Children were squealing on rides at the Seldom fair-grounds and the night just above the horizon was brilliantly streaked with the scarlet and yellow and blue neon lights of wild machines and game arcades and food booths filled with pizza slices, hot dogs, and sweets. Waiting their turn at the Dairy Delite were Iona and Pierre, each wearing jean cutoffs under Owen’s green gas station shirts. Pierre’s hung loose but Iona’s was tied above her firm-muscled stomach. She handed Pierre a vanilla ice cream cone that a churring machine had stacked like a minaret, and he sculpted it with his tongue as they strolled.
Iona asked, “When you got here? Why was Natalie upset with you?”
“We have an argument,” he said.
“And what was the topic?”
Pierre shrugged and said, “She says I never pay attention to her. . . or something like that.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t about the wedding?”
Pierre halted a second in confusion, and then he resumed his stride.
“Don’t worry,” Iona said. “You don’t have to pretend. Anyone can see you still like her. Otherwise you wouldn’t be so mean.”
She’d lost him. She seemed to want a comment. “But it’s you I like,” he said.
She cocked her head and became coy. “Why?”
Pierre stepped away to give her a hair-to-toe appraisal as he licked the balconies of the ice cream. Even in Owen’s shirt she was gorgeous. “But you are so natural and beautiful!” he exclaimed. “Elemental. Passionate. Erotique. Like Brigitte Bardot before she went crazy for animals.”
She blushed. “I’m not like that, really. I just want normal things. To be friendly to people. To love and be loved. To get to know someone really well and to have him know me in the same way.” She paused. “You probably don’t think that’s very ambitious.”
“But no! To love and be loved is the highest ambition!”
She smiled. “You’re pretty good at this, aren’t you.”
“At what?”
“Romancing a girl.”
Complacently, he said, “Well, I’m French.” And then he continued his hobby, turning his shrinking ice cream cone this way and that. The soft August heat was melting it too fast and he was not practiced in the art of such eating. “Il fait trop chaud pour une glace,” he said. (It’s too hot for ice cream.)
“Are you getting it all over your hand?”
“I fear yes.”
“Here.” She licked a tear of ice cream from the cone and then coquettishly licked some more from his hand.
“Sank you.”
“Good flavor,” Iona said.
“Vraiment?” (Truly?) He licked his cone and then Iona’s hand. She giggled. “Yes,” he said, “very good that way.”
She saw people who knew her and all seemed to have children either on the rides or waiting for them. All stared at Iona with worship or leers or silent opinions, some of the men nodding in a hidden way or waving hello with the twitch of a finger. She told Pierre, “You don’t know what it’s like growing up here. With it being so claustrophobic. I mean, they’re the salt of the earth, but every person in Seldom has known every blessed thing about me since I was one year old. You can’t grow up, really, you can’t change, you can’t even get a little wild. You’re in front of all these cameras. You aren’t supposed to be perfect; you’re just supposed to be predictable.” She paused. “Why don’t we get out of here?”
She took him by the hand and turned south, away from the booths and exhibits and toward a night where lightning bugs flickered and trembled and described strange golden alphabets in the air. A healthy scent of alfalfa drifted in from the fields. She got to a white plank fence and jumped her rump onto the top rail before quickly swinging her lithe legs over to the greensward on the other side. Pierre finished the remainder of his ice cream cone and wiped his hands on Owen’s green shirt before holding onto a fence post as he struggled over the fence and bulkily fell onto the lawn. She helped him up and he saw they were on the sixteenth tee of the golf course. A 412 yard, par 4. Water hazard on the left. Tricky green. She slipped her right arm around his waist and he pulled her closer so that there was friction as they strolled.
“So who are you really?” she asked.
“Gérard Depardieu. But younger.”
She laughed. “I need more.”
“My grandfather was British. My grandmother, she was a countess. I have herited from her. . .”
“Inherited.”
“. . . a little castle and—I am losing the English—une vigne?”
“Vineyard?”
“C’est juste. And from my father I have the job in the family firm, which is buying and selling the wines in all the world. I am the director of—”
“Your job?” She gazed at him in amazement. “That is such a male answer.”
“I have left out what?”
“Emotions, for starters.” And he seemed so mystified that she decided to prompt him. “Are you afraid of anything?”
“Spiders.”
She could see he was withholding. “And that’s all?”
“Another question please.”
“Heights? Snakes? Failure? Kitchen appliances?”
“Kitchen appliances?”
She felt caught out. “But we were talking about you.”
He stilled as he thought. “I have sree older brothers. All very good at business. And for them I am merely a. . . jouisseur?”
She considered the possibilities. “Playboy?”
