FORTY-SEVEN

Victor

The car kept jerking forward. Empty water bottles rolled out from beneath the seat and knocked lightly against Victor’s shoes before retreating back to their hovel. Still, it felt good to be in a car. In the side mirror, he could see Kezia asleep behind him, mouth open, seat belt separating one breast from the other.

Victor watched the countryside differently now, with a sense that he knew every bend in the road. It was the same feeling he had the day Caroline picked him up on the side of a New England highway—only more scenic. Stone walls rushed by. Apple trees blurred into clumps. He played a game with himself, trying to focus on a single tree and then watching it speed out of sight. He flipped open his visor and a piece of scrap paper with pink ink came tumbling out.

“What’s this? ‘Est-ce que je peux garer ma voiture ici?’” Victor tripped through the first column before moving on to the second. “May I park my car here? ‘J’ai mes règles et j’ai besoin des tampons.’ I have my . . . my—”

“Period,” came a groggy voice from the backseat. “She needs tampons. It’s Grey’s. That must have been there for a while.”

He turned around and looked at her and she gave him a quick grin before looking back out the window. Nathaniel, meanwhile, peppered him with questions about his brawl in Rouen. Victor found himself answering honestly. He was afraid at the time and free of ego in the retelling. Now that Kezia and Nathaniel had seen him at his worst, he felt enabled to be his best. Or some approximation of it.

Nathaniel told him about his own adventures with Kezia. Something about the way he spoke, carefully glossing over what the two of them did at night, Victor was pretty sure something had gone on between them. This was nothing new. He had been pretty sure many times over the years, living in perpetual fear of confirmation. But now something had shifted slightly and Victor only felt as if he should be crushed. Guy once wrote that “one sometimes weeps over one’s illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.” But Victor no longer felt like weeping over lost illusions.

As they drove into Paris, the Eiffel Tower rose in the distance. Whenever Guy was in Paris, he would eat exclusively at the base of the Eiffel Tower because it was the only place left in the city where he couldn’t see it. Victor tried to adopt this exasperation but the view wouldn’t let him. The road hugged the Seine, the “beautiful, calm, stinking river” Guy described. As suspected, it was more pleasing to the eye here than it had been in Rouen. The surface sparkled in waves of inky meringue. Granted, Victor was biased. To him, Rouen was hazy and abusive.

There were several crew boats on the water. From this angle, they looked like caterpillars that had been flipped over by some sadistic child, oars flailing. Guy used to race up the fog-veiled river. He would rest at major bends, at fishing towns with names like Sartrouville, getting a second wind upon seeing the buttresses of Notre Dame rise in the distance. “He took up the oars,” wrote François, “and nodded to the thirty persons who had come to see him off. Then, imitating the motion of a large bird taking its flight, he plunged his oars into the water. A few minutes later, I could only perceive in the distance a black spot on the silvery sheet of the Seine.”

Victor could just see Guy grimacing behind his mustache, gliding down the river.

Then Nathaniel sped through a yellow light and the car jerked forward and backward and stopped.

Nathaniel glanced at the rearview mirror. “Sorry.”

No longer running parallel to the crew boats, Guy’s imaginary boat pulled ahead too, vanishing. Victor felt a hand affectionately scratching at the base of his skull.

“You need a shower.” Kezia wiped her fingers gently on his shoulder.