Inside a Pearl by Edmund White Read Free Book Online Page A

Marie-Louise always chose the most handsome. This year it was a tall blond who had bad teeth and never smiled but who blushed easily and sometimes, very rarely and improbably, laughed at Marie-Louise’s wisecracks and instantly covered his ruined mouth with his hand. He surely lived at home with his parents where he had rural chores to do, for the layer of urbanism in the village was literally only one street deep and the burghers’houses—even those built around the town square with its band kiosk and town hall—opened up in the rear to fields and barns. One night my lover Hubert, who was very ill, couldn’t finish his meal. Marie-Louise sniffed,
“Une petite nature.”
    We invited the “peasants” who lived next door (I could never get used to calling them
paysans
) to visit the house sometime, and Hubert bought a bottle of aperitif, Suze, popular in the French countryside. I don’t drink, but I admiringly smelled the bitter medicinal yellow fluid (a cordial made from boiled yellow gentian roots) in its tall, narrow bottle. The invitation we’d extended was understood to be flexible and open-ended and we didn’t know when to expect the neighbors, yet two Sundays later all of them showed up, parents and grandparents, the two little girls and their handsome, effeminate teenage older brother who was being sent off to hospitality school to become a waiter. He’d straightened his blond hair and his clothes had sophisticated, stylishly useless buckles and straps.
    The conversation was ponderous, the dialect (reputed to be the best, purest French) nearly incomprehensible to me—and I fled into an adjoining room and waited for it to end. From what I could understand, they were telling dull local stories involving the weather, much as my Texas farming relatives might do, except that my relatives would also include the mileage they’d gotten and the route they’d taken and the dust storm they’d seen. When my born-again cousin Dorothy Jean came to Paris, I took her to a museum entirely devoted to the work of Gustave Moreau and pointed out a painting of Judith cutting off the head of Holofernes. “It’s a biblical scene,” I said optimistically.
    â€œThat’s not in my Bible,” she scoffed.
    One night Hubert and I, as we drove home from the hotel, saw a car that had gone off the road into the ditch. We hopped out and peered into the driver’s side, where a young woman was slumped over the wheel, her ear running with blood. The headlights blazed into the tall, uneven grass. A little dog was yapping soundlessly in the backseat behind a closed window. The only noise was the creaking and ticking of the still-warm automobile. Since we didn’t have a phone in our house, we rushed up the nearest drive to the peasant’s house andknocked. The farmer answered the door, blotchy-faced and reeking of cheap brandy, his trousers unbuttoned.
    â€œWho is it?” he said, referring to the victim.
    â€œWhat difference does it make?” cried Hubert. “She’s hurt! Call an ambulance!”
    â€œBut who is it?”
    â€œWe can figure that out later. Whoever it is, we need to get her to the hospital.”
    The entire family, even the grandmother, wanted to know who it was before they would bother to call the ambulance. It was raining slightly as we all trudged down to the still-illuminated car in the ditch. If I’d been able to communicate with them more readily, I might have reminded them their hesitation could very well end up being partly responsible for the woman’s death.
    â€œOh, it’s Hélène!” said the farmer. “She and her mother are both big drunks. This is the second accident she’s had in a month.” And he went on and on filling us in on the sad case of Hélène as the dog barked silently and climbed up on the backseat to look at us through the window and left a breathy ghost of his