The time Anne leaves her husband, she goes to France. She spends the first few days in Paris at an inexpensive hotel on rue Jacob. Her room is small and sparsely furnished; the bathroom, too, is small, the shower produces a tepid trickle. Instead of looking out onto the street, the single window in Anne’s room gives onto the back of the hotel, onto an empty courtyard where half a dozen cats lie sunning themselves—although late October and the days are getting shorter, darker. Right away Anne plans to visit museums, churches, cathedrals, but her first day in Paris she can hardly get out of bed. When finally she does, she stands at the window and watches the cats. She does not feel depressed so much as absent. She does not think about her husband, George, or about her daughters—what they might be doing. The only explanation, which was not an explanation Anne gave before she left, was that the two girls were old enough to look after themselves and that George would just have to cope with the groceries, the cooking, the washing and whatever Anne did all day. Making a vague fanning motion with her hand, Anne told George she needed air.
The second day Anne rouses herself and walks from Sainte-Chapelle, to Notre-Dame, to the Louvre; the third day it rains and Anne buys a lot of expensive clothes: a dress, a suede jacket, a pair of trousers, two silk blouses; she charges them to George. She also starts to feel lonely. (Except for the man sitting at the next table in a restaurant who asks Anne if she recommends her canard à l’orange—not looking up from the magazine she is reading, Anne answers a barely audible oui—Anne has spoken to no one except to salespersons and waiters.) On the fourth day, a man follows Anne as she walks along the quays back to the hotel. Although her heart is pounding and she wants to run, she remembers a stupid joke she once heard about an American tourist who, instead of calling the man on the métro who pinches her cochon—pig—tells him couchons—let’s sleep together. Two hours later, when Anne leaves the hotel again to have dinner, the man is across the street, smoking a cigarette, waiting for her. Couchons!
Standing at her window the next morning, looking down at the cats in the courtyard—by then, Anne has a favorite, a big marmalade cat who, except for an occasional impatient flick of his tail, lies motionless for hours—she decides to call her school friend Nina.
At the Montpellier train station, Anne, her large suitcase at her feet, waits for Nina. As usual Nina is late, and Anne is reminded of all the times Nina has kept her waiting—in particular, the time that led to her meeting George, since she could not keep saving the seat at the sold-out Stéphane Grappelli concert for Nina indefinitely. At last Anne sees Nina.
“You look just the same,” Anne says, kissing Nina, who is thinner. Her hair is streaked with gray.
“So do you,” Nina answers breathlessly. “Always très chic.”
In college, both Anne and Nina majored in French; after graduation, Nina went abroad to study music and fell in love with a musician.
Anne shakes her head; suddenly she feels like crying. “Your children?” she asks instead.
“At home, with Michel.” Michel, the musician, is already married to someone else, to a woman named Eliane, whom he cannot divorce; Nina and Michel have two small children, a girl and a boy. “Here, let me.” Nina reaches for Anne’s suitcase.
Embarrassed all of a sudden by the size and the weight of the suitcase, Anne hands Nina her new jacket instead. “Take this,” she says.
“Oh, how beautiful.” Nina strokes the suede. “I’ll have to borrow it from you,” she says, smiling. They both know that Nina is referring to the many times in college when Nina borrowed Anne’s clothes. Often, without asking.
“No, keep it,” Anne says. “I mean it,” she adds.
As Anne opens the door to Nina’s car, a large white dog lying on the front seat raises its head.
“Get, July! Get in the back,” Nina tells the dog. “She followed us from the beach last summer—the children insisted on keeping her. But don’t go near her, she sheds.” The backseat of Nina’s car is littered with toys, a discarded sweater, a child’s sandal, food wrappers. “Don’t mind the mess,” Nina also says.
In addition to borrowing Anne’s clothes in college, Nina was incapable of putting her own clothes away. She left everything trailing on chairs or lying on the floor. But it was her sweetness more than anything else that attracted Anne, and Nina’s selflessness—she had a kind of otherworldliness, a total lack of ego, is how Anne always described her.
“How many people live in however you pronounce the name of your village?” Anne asks as Nina starts up the car. The village is a few miles north of Montpellier.
“St. Guilhem-le-Désert,” Nina enunciates the name for Anne. “About two hundred, except on weekends and holidays, then it is more like two million people, who come here to climb the Cévennes. Also, you would be surprised at the number of pilgrims.”
