Outside Mrs. Christiansen’s rooming house, the confederacy of onlookers had doubled in number. Lawn chairs and picnic tables had been teamstered over. Orville Tetlow’s wife was filling coffee cups from a chuffing urn on a card table. A girl was walking along and holding out a pastry box and people chose donuts from it. Inquiring minds had congested around Bert Slaughterbeck as he held forth. “Whereas if it was poltergeists, I think you’d see some of that levitation and telekinesis, plus those little red pig eyes and books flying across the room.”
And now there was a buffet in the upstairs hallway. Mrs. Christiansen brought out her best silver coffee service and china. Toasts and pastries were in white-napkined baskets. It looked like a catered affair.
Carlo moonily stared at Iona’s room, still thinking, One heart, one bed, one troth, and he said to no one in particular, “I just hope she learns to love again.”
Owen hauled a chair up to the buffet table and was ravening with great relish as he told the priest, “What I did was combine about sixty percent cabernet sauvignon grape and about thirty percent merlot, plus some cabernet franc and malbec to keep it true to the soft and fruity . . .”
Natalie interrupted to fill Owen’s coffee cup.
Owen asked her, “Any progress on your end?”
“Two say I should marry Pierre. Two say Dick. Two say it is usually hotter in August. Iona is abstaining. What do you think?”
“We could be a little cooler this year.”
The Reverend Picarazzi kicked his shin.
“Oh that,” Owen said. “Well, I’m a silent partner in ‘Smith et Fils’ now, so my choice would be whatever makes Pierre happiest.”
And then the Reverend Picarazzi spoke and the river of his sentences was so slowed by his tiredness that she understood many words. “You and your fiancé,” he said, inter-locking his fingers, “you fit together, you mesh. You accessorize each other, so to speak. And Iona and Dick: peas in a pod. Hand in glove. But you switch the parties around—if you don’t mind my saying—it’s a shtickl crazy. You find yourself thinking, What shoes do I wear with this? I haven’t any wisdom; I just call ’em like I see ’em.”
She smiled and got up and went to Iona’s room, where six women gathered to dispassionately list Pierre Smith’s good and bad points.
Iona said, “He’s French, number one.”
Opal asked, “I forget: Was that a good or bad point?”
Iona smiled. “C’est bon!”
Ursula said, “He’s a hunk.”
Mrs. Christiansen said, “He’ll be a good provider.”
And old Nell said, “He’s always carrying around that duck.”
She was stared at.
Iona said, “You’re thinking of Chester.”
“Oh.”
Opal folded her arms with finality. “I have it on good authority that he’s a philanderer.”
“Oh, he is not,” Iona said.
“You say that like it bothers you,” Ursula said.
“Are we talking about Chester?” Nell asked.
They all shouted, “No!”
Cigars made Natalie’s quarters as gray as a political back room as Dick straddled a Shaker chair he’d spun around and Pierre hunkered on the floored mattress, his head in his hands, his jacket and bow tie off.
With some heroism, the rancher said, “You know, actually a guy like you couldn’t make a better choice for a wife. She’s smart, fun to be with, beautiful, and you can tell in an instant what a good person she is. And it’s as plain as the nose on your face that she loves you . . .”
Pierre jerked his head up, his door-damaged nose heavily bandaged and no longer noble. “She loves you!”
Dick held his cigar in his mouth as he gave that solemn thought. Cigar smoke lengthened toward the ceiling, waving like seaweed, and he said, “She was trying to make you jealous.”
“She’s crazy!”
Skinny Carlo was stooping to tap cigar ash into a plastic cup on the floor when he noticed the Ferragamo loafer Pierre tore on his Wednesday walk into Seldom. “Whose shoe you s’pose this is?”
Pierre turned, struck by her tenderness for him. “She kept it?”
Dick said, “See there?”
