The Café, the Sea, Deauville, 1966

Frederic Tuten

1.

Natasha waved to him from her high window. He blew her a kiss. He checked his watch. He was already fifteen minutes late but he decided to have a brandy at the café and burn away the rabbit-stew lunch still churning in his stomach.

2.

Seagulls whirled in long loops, their reflections smashing into her window. She waved again before disappearing behind a flimsy red curtain.

“You know,” he once had said after they had made love on their third rendezvous in her cold, vast apartment, “your curtains look like the ones in brothel windows in Amsterdam.”

“You speak from firsthand knowledge, I suppose,” she said.

“That’s beside the point. Why dress your window like a whore’s?” He regretted saying that, apologized, and later bought her a large blue tin of her favorite caviar.

“I hope it cost you plenty,” she said.

“Not enough for my stupidity,” he answered, hoping he sounded sufficiently contrite. “You are far from a whore or vulgar,” he added.

“Not as far as my curtains go, it seems.”

“No need for irony. I know that you soar above me. You are the apotheosis of high culture. You are the total artwork, the Gesamtkunstwerk that Wagner dreamed of creating.”

He was unsure about his German pronunciation but she did not correct him and he had hoped, in any case, that she would be impressed with his smattering of opera culture and he considered adding: Let me take you to see Tristan und Isolde the next time it comes to Paris. But he reckoned the expense would be above his means—the first-class train round-trip, the best orchestra seats, the high-class dinner after, and then a fine room at a fine hotel. She was rich enough to travel without advance planning or thought of expense. But she seldom left her apartment or her street. So what good was her money? He would have loved to travel—to live—without a care. Not to have to settle for a middle-grade hotel with faded carpeting and suspect sheets, to be able to take an aeroplane anywhere, just on a whim, on a desire—what more was there to life but an elegant life?

“Thank you, for the compliment,” she said. “It struck a note.”

“You have your own power and beauty to pick and choose. I don’t know why you even give me a tumble,” he said.

She laughed. “If you think that, you know very little of life and nothing of women.”

He checked his watch again—noticing a crack in its crystal—before entering the empty café, where Alfred stood waiting for no one.

3.

The Longines Conquest, with a green lizard strap, burned his wrist. His wife had given him the watch some birthdays ago—“for the man I love,” she had said—and it told him the wrong time to punish him for his infidelities and it made him think of death three times a day and at night after dinner and again before slipping under the bedcovers.

He could always blame the tricky watch for his being late but Natasha would know he was lying.

4.

“Good afternoon, Monsieur Alfred,” he said to the barman, who was standing by the window and looking out to the sea.

“The usual?” Alfred asked without turning and still at the window writing in a small green notebook.

He had always found Alfred polite enough, cordial enough, but never embracing of his clients, or at least the few he had ever encountered there at the bar or seated at the old-fashioned, upholstered red-leather banquettes with marble-top tables and black wroughtiron legs. He never understood what she saw in the café, why she had once said, “That’s the only place I want to be other than my bedroom or my kitchen. It’s my sea cave and if Alfred changes it I will die.”

“It’s very gloomy,” he once ventured to comment. “Narrow like a coffin for a tall, narrow person,” he had added for emphasis.

“I wonder,” she said, “if I can make it my mausoleum?”

“It’s already Alfred’s,” he said, thinking that she must never, never die. That he would never allow it.

“Not today, Alfred. A brandy will do, I think. Yes, something solid, fortifying but not medicinal. Something celebratory even.”

The brandy was surprisingly rough and he thought of making a small fuss but finally he decided to say, “Alfred, what is your best brandy and will you have one with me?”

“Gladly, but in spirit,” Alfred said.

5.

He swirled the brandy in the snifter, sniffed, sipped, smiled. He made a pleased face and an approving nod. But it was all show, because all he was thinking about was his watch.

6.

He sported a yellow maple-wood cane fashioned in Vermont, where he dreamed one day of visiting and seeing for himself the sweet sap ooze down from the maple trees. America, where trees bled sugar and people lived in yellow maple-wood cabins and sang hymns before dinner. He had read that. The simple life. He longed for it.

