Foreign Tongue by Vanina Marsot Page B

sweat.
    “You must watch out for my little Raymond,” Madame Ronet told me. “He’s not as clever as you.”
    It was true: Raymond was a boring little runt, whose principal interests were burning bugs with his magnifying glass and knowing facts about dinosaurs. But I did keep an eye out for him, even befriending him, because she’d asked me to. For my trouble, I was invited to the Ronets’ country house for a weekend.
    It was a damp, miserable cottage in Normandy, set on a grim stretch of local highway. Monsieur Ronet, a tense, burly fellow with a handlebar mustache, took us out for a long walk—“an airing,” he said—then put us to work repairing a stone wall. At dinner, Madame Ronet served pumpkin soup and a gristly beef stew. We listened to a giant radio, shaped like a church window, while Madame mended socks with a darning egg. Later, she tucked us in bed.
    The distinct crawl of insect feet across my forehead woke me up at night. Without thinking, I smacked my hand down, killing it with an audible crunch. I panicked when I felt a sticky pulp on my hand, and I ran down the hallway, colliding with Madame. She was dressed for bed, in a clingy nightgown under her open dressing gown, her hair in curlers under a threadbare red scarf.
    “How horrible!” she exclaimed, blanching at the squashed insect carapace stuck to my forehead. She led me into the bathroom and cleaned my face. Afterward, while she heated a saucepan of milk and vanilla, I sat at the kitchen table, dangling my feet, mute with joy at being alone with her at last.
    “There,” she said, placing a cup in front of me. I blew on the surface, a fine pucker of milk skin already beginning to form. “My poorlittle man,” she said, stroking my face, “poor little Jean-Marc.” I gave a theatrical sob, biting my lip to keep from laughing. It had the desired effect. She pulled me onto her lap and held me close to her chest. My nose was squashed flat against her nightgown, pressed right into the hollow between her breasts. “There, there. You’ll be able to sleep now.”
    Not likely. I couldn’t breathe.
    It was the happiest memory of my childhood.
    I was eleven.
    The next few pages covered the author’s adolescence, including a high school sweetheart and a brief affair with one of his father’s nurses. The language was straightforward, factual. Then the narrative returned to its main subject.
    Is there anything more compelling than the pursuit of a woman? All I could think of was Eve. The facts and routine of daily life were just a stopgap, a bookmark, a pause between notes, background noise. I lived through my senses. Information did not get processed through my brain; instead, I felt it on my skin, tasted it with my tongue, and caressed it with my fingertips. After an escalating campaign of phone calls, flowers, and lunches, Eve and I began an affair.
    We met at noon, in the late afternoon, sometimes on weekends, but always at the same sparsely furnished apartment near the place de Clichy. We made love, ate, made love again. We didn’t discuss jobs or friends or obligations, how we filled up the day until we saw each other. We kept ourselves free from the mundane details that dull most affairs. Instead, we talked about our childhoods, favorite books, memories. The time I spent with her was enchanted, and she’d agreed to a weekend in Venice with me later that month.
    The first weekend in October hosted the most important horse race in France, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. Daphne and I went withmy cousin Yves, a sports journalist. He’d finagled us an invitation to a cocktail party at the loge of a wealthy Brit. Neither Daphne nor I knew anything about racing, so we drank champagne and soaked up information from the horse world cognoscenti.
    Extravagant hats were traditional, so Daphne wore a wide-brimmed straw confection covered in plumage. It resembled nothing so much as an unidentified flying object after an infelicitous encounter with a