In Mrs. Christiansen’s many slept. Ursula was on Iona’s floor, a hand slung over her boom box. In the hallway, the guys with the scuba tanks were hugging them against the main staircase railing. Owen was next to the hallway food table on a dining room chair, balancing precariously on its hind legs as he snored. Carlo was underneath the hallway table, jam dripping onto his cheek. The trucker from Sidney was sitting upright against his pony keg, in his hand Natalie’s gift of a mallard wine decanter, now half-filled with beer.
Even though it was nearing sunrise, Dick was still awake and soldierly on the Shaker chair, paging through the heirloom journal of Bernard LeBoeuf that he’d given Natalie.
The Reverend Picarazzi was face down on the yellow sofa downstairs, his sneakers off, his Volkswagen van’s keys fallen to the floor beside a limp hand.
In the upstairs bathroom Pierre was washing up. Water ran in the sink as he shook back his wild blond hair, straightened his bow tie, gently touched his bandaged nose, and for a long time looked haggardly into the mirror. “Tu es un imbécile,” he said. (You are a fool.) Then he turned off the water and exited the bathroom.
At the far end of the peopled hallway, Natalie was facing him like a gunfighter. She held high Reverend Picarazzi’s Volkswagen keys. “Allons-y,” she said. (Let’s go.)
And Pierre asked, “Ou?” (Where?)
Sunrise in Nebraska. The indigo skies high overhead were lightening to electric blue and magenta just above the inky tree canopy and to a soft mist of rose and gold at the eastern horizon. The old Volkswagen van was stalled on an iron-girdered bridge high above Frenchman’s Creek as two side doors winged open and Natalie and Pierre got out, their clothes off. Sun rays streaked through the woods and the golden sun rose like something wet and molten behind them as she got up onto the bridge frame’s sidewall and then he. They looked down to the sun-painted creek twenty feet below as she counted, “Un, deux, trois,” and they flung themselves naked into the chill water. They gasped when they broke the surface, but soon got used to the morning cold as they swam. She told him, “We have too many hindrances to our marrying.”
“C’est vrai,” he said. “Par exemple . . .”
“English, Monsieur.”
“There is this madness in you.”
“And you are shifty.”
“You have no head for business,” he said.
“And you?”
“Bad example,” he said. “But you get up too early and put on as music your Fred Astaire, your Gene Autry.”
“You stay up too late. And you yack.”
“What is ‘yack’?”
“Bavarder,” she said. She halted her swim, put her hands on his head, and dunked him into the medicine of Frenchman’s Creek, counting as she held him under, “Un . . . deux . . . trois . . . quatre . . . cinq . . . six . . . sept . . .” She let him up.
Pierre gasped for breath and whipped his long hair as Natalie blithely floated away. Swimming after her, Pierre admitted, “I’m forgetful of you.”
“In which way?”
Wiping his hair sleek against his skull, he floated on his back. “Well, I never think about how you are feeling.”
She floated too, her pert breasts rising just above the water, her dark hair trailing out and undulating. Seriously considering him, she said, “Actually, in your own way, you never think about anyone else.”
Pierre seemed relieved by the revelation. “But yes! It is true!”
“Wait,” Natalie said. She held onto his head and dunked him again. And then she went down alongside him. And they were all ardor as they broke the surface, holding each other and kissing.
“I’m an idiot,” Pierre said. “I’m a brute. I’m a beast.”
“No more than most men,” Natalie said.
“You are too beautiful for me!”
She smiled. She touched his handsome face. “You will perhaps get less ugly as you grow older.”
She felt the tolling of her heart as each stared at the other for a moment. And then each independently went underwater.
Small ripples traveled away. Water flattened. There was silence. And then both of them slowly rose up until just their eyes were above Frenchman’s Creek. After some cautious consideration, they raised their heads to talk and Pierre became a hard and terse Western outlaw. “Let’s do it.”
And mimicking him, Natalie said, “Why not.”
They heard Dick yell, “We’re joining you!” and they turned to see him and Iona, naked on the iron bridge, their hands linked, their hearts united, and then plunging with screams of joy.