, which she might any moment, she wouldn’t see what her mother had gotten up to in her absence.
And they had gotten up to some things, that’s for sure.
Marlow felt a not-so-tiny stir in her nether regions.
One more romp before Sabine came home would be delicious, wouldn’t it?
STOP.
But when she got back to Maison Perdue, Luc was gone. She looked out the window to his bedroom—not there either. She went outside and found him in yesterday’s clothes cleaning up the mess in her courtyard. He smiled at her.
“Bonjour,” he said, noticing the baguette. “If you were able to buy that, the power is on at the boulangerie. But it is out up here.”
“Yes. And yes, I am a baguette. I mean I have one. Bought one.” All she could think of was sex on the bed, on the floor, up against the wall, in the old purple velvet chair … Careful. Her knees might buckle.
“Bon,” he said. “We need some energy after last night.”
“About that,” she said, picking up detritus alongside him. “It was great. You are—great. But I need to not do that. I mean—I kissed Guillaume. And you saw it! It’s too complicated.”
“Ah. I see.” He returned to sweeping.
“It’s just—I’m your employer, even though I haven’t paid you. Please let me pay you! And I’m also your—”
“—neighbor, yes.”
“Please don’t take this badly, I mean, you are, um, I’ll just say it, mind-blowing in bed—” She could not go into details or they’d immediately end up back between the sheets with him.
“But I have to finish the house for Ruth. And I promised to take Sabine around France after the papers are signed. I don’t want to make a bigger mess than the one I’m crawling out of right now. That would be classic me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. No. I mean—it depends.” She took a leap. “Do you want to hear something ridiculous?”
“I live for the ridiculous.”
“Sabine told me there’s something now called ‘situationships.’ It’s when you are OK to sleep with more than one person because you’re all consenting adults. It’s more than a one-night stand, but less that a relationship. And—”
“—you are wondering if this interests me.”
“I don’t know if it interests me! But I seem to have slipped into—into—”
“Two situationships?”
“Exactly. I’m confused.”
“We are adults. And I liked sleeping with you. Beaucoup. But I cannot see it working out. Too bad, because last night was my intense pleasure.”
Wasn’t that the truth, thought Marlow, snapping right back to the velvet chair and what delightfully rude things had transpired there.
“I will remember it for a long time,” he said wistfully. Did lack of future sex with her warrant wistful? How dreamy.
Return to the matter at hand, Marlow. “Madame Belleville’s window was broken in the storm. I told her we’d fix it.”
“I slept through that storm,” he said, looking up at the clear blue sky.
“Yes.” She laughed. “You were out like a light.”
“I gave away all my energy earlier.”
“We’re not going to talk like that, remember?”
It was as if he could see through her clothing to the wanting body beneath. “Too bad.”
Too bad indeed.
Sabine woke up and, for a moment, forgot where she was. Outside, merchants greeted each other, unlocking the grills that protected their businesses overnight, rolling them up. Ka-chunk.
Right. Yves’ flat in the Quartier Latin. She rolled over to look at Aubin, but the bedding and cushions were neatly folded on a chair, and he was nowhere in sight. She must have slept in.
She got dressed and went into the living room. No one there either. She checked her phone. A text from her mother about a storm last night in Mirabelle. Shit. She put off replying.
Alone, she had a chance to snoop. Cracked, moody oil paintings.
Framed, old black and white photos of … family members, probably.
People on summer holidays at the beach in bathing suits that looked like they were from the forties.
A woman on a café terrace, smoking, with cat-eye glasses.
Fifties? A little boy in front of a Parisian school gate in shorts and new running shoes: her father, as a child. Early nineties?
There were shelves of old leather-bound books. Silver cigar boxes and crystal ashtrays, covered in dust. Yves was not a housekeeper, that was for sure.
The windows gave onto Rue Xavier Privas.
Below were two kebab places and a bar named Frenchy MacGuffin’s.
Its awning read “Karaoke, EDM, Beer Pong.” Sabine thought she should take Aubin there, since he liked dance music, although she was loathe to go to a bar with such an American name, one which surely drew foreigners rather than Parisians.
All she wanted to do was soak up the local atmosphere.
She found paper and colored pens, flopped into a big armchair and made a little book. On the front, she wrote “Flane Right.” Then she drew the cover art: the vantage point from the place where they’d eaten their lunch on ?le Saint-Louis. Inside, she wrote:
Are we doing this flane thing right?
Are we getting outside ourselves but deeper inside?
Are we becoming a part of a place?
Let’s.
