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Page 29.
Chapter 6
 He awoke because a sunbeam dazzled the orbits of his eyes, because a hand brushed against his shoulder, because a droplet fell on his bare chest.
He opened his eyes and sat up but she had left the room in a rustle of skirts. “I have breakfast for you,” she said in the kitchen. The apartment was endowed with the aroma of coffee, the essence of a light perfume, the stirring of a fresh breeze from some half-open window amid the stale odors of sleep.
Twisting aside to get out of the direct sunlight, he remembered that he must get off to work. He buried his head in the pillow. Bird twitter and consciousness that it was Monday made him swing upright into a sitting position. He awoke fully when his soles touched the cool wood floor and he heard the crackling of ham in a pan.
The bedroom where he had intruded and borrowed time and love was a study in white. Even inside, it was evident the house was very old and had been remodeled, but it was solid as the centuries and as money.
He saw the source of the breeze. While he was asleep, Emma had slightly opened a glass-paned door leading to a wood porch palisaded with flower boxes. White and red blossoms stirred in sun and wind. A delivery truck hummed through the quiet street outside; cowboyed to an impatient stop at the corner with crashing contents.
A broad picture window overlooked the porch. Yellow curtains hung pinned back by heavy brocade cord, revealing banked and newly green elm trees outside. Marc Fontbleu rose, belching, and staggered, stretching and rubbing his head, yawning, past a wall covered in books (rousing creative jazz in Léopold Montblé)—into the living room.
His clothes lay neatly folded and stacked on an armrest of the couch. Daylight filtered in through a sea of tree crowns outside, in a rich and golden stream through a three-sided bay window overlooking a long, narrow backyard. Cross-streams of light from the bedroom and a window at the side of the house stirred millions of dust molecules dancing in a faint breeze. The days of sifting spring tea were over, he thought, sitting beside his clothes.
He thought of home. Soon, spring rains would turn into drifting clouds of gray humidity. Colorful pleasure boat sails would criss-cross the Lac de Créteil.
Emma poked her hand and face around the doorway in which she’d twirled nakedly the night before. “Do you want to take a shower?”
He looked at her and nodded. It was then he learned something about her. Her long, elegant face fluttered with a white smile. Her cheekbones glistened and a tear fell from her chin. “You’ll have to make it quick because I still have to finish drying my hair,” she told him.
Puzzled, he gingerly entered the kitchen.
She handed him a towel but turned away. “Hurry, your eggs will be ready in five or ten minutes.”
He would normally have steamed up the bathroom, but he did not want to cloud the mirror.
Anyway, it was spring, finally, and he half-opened the window and stepped shivering into the cold tub behind plastic curtains fragrant with hundreds of past shampoos. He showered quickly, lathering himself, his hair, then rinsing away the sweat and sticky dried sediment of the night’s exploration. He marveled that a person could smile and cry both at the same time.
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