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Page 16.
 “And love women like yourself,” he finished. “What else could a man say, looking at you?”
“A man,” she said, making a fist of her fight hand on the table and reaching with her left to grasp his knee and squeeze under the table. “That’s how I like you.” She squeezed his knee, shaking it with surprising intensity, and leaned close and said with tea-breath, “I’d like to take you by your grass…and mow you!”
He felt relieved, and they both laughed.
Some bubble had broken, a tension had disintegrated and filtered away in pieces into this greenish air.
“What I want,” he said, “is to be honest and open. I have this feeling we can have that. I feel such intensity about you. I can’t explain it.”
“Maybe Léopold Montblé will write me a poem.”
“He did last night,” Marc Fontbleu confessed. “He fell asleep though before he could retype it.”
“Honest and open. Those qualities are hard to find, unless two people hate each other.”
“What I mean is, I have this feeling we don’t have to act, know what I mean? We don’t have to play games.”
“Does it bother you I’m married?”
“You bring me neatly from the general to the particular. Yes.”
“Would you love me and leave me, excuse my cliché?”
“Maybe if it was the right thing, or the right time.”
She raked the opposite wall, the fireplace, the stained glass windowlets, with a gaze filled with hot and cold computations. “Maybe that’s how it should be.” She darted a look at him. “Suppose I don’t surrender?”
He spread his hands in the air. “I would dip my colors to you in salute, and pass you at a respectful distance. In plain language, I already am so in love with you that I would do nothing to hurt you.”
“You would let go of me?” she asked, full of hidden calculations.
“Reluctantly, yes.” It already seemed like losing a best friend.
Am I nuts? What am I getting into here? Can I be arrested?
She placed her hands in her lap. “Would you think badly of me if I…had you on board?”
“I’d bring my best manners. Léopold Montblé would rhapsodize you in the third person.”
She was resigned to her sensibility. Lying back again with her hands in her pockets, she looked up at the ceiling. “I wouldn’t get you get into anything embarrassing, or dangerous. Jérôme won’t be back for three months.”
“Why doesn’t he have you along?”
“He asked me. He asks me every time. I just don’t want to. Things won’t be any better in Australia. You see, I know something he doesn’t. He doesn’t want me to come along. He really can’t stand being with me. That’s marriage. This is passion. This is hunger. Maybe it is baby love being born.”
“Upskate.”
“Downskate.”
“Cheapskate,” he said, knowing it was the last thing about the world in which she sailed.
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