She felt like a kid, safe and relaxed in this apartment, but also happily adult in a new chapter of her life where she would learn different things and feel inspired.
Aubin came in, his arms full of baguette and croissants from Maison d’Isabelle.
“Morning,” she said. “You’ve been busy. Did you sleep OK on the floor?”
“I did,” he said, putting the food on a corner of the table that wasn’t covered in scripts and paperwork. “You?”
“I slept great. Thank you for bringing me here. I wouldn’t have been brave enough to come on my own. Somehow with you, I’m braver.”
“I will let myself be braver around you, too.” She didn’t know what that meant but liked the sound of it.
Yves arrived. “You found breakfast, good. I went down to the café and wrote and forgot I had guests. Now you see what an awful person I am.”
“You’re not,” said Sabine.
“I am, how do they say, off in the clouds. Up in the clouds? I have this new script to deliver, I am getting terrible notes from financiers and my distributor, I don’t see a solution. A poor excuse, but you are adults. I know you can take care of yourselves.”
Yves eyed what she was making. “What is this?”
“It’s nothing. It’s when I’m, you know, in a waiting room or on a train. It’s not finished. It’s silly, really.”
“Can I see?”
Aubin nodded, encouraging, so she passed over the little book.
Yves flipped through it. “This is not silly,” he said.
“Art happens when we let our brains go. This is mostly what I am trying to do. Get out of the way, not plan or think too much, not try to say something important. This is much more art, in a sense, than something a person has worked on for ten years. This is pure. An echo of yesterday. I love it.”
He gave it back. She looked at her tiny book with new eyes.
“What train are you planning to take?” he asked. “Because I suddenly wonder if you would like to stay and help me with pick-ups.”
“I don’t know what that is,” said Aubin.
“A pick-up is a scene you still need. You might be working with your editor, and you see that two scenes will not fit together, or there is a problem, or the story won’t make sense unless you add something new.
I am in that place on the film I am finishing now.
It is never good—it can be very costly on a film with a big budget—but thankfully I am not only the director, I am also the writer and the crew, so I can achieve this without much difficulty. ”
Sabine could see it sounded like as much fun to Aubin as it did to her. “We’d love that.” She’d have to lie again to her mum about not getting back around noon, but maybe late this evening? Tomorrow? The lies were piling up.
“Merveilleux,” said Yves. “Hopefully we won’t get arrested this time.”
No word from Sabine. She’d no doubt be sleeping in.
On the way to Neufchateau, Marlow and Luc saw more destruction.
There was a washed-out road in the valley, so they had to pick a different route past battered road signs.
A coop had been crushed by a fallen tree that had also flattened its enclosure fence; the chickens had escaped.
An older man in rubber boots and worn corduroy pants with patches on the knees chased the chickens to no avail.
They helped pull the tree off the fence and propped it back up.
They chased the chickens this way and that, laughing at the mayhem.
Marlow found the corrugated metal coop roof twenty feet away in the tall grass, curled up like a sardine lid.
She dragged it back, using her broken French to ask if the man needed anything from Neufchateau, given she and Luc were headed there.
He was touched, especially given they didn’t know each other.
“Je suis de Mirabelle, en haut de la colline,” she said, “et vous êtes sur la route de Neufchateau, donc ce ne serait pas un problème du tout.” (I am from Mirabelle, and you are on the way to Neufchateau, so it isn’t a problem at all.)
“C’est très gentil, Madame,” the man said.
“Je m’appelle Marlow Linden. Et je voudrais vous présenter Luc Celeste.” She could now not only introduce herself and Luc, she could use “vous” correctly. Not bad.
“Gérard Dubé,” he said.
They said their goodbyes and got back into the car.
“I want to keep sleeping together,” blurted Luc, pulling back onto the road.
She laughed. “Is chasing after chickens so sexy?”
“It is. It is you helping someone you don’t know.”
“That’s just being human.”
“You also told him you were from Mirabelle. And you used French freely with a stranger. That is not the French from when you arrived a month ago.”
“So chasing chickens, saying I’m from Mirabelle, and using my bad French are a turn-on?”
He nodded. “It’s only that this ‘situationship’ is not for me.”
“That works out then, because I think it’s a mistake to have sex with a neighbor.”
“Bah. That would not bother me at all. It is very convenient, non?”
“All the easier to get into trouble.”
“And a ‘situationship’ wouldn’t get you into trouble?”
He was right about that.
“So. If you decide to get rid of this strange idea and commit to one man—the better man—me—I will be there. When Ruth buys the house, for example. You won’t be a neighbor then.”
“We’ll see.”
“I live in hope.”