America was Natalie’s idea.
She’d gone to the upstairs travel agency of Madame Dubray on rue Saint-Jacques in Paris, and politely listened as Madame extolled the fresh sea oysters of Saint-Malo, the forests and glades of Perpignan where there were no longer lions, the sunstruck beaches of the Côte d’Azur where Mademoiselle could air her still-youthful breasts in innocent, unfettered freedom.
Natalie shyly hid her still-youthful breasts with her forearms as she told Madame that unfortunately those were all places that Pierre would have chosen for an August vacation and she was no longer interested in accommodating her shifty fiancé. She reminded Madame that she was a librarian specializing in Americana at the Bibliothèque nationale, so touring the United States seemed a more intriguing and practical choice than staying with the French in France for the August vacances as she’d done all her life.
Sighing, Madame agreed, in the grudging way of one who thought some people would garden in basements if you let them. “You would prefer what, Mademoiselle Clairvaux? Shopping in New York? Mickey Mouse in Orlando?”
She shook her head and said she would like to tour America on an overland route from the East Coast to the West.
Madame Dubray held her face carefully fixed as she asked, “How?”
Natalie felt unfairly tested. “Railway?”
Madame smirked. “Railway,” she said. “In America.”
“Or perhaps I could rent an automobile.”
Madame scoffed, “Aren’t you the audacious one? Motoring through all the forty states.”
“There are fifty.”
“Well, not worth seeing,” said Madame.
Natalie told the travel agent that she wasn’t confident there was a good way to do what she wanted, that’s why she’d thought it necessary to visit Madame. But she very much wanted to see some of the attractions and natural wonders in the American interior that Europeans frequently missed. She lifted from the floor beside her a coffee-table book and turned its pages to show photographs of children on candy-striped swings below a car chase on a drive-in movie screen, snow falling on the just-alike homes of Levittown, hot sunlight and green machinery baling yellow hay in Iowa, an ominous rainstorm over a trailer park in Kansas, a girl in cowboy boots selling yard gnomes at a flea market, a giant bingo parlor with hundreds hunching over their game cards. “Like these,” Natalie said, “not the typical places.”
Madame Dubray gave it some thought and said, “We have one possibility.”
Natalie said in English, “Oh goody!”