THIRTY-NINE

Nathaniel

Your phone is cracked to shit.”

“Sign of a life being lived.” He thumped the steering wheel. “I’m sure yours is totally intact. Just like your—”

“Gross, stop it.”

He had asked Kezia to read his texts aloud while he drove and gotten himself the world’s most exasperated secretarial service.

“This one says, ‘what r u up to.’” She sighed. “Revelatory stuff from Emily B.”

“Delete.”

“This one says, ‘hiyah, hotness,’ and it’s from Emily S. What are you, running a reality dating show?”

“I’m not the one who decided to name every girl in Los Angeles Emily.”

“This one isn’t a text. You have a reminder to call the writers’ guild re: health insurance. Again, riveting. Do I have to keep going?”

“If you want this car to keep going.”

The phone vibrated. “Oh, this one just came in. It says, ‘How’s the putangé?’ From Percy. Aww, Percy. It must be one a.m. in L.A. What’s a poot-an-jay?”

“Let me see that.” Nathaniel took the phone and glanced at it. “He means putang. He’s drunk.”

As if to prove Nathaniel’s thesis, another text came in and Kezia read:

“‘Ouvre le puntang!’”

This was followed by a lone “f.” Followed by a “dotty.” Followed by another “dotty.” Followed by a “sorry. ducking iPhone.”

Nathaniel laughed as she deadpanned each message. He had expected another “gross” but she began cackling maniacally, clutching her stomach over her seat belt, finishing with a whistle and an “Oh, that’s rich.”

“What’s rich?”

“Nothing, it’s just . . . you’ve got all your fancy friends convinced you’re out on the town in Paris, waking up next to ashtrays full of cigarette butts and naked ladies.”

“Naked ladies don’t fit in ashtrays. And my friends aren’t fancy, they’re comedy writers.”

“That’s worse! I know, I’ve met them.”

“Who have you met?”

“Percy. That guy Will. You. You all pretend not to be fancy. At least the actresses don’t have to pretend. It’s their job. But you guys are afflicted with want just like everyone else except you have the added burden of having to pretend you’d rather be home than at the Vanity Fair Oscar party.”

“Wrong. I would love to go to the Vanity Fair Oscar party. It’s not a secret.”

“Yeah, to me you’re saying this but to a celebrity who was already going and casually invited you? You’d say, ‘Sure, man’ and act like it wouldn’t make your entire life.”

They fell silent. He hoped they would stay that way. She had jumped with unnerving ease from a couple of texts to the core of Nathaniel’s discontent. I HAVE COVETED EVERYTHING AND TAKEN PLEASURE IN NOTHING. He imagined the letters floating off Guy de Maupassant’s tombstone, swirling through the air and landing on Bean’s biceps. His abnormally small heart beat with annoyance.

“All I’m saying is that if your friends, who think you’re gallivanting around Paris, could see you now, they might find this amusing.”

She turned her palm up and gestured across the spotted windshield. There were fields of cows, their tails dangling like ropes. They each looked like they’d been given a screen door to swallow. She had promised him no cows. There were trees with knots of Spanish moss in them and hay bales covered in plastic, like giant marshmallows.

“I have nothing to be ashamed of—I’m on a rustic road trip with a hot chick.”

That shut her up. And it was true. That curvy little body, those buttery blue eyes, that insane hair. Every once in a while he would look over at her in the passenger seat and see her as if they had just met. Or see her as he saw her before he knew her, watching her diligently take notes at the front of the class. She rolled her eyes and opened her window. The wind whipped the top of her hair into a frenzy.

They came to a large highway sign with a cliff and some silhouetted birds on it. He perked up. Cliffs meant water and water meant beaches and beaches meant nude beaches. Something to upload home about.

Kezia pointed. “Here, this should be good. Take this to Étretat.”

After offering them anchovies and cream for breakfast, the woman who ran the guest house had directed them to Étretat, where she said there were beaches and “a nice view.” This was an understatement. Everything in town was crowded along the scalloped shores, the buildings all jockeying to get a better view of the ocean. Their thatched roofs were covered in silvery patches of lichen. The land rose sharply from the shore, giving the whole place the look of a recent earthquake.