“Exactly.”
“Are you one?”
His head ducked in his French way as his mouth puffed a soft puh at the indisputable. “It is the role I have been assigned. I cannot do otherwise.”
“And you’re afraid of what?”
Squirming with uneasiness, he said, “Are not playboys always, finally. . . fools?”
“So you’re afraid of making a fool of yourself,” she said.
“I have said enough.”
“And that’s why you try to act so bristly and cold and highfalutin. So no one gets inside.”
In an effort at deflection he asked, “Is it that you have studied the psychologie?”
She flatly stated, “I just listen to Doctor Laura on the radio. Oh, and hot tip, Pierre: Don’t ever call in.”
Soulfully gazing into her eyes, he said, “She could teach me about my heart’s desire.”
“Which is?”
Without smiling, he quoted her. “To love and be loved.”
Iona smiled. “Clever boy.”
“Really, Iona. I think it is so.”
“Well, I’m touched.”
“And you?” he asked. “Who are you, Iona?”
“The facts?”
“We begin there.”
“I’m twenty-three years old. Raised in Seldom. My mom passed when I was a girl, and my dad was off in Timbuktu by then, so I’ve been halfways on my own for ages. Brownies, Girl Scouts, Four-H Club. Went to high school over in Three Pillows. I was a football cheerleader in the fall, a gymnast in winter, and played girl’s softball in the spring. And I have a letter sweater to prove it. Mister Tupper coached us. Average student. I’ve had nine semi-cute boyfriends since puberty, and only three broken hearts. Oh, and I was queen of the Snowflake Frolic and the Senior Prom. Attended Metro Tech Community College, Associate of Arts degree, and then I got a job at Mutual of Omaha. Shared an apartment with three other girls. We quarreled all the time. Ran out of hot water every morning. Went into credit card debt, shopping just to soothe the melancholy, and decided Seldom wasn’t so bad. I’ve been back with my grandma for three months now.”
“Madame Christiansen. Très gentille.”
“She is. I love her to pieces, but she thinks things ought to be the way they were when she was a girl. She caught me with a guy in my Omaha apartment and she got so stricken! Like I was defiled.” She paused. “I’m afraid of being a fallen woman. And my heart’s desire is to fall for someone.”
The sand bunkers that fronted the sixteenth green were half a wedge shot away. Pierre sought a sympathetic response. But he sought in vain. “It is never easy, is it,” he said.
Iona noticed his vague detachment and said, “Here I am griping and doing the poor-me bit and tiring you out with the translating.”
He admitted, “English is a difficult language for me. I have not the. . . vocabulaire. I feel stupide?”
“But you’re not! I can tell. Which words were you hunting for?”
Pierre frowned with thoughtfulness and asked, “How does one say in English, ‘You have beautiful breasts’?”
Iona blushed as she looked down at her shirt and said, “Exactly like that.” After a pause, she said, “I’ll bet it’s prettier in French though.”
Pierre haughtily said, “Of course.” His hand went to her blonde hair. “The hairs. . . les cheveux.” He floated both hands onto her face and she turned it against his right palm. “Your eyes so blue . . . les yeux couleur d’azurs.” His right thumb lightly traced her lips as he whispered, “The mouth . . . la bouche.” And his mouth neared hers as he said, “The kiss . . . le baiser.” They kissed and she seemed to swoon a little. Pierre theatrically withdrew from her and settled onto the freshly mown fairway, and she got down on the fairway, too, lying half on top of him, one thigh beside his, her forearms propping her up off his chest, a hand toying with his wild mane of hair. A moon of pearl was shining down on them.
Iona asked, “How do you say you’ve got a crush on somebody?”
“A. . . crush?”
“Say you’re romantic about someone you just met.”
Pierre replied meaningfully, “J’ai le béguin pour toi.”
She said as if just practicing it, “J’ai le béguin pour toi.” She smiled shyly. “Handsome language.”
“Yes,” he said. “Very pretty.”
“This just in: I like you a lot.”
And they were about to kiss again when heavy Owen and skinny Carlo sloshed up from the fairway’s water hazard to the left, wearing miner’s lamped helmets and weedy hip waders, garden rakes and full gunnysacks in their hands.
“Ill met by moonlight,” Carlo muttered.
Owen hefted a gunnysack high and shouted, “You guys want any golf balls?” Pierre and Iona jolted up and straightened themselves. Owen said, “We got plenty.” When he only got hard stares from them, he said, “I guess we’ll be going.”
Sloshing away, Carlo’s jealousy overcame him and he yelled, “Don’t let him speak French to ya!”
Smiling, Iona got up. “Too late!”