I never do quite manage my jacket zipper in the dark.
I come out, gratefully, to an empty room. According to my reset watch, there’s still five minutes till the train arrives. In the bright neon light over the sink, I can see all the mill dirt I’ve hauled with me. I use a dirty handkerchief to brush off the worst. My new L. L. Bean crepe-soled shoes are covered with goop from in front of our garage. I run trembling fingers through my crazy looking shock of white hair. I hate being nervous, so nervous my hands shake. It seems to happen more often lately.
I started graying seriously at thirty-five, had a white streak in front when I was only in my twenties. There’s something about those of us with a premature white streak, gray or white hair which causes other people to distrust us. I think they feel we’re crazy or have had some terrible trauma which has permanently disabled us. Maybe that’s how I became a philosophy major. I look like someone who worries about things. I am.
Now I’m fifty-two it isn’t so bad, white hair is more appropriate but none of it will fall out. They’ll bury me still looking like a slowly fading, washed-out boy. That’s not far off the mark either. I’ve been waiting over fifty years to feel like a man. I might as well get used to it, it’s probably never going to happen.
I stare ten seconds at unsure cerulean blue eyes surrounded by somewhat bluish flesh, as I wash my hands. It’s really weird, as I get older, my eyelids keep drooping so now my eyes look as if they’re peering out from the ends of side-by-side pup tents.
I should have shaved this morning but there wasn’t time; also, I didn’t think of it. My beard, strangely enough, is still dark, at least the stubbles are. Once I let it grow a little to see how it would look. I looked as if I had my head on upside down.
The train is five minutes late so I have time to make a momentous discovery, for me, that is. It’s far from original, this insight, but it’s creative within my personal limits. I discover why croissants are made that way, wrapped as thin layers into a crescent form. It’s so they can be dunked in coffee, easily, with virtually no crumbs dropping in the cup. I luxuriate over my croissant, my lukewarm coffee and my idea, feeling genial and very cosmopolitan. The anxiety of the trip is dropping off like that slush from the Nevers road.
Coffee usually makes me hyper, but this time I’m soothed, perhaps because it’s almost cold, or perhaps something chemical happens when it combines with a dunked croissant; or probably this is only a letdown after the mad, desperate rush. I don’t know which, but I’m mellow, very Santa Claus-Christmasish, wishing I had a bell and sleigh. It would be great fun to really be Santa Claus. Maybe next life.
So, when I hear the train from Paris come into the station, and I go out onto the quai, I’m the international man meeting his loved ones at the start of some story in a book. Probably a book by John O’Hara or J. P. Marquand about unrequited love. Better not to think about that; not now anyway. I’m still not ready.
2
Two Turtle Doves
Out on the quai, I’ve just about given up, I’m beginning to think of phoning Paris. My mind’s spinning wildly through all the bleak alternatives; then I see them, the last ones off the train.
I should have known. It’s not Loretta’s way to fight through a crowd just to be first or tenth or thirtieth, or three hundredth. She’ll sit unruffled till everyone’s struggled, fought, scrambled themselves away with their luggage; then, unhurriedly, graciously, as if it’s her private car, as if there were no such thing as time, she’ll dismount, nice smile for the conductor on the way out. Ben’s the same, I’m not. I’m a pusher-shover. The two of them drive me nuts; I hate to imagine what they think of me.
So there they are, lightly luggaged, drifting dreamily along behind the crush. They find me and I think we’re all glad to see each other. Christmas is actually beginning. I sneak some looks at Lor to see how she’s holding up, but she has her ‘isn’t the world lovely’ smile pasted on her face so I can’t tell anything. Mike has a smile like that, too; but his is amateurish and childlike compared to Lor’s.
First we drive out to a large market, two kilometers from town, called Carrefour, French for intersection. It’s almost like an American supermarket, huge parking lots, grocery carts, Christmas music playing. We’ll stock in the bulk of our perishable groceries here and perhaps buy some gifts for our neighbors.
The big purchase will be the turkey. It needs to be large enough for six with enough left over for turkey soup and a hot turkey sandwich meal.
I’ve already bought all the nonperishables in Paris and carried them down in the car, extra goodies such as Nova Scotia smoked salmon, chocolate bars, several cookies: Russian cigarette, chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin. Also a bottle of Cointreau, some Poire William, Cognac and Champagne. These are the superlatives. There are also eight hundred francs’ worth of the necessities, apples, flour, rice, cheeses, sugar, butter, canned goods, onions, matches.
Lor, Ben and I push our cart through the aisles, agreeing, disagreeing, picking, weighing, gradually filling up. We buy more tangerines, oranges; walnuts for the Christmas cookies. A sack of peanuts in the shell, endive, lettuce, tomatoes; celery, stalk and root, for the turkey stuffing. That turkey isn’t the only one who’s going to be stuffed.
I also buy a ten-liter can of spar varnish and a new paint brush. This costs over three hundred francs right there. My mind glistens just thinking about that varnish.
I sneak in a Cuisinart food processor for Loretta. We also fulfill Ben’s greatest Christmas wish: a Russian-built, clip-loaded 22-caliber rifle with a seven-power telescopic sight. Rifles are a minor mania with this peaceful, shy, almost fifteen-year-old last child of ours. He, through his Guns & Ammo magazine, is our only contact with a whole world to which neither of us relates. Lor is concerned about the appropriateness of a rifle on a festival of peace. But it’s also a festival of love. A good part of love, to me, is respecting the uniqueness of another, especially when his preferences are different from yours. God, I’m a great one to talk about love!
Ben is as much concerned with trajectory, accuracy, optics as anything. A rifle to him is a magnificent tool for projecting an object at high speed over a considerable distance with accuracy. It isn’t far removed from his passion for model airplanes and gliders. He has a horror and fear of actual hunting, or flying in a real plane. Hang glider, or hunter, or soldier he’ll most likely never be.
We also buy log cabin logs, two dolls, baby doll carriers, a spinning top with a tiny train inside which goes around and whistles when the top spins, plus a sack of grain to feed the ducks on the pond. For Madame Le Moine we buy a potpourri of plants all in one pot. For her son, Philippe, thirty-seven years old and unmarried, a set of small glasses, each with a different fruit sealed in eau de vie, also one of those dogs which wags its head when you put it on the back shelf of an automobile.
On the way out of the market we see some Christmas trees. These trees are small, none taller than six feet, but they’re cheap, only eighteen francs. They’re unloading the truck with a new supply. We choose the bushiest, tallest tree. Ben’s in a state of shock as I tie it to the roof of our car.
‘Gosh, Dad, that’s not a Christmas tree, it’s a branch.’
I assure him I’ve found a stand of most beautiful trees in the woods near Mike’s cabin. Philippe told me this part of the forest is owned by Monsieur Boudine and I can probably make a deal with him to cut down one of the trees for us. All year we let him pasture his donkey. Pom Pom, in our field when we aren’t there, so we should come to some arrangement. Paying to have someone cut down a tree for us in plain daylight is a long way from stealing one in the secret of night but a sight better than what we’re hauling on our car.
We drive into central Nevers, it’s almost two o’clock and the traffic is a muddle. By sheer luck we see a woman with two kids coming out of a parking place on a one-way street behind the post office. We’re on the wrong end of the street. I gallantly let the woman out, then wildly start backing up the narrow passage between close-parked cars.