“Pilgrims?”
“Yes, they come to worship a three-inch piece of the True Cross, which Charlemagne is said to have given to one of his favorite knights, a man named Guilhem who built an abbey. You can visit it if you like. Now a community of Carmelite nuns lives—Oh, I don’t mean to go on about the local sights.” Nina reaches with one hand to touch Anne’s arm. “Tell me,” she says, “how’s George?”
“I think I’ve left him,” Anne answers, turning to look out of the side window so that Nina cannot see her face. “Nothing is settled yet. But go on, I like hearing about where you live.”
“There’s a castle. We can visit that too,” Nina tells Anne after a while.
“Oh, what a pretty house!” Anne exclaims as Nina parks the car. “It looks as if it was built back in the Middle Ages.”
“It was.” Nina laughs. “There’s practically no heat in winter and there’s just enough hot water to fill a teakettle.”
“I’m so happy to see you,” Anne says, getting out of the car and brushing at her skirt, which is covered with dog hair.
Nina’s children, Sophie and Paul, are sitting at the kitchen table coloring in a book. Michel, a big man in a red wool checked shirt, sits with them. He has on a headset and is listening to music; he does not hear Nina and Anne come in.
“Hello, chéri!” Nina shouts.
Anne stands at the door and smiles at the children, who are staring at her. July, the dog, trots past her and Sophie gets down from the chair and, kneeling, puts her arms around the dog’s neck.
“Je t’aime,” she croons.
Looking up, Michel turns off the music and takes off his headset.
Her hand extended, Anne walks up to him. “Nice to meet you, Michel.”
“How was your trip, Anne?” he asks, his English is heavily accented. Then, turning to the children, Michel says, “Anne, here, went to school with maman when maman was a girl.” Michel speaks as if this is the first time Anne’s name has ever been mentioned. “She lives in America, don’t you, Anne?”
Anne nods.
“Come, let me show you to your room,” Nina says.
Anne’s room is Sophie’s, and Sophie has been moved into Paul’s room. The bed is a narrow child’s bed, and the quilt is covered with faded figures of Babar. Once Nina has gone back downstairs, Anne sets her suitcase at the foot of the bed and opens it; all her clothes—sweaters, skirts, jackets—are carefully wrapped in tissue to keep them from wrinkling. There is no closet in the room, only a few hangers dangle from a hook on the back of the door, and Anne decides not to unpack after all. Instead she takes out her flowered toilet kit and goes down the hall to the only bathroom. When she tries to lock the bathroom door, she finds that the lock does not turn.
In the afternoon, Michel leaves to play in his band in Montpellier, and Nina drives Sophie to a ballet lesson. Anne stays with Paul, who has turned on an old black-and-white television set to watch cartoons. The picture has a grainy quality she remembers from her own childhood.
When Anne wakes up it takes her a few seconds to remember where she is. “Paul?” she asks.
“He’s here, he’s fine.” Nina says, standing in the doorway. “You fell asleep.”
Apparently, while she was sleeping, Paul went outside to pile stones on the side of the road. “I can’t believe I did that,” Anne says.
“Don’t worry about it,” Nina tells her. “As the youngest, Paul has a highly developed sense of self-preservation, and there’s never much traffic on our street. Look how perfectly this fits me,” she says, changing the subject and twirling around in Anne’s suede jacket. Then, remembering dinner, Nina says, “You must be starving, Anne. And I told you, didn’t I, that Michel is a vegetarian?”
“Do you have anything to drink?” Anne asks Nina, who is boiling water for spaghetti. “Wine?”
“Wine? Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll ask Michel to get some tomorrow.”
“It doesn’t matter. I just thought if you did . . . Here,” Anne also says, “let me do something useful.”
As Anne is setting the table she can hear Nina humming in the kitchen. Nina had a beautiful singing voice. When she sang, everyone said, Nina was transformed. She became powerful, important.
Although fairly sure of the answer, Anne calls out to Nina in the next room, “Are you still singing?”