A simple life with her in her blue stone-floor kitchen and its collection of aging copper pots she never used but left hanging on hooks from the ceiling, as they were when her mother died. And the samovar too, like a fat-bellied silver god of the kitchen.

It made him uncomfortable that once, in their rush to couple, the samovar had watched them making love on the kitchen floor and he had imagined that the pots would fall down on them for punishment.

“There is a kind of sanctity to the kitchen that we should perhaps respect,” he once said to her. “Everything has its place, the bedroom for love, the toilet for you know what, and the kitchen for cooking, no?”

“I never cook in the kitchen or anywhere else,” she answered. “Unless you consider boiling water cooking.”

He kept on his hat, a weathered Borsalino that had belonged to his father, a country doctor who made house calls even in the deepest winter and never remarried. He thought of his father every time he put on and took off the hat.

One day he would go to Milan and buy a new Borsalino and store the old one in his closet for good luck. And maybe he’d also buy a new suit; his workaday gray flannel with pinstripes sagged at the shoulders and looked tired, although his polished new shoes mirrored the sky and made him seem current. His father’s shoes were always bruised and caked with mud and blades of grass from his country rounds. What good was it to be an educated doctor and look like a rustic, a farmer, a bumpkin married to the earth?

She had chosen his beautiful shoes for him on their tryst in London, in a shop on Jermyn Street, where rows of burnished leather shoes sat in the window like saints. “Those,” she had said, “get those, and get a black umbrella and keep it rolled tightly as the Englishmen do.”

7.

He was still lingering over his second brandy when she emerged from her building. His watch explained he was now more than thirty-five minutes late. She came close up to the window and looked in; he smiled and saluted her with his brandy. Instead of walking into the café, to him, as he had expected, she sped away toward the promenade.

8.

She took a seat at a table on the empty, chilly café terrace. She enjoyed the cold, the gray dampness of Deauville, where the old stone houses kept their winter iciness even in summer. She imagined that she would light the fireplace when she returned home and not answer the phone.

She ordered a double espresso, bien serré, she said, because she liked the sound of the words, and opened a newspaper someone had left on the chair beside her. It was three days old but she was glad that everything she read had already happened, as in a film or an absorbing novel by Simenon, which she regretted not having brought along with her to the café.

9.

His father would return from his house calls late at night and sit in the kitchen smoking his pipe, an encrusted briar from Algeria. Sometimes he would fall asleep at the table, his stethoscope still draped about his neck, his dinner half eaten.

“The trick,” his father had once said, “is never to stop moving, so that life passes quickly and slowly at the same time.”

10.

Without asking her permission, a young man sat down in the chair facing her. “May I engage you in conversation?” he asked.

She raised her newspaper higher. Then he asked the same in Italian, and again in English.

11.

“Here’s what I think, Alfred,” he said, “brandy flattens the appetite for love. But calvados quickens its hunger.”

“After fifty, one should only drink warm milk with half a spoon of honey,” the barman said.

“I still have some time then, Alfred.”

“Of course. I myself have only started drinking milk recently, a decade ago.”

“Do you drink alone, Alfred? Or do you have a wife?”

“A wife? No.”

“Do you want one?”

“No.”

“What are you attached to then?”

“The café. And the window, of course.”

“Let me have a calvados then. I’ll toss you for it.”

The barman laughed. “A spinning coin makes me dizzy.”

He looked out the window, wondering if he should leave and go after her or wait for her to come to him, whereupon he would apologize and offer her a kir royale, her favorite drink.

“Do you like your profession, Alfred?”

“It is the only one I have known or have ever wished for. And you?”

“I thought I’d be a doctor, like my father. But I came to realize there is no point in a doctor trying to keep people alive because in time we all will die anyway.”

“Yes, but some people like to linger as long as possible. Anyway, there’s no telling when it will come. I’ve witnessed two of my steady clients die before they finished their first drink. But mostly we are all leaves waiting for our season to fall from the tree.”

“That’s very philosophical, Alfred, the leaves, the trees, the cycle of life and death. But it’s not very comforting and, forgive me, but I think I have heard all that before.”

“Yes, it’s an old song. As for comforts, I think there are very few. In any case, may I offer you another calvados?”

12.