They parked and climbed to the top of one of the peaks, thistles scraping their legs. Kezia yanked her hat down as he walked closer to her, using the brim as a wind shield.

“Will you look at that view?” She inhaled. “Don’t you get the feeling that there’s a matching set of cliffs in England?”

“There are. The white cliffs of Dover.”

“No, but like matching exactly. Like if you smushed England and France together they would fit like a puzzle.”

A strong gust of wind came bursting from behind them and relieved Kezia of her hat. She had no time to grab it. The two of them just stood there, not even lunging as it sailed over the cliffs.

“Oh . . . shit.” She laughed, her hair flying in all directions.

“We can totally still get that.” Nathaniel peered down at the bobbing yellow dot.

The sun was setting, peeking out from where the cliff split from itself and extended into the water like the trunk of an elephant. He now had an unobstructed view of Kezia’s neck, that pale parenthesis of the flesh.

“Watch.” He fixed his eyes on the horizon.

“What am I looking for?”

“The green flash. This is what happens in Malibu. The second the sun sinks past the ocean, there’s a line of green.”

He thought of the time he went to Malibu with Bean, thinking they could stay on the beach, watching the sun go down together. Instead they ran into her friends, who gave them mushrooms. They tasted like rotten cauliflower. He watched their blanket undulate while Bean disappeared behind a rock for an hour. He wasn’t sure who with.

He watched Kezia watching the horizon. Below them came the sound of families stomping over gray and white stones. He could hear each distant step, as if they were fighting their way out of a gumball machine. Waves rolled out onto the shore, white crests crashing against the rocks and retreating. There were no naked sunbathers. No regular sunbathers. He knew, somewhere in the back of his mind, that the north of France would not live up to his tan-line-free fantasies. But he left Paris with her anyway.

And so they stood, waiting for the sun to go away. Little boats were lined up on the shore like open pea pods. He felt his anxieties twirl away on the wind. So long as Nathaniel remained standing on that cliff, he could turn back the hands of time ten years and be whoever he was meant to be. So long as he stayed with his feet planted here, he wouldn’t have to face anything but a stretch of cobalt water. He could take his meals here, pee into the ocean, sleep standing up.

“Well, that was disappointing.” She elbowed him in the ribs. “No green flash. Am I blind? I didn’t see it.”

He hadn’t seen it either. But he also hadn’t been looking in the right direction.

“Maybe we’re both color-blind.” He stretched.

“Actually,” she said, “I think only men are color-blind.”

“Whatever.” He lowered his arms and beat on his stomach. “Can we drink now, know-it-all?”

Kezia considered the view, cocking her head back and forth like the seagulls.

“Yes.” She hopped down and reached for his hand. “We can drink now.”

His phone vibrated in his pocket. The uppercase B of Bean’s name hit him in the eye. The miracle of it—the time difference, the reception on top of a cliff, the fact that she would be calling and not texting—meant that somehow this trip to France was working in the indirect way he had hoped it would. He had won the game. All he had to do was pick up the phone and claim his prize.

“Allons-y.” Kezia swiped at her cheek. “I’m eating my hair.”

He stared at the screen until Bean’s name switched to the words “missed call.”

Then he took Kezia’s hand and they thumped down the cliff on a path of crushed shells. The path leveled off into a small boardwalk of gelato vendors tying up their umbrellas for the night. It was getting chilly. He could see her little blond arm hairs sticking up.

“Here.” He removed his jacket.

She held the jacket in her fist. He stared at it, flopping across her body as she chatted, the zipper swinging between them.

“Aren’t you going to put that on? That’s what they’re for.”

“Oh.” She shook it by its collar. “I thought you wanted me to hold it for you.”

“Moron.” He stretched the jacket behind her until she put her arms in.

Nathaniel was stung by her reaction—that she would not recognize basic gentlemanly behavior from him if it were right in front of her face. Worse, that she wouldn’t be remotely upset by the lack of it. He had made her expectations for him low on purpose. Because he didn’t need to feel obligated to this person from his past who came swooping into town every few months with the express purpose of making him feel bad about himself. But the danger of her wanting nothing from him struck him harder than the danger of her wanting everything.