In bed, that night, underneath the flimsy Babar quilt, Anne keeps all her clothes on—except for her shoes—the room is so damp and cold. Disoriented and uncomfortable, she does not sleep much. She hears Michel come up the stairs—by the luminous hands on her watch, which she has not bothered to change, it is ten o’clock in the evening on the East Coast of the United States—and for a moment she confuses him with George, about whom she has been dreaming. (In the dream, she is in a crowded room, at a party perhaps, where George, who does not smoke, is smoking and offering everyone at the party a cigarette—a special blend, George keeps repeating in a boastful and unfamiliar way.) Later, at seven and while it is still dark, she hears Nina get the children ready for school. Anne waits until she hears Nina drive off, then she gets up and dresses—she merely puts on another sweater and brushes her hair. On her way downstairs, she stops off at the bathroom. Wearing the red checked shirt, Michel is sitting on the toilet, reading a magazine.
“Oh!” Embarrassed, Anne quickly shuts the bathroom door.
Barely glancing up, Michel says, “Pas de problème.”
“How about a walk?” Nina suggests when she returns. “We can go up to the castle, but it’s a bit of a hike. I’ll take July—it will be good exercise for her.”
Rue du Bout-du-Monde—End-of-the-World Road, Nina translates for Anne. A steep and narrow road, and Anne is grateful that she has on her walking shoes. Even so, she slips on the loose stones and pebbles. On either side of her, the ground is covered with mostly impenetrable scrub and oak thickets.
“Michel took me up here when we first met. I didn’t notice how steep it was then,” Nina says with a little laugh. She has July on a leash and the dog is pulling her.
“Perfect if you’re a goat,” Anne says.
“Or a sheep. In summer, the place is filled with them. Each year the shepherds bring up their flocks. You should see all the lambs—” Nina stops. “But I’d rather hear about you, Anne.”
“The two girls are all right,” Anne begins in an expressionless voice. “They’re in school, they’re getting good grades, they’ve already decided on careers: Danielle wants to be a doctor, Joyce a lawyer.”
“And George? Is there someone else?”
Anne shakes her head. “Sometimes, I wish there was. There’s nothing I can really point my finger at. It’s just . . .” She hesitates. “It’s just so trivial and predictable. And I guess it always boils down to the same thing—sex, which in our case is nearly nonexistent. I know, I know, I am being incredibly spoiled, but I want more and I want it to be different.”
“Different is not necessarily better,” Nina says.
They walk on in silence—except for Nina occasionally telling July to stop or to heel—until they reach the top of the ridge and the castle. All that remains of it is the curtain wall and the sixty-foot-high keep faced with huge limestone blocks, but it is the view that draws them. The sheer drop from the cliff and the gorge hundreds of feet below.
“So what happened to Guilhem?” Anne asks.
“After his wife died, Guilhem gave up all his worldly possessions and became a monk. He spent the rest of his life in a cell, fasting, praying—” Far down in the village, a church bell begins to ring the hour—eleven o’clock. “And according to the legend,” Nina continues, “when Guilhem died, all the church bells began to ring at once of their own accord without anyone pulling on the ropes.”
Again, that night, Michel leaves to play in the band, but at dinner Nina holds up a bottle of wine. She pours Anne a glass, then herself a glass as well. “I know it’s funny,” she says. “Most people, including my family, think that musicians drink, smoke and are completely dissipated, but Michel isn’t like that. And he’s a wonderful father.”
Anne takes a sip of wine. “So, you’re really happy, Nina?”
Nina shrugs. “Happy? Sure, I’m happy. I miss a lot of things. I wish Michel did not have to struggle so hard to get work. But I love him and I love the children.”
Except to say good morning and good-bye and making sure to knock before she uses the bathroom, Anne has barely spoken to Michel. “You don’t mind not being married?”
“I don’t think about it anymore. And, in a funny way, I like Eliane. Sophie and Paul like her, too.”
That night, Anne cannot go to sleep, but instead of tossing and turning under the flimsy Babar quilt, she turns on the light and reads in a guidebook how first Guilhem captured the city of Nîmes by hiding his soldiers in wine barrels, then how he lost the tip of his nose fighting off the pagans in Rome. Hours later, Anne wakes up to find the light on in her room and, after a moment of confusion, to the sounds of Michel and Nina making love. Couchons! Anne is reminded of the man who followed her in Paris—he was not bad-looking in a foreign sort of way. It would have been easy.
“What kind of music do you play?” Anne asks Michel in the morning. Nina is taking the children to school, and Michel is making coffee in the kitchen. “Rock?”