She lowered the newspaper. The young man was handsome, his suntan richly even, his nose slightly bent, offsetting what would have made his good looks quickly boring. His blue blazer fit too tightly, so did his white shirt, open at the throat. He sleeked his hair back like a tango dancer in an Argentinean movie of the thirties.

13.

“Would you like another espresso?” the young man asked.

“No, thank you.”

“A glass of wine?”

She folded the paper and gave him a long look from which he did not flinch or look away. “A Pouilly-Fuissé or a Sancerre,” she said, adding, “No, a kir royale.”

“That’s an elegant choice. Of course, it would be from you.”

14.

A propeller aeroplane circled overhead as if uncertain of its destination. She wished it would drop into the sea and drown along with its annoying buzz. She hated aeroplanes and hated travel. London, maybe, from time to time, because its wet grayness was like staying home. But perhaps one day she would take a train to Russia and see what all the mystery was about, all that vast gray, vast space, and drunken melancholy that she had read about in those old novels with their murky, noble souls talking without reserve to the heart of life. “When you read a Russian novel, especially Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, you learn all you need to know about life,” her mother had told her, drinking tea with a sugar cube between her teeth. She herself read the same Russian novels, keeping it a secret from her mother for fear she would say: “How dare you trespass into my private world?”

The damp sea breeze chilled her. She shivered and liked it.

“Take my jacket,” he said, without removing it.

15.

“Have you,” she asked the young man, “ever read Miguel de Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life?”

“No need to. I know life’s tragic.”

“Have you ever read a book?”

“No and I never will.”

“Can you read?”

“Certainly. But I have no wish to.” He tapped his foot until her sharp look ordered him to stop.

16.

She wore black stockings with seams. A green skirt, a classic Chanel that her mother had left for her in its original box. The skirt smelled faintly of mothballs. Her sleeveless, straw-yellow sweater, a cashmere woven in Scotland that she had bought in London at Westaway & Westaway, loved her.

The straps of her high-heeled black shoes bound her ankles like sadistic vines. “Wear those shoes whenever we make love,” he had said. She had forgotten to change them in her rush to leave the house.

17.

Earlier that afternoon, he had been taken to lunch by his colleagues at the law office to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. He ordered a frisée salad to start, followed by a rabbit stew with turnips and a crème caramel for desert. The espresso was bitter. The calvados made up for it.

A young colleague asked him, “What is the secret to a good life?” He was flattered to be asked but shrugged his shoulders as if to say, how would I know? He had thought of saying: Keep moving so life passes quickly and slowly at the same time, but was afraid of sounding sage-like and open to mockery. He was woozy when he left the restaurant and aglow with good feelings. He announced that he was the luckiest man alive to have such colleagues. But he saw that he was running late to his rendezvous and was glad to leave them chattering happily on the sidewalk and to find a taxi so quickly. A thought came to him as he stepped in the cab and for a moment he considered turning to the young man who had asked his advice and saying: Do not expect anything. Not even unhappiness.

18.

She enjoyed his thick weight on her, the apple aroma of calvados in his pores. She liked that he kept his watch on in bed while all else of him was naked white. She liked that he was neither young nor old but at the moment of fullness before he turned unattractively ripe.

She liked how sometimes he would turn from tender to cruel, his voice commanding her to undress, to bend, to stand by the wall with her legs spread apart. “Do what you want to me, so long as you do it only with me,” she had said, not long after they had met.

19.

“Married?” she asked, after deciding the young man was handsome.

“Yes.”

“No ring?”

“No need to blazon one’s life.”

“May I ask your profession?”

“I’m a professor of the tango,” the young man said, adding, “I would be honored to give you lessons.”

“What makes you think I don’t already know how to dance the tango?”

“I can tell from your legs.”

20.

“Let’s go for a walk,” the young man said, half rising from his seat.

“Not now. Maybe some other time.”

“When?”

“When it’s another time.”

21.

His watch also made him overeat. It made him sing like a mouse in the shower. It made him want to run from his life all expenses paid and fly to Brazil and sleep in a straw hut by a giant, frightening river and eat fish and fat corn roasted over a pit.

22.

How much time had passed since he entered the café, he did not know. His watch had stopped entirely, rigor mortis setting in at 4:07. Now he had an excuse to get rid of it and all the trouble it caused him. He was about to leave to find her when she passed by the window, glanced at him, laughing, young, immortal, on the arm of a slender, young, immortal man. At first he thought he would go after her but he quickly envisioned the vulgar scene that would ensue. It would be better to wait some while before trying to beg her forgiveness, to try first sending her flowers, white roses, nine, to make it up to her. And when he was with her again, bringing her another tin of caviar that made him grind his teeth at the expense. Or maybe he would never try, after her going off with a boy.

“Goodbye, Alfred,” he said.

“Don’t forget your cane,” Alfred replied, walking to the window.

23.

He reached the sea and its flatness. Not a wave, not a ripple, not a crease. The sea was dozing, hoarding up its passion. There were no umbrellas, no chairs on the beach. The cabanas were boarded up; the houses shuttered and locked down, silent, bored, waiting for summer and the exciting return of their tenants. A three-legged black dog ran up and down, wheeled and wheeled and, howling, crashed into the water. Seagulls. He tightened his coat. He searched for his gloves. But he found instead a book he had bought for her, Dirty Snow, because she read Simenon by the dozens while smoking in bed.

“I hate Russian novels,” she told him once, apropos of nothing, when he was about to enter her.

24.

“Do you still make love to your wife?” she asked, one day at the zoo.

“From time to time, as a courtesy,” he said.

“To her?”

“To duty.”

25.

She watched the afternoon cling to her window then fall away. The young man in her bed snored. It rained, smearing her windows, but still she could see the café below breaking into its first evening light.

It had rained like this one night when her mother had said, “When I’m gone, do what you wish with this place; it will be yours, of course. But please keep some of it the way I leave it. Above all, please keep the samovar where it is in the kitchen. As long as it is there, I am too.”

“Your ghost, Mother.”

“My spirit,” she had answered.

The phone did not ring. She supposed that he would not call so soon, in any case, but she wished he would so that she could berate him for keeping her waiting. Tell him never to call her again. Tell him he had done her a favor because now she had found a man who knew what to do in bed and he could do it forever.

She was chilled and went to the kitchen to make tea. The Russian samovar stood atop a teak table draped with a heavy red damask cloth that fell to the edge of its portly nineteenth-century legs. She nodded to the samovar and lit the kettle on a stove with seven burners and on which her mother had stewed red meat and cabbage following a Russian recipe. Her mother had studied and spoke Russian but had never gone to Russia. Her mother read Russian novels and poetry in Russian and drank tea from a thick glass. She once said: “Only the Russians know life.”

“What is it that they know?” she had asked, annoyed that her mother would believe that about a people who drank vodka without nuance and ate radishes without butter.

26.

“How much did you enjoy that?” the young man asked on waking, his eyes shut.

At first, because she did not like his presumption, his preening maleness, she thought to answer: Perhaps you are more proficient at giving tango lessons. Instead, she said: “If you want coffee or something to eat you will have to go out.”

“Coffee. But let’s drive to Rome, where the coffee has taste.”

“Are you old enough to drive?”

“Yes, and with my own car.” He had opened his eyes and was beaming like a proud boy, the teacher’s pet.

“I don’t like Italy. Or Spain, or England. I like it only here in this city, in this apartment. Or in the café across the street but never after five.”

She was starting to dress when the phone rang and would not surrender. She lifted the receiver and let it drop. It rang again. She unplugged the phone and, for safe measure, left the receiver off the cradle. “I’ve decided,” she said, sliding into bed beside him, “to change my routine, so there’s time for coffee or a drink after.”

“It’s good to be flexible,” he said, opening her robe.

“But I do not like to talk over coffee.”

“Why talk anyway,” he said, “now that it’s been done.”

27.

He looked up at his apartment window and its mellow, homey glow. Then, after a few moments of lingering in the rain, he took the stairs slowly, counting the steps. He was glad that the elevator was out of order because he feared it, not that it would fall but that, on a whim, it would decide to compress its walls and crush him like an iron maiden.

He hung his hat on the rack to dry and even before he took off his wet overcoat his wife said: “I made you your favorite for dinner, rabbit and turnips in white wine. For your birthday, my sweet wet bear.”

She was wearing her black going-out dress and a cultured-pearl necklace he had given her on their tenth anniversary. He kissed her and gave her an extra hug and kissed her again. For a moment he thought to say: “That’s too bad, I had rabbit for lunch.” He decided instead to say: “How thoughtful of you, my dear,” giving her a kiss on the cheek.

He had drunk too much wine at lunch and too much calvados at the café and he felt heavy in his bones and had wet cement for blood.

His wife was speaking to him very pleasantly but it did not matter. “You are still a young man,” she said, thinking he was brooding at yet another birthday.

“Young enough still, I suppose,” he said, feeling, as he said it, a breeze of time whiz by and take another year from him in its wake.

After dinner, in bed that night, he said, “Maybe we should go to the mountains this summer?”

“You hate the mountains, you always say you hate the mountains.”

“Yes, but sometimes we must try new things before we dive into the winter of our life.”

28.

The rain pelting the window kept him awake. It made him imagine himself dead and the rain leaching into his casket until whatever decomposed bits were left of him floated like suds in the bath. Also, the two rabbits jumped in his stomach, the lunch rabbit and the dinner rabbit. Also, he wondered if she would ever want to see him again or if this time, by keeping her waiting, he had gone too far.

His wife raised herself on her elbows and stared at him.

“Indigestion?”

He spoke in a low voice that she was not accustomed to. “Never be in love or love too much.”

“Are you in love with someone now?”

“No.”

She stayed silent for a long time. Finally, she said, “The mountains would be agreeable.”

29.

Alfred was most happy when the café was empty and the sea was flat and biding its time to go wild. Above all, he liked to stand by the window as the afternoon light shrank into the edge of night—this light—and to write in a green notebook where he gathered up all the pieces and fragments of the day that he could recall, even the smallest thing: the sunlight on a hand as it raised a glass or the cracked crystal of a watch and the shadow it made on the dial. Or the way a man regards a woman from behind the café window as she crosses the street, as if the glass shielded his hungry gaze from being seen. Or the way a man drinks hunched at the bar, his black hat crowning the yellow cane beside him like a silent drinking partner.

He looked up at her apartment widow and was lucky. The light behind her as she stood at the rain-smeared window outlined her beauty. She was always beautiful. She never made cozy small talk and self-indulgent chatter as did most of his regulars, as if he were their friend, their confidant.

But she had overstepped only once when she was drunk, and had cried about her dead mother and rambled on about the beauty of the Russian soul. “Only the Russians understand melancholy, without which the soul starves. The falling snow, the crushing cold, the great distances, the birch trees in the moonlight—the Russian soul, who knows it better than I?” she had said.

There was more of the same until she tottered and almost fell off her stool; he half walked, half carried her to her building and to her apartment, where she collapsed in her bed. He had removed her shoes before leaving and left a light on in the hall lest she wake up frightened in the dark. He had rushed to leave: the vast apartment with its empty rooms and no furniture or carpets or standing lamps or pictures to befriend the naked walls had given him a chill that only his café and a glass of hot milk could warm. He had much to enter in his green notebook, when standing by the café window; he took his bowl of breakfast coffee, as the sea swelled to meet the first morning light.

She apologized the next day, bringing him a gift. A Simenon novel about a man who, one day, telling no one, taking nothing, simply walked out of his life, leaving his small, successful business, his three employees, and faithful wife to puzzle over where he had vanished. He had enjoyed the book but wondered if it was something she had at hand and gave to him without a thought, an impromptu token of apology. If not, why would she ever have imagined he would have liked to read about a man who turned away from his life, taking the first train that pulled into the station and, without a plan, alighting in a remote village unknown to him and whose only light, at ten at night, came from a café with three drunks and a whore.

He himself was too settled, too happy in his café with its window to the sea, ever to leave. All the life that mattered flowed through that window and all the people in the world were winnowed down to the few who came to the café.

Though he was fearful of the time when he would be too old or too ill to tend to the café and stand by its window, he had a plan that comforted him. One day, he would sit himself in his club chair in his cozy room above the café and, with a warm glass of milk on a silver tray by his side, pore over all the years of green notebooks, one by one, savoring the pages line by line as if he were a stranger who had discovered them in a trunk beached from a schooner drowned at sea.

—For Danièle Thompson