Michel nods. “And whatever people want to hear. Would you like some coffee, Anne?”
“I’d love to hear you play,” Anne goes on, handing Michel her cup. “Maybe, one of these nights I can go with Nina. My husband—you should meet him,” she hears herself say, “he’s a great music . . .” Anne’s voice trails off—how to explain the word fan?
When Nina gets back to the house, she has a headache, the start of migraine, she says.
“I hope it wasn’t the wine,” Anne says.
Nina shakes her head. “I’ll be fine later.” She smiles at Anne but her eyes look watery and unfocused. “I just need some sleep,” she says.
“Don’t worry about me, Nina. I’ll go for a walk,” Anne says. “Oh, can I get you something? Tea?” she adds too late—Nina is halfway up the stairs and does not hear her.
“You can walk to the Grotte de Clamouse,” Michel tells Anne after Nina has left.
“The grotte? Is it a cave?”
Michel nods. “It’s three kilometers from here. I can start you on your way, if you like. Show you a shortcut, so you won’t have to walk on the main road.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Anne answers. “I’ll go and put on my walking shoes.”
When Anne comes back, Michel, too, has changed. He is wearing a different shirt, a clean white cotton one.
“Some of the caves are so far underground they have never seen the light of day, yet bunches of green ferns grow inside them,” Michel tells Anne as they set off through the village. Michel walks fast and Anne has to nearly run to keep up with him. “You can see beautiful crystals in the shape of flowers,” he says. “Bouquets of flowers made from pure white aragonite.”
“Aragoneat?” Anne repeats after him, mimicking his pronunciation. She feels stupid. She knows nothing about caves or crystals.
“My father often worked as a guide, he took tourists to visit the caves. He also had the good fortune to go on several exploratory expeditions with Martel.” When Anne does not answer, Michel continues, “Édouard-Alfred Martel, the famous how do you say, spéléogiste.”
“Ah, yes. Spéléogiste.” Anne feels as if she was having a conversation with someone from another planet; uncharacteristically, she is tempted to laugh. She bends her head so that Michel cannot see her while she tries to compose her face. After a while, so as to say something, she asks, “Your father is from this region? This région?” Anne repeats it the French way.
They have reached the outskirts of the village and instead of answering her, Michel points out a path that runs parallel to the main road. “One of the oldest transhumance in the Cévennes begins right here. When I was a boy I went every summer with my father when he took up the ships.”
Again, Anne is tempted to laugh.
“Yes. Sheep, Nina told me how—” she starts to say when, without warning, Michel takes her in his arms and tries to kiss her on the mouth. Letting out a cry of surprise, Anne shakes herself free of him.
Anne has tied a scarf around her head. Now the ends of the scarf whip around and hit her face, startling her. The day, which started out mild, has turned chilly, and the wind has picked up. Fast-moving clouds hide the sun; any moment it looks as if it might rain. No one else is on the path, which, instead of running parallel to the road, winds more and more steeply up the hillside, who knows to where? And who would find her if she twists an ankle or breaks a leg? There are no signs or markers, and Anne is angry with herself for taking Michel’s advice and not walking on the road instead. Also, she is angry at Michel. Fool, she thinks, not sure whom she means. Then she stops so abruptly she almost loses her balance. She was about to step on something that she does not immediately identify—a mass of dirty white wool.
A year to the day after Anne leaves St. Guilhem-le-Désert, Nina dies of a brain tumor—the cause of the headaches, Anne supposes. Michel telephones at two o’clock one morning—eight o’clock in St. Guilhem-le-Désert—to let her know, and it takes Anne, who is in bed asleep next to George, a while to understand who Michel is and what he is telling her. “What time is it there?” she asks foolishly, at the same time that, in the background, she hears the bells begin to ring. The St. Guilhem-le-Désert church bells. Next, still only half awake, Anne asks Michel if there is anything she can do for him or the children. “I am going to go back and live with my wife, Eliane,” Michel says. “Perhaps this time we can work it out.”
The dead sheep was lying right across her path. Underneath the matted wool, Anne could see a row of startlingly white rib bones, and underneath the rib bones, the ground. The sheep must have been dead for quite some time. Anne had to step over the dead sheep and continue on the path or